Sapna Indu Pillai - Week 9


                                                  Weekly Summary - 9 

                                                                                                               Sapna Indu Pillai 


The Dalit community has a very intimate relationship with food. They has used food in their politics to show how different even something as necessary as food is different for the marginalised community. In multiple occasions like when Rohit Vemula and his Dalit peers organised a beef festival, The Dalit community has been shunned from organising beef festivals etc as the larger brahmin hegemony looks down upon beef eaters and considers it a sin to eat the holy animal. The undeniable truth remains that the Dalit community for years have had to eat the remains or Joothan of the upper caste. Due to scarcity of food they would even have to eat dead animals such as cows and then dispose of their dead bodies. In older days eating meat was a practice even followed by the upper caste but with time and the introduction of purity pollution in the caste system there was a eradication of eating meat seen in the brahmin and upper caste circles as meat as eating meat was considered impure and unholy. In many places in the North a lot of poor people who belong to the Dalit community earn their livelihood by selling meat and this anti meat, especially anti beef politics directly effects their ability to eat and earn a livelihood which seems to be ignored by the upper caste and the media in general. 

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