My father recollects a memory very fondly – a memory that I find rather painful. Back in his childhood days in a remote village in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, him and his grandfather shared an experience of getting rid of dead cattle. Caste dictated that our community carried the dead cattle, skinned it for leather, and disposed off the carcass.
With a nostalgic smile on his face, he mentions how he used to ward off vultures, eagles and dogs while his grandfather skinned the cow – a scenario which is hard for me to imagine!
My father's grandfather, my great- grandfather used to consume meat of this dead cow. Turns out, this is only one way in which the caste of my family impacted our eating-habits. My father tells further, a common cultural practice in the village was that the members of our community would visit wedding venues the next morning to receive left-over, half eaten food – ‘parsa' as they would call it.
Eating the meat of dead cattle by Dalits is different from the way we eat meat- former being a product of casteism and comes with it a sense of inferiority and getting ‘polluted'. As a result, around the time of bhakti movement, several of my ancestors gave up the practice of disposing off dead cattle and eating beef, few even became vegetarian.
When my grandfather migrated from Unnao to Delhi at a young age, my family stopped eating cow meat. Later on, as our family members got into government jobs and attained some sort of ‘social mobility', a more prominent cultural shift took place. For instance, on Mondays, my mother started fasting and only vegetarian food was made at home on this day.
This cultural shift taking place in our family as it was now gradually operating in a more urbane, middle- class and predominantly Hindu social setup, can be seen as ‘Sanskritization'.
On the other hand, back in Unnao only a few types of crops were grown and eaten corresponding to the season, and we couldn't afford a diverse nutritional diet unlike rich vegetarian brahmins, so we relied more on meat for proteins and other nutrients. This changed when my grandparents came to Delhi and financial condition got improved gradually.
Yet, most people in my family are meat- eaters except for some, my mausi who has been more of a believer of Hindu religion than her other siblings as my mother would tell, doesn't eat meat since childhood. Interestingly, she married into a meat- eating Brahmin family, and now cooks meat and eats the gravy. On the other hand, my bhaiya (cousin), who is a meat eater married my Bhabhi, who does not consume meat as she belongs to a brahmin family from Bihar. Meat is not cooked in their household.
When I look at the various cases of inter-caste marriages in my family and how they impacted the household food culture, the intersections of gender and caste are reflected in the way a Dalit woman is not able to exercise as much of her agency and choice in a Brahmin household as a Brahmin woman could in a Dalit household!
It is also important to note that all vegetarians in my family are women which supports the fact that there are more vegetarian women in India (NFHS survey – What India Really Eats by The Wire). One of the many reasons for this is that the traditional practices like fasting are followed more by women (as seen in my parents), who are expected to fulfil traditional norms more strictly than men - who tend to be considered ‘exempted' from such practices. A more common practice that I have seen is that at a gathering or at a usual dinner, women cook while men eat, and women eat only after men are done eating. This sometimes leads to women consuming leftovers for not being left with enough of the food they cooked.
Region also plays a significant role in deciding what is taboo to eat and what is not. An instance can be seen by comparing the mess of IIT KGP and IIT DELHI.
My sister who is pursuing a PhD from IIT KGP tells me that in their mess almost 4-5 days in a week they get chicken biryani, fish etc. And if I see the case of my hostel's mess where no meat is cooked, in a university where people come from all over the country with fish being the staple of many, after constant pressure from some students that meat should be served, workers in my hostel have refused to cook meat in the kitchen, that they would get polluted by only cooking it, from where is this feeling of getting polluted from food is coming from? Vegetarian students have said that separate eating place should be made if meat will be served which is very problematic, still we hear it every day like it is no big deal.
Answer to these questions can be found partly in the reading ‘Why isn't this plate Indian' (WS Class 10 of Prof. Sharmila Rege) which talks about how Brahminical forces delegitimized meat consumption to establish power and to maintain their position in the social hierarchy.
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that my sister consumes meat other than chicken and goat, eg beef, pork - unlike other people in my family. This is because her being an Ambedkarite and a Buddhist allowed her to reject Hindu framework and therefore she was able to escape the notions of how beef-eating is looked as a taboo. Here, we see how religion plays a determining role in food choices.
To conclude this long and dynamic journey, today I have a wide variety of choices on my table when I sit down to eat. I can judge the nutritional content on my plate and monitor my diet. In today's era of capitalism and consumerism – along with financial security that my family has provided – I have incomparable access to food options than what my ancestors had. It is almost a crazy realization that this one plate of food in front of me, on my table, has a loooong history behind it, and a large number of social-cultural-geographical factors determining what gets served on it!