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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 as those who would never eat beef but who do not necessarily object to others doing so, and who in some cases, as I discovered, are implicated to greater or lesser degrees in the beef trade.

What role did the shared consumption of beef—or of meat more generally—play in the forging of both positive and negative identities, and how, if at all, was that changing with the times? How effective were claims relating to the positive attributes of beef at challenging the apparently hegemonic view that those who ate it were low-status and polluting? How were what people described as “modern” practices of eating, including, for example, Chinese-inspired dishes like chicken or cauliflower Manchurian—from which this book takes the second part of its title—or Western-style pizzas bought from takeaway carts, having an impact on the kinds of meat and other comestibles that were being eaten? And how did they affect the ways in which they were consumed? The multiple, and perhaps conflicting, meanings attributed to beef and the animals from which it comes at any given moment tell us something about what is going on in Indian society in more explicit ways than might otherwise be obvious. This is crucial, because identifying those meanings and the points at which they change helps us to discern the central fault lines running through contemporary India: the socioeconomic, political, and religious divisions; the dominant ideologies that motivate them; and the contexts within which these ideologies gain traction.

In attending to these questions, this book offers an ethnographic exploration of the current situation as it is experienced by people on the ground, and also locates it comprehensively within the wider foodscapes of the region. That is to say, this book is not only about cattle slaughter and the eating or not eating of beef, or even meat consumption more generally. It is also about placing—and consequently, better understanding—practices in respect of beef in relation to wider shifts and vacillations in Indian foodways. The cost and availability of different kinds of food, as well as changes in the technologies via which it is processed, distributed, stored, purchased, and consumed, all have varying degrees of impact on the significance of beef—and its capacity to have meanings attached to it—in the diets of particular families. Such changes include, for example, the availability of industrialized, packaged foods that did not previously exist, and new ready-made foods on offer outside the home, such as the Chinese-inspired dishes that are now served from takeaway carts even in small towns.