Hinduism Cultural Changes

This paper is about Hinduism and how few aspects of the religion has changed with time due to change in the social and cultural environment. There are various aspects of Hinduism that has changed and is changing like the weakening of the caste system, changes in the way people worship Gods, the way they celebrate festivities, decrease in animal sacrifices, and so on. In this paper, I address the culture of animal sacrifice that many Hindu groups practice around the world. It explains how the Hindu communities have adapted to the rules of the modern world, and let go of their ancestral ritual of sacrificing animals by the hundred thousand. The main focus of this paper is on a Hindu ritual, the Gadhimai festival, which is the largest animal-sacrifice ritual in the world.
Hinduism is a compassionate religion which believes in treating all living beings with great respect as they all have some aspects of God in them; they have souls, and they go through the same process of …show more content…
In ancient times, horses were sacrificed in the Hindu tradition. Later on, horses were replaced by smaller animals like goats (Kemmer 21).
The largest festival of animal sacrifice in the Hindu community is the Gadhimai festival which was a sacrificial ceremony that was held every 5 years at the Gadhimai Temple of Bariyapur in Bara District, near the Indo-Nepal border. It was primarily celebrate by the Madheshi and Bihari people. In the Gadhimai festival of 2009, over a quarter million animals were sacrificed to Gadhimai, the Goddess of power. (News.bbcco.uk, 2009).
The history of the Gadhimai began about 260 years ago when Bhagwan Chaudhary, a feudal landlord was imprisoned in Makwanpur and he dreamed that all his problems would be solved if he made a blood sacrifice to Gadhi Mai. Immediately upon his release from prison he took counsel from the local village