Eating meat, particularly beef, has become an increasingly controversial subject in Indian public discourse since the Bharatiya Janata Party's victory in the 2014 general election. Contemporary Indian media might lead one to conclude that the nation is divided between supporters of Muslim, Christian, and Dalit pro-beef activists, on the one hand, and (occasionally violent) right-wing Hindu cow protectionists, on the other. However, this study by social anthropologist James Staples convincingly demonstrates that attitudes toward meat eating among nonactivist communities in southern India cannot be reduced to this simplistic binary. Through a detailed examination of the ways in which people negotiate the politics of eating meat in their everyday lives, Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian calls attention to the ambiguities, contradictions, and compromises that characterize Indian foodways as they evolve within specific historical and material contexts.
Staples (a vegetarian) has worked in this region for decades, and it shows in the close relationships he shares with his largely low-caste and lower-class informants. Readers are invited to accompany Staples as he dines at the home of a Christian schoolteacher, journeys to the site of an illicit cattle slaughter, and lunches with a Dalit graduate student. Pushing past the received political ideologies that typically frame discussions of beef eating, Staples argues that a wide range of factors shape his interlocutors’ dietary practices and the meanings they attribute to them, including changes in technology, ecological and health-related concerns, age, gender, aesthetics, price, marketing, and so on. Salient, also, is the sheer materiality of cows and buffaloes, curries and spices, tables and tableware through which meaning is conveyed. Once one begins to take such complexity into account, it becomes apparent that “understanding the decisions–if that is what they are–people make to eat or not eat meat cannot be deduced simply on the basis of their caste and community affiliation, nor can their attitudes toward it be read only in relation to changing political moods” (p. 14).
Six substantive chapters follow the introduction. Chapter 1 establishes a historical framework by briefly exploring representations of cow slaughter and beef eating in ancient, colonial, and post-1947 India. Chapter 2 then introduces the everyday foodways of coastal Andhra Pradesh and Hyderabad, observing the ambivalence with which Staples's informants greeted recent culinary developments, such as the near ubiquity of ready-to-use spice packets.
The remaining four chapters then turn to look more specifically at how people think, feel, and act in relation to bovine animals and their consumption. Chapters 3 and 4 offer fascinating accounts of the local domestic beef trade and the often highly nuanced stances that informants took vis-à-vis different kinds of meat, varieties of beef-based dishes, and the government regulation of cattle slaughter. The second part of the book's title is justified in chapter 5, which considers, among other things, how attitudes toward meat eating have been shaped in recent decades by the availability of the relatively inexpensive broiler chicken. Finally, chapter 6 examines how meat eating gets refracted not simply through the lens of caste but also class, noting the ways in which Staples’ hosts drew upon their awareness of upper-middle-class food practices when preparing and serving meals.
Among the insights to be gleaned from the book's wealth of data and fine-grained analysis it may suffice to highlight the following two, both of which blur the distinction between pro-beef activists and Hindu fundamentalists. First, it is apparent that many people who identify or are identified as nonvegetarian may eat meat only rarely, while those who identify as vegetarian may in fact eat meat on occasion, for instance, to signal their cosmopolitan sophistication. Second, while the operation of the local domestic beef trade depends in no small measure upon the cultivation of a willful ignorance on the part of those—including ostensibly vegetarian high-caste Hindus—who are involved in the sale and purchase of bovine animals, many Dalits, Christians, and Muslims who consume beef purchased at market also assert deep emotive ties to their own cattle. Clearly, then, current cow-protectionist rhetoric, which often invokes vegetarianism as a central element of “Indian culture,” reflects neither the extant historical record nor contemporary food practices (p. 165). As Staples puts it, “few people were ever simply meat eaters or not” (p. 14). Nevertheless, this rhetoric persists within the context of a backlash to globalizing and modernizing forces that is, obviously, by no means limited to India.
The book also contains a foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan, a glossary of key terms, and several photographs of cows, shops, and meals that will be familiar to anyone who has spent significant time in southern India. It will be of great interest to graduate students and scholars interested in the anthropology of food and representations of nonvegetarianism in India.
