One man's meat: Why Maharashtra's defence of its beef ban is particularly jarring

No, you are not what you eat, according to the Maharashtra government. Defending the state’s beef ban in an affidavit submitted to the Bombay High Court, it argued, “The concept of culture is far above issues like what one eats.” The government got its disclaimers in early: it was not trying to impose a regime of vegetarianism on the state, but “eating a particular food does not entitle the constitution of a cultural minority”. Certainly not one whose rights could be protected under Article 29, the affidavit ran.

The legality of the state administration’s claim must be left to the wisdom of the courts. But to the lay observer, the government sounds specious at best, deliberately blind to a broad range of experiences and vulnerabilities at worst. To begin with, at least two petitions challenged the beef ban on the grounds that it was “draconian” and violated fundamental freedoms of all citizens. The government sidestepped that question and made it a problem of minority rights. Even if we take the government’s word for it, the affidavit reveals a flawed, reductive notion of what it means to be a minority.

Article 29, which deals with the “protection of interests of minorities”, says “any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same”. The constitutional clause conveys a nuanced understanding of minorities as groups that may be recognised by their distinct language and culture, which could include food habits and social customs.

The Maharashtra government’s affidavit chooses to misunderstand minority identity in two ways. First, it assumes that people who eat beef want to be recognised as minorities simply because they eat beef. Second, it cheerfully asserts that cultural identity is not shaped by food. According to the Maharashtra government, culture, the articulation of a society’s sense of itself, somehow floats above the tastes, smells and textures we take in every day.

Somewhere in France, Claude Levi-Strauss is turning in his grave, but you don’t even need to have read the rather large body of literature connecting food and identity. In India, food has always played a very visible part in constructions of identity, whether religious or cultural. Rituals of feeding and eating, what you can take and what you cannot, has traditionally stood for who or what you are. The most obvious instance is the Hindu caste system.

In the fifth edition of his 1932 classic, Caste and Race in India, GS Ghurye details how the caste system is arranged around the feeding of the twice born. He divides caste into five groups: first, the “twice born”, second, those from whom the twice born could accept “pakka” food, third, castes from whom the twice born could not take any food but might accept a sip of water, fourth, castes who were not “untouchable” but who may not feed or water the twice born, fifth, the  untouchables, whose very shadow “defiled” any orthodox Hindu. Food could be “kaccha (cooked with water)” or “pakka (cooked in ghee, without any water)”. Both kinds came with their own rules of consumption.

Food taboos bound you to the Hindu caste system. Restrictions on eating beef or consuming alcohol, for instance, did not necessarily apply to Dalits.  So it not surprising that, across the country, experiences of discriminations have often been tied to food. Those with tastes and practices different from the Hindu mainstream in a particular place have been punished for it. In 2012, when Dalit students from Hyderabad’s Osmania University organised a beef festival to assert their culinary rights, they were attacked by extremist Hindu groups.

The site of conflict has often been the Indian city, where people of different communities are crammed together in very close quarters. Anthropologist Dolly Kikon has written eloquently about the perils of cooking akhuni, fermented soya bean used in Naga chutneys and curries, in Delhi’s sunless apartments.

Naga customs and social structures are threaded into the process of making akhuni, the ways in which it is consumed. The fermented food, which is entwined with both personal and collective histories in Nagaland, has a strong, distinctive aroma. Kikon describes how the smell of akhuni is addictive for some and repugnant to others, how personal taste can often become a marker of cultural difference. When Nagas travelled to Delhi, they were either forbidden from cooking their native food or reviled as the people who cooked food that smelt like “shit”. And akhuni became associated with daily discriminations faced by Northeastern people in Delhi.

In Mumbai, restrictions on non-vegetarian food in housing societies often became a means to either impose a culinary regime or keep certain kinds of people out. Finally in 2014, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation passed a resolution that it would revoke permissions to builders who sold flats only to a particular caste, community or vegetarians. Note how communal distinctions segue into dietary preferences.

So for a government that is based out of Mumbai, it is particularly disingenuous to say that food has nothing to do with culture, cultural difference or the rights of a minority. The city’s favourite demon, 26/11 attacker Ajmal Kasab, was pilloried for allegedly eating biryani on death row. Suddenly, the cuisine of an entire community became code for a kind of desperate criminality.

The affidavit is also jarring because it defends a beef ban barely three months after Dadri, where a man was lynched after rumours that he had eaten beef and the meat in his fridge was taken for testing after he died. As if the nature of the meat would decide the nature of the crime.

In the debate over intolerance that ensued, beef stood in for the practices and beliefs of a minority, which made it the target of attacks from the majority. What you were became very much about what you ate. That the government of a diverse and populous state should choose to gloss over this grim reality is deeply troubling.