How the emotional subject of food has entered the political discourse too

Food has always been an emotional subject, arousing fierce opinions and defiant defences

In our swachh era, we are made to believe that a majority of Indians are no longer content with prefixing shudh (pure) to shakahari (vegetarian) and letting the value-neutral non-vegetarian partake of meat in peace. So for an Assamese who identifies as a “pure” non-vegetarian — as many from the high meat-consuming Northeast region would concur — a new meat-centric film felt like a welcome cinematic transgression. One that left me chewing on questions of love and desire as well as ruminating on the politics of food.

The Assamese film Aamis (Ravening) is not a treatise on non-vegetarianism. It is about the relationship between a paediatrician, who is married and has a child, and a PhD student researching meat-eating practices of Northeastern societies. The two are in denial about their mutual attraction because they are unable to digest the idea of adultery. So they bond over meat and sublimate their desires by feeding on (human) flesh.

Aamis stretches our ideas of what might be considered normal and acceptable, even to meat eaters. An Indian — let alone Assamese — film that nibbles away at taboo topics such as cannibalism is a delicious sight in our deeply conservative society. Until the characters take a morally and legally criminal turn, we are faced with some provocative questions. Is cannibalism okay so long as it doesn’t “harm” the one cannibalised? And is it also just another means to satisfy dietary needs?

In the film, the two leads are drawn to unprocessed and unusual varieties of meat, including rabbit and bats.

As such, in the absence of beef or even the madly popular pork in the menu — neither of which is part of the traditional diet of caste Hindu Assamese like the characters — the meat (non-human kind, that is) in Aamis is more of the exotic kind than the politically incorrect. At any rate, the Northeast isn’t getting de-exoticised for mainland India anytime soon.

We know that food choices are a battleground when communities clash, and they often betray the notion of “one man’s meat is another man’s poison”. These markers of regional, caste or religious identities have become more pronounced in the face of growing majoritarianism in India.

Yet, political compulsions have so far largely ensured that the wave of Hindu mob-led lynchings cannot be orchestrated in India’s Northeast — where beef is integral to its sizeable tribal population — in the same way as it has been in the hinterland. (How pork captured the palates of tribals and non-tribals alike in recent decades, with an entire region becoming synonymous with delicacies such as ‘pork with bamboo shoot’, is another story.)

Studies have confirmed that an overwhelming majority of Indians is non-vegetarian (one study claimed the figure was as high as 80 per cent among Indian men). Vegetarians were found largely in the North and West, and meat consumption was highest in the South and Northeast. Murders of Muslims by vigilante mobs have been recorded mostly in the North and the “cow belt” — meat consumption is lower in these states, from which a Hindu hegemonic culture is sought to be spread across the rest of India.

The framer of the Indian Constitution, B R Ambedkar, wrote that untouchability, associated with the lowest castes, had its roots in their practice of beef-eating. He also wrote that the flesh of the dead cow was also eaten by upper-caste Brahmins, and argued that they gave it up as a deliberate strategy as part of which they started worshipping the cow. “...without becoming vegetarian the Brahmins could not have recovered the ground they had lost to their rival, namely Buddhism,” he adds.

Historian D N Jha argued similarly in his book, The Myth of the Holy Cow (2002), that the “holiness” of the cow was a carefully constructed myth and that its meat was an important part of the ancient Indian diet. He cites Hindu, Buddhist and Jain scriptures to stress that beef-eating was not an Islamic “baneful bequeathal” to India. Hindu fundamentalists reacted angrily to the book, which was banned by a civil court and later republished. The fundamentalists also issued death threats to Jha.

That was then. Now, after the consolidation of Hindutva politics with the Bharatiya Janata Party ruling at the Centre since 2014, religious differences based on food habits have suddenly become acute leading to extreme reactions to the most mundane matters.

This was arguably never more apparent than earlier this year when a man in Jabalpur cancelled his order on food delivery service Zomato because the courier was Muslim. Social media condemned the man for what appeared to be brazen bigotry and lauded the delivery app for its stand that “food has no religion” and its refusal to entertain him. The man claimed to have exercised his personal choice in the holy month of Shravan. This instance made it apparent that the current climate of unashamed majoritarianism has emboldened many to voice their religious prejudices publicly rather than grumble in private.

In less distinctly unsavoury moments, whether on social media or offline, debates over food tend to be more about one’s personal preferences and passionate justifications. Just last week, a tweet by a US professor saying that Indian food was terrible caused a furore. His comments were reviled as being racist and he earned unenviable labels such as being the “Donald J Trump of food”.

Besides its possible intention of simply shocking politically correct Twitterati, such an opinion possibly also reflects utter ignorance of the huge heterogeneity that is “Indian food”. Our multiple cuisines from different regions have remained hidden and unrepresented — for the vast majority, Indian food essentially means North Indian food and that, an exclusively restaurant version that would be only faintly recognisable to those who have eaten in North Indian homes. We ourselves in India fail to take into account diverse cuisines and stick to broad categories. We only need to look at the generic restaurant menu, and its proud offering of “Indian, South Indian and Chinese”.

Aamis stretches our ideas of what might be considered normal and acceptable, even to meat eaters

Conversely, there is a snobbery among some of us who obsess over “authentic” cuisines. It is not enough to merely dish out “Chinese” fare — Cantonese or Sichuan or Yunnanese it must be. It encourages food outlets to cater to a niche audience, and as consumers in a truly consumerist space we consume capsules of cultures that we cannot have intimate access to. Craving authenticity is all very well, but to truly appreciate cultural nuance through cuisines the best bet is to visit a place and its people.

As we seek variety at one place in a globalised world, and despite highly discussed fads such as vegetarianism and veganism, meat-eating has been rising rapidly. There are calls already for reduction in meat-eating in order to mitigate the effects of climate change.

At the end of the day, a need to exercise one’s choice or simply economic compulsion determine what we eat. I’d leave you with a question. Don’t we simply eat what — or whom, an idea hinted at in Aamis — we love and crave? Of course, I’d rather pose the same question to a Swiss farmer in the Alps than to a gau rakshak.