was working on a paper for a special issue of the journal South Asia—coedited by Caroline and Filippo Osella (2008b)—that first got me thinking about meat eating in India; working with Jakob Klein on Consumer and Consumed, an edited special issue of the journal Ethnos (Staples and Klein 2017a)—which in turn drew on a panel we coconvened at the 2011 conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) in the UK—drew me in even further. Jakob also invited me to write a chapter on food and caste in India for the handbook he edited with James Watson (Klein and Watson 2016), and I am deeply appreciative of his always thoughtful comments and suggestions both as an editor and as a coauthor. Kiranmayi Bhushi, with her specialist, interdisciplinary knowledge of food in South Asia, was likewise a valuable interlocutor as I further traced attitudes toward beef eating in South India for an essay in her recently published anthology (Bhushi 2018). Although none of the chapters in this book directly replicate this previous work, they draw and expand on it extensively.
In the writing of this book, I have also leaned on several South Asianist colleagues for their own fieldwork insights and for pointers toward what to read. Thank you, Henrike Donner, Michele Friedner, and Atreyee Sen in particular, and thanks also to scholars I have not yet met, such as Kalyan Das, Estelle Fourat, Suraj Jacob, Jacob Lahne, Balmurli Natrajan, and Christy Spackman, all of whom corresponded with me or shared relevant articles at just the right moments along the way.
I am indebted to the two anonymous readers for their feedback on an earlier draft of this book. I warmed to them not only because of their kind words and their enthusiasm for the project but also because of their thoroughness, fine attention to detail, and thoughtful suggestions. Remaining flaws are, of course, my own, but this certainly became a better book from responding to their comprehensive feedback.
Finally, thanks to my family, Becky, Theo, and Felix, for being there throughout. Stanley has also been a willing walking and running companion through the whole process: the hours of thinking time I spent with him away from my desk each day were often the most productive ones.
Introduction
Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian
CATTLE seemed to be everywhere. At least, they did once I became consciously on the lookout for them in the small corner of coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India, that I have been visiting for the last thirty-five years. I saw them on the main road when I went out to run in the misty early mornings when it was still relatively cool, being directed on their way to patches of grazing land and watering holes; I passed them while they were still resting, tethered to poles or trees alongside village dwellings. Sometimes—two abreast—they were pulling carts packed full of straw, manure, or other agricultural loads. There were nearly always small herds of buffaloes huddled together at the railway crossing when I, like them, was waiting at the barrier for a train to pass. They were kept in check by their herders, who, almost to a man (and they were, for the most part, men), brandished long sticks and wore white shirts (towel draped over one shoulder) and lungis. If they had anything on their feet at all, they wore rubber flip-flops or dusty leather sandals.
The animals waited patiently, tails languidly swatting away the flies, seemingly at home among the jumble of pedestrians, cyclists, auto rickshaws, motorbikes, and trucks. In the case of the white, humped zebu cows (see figure I.1) considered by many so iconic of India, they were more likely spotted wandering alone, unhindered, or lying in the road, impervious to the vehicles whose drivers navigated carefully around them. In the market they could be found in corners, munching away on the piles of okra, green beans, and gourds that had been discarded especially for them; inside the soft drinks shop or the bakery, I watched them edge slowly toward the counter while the proprietors, well accustomed to the drill, gently tried to lure them away with offerings of food (figure I.2).
I.1 A humped zebu cow, tethered and ready for sale at a major cattle market.
Even when one could not immediately see them, there were signs of bovine presence all around: the fragrant splats of excrement that punctuated every track into the village; circular dung cakes, for fuel, drying on walls; and the rich, earthy smell of their warm bodies lingering in the air. In some of the village households I visited, their dung was diluted with water and swept across interior floors to keep insects at bay; sometimes it was even mixed into the very fiber of the mud walls as insulation. Cattle products also permeated nearly every repast: melted ghee (clarified butter), drizzled onto mudda pappu (a plain dal, usually made with split pigeon peas); milk, thick with cream, enriching small glass cups of sugary tea; and the curd or buttermilk that, mixed by hand into rice, marked the final course of a meal. More controversially, in plenty of Christian, Dalit, and Muslim households on Sundays, their flesh also appeared as the center of the meal: a special dish to differentiate the holiday from the rest of the week, and themselves as particular kinds of people. The presence of cows, oxen, and buffaloes was, in short, a constant in rural South India.
I.2 A wandering, small-town cow goes trader to trader in search of offerings.
Given the centrality of bovines to pastoral life, it is perhaps unsurprising that consumption of beef—particularly the flesh of the cow, but also, as will become clear, that of the water buffalo—has regularly sparked controversy in the subcontinent. One might well describe the cow as “a fundamental symbol” (Yang 1980, 585) or a dense metaphor (Pinney 2004, 205): an entity so embedded in the common pool of experience in India that meanings attributed to it are widely shared and understood, albeit contested. Often invoked as a motif of deep-rooted communal difference between Hindus and other religious groups, Muslims especially, their meat simultaneously represents a violation of sacred taboos and a celebration of marginalized identities. In certain circumstances, beef consumption—and beef eaten in particular ways—might even be seen as a symbol of cosmopolitan sophistication.
Following the landslide election of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in 2014, however, the relatively peaceful coexistence of these apparently contradictory representations has come under increasing strain. Reports of cattle-related violence, particularly in some of the northern states of India, have been widespread. News reports and debate on social media suggest a growing polarization of views. On one side were Dalit (former Untouchables or, to use the state’s own categorization, members of Scheduled Castes), Muslim, and Christian activists protesting at what they saw as a threat to their beef-eating heritage. On the other were Hindu fundamentalists rallying, sometimes violently, against those who ate the flesh of the “holy cow,” ox, or buffalo.
This book offers an anthropological take on what it is about the contemporary moment that has led to the apparent turn away from the hitherto secularist approach of postindependence Indian governments, a move that started to become noticeable back in the 1990s, although its roots can perhaps be traced even earlier.1 Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian attempts to bring nuance to existing accounts by journalists, historians, and others by charting how nonactivists—a wide category of people who position themselves neither as cow protectionists nor as pro-beef activists, on whom more shortly—navigate the current febrile political climate in their everyday lives. Doing so effects a shift away from an unduly simplistic binary opposition drawn between those who oppose the slaughter of cattle on the one hand, and those who view beef consumption as a fundamental gastronomic right on the other. Such an approach enables me to document the vital but frequently overlooked ambivalences that exist between these two poles. It attends, for example, to the views and experiences of those who sometimes eat beef but who see slaughter as problematic, as well
