On The Menu: Culinary Politics

Food remains a great political tool to keep alive implicit caste boundaries in the modern Indian context

Barely days after HRD Minister Smriti Irani, acting upon the plea of a Madhya Pradesh based swayamsevak, sought an action report on the so-called 'tamasic' (read non-vegetarian) food being served up at IIT campuses across the country, come reports that the Maharashtra Navanirman Sena has taken up cudgels against discrimination by housing societies in Mumbai towards non-vegetarians.

The MNS headed by Raj Thackeray has reportedly shot off a letter to the BMC, Mumbai's civic authority, asking it to ensure that flats are sold irrespective of buyers' food preferences. The party is only echoing the chants of Congress leader Nitesh Rane who complained earlier this month when he went on a tirade against the Gujarati community of Mumbai, that the city's Maharashtrians weren't getting housing of their choice because of their dietary preference for meat.

 

 

At the heart of it, this debate isn't really about meat vs. veg though. Would politicians, barely bothered about if Indians eat at all - the rate of malnutrition cases among children in this country deplorably, being twice that of Sub-Saharan Africa - really give two hoots about what Indians eat? The truth of the matter is, both, the BJP's alacrity  to act upon an RSS volunteer's absurd suggestion, and the Congress & MNS's posturing (rational as it might sound for once) on the issue, find a deeper subtext in caste and religion based identity politics, at the centre of which food has historically played a big role.  

 

"No Indian needs to be reminded that the caste system is kept firmly in place on the basis of two historically reproduced principles – of what you eat and whom you marry" wrote G Arunima, a historian who teaches at the Centre for Women's Studies in Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, in a piece for the Economic & Political Weekly a few months ago.

 

Politicians of the day seem to be tweaking this food axiom not merely to preserve the caste system, but also to divide vote banks on religious, racial and linguistic lines. Rane's remark, factual as it may have been about the systematic bias against meat eaters in Mumbai, was after all more anti-Gujarati than anti-discrimination. And the RSS' appeal for segregated vegetarian canteens in the IITs, is only overtly reflective of its desperation to construct an all embracing Hindu identity over cuisine than anything else.

 

The irony of the day however is that vegetarianism isn't a dietary convention among more than 80% of India's citizens, a majority of whom happen to be Hindu. Its institutionalization say historians, has largely been an upper caste attempt to perpetuate Brahmin hegemony over food practices.

 

Writing in Economic & Political Weekly after the controversy over The Hindu newspaper asking its employees not to bring non-vegetarian food into its canteen broke out, Hugo Gorringe & D Kartikeyan, researchers from the University of Edinburgh surmised that accepting the prohibition of non-vegetarian food was "caste by other means". That even in a state like Tamil Nadu, the cradle of the Dravidian movement where most gods were non-vegetarian, and Brahmins constituted barely 3% of the population, the fact that meat could cause discomfort to The Hindu's employees, reflected the continuing dominance of Brahmin strictures in the Tamil press.

 

Does such form of discrimination, shrouded under the garb or respect for religious sentiment or tolerance, find legal sanction in India? The Supreme Court in March 2008, upheld a Gujarat government imposed ban on selling meat for 9 days during a Jain festival. A division bench of the Gujarat High Court followed suit in 2012, quashing an interim order passed by a single judge bench granting relief to a civic body in Vapi, which sought the sale of chicken and fish during, Paryushon. The Indian Express reported the bench as saying sale of these products would "frustrate the spirit of the apex court's order and also hurt religious sentiments." Tarunabh Khaitan, an anti-discrimination law expert at the University of Oxford cites several other such dangerous legal precedents set in the past, that could today be impinging upon peoples fundamental personal liberties, in a piece he wrote ironically, for The Hindu, in 2008.

 

Evidently, if these laws aren't urgently relooked at, food diktats will continue to remain great tools for politicians as well as private persons to keep implicit caste boundaries alive where they don't have any place in the modern, pluralistic Indian context. Politicians across party lines need to unite to unequivocally denounce this legacy of culinary discrimination against what is, a majority of India's meat eating population.