The shop owner, as he answered my questions, continued to chop up the large hunk of meat on his block, his cleaver sweeping dramatically through the air and flecking us, as it did so, with fragments of bone and droplets of bovine blood. Das glanced toward me at one point and caught my eye. “How did we come to be doing this?” he asked sardonically, before shaking his head with slightly amused resignation. In truth, however, by then we were used to it. Whatever visceral reactions the sight and smell of raw meat might once have evoked for either of us, they had ceased to be a problem.
Our vegetarianism did, however, present other concerns.35 First, it created a certain distance between us and some of our interlocutors. Another of the Hyderabad butchers we knew, for example, had, at one point, expressed an interest in inviting us to dine with him at his family home, a sure breakthrough in establishing lasting rapport. After Das told him we did not eat meat, however, the invitation was diplomatically and, it turned out, permanently, put on hold. It was not, I am fairly sure, given his subsequent manner, that he was offended. He had, after all, been very pleased to have the opportunity to offer his take on meat eating and cattle slaughter, and he continued to take pleasure in joining us to drink tea on the bench outside his shop and talk about his work. Rather, coming from a Muslim family of meat sellers who ate meat every day, my assumption was that he was now uncertain what he could feed us that would, at the same time, be appropriate food with which to honor his guests.
My second concern was that, having not knowingly eaten beef in India since the mid-1980s, I had little memory of its taste or its mouth-feel, nor had I felt its impact on my stomach or on my digestion. When people told me about the differences in flavor and texture between cow and buffalo meat; tried to explain their preference (or otherwise) for beef over chicken, goat or, fish; or described its succulent, sweet flavor and prized chewiness, I had to rely on their descriptions and my own imagination. I had no direct, material experience to help me contextualize their words. I could see and smell it, in all its forms, and I even felt it between my fingertips, but I never ingested it.
In the end, the pros and cons of my position as a vegetarian among the meat eaters, as it were, were fairly evenly balanced. Being a vegetarian was a useful provocation: it teased out other viewpoints as much as it suppressed them, in the same way that being outside a situation more generally can help an anthropologist to capture perspectives insiders cannot. It was also an occasional hindrance. The personal discomfort in navigating the tensions my position sometimes created was also productive, forcing me to reflect in ways that I might not otherwise have done. And my keen appreciation of other regional specialties that people fed me—gongura patchidi (an Andhra-specific green leaf chutney) especially—seemed to make up for any deficits in meat consumption.
Of Cows and Buffaloes
Cows and water buffaloes—the two key sources of goddu mānsam (beef, in Telugu, the first language of most of my informants)—are clearly different beasts. Indigenous zebu cows have played a role in Hindu cosmology since the Vedic period (c. 1500 BCE), with the sacred cow concept established as early as 400 CE (Lodrick 2005, 61). Gandhi dubbed the zebu “a poem of piety” (1954, 3; cited in Korom 2000, 188), revered, in everyday discourse, as a symbol of motherhood. The water buffalo, by contrast, has sometimes been represented in contradistinction to the cow: as the Dalit is to the Brahmin, so, in scripture and in common practice, the buffalo is to the cow (Narayanan 2018, 335–36). While the consumption of the buffalo is taboo because it is considered impure, eating the flesh of the cow is proscribed because of the animal’s elevated symbolic status.
Even among cows, some are more holy than others. Shankar Lal, president of the Akhil Bharatiya Gau Sewa—an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamesevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist organization that spawned the ruling BJP—reportedly suggested, in 2015, that Indians should only drink milk from what he described as “virtuous breeds.”36 In particular, he warned that the milk of Jersey cows—a breed of cattle brought into India under British colonial rule, so ripe for symbolic appropriation as “other”—might even lead those who drank it into criminal activity. In an article reporting on the RSS’s plans to construct cattle shelters across the country, Lal was quoted as saying, “For a crime-free Bharat [India], it is necessary that our children drink only Indian cow’s milk because it makes them saatvik (virtuous). By drinking the milk of Jersey cows and buffaloes, their minds get harmful ideas, which make them criminals.”37 Lal’s provocative sound bite resonates with more nuanced distinctions drawn by central Himalayan mountain dwellers. For them, while Jersey and hybrid cows have style (style-wal goru), their milk—despite being more plentiful—is thinner and less nutritious, and their dung and urine more watery. Their local pahari cows, by contrast, are associated with moral, physical, and spiritual strength (Govindrajan 2018, 72–77).
What at first appears to be a clear separation between cows and buffaloes, and a hierarchy of breeds within the former category, is not quite so straightforward, however. My own interlocutors did distinguish, at least some of the time, between eddu mānsam (buffalo meat) and āvu mānsam (cow meat) when they were discussing their preferences. Some Madigas, for example, by virtue of their birth-ascribed status as leatherworkers (even if they never entered the trade), claimed a particular affinity to the buffalo, arguing that its meat was particularly well suited to their constitutions, but did not eat the flesh of the cow. Muslim informants, by contrast, tended to prefer āvu mānsam, in part because of eddu mānsam’s tainted association with low-caste impurity.38 Christians, if they (or their recent ancestors) were converts, retained a preference for buffalo if they were from Dalit castes (as the majority of them were); others, like a Hyderabad Roman Catholic family I knew well who had grown up in a Muslim part of the city, expressed surprise that anyone would eat anything other than āvu mānsam. The reality, though, was that all the butchers I met, whichever populations they served, sold the meat of whichever animals they could source most easily and at the most competitive rates; for the most part, during my fieldwork, this seemed to be buffalo. When people purchased beef, they never, in my experience, questioned the butcher about the provenance of the animal; if they asked for the meat by name at all—hardly necessary, since the sellers sold only one product—they used the generic goddu mānsam, in Telugu.
As in Telugu, in Hyderabadi Hindi there were also different terms—gaa’ay ka gosht and bhains ke gosht—to distinguish between cow and buffalo meat, respectively, but it was far more common, in Hyderabad, for customers simply to ask the seller for gosht (meat).39 Although this enabled customers to assume that the meat came from where they expected or wanted it to come from, it also signaled an awareness, among some of those I worked with, that sellers might also mix buffalo, cow, and ox meat together. Once the skin was drawn back from the animal, despite my informants’ claims to be able to tell the difference, by appearance and by taste, it was difficult to discern with certainty which meat came from which animal. There were reports in October 2017, for example, suggesting a sharp rise in shipments of cow meat being passed off as buffalo through southern Indian ports, where enforcement of legislation on the export of beef from cows was seen as less stringent. The provenance of the meat—as had been the case with the meat found in the fridge of the Muslim man beaten to death in Dadri—was impossible to confirm without laboratory tests.40 This potential confusion between the two sources of beef worked both ways. As a Hyderabadi butcher who had had two consignments of meat violently seized by protestors as they were transported to his shop from the slaughterhouse told me, the vigilantes had not stopped to ask what kind of meat it was before they contaminated it with phenyl and thrashed the truck drivers.
I raise these examples simply to flag the uncertainties in trying to draw a distinction between the meat of cows and buffaloes, particularly when state legislation often restricted the slaughter of both kinds of animal. It was also the case that castes and other groups who did not eat beef, even when they ate other kinds of meat, treated buffalo and cow beef as one and the same thing. Consequently, and reflecting the fact that my interlocutors were likewise often hazy about
