Bigger Fish To Fry – The Politics Of Veg-NonVeg “Hindu-tva”
By Umang Kumar
14 May, 2014
Countercurrents.org
The Hindu's recent circular prohibiting non-vegetarian food in their canteen could be seen as an internal matter, as some may argue, and it may almost seem unfair to draw too many conclusions of obvious motives of exclusion and discrimination from that incident alone. After all, It is not uncommon to see, even in the USA, messages taped to microwave ovens in offices urging users to not heat "smelly foods" - and we can almost guess which communities this might be aimed at.
S. Mitra Kalita, a US-based journalist and writer, writes about IFS or Indian Food Smells in her book Suburban Sahibs. And in a paper about the anxieties caused by food odors titled, “Incensed: Food Smells and Ethnic Tension,”[i] she is quoted describing her own experiences of “dining with her parents in their home [in New Jersey] but concealing the aroma of their food by spraying air freshener before her non-Indian playmates came over.” One person's food can certainly be another person's poison!
And yet, smells and foods in India (and of Indians) are also invariably indexed by caste. As James McHugh shows in his book, Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in South Asian Culture and Religion, “smells could be associated with various types of divine being, and with various castes.” Further in his book, delving into a Sanskrit text Matangalila on the smell of elephants who are also ranked by castes (bear with me...), McHugh tells us that, '[t]he elephant that corresponds to the Sudra caste, an animal that is said to be the lowest of elephants, has a "smell that is sour, acidic, or of a he-goat, bones or crab.' According to McHugh, “the smell of he-goat, bone or crab may reflect impure elements of the diet of this caste in the Sanskrit imaginary.”
It is almost risky to go into the instances of the dietary habits of Indians over the ages, especially how the upper-castes enjoyed their meats and meads. One is only too acutely aware of the blood-spattered history of cow-protection movements and also the acrimony over whether the holy cow formed part of the upper-caste diet or not.
Many would like to bowdlerize the menus of the Indians in the past, ridding them of any carnal associations whatsoever. But as is shown by various scholars, including P.V. Kane, Patrick Olivelle and even Wendy Doniger, who've examined the various law-books of the Hindus (the Dharmashastras), a wide variety of foods – including several kinds of animals – were permitted for consumption. Gautama, the author of one of the Dharmashastras begins a list of the “bhaksyah” (edible) food thus -
bhaksyah pratudaviskirajalapadah I matyas cavikrtah I
vadhyas ca dharmarthe IThese may be eaten: birds that feed by thrusting their beaks
or scratching with their feet and that do not have webbed
feet, fish that are not grotesque, and animals that have to be
killed for the sake of the Law.[ii]
Doniger, quoting from the Manusmriti, discusses the dietary taboos that Manu lists, but in that list one can get an idea of permissible items of flesh also -
Do not eat carnivorous birds or any birds that live in villages, or any whole-hoofed animals that have not been specially permitted (emphasis mine)...They say that, among the animals with five claws, the porcupine, hedgehog, iguana, rhinoceros, tortoise, and hare may be eaten, as well as animals with one row of teeth, except for the camel. (The Laws of Manu, 5.5-14, 17-18)[iii]
However, if anyone still has any serious doubts about the historical evidence, they should probably just peek into the shopping bags of a modern-day Bengali bhadromohila in Kolkata to disabuse themselves of their vegetarian ideals and imaginaries. Or one could try to take in the smells of frying illish maach wafting out of a Bengali neighbor's window.
Or chances are, your Konkani colleague would have told you about her love for fish curry (hooman) or that you might have been invited to try meen vevichatu at your Malayali boss's home – and it is certainly possible that you tasted some rogan-josh at your friend's place, who happened to be a Kashmiri Pandit.
(The Saraswat Brahmins of Kashmir and Goa sometimes speak of the founder of their clan, the sage Saraswat, as having continued to recite Vedic verses while eating fish given to him by the goddess Saraswati in times of a drought. And speaking of fishes and fishy smells, the mysterious Ved Vyasa, him the composer (and arranger) of the Vedas, the Puranas and the Mahabharata, among other texts, was conceived of Satyavati, who had a fishy odor, and the sage Parashara.)
Quite obviously vegetarianism as the marker of Hinduism – which it never was - did not travel to the eastern, western, southern and, well, even the northern reaches of the country, at least in modern times.
What The Hindu can certainly be held accountable for is its unilateral manner of issuing this firman, which could be a seen as a sign of a certain assumed caste-privilege, maybe even representative of the fact that a good chunk of the Indian media establishment being upper-caste, they are thus secure in the sweeping, exclusionary actions they take.
But it is hard not to see parallels even in this rather localized incident with the commonest excuse offered in the housing market in urban India by people who do not wish to admit those from other communities. In fact, that is what the people in Bhavnagar, amongst whom Praveen Togadia recently made his hate-filled statements against Muslims, seem to be saying as quoted in this Indian Express article -
“As a matter of principle, I am not opposed to Muslims living in our area. A family has been living among us for the past four decades. But we fear their food habits can offend us (emphasis mine), and it may lead to other Muslims buying properties here. That is why I am protesting,” said another Hindu resident on condition of anonymity.
That such excuses of differing food habits conceal other motives is revealed by another quote, again from a similar incident in Bhavnagar from 2012 as reported in the Times of India, this time made by a VHP leader -
"We have asked the person, who sold the residential property, to cancel the deal but he was not willing. So, we organized a Ram darbar to make local residents aware about such move that will make the area Muslim-dominated ultimately (emphasis mine)," said Kirit Mistry, a Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader in Bhavnagar.
However, such exclusion and discrimination is not limited to Muslims but also targets "prospective untouchable tenants", as is shown tellingly by Gopal Guru in his paper, "Archeology of Untouchability."[iv] Guru offers a very helpful series of questions put by a landlord to the tenant, which is particularly illustrative and relevant when the question comes to food habits -
Landlord: Are you a vegetarian or a non-vegetarian? (This is true
in some regions only.)
Tenant: Vegetarian. (This does not help the landlord to overcome
landlord's reservations, and hence, he uses the last question.)
Landlord: Where do you work?
Please note Guru's second parenthetical note - even when the tenant, in this case an untouchable, declares himself a "vegetarian," the landlord is not fully convinced. The lower caste person's admission to vegetarianism is not quite enough it seems to prove his suitability for tenancy – the landlord has his own fixed ideas of the dietary habits of the prospective tenant. It confirms what Doniger observes in her paper cited above in discussing the expression “You are what you eat” in the Indian context - “It represents the traditional view set forth by the classical texts on the caste-system, which defines the person by what he (rarely she) does (and does not) eat.”
The Hindu's action surely smacks of arbitrariness - the sensitivities of the vegetarians unilaterally trumped the rights of the non-vegetarians. It also seems to have shut the door on the complexities of the food habits in Chennai itself, as the detailed study by anthropologist Pat Caplan[v] has shown and also as Saeed Naqvi's delightfully anecdotal Sunday Guardian piece brings out.
Though, as The Hindu claims, that a majority of its employees are vegetarian, and though some might argue about “respect,” quite obviously any such respect has to cut both ways. The Hindu seems to be taking what it considers the moral high ground, as the Hindutva forces have done in the case of cow-slaughter and consumption of beef (as a matter of fact, two other loose canons of the BJP, Amit Shah and Giriraj Singh both make reference to abattoirs and the cow-protection program in their recent speeches). As Kancha Illaiah observes in his 1996 article[vi] in the EPW, "On one hand the BJP defines SC, BC castes as Hindus, and on the other by banning beef, denies them their age-old food habits...The food rights of people form part of their civil and democratic rights.”
However, it is not just about food rights, as we have seen. Whether it is a national party or a national newspaper, the battle over food habits masks more sinister attempts to define ideal modes of life and behavior and also to mark off space by displacing the other. In some cases, the displacement may be just beyond the pale, whether to the outside of a canteen or a village, in others it is meant to indicate expulsion to another country.
Umang Kumar is an activist and researcher based in Boston, USA.
[i] benjamin aldes wurgaft , Incensed: Food Smells and Ethnic Tension, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Spring 2006), pp. 57-60
[ii] Patrick Olivelle, Abhaksya and abhojya: An Exploration In Dietary Language, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 122, No. 2
[iii] Wendy Doniger, Eating Karma in Classical South Asian Texts, Social Research, Vol. 66, No. 1, Food: Nature and Culture (Spring 1999), pp. 151-165
[iv] Gopal Guru, Archeology of Untouchability, Economic & Political Weekly Vol. 44, No. 37, September 12-18, 2009 pp. 49-56
[v] Pat Caplan (2008), Crossing the Veg/Non-Veg Divide: Commensality and Sociality Among the Middle Classes in Madras/Chennai , South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31:1, 118-142
[vi] Kancha Illiaiah, Beef, BJP and Food Rights of People, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 31, No. 24 (Jun. 15, 1996), pp. 1444-1445
Comments are moderated