A religious intellectual sparked condemnation when he ate human brain tissue with a group of cannibals in India while filming a TV documentary.
In the episode, Reza Aslan, a Muslim, meets the Aghori, a Hindu cannibalistic sect in northern India, during filming of the CNN show Believer, reports The Washington Post.
Among their practices, the Aghori have been known to smear themselves with the ashes of corpses, eat human faeces and drink out of human skulls.
In footage from the show, Aslan is sitting around a fire with members of the sect when one of them smears the presenter’s face with ashes of cremated humans.
When invited by the Aghori, he drinks alcohol from a human skull and eats what was purported to be a piece of cooked human brain.
Aslan wrote on Facebook: “Want to know what a dead guy’s brain tastes like? Charcoal. It was burnt to a crisp.”
But his actions have drawn a backlash from Hindus in the US including industrial magnate Shalabh Kumar who said the episode was a “disgusting attack on Hinduism”.
The US India Political Action Committee said in a statement: “With multiple reports of hate-fuelled attacks against people of Indian origin from across the US, the show characterises Hinduism as cannibalistic, which is a bizarre way of looking at the third largest religion in the world.”
Aslan defended his actions and the programme, tweeting: “This is a show about the Aghori not Hinduism”.
Source- 9NEWS.com.au
