A DEVELOPING INTEREST IN BEEF AND COW POLITICS
My reason for starting to pay special attention to bovines—or more precisely, to how humans relate to them, as meat in particular—was not their omnipresence. If anything, the fact that they were such a taken-for-granted feature of the Indian landscape meant that I had ceased, over the years, to take much notice of them at all. My interest, rather, was stirred when, back in the late 1990s, I first encountered beef on the menu at dinners to which I had been invited. Even then, given that food was peripheral to my research interests, it would probably not have unduly aroused my curiosity had it not been for the fact that I was a vegetarian, and so found myself having to refuse what I had been offered. Food, while usually a pleasurable backdrop to my social encounters, was, as I saw it then, merely a means to access and sociality. Shared meals provided a context in which to speak to people, to develop relationships, and to observe people in their domestic environments. Consequently, I was initially puzzled that, in a country renowned for its plant-based diet, anyone should have been surprised by my own eating habits.2 Forms of vegetarianism are, after all, commonly recognized practices for Jains, Buddhists, and certain Hindu castes, and even many of those who ate other kinds of meat drew the line at beef consumption. That the cow is viewed as sacred in India was, I assumed, a truth universally acknowledged.
Certainly, if anyone I met in India found my food preferences in any way worthy of remark, they had no difficulty in finding categories in which to classify them. “Oh, in his own country, is the doragaru a Brahmin?”3 I recall an elderly woman once asking my research assistant, on hearing that I did not eat meat. And during the years when I ate fish but did not eat other kinds of meat, village friends jokingly referred to me as a “Bengali Brahmin.” While Brahmins were not supposed to eat meat at all, fish consumption was said, at least by my Andhra informants, to be central to Bengali identity. My point here is that vegetarianism, while perhaps less ubiquitous than commonly assumed, is not an alien concept in South India.
It was against this background of acceptance of dietary differences that the dogged insistence by Victoria-Rani, a Christian teacher I knew, that I should try some of the beef curry she was offering me caught me off guard. Not only did she offer me, a dinner guest at her house, the beef dish; she also urged me to try it without at first letting on what it was. She was then disappointed when I politely refused, even when I tried to explain that I was happy with the vegetable- and lentil-based dishes also on offer. Why, I pondered afterward, was she so keen to tempt me with something she knew I did not eat, and why would she be offended—in a social setting full of vegetarians—by my refusal to partake? After all, having spent an hour or more with me almost every morning over the past year as my Telugu teacher, Victoria-Rani was well aware of my food preferences. It was also noteworthy that although I was offered beef in similar circumstances at several other Christian households over the year I spent in India in 1999 and 2000, this was something new. Prior to then, I had never, in fifteen years of traveling to India, knowingly been offered beef in someone’s house.4
This was the event that stirred my initial interest in food as a topic of anthropological inquiry, and that began the quest that led to this book. As I explored the questions it provoked in the years that followed, a number of explanations emerged as to why my teacher, Victoria-Rani, behaved in the way that she did. First, there were the sensory pleasures of beef: why, in her logic, would I deny myself something so delicious and wholesome when my own religion (assumed to be Christianity) and status (as a foreigner) did not require me to do so? Second, eating beef would also have identified me as an ally. As a Madiga, the beef-eating leatherworker caste, previously dubbed Untouchable and now, in the state’s nomenclature, a Scheduled Caste, she saw herself as one of “the people Hindus always treat very badly.” Dalit, the more politicized term for people from Scheduled Castes—used by activists but seldom, if ever, by my own informants in Andhra Pradesh—literally translates as “oppressed” or “broken” or “scattered.” The sharing and enjoyment of beef—albeit privately and away from the gaze of non-beef-eating Hindus—resisted the notion that its consumption was inherently linked to impurity and low social status.
To Victoria-Rani, my vegetarianism could be read as a political act: an implicit acceptance of the sacred status afforded by higher-caste Hindus to the cow, and, by association, of her Hindu-defined impurity. I appeared to be siding with a Hindu ideology that, as Victoria-Rani saw it, oppressed her and others like her. To have partaken, by contrast, would have been to recognize—and in doing so, reinforce—her positive identity as a Christian, a religion in which there was no taboo prohibiting eating beef. It would also have signaled solidarity in her struggle against oppression.
This does not, however, explain why beef has become significant now; the association with beef eating and low social status is, after all, long established, yet questions about my own willingness to eat it had not been raised in the previous fifteen years that I had been visiting the area. One explanation was that, by the late 1990s, Christians and other minorities in Andhra, Muslims in particular, were feeling under threat in ways that they had not in the recent past. The case of a Christian missionary in the neighboring state of Orissa (now Odisha) who had been burnt to death, along with his children, by Hindu extremists in January 1999 was a regular topic of discussion during my first major period of fieldwork.5 Following a spate of local church bombings, there had also been a police presence outside nearby churches on Sunday mornings, reminding Victoria-Rani and others that Christianity, as well as Islam, was seen in some quarters as un-Indian.6 Indeed, it was only a year earlier that the BJP, part of the Sangh Parivar, or “family” of Hindu fundamentalist organizations,7 had emerged for the first time as the largest party in India’s 1998 general election. Such electoral success gave a boost to the right’s vision of Hindutva, or Hinduness: what the nationalists articulated as the revival of an Indian culture untainted either by Mughal rule or by colonialism.
This “saffron wave,” as anthropologist Thomas Hansen called it, was in part a consequence of successful organizational work done by rightwing Hindu parties over a prolonged period (see, e.g., Jaffrelot 1996). It was also because its message struck a chord both with the growing middle class and the poor masses. The first group, the middle class, was fearful of its fragile dominance being threatened, in a globalizing world, from the outside; the Hindu poor, meanwhile, were seen as taking solace in the majoritarian rhetoric about cultural pride and national strength that the BJP and other regional nationalist parties were renowned for. It was in this context that the BJP emerged as “the most resolute defender of India’s national pride and its national interest” (Hansen 1999, 3). A key part of this imagined Hindu culture, supposedly rooted in the ancient Vedic texts, was reverence to that most fundamental symbol of the Indian nation, the cow, leading the new BJP-led government to press for greater compliance with a provision in the Indian constitution for states to enforce bans on cow slaughter. In so doing, they constituted beef consumption as a battleground on which identities might be fought over. To be a vegetarian, in this context, placed me in an unexpectedly uncomfortable position, albeit one that triggered interesting lines of inquiry and of self-reflection.
I was particularly concerned, when I returned to coastal Andhra for short visits—six to eight weeks at a time in 2009, 2011, and 2013—to find out what other people who ate beef thought about