COMMENTARY

The Hidden Politics

of Vegetarianism
Caste and The Hindu Canteen
Hugo Gorringe, D Karthikeyan

A notice issued to employees of

The Hindu asking them to desist
from bringing non-vegetarian
food into the office canteen as it
causes discomfort to a majority of
the employees who are vegetarian
has caused a fair amount of
controversy. This article looks
at how food and dietary customs
mark out caste in modern
India and suggests that public
institutions, particularly those
which have a commendable track
record on matters of social justice,
need to further introspect on the
silent coding of caste into the
institutional space.

alking about food in the south

Asian context, Arjun Appadurai
notes how consumption practices
signify the structures within the social
order and act as the semiotic instrument of Hindu ideas of rank and distance (Appadurai 1980: 497). Whilst
political events such as the Osmania
Beef Festival in 2012 occasionally force
the politics of food into the public arena
in India, all too often food preferences
and practices are hidden from view, confined to the domestic sphere and regarded as of little importance. This elision,
we argue, is misplaced. Indeed, some 35
years ago Conlon argued that commensality (rules about interdining) was
the root of all caste distinction (Conlon 1979: 157, cited in Iversen and
Raghavendra 2006). Prescriptions about
what food one can eat and proscriptions
about whose food you are allowed to eat
animate caste boundaries and identities.
Food practices, thus, are inherently political
whether they are politicised or not.
Marginalised Palettes

Hugo Gorringe (Hugo.Gorringe@ed.ac.uk)

teaches at the School of Social and Political
Science, University of Edinburgh, United
Kingdom, and D Karthikeyan (karthik.guevara
@gmail.com) is a PhD candidate at the
University of Edinburgh and was till mid-2013
a special correspondent of The Hindu.

20

Over the past few decades assertive dalit

activists across India have questioned
the dominant hierarchies of taste and
celebrated their liking for non-vegetarian
cuisine and beef in particular. This overt
contestation of dominant cultural codes
has fostered the impression that lower
caste groups are labouring a point or are
helplessly mired within a futile and divisive politics of identity. The palettes of
the marginalised, thus, are seen as distasteful both because of what they eat
and because of how they express themselves. What such a reading of the situation neglects, however, is the pervasive
and taken-for-granted norms that dictate the hierarchies of taste in the first
place and give rise to the assertion of
those who are habitually excluded. It is
May 17, 2014

this implicit caste politics of food that

concerns us here.
This reflection has been prompted by
a notice displayed in the canteen of The
Hindu newspaper on 10 April this year
(Dalit Camera 2014). It states, very simply, that some employees have complained that colleagues are bringing
non-vegetarian food into the canteen
and consuming it there. All are aware,
it reads, non-veg food is not permitted
in our Canteen premises as it causes discomfort to the majority of the employees
who are vegetarian. Put like this, the
demand is merely a polite reminder to
patrons to observe the rules of the space
as a courtesy to others. Indeed, one of
the arguments made by the administration and circulated in the social media
is, The Hindu office is private property,
and those who own it, subject to law, can
make rules for it, and no right is being
denied. Indeed, the newspaper does
not refuse to employ meat-eaters or
impose dietary restrictions on them, it
merely asks for certain spaces within the
offices to be kept meat-free. Why then
has this notice generated a storm of
protest and anger?
To understand the reaction to a commonplace statement we need to place it
within a wider context. The first step is
to decode the implicit message being
conveyed here. As M S S Pandian notes
in his analysis of R K Narayans autobiography, It does not need much of an
effort to understand what strictly vegetarian atmosphere encodes. It is caste
by other means (2002: 1735). Pandian
observes how such notices serve to simultaneously acknowledge and disavow
caste by transcoding caste and caste
relations into something else. The carnivores causing discomfort to colleagues
in the canteen are not labelled in caste
terms anymore than the majority vegetarians are; nor does the cause of the
vegetarians discomfort need to be spelled
out. To talk about caste, as Pandian
concludes, would incarcerate one into a
pre-modern realm (ibid). Such strategies effectively serve to shroud the
structures of power and domination that
have made vegetarianism the dominant
norm and rendered vegetarians uncomfortable with the consumption of meat.
vol xlIX no 20

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly

COMMENTARY

Accepting that the prohibition of nonvegetarian food is caste by other means,

what does this tell us? The Hindu offices
after all are in Chennai, Tamil Nadu the
cradle of the Dravidian movement and
ruled continuously by Dravidian parties
since 1967. Insofar as vegetarianism
characterises any caste cluster it is the
brahmins, but they constitute barely 3% of
the population in the state. What then,
does the prohibition signify? This is a
state where the victory of the regional
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in 1967
was heralded as marking the end of
brahmin rule; where Mani Shankar
Aiyar had to defend his candidacy in a
key electoral contest in Mayiladuthurai by
reference to his partiality for, and proficiency in, the consumption of non-veg
biryani (Pandian 1991); and where even
most Gods are non-vegetarian and expect animal sacrifices. That the majority
of The Hindu employees are vegetarian,
in this context, merely serves to underscore Pandians (1991) assertion that
brahmins dominate the Tamil press.
The Hum of Distant Traffic
Further still, the prohibition raises questions about pluralism and diversity in
contemporary Chennai. In her study of
the culinary habits of the urban middle
classes in Chennai, Pat Caplan (2008)
observes how dining spaces beyond the
confines of the domestic sphere become
spaces of commensality and sociality
where the sharing of food between different castes becomes possible. In this
context we can see how The Hindus ban
on non-vegetarian food retrenches privilege and hierarchy by denying what
Dumont (in Caplan 2008) referred to as
small islands of egalitarianism and the
possibilities of socialisation they entail.
Unlike some of the most hostile critics,
we do not see this prohibition as a form
of untouchability given the numbers of
vegetarian dalit Buddhists and non-vegetarian brahmins like Aiyar above nor
do we demand that The Hindu canteens
should serve meat (though if insiders are
right that all the cooks in their Tamil
offices are brahmins, then employing nonbrahmins as cooks would be in keeping
with the newspapers commitment to
social justice). We would, however, call
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

May 17, 2014

for employees to be allowed to use the

dining spaces to enjoy the food which
forms their normal everyday diet rather
than letting brahmanical codes determine
the dietary practices of all employees.
The significance of the notice in The
Hindu canteen, thus, extends beyond
the institution. What it suggests is that
the vegetarian employees are not content simply to predominate, but wish to
impose their tastes and sensibilities onto
others. The newspaper will doubtless,
and justifiably, point to their proud
record of raising issues pertaining to
social justice and one of the authors can
speak from experience of the organisations swift and effective condemnation
of casteism amongst employees. What
this laudable and important history obscures is the fact that following the
feminist movement at least we can no
longer ignore the relationship between
the personal and the political. Ironically,
on the same day that Dalit Camera broke
the story of the ban, The Hindu carried a
powerful op-ed from Nissim Mannathukkaren (2014) that called for an end to
the echoing silence of caste and
stressed the need to liberate ourselves
from the labyrinth of caste not by remaining silent about it, but by shamefully acknowledging the layers of historical privilege that have sedimented every
pore of our existence.
To focus on the public and violent
manifestations of caste discrimination
whilst simultaneously reinforcing one of
the everyday pillars of caste difference is
to obscure the pervasive significance of
what we might, following Michael Billig
(1995), term banal casteism. By reference to national identity, Billig focuses not
on the eruptions of sentiment and anger
that are the focus of much research, but
on the mundane and ever-present ways
of viewing the world that form the backdrop to social action. Assumptions about,
and references to, just who and where
we are, become so routinised as to
become unnoticed: Beyond conscious
awareness, like the hum of distant traffic (Billig 1995: 94). Caste practices
and modes of discrimination, we would
argue, function in like manner and serve
to render certain practices and diets
acceptable whilst delegitimising others.

vol xlIX no 20

The cumulative impact of such marginalisation of non-vegetarianism was

seen in 2012, when supporters of the
AIADMK violently attacked the offices of
Tamil magazine Nakkeeran after it printed a story claiming that Jayalalithaa was
a beef-eater (Kolappan 2012). It speaks
volumes about the connotations of this
accusation that party cadre were so
incensed by this story and launched legal
proceedings as well as attacking the
magazine offices. Although the canteen
notice is couched in terms of discomfort
rather than purity, the proscription of
non-vegetarian food within the offices of
a significant and powerful public institution sends out an unambiguous message.
In a recent book, Balmurli Natrajan (2012)
refers to the culturalisation of caste as
the process by which caste groups seek
to represent themselves as cultural
groups, thus naturalising their existence
and justifying their preferences and
practices as diversity and difference
rather than hierarchy. Crucially, he notes,
that such strategies sustain the powerful
illusion that the annihilation of caste
is no longer a necessary condition for
democracy in India (Natarajan: 8).
The seemingly insignificant notice in
one institution assumes social significance
against this backdrop and compels us to
question the taken-for-granted nature
of caste divisions and norms. It is, as
Pandian (2002: 1740) concludes, the
refusal to concede the demands of Indian
upper-caste modernity to hide and at
once practice caste that has been at the
heart of dalit and backward caste assertion. That The Hindu notice can remind
employees not to consume non-vegetarian food on the premises as all are
aware of the discomfort it causes rather
than for example having separate
vegetarian and non-vegetarian areas,
illustrates the pervasive influence of
brahmanical practices within the public
sphere and the continued resistance to
lower caste and non-Hindu assertion.
Whilst it may be tempting to dismiss the
anger generated by this notice as an
overreaction, what is at stake in this debate is far more than the discomfort or
unease of sensitive The Hindu employees.
At heart, the issue pertains to the deeper
questions of democracy and citizenship
21

COMMENTARY

and reveals how the unmarked and abstract Indian citizen is still all too often
modelled on an upper-caste norm.
References
Appadurai, A (1980): Gastro-Politics in Hindu
South Asia, American Ethnologist, Vol 8, No 3,
pp 494-511.
Billig, M (1995): Banal Nationalism (London:
Sage).
Caplan, P (2008): Crossing the Veg/Non-Veg Divide: Commensality and Sociality Among the

22

Middle Classes in Madras/Chennai, South

Asia, n.s., Vol XXXI, No 1, pp 118-42.
Dalit Camera (2014): The Hindu BANS Non-vegetarian Food in Its Canteens and Dining Halls,
Round Table India, 15 April, accessed on 15
April 2014, http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php? option=com_content&view=article
&id=7363&catid=129&Itemid=195
Iversen, V and P S Raghavendra (2006): What the
Signboard Hides: Food, Caste and Employability
in Small South Indian Eating Places, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 40(3): 311-41.
Kolappan, B (2012): AIADMK Activists Attack
Nakheeran Office, The Hindu, 18 January,
accessed on 16 April 2014, http://www.thehindu.

May 17, 2014

com/news/national/tamil-nadu/aiadmk-activistsattack-nakkheeran-office/article2782907.ece
Mannathukkaren, N (2014): The Echoing Silence of
Caste, The Hindu, 15 April, accessed on 17 April
2014, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/
the-echoing-silence-of-caste/article5911938.ece
Natrajan, B (2012): The Culturalization of Caste in
India (London: Routledge).
Pandian, M S S (1991): Chicken Biryani and the
Inconsequential Brahmin, Economic & Political Weekly, 26(35): 2043-44.
(2002): One Step Outside Modernity: Caste,
Identity Politics and Public Sphere, Economic
& Political Weekly, 17(18): 1735-41.

vol xlIX no 20

EPW

Economic & Political Weekly