Shahu Patole. 2024. Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada. Anna He Apoorna Brahma. Translated by Bhushan Korgaonkar. Gurugram, Haryana: Harper Collins India, Paperback, 386 pages, ISBN-13: 978-9356295834
Reviewed by Krishnendu Ray (New York University)
This is Part II of a three-part review. For Part I go to: https://foodanthro.com/2024/08/26/review-essay-caste-and-cookbooks/
Caste is Both Ancient and Modern
One of the ways in which many distinguish caste from class and race, is that the former is classified as something eternal because it is old and religiously sanctioned. Nevertheless, a substantial body of scholarly research has shown that caste is in fact equally complicated and dynamic as class, which is closed at the top, but open at the bottom. Caste is comparable to race as an entrenched social hierarchy that is framed by a matrix of purity and pollution. Arjun Appadurai recently clarified its nature:
Caste crystallized over several millennia of Indian history, primarily as a cosmology which allowed pastoral and agricultural colonizers from the Northwest of the subcontinent to gradually colonize thousands of groups and communities who were previously not organized into castes. The new framework allowed many locally dominant groups to organize their local subordinates into a system which conflated rank, occupation and purity into a single status system…[T]he Indian caste system is geared to an infinity of caste ranks, and many Indian villages have 30 or more hierarchically ranked castes (jatis), all keenly aware of who is above them and who is below (Appadurai 2020).
Caste has an immensely varied and local characteristic in India (see Vaid 2014, Teltumbde 2018). Which is why and how “passing” works once the protagonists move from their village and town as Yashica Dutt, the author of Coming Out Dalit: A Memoir of Surviving India’s Caste System (2024), shows. As a Dalit she could pass as Brahmin because of her father’s government employment, altered last name, mobility, color (dusky but not dirty, she notes), class, and of course the capacity of several actors to stick to the script, along with silent allies, and suspicious antagonists. Dutt notes that “Dalits in India have been passing as upper-caste Hindus by adopting elaborate lifestyle changes — changing their last names, moving to cities, turning vegetarian, even embracing religion — to appear more like upper-caste Hindus” (in Thiagarajan 2024).
That is my second point so far – the malleability of caste practices. For instance, the levels of upper caste, even Brahmin vegetarianism, is quite low in Bengal and Odisha – my home states – where most eat fish and goat meat. Although average amounts of animal protein consumed are relatively low, compared to American and European standards, less than 10% of the regional population in West Bengal and Odisha pursue ritual vegetarianism. Nationally, rates of vegetarianism have been estimated to be a third or so. Some of the highest rates are in the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat – where it can reach up to 70%. That kind of ubiquity of vegetarianism developed over time and unevenly across the foodscape. In contrast, “According to the latest National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) figures, more than 70% of the beef-eating population is from the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), 21% is from other backward castesand only 7% belongs to the upper castes” (Masoodi 2016).
Caste is both ancient in design and modern in application. Although the British did not invent the classification system, they strengthened it (Bayly 1997). The administration of Indian subjects as a part of the Empire crystallized caste categories – in the military, on the railroads, in the labor market, and as voters in local elections — building on long-lasting local idioms of gustatory repulsion (see Dirks 2001, Tambs-Lyche 2018, Cherian 2023). Specifying that argument regionally, Divya Cherian shows how a new elite Hindu identity developed in the 18th century state of Marwar – one of the hotbeds of proselytizing vegetarianism today. This middle-to-upper-caste vegetarian identity was defined, “against the specter of the Untouchable,” and the Muslim (2023: 4). This is when a vegetarian diet came to be associated with the Hindus in this region, and meat-eating was associated with the people who could no longer be touched. New forms of money that accumulated as merchant capital from the 16th to the 18th century and moral reforms converged, in the social structure of the Marwar state. That went hand-in-hand with the production of a less inclusive, and more austere, Vaishnav-Jain public that acquired a virulent afterlife in the circulation of Marwari merchants across South Asia. There is strong co-relationship today between areas of high vegetarianism and high untouchability practices.
So, dietary restrictions linked to caste and religion are highly regionalized in India. As Bengali Kayasthas and Odia Giris we ate fish and meat, but never beef or buffalo, or at least not at home. That was as much a function of class as caste. My paternal grandmother became a vegetarian only after the passing of my grandfather. So, vegetarianism has a gendered and a life-cycle dimension to it too. Meat is also more immediately political in the narrow sense. Most of the fifty-or-so members of my generation of the Rays, who identify with Left-Liberal politics, have consumed beef or buffalo at some point, in the marketplace, but not at home. The Giris of my generation, on the other hand, have mostly abstained from it, partly as an expression of their body politics under conditions of Hindu Nationalism.
A recent collection of essays on caste underlines the internal logic of caste thinking. In a well-developed anthropological field, sometimes classified as ethnosociology in India, a group of scholars led by McKim Marriott (1989) argued that:
[T]he code for conduct of living persons is not regarded as transcendent over bodily substance, but as immanent within it (Marriott & Inden, 1977: 228). One’s social status is read either from the qualities of the coded substance in the actors or from their exchanges of substance (ibid.: 235). People, therefore, ‘seek to acquire the most appropriate substances for themselves through right eating, right marriage, and other right exchanges and actions.’ Care is needed to avoid the co-mingling of substances, which explains the elaborate rules of commensality (how food is prepared and by whom, who one receives food from and who one eats with) (Bhoi and Gorringe 2023: 5).
Gopal Guru (2009) brings up that discussion to contemporary times where he contends that in this caste Hindu view, food is a substance that determines the fate of the subject and taste is “an idea emanating from the substance.” The ontological status of uncooked and cooked food is different. “Cooked food is a derivative of food grains but is different from the latter in a fundamental way” (2009: 3). As we will see below that will restrict the capacity of cooked food to travel and would be a source of systems of reward and humiliation. In the next section I drill down into the content and form of the cookbook to identify its strengths and weaknesses.
References:
Appadurai, Arjun. 2020, September 12. “Comparing Race to Caste Is an Interesting Idea, But There Are Crucial Differences Between Both,” Wire India https://thewire.in/books/book-review-isabel-wilkerson-caste-racism-america
Bayly, Susan. 1997. “Caste and Race in Colonial Ethnography.” In P. Robb (Ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (pp. 165–218). Oxford University Press.
Bhoi, Dhaneswar and Hugo Gorringe. 2023. “Introduction,” Caste in Everyday Life: Experience and Affect in Indian Society. Springer International Publishing AG.
Cherian, Divya. 2023. Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of Mind. Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dutt, Yashika. 2020, September 17. “Feeling like an Outcast,” Foreign Policy https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/17/caste-book-india-dalit-outcast-wilkerson-review/
—. 2024. Coming Out Dalit: A Memoir of Surviving India’s Caste System. Boston: Beacon.
Guru, Gopal. 2009. Food as a Metaphor for Cultural Hierarchies. Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/research/Food%2Bas%2Ba%2BMetaphor%2Bfor%2BCultural%2BHierarchies%2B-%2BGopal%2BGuru%2B%28working%2Bpaper%29.pdf
Masoodi, Ashwaq. 2016, Sept 16. “A Story of Culinary Apartheid,” Mint https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/wJzDhGEE4csaX2BjhjHMsL/A-story-of-culinary-apartheid.html
Marriott, McKim. 1989. “Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 23(1), 1–39.
Marriott, McKim and Ronald Inden. 1977. “Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems,” in K. David (Ed.), The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia (pp. 227–238). Mouton.
Tambs-Lyche, Harald. 2018. Transaction and Hierarchy. Elements for a Theory of Caste. New York, Routledge.
Thiagarajan, Kamala. 2024, March 10. “Q & A: Yashica Dutt on her Lie as Part of an Oppressed Caste in ‘Coming Out As Dalit’” NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/03/10/1237079092/q-a-yashica-dutt-on-her-life-as-part-of-an-oppressed-caste-in-coming-out-as-dali
Vaid, Divya. 2014. “Caste in Contemporary India: Flexibility and Persistence,” Annual Review of Sociology, 40(1), 391–410, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2475573