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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 reductionist, too selective in its use of data, and too dismissive of the role that ideological belief and emotion play in social relations.²⁵ It also failed to recognize that the neat distinction between “religion” and “economy” does not hold in the Indian context, where the two realms have been shown to be inseparable (Adcock 2010). But whichever position one took vis-à-vis Harris and his interlocutors, the argument was not really about cows but about wider theory.

Meanwhile, food was finally beginning to be considered a topic worthy of anthropological study in its own right. The first single-authored monograph on food in Hindu society appeared in 1976: R. S. Khare’s The Hindu Hearth and Home (1976b), published in the same year as his related collection of more theoretical papers, Culture and Reality: Essays on the Hindu System of Managing Foods (1976a). Drawing on his fieldwork with the Kanya Kubja, orthodox Brahmins in Uttar Pradesh, the findings presented in The Hindu Hearth and Home might well have been remote from the experiences of lower-caste (or less economically established high-caste) diners, but the book was valuable in at least two respects. First, it offered a wealth of detailed empirical data that had not previously been documented; second, it extended discussion beyond public commensality, where it had become too firmly rooted, into the realm of food in the domestic arena. As such, Khare’s book offered rich material not only on shared dining between groups but on the neglected areas of cooking, utensils, ingredients, and food sharing within the home, opening up an array of possibilities for future study.

The decade that followed, as Watson and Klein (2016) confirm, was when food studies in anthropology really began to blossom. It was with the publication of Jack Goody’s pioneering work comparing what lay behind national cuisines, Cooking, Cuisine and Class (1982), and Mintz’s now classic monograph, Sweetness and Power (1985), that the anthropology of food witnessed a shift from studies embedded in either symbolic or materialist paradigms toward more historically and ethnographically grounded work (Watson and Klein 2016, 3). Both books were instrumental in drawing attention to the relationship between material practices, power, and meaning. They also prefigured a new turn to the material a couple of decades later—arguably ignored for too long, as theorists tired of the structural Marxism within which Harris’s earlier invocation of the material was embedded (Coole and Frost 2010, 3). Like Goody and Mintz, the so-called “new materialists” recognized that the symbolic must be grounded in the material, that matter is not simply passive or inert (10), empty vessels into which symbolic meanings might be poured. Rather, in line with ways of thinking inspired by Bruno Latour (2005, 2010), we should recognize that matter has agency in itself, an approach that emphasizes the active, self-transformative, practical aspects of corporeality as it participates in relations of power (Coole and Frost 2010, 19).²⁶ If we apply these insights to our study of the relations between cattle and other animals, both with human beings and the wider world around them, it becomes clear that “animals condition political and cultural possibilities not just as immaterial metaphors but as particular actors with complex lives, histories, and characters” (Govindrajan 2018, 89).²⁷ The symbolism of the cow takes its meaning through human entanglements with the actual bodies of cows.²⁸

Goody and Mintz, in addition to leading us out of the cul-de-sac into which Harris’s vision of materialism had arguably taken us, recognized, through food, the transnational links that shape social relationships. Appadurai’s (1988) exploration of the growing numbers of cookbooks and what they said about the changing foodways of India’s major cities reflected parallel moves in the anthropology of food in India. Going further than his previous writing on “gastro-politics” (1981), he demanded that we look beyond caste and traditional taboos in understanding urban middle-class relationships to food. “As food emerges from its traditional moral and social matrix,” he argued, “it becomes embedded in a different system of etiquette—that of the drawing room, the corporate gathering, the club event, and the restaurant” (1988, 8).

As the anthropology of food became more firmly established, its turns reflected, or led, those of anthropology more generally. It witnessed a shift from the structuralist explanations that framed the debates between Marriott and Dumont, for example, to those that, after Appadurai (1988) and others, reflected not only the changing theoretical concerns of anthropologists but also corresponding shifts across the world. These included the impact of globalization on what had once been thought of as bounded cultural spaces, new nationalisms, and, particularly relevant in India, the sway of economic liberalization on the food people sourced, cooked, and ate, as well as its significance.

Within India, despite its particularly rich gastronomic range, there have been relatively few monographs that focus specifically on food post-Khare. Those that have been produced tend to focus on particular regional cuisines and eating practices in urban centers²⁹ or Indian food in the diaspora.³⁰ The apparent reticence of others to join them is perhaps because of, as food studies scholars Ray and Srinivas suggest, “the burdens of the long-festering discussion on caste and commensality that had dominated Indian sociology at least since Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus” (2012b, 13). It is certainly true that our long enchantment with caste—and a focus on commensality rather than the other aspects of food that Khare drew attention to—obscured alternative forms of social relation, class among them, for too long. We were, it seems, too eager to dump caste in favor of examining the growth of a cosmopolitan middle class, and not only because, as they note, it led scholars to pay less attention to Khare’s sustained input than they might otherwise have done (1976a, 1976b, 1992, 1994, 2006).

Vital though it is to take seriously the growth of the middle classes, as well as to attend to the foodways of Indians in the diaspora, such an emphasis has obscured from view the enduring impact that caste and community play in what people eat, particularly in villages and small towns, and its social implications. This is significant because relegating caste to the realm of “heritage,” while the real politics goes on elsewhere, has enabled dominant groups to continue exploiting low castes and the non-Hindu “other” through food taboos, more or less unnoticed (Gorringe and Karthikeyan 2014). The denial of nonvegetarian diets in public or institutional spaces, for example, has been presented merely as sensitivity to the cultural values of Hindus (despite a significant majority of them actually being nonvegetarian), rather than violence, structural and symbolic, inflicted against those who eat meat (Osella 2008, 4). Veena Shatrugna, previously of the National Institute of Nutrition in Hyderabad, remarked in an interview that India’s nutritional experts have tended to come from vegetarian castes, and their advice has thus been skewed in favor of plant-based dietary recommendations.³¹ Vegetarianism has subsequently been institutionalized in the public distribution system (which provides key foodstuffs at subsidized prices for those on low incomes) and the more recent midday meals program for school children.

Much of the literature suggests that a broad change has occurred in culinary and gustatory practices and what they mean: a shift from eating habits shaped predominantly by caste to those dominated by the sensibilities of a globalized middle class. Insufficient attention, however, has been paid to contemporary foodways in village settings (despite something of a return to village studies in South Asian ethnography more widely³²) and to those of city dwellers beyond the middle class. In beginning to address these gaps, I explore the ways in which caste and community continue to dominate the food choices of my friends and acquaintances in India, even as they are refashioned by what is going on in the world beyond them.

Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian focuses on meat consumption and, within that, the eating of beef in particular. Other ethnographies and collections have focused on meat,³³ but with the exception of a special issue of South Asia on the veg/non-veg divide (Osella and Osella 2008b), very little scholarship turns the spotlight on meat in India. With at least twenty-eight human deaths—and many more injuries—attributed to disagreement over whether bovine slaughter should be permissible in India reported since 2010,³⁴ attention to the problem of the kind that only a detailed, ethnographic approach can provide is long overdue. An ethnography of eating and not eating meat is also a timely intervention in a more general sense, because the worldwide industrialization of meat production has been changing eating habits in new and sometimes unexpected ways (Watson and Klein 2016, 9).