IN SEPTEMBER LAST YEAR, a 72-year-old Muslim man was taunted and beaten by young Hindu men on a train in the state of Maharashtra for carrying meat. Just days earlier, a 19-year-old Hindu boy died after being shot by cow vigilantes who chased him down on a highway near Delhi on the suspicion that he was a beef trader. Around the same time, hardline Hindutva groups in Rajasthan attacked Muslim shops and homes after a severed cow’s tail was discovered near a temple. These are only some of the latest instances in the resurgence of vigilante attacks following the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party’s coming to power in India in 2014. Led by self-styled cow-protection groups linked to militant Hindutva outfits, many of which have ties with the BJP, cow vigilante campaigns target Muslim and Dalit communities under the pretext of their alleged production, sale or consumption of beef.
With the Narendra Modi-led BJP government’s re-election for a third successive term in June 2024, the intensity and frequency of these attacks have continued unabated, with one report by the rights group Citizens for Justice and Peace noting a surge in such attacks in July and August last year. A 2019 report by Human Rights Watch documented 44 deaths caused by cow-protection groups between 2015 and 2018.
Increasingly, “cow protection” rhetoric has also coincided with the enforcement of a hegemonic vegetarianism. There have been official bans on meat during Hindu and Jain religious festivals, proposals to ban the display of meat-based dishes outside eateries and restaurants, and numerous refusals to serve eggs in government-sponsored mid-day meals for public-school children. Institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay have reportedly carved out “veg-only” eating spaces; at least one student of the institute was fined for consuming meat.
By now, the state-sanctioned brutality of cow protection, buttressed by anti-slaughter laws in all but six Indian states and frequent complicity by police forces, is on blatant display. Meanwhile, vegetarianism in India, despite its violent roots in caste-based hierarchies, continues to be couched in a language of animal welfare, good health and non-violence.
This myth of non-violent vegetarianism comes under scrutiny in three recently published books: Julia Hauser’s A Taste for Purity: An Entangled History of Vegetarianism, Yamini Narayanan’s Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India and Shahu Patole’s Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada. Hauser argues that, globally, the history of organised vegetarianism has been marked by an obsession with upholding racial purity and hierarchies. In India, dominant-caste Hindu nationalists used vegetarianism as a facade to push for a cow-protection agenda that results in the violent “othering” of Muslims and Dalits. Narayanan, in Mother Cow, Mother India, undertakes a contrarian reading of the narrative that underpins cow-protection efforts, which constructs slaughter and beef consumption as the only markers of violence against the cow. By focusing on milk instead of beef, she unpacks the violent commodification of cows by the seemingly non-violent dairy industry – an industry celebrated by dominant-caste Hindus, who gleefully consume copious quantities of milk. Patole’s Dalit Kitchens is a chronicle of the foods and food practices of the Mahar and Mang communities of Maharashtra, and a critical inquiry into how dietary choices have been systematically weaponised by dominant-caste vegetarians to malign and oppress Dalit communities. Coming at the issue from divergent perspectives, each of these books lays bare how vegetarianism has been, and continues to be, a form of violence in India.
THE TANGLED PAST of Eastern and Western vegetarianism is the overarching theme of Hauser’s A Taste for Purity. Departing from earlier studies that examine vegetarianism within national contexts, Hauser traces the rise of and interconnections between organised vegetarian movements in Britain, Germany, the United States and India between the mid-1800s and 1950s. This translocal approach allows her to see how individual vegetarian actors and organisations were modelled on and interacted with each other, with vegetarianism in India emerging as a common reference point.
By delving into vegetarian societies’ journals, travelogues, letters and other communication materials, Hauser shows us that the flow of knowledge between these actors and organisations was often circular. Western vegetarian associations, for instance, were influenced by Brahminical notions of meat-eating as a source of “impurity” and a driver of “animal impulses” in humans. In turn, right-wing Hindu nationalists in colonial India deployed Western science and dietetics made popular by British vegetarians to advance their cow-protection agenda. While German vegetarians were fascinated by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s vegetarianism – seeing in him the figure of the strong, ascetic leader their nation desperately sought in the aftermath of the First World War – Hindu nationalists saw the Nazi government as a potential ally in ushering in a vegetarian world. Adolf Hitler, famously, was a fastidious vegetarian himself, at least in the latter part of his life.
These exchanges, Hauser points out, led to the creation of a hybrid knowledge in favour of vegetarianism that was neither fully secular nor entirely religious. This admixture meant that the biological racism of evolutionary theory at the time rubbed shoulders with the caste-based dietary prescriptions outlined in ancient Hindu texts like the Manusmriti. More crucially, these transnational interchanges held up a mirror to vegetarianism’s continued preoccupation with social hierarchies and racial purity. “In both India and the West, vegetarian bodies were imagined as morally and physically pure, whereas meat eaters were considered to be degenerate,” Hauser writes. “Individual conversions to vegetarianism were imagined as benchmarks on the path toward a new, purer nation, race, or even humankind.” While some Western vegetarians remained oblivious or wilfully blind to the caste hierarchies that underpin vegetarianism in India, others enthusiastically approved of the underlying logics. Many used the Brahminical censure of “impure” meat eaters to assert the superiority of plant-eaters and advance theories of racial supremacy.
Hauser cites the example of Mazdaznan, an esoteric 19th-century religion popular in Germany and Switzerland, which held that vegetarianism would advance the supremacy of sections of the “‘white race’ … as long as they maintained their ‘purity’ by rejecting [meat and] contact with other races.” Though propagated as a neo-Zoroastrian religion, Mazdaznan drew heavily on Brahminical notions of caste purity and Jain dietary norms, urging its followers to not only give up meat but also avoid vegetables and fruits grown underground. When a section of Bombay Parsis began to embrace abstention from meat in a bid to align themselves with Brahminical norms, they were influenced by Mazdaznan’s ideas on vegetarianism, race and eugenics. Equally, they were drawn to its notion of an Aryan brotherhood that explicitly included Parsis while excluding Hindus.
In tracing these interactions, Hauser draws attention to not only what was communicated but also what was deliberately withheld. We see, for instance, how cow-protection societies in colonial India used a shared advocacy of vegetarianism to engage with British and American vegetarian associations, but conveniently omitted any mention of the violence they incited against Muslims and Dalits. Hauser cites the example of Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the Hindu revivalist Arya Samaj, whose 1882 treatise used economics and comparative anatomy to make a case against cow slaughter, borrowing these ideas from the work of a prominent Theosophical Society member, Anna Kingsford. The cow-protection groups set up in response to this treatise “pressured Muslims to stop buying and slaughtering cattle and consuming their meat by threatening to boycott their businesses, loot their houses, or kill them – and by calling on Hindus to protect the cow, if need be, with force,” Hauser writes. But this fact remained carefully concealed in Saraswati’s communication with members of the Theosophical Society.
These instances point to how organised vegetarianism around the world upheld power structures based on caste, race, religion, colonialism, nationalism and – as in the case of German vegetarians who sympathised with or openly supported the Nazi Party – militarism and war. By drawing on a century’s worth of archives, Hauser not only contradicts vegetarianism’s purported non-violence but also underscores the complicity of vegetarian actors and organisations in religious, racial and caste-based violence against marginalised communities, whether Muslims and Dalits in India or, given many German vegetarians’ anti-Semitic views, Jews in Germany.
One of Hauser’s more critical interventions is the historical evidence she provides on how the rhetoric of cow protection, from its very inception, was inextricably linked with the characterisation of Muslims as “enemies of a desired Hindu nation.” While the argument is not new, Hauser widens its scope by pointing to how other communities, such as Bombay Parsis and Europeans in India, also contributed “to an increasingly hostile climate toward nonvegetarian communities” by aligning themselves with the Brahminical derision of meat consumption, motivated by their own self-interest and agendas.
IF A TASTE FOR PURITY is a historical account of how vegetarianism and, specifically in India, cow protectionism have always been invested in maintaining hierarchies of power among humans and between humans and animals, Yamini Narayanan’s Mother Cow, Mother India examines how those hierarchies play out in the present. Set against the backdrop of the resurgence in cow vigilantism in India since 2014, Narayanan’s book is an against-the-grain reading of who and what cow protectionism purportedly protects, and who it renders vulnerable. More broadly, it is a scathing critique of the human-animal and human-human hierarchies that are simultaneously invisibilised and reinforced by the cow-protection agenda.
One of Narayanan’s starting points is the horrific killing and lynching of Muslims and Dalits by Hindutva-affiliated cow vigilantes for the alleged offences of transporting, possessing, selling or consuming beef. Her other point of departure is the Hindu reverence for the cow as a mother goddess, an appellation used to justify violence against suspected “beef eaters” who, as Hauser notes, have historically been deemed enemies of the Hindu nation. The cow-protection agenda casts slaughter as the only form of violence against the cow and frames Muslim and Dalit communities, who have historically undertaken this work, as solely responsible for any and all violence against cows in India.
Mother Cow, Mother India upends the very basis of this agenda by looking beyond the point of slaughter and examining what else makes the cow vulnerable at human hands. Rather than treating the animal as an object of political analysis, as cow-protection discourses as well as their critiques have done in the past, Narayanan focuses on the cow as a key political subject and a living, sentient being. This allows her to dwell on the life cycle of the dairy cow and examine how its mundane status as a nutrition source stacks up against the cow’s sacrality in the Brahminical view. It also allows her to step back from the “hyper-politicization of beef” and examine the politics of milk, of which India is the largest producer and among the largest consumers globally.
The book makes two broad interventions. First, it links both milk and beef back to the dairy supply chain, and argues that in India, where cows are reared exclusively for milk, “there is no beef economy without a milk economy.” By tracing the extractive commodification of the lactating cow at every stage of the dairy industry, the book disrupts the notion that slaughter is the sole act of violence against bovines. While the dairy industry’s culpability in the mistreatment and slaughter of cows has been widely documented, this book goes a step further, drawing parallels between the abjection of the dairy cow and the precarity of human workers, mainly Muslims and Dalits, trapped in specific segments of dairy production. Narayanan’s other, related argument is that the framing of the cow as a mother goddess acts as a convenient smokescreen for both its violent commodification as a dairy resource and its weaponisation to construct Muslims and Dalits as the “others” of a desired Hindu nation. Just as Hauser holds up a mirror to the racism and fascism underlying the “purity” of organised vegetarianism, Narayanan questions the Hindu veneration of cows and the caste-ascribed “purity” of dairy by highlighting how the animal is exploited in the process of dairy production.
Narayanan’s narrative traverses breeding farms, bovine semen centres, dairy farms, cow-trafficking routes, slaughterhouses and gaushalas – or cow shelters – across twelve Indian states to show us how these sites are rife with violence. If bovine semen farms keep virile and traumatised young bulls in a state of permanent hyper-confinement for years on end, dairy farms act as sites of gendered and reproductive violence as cows are repeatedly impregnated to keep them lactating and, therefore, productive. The profitability of dairying, Narayanan observes, depends on forcibly separating newborn calves from their mothers, often on the very day they are born, to divert milk for human consumption. Debunking the misconception of gaushalas as sites of shelter, Narayanan demonstrates how these spaces subject cows discarded by dairy farms to further exploitation, and even serve as conduits through which male calves and unproductive cows are moved on to slaughterhouses.
By meticulously piecing together this segmented supply chain, Narayanan argues that slaughter is the final and inevitable stage of dairy production, establishing milk, and not beef, as the starting point of violence against the cow. “It is impossible to sustain dairying, an industry which requires continuously impregnating and breeding ever larger numbers of animals, without slaughtering the ‘useless’ males and ‘spent’ females,” she explains. Doing otherwise would put huge pressure on feed, shelter, housing, labour and other resources – a fact conveniently elided by the cow-protection narrative.
While the ways in which Hindu nationalism exploits the symbolism of the mother cow is well-established, Narayanan also extends her scrutiny to include ostensibly secular Indian nationalism. In the post-independence years, the Congress government that ruled the country was invested in evoking the cow as a symbol of self-reliance and moral purity, and milk as a marker of growth and national development. In the process, the body of the dairy cow became a site for tense encounters between Hindu, Congress and developmental nationalisms.
These tensions are best illustrated in Narayanan’s discussion of Article 48 of the Indian constitution, passed in 1950 with an overwhelming majority by a Congress-dominated parliament. Simultaneously recommending cattle breeding and prohibiting cow slaughter, Article 48 reflects “an uneasy attempt to mediate secular democratic and Hindutva nationalisms,” she writes. “If the anti-slaughter clause of Article 48 was important for Hindu nationalism, then its breeding clause became equally crucial for developmental nationalism.” Indeed, the breeding clause was instrumental in India’s famed dairy development scheme of the 1960s and 1970s. Known as Operation Flood or the White Revolution, it transformed India from a milk-deficient country to the largest producer of milk in the world. The anti-slaughter clause, in turn, was among the early victories of the Hindu Right in independent India. Together, the two conflicting clauses resulted in the cow being subjected to an intensely extractive form of commodification in the dairy industry even as it was rendered a potent weapon of Hindutva.
An overarching point in Mother Cow, Mother India is the interrelatedness between the condition of the cow, which is instrumentalised to create an exclusionary Hindu state, and the condition of India’s Muslim, Dalit and Adivasi communities, who are subjected to unspeakable violence in its name. By focusing on milk rather than beef, Narayanan pays careful attention to which communities are rendered vulnerable by the dairy supply chain and who is able to profit from it. “Most dairy workers are poor, landless, and of the ‘lowest’ Dalit or Adivasi castes; it is more privileged castes like the Patels in Gujarat, for instance, who typically own the animals, space, and infrastructure of a dairy farm, and who predominantly comprise the decision-making membership of dairy cooperatives,” she writes. While the physical safety and health of dairy-farm workers are continually under threat, the lives of cow transporters and slaughterhouse workers are made doubly precarious because of rising vigilantism and anti-slaughter laws.
Some of the book’s most evocative passages include Narayanan’s conversations with Dalit and Muslim workers at the transport and slaughter ends of the dairy industry, and also at the lower rungs of dairy farms. A 16-year-old Muslim butcher tells her that he and his colleagues “have to be blind drunk for this job” as he describes the crude mechanics of slaughter in an unauthorised slaughterhouse. A cow trafficker admits, “I would really like to give up this trade, it is nothing but stress now but what can we do? We have no other skills, no education!”
It is precisely these marginalised groups that face mob violence in the name of cow protection even as dominant-caste Hindu dairy-farm owners profit from the animal’s brutal commodification. Hindutva groups like the Gau Raksha Dal and the Bajrang Dal routinely patrol highways, intercepting trucks and assaulting drivers on the mere suspicion of transporting cows. They often work in tandem with local police and under the protection of state administrations. On many occasions, they have been known to film and circulate videos of their assaults, with little or no legal repercussions. Many of these incidents have led to the deaths of alleged cattle smugglers.
Equally, no accountability attaches to wealthy and middle-class groups who, according to Andrea S Wiley in Cultures of Milk, are India’s most prolific dairy consumers. This includes Hindu devotees, priests and temple administrators who use huge quantities of milk and dairy products in ritual worship each year. In December 2020, for instance, a temple in Rajasthan made headlines after 11,000 litres of milk, ghee and curd was poured into its foundation pit in a single day. As Narayanan argues, “When only slaughter is violent, and dairying is conceptually disconnected from the sole act that is defined as ‘violent’, Hindu consumer–devotees, thus absolved, can pass the crucial slaughter-end of milk production as an unnecessary and malicious act of Muslims and Dalits.”
Against this backdrop, Narayanan points out, “The fullest extent of anti-casteist and anti-fascist politics in India, must then also compose an anti-anthropocentric anti-Hindutva resistance.” At the heart of her vision is a post-dairy, post-meat, vegan future. Narayanan concludes with the environmental case for veganism, and calls for it to be understood as “a political examination of human-animal relations” rather than simply a diet. She suggests that livelihood losses resulting from the end of animal dairying or tanning be countered through vegan dairying and vegan-leather production, spurred by state-led research and investment. She further argues that the “singular framing of vegetarianism as fascist blurs the reality of the sentient, suffering animal.” It is a point well made even if it comes into tension with the historical links Hauser establishes between organised vegetarianism, white and Brahminical supremacy, and facism.
As an antidote to fascist vegetarianism, Narayanan suggests “a radical rethinking of humanity and animality as means of relatedness.” It is surprising, however, that she does not really engage with indigenous authors rooted in environmental justice and fairness who have written about human-animal relatedness and interdependence. More specifically, there is no engagement with the question of how indigenous communities, whose understanding of animal-human relations is based on reciprocity, may approach the subject of veganism.
Besides drawing on the writings of the Dalit-rights advocate and leader B R Ambedkar and the anti-caste thinker Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, Mother Cow, Mother India rarely brings into the conversation the works of Dalit authors who have reflected on their relationship with food in general and Hinduism’s forbidden meats in particular. Narayanan dwells on the subject of beef festivals – events celebrating beef consumption and associated culinary cultures – as an instrument of Dalit resistance to the Brahminical weaponisation of beef, pointing out how both the subaltern human body and the subaltern animal body become enmeshed in the perpetration of violence against each other in the process. However, her vision of veganism as a form of “interspecific solidarity” and “multispecies democracy” does not ask what it would mean for communities that were historically forced to adopt certain “impure” meats and denied “pure” foods such as dairy as a form of caste-based oppression. Certain Dalit groups, for instance, have traditionally been required to do the “impure” work of disposing of cattle carcasses, and in their poverty have been left with little choice but to see these as key sources of protein.
“This whole system puts you in a position that you can’t afford the food you want to eat, and when it comes to something like beef, you enjoy it because it is what you know and like,” Rajyashri Goody, a visual artist and ethnographer of Dalit origin, has said. “But even then, there is always the shame of caste, the shame associated with eating an ‘impure’ food, holding you back.”
THE “UNHOLY” DIETS that were imposed on Dalit communities through the illogics of the Hindu caste system are the subject of Shahu Patole’s Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada. Originally published in Marathi in 2015 as Anna He Apoorna Brahma and recently translated into English by Bhushan Korgaonkar, the book has the distinction of being the first to document Dalit food history through the culinary practices of the Mahar and the Mang communities. It is part memoir, part collection of recipes and part commentary on how food is weaponised to reinforce caste-based hierarchies and discrimination. “This is the story of the food my parents ate – an acquired taste, especially one acquired through centuries of caste discrimination,” Patole tells readers in the preface.
It is a story whose telling is both urgent and necessary given the near-total silence in Indian food writing on the culinary practices of marginalised communities – especially, but not only, those communities marginalised along the axis of caste. With dominant-caste cuisines masquerading as mainstream ones and even as symbols of regional, state and national identity, Patole points out that Dalit writers have largely been reluctant to engage with their communities’ food habits and cultures.
To be sure, such perspectives are not entirely missing. Dalit authors like Omprakash Valmiki, Daya Pawar, Urmila Pawar and Laxman Gaikwad, among many others, have engaged with food as a site of everyday casteist violence and as a metaphor for poverty and resilience within Dalit communities. The 2009 anthology Isn’t This Plate Indian? takes up a very similar task of documentation as Patole’s Dalit Kitchens. It is at once a rich archive of recipes based on the memories of Dalit women in Maharashtra and a critical interrogation of the silence around Dalit food practices. That said, Patole is right in asserting that there is a lack of engagement with Dalit food from the perspective of recipes and modes of cooking and eating. This is a gap he seeks to fill by documenting the foods and cooking practices of Maharashtra’s Mahar and Mang communities, and by drawing on existing Dalit literature, memory and folklore to offer an account of how those practices emerged and evolved.
In the book’s first two chapters, Patole offers an account of various Dalit castes and subcastes, the hierarchies between these groups, their farming and hunting practices, their wedding and funeral rituals, and the foods and feasts associated with them. In addition to certain meats being forbidden for these communities – Mahars may not eat pork, Mangs may not eat horse meat – meat in general was a rare luxury for them, available only when an animal died naturally. When it did become available, no part of the animal was wasted. The book details recipes for rakti and latuki prepared from blood as well as dishes made of jeebh (tongue), fashi (epiglottis), mendu (brain), kalij (liver), boka (kidney), dil (heart), fofis (lungs), gana (windpipe), tona (bones), bal and mand (fat), kaas (udders), aand (testicles), paaya (hooves) and wajadi (intestines). Leftover meat was dried and preserved (channi) for the monsoon, a season of pronounced food scarcity.
About two-thirds of the book is filled with recipes for dals, breads, vegetables and foraged greens. Patole writes that wild greens and vegetables rescued these communities from starvation during the monsoon, when agriculture had to be halted and there was little scope for earning a wage from daily labour to buy food from the market. He dedicates an entire chapter to recipes for wild foods, such as hagarya ghol (purslane), paathari (country dandelion), chigur (tamarind flowers) and tekale (mushrooms), pointing to the know-how and skills required to forage and cook them.
In detailing delicacies such as goat epiglottis and honeycomb containing bee larvae and eggs, Patole points to the inventiveness and resourcefulness of the Mahar and Mang communities. At the same time, these recipes are utilitarian – intended to make do with whatever ingredients are at hand, to stretch a meal to feed extra mouths and unannounced guests, to preserve food for periods of scarcity, to make food that may be going stale last a little longer. Patole notes the prevalence of “thin, watery curries” to stretch meals and the practice of mixing dodya (unripe figs) with flour to make bhakris (sorghum or pearl millet rotis) when there wasn’t enough grain.
Elsewhere, he describes dishes like ambura – the word means “fermented” in Marathi – that evolved specifically to use up the large quantities of leftovers received by the Mahar and Mang communities from dominant-caste households during festivals. A mix of different sweet and savoury, dry and gravy-based items would be put in a large, non-porous clay pot that would then be placed over a low fire. “The mixture would be stirred every time any new food item was put in,” Patole writes. “This ambura would last for a week or so.”
The recipes in Dalit Kitchens are as much about savouring food – Patole often tells us how a certain dish is best enjoyed – as they are about necessity. Yet even the preparation of delicacies calls for workarounds, substituting what could not be accessed with what was available. “The traditional way of eating puran poli is to mix and mash it with milk,” Patole points out. “But milk was rarely available for Mangs and Mahars.” In its absence, these communities prepared gulavani, made with jaggery, salt and dry ginger powder “if available and desired”, added to water. Many of the book’s recipes do not require cooking oil, while in others it can be replaced with crushed peanuts or animal fat.
The question of access to food – more specifically, the lack of it – marks these modes of cooking and eating. This, in turn, challenges the conventional understanding of recipes, typically premised on an assurance of abundance or even excess. The scholar Vinay Kumar writes in the Southasian food and culture publication Goya that Dalit food is “born out of hunger, poverty and marginalisation.” He adds, “Food from Dalit communities have never been featured in cookbooks; we have never had a cookbook of our own either.” Patole’s book plugs a part of that gap even as its recipes drive home the point that, in oppressed-caste communities, the easy availability of ingredients and an endless supply of time and labour – chiefly women’s time and labour, given the gendered nature of cooking – cannot be taken for granted. This is a consideration that cookbooks and recipes recording dominant-caste cuisines seldom grapple with.
Even without the theoretical heft of Hauser and Narayanan’s works – never something the book aims for – Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada is a quiet interrogation of the mythical non-violence of vegetarianism and the alleged violence of meat-eating. Interspersed throughout it are the author’s rhetorical questions as to why the practice of eating the meat of cows and buffaloes became taboo for the dominant castes and not for Dalit communities. He questions how “holy” cattle become impure after death, why the dietary norms of a minority social group should be imposed on the rest of the population, and how dominant-caste food preferences and restrictions become the norm even in intercaste marriages. Patole engages with these questions in a very limited manner, but his reflections, rooted in memory and lived reality, lay bare with unshakeable clarity the insidious and overt violence of a Brahminical vegetarian order.
source : himalmag