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thehindu.com

A meatless argument
Vamsee Juluri

The U.S.s National Public Radio (NPR) recently featured an article

entitled Egg War: Why Indias Vegetarian Elites are Accused of
Keeping Kids Hungry. The concern expressed by the writer was
legitimate: the nutritional needs of poor schoolchildren in Madhya
Pradesh following the State governments decision to remove eggs
from the menu. But, as the rather judgmental term vegetarian
elites suggests, the article seems to be more about perpetuating a
common misperception in reporting on India, that somehow
vegetarianism is an upper caste Hindu ploy to make the poor in
India starve. After all, just a few days before that, The New York
Times addressed the beef ban issue with the headline, Saving the
Cows, Starving the Children, complete with a photo of a woman
offering a pranam to a cow.
The irony, as readers have pointed out already, is that both NPR
and The NYT have usually been liberal when it comes to coverage of
the disastrous implications of a global meat diet for the
environment, not to mention animal lives. When it comes to India
though, not only have these aspects been ignored, but a wholly
insulting edifice of distortion and disdain has been erected on that
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silence about what diet issues are all about. Using the cliched and
colonial trope of starving children, we are offered one more lesson
in how Hinduism is somehow responsible for all that is wrong in
India today.
Wrong formulation
Let us examine the idea of vegetarian elites more closely. This has
become a part of commonsense in the West, and in the
well-educated sections of the Indian intellectual and media
communities too. As the NPR article says, quoting a much cited
2006 survey of diet in India, vegetarianism is limited to privileged,
upper caste Hindu communities. Given the general association of
diet and caste in India, this might appear to be true, and sustain the
whole accusation of a vegetarian elite making children starve.
However, what this formulation misses out on is one key question:
how vegetarian really are Indian elites? If you walk into the mid- to
upscale restaurants in urban and small town India today, where the
elites go to eat, do you see the majority really eating only
vegetarian food? On the contrary, the more expensive the place, the
more likely it is skewed heavily towards non-vegetarians. It is not
just about personal choice either, but a social and demographic
reality. If you look at the most influential communities in India
today, is their traditional diet likely to be vegetarian or
non-vegetarian? Those that are traditionally vegetarian are
probably a minority among them.

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Conversely, if vegetarianism is limited to privileged, upper caste

Hindu communities, how do we account for a vegetarian Prime
Minister who happens to come from a less than privileged,
backward caste background? How do we account for the saints,
gurus and just ordinary people from slums and villages who
renounce meat for its innate violence? And even among Hindus
who do eat meat, how do we account for the fact that for many of
them there is a great deal of traditionally ingrained respect in their
practices about what, when, and how much they would eat? None of
these realities is considered when what is being produced in
reportage is not so much an honest discussion but a relentless
perpetuation of Hinduphobia.
Hinduphobia needs to be understood not only as a systematic
denial of Hinduism in academic and media discourses, but also as
an integral part of a broader distortion in the global, modern
commonsense on nature, animals, diet, and life itself. By reducing
social problems, even serious ones like malnutrition, to an
ahistorical fantasy narrative that blames Hinduism, and by failing
to introspect on the assumptions about carnivory formulated in
other lands and times, the Hindu elite vegetarian myth feeds a
failing propaganda for violence. The effect of such pronunciations is
palpable. It is not surprising to find Western readers, unaware of
the nuances of Indian culture, jump to offer simplistically, racist
comments like lose the religion and eat some beef, even on the
usually intelligent media like NPR.

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Caste in flux
The realities of culture, ethics, and diet in India are far more
complicated than what some static and simplistic four varna
oppressor model taught to middle school American children might
proclaim. The reality neither American textbooks nor national
newspaper columnists seem to be aware of though is the fact that
castes and cultures have been in great flux in India, rapidly so since
Independence. Even if much more still needs to be done for the
poorest, the simplistic myth of a static, caste-dictated dietary
system cannot be taken seriously any longer. Unfortunately, in the
popular Western imagination, caught up with delusions of its own
agency and the lack of any such for the other, the realities of
Sanskritisation and Mandalisation in India are too much of a
headache to acknowledge. We find that old, pervasive Western
notion, the why dont the starving Hindoos just eat all those cows
instead of praying to them now informing serious debates on
Indian news media as well.
Way of life
The problem today is that the right in India lacks the intellectual
resources to invest in an Indic narrative of decolonisation, much as
its younger minds want to. Whether it is a cause, or an effect, I do
not know, but it also often lacks the heart too to go about what it
thinks is a restoration of ancient Hindu glory in a wise and
compassionate manner, celebrating its bans not as efforts to help

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animals or the environment but as lessons taught to those people.

The bigger problem though is the intellectual inertia and malaise
that has allowed an old, colonial, racist mythology about India to
become synonymous with the progressive, anti-casteist position in
India today. To put it simply, I think the beef bans and beef festivals
both miss the point by fighting over rights bestowed by the past on
the present. It has to be about the present preparing for a future
where one day we might well wake up with a start, as we did about
second-hand smoke, about the needlessness of the mass industrial
slaughter of animals, birds, and sea-life that we routinely accept as
a global way of life today.
For such a realisation to dawn, we must not dismiss what is perhaps
the oldest, living, continuous tradition of vegetarianism in the
world as mere superstition. Such an appropriation and denial
though has already happened in Western discourse, which
increasingly highlights animal rights but somehow turns its back on
Indias past and present. All of India may not have been vegetarian
all the time. But the importance given to vegetarianism in Indian
life for the simple reason that our ancestors knew we could live
without taking an animal life, is an enormous leap in human
civilisation that the modern West has had a very tough time coming
around to accept.
(Vamsee Juluri is a professor of media studies at the University of
San Francisco and the author of Rearming Hinduism .)

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