“Holy Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions,” is a dry work of historiography buttressed by a 24-page bibliography and hundreds of footnotes citing ancient Sanskrit texts. It’s the sort of book, in other words, that typically is read by a handful of specialists and winds up forgotten on a library shelf.
But when its author, Dwijendra Narayan Jha, a historian at the University of Delhi, tried to publish the book in India a year ago, he unleashed a furor of a kind not seen there since 1989, when the release of "Satanic Verses," Salman Rushdie’s novel satirizing Islam, provoked rioting and earned him a fatwa from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”
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