Volume 9

March 2018
Editor
Rabi Thapa

Assistant Editors
Itisha Giri
Niranjan Kunwar
Pranab Man Singh
Prawin Adhikari

Contributing Editors
Pranaya Rana
Rajani Thapa
Shlesha Thapaliya
Smriti Ravindra

Cover
Cecilia Valagussa

Design
Dishebh Shrestha

Published by Safu, Ekantakuna, Lalitpur

www.lalitmag.com by Neolinx, Kathmandu

Volume 9, published in 2018, Lalitpur, Nepal

001
Copyright © Editors and Contributors

ISSN No. 2091-2390

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Contents

Editorial 7

TRADITIONS & TRANSGRESSIONS

Salt: a vignette from a small Croatian island 11

Lora Tomas

West Country Scrumpy 15

Ross Adkin

The Taste of Decay 19

Muna Gurung

New Gurkha Kitchen: Eating Nepali in England 23

Premila van Ommen

Fussy Eaters Forever 33

Amish Raj Mulmi

Beef-pork Politics and the Bahujan Paradox 39

Kaustav Bannerjee

Tamed Tigers: Indigenous Cuisines in Imperium 43

Garga Chatterjee

Fascism in the Kitchen 48

(Review)
Beef-pork Politics and the
Bahujan Paradox
K AUSTAV BANNERJEE

Paradox and politics are often intertwined, especially if one reflects on food habits in
India. Recent attempts at organizing “food freedom festivals” – also termed “beef-pork
festivals” – across Indian university campuses are a very good example of this paradox.
The “majoritarian” Hindu claim is that beef and pork are not part of Indian diets, and the
organizers are easily accused of encouraging divisiveness in the name of religion and caste.
On the face of it, this claim seems to appeal to common sense. After all, India is the land of
preachers of non-violence: Gandhi, Buddha, Mahavir Jain and most Indians are perceived
to be vegetarians. Moreover, Hindus don’t eat beef and Muslims don’t eat pork by religious
sanction and this is accepted as gospel truth. So who eats beef and pork in India, and are
vegetarians the majority (Bahujan)? The answer to this unravels the political paradox of our
times.

Behind the “majoritarian” religious assumption is the fact that Muslims, Parsis, Christians
and other religious groups are consuming either beef or pork or both in India. What if we
first segregate Hindus by caste and see who consumes pork or beef or both in India? The
Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Castes constitute almost 75%
of Hindus and a large proportion of them consume either meats or both. So it actually is a
numerical minority of Hindus who are vegetarians and it is a projection of their views that
has come to be seen as the majoritarian view.

The real Bahujans in India, the numerical majority, are actually not vegetarian. The National
Sample Surveys (2012-13) of the Indian Government point to the fact that the percentage
of people in India consuming non-vegetarian food has actually gone up, with 6.4% of
rural Indians consuming mutton, 21.7% consuming chicken, 26.5% consuming fish, and
29.2% consuming eggs. In urban India, 10% consume goat meat/mutton, 21% consume
fish, 27% consume chicken and 37.6% consume eggs. A staggering 80 to 85 million people
consume beef or buffalo meat in India. A similar number consume pork, and an even larger
number consume other items like mutton, lamb, chicken, fish or eggs. Across the seven states

Traditions & Transgressions 39

of Northeast India, Kerala, West Bengal, Goa and Lakshadweep, beef and pork is easily
available and consumed widely. The other states in India consume buffalo meat instead of
beef because of the ban, but pork meat is available in almost all states.

The number of people whose livelihoods depend on rearing these animals or using them
for agriculture is also very large and again very easily forms a majority of Indians. The
percentage of people who are engaged in agriculture and livestock rearing in India is
disproportionately larger than those who are dependent on them for consumption. The meat
trade provides livelihood opportunities to many members from the same communities who
otherwise have limited access to the employment opportunities available to the hegemonic
minorities in India. It should come as no surprise that the sector also recorded the fastest
growth rates as compared to most other sectors of the Indian economy. The livestock
sector contributes around a third of the output value of the agriculture and allied sector in
India and already clocked a 21% growth rate at the start of the new millennium. It had an
impressive compound average growth rate of around 5% from the 1970s to the early 2000s.
Over two decades, the sector has had a compound growth rate almost equal to that of the
Indian economy, if not better. So what could explain “majoritarian” apathy towards one of
the fastest growing sectors of the Indian economy? Shouldn’t it be celebrated as an example
of Shining India, especially the India that fetishizes growth?

The ownership patterns of the meat and leather trade reveal a few interesting facts
too – while the beef trade is very Muslim-dominated, the pork trade is dominated by Hindu
lower castes, the leather trade is dominated by Hindu upper castes and Jains, and the overall
meat trade has four Hindu upper castes in the top six. Cattle ownership is a marker of
wealth and this is largely dominated by caste Hindus and Sikhs. Very often it is the Muslim
communities who are singled out for vigilante action in the name of banning cow slaughter,
but never has a Hindu cattle owner who sells his cattle been attacked. What could explain
this paradox?

When the children begin shouting that the emperor has no clothes, the naked display of
power starts, as it has in Indian universities in recent years. Universities are seditious spaces
because they encourage thinking and questioning. One interesting experiment in modern
Indian universities has been the idea of a common hostel mess, where students across
caste and religion sit together and eat. This would have been unthinkable at the time of
Independence due to the persistence of stringent caste and religious codes. So hostel messes
were part of a secular modernizing project that was conceptualized right from the beginning
of a university like Jawaharlal Nehru University. However, the hostel messes – for reasons
best known to the administrators – did not serve beef or pork. So it was as though we could
pretend to be secular because we all ate together but you only got to eat “our” food, not
yours! Students were of course allowed to bring their own pickles/food items to the mess but,
curiously, most beef and pork eaters shied away from bringing these meats to the mess tables.

In the early 2000s, some students decided to break this trend by eating beef in a hostel mess.

40 Vol. 9 | 2018
The meat looked delicious and drew the attention of the other residents. Now, even though
JNU hostel messes were conceptualized to transcend barriers of caste, religion and ethnicity,
it wasn’t so in practice. Most hostel residents would cluster around the eating tables in their
“own” groups. The group of students that had hatched this plan of consuming beef at the
mess table were aware that there would be questions asked as to what they were consuming
and had thought of suitable answers for each group. The first query came from a bunch of
north Indian friends, and the prompt answer was beef, would you also like to try? They
recoiled, grumbled and quickly finished their meal. A group of Muslim students sitting
nearby overheard this conversation and came forward to enquire what this delicacy was. The
answer to them was that it was pork, would you like to try?

Both the groups now got talking to each other, protesting that the consumption of such
meat at the mess table should not be encouraged. But what was the meat that had raised
the hackles of both a north Indian majoritarian group and a group of Muslim students?
Realizing that the original group of students had played with their religious sentiments, they
decided to get to the bottom of this together. They asked the students who were licking their
fingers dry: what meat it was “really”? Sensing that religious sanction would form an unlikely
alliance between the majoritarian Hindus and Muslims, the group of students said dog meat!
Surely, there was no sanction against that animal? Both groups left the mess in disgust.

The notion of beef-pork festivals gathered traction only in the last decade, with a new wave
of Dalit Bahujan assertions in Indian universities. In JNU, two movements went hand in
hand. The All India Backward Students Forum organized a Mahishasur Martyrdom Day
in 2011. Mahishasur has been portrayed as the demon, or Asur, who is slain by Goddess
Durga, the Mother, according to the “majoritarian” belief structure. Reclaiming one’s own
heroes and martyrs was one way to assert a Dalit Bahujan voice and this flew in the face of
“majoritarian” common sense. The university authorities were not pleased; the hegemonic
forces protested at this inversion of history and tradition. But the Bahujan assertion could
not be contained. Subsequently, a group called the New Materialists started a food freedom
movement in 2012, later labelled a beef-pork festival by others. This drew on the Bahujan
philosophical tradition of the Lokayat, and insisted on scientific materialism as its basis.
Predictably, this drew the ire of the same “majoritarian” groups and university authorities.

Earlier, Bahujan students of Osmania University, Hyderabad, had organized a similar

festival. These incidents raised the hackles of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and with
the backing of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, they targeted these students and the
universities that were the cradles of such thinking. But why did celebrations of the freedom
to enjoy one’s own food become a seditious activity? Why would celebrating Vijay Dashami
Divas as Mahishasur Martyrdom Day be unacceptable to the “majority” of Hindus? Would
it actually expose the falsehood that there is no Hindu majority?

The Bahujan is the majority in India but its heroes are vilified, their food habits are scorned
and their sources of livelihood are criminalized. In a searing critique, N. Sukumar, writing

Traditions & Transgressions 41

in the Economic & Political Weekly in 2015, asked the provocative question “Why was beef
banished from my kitchen?”, and proceeded to lay out the machinations that led to the
disappearance of beef from the diets of Dalit households. Once we are able to see through
the veneer of majoritarianism we actually chance upon an insecure minority, a minority that
finds solace in projecting itself as a majority. The cloak employed very productively by the
majority is that of nationalism, and a harking back to ancient traditions. Since nationalism is
accepted as a recent construct, let us consider ancient traditions.

Alas, the ancient texts allude to animal sacrifice and a lot of meat eating by our gods. Our
myths are replete with such references, and our diverse traditions bear testimony to what
the food freedom movements want to celebrate. D. N. Jha’s classic The Myth of the Holy Cow
documents meaty ancient Hindu traditions with aplomb. But these heterodox views render
uncomfortable those who want a strait-jacketed notion of tradition, and hence the Nation. The
moral basis of laying claim would be exposed and this is what the new Dalit Bahujan discourse
in Indian universities has managed to do. So the reaction that followed was predictable – slap
sedition on such critical thinking. Punish the child who shouts out the obvious truth – the
emperor is naked! The flip side is that the demonstration effect of punishing the child might
give rise to adverse consequences – many more children may want to shout out the truth. Once
their voice amplifies and reverberates across the nation, the true majority will come together.
The Bahujan will stand up and be counted. The paradox will dissolve.

42 Vol. 9 | 2018