Nayonika Sen Week 9

You are What You Eat

                 Food is central to most cultures. Shared family recipes, community building, celebrations etc. are all dependent on what's on the plate. There's different food for different occasions. Different cultural practices. However, the Hindu social order deems some food fit for consumption and some food 'dirty', and naturally they are shaped around caste lines. While most culinary practices are shaped by geographical locations, caste practices, and availability of different grains, etc. Dalit culinary habits are born out of deprivation. Without access to proper grains, cereals, fruits, meats, the food palette is drastically different from the upper-castes in the same regions. 

                  Kancha Iliah in his piece in the Caravan titled 'Freedom to Eat' talks elaborately about the Dalit food consumption patterns, history, origins, and a phenonema countering the current one of 'Sanskritisation' that he calls 'Dalitisation'. He traces the history of the contested 'beef consumption' in India de-linking it from the traditional Hindu-Muslim narrative. He talks of the historical process of Joothan (leftovers/ things that one no longer needs and hence discards) where upper-castes have consumed beef (as mentioned in the Rig Veda) in the past but have gradually given up on eating it as cattle-reading and the ground work was being carried out by those of the lower castes and eventually became part of their plate (although in the Brahmanical sense of not actually slaughtering the cow).

                   He tries to think of those belonging to the Gandhian ideology who have essentially said that everyone should become vegetarian as it is a more nutritious and better way to lives. He requested people of lower castes and Muslims to abandon the consumption of meat. This is a process of Sanskritisation itself, where the ideal is the Brahmin and to emulate and imitate the Brahmin is rid oneself of the 'impurity' of their caste and hence remove caste altogether. The concept of 'secularism' somehow being that everyone acts in a relatively homogeneous manner along caste lines is perhaps the biggest loss in liberal thinking. The assertion of Dalit identity still seems to shake even those who aim to make political gains from the votebanks of Dalit communities.