How people navigated through these multiple meanings—contributing to or reshaping them as they went—is a core part of this book. Instead of focusing our intention on declarations by those in favor of more stringent cattle protection or their activist opponents, who speak up instead for the “culinary rights” of those who want to celebrate the consumption of beef as an integral part of their identity, what happens if we take seriously what those who express more ambivalent, complex views toward it say? That is what this book seeks to do.
PLACES AND PEOPLE
For my first bout of official fieldwork in 1999 and 2000, I was based in a self-established and self-run leprosy colony, Anandapuram (a pseudonym), in coastal Andhra Pradesh. It was a community of around one thousand people spread across around three hundred households, most of them living below or around the official poverty line. I had been visiting it since 1984, both as a volunteer and, later, to conduct research for an undergraduate dissertation. By the time I began my PhD fieldwork in November 1999, which focused on the social implications of leprosy, I already knew many of the people there very well. Inhabited largely by converts to Christianity who made their way there via missionary leprosy hospitals, the ordering of houses in Anandapuram, unlike villages elsewhere in the region, bore no relationship to the inhabitants’ original caste or religion, and intercaste marriages were very common. Of the 232 marriages I recorded in a survey in 2000, 128 were intercaste or intercommunal (Staples 2007, 138). Self-run as a colony since early settlers established themselves as an association in the 1960s, there had also been an unusually high foreign presence in the village since the late 1970s. First to stay there long-term was an Australian monk, who set up a number of income-generation and social-welfare programs. His work was continued by a British nurse, who expanded on the projects that he had begun and started new ones, and there were numerous volunteers and others, like me, who passed through in the years that followed. From the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, there was always a foreigner involved in the running of the colony’s programs. That these various differences all left their mark is, perhaps, self-evident, and I drew out and explored some of the particularities of Anandapuram in my earlier work (e.g., Staples 2007).
Using research findings from such a community to make more general claims about the meanings of eating or not eating meat in India might, not unreasonably, be challenged. But the material on food I collected there over the years is useful for at least three reasons. First, as relatively new converts to Christianity, from across castes, my interlocutors’ attitudes toward eating beef serve as a useful comparison to those of longer established, almost exclusively Scheduled Caste Christians that I met elsewhere. Examining the differences between Anandapuram’s beef consumers and those from other places in the region might in itself be informative. Second, while always remaining aware of its limitations, the very richness of my data, some of it dating back more than thirty years, provides a unique perspective on dietary change among a particular group of people in recent times. For all their differences, after all, Anandapuram’s residents were also embedded within the wider local contexts in which they shopped, cooked, and ate. Third, my long-standing relationships with people in the community were invaluable in establishing new contacts with people beyond the confines of the colony who also informed this study.
Several of those I worked with took me to visit their natal homes, sometimes for several days at a time, during which I learned a great deal about how commensality was done elsewhere. I spent, for example, a week in one village, with a dominant-caste, landowning family, whose Dalit laborers were fed on disposable leaf plates outside the main house. I spent a similar amount of time in a Madiga hamlet of another village, where buffalo hides hung in the sun to dry and where beef was a desired item on the menu. And I stayed with a large Muslim family—thirteen people sharing two small rented rooms—in a provincial town, where preferences for beef, as well as for other foods less eaten in the villages, were also expressed. The differences in these domestic setups related not just to the consumption of meat: there were also important variations in menus and styles of eating, influenced by locality as well as religion, caste, and class status. Other visits out from Anandapuram took me to the community’s makeshift begging settlement in Mumbai; my field notes are replete with observations of shared meals there, as well as records of conversations about the availability of foodstuffs and eating habits in urban, coastal Maharashtra compared to those of Andhra, more than six hundred miles away on the opposite coastline.
I also worked with people from the local town, Bhavanipur (also a pseudonym)—Victoria-Rani, my beef-eating Telugu teacher, among them—whom I met either through friends in Anandapuram or because they worked in or visited the village. From itinerant vegetable sellers, snack vendors, and builders to doctors, teachers, and social workers, movements into the village as well as out of it had increased significantly over the past thirty years. Anandapuram was not the bounded, isolated community one might imagine a leprosy colony to be (at least, that was my own perception before arriving there for the first time) but instead interconnected with multiple other places. Through those incomers I got to know a range of people from Bhavanipur and the surrounding hamlets, whose experiences were arguably more typical—if there is such a thing—of quotidian life in the region. Few of them would be described as rich, and none were of the “small but important class of consumers characterized by its multiethnic, multicaste, polyglot, and Westernized tastes” that anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes (1988, 6), still less of the “sophisticated super-elites” he refers to, from the major cities. Many of them were, nevertheless, wealthier than their Anandapuram neighbors. Several families, for example, owned at least some arable land in their natal villages, and nearly all lived in brick-built dwellings, owned or rented, with three or four separate rooms. Conspicuous evidence of their drift toward middle-class sensibilities—and, in some cases, membership, at the lower rungs of that elusively defined class—was evident in the presence of consumer goods such as dining tables and chairs, televisions, and refrigerators.
During my most recent field trips, in 2016 and 2017, I also worked specifically with beef sellers and others involved in the meat trade in Bhavanipur’s market, all of them Madigas or Muslims, again relying on friends from the leprosy colony to forge the initial contact. It was beef-eating friends, for example, who got word from their contacts when cows were to be slaughtered clandestinely for sale in other towns in the district, and who accompanied me both to witness those slaughters and to purchase meat, for themselves and to sell to other households that partook. The locations of these transient, informal slaughterhouses—a clearing in a wood, or a secluded domestic compound—would not have been accessible to me without the long-standing relationships I had developed over the previous thirty years.
One family to which I was particularly close and had known from my first visit had moved to Delhi in the mid-1990s. My social obligation (and desire) to visit them meant my subsequent research field trips always started or ended (and sometimes both) with a visit there. Although these trips were intended to be social rather than a segment of my research program per se, the discussions—as well as