Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian. James Staples
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and 2000, I had expected other Christians I interviewed a decade on to take similar, perhaps even bolder, positions vis-à-vis beef eating. But a curious thing happened. Each time I followed up on my beef-related inquiries over those visits, my interlocutors—as if to keep me on my toes—seemed to change tack. People who, like Victoria-Rani, had encouraged me to eat beef in the past no longer bothered, or told me it no longer agreed with their bodies. “At my life stage,” Mariamma, a Christian who had also regularly offered me beef during my earlier visit, told me, “beef is too heating for my body; I can’t digest it in the same way. Sometimes I will take [it], but mostly now”—she gestured to the serving dishes filled with pulse and vegetable preparations that filled the space on the table between us—“I take simple food like this.” Others—more confusingly still—told me that it was, of course, morally wrong to slaughter cattle and Hindus were right to take a stand against it, but that yes, they sometimes liked to eat beef on Sundays. “What can we do? We need to eat something, no?” was a common response from those I asked about it, often delivered with a shrug of the shoulders and a sheepish smile. Still others, who opposed both cattle slaughter and the consumption of its flesh, readily confessed to selling their own animals when they were no longer able to produce milk; although they seldom said so, who would buy them, other than meat traders? What, I asked myself, was going on?
My initial frustrations at this shifting landscape gave way, over time, to the realization that any attempt to discover, definitively, what bovine animals and their products mean within India, even at a single point in its history, is doomed to failure. Meaning, as the literature in the anthropology of food has been pointing out for some time, does not inhere permanently in objects: animals, foodstuffs, or, for that matter, anything else.8 Meaning is attributed in social interaction. That interaction—as anthropologist Jack Goody (1982) set out so eloquently in his seminal study Cooking, Cuisine and Class—occurs within an intricate web of changing circumstances, contexts, and scales that continually alter the possibilities for attributing new meanings and modifying old ones. While this insight certainly complicates social analysts’ task—their job, to be sure, can never be deemed over—recognizing the potential for such fluidity of meaning is in itself vital. It also allows us to explore the contradictions and ambivalence with which those meanings intersect. As the social theorist Ashis Nandy puts it, referring to food more generally, “The crucial issues that have come to dog Indian cuisine are not radically different from the questions that dog Indian cultural life in general” (2004, 10).
So, to reiterate the question: What was going on?
COW POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA
The shifts in attitudes toward cows, buffalo, and their beef among those who eat it, while never homogenous, to some extent mapped onto wider social changes in India as a whole. In particular, the change from the BJP-led government, in power from 1998 to 2004, to a more secularist Congress-led one helped to account for why those who ate beef no longer felt the need to defend it so vociferously. Bovine symbolism—the capacity of the cow to serve as a rallying cry for Muslims and Christians, as well as a motif of purity for Hindus and Jains—was muted. By the onset of the second decade of the century, however, when the BJP was again in the ascendency, attitudes, even in South India where support for Hindu nationalism was less embedded, could be seen to be changing. A beef festival at Osmania University in Hyderabad in 2012, for example, and the violent protests against it (one student was stabbed) provoked a polarized online debate.9 Elsewhere in the city, tensions rose when beef was thrown onto the walls of a Hanuman temple, by, it later transpired, Hindu extremists in a bid to foment communal unrest.10
When the 2014 general election campaign began in earnest, corruption, the economy, and protecting women’s safety emerged as key issues. However, Narendra Modi, leader of the BJP and the soon-to-be prime minister, also put debates about cattle slaughter at the core of his campaign. “Those at the Centre want a ‘Pink Revolution,’ ” he told a rally in Bihar, referring to the then-Congress-led coalition government. “When animals are slaughtered, the color of their flesh is pink. Animals are being slaughtered and being taken to Bangladesh. The government in Delhi is giving subsidies to those who are carrying out this slaughter.”11 The subsidies and tax breaks for slaughterhouses introduced by the outgoing government, Modi claimed, led to the mass killing of cows and buffaloes. With the BJP’s landslide election in May that year, the mood was clearly changing once again. By the time of my most recent fieldwork trips in December 2016 and July and August 2017, it was evident from press coverage that anti–cattle slaughter protestors had been encouraged by the shift in the Indian government’s tone. One of the most widely publicized cases was that of the beating to death in 2015 of a fifty-year-old Muslim man, Mohammad Akhlaq, in a village near Dadri, by a Hindu lynch mob that suspected him of storing beef in his refrigerator during Eid al-Adha, but there were plenty of references in newspapers and blogs to other beef-related skirmishes.
Much of the reported violence was taking place in the so-called “cow belt”—the northern states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh—but it was by no means confined to it. Hyderabad butchers I worked with, who at the end of 2016 spoke of vigilante attacks as something happening elsewhere, were, by mid-2017, reporting their own firsthand encounters with violence. Fear and anger had become palpable, at least in Hyderabad if not in the coastal regions of Andhra Pradesh. One of the most recent in a stream of government initiatives had been the introduction in May 2017 of regulations—subsequently withdrawn at the end of the year—to ban the sale of cows and buffaloes for slaughter through animal markets.12 The proposals met with vocal resistance from some states—notably Kerala and West Bengal—and a legal challenge from the Madras High Court in Tamil Nadu. Nevertheless, the government’s attempts to take control from the Centre, and what some considered to be its half-hearted condemnation of the vigilante groups to which its hard line gave encouragement,13 marked a further shift from what many of my interlocutors described as the hitherto “live and let live approach” that had been favored by the more secular Congress Party–led Government of the previous decade.
But this was not just a struggle between two opposing political ideologies, nor, as it will become plain, does it aid our understanding of the situation to categorize the central actors as either pro-beef activists—drawn from the Muslim, Dalit, and Christian populations—or, conversely, pro–cattle protectionist Hindu fundamentalists. First, there were other things going on alongside the ideological battles, sometimes intertwined with them, one affecting the other, sometimes not. One of these factors was the changing technologies via which meat was produced, and the impact these had on cost, taste, and availability. As my own research made clear, when those technologies led to the availability of cheaper chicken, as the industrialization of broiler-chicken rearing did, those who previously preferred beef in many cases shifted their allegiances on economic grounds. Developments in infrastructure, such as a more stable electricity supply or the availability of lower-cost generators, in tandem with innovations in packaging materials, also created openings for new kinds of food products that previously were not available in small towns. Transitory takeaway stands, as well as restaurants of various kinds, alongside long-established canteens and messes, had expanded exponentially in the area where I worked over the past twenty years. Such changes helped to recalibrate, in ways small and more significant, the everyday diets and food-related practices of my interlocutors.
Environmental concerns, and with them worries over the health effects of what people called the “medicines” given to livestock to make them grow bigger and faster, likewise influenced choices. The people I worked with were mostly aware, in a general sense, of criticisms concerning the ecological consequences of the Green Revolution. So too did they partake in wider discussions about food and health, whether rooted in Ayurveda, biomedicine, or pop-science reports accessed on the internet. Concerns about high-blood pressure, “sugar” (diabetes), or “gastric troubles” all affected what people ate at different points in their lives, suggesting that few people were ever simply meat eaters or not; a large number ate it sometimes and sometimes not, helping to account for changes in what my interlocutors told me as I returned to them over the years.
My research participants’ choices were also shaped by their relative position within the household: a child, while