Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian. James Staples
aromas or ate the same foods, our bodies—through their embodied histories, what Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 52) called the habitus—likely responded to them in unique ways. The heat of chili powder, for example, is felt more keenly on the tongues of the uninitiated than on those that have tasted it with every meal all their lives. And the creamy, salty taste of English cheddar cheese, once so delicious to my own taste buds, was—as I learned—universally repulsive to the friends in a South Indian village with whom I tried to share it some years ago. They were the same things, but they evoked different sensory experiences for different people. Not only did the same substances taste different to different bodies, they also provoked other thoughts and sensations—Proustian evocations of pleasurable meals shared, for example—that are particular to the broader webs of context within which an individual consumer is enmeshed.
The anthropologist Richard Wilk (2017, 279) put it well in a passage reflecting on childhood memories of consuming chicken soup when ill. Subsequent bowls of chicken soup, he says, “can only be experienced through a sensory memory, not just its flavor, but its emotional associations, the warming of the belly, the clearing of the sinuses, and the feeling of healing. The real soup is its archetype, not warm stuff in the bowl on the table.” Even if our sensory experiences could be matched—and certainly the longer I spent with people, the closer together they were drawn—capturing them in writing is another matter altogether. It hardly needs to be said that a written description of a sensation, however evocative, is substantially different from the literal experience being described.
Nevertheless, what I was able to do was to be alert to the emotional responses my interlocutors displayed, like the unchecked expressions of disgust on the faces of some of them at being asked whether or not they ate pork, to take note of them, to ask questions, and, over time, learn to make sense of them. Such fine-grained observations, documented in context, can, as anthropologist Andrew Beatty (2019) recommends, be contextualized and made sense of through the narratives within which they are played out. Emotions, like the corporeal senses with which they are connected, “tell a story and belong to larger stories.”19 And while my thinking on this is inevitably also informed by those scholars who try to capture how sensory experience shapes quotidian political engagement,20 and while I try in my writing to convey a sense of what things felt like as well to explain what they meant, I remain acutely aware of the problems inherent in such an approach.
That brings me to the broader issue of ethics. Here, my key concern—as for other ethnographic research, but heightened in this case because of the rising levels of violence perpetrated in relation to cattle slaughter and the sale and consumption of beef—was in ensuring that those I worked with were not put at increased risk because of me. I would hope that a more subtly textured study of everyday experiences in relation to eating or not eating meat might, in itself, be productive of a dialogue less enflamed by communal and other tensions. Certainly, some of those I spent time with on this project spoke to me precisely for that reason: because they wanted their voices to be heard, and they felt no one else was listening to them. Nevertheless, some of them were well aware of the risks they faced. One Hyderabad butcher, for example, while happy for me to quote him and keen to identify his shop in anything I wrote—safely located, he felt, within a Muslim area—did not want me to take any photographs that identified his face. In an attempt to give that protection, I have used pseudonyms for people and places—other than large cities, which it was futile to attempt to disguise—and have changed or omitted other details that might identify specific people. This offers no guarantee, of course, but it does make it difficult to attribute the particular words or actions I document to particular, named individuals.
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF FOOD AND EATING IN INDIA
This book is a contribution both to the anthropology of food and to the study of food within the related disciplinary fields of history and sociology, as well as, more particularly, to the growing body of specifically Indological contributions to the field. Both Krishnendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas (2012b, 13), in their edited collection of essays on the impacts of globalization on South Asian foodways, and Kiranmayi Bhushi (2018, 3), in a recent anthology intended to capture how India is being transformed through food practices in the contemporary moment, usefully identify a number of discrete but overlapping categories into which the study of food in India might heuristically be divided. In short, these are bodies of work rooted in agroscience, concerned with improving crop yields; nutrition and public health; development economics, emerging from studies of colonial engagement with food and famine; food science; historical analysis of classical texts; and cultural aspects of food and eating.
Anthropological contributions, clearly, fit most comfortably into the “culture” strand of this work, even as it makes sense sometimes to visit and to utilize contributions from food studies’ other constituent parts. In the introduction to their masterful recent handbook on food and anthropology, James Watson and Jakob Klein (2016) trace the subdiscipline’s history, noting that while food and eating feature in many of the classics—from Marcel Mauss ([1925] 1990) and Bronisław Malinowski (1935) to Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966)—there was little that placed food center stage prior to the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the notable exception of Audrey Richards’s (1932; 1939) work on hunger and diet in what is now Zimbabwe. The same might be said for the anthropology of food in India. Descriptions of public dining and what it said about the relative status of the diners, it is true, had their place in the monographs of the so-called village studies era of the 1950s and 1960s.21 M. N. Srinivas (1952), for example, used the strategic dining practices of the Coorgs of South India, with whom he conducted fieldwork, to illustrate his notion of Sanskritization, the process via which lower castes sought to improve their social standing by adopting the ideologies and practices—those relating to food and eating among them—of their higher-ranking peers. Exploring the problem of putatively higher castes being polluted by food prepared by those of lower ritual status, and the strategies they might deploy to avoid it, had also been a preoccupation of earlier scholars.22
It was though the work of Chicago anthropologist McKim Marriott and French structuralist Louis Dumont that commanded the most enduring attention in respect to caste and its relationship to eating, at least from the late 1960s. Marriott, in summary, depicted food transactions as a kind of tournament, during which players sought to gain “dominance over others through feeding them or securing dependence on others by being fed by them” (1968, 169; see also Marriott 1976). Dumont (1980), by contrast, developed a more abstract theory of caste, elaborated through the oppositions he drew between purity and impurity on the one hand and status and power on the other.23 For Dumont, food exchanges were ultimately less significant than marriage when it came to understanding caste order (Khare 2012, 244). This is not the space to rehearse in detail the positions of the two theorists and the debates they engendered;24 for current purposes, suffice it to state that for both of them, as for many other anthropologists of that era, their interest in food was predominantly as a means of explicating their theories on caste. As Sidney Mintz put it, writing about the study of food in that time period more generally, “It was not the food or its preparation that was of interest, so much as what, socially speaking, the food and eating could be used for” (1996, 4).
If one were to change the word “food” to “cow,” Mintz’s words would be equally apt to describe the literature that was emerging, at around the same time but in a different anthropological silo, on the cow’s status in India. Chief among these contributions, at least in terms of shaping the debate, was Harris’s (1966; 1985; 1989) argument that the protected status afforded to the cow in India was a consequence of ecological, rather than ideological or religious, factors. It was not, he suggested, that Hindus avoided slaughtering cattle because of ahimsa (the religious doctrine of avoiding violence to other beings); rather, ahimsa is powerful precisely because of the material rewards that observing it confers. To put it crudely, Harris’s thesis was that, in order to survive, a religious doctrine or a cultural practice also had to make rational, economic sense. The debate that followed was less about the empirical realities of human-bovine relationships—Harris, by his own admission, had never stepped foot in India (1966, 51)—and more to do with what one made of Harris’s cultural materialism, a theory rooted in Marxist evolutionism. For several critics it was altogether too