The Temple Bull Controversy at Skanda Vale and the Construction of Hindu Identity in Britain

Abstract

The temple bull controversy at Skanda Vale, a small monastic-cum-devotional complex in rural West Wales, first received public attention in April 2007 when Shambo, a black Friesian bull living in the Skanda Vale complex, tested positive for bovine tuberculosis. The UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs deemed that the bull, as a potential transmitter of the disease, posed a threat to human and bovine health and therefore must be slaughtered. The Skanda Vale residents challenged this decision; they demanded to be allowed to quarantine Shambo and restore him to health through medication. In the following weeks, which culminated in Shambo’s killing on July 27, Skanda Vale found itself at the center of a widely publicized campaign, which briefly transformed it from a littleknown and avowedly eclectic devotional community in a remote part of the country, to a politically engaged “Hindu” organization mounting a legal challenge to the policies of the Welsh government and winning supporters from as far away as India, Russia, USA, Japan, New Zealand, and Switzerland. 1 The battle (both moral and legal) over Shambo was fought on a number of different fronts. At the most elementary level, this was a battle between the monks at Skanda Vale, deeply unhappy to lose their cherished bullock, and government officials, determined to curb the spread of bovine tuberculosis at any cost. At a second level, it came to be recast as a conflict between the forces of dharma (the just and the righteous) and adharma (the unjust and immoral). At a third level, this became a conflict between Britain’s so-called “Hindu community” fighting to protect its religious freedom and Britain’s secular state supposedly denying Hindus this right. My aim here is to explore these different levels of conflict and examine the meanings and symbols brought into play by the contesting groups; this in turn provides insights into three critical developments: first, the transformation of Skanda Vale’s identity from an eclectic spiritual organization into a “Hindu” religious group; second, the public representations of Hinduism, and of a supposedly unified Hindu community in Britain, that emerged in the course of this controversy; and third, the voices of dissent and disagreement over Hinduism and Hindu dharma that emerged in its aftermath.