The Taste of India
So far, communal divides prevented us from eating together. Now, our nationalism is being judged by what we eat
There are now more than one billion of us, Indian citizens. And we together celebrate August 15 as the day we won our freedom. Men, women and children through the length and breadth of the subcontinent took part in the Indian freedom movement.
The immediate cause of the first great war of Indian independence in 1857 was the revolt of Indian soldiers in the British army upon discovering that when they bit the paper to open the cartridge of the new Enfield rifles, they were swallowing pork and beef grease covering the bullets to keep them dry. The British had offended the religious sensibilities of both Muslims and Hindus and united them in a massive uprising. India’s first war of independence began in May 1857 and has been described as the largest, bloodiest anti-colonial revolt in any European empire in the 19th century.
In the 200 years of our freedom movement, our leaders also debated on many social issues. One of these debates was around the issue of inter-dining. Should upper-caste Hindus sit together with members of low castes and eat at the same table?
Those who wanted to challenge upper-caste Hindu practices felt they had to tread carefully; even Gandhiji ‘started by accepting that untouchability was bad, but added a cautionary caveat—that inter-dining and inter-marriage were also bad. He moved on to accepting inter-mingling and inter-dining... and to arguing that all men and all varnas were equal. The last and most far-reaching step, taken only in 1946, was to challenge caste directly by accepting and sanctioning inter-marriage itself’.
Indian nationalists debated, discussed and attacked each other on the issue of inter-dining: Gandhi advocated inter-dining, but B.R. Ambedkar argued that inter-dining was not the issue; he felt we should work towards annihilation of the caste system itself. E.V. Ramasamy or Thanthai Periyar protested against the practice in the Indian National Congress where upper-caste people ate separately.
DISCORD ON A PLATTER
Now, after more than 70 years of independence, what is the taste of freedom for us Indians? During the freedom movement, poets used to imagine free India would be like a garden with the blossoming of flowers of different colours and hues; birds singing in the trees and gurgling streams running happily through the beautiful garden. But in post-independence India, a poet has written that all of nature has been divided down communal lines. An extract from the poem by Syed Ahmad Javed Jaffrey, which went viral on social media:
Such are the effects of hatred, even animals have been divided, the cow has become a Hindu, and the goat a Muslim.
Even the trees, the leaves and branches are troubled, in case birds too become Hindus and Muslims.
The dry fruits are all very confused, knowing not when coconuts became Hindu and dates Muslim. The way religion is dividing everything, that green is now a colour of Muslims and red for Hindus, The day isn’t far off when all the green vegetables would belong to the Muslims, and Hindus would be left with carrots and tomatoes.
Now, here is a conundrum—what does the poor watermelon do?
I STILL DREAM OF A COUNTRY WHERE ALL OF US CAN EAT TOGETHER, ENJOY THE STAGGERING DIVERSITY OF CUISINES, LAUGH AND MAKE FUN OF EACH OTHER’S FOOD HABITS
Is it a Muslim on the outside, but from inside a Hindu?
Sadly, it is not only communal divides that prevent us from eating together. We are being told that our nationalism is to be judged by what we eat. Those who are vegetarian are the most Indian; those who eat beef are violating the Indian ethos. Even the documentary Caste on the Menu Card, made by students of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, was banned from the Jeevika Film Festival by the ministry of information and broadcasting. Why? The film mentioned the word ‘beef’. The film begins by quoting a poignant poem from a collection of Madiga poetry by a Dalit poet in Telugu:
Beef beef
The meat I have eaten since my cord was cut
The meat that has risen as bone of my bone
The meat that has raced as part of my blood;
When you drove me far from the village
When you found even my footprints untouchable
When you couldn’t even see me as human
What stood by me
And brought me here was beef;
When you bragged, presenting your side,
Your forefathers drank ghee
Undertook many exploits and so on
It was only beef which stayed with me
Stood by my side;
When its udders were squeezed and milked
You didn’t feel any pain at all
When it was stitched into a chappal you stamped underfoot and walked
You didn’t feel hurt at all
When it rang as a drum at your marriage and your funeral You didn’t suffer any blows
When it sated my hunger, beef became your goddess?
There is an attempt to build an argument that Hinduism is in danger and Hindus need to build a movement to protect their religion; and the cow is a sacred symbol for the Hindus. But is this the real reason behind the lynching of people, almost always Dalits or Muslims, by cow vigilante groups and the murders of rationalists? If the Hindutva lot really revered cows, then why did they allow 500 cows to starve to death in 2016 in a government-run cow shelter in Rajasthan, the state to have the first-ever ministry devoted exclusively to the protection of cows?
Or why would Manohar Parrikar, a product of the RSS and chief minister of a Hindu majority state, back beef traders? And why would Hindutva goons in Jharkhand beat up Swami Agnivesh? How did Agnivesh, a saffron-clad Hindu, a believer in the Rig Veda, a staunch vegetarian, anti-beef eating, Hindi speaking and, above all, an Indian nationalist pose a threat to the Hindutva family? Agnivesh says he had gone to Jharkhand to express solidarity with tribals whose land was being taken away in violation of the law made under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, which gives special protection to tribal lands.
To understand the growing intolerance and politics of hatred, we have to read the justifications of famine by the British Famine Commissions. There were 120 devastating famines during the 120 years of British rule (against just 17 in the 2,000 years before the British occupied the subcontinent). The Famine Commissions blamed the Indian customs and traditions for the lack of response to famine relief work; they criminalised critique of colonial policies which exposed how these policies were responsible for shortages.
Why else would we as a nation not be discussing the crisis in agriculture, which has forced 59,000 farmers in independent India to commit suicide; 23,000 between 2009-2016? It is true the national media occasionally focuses on specific deaths by starvation but does not mention that 7,000 people die of hunger every single day in independent India. But our media and our middle class are too busy enjoying the food courts in shopping malls. The buzz at the food stalls drowns the protests by street hawkers who are being displaced by multinational corporations, such as Walmart stores in the food and grocery business. And our cuisines are being destroyed; our culinary imagination enslaved.
In the midst of this depressing scenario, I still dream of living in a country where all of us can eat together, enjoy the diversity of cuisines, laugh and make fun of each other’s food habits, but sit together in equality, dignity and no one ever goes hungry. I dream that all of us get the real taste of real freedom.
Nandita Haksar is a human rights lawyer and campaigner. She has written more than 15 books. The Flavours of Nationalism: Recipes for Love, Hate and Friendship (2018) is her latest work