No democracy without beef: Ambedkar, Identity and Nationhood

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

We would have felt proud if the Vice Chancellor has told that we were suspended because we organized Ambedkar Vardhanthi, Babri Masjid demolition day and Beef festival in the last week. Anyways, this is not the first. Assertion of Dalits has been met with these kind of cunning suppression all over India—It’s Christmas month, resurrection is more than likely in this season.

—Rohith Vemula, 18 December 2015, Facebook post

In April 2012, a beef-themed food festival was organized by the Dalit students of Osmania University in Hyderabad. This was a good two years before the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took control of the Indian parliament with Narendra Modi as prime minister with the brazenly stated religious agenda called Hindutva that is at odds with the Constitution, and seven years before it renewed its pincer-like hold on state and society in May 2019. The festival was part of B.R. Ambedkar’s 121st birth anniversary celebrations, in which Dalit, Shudra, Adivasi and Muslim students, teachers and other social and political activists participated. Beef biryani was served in plenty, and the ‘pure vegetarian’ nationalism propagated by the right-wing Brahmanic forces was collectively challenged. The public and celebratory consumption of beef was and is projected as anti-Indian by the right wing. A food item turned into an object of stigma and shame was being reclaimed as a symbol of pride, as a right. The purpose of the Osmania University beef festival was equally to declare that those opposed to beef were anti-human. About fifty members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the students’ wing of the BJP, stormed the venue and attacked the organizers and beef-eaters. The BJP was not a significant player in the southern state in 2012 and yet they could will their way to gratuitous violence. Five people were injured in the scuffle that ensued.

‘Beef stalls’, as they are called, have been successfully put up at the annual cultural festivals of all three major universities in Hyderabad, the city where I have lived and taught most of my professional life. In April 2011, the English and Foreign Languages University in the city saw fights break out over a beef festival in celebration of Ambedkar’s birth anniversary by the Dalit Adivasi Bahujan Minority Students’ Association (DABMSA) and the Telangana Students’ Association (TSA). This festival was also attacked by the ABVP. A news report said:

According to members of DABMSA and TSA, the ABVP activists barged into the campus kitchen, threw down the vessels in which the beef was cooked, and desecrated the food. The next day, beef supporters initiated a “food bandh” on campus, closing down the messes, canteens and stores and demanding inclusion of beef in the menu. They said that no food would be available on campus if their demands were not met (Thomas 2011).

The third major university in the city, the Central University of Hyderabad (HCU), gained global attention four years later, not for its achievements in the humanities or the sciences, but when Rohith Vemula, a PhD scholar in Science, Technology and Society Studies, committed suicide by hanging himself in January 2016. Over the past decade, HCU too had seen Dalit-Bahujan1 students come up with stalls that served beef biryani, known locally as Kalyani biryani. The Kalyani variation of the meat-and-rice dish, that Hyderabad is reputed for, has an antiquity of some three hundred years. It is known for its distinctive flavouring of cubes of beef with tomato, cumin and coriander. It is no coincidence that Rohith Vemula was part of the Ambedkar Students’ Association (ASA) that organized a beef festival. The date chosen was 6 December. It marks both Ambedkar’s death anniversary and the day the Babri Masjid (a sixteenth-century mosque in Faizabad district, Uttar Pradesh) was demolished by coordinated right-wing militia under the aegis of Hindutva forces in 1992.

The epigraph to this introductory essay makes it clear why Rohith Vemula was forced to his death by a state that had declared war on young Dalit men and women who had dared to organize ‘beef parties’ and question the whims of the state (see #Caste Is Not a Rumour: The Online Diary of Rohith Vemula [2017], a compilation of his key Facebook posts from 2008 to January 2016).

Rohith and four other Dalit students—Vijay Kumar P., Seshu Chemudugunta, Sunkanna Velpula, and Dontha Prashanth, all members of the Ambedkar Students’ Association—were suspended for allegedly assaulting an ABVP student leader on campus. Bandaru Dattatreya, a BJP member of parliament, and then Union Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani (whose portfolio included education) were proactively involved in suspending the ‘anti-national’ Dalit students. After being forced out of their hostel rooms and being denied access to libraries, the five Dalit students pitched a makeshift tent—a veliwada in Telugu—on campus, in the university shopping complex. It was made of life-size vinyl-printed posters of anti-caste thinkers, poets and activists from across the subcontinent—Buddha, Kabir, Gurram Jashuva, Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram, Savitribai Phule, Jotiba Phule, Ayyankali and Periyar.

On 17 January 2016, Vemula left behind a powerful suicide note entitled “My birth is my fatal accident”, indicting the university authorities and the world at large, and took his own life in a friend’s room. He hanged himself with the ASA banner. In the wake of protests and demands for justice for Rohith that spread across India and the international community of scholars and intellectuals, Kailash Vijayvargiya, a senior BJP leader in Delhi, had this to say: ‘One who protested against the execution of terrorists, one who said he feels like sin whenever he sees saffron colour, one who publicly announced to organise a beef party ... cannot be a weak youth, who would have committed suicide’ (Hindustan Times, 31 January 2016, emphasis added).

Rohith was part of a movement among students from diverse caste and minority backgrounds who across campuses in India have been conducting the kind of caste-aware and anti-caste politics that generations before them had not even thought of. Following the Ambedkar centenary celebrations and the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations (that offered quotas for members of the Backward Classes in education and jobs in the public sector to redress caste discrimination), both in the year 1990, the confidence of students belonging to Dalit, Adivasi and other Shudra communities rose.2 Around the same time, the emergence of Kanshi Ram and Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party empowered such politics. Dalit students have often formed alliances with other social, religious and sexual minorities, allowing for a spectrum of solidarities to emerge. Surely, there were left and radical left student movements in the country all along, but none of them ever gave thought to the beef question or to what was served on their plates in mess halls as ‘standard’ food over the decades. Since the late 1980s and 1990s, student bodies named after anti-caste icons such as Ambedkar, Periyar and Phule established themselves across campuses and questioned the Brahmanic status quo. The Ambedkar Students’ Association in HCU, for instance, was formed in 1993. Such Ambedkarite politics and its critique of what was seen as Brahmanical food culture (and often curricula) gave impetus to the beef festivals. The pressure created by such Dalit initiatives also led to Ambedkar being taken seriously as a thinker and philosopher to be taught in universities. Beef festivals, despite the skirmishes with the authorities that their existence entailed, came to be a fixture in Hyderabad since 2006. The scholar Sambaiah Gundimeda, an alumnus of HCU, offers us a history of ‘beef stalls’:

The Dalit Students Union, a few months before the Sukoon Festival in 2006, challenged this hegemony. They argued that the food in the stalls did not represent the cultural diversity of the university community, comprising students, teaching and non-teaching staff of the university, and was simply another manifestation of the hegemony of the upper castes and their culture. The university, as a public institution, it was further argued, should not allow its public space to be colonized by a particular culture. Instead, it should ensure that space is shared equally by every culture of the university community. In short, the cultural festival of the university should represent the many cultures of Indian society. As a step towards equality in representation, the Dalit Students Union demanded that it should be allowed to set up a beef stall in the Sukoon festival. It was argued that beef constitutes an important part of the food habits of dalits and is thus part and parcel of dalit culture. Besides, such food culture is equally shared by Muslims and a few others from caste Hindu cultural backgrounds. The administration, the executive body of the university, was ‘irritated’, to quote one of the Dalit Students Union delegates, by this request and instantly denied permission for the stall on the grounds that ‘consumption of beef…(in the campus) creates caste and communal tensions’ (Gundimeda 2009, 130).

In 2012, the same year as Osmania University’s first ever beef festival, Jawaharlal Nehru University tried to catch up and sought to play host to a historical first in the national capital: a beef and pork festival planned by a group called The New Materialists (who were careful to choose a non-sectarian name for themselves). I was to speak at the event called “Why Beef and Pork Food Festival in JNU?” held on the JNU campus on 17 August 2012.

A statement issued by The New Materialists made its argument forcefully:

When we asked many of the so-called comrades about the celebration of beef and pork festival, they said that celebrating beef and pork festival is a sentimental issue. They advised us to cook beef or pork in our rooms and they promised to join us. So cooking beef and pork in room is not sentimental but openly celebrating is problematic for them. Because the public sphere belongs only to the hegemonic culture that is brahminism. In India, the public space is not yet public i.e. not for Muslims, Buddhists, Christians or any other religion but only for Hinduism. The public space in India is private space for Hindu brahminical forces and thus nobody else can enter into this ‘public space’. All the beef shops in India in many of the cities including Hyderabad are pushed into interior areas. Now the democratic space in India is shrinking and JNU as an institution is not an exception to it (The New Materialists 2012).

However, a functionary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad approached the Delhi High Court, and it ruled that the festival should not be allowed, citing the Delhi Agricultural Cattle Preservation Act, 1994 (Chandran 2012a, 2012b). Often the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP and its many affiliates (known as the Sangh parivar or family) are blamed for the militant politicization of Hinduism, but few acknowledge or realize that a cow slaughter ban has been in place in Delhi since 1994, instated by a BJP government, which continued when the Congress party came to power and held power in the state for fifteen years. In many Congress-ruled states the ban has been in place since the 1950s. Although this law—like most laws in India—was not forcefully implemented, in 2017 the zealous Modi regime extended the ban to bulls and bullocks too. In effect, the BJP declared all beef-eaters to be ‘anti-nationals’. It comes as no surprise that communities that do not put their hand to the plough—Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya, of Jain and Hindu belief—sit in judgment about the cultural practices of labouring castes.

Most beef sellers in Delhi and other places where cow meat is proscribed are forced to claim that they are selling ‘buff’, or buffalo meat. Consumption of beef, or its proscription, does not seem to agitate or excite the secular-liberal elite either. The vociferous defenders of A.K. Ramanujan’s essay “Three hundred Ramayanas” (Ramanujan 1991) or Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (2010)—both of which got into trouble with the Hindu right and were banned—would never sign a we-love-beef petition. Consequently, when I participated in a television debate on an English language channel, the left-wing Brahmin historian from JNU, Mridula Mukherjee, best known for being the co-author with Bipan Chandra of the influential textbook India’s Struggle for Independence (2000), argued that the beef question was one of ‘nationalist sentiment’, and asked why anyone would organize such ‘anti-national’ festivals in university campuses. A beef festival today is a breach of peace.

These beef festivals, or even the attempts to organize them, have fostered a pan-Indian movement among Dalit/Bahujan/ Adivasi and other minoritized groups to assert their food rights, often at risk to life and limb. Poems and songs around beef were composed; pamphlets were issued. Literary texts by Dalits, Shudras and Adivasis were re-examined to look at how food culture, especially beef, figures in the lives of people.

Even after the mass conversion to Buddhism initiated by Ambedkar in 1956—in which he led half a million Dalits away from Hinduism and caste—beef has remained a staple in many Dalit households in Maharashtra. The 2009 Pune University Women Studies Centre project, Isn’t This Plate Indian: Dalit Histories and Memories of Food, anchored by the feminist scholar Sharmila Rege, bears testimony to this (see Rege et al. 2009). As part of their master’s course, students interviewed several Dalit men and women and documented their food practices and unique recipes. Daya Pawar’s autobiography Baluta (1978), translated from Marathi in 2015, describes the significance of chaanya—strips of smoked beef roasted until they turn crisp. Cow’s flesh is cut into long strips and hung on ropes and sundried for two to three days. It is then cut into smaller pieces, called chaanya, which can last a few months. Such practices are spread across the subcontinent with variations in the style of curing and preparation—what binds all is the love of meat. A range of tribals and lower Shudra communities eating fresh and dry beef is commonplace. Yet, the rest of the world has been made to believe that Brahmin–Bania-led Gandhian vegetarianism is standard Indian food culture.

A Marathi book of 2015, Shahu Patole’s Anna He Apoornabrahma (Food is an Incomplete Creation), documents rare meat recipes from the Dalit households of Maharashtra. The author in an interview says:

In old days, you could not afford to buy live animals and slaughter them. As a rule, these two communities (Mahars and Mangs in Marathwada) had to clear away carcasses of animals, and they would eat the flesh. If there was a festival, or if there was a sacrifice of an animal, that was the only time you got live or halal meat. And we ate what we had to eat, because that was what was available…Let’s take the subject of chaturmaas [a four-month holy period according to the Hindu calendar when fasts are observed]. Whom does this period place restrictions on? Those who do not engage in any strenuous physical activities. If a farmer or a labourer does nothing for four months, then they might also follow the ritual. So these traditions exist only for those people who do not earn their living through physical work. For those who do, even religion does not place any restrictions (Karkare 2016).

The new cultural assertion over beef has spawned powerful poetry and music as well. Here’s an excerpt from “Goddu Mamsam” (Beef) by Digumarthi Suresh Kumar in Telugu in Naren Bedide’s translation:

When its udders were squeezed and milked

You didn’t feel any pain at all

When it was stitched into a chappal you stamped underfoot and walked

You didn’t feel hurt at all

When it rang as a drum at your marriage and your funeral

You didn’t suffer any blows

When it sated my hunger, it became your goddess? (2011)

Another bardic poet from Tamil Nadu, N.D. Rajkumar, who performs his poems set to ragas, sounds as forceful in Anushiya Ramaswamy’s translation:

Here, lay the cow

Down in the middle of

The living room

Gut it, slice, and dice

O, Women, I have come

The God of the Forest

Give us this day

A feast of flesh (2010, 43)

Naliganti Sharath, a powerful poet and one of the principal organizers of the beef festival in Osmania University (who added Cobbler to his name after I added Shepherd), penned the ‘Beef Anthem’ that ends:

Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,

Jesus, Mohammed, Marx, Ambedkar,

Newton, Einstein, Stephen Hawking,

Martin Luther, Malcolm X,

Lincoln, Lenin, Stalin, Guevara

Bob Marley, Bob Dylan,

Mike Tyson, Serena Williams,

Paul Robeson, Michael Jackson,

All the legends, all beef-eaters

Beef is the secret of life (2012)

In Chennai, popular movie director Pa. Ranjith who has pioneered Dalit themes and protagonists in mainstream cinema (with blockbusters like Madras [2014], Kabali [2016], Kaala [2018]) started the unabashedly Ambedkarite Neelam Cultural Centre that provides a platform for young Dalit rappers. Under the banner of The Casteless Collective, their ‘Beef Song’ launched in 2018 has become very popular.

While the harming and lynching of Dalits and Muslims— for either consuming or possessing beef, for slaughtering a cow past its prime, for skinning its carcass, or for merely transporting cows—has made headlines in recent years, the Dalit-led efforts to assert beef-eating with pride have not made as much news. In 2017, the union government issued a notification to tighten the regulation of the cattle trade across the country. The new rules on transporting cattle made communities that have nurtured our cattle economy over centuries look like enemies of the cow. They were dubbed as ‘cow smugglers’ by the forces of Hindutva. Students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Madras, under the banner of the Ambedkar–Periyar Study Circle, protested this move with a beef festival in which several non-Dalit students took part. Even though beef is not proscribed in the state of Tamil Nadu, this again led to violence between student groups. As a consequence, December 2018 saw the segregation of vegetarian and non-vegetarian students in the hostel mess in IIT Madras.

Beef and its Indian trajectory

It is against this backdrop that we must today engage with what B.R. Ambedkar has said about the place of the cow and consumption of beef in his important but much-neglected 1948 work of historical investigation, The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchable? The sidelining of Ambedkar and particularly this work in academic and intellectual circles, both in India and around the world, is symptomatic of the fact that most visible academicians and intellectuals of India or of Indian origin tend to be Brahmins or from the Brahmanical classes who show no interest in beef and the politics surrounding it. While the vegetarian, cow-loving Gandhi of the trading Bania caste was packaged and projected as an anti-colonial icon, the equality-loving, caste-hating Ambedkar was treated like an Untouchable by the elite.

Published against a landscape of everyday violence and fear that has escalated since 2014, this annotated edition of selections from The Untouchables, with a specific focus on the cow and the implications of eating beef reflected in its new title, will go a long way in busting several myths around the consumption of beef and the rather modern love for the cow that the nonlabouring Hindu castes espouse. Communities that have never grazed cows have constructed theories of the cow’s sacredness. This elaborate annotative exercise also looks at how and why this subversive and radical work of scholarship was neglected by so-called Marxist and liberal scholars for decades, which has brought us to the ugly present.

Ambedkar’s argument, some of which is in agreement with the scholarship of Indologists before him, is as follows: around the fourth century of the Common Era, Brahmanism countered Buddhism’s democratic and egalitarian appeal by appropriating its message of ahimsa; the cow became the central figure in this appropriation. Whereas earlier cows were sacrificed because they were sacred, now the sacredness became an excuse for their protection. However, because there were people who lived outside the village, as Broken Men, and who had the duties of collecting cow carcasses and eating their meat, they became figures of scorn. Their degraded position, compounded by their poverty, forced them to consume leftover meat, resulting in the creation of a new form of discrimination: Untouchability.

According to Ambedkar, these ‘Broken Men’ were Buddhists, not as practising bhikkus, but as people whose local idols, yakshas, yakshis, had been incorporated into the Buddhist pantheon by travelling monks. Although a majority of castes ate meat, it was the compounded effect of the above factors, chief among which was the continued consumption of cow carcasses even when the rest of the culture had moved away from it, that resulted in their ostracism and the birth of a new category of oppression. This perhaps can explain why the different castes that eat pig, sheep, goat, chicken or fowl did not form solidarity with them.

Ambedkar’s work was published at a time when the debate around the cow had come to assume an exclusively Hindu–Muslim angle. However, Ambedkar sought to turn the focus firmly on the caste aspect and the pre-colonial, pre-Islamic past. He focused his study on old Brahmanical texts and the scholarship around them. His is an effort at paying the Brahmins back in their own coin and proving how their current-day arguments about the cow do not measure up to what their own texts say. However, he does not engage with the lived experiences of beef-eating among Dalits, Adivasis and Shudra communities. Nor does Ambedkar stop to examine the role of the buffalo in the Indian meat and dairy economy.

I shall not concern myself here with examining Ambedkar’s hypothesis since this task has been undertaken at some length in the annotations and the adjunct essay on the Broken Men Theory. Besides, the links between Untouchability and beef-eating are more than clear. With an eye on history and Ambedkar’s theory, my concern is with the unfolding present and how any proscription against beef by a modern, secular state strikes at the very heart of the health and livelihood of the poorest Indians while at the same time criminalizing large swathes of the population. The ban on consumption of beef and the curbs on trading in cattle today are nothing but the state practising a severe form of Untouchability with the collusion of the courts of law. Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis—or for that matter all who consume beef irrespective of identity—face a threat to life today. It is thus imperative to interrogate how this has come to be.

While working on The Untouchables, Ambedkar was also heading the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution; a document that, sadly, does not reflect his concerns on the question of the cow. In the years leading up to the so-called freedom struggle, both the Hindu right and influential figures like Gandhi harped on the cow’s special place in the Hindu order of things. Akshaya Mukul (2015) has shown in his recent work how the reformist Arya Samaj (founded in 1875 by Swami Dayanand Saraswati), the Hindu Mahasabha (founded in 1915) and the Gita Press (established in 1923) drummed up caste-Hindu hysteria around the cow, especially as a means to browbeat Muslims. Mukul also chronicles the efforts of the mercantile Marwaris in funding what came to be known as the gau-raksha (cow protection) movement. Gandhi, whose ashrams and movements were funded by wealthy Marwari businessmen, preferred the less militant term go-seva, service of the cow, and in 1941 he established the Goseva Sangh with help from his patron, the industrialist Jamnalal Bajaj. Although Gandhi did not push for a law proscribing the slaughter of the cow, he argued that Muslims should voluntarily give up eating the cow. He once wrote: ‘My religion teaches me that I should by personal conduct instill into the minds of those who might hold different views, the conviction that cow-killing is a sin and that, therefore, it ought to be abandoned’ (1925, 21). Gandhi believed vegetarianism to be morally and nutritionally superior and he strongly advocated that the Untouchable castes give up meat-eating altogether. Yet he never asked the Brahmins and Banias to graze cows or try their hand at leather-work or agriculture. (His gestural politics was limited to cleaning toilets and also asking the scavenging castes to take pride in their work without expecting anything in return.) Generations of social scientists were influenced by his thinking, but scholars from Dalit-Bahujan backgrounds are now forcefully challenging this logic. For instance, Christina Sathyamala (2018) critiqued the ‘structural violence of Hindu vegetarianism’:

Though Gandhi was averse to all flesh-eating, his upper-caste Hindu sensibility was particularly outraged at the consumption of beef, and it was the ‘untouchable’ caste groups which became the target for his reformist propaganda as they were the ones who openly consumed the flesh of cow. It was left to Ambedkar, born of this ‘untouchable’ caste group, to show how it was that the food hierarchy among the Hindus, specifically beef consumption, provided the material basis of the unjust caste system (Sathyamala 2018, 4).

While modernists like Nehru and Ambedkar were not for a religious ban on cow slaughter in the Constitution, they were under enormous pressure from the Hindu right in the wake of the Partition and the subsequent riots. Oddly enough, neither Nehru as prime minister nor Ambedkar intervened or said anything of significance on the cow protection debates in the Constituent Assembly.

From the time of debates in the Constituent Assembly to the televised shouting matches of today, it has been difficult to define and legalize the sacrality of the cow. The speeches by Syed Muhammad Sa’adulla and Frank Anthony, among others, pressing for clarity regarding the ‘cow question’ in the Constitution are cited and reproduced today. Gandhi, on his part, in 1947 tells a prayer gathering in Delhi of a ‘wave sweeping the country’, and that ‘he was being flooded with telegrams demanding that cow slaughter be stopped. He was urged to persuade [prime minister] Jawaharlal Nehru and [home minister] Sardar Patel to enact cow protection laws’ (De 2019, 255–6). During the Constituent Assembly debates, members representing the mercantile Marwari community interests joined hands with Brahmins—Seth Govind Das, Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava, Shibban Lal Saxena, Ram Sahai and Raghu Vira were most vocal in demanding a law to prevent the slaughter of the cow and wanted this enshrined as a ‘fundamental right’. This had earlier been dismissed by Ambedkar, in his capacity as chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution, stating that fundamental rights dealt only with human beings and not animals.

Thanks to Ambedkar, India did not become the only nation in the world to offer a ‘fundamental right’ to an animal. The concern for cows was however introduced into the Constitution in ambiguous language under the Directive Principles of State Policy. The provision under Article 48 entitled “Organisation of agriculture and animal husbandry” reads: ‘The State shall endeavour to organise agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and improving breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle.’ On his part, Ambedkar ensured that Article 48 eschews religious language. While as a fundamental right it would have been enforceable, its inclusion as a directive principle makes it a non-justiciable though enabling provision. That is, each state in the federally bound Union of India is free to legislate on this matter. This is why we may relatively easily procure beef in Kerala, Tamil Nadu or the North-eastern states but not in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh or Gujarat.

It is not that the ‘secularism’ of the Congress is something one can count on, for after 1950, the Congress party-led states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh were the first to enact laws banning cow-slaughter. Since the so-called anti-colonial period, the Hindu right has been comfortably accommodated within the Congress. The BJP of today merely panders to a right-wing, caste-loving Untouchable-hating Hindutva-influenced public that is inherent to Hinduism, a tendency encouraged by everyone from Congress Gandhians to communist and socialist Brahmins. For instance, in the 2018 assembly election, after the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh was ousted, the new Congress government emphasized its commitment to cow protection and cow shelters. On 30 January 2019, Gandhi’s death anniversary, the Congress chief minister of the state announced that one thousand gaushalas (cow shelters) will be set up in Madhya Pradesh in four months to accommodate nearly one lakh stray cows and progeny. By March of the same year, he had laid the foundation for thirty-six such gaushalas in Vidisha, making it clear that the party intended to fulfil its promise within the declared time period.

The violence of the non-violent

Let us now turn to some macabre yet defining moments in recent history. In what’s marketed as ‘vibrant’ Gujarat, after present-day prime minister Narendra Modi, who belongs to the Bania caste of Modh Ghanchi but claims Other Backward Class status, had ruled as chief minister for three terms (2001–2014), members of a ‘gauraksha samiti’—self-anointed cow-protection committees tacitly supported by the ruling BJP and schooled in the ideology of the RSS—entered the house of Balubhai Sarvaiya, a Dalit, in the village of Mota Samadhiyala on 11 July 2016. They assaulted seven persons: Sarvaiya, his wife Kuvarben, sons Vasram and Ramesh, two relatives Ashok and Bechar, and a neighbour, Devarshi Banu, who had come to their rescue. Their alleged crime was that they had slaughtered a cow and were skinning it; later investigations proved that the cow was already dead. Dalit-Untouchables are expected to dispose of the carcass of a dead cow anyway. The mob then picked up Ramesh, Vasram, Ashok and Bechar, stripped and tied them to the rear of a car and dragged them half-naked to the town Una, twenty-five kilometres away, where they were again flogged in front of a police station. The mob was so confident that the proceedings were recorded with phone cameras and posted on social media, ostensibly to inspire others. The video went viral but before it could inspire right-wing mobs to do likewise, it spread indignation among Dalits and protests erupted across India.

While the BJP and its many Hindutva affiliates are sometimes compelled to account for assaults on Dalits—given that Dalits are deemed to be Hindus, even if of a lesser order—similar assaults on Muslims are brazenly justified. In September 2015, 52-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq of Bisara village in Dadri, on the outskirts of Delhi, was brutally attacked and killed by a mob led by local BJP leaders. His 22-year-old son Danish was left severely injured. Rather than acting against the criminals, the police filed a First Information Report against the victims for the consumption of beef. Meat found in Akhlaq’s refrigerator was subjected to forensic tests and was claimed to be that of a cow. The RSS-run journal Panchajanya justified the lynching with a cover story “Vedas order killing of the sinner who kills a cow” (Panchajanya, 21 October 2015). Earlier, in 2014, in an address on state-owned national broadcaster Doordarshan on the eve of the Hindu festival Vijayadashami, the chief of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, said: ‘We feel it necessary to put a ban on meat exports, beef in particular and cow smuggling in the immediate future [cited in Saba Naqvi 2014].’

As of February 2019, India Spend, a policy research think-tank, reported that of the 123 instances of cow-related violence between 2010 and 2018, 98 per cent occurred after the BJP came to power in 2014. Muslims account for 56 per cent of the victims of such violence and for 78 per cent of those killed because of it (Saldanha 2019). That Dalits account for around 10 per cent of these victims should not detract us from the fact that many of the Muslims in India are converts from erstwhile oppressed castes, and the xenophobic hatred of the Hindutva forces against Muslims is compounded by their general hatred for the productive castes. Parallel to these developments, as constitutional historian Rohit De says: ‘The last decade has seen new laws regulating the slaughter of cows enacted in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Haryana, and Rajasthan. There have been writ petitions before the high courts of Delhi, Madras, and Bombay as well as the Supreme Court of India either asserting or challenging the bans on cow slaughter’ (2019, 249–50).

While a false image of India as a land of vegetarianism and nonviolence has been created across the globe, the truth is the opposite. Even government studies, such as the annual National Family Health Survey, have shown that up to 70 per cent of Indians eat meat—negatively labelled in India as ‘non-vegetarian’ food. Nutritionist and scholar Veena Shatrugna has consistently argued that the so-called standard Indian vegetarian fare of lentils-vegetable-rice-ghee-curd was made normative, starting in the 1960s, due to state-led policy efforts, often helmed by Brahmins and vegetarians. The former deputy director of the National Institute of Nutrition says:

The RDA (recommended dietary allowance) was calculated in laboratories by well-meaning, nationalist scientists and economists. Eminent people like C. Gopalan, V.M. Dandekar, Nilakanth Rath and M.S. Swaminathan. When you do nutrition in a lab, cost becomes a major factor. These were all upper class, upper caste—Brahmins, for the most part— who used their own preference for vegetarian diets to offer simple, scalable solutions to provide “adequate” calories to the vast numbers of the poor of the country. They did not understand the food culture of the poor people who ate a variety of meats from mutton to pork, rabbits, tortoises, beef, and birds, apart from a whole lot of fruits, berries, tubers and eggs (Jishnu 2015).

Combined with this was the so-called Green Revolution of the 1970s, where capitalism was imposed on a feudal agrarian system in the name of redressing the prevailing food crisis. This introduced machine-intensive monocultures of cash crops that came to decide the food on our plates in public institutions. This ‘pure vegetarian’ Gandhian brigade has no solution for the dire scarcity of food, caused in no small part by the beef and meat bans, in a country with a current population of over one billion. It is no exaggeration to claim that if everyone adopted vegetarianism, the nation would collapse. While Shatrugna speaks in her professional capacity, the Hindi writer and critic Anita Bharti, in an interview with Sharanya Deepak, speaks from personal experience:

“I don’t understand this word [essentials]. Rice, turmeric, jaggery—who thinks about, who can afford and eat these? My husband is from an upper-caste Kshatriya family, and I remember the first time I went to eat at his house,” she said. “Roti, sabzi, dal, dahi, achar (bread, vegetables, lentils, yoghurt, pickles) and salad all for one meal, whereas in my house, we ate roti, and one dish, that’s all we needed.” She added, “The upper-caste minimum is our maximum” (Bharti 2016).

Yet it is not the mere consumption of meat that leads to violence. The cow—not the black buffalo—is at the heart of the matter. And it is the notional association of beef-eating with Untouchability that lies at the root of the problem. From Gandhi to former president Rajendra Prasad (a Kayastha by caste) to Narendra Modi, including judges in the Supreme Court (see Gundimeda and Ashwin 2018), countering bigots with facts and reason does not get us far. If reason were to govern our lives, caste itself could have been wished away. Like Ambedkar says in Annihilation of Caste, caste accords with neither reason nor morality; it merely seeks hierarchy, one way or another:

How are you going to break up caste, if people are not free to consider whether it accords with reason? How are you going to break up caste, if people are not free to consider whether it accords with morality (2014 [1936], 303)?

It is a fact—clear as daylight to even Brahmin scholars before and after Ambedkar (from P.V. Kane 1941 to D.N. Jha 2001)—that the Vedic Brahmins did eat beef and slaughtered cows, and to them no Untouchability applied. Since caste can never be held accountable to morality or even notional equality, the modern association of beef-eating with Untouchability is as such irrational. And if eating beef is a marker of Untouchability, giving it up does not remove the taint either. This argument was made by Periyar way back in 1926 in a speech he delivered at the village Siravayal in Karaikudi district:

[…] they find fault with you [Paraiars], that foul smell comes from your body, that you do not take bath, do not wash clothes, that you eat beef, that you drink alcohol and preach that you must give up all these. […] it is not an honest act to say that your eating beef and drinking alcohol is the reason for your being ‘paraiar’. In fact, those who eat beef and drink alcohol are ruling the world today. Besides if you eat beef, the fault is not yours. As you have not been allowed to earn, eat well, walk in the streets, freely move about to go and work and earn accordingly, you are obliged to eat with your limited resources to have more to eat whatever can be had for that money. […] My conclusion is that this is a dishonest, irresponsible reason for keeping you in a degraded condition rather than a real cause. I am not objecting that beef and alcohol should be given up. But when some say that if you give up these your caste will have a higher status, then I object to that dishonest uttering. I will not ask you to give up beef or alcohol just to raise your caste to a high level. For that, there is no need for you to do either. […] giving up what is consumed by all has nothing to do with becoming a higher caste. So if any one says avoiding beef and alcohol is good to become a higher caste I say it is a lie (Periyar 2015).

Among the Scheduled Caste communities and Dalit individuals, there are many who do not eat beef and yet face Untouchability. The solution to this, as I have been arguing for some time now, is Dalitization—the philosophical and material opposite of what Brahmanical sociologists like M.N. Srinivas, Andre Beteille and their acolytes have described as Sanskritization (the desire for upward mobility by imitating a superior caste, with the Brahmins at the apex, despite their being a social and cultural minority).

Dalitization as democratization

Dalitization is not simply about eating beef but about changing one’s attitude to questions of dignity, food culture and labour. It is a move toward equality. Dalitization is about the democratisation of society by disregarding the false divisions of the sacred and the profane, of the high and the low. Dalitization is surely not about forcing anyone to eat beef or any meat; it is about challenging those who question the right of others (often Dalits and Muslims) to eat beef or any food of their choice; it is about challenging the false and unnatural consensus around vegetarianism imposed unjustly and violently. The act of serving and partaking of beef (or pork) in public in India is quite like the Ambedkar-led act of drawing water from the Chavadar Lake in Mahad in 1927. Echoing what Ambedkar had said at Mahad— ‘We are not going to the Chavadar Tank to merely drink its water. We are going to the Tank to assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality’—the Dalit and non-Dalit students behind beef festivals on campuses are saying that by serving and eating beef they are not merely quelling hunger, but asserting that they too are human beings, the food they love to eat is just as equally food. Each beef festival is a meeting to set up the norm of equality.

Ambedkar, in a speech at the Round Table Conference in 1932, speaks of the caste system being an ‘ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt’. The contempt, in essence, is for work that involves both the body and the mind, physical and intellectual labour. Consequently, graded hierarchy leaves those who deal with the disposal of dead cattle and their skinning and tanning as the lowliest of castes. Meanwhile, so-called upper castes claim greatness for themselves for what is ostensibly the thoughtless repetition of useless tasks: the Brahmin chants his slokas unconcerned by their meaninglessness; the Kshatriya kills enemy after enemy without stopping to think why; the Vaishya is preoccupied with counting the money he amasses. These castes are deemed more productive than the labourers who creatively work the land, who use their tools to fashion new objects, who solve problems and engineer the world so that its harshness can be survived.

Another of Ambedkar’s dictums explained in Annihilation of Caste (2014) is that caste as a system is not just ‘a division of labour but a division of labourers’. It therefore follows that while the disposal of a carcass became the occupation of one caste (Mahar), another caste (Chambhar) is expected to skin the dead animal, tan the hide, and make useable goods of it. Hierarchies within Untouchable castes become possible only because of their being scaffolded to a larger System of Castes (as Ambedkar was wont to say, using capitals for emphasis) sustained by Brahmanic ideology. The more closely a person works with organic matter—be it earth, fabric, wood or animal skin—the lower she is placed in the descending scale of contempt. With no irony, castes that are forced to do the work of cleaning—including attending to basic human needs such as shaving, washing clothes, and scavenging—are considered ritually impure. While exit from the matrix of caste does not come about by merely giving up a ‘traditional’ occupation, at the same time annihilation of caste is not possible without breaking the caste–occupation nexus.

While Ambedkar was right in asking all Untouchables to stop doing the pro bono ‘duty’ of disposing off dead cattle and eating carrion and surviving on rotting leftovers thrown at them from a distance—in Gujarat a young Dalit leader Jignesh Mewani issued a similar call in wake of Una in 2016—it is not as if desisting from such occupations rids one of the stigma of Untouchability. To stop eating beef is neither practical nor economically viable. Indeed, there’s a big difference between eating beef out of choice and being forced to eat it out of lack of choice like Untouchables have done over centuries. Their traditional duty—projected often as right—as part of the caste order, was to dispose of carcasses and in the process claim every part of the dead cow (or buffalo). On the other hand, the upper-caste vegetarianism is not a food culture based on individual choice either; it is merely a habit enforced in childhood. Besides, no Dalit community ever forces anyone else to consume beef. Conventionally, those designated as Untouchable, impoverished and exploited as they are, did not get to eat a cow after having slaughtered it in its prime; as a rule they had the ‘right’ to a cow only after it had died of old age or disease. The meat is therefore often stringy, not juicy, and yet they made the most of it.

The meat of our fellow mammal is as much a metaphor of convenience today as Ambedkar diagnosed it to be in 1948. He argued that many Hindu ritualistic beliefs like Brahmanical idolatry, vegetarianism and devotion to the cow came into practice only as the stronghold of Brahmanism was threatened by the popularity of Buddhism, and thus what was ‘sacred’ needed to be constantly performed, uttered, and upheld—but always in ways that were oblique. As Ambedkar, following Durkheim, explains in The Untouchables:

The interdiction on contact rests upon the principle that the profane should never touch the sacred. Contact may be established in a variety of ways other than touch. A look is a means of contact. That is why the sight of sacred things is forbidden to the profane in certain cases. For instance, women are not allowed to see certain things which are regarded as sacred. The word (i.e., the breath which forms part of man and which spreads outside him) is another means of contact. That is why the profane is forbidden to address the sacred things or to utter them (p. 253–4 in this edition).

An interdiction cannot, however, stop people from eating what they will and must eat. Besides, if one of the theoretical premises of democracy is equality—and India’s claim is it is the most populous democracy on earth—then equality must begin with food and the right to eat what one likes, wants and needs. What one eats cannot and must not be legislated about, unless it involves partaking of endangered species (a pastime of the very rich) or eating one’s own species (an aberration). Yet one often hears stories of how many non-Dalits, Shudras and even higher castes happily tuck into beef across India—ostensibly for its taste—but would not admit to doing so in public. It is not as if the beef stalls of Hyderabad and other mainland Indian cities that I have been to are frequented exclusively by Dalits and Muslims. Others do queue up on the sly.

Just like Veena Shatrugna tells us of the consequences of Brahmin male domination in the field of sciences that decided on key, life-affecting factors like ‘recommended dietary allowance’ (that exclude eggs), it is again mostly the Brahmanical scholars who have dominated the social sciences and have made decisions on what is to be studied and how. Surely we have had several anthropologists and sociologists doing immersive studies by living with weavers, potters, various Adivasis, slum-dwellers and so on (often without partaking of regular food with them). But the life-worlds of these labouring communities are reflected neither in what’s taught in schools, colleges and universities nor in the food served in the mess halls—be it in the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi or Osmania University in Hyderabad. The well-funded liberal arts universities mushrooming across India (Ashoka, Jindal, Shiv Nadar, Azim Premji, FLAME), where the wards of the rich pay up to a million rupees a year to get into reservation-free ‘islands of excellence’, offer no room for debate on these issues in their curricula or mess halls.

There’s little doubt that the so-called secular-liberal intellectual in India, often a high caste person, is squeamish about beef. They may, if at all, eat it in the protected environs of a star hotel paying a heavy price, or when they travel abroad, but they do not countenance beef being served as part of one of the conferences or seminars organized in university premises.

Except in Kerala, where almost everyone save for some Brahmins eats beef, even the Indian left, which remains Brahmin-dominated, does not really push the beef question even in places like Chennai or Hyderabad where the sale of beef is not banned. In fact, in West Bengal, a communist stronghold for decades (where Muslims account for 27 per cent of the population and Scheduled Castes 23 per cent), a Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and former Kolkata mayor, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, was severely reprimanded by a cross-section of Left Front leaders for participating in a ‘beef-eating event’ in 2015 held after the murder of Akhlaq. The Hindu reported on 7 November 2015:

“During the meeting, CPI’s State Secretariat member Swapan Banerjee said that Mr. Bhattacharya should not have participated in the beef-eating event as it may create negative impression on a section of the society,” a senior Left Front leader told The Hindu. He also said the CPI leadership expressed its displeasure over the “media hype” created by the organiser’s [sic] of the event. “Mr. Banerjee wondered what Mr. Bhattacharya was trying to prove by taking part in that protest. He said that food habits are one’s personal matter. He could have eaten beef at home,” the Front leader added. According to Front insiders, senior Forward Bloc leader Hafiz Alam Sairani also criticized Mr. Bhattacharya’s actions. “Left Front chairman Biman Basu also agreed that it would have been better if Mr. Bhattacharya did not take part in the event,” sources said.

An incident from my days in the left-based civil liberties movements in Andhra Pradesh comes to mind. When I was part of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee, I suggested that they serve beef at their annual conference in 1995. This was unprecedented. The Brahmin leaders fell silent. The exclusion of beef had apparently happened almost naturally over the years. One fellow-Shudra member of the group, Burra Ramulu, said that he could arrange beef to be served at the Warangal conference, and he did. I recall most Brahmin delegates avoided the beef-eating except for the writer and lawyer K. Balagopal.

What is the way out? It is neither practical for whole swathes of a population to stop doing labour that enriches and sustains the lives of millions, nor would they be able to wholly Sankritise themselves and, over generations, turn into Brahmins. Ambedkar, in a speech in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948, was right in condemning the Indian village as a ‘sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism’. He even advocated that Dalits, who have no nostalgia for any mythic golden age, must try and migrate to cities, get an education and Westernise themselves to escape caste. Good, modern education in the English medium may be a way out of Sanskritization and Hinduisation but that, in most cases, is an unequal desire with vegetarian Brahmin and Bania children dominating this field.

Conversion to Buddhism, Ambedkar had hoped, would offer the ultimate exit from caste. But we have seen over the decades that thronging to the cities does not quite end the workings of caste nor does conversion since Dalit Christians and ‘Pasmanda’ Muslims (as low-caste Muslims are known in parts of North India) continue to face caste discrimination. Often in cities the low-end jobs are reserved for Dalits, poor Muslims and other poorer backward castes or Shudras, irrespective of whether they are Buddhists who have given up beef-eating or not.

Caste as a system survives by devising new ways of keeping people fenced in and fenced out. In this light, the call for Dalitization is not just rhetoric but a call for reason: it does not mean a mere reversal by embracing what Brahmanical thought denigrates, but it is about taking reasonable pride in items of food and forms of labour that would earn respect, status and wealth in any other society. We must learn to recognize that there’s more art in a well-made shoe, in a fried strip of salted beef, in an expertly wrought clay pot and in a sheaf of freshly harvested grain than in a single meaning-defying verse from the Rig Veda or of contemporary poets who in 2015 returned state-issued awards to protest the killings in the name of the cow and Hindutva. This is why in Telugu we often say to someone who is idling: pani-paata leda? Which means, don’t you have any work-and-song to go about? For the working castes, work and song go together; ethnologists and anthropologists have laboured enough in fields of their own making to prove this.

While in the Sanskritization thesis, the figure of the Brahmin is imagined as the norm, and the obscure, inaccessible and exclusionary Sanskrit language is projected as an aspirational ideal, for Dalitization, we must take the beef-eating labouring Untouchable figure as our new universal. If everyone who claims to be secular and enlightened in India adopts this approach and ceases to see beef as the food of only Dalits and Muslims, it will be a bigger blow to caste-fixated Hindutva than conversion to Buddhism or any religion can be. It also removes the onus from the Dalits and oppressed castes, who are often asked to adjust, to try and ‘fit in’, and puts it on the privileged castes—the ones who benefit from this system, the ones who need to desist from their casteist ways and the ones who actually should be asked to change their behaviour. This also means beef, as a source of rich protein, needs to be embraced by everyone. If vegetarianism has been forced down our throats for centuries, it is time we reclaimed beefarianism. It is time we let go of Brahmanism or the ideology of caste that has concocted a theory of starving the labouring castes while the Brahmins and Vaishyas stay away from the actual work of production and labour, espousing a spirituality that assumes an anti-life ethic.

The buffalo, from Harappa to now

If history is what we need to keep looking back at for validation, we may well turn to the Harappan era that begins at about 7000 BCE. Recent advances in archaeology, linguistics, genetics (Reich 2018) and history (Joseph 2018) have proven how the buffalo in India was both domesticated and consumed in the Harappan period. It has also emerged that the Harappans had little to do with those who came later and called themselves Aryan and spoke Sanskrit. The Harappans, themselves migrants from Zagros (western Iran), mingled and interacted with people whom historians are designating as the First Indians of pre-history, who in turn were Out-of-Africa migrants. Science and history now tell us in one voice that all of us who call India home—Dalit, Shudra, Brahmin, Tribal, Aryan and Dravidian, Ancestral North Indian or Ancestral South Indian, Hun, Turk, Austroasiatic and Mongol—came out of Africa. All of us ate many things to survive; our food cultures evolved both scientifically and organically over time. Beef has been very much an ‘Indian’ food since the beginnings of what we call civilization in the subcontinent.

It is also a fact that today buffaloes in India produce more milk than cows, and that their thicker milk contains not only more fat (7.5 per cent against 3.5 per cent in cows) but a higher percentage of Vitamin A (9 per cent for buffalo milk against 7 per cent for cow) and calcium (41 per cent against 27 per cent), among other positives. While cows account for 45 per cent of milk production in India, not all these cows are indigenous. Over half of this yield comes from cross-bred animals containing genetic material of ‘Western’ breeds such as Holstein Friesian, Jersey and Brown Swiss. Indigenous breeds, considered worship-worthy by the non-productive Brahmanic castes, while accounting for 45 per cent of India’s milch population, produce just about a fifth of its milk. A senior Indian journalist reporting on agriculture for over two decades has this to say:

For an indication of where farmers’ rational choices are leading to, one needn’t look beyond Gokul and Vrindavan— the holy sites of Lord Krishna’s childhood life centred around cows, milk, butter and gopis [young herding women Krishna was promiscuous with in mythic stories]. According to the 2007 Livestock Census, Mathura district, of which they are part, had a total cattle population of 141,326, whereas its buffalo numbers were five times higher, at 722,854 (Damodaran 2012)

So the so-called ‘cow belt’ (a term for the regions UP and Bihar, also called Aryavrata) has actually become a buffalo belt. A Ministry of Agriculture report of 2016 proffers this: ‘The percentage share of buffalo milk production estimate in total milk production estimate in Uttar Pradesh was 69.54 per cent during 2014–15’ (Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare 2016). Since keeping a cow and transporting or slaughtering it has been made impossible through legal means, the BJP and the Congress may competitively and unwittingly be ensuring that the farming communities soon give up on the native cows and take to only the hardy and unholy buffaloes.

Besides its contribution to the dairy economy, the buffalo enriches our lives even after its slaughter or death: by 2013, India emerged as the largest exporter of buffalo beef, known in the trade as carabeef, beating Australia and Brazil with 1.56 million tonnes. As of 2018, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), India has the largest cattle inventory in the world (34 per cent) and is followed by Brazil and China. The United States comes fourth. In the leather industry, too, the buffalo leads—of total leather exports from India, 40 per cent of buffalo and 30 per cent of goat rawhide skins are used for leather. Across India—which has 20 per cent of the world’s cattle and buffalo and 11 per cent of the world’s goat and sheep populations—the buffalo is a much-loved animal. Though not all Dalit- Bahujans can afford a buffalo, they graze it, love it, eat it, and are intimately familiar with its cultural and economic value.

It comes as no surprise that since the Harappan period several cultural practices have survived the imposition of the tyrannical caste system by the Aryan Brahmins for over two thousand five hundred years. Offering an overview across disciplines, Joseph writes that the items that twenty-first century Indians use which can be traced back to the Harappan era can make for an endless list: from precision-made burnt bricks made of uniform height to width to length ratio of 1:2:4, to seals depicting veneration for the peepul (bo) tree and seals where buffaloes are shown being both venerated and speared, seals with yogic-looking figures wearing a horned buffalo headdress, seals with the serpent and possibly the phallic symbol, to the ‘handi’ or cooking pot with a ridge to avoid direct heat on the hand, and more—all of these ‘have been derived not from the earliest Vedas, but from the pre-Aryan population’ (Joseph 2018, 144). The Harappan civilisation spread across one million square kilometres, a third of what constitutes India today, has left a deep impact on how we now live and on what we eat.

While the cow was made central to the Vedic worldview— as an object of both sacrifice and food of the Brahmins—the black buffalo was ignored. In fact, latter-day Hinduism turned the buffalo into a demonic asura character called Mahisha or Mahishasura (mahisha is the word for buffalo in Sanskrit). The goddess Durga murders the buffalo-headed demon Mahisha and assumes the name Mahishasura-mardini, the woman who kills the Mahisha. This ritual murder of a figure of Shudra-Untouchable-indigenous origin, shown often as a denier of caste laws, is one among many acts of murder in Brahmanic narratives. In several parts of South India, Mahishasura’s ritual killing is re-enacted, and Dalits are forced to do the slaughtering as archived by the Kannada Dalit writer Aravinda Malagatti in his autobiography Government Brahmana (1994, 2007). Such killings are celebrated by a large section of Hindus as festivals—such as the Durga puja and its many variants in the East and North of India. In 2011 and 2014, when Bahujan and Dalit groups sought to celebrate a Mahishasura festival in Delhi as a counter to high-caste celebrations of Durga puja, the police attempted to hunt down and arrest the organizers, including Pramod Ranjan, the managing editor of Forward Press (Round Table India 2014).

Consider this. ‘This animal [the buffalo] has not been given its due place in the livestock sector. Paradoxically, it is discriminated against merely on account of its dark colour. This is clear apartheid against buffalo in relation to its other cousins.’ Do not assume that I am citing from my own 2004 work, Buffalo Nationalism. This is from the FAO’s India report, published the same year as my book. The report further says: ‘The buffalo, if reared properly in hygienic environments, would provide food security and rural employment to the small and marginal farmer. This would be possible only if its by-products are exploited ingenuously for benefit of mankind. Buffalo produces good quality of milk and meat. Its meat is lean, low in cholesterol and has excellent blending quality for production of corn beef, hot dogs and sausages.’

One of the most useful animals in India has been shown no respect in the theory and practice of Hinduism; politicized Hindutva merely cashes in on this sentiment. In India, we find several books, old and new, on the cow but rarely one on the buffalo. That the buffalo is black is the simple and racist reason. It comes as no surprise that this animal does not find any protection under the BJP’s rule, though it shall continue to contribute to the economy. Neither Gandhi nor the Hindutva forces that assassinated Gandhi consider the slaughter of a buffalo (or a goat) as violence. This skewed idea of nonviolence, which sacralises the cow while demonising the buffalo, is both racist and casteist. Such hypocrisy—of projecting the ideology of caste onto animals that know nothing of caste—is unique to the Brahmanic mindset.

With the largest population of the world’s buffaloes and cows, India leads global milk production and is the third largest exporter of beef according to a 2017 joint report of the FAO and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The report says India was expected to maintain ‘its position as the third largest beef exporter, accounting for 16 per cent of global exports in 2026’ (OECD-FAO 2017). Why is so much beef exported and who are involved in this business? Reports from the US in 2015 said that beef has overtaken basmati rice as India’s largest agricultural food export in sheer value (Iyengar 2015). Who is benefiting from this huge export market for cow and buffalo beef from India? Certainly not the Muslims and Dalits who are accused of cow smuggling.

One of the largest slaughter houses and biggest beef exporter in India, Al Kabeer Exporters Pvt. Ltd., occupies 400 acres on the outskirts of Hyderabad. This major modernized establishment is jointly owned by Satish Saberwal, a high-caste Punjabi Khatri, along with Ghulamuddin Shaikh, his partner. Al Kabeer reported business worth Rs 6500 million in 2016. Another major Indian beef exporter, Al Noor Export, is headquartered in Delhi, and owned by a family of Suds, who again are non–beef-eating Punjabi Khatri by caste. Al Noor’s slaughter house is located in Sher Nagar village in Muzaffarnagar district of UP. The names of their companies are misleadingly Islamic since they cater largely to the Arab world’s needs. In fact, a business newspaper reported in 2007 that Al Kabeer is branded ‘Samurai’ in Japan, ‘Falcon Foods’ in the UK and ‘Tayebat Al Emarat’ in the UAE (Chamikutty 2007).

At the same time, according OECD’s 2017 data on meat consumption, India ranks among the lowest annual per capita consumers of beef and veal at 0.5 kg compared to Ethiopia’s 2.3 kg, Vietnam’s 9.3 kg and the United States’ 25.9 kg (OECD 2019). In India, 44 per cent of children are malnourished (that is, 48.2 million). Of these, 45 per cent have stunted growth and another 20 per cent are too thin. And beef is recognized as a source of rich protein and is way cheaper and healthier than the much-promoted broiler chicken, which many studies have revealed is high on steroids and antibiotics. In 2010, beef retailed in Hyderabad at Rs 80 a kilo; by 2014, the price shot up to Rs 140 and, after a Hindutva-driven state clamped down on beef, it retails now at Rs 180 or more. In Indian cities today, where vegetables like okra can cost up to Rs 120 a kilo, beef is a far more nourishing option, serving more heads.

One often encounters in India and across the world two ethical issues when it comes to eating meat—environmental concerns and the ethics of killing animals. Often, to counter Dalit and Shudra-led initiatives to reclaim meat and beef, we are told we must heed the compassion of the Buddha, who by most accounts ate a meal of pork even on his deathbed. Universally, human beings have evolved by eating all kinds of meat. Agriculture comes much later—the taste for burnt meat is almost a primal instinct. Yet it is a scientific fact that livestock accounts for about 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the FAO. Last year, it was reported that ruminants such as cattle, buffalo, sheep and goats produce nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and crucially methane through belching. But unlike in the West or even Latin American nations, in India most cattle are not factory farmed; poultry is. India’s dairy industry was pegged at Rs 5.5 trillion in 2015 and engages 73 million small and marginal dairy farmers. Renowned Indian environmentalist Sunita Narain has argued how environmentalism does not mean vegetarianism:

Indian farmers still practice cow-buffalo-goat economy that is of small scale. In fact, this economy has been sustainable for the fact that it is in the hands of small farm owners. Animals are their insurance policy; their ways of managing bad times, made worse today because of climate change-induced variables and extreme weather…the strident and often violent call for cow protection has led to the total breakdown of this economy of the poor. Cattle are now abandoned. They have become a menace, marauding fields and destroying crops. Remember Indian farmers do not fence their fields; they cannot afford it and actually this is good for soil and water conservation. Now this is not going to work (Narain 2019).

Cows can live up to twenty-five to thirty years but they are considered productive only till they can be milked—from the age of three to ten or twelve at best. The so-called cow-worshipping Hindutva forces also dispose of aged cows since they are a mere drain on resources. The reason most foreigners in India are bemused by the many cows on the streets, ambling aimlessly on main thoroughfares in peak traffic and foraging from overflowing garbage dumps, is because most people abandon their non-productive cows and render them homeless. The BJP is not even sincere about saving these cows. The media regularly reports the death by starvation of large numbers of cows in cow shelters across North India, especially in Uttar Pradesh, ruled by its saffron-clad, Modi protégé chief minister, Yogi Adityanath. You rarely see stray buffaloes since people see nothing divine in this black animal and are happy to send it to a slaughter house after it has ceased to produce milk, thereby earning a good sum in the process.

Despite these indisputable facts, the highest courts of the land have taken a sentimental and religious view of the matter, impacting the lives and livelihoods of millions of persons involved in the cattle economy. Gundimeda and Ashwin (2018) analyse two important verdicts on cow slaughter in independent India—Mohammed Hanif Quareshi and others v. State of Bihar in 1958 and Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat and others v. State of Gujarat of 2005. The authors demonstrate how the Indian Supreme Court has legitimized majoritarian sentiments in the law by conceding valuable ground to cow worshippers. In both cases, Muslim butchers had moved the courts to challenge ‘the total ban on cow slaughter under three Fundamental Rights, respectively Article 14 (right to equality), 19(1)(g) (right to practice any profession and carry on any occupation) and 25 (right to freedom of religion). They argued that the total ban imposed by the three states (which were Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh) placed Article 48 as a Directive Principle of State Policy above the Fundamental Rights (Gundimeda and Ashwin 2018, 164). The subsequent miscarriages of justice are accounted for by the authors:

The State Legislature of Gujarat had introduced the Bombay Animal Preservation (Gujarat Amendment) Act of 1994, enlarging the prohibition of slaughtering bulls and bullocks below the age of 16 years to a total ban on slaughter of cows and their progeny. As the Gujarat Act infringed the long-held Supreme Court position, its constitutional validity was challenged before the Gujarat High Court, which promptly struck down the impugned legislation, arguing that the 1994 Act imposed an unreasonable restriction on Fundamental Rights and was ultra vires the Constitution. This was probably a strategic refusal, allowing the state of Gujarat to appeal to the Supreme Court by a Special Leave Petition. A Supreme Court Bench of seven judges, led by Chief Justice Lahoti, re-examined the issue and in the final verdict, six judges upheld the validity of the impugned amendment. The Court eschewed not just established principles of constitutional interpretation but overruled the earlier settled jurisprudence on the slaughter of bulls and bullocks in Hanif Quareshi case. Unmistakably, this judgment was pro-Hindutva, and against Dalits/OBC, Adivasis, Muslim and Christian minorities…. He [Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti] also rendered the Fundamental Rights subservient to the Directive Principles, an interpretation, as Jaising et al. (2016) argue, that was ‘both disingenuous and dangerous and precisely what the constitution-makers wanted to guard against’ (167).

The bench headed by then Chief Justice Lahoti made some astounding statements. Statements that are akin to the claims of a minister in the Modi government that Indians devised plastic surgery, test tube babies and the airplane more than five thousand years ago in some mythic past.

[T]he value of dung is much more than even the famous ‘Kohinoor’ diamond. An old bullock gives 5 tonnes of dung and 343 pounds of urine in a year which can help in the manufacture of 20 cartloads of composed manure. This would be sufficient for manure need of 4 acres of land for crop production. The right to life is a fundamental right and it can be basically protected only with proper food and feeding and cheap and nutritious food grains required for feeding can be grown with the help of dung. Thus the most fundamental thing to the fundamental right of living for the human being is bovine dung (Gundimeda and Ashwin 2018, 170).

Gundimeda and Ashwin tell us how the Chief Justice was merely (re)citing the claims made by right-wing, cow-worshipping pamphleteers. Consequently, the Indian state has been proactive about creating gau-shalas, shelters for abandoned and stray cows.

Contrast this with what the state has done to address the issue of mass malnutrition among the country’s children. The introduction of the midday meal scheme, inaugurated in the Madras Presidency in 1925 during the colonial period, was revived in Tamil Nadu by chief minister M.G. Ramachandran in 1982. By the 1990s, twelve states followed suit since India, as part of its commitment to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1990), had to address the issue. The midday meal programme was modelled on the 1946 US scheme, the National School Lunch Act. By 2001, the Supreme Court directed the universalisation of this programme. Now, the National Food Security Act of 2013 covers this scheme and seeks to redress the nutritional needs of over 120 million children. Eggs and milk were made part of the diet to address malnutrition. But after the Modi-led BJP government has come to power, only five of the nineteen states governed by the BJP or its allies provide eggs to children. In 2015, Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje of Rajasthan declared that there was no question of offering eggs in the midday meal scheme and in food distributed at anganwadi centres (there are 1.4 million such centres meant to provide rural child care). ‘We respect religious sentiments of the people. We will not distribute eggs or any other [edible] item that hurts anyone’s religious feelings,’ said Raje. If they can be so squeamish about eggs, the struggle to put beef on the table is going to be long and arduous.

The caste system’s inferiorizing of those who deal with cattle (dead or alive) and leatherwork has resulted not just in intolerance but also in the lack of evolution of diversity in red-meat products produced in India. According to FAO reports, hardly one per cent of the total meat produced in India is used for processing. Contrast what you may buy from an Indian retail store compared to Germany’s wide range of sausages (Bratwurst, Blutwurst, Bregenwurst, Liverwurst) and salamis (dry-cured, aged from chorizo to pepperoni). Consider the range of knives and precision instruments used for cutting meat in the Western world. In African nations, all manner of liver pâté (seasoned meat) is tinned and sold—from zebra to ostrich to wildebeest. Think of the range of cheeses in France. This comes from not just love for food but from respect for communities that deal with animals. In India, many of the inferiorized castes have wonderful ways of salting and preserving meat (and fish). When these communities are despised and rendered resourceless, how will their skills and techniques be valorized and commodified?

Oddly but not surprisingly, Italy, known for its Parmesan cheese, today employs more than 45,000 migrants from India across four thousand farms, to make cheese. Most of the migrants are from Punjab. They earn €15–20 an hour, depending on skill; some make €3,000 a month and enjoy a good standard of living. However, India, despite being the largest producer of milk in the world, has barely developed its cheese industry. One of the most important ingredients that led to the development of different varieties of cheese across the world is rennin—the inner lining of a calf’s stomach, which acts as the starting agent in the coagulation of milk. With the taboos on cow-slaughter and the scant respect for people who graze cattle, care for them, and also eat them, the development of such culinary culture was arrested. For the most part, Indian markets are flooded with processed cheeses that do not require rennin.

The allied leather industry is another large contributor to the economy. India is the world’s second largest producer of footwear and leather garments, and the industry employs over 2.5 million workers. But the mechanization of the industry hasn’t changed the caste nature of the work. A 2017 study, conducted by Roseanne Hoefe for the India Committee of The Netherlands, covering Uttar Pradesh (Agra in particular), West Bengal (Kolkata) and Tamil Nadu, which together account for ninety per cent of India’s leather production, found that Dalits make up eighty per cent of the workforce in both Agra and Tamil Nadu. In the 1960s, governmental policy focussed on promoting small-scale production centres. This contributed to creating a class of upper-caste owners with an underlying class of Muslim and Dalit workers. But since liberalization, a move has been made towards export-oriented large manufacturing companies, rendering large swathes of Dalits unemployed, undermining traditional leather work, and reducing the workforce into factory employees. In Agra, small-scale units continue to thrive, but most of them remain unrecorded, which makes the flouting of employment norms easy. The leather industry also generates large amounts of pollutants and effluents, the most direct victims of which are the workers themselves. Working in hazardous conditions, often without any protective gear, the workers are prone to fever, eye inflammation, skin diseases, lung cancer, body, joint and muscle pain, musculo-skeletal injuries, asthma and eczema. Furthermore, most of the workers are employed on contract basis, which means, in addition to the loss of job security, the workers also cannot claim redress from their employers in case of injuries. This casualization has also weakened hitherto strong trade unions, allowing the employers to pay the workers significantly below the minimum wage. Most recognized unions are controlled by managements. The low salaries in this industry can be tied to the caste nature of working with leather, which is often looked down upon (Hoefe 2017). An average leather worker makes about half the pay of a worker in the electronics or textile industries.

While societies across the world have seen wholesale discrimination against communities, no person of colour in America or Europe or even in apartheid South Africa has been ostracized or killed on the basis of the food they consume. The segregation has often been on colour lines and directed at the extraction of surplus through cheap or unpaid labour (slavery). Across the world, despite other markers of difference, food brings people together and helps establish cultural common ground—not so in India. Surely there are ideas of the sacred and the profane and of food taboos in both organized and tribalistic religions, but none of this leads to either Untouchability or lynching. If an elite engineering institute like IIT Madras believes in separate dining spaces for vegetarians and meat-eaters in 2018, the kind of hell rural India is can only be imagined.

Such violence and murderous action based on the consumption of food or the trading of cow ought to have led to an international scandal but this has not happened. The reason is that intellectuals and scholars from India, instead of taking the lead in standing up to such violence, have come to believe that food habits and practices such as Untouchability are a part of Hindu ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’. Cultural diversity and respecting ‘Hindu’ sentiments are offered as pathetic excuses for sidestepping the issue of a fundamental right to food of one’s choice. While the BJP-led violence against Muslims and Dalits saw the so-called liberal–secular intellectuals come up with the ‘Not in My Name’ campaign in 2017, and 2015 saw writers, poets and filmmakers outraged by Akhlaq’s murder (and the assassinations of intellectuals critical of the government) return state awards in order to shame the Modi government, hardly one of these intellectuals expressed support to or showed up at the beef festivals organized by Dalit and marginalized people in the recent past.

We do not know whether Ambedkar, a very private person, relished beef or not. Given his community’s stereotypical association with the meat, he likely stayed off it while in India. He may have eaten it during his days in the US and Europe. In contrast, Gandhi issued daily bulletins about what he ate and what he expected others to eat. His positions on the cow and Untouchables eating beef merely helped the Hindutva forces to use violence against eaters of beef and enforce vegetarianism on everyone.

The onus now, however, must be on non-Dalits taking the initiative in serving and eating beef, and thus secularizing it. This annotated edition offers enough evidence that Shudra communities did eat the flesh of the cow in history but gave it up after it became associated with Untouchability. In post-independence India, even Dalit leaders of Kanshi Ram’s stature stayed shy of such civilisational questions and merely focussed on wresting political power; the need to build social and political coalitions for electoral politics makes a politician wary of an initiative like a beef festival. While the BJP or the Congress can blatantly push for a cow-protection agenda, even Mayawati as chief minister cannot promote beef-eating as a counter. It does not work as realpolitik. Electoral politics will not be able to challenge spiritual fascism; the moral onus of this is on non-Dalits and civil society.

As a non-Dalit Shudra intellectual, I belong to a small minority of non-Dalits participating in the Dalit-led beef festivals. Today, people across castes who believe in the secularisation of food habits need to step up. In 2001, defying the Indian state, Dalits took the caste issue to the United Nations’ World Conference against Racism in Durban. Beef, Brahmins and Broken Men likewise seeks to take an important issue to a worldwide audience. It is both an invitation to engage with Ambedkar’s writings on the beef question and to deepen democracy in India.

There is no bigger spiritual experience than equality, to experience equality is to be truly alive, and beef gives life.