From beef to bugs: What do people not eat in India?
I remember having this intense conversation with a colleague, a very serious political journalist, who couldn't fathom why anyone would want to devote his life to the pursuit of food writing. Jokingly, I said to her, "Look, food is the mother of politics. In ancient civilisations, it started with the fight over the control over land and its produce. And the rest, as they say, is history."
After a couple of Old Monks, it was a nice speech to give - and it had the desired effect on my interlocutor, who, it appeared, started seeing me in a new light. Little did I realise then that food was to become the fuel of divisive politics in a country that should celebrate its unmatchable diversity of cuisines - and worry more about real food issues such as the catastrophic rise in the prices of dal, an essential source of proteins for vegetarians.
We, Hindus, have been offering food to the gods and to our ancestors for as long as our religion has been around, yet we have turned this sacred gift of our planet into a leitmotif of bigotry. Not long ago, I was talking to Vikas Khanna, the celebrity chef who shuttles between America and India, and has been travelling across the country studying the food practices of our diverse people for a Fox television series, and he was marvelling at how India is home to every kind of dietary practices, so who are we to get shocked, or upset, over what other people eat.
How true! We have had Muslim rulers who were vegetarian for most days of the year and Hindu communities that continue to eat beef as a part of their daily meals. I was a very young reporter when I got the opportunity to meet a Kerala minister, who later became one at the Centre. He was sitting down for breakfast, so he asked me if I could join him and interview him over a meal of idiappam and beef fry.
Here was a Hindu politician offering me beef without even bothering about whether he should do it - after all, his community, like many other marginalised social groups, had been eating beef for as long as it has been around. I did not eat beef, so I had to made do with a vegetable stew left over from the night.
What do people not eat in India? In Chhattisgarh, red ants are considered a delicacy; Bodos love silkworm pupae so much that a Madhya Pradesh research institute is canning them and selling them to this tribal community in Assam; and in the temple town of Madurai, the most visited food destination is a shack that only sells preparations made from each part of a goat, including the animal's blood.
Personally, I had had shark meat in Mahabalipuram, rabbit in Rajasthan, snails at an Assamese restaurant in New Delhi, pork in plenty in Northeastern homes and dhabas, and some of the best kebabs in my life in so-called "vegetarian" Gujarat, where I learnt later that the majority of the population is non-vegetarian.
Like everything Indian, which protagonists of Hindutva wouldn't ever understand, the Indian thali is a happy bundle of contradictions where all kinds of meat make a happy appearance. A pragmatist such as Mahatma Gandhi, despite his support for the cow protection movement, understood this reality very well. Three weeks before Independence Day, addressing a prayer meeting, Gandhi had said: "How can I force anyone not to slaughter cows unless he is himself so disposed? It is not as if there were only Hindus in the Indian union. There are Muslims, Parsis, Christians and other religious groups here...
"If we stop cow slaughter by law here and the very reverse happens in Pakistan, what will be the result? Supposing they say Hindus would not be allowed to visit temples because it was against Shariat to worship idols?"
Politics is all about recognising ground realities. In the Indian context, it means respecting our awesome diversity like an article of faith.