Changing Practices of Meat Consumption Among Hindus in a North Indian Town
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Changing Practices of Meat Consumption among Hindus in a North Indian Town Mohit Chaturvedi, July 2019 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. © Copyright by Mohit Chaturvedi 2019 All Rights Reserved This thesis is my original work. Word count: 85,951, exclusive of footnotes, tables, figures, maps, bibliographies and appendices. Mohit Chaturvedi ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has brought me in contact with a number of people whose help in completing it I would like to acknowledge here. At the Australian National University I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Simone Dennis, my supervisor and the chair of the advisory panel, for her guidance in writing this thesis and giving it a coherent structure. I am also grateful to Professor Christine Helliwell for guiding me in the right direction in the earlier part of my research. Professor Assa Doron, my research advisor, took time out of his busy schedule to give detailed and extremely helpful comments on the draft thesis. They are gratefully acknowledged. I thank Dr Keith Barney, also my research advisor, for stimulating conversations, and for detailed feedback on my research presentations and the direction of my work. I also take this opportunity to thank Dr Lan Tran, HDR (PhD) Administrator at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, for her help in negotiating the university bureaucracy. In Dehradun, I would like to thank the participants of this study. They went out of their way to accommodate the demands placed on them by my research and were generous with their time and hospitality. I would also like to thank the members of the local NGO who gave their time and insights to set the fieldwork on course. The staff of Doon Library and Research Centre were helpful with questions on the past, present, and likely future of Dehradun and with finding - sometimes against heavy odds - books I requested of them. In Dehradun also special thanks to BKJ, RT, and SPS for keeping me intellectually and emotionally buoyant. The thesis took rather longer than I had expected; since the completion of fieldwork some of the participants have attained their ‘union with God’. I hope it was a happy one. Finally I should like to express my gratitude to the two anonymous examiners who assessed the thesis. Their detailed critical and constructive feedback has helped improve this thesis. Capstone Editing provided copyediting and proofreading services, according to the guidelines laid out in the university-endorsed national ‘Guidelines for Editing Research Theses’. iii ABSTRACT The food practices of Hindus in north India have historically been viewed through the prisms of caste and region—high-caste Hindus are vegetarians and while the lowers castes eat meat vegetarianism remains desirable. In recent years these practices, especially a growing consumption of meat, have been explained by reference to increased economic prosperity and the emergence of a ‘modern’ middle class. Several recent surveys of food practices have unequivocally reported that the relationship between caste and meat consumption and avoidance is not as straightforward as generally believed and that some of the most prosperous parts of India have the highest proportions of vegetarian population. Drawing on fieldwork conducted among a group of Hindus in a north Indian town this research suggests that while caste and economic wellbeing remain important determinants of food practices, these practices, especially the practices of meat consumption and avoidance, are far too complex and nuanced to be adequately explained by these two factors alone. A detailed documentation of everyday food practices, in particular the avoidance and consumption of meat, suggests that while the everyday practice remains overwhelmingly vegetarian there is increased discretion in food choices and greater reflected consumption. Food has moved outside the household and into the public domain, the boundaries of ‘vegetarian’ and ‘non-vegetarian’ have been stretched, there is regular movement between the two categories, and today it is possible to consume meat while being a member of a vegetarian household. The changes in food practices—motivated by diverse considerations—are not in any one direction but in multiple directions including vegetarians taking to meat consumption and those who eat meat turning vegetarian. Building on the explanations of caste and economic wellbeing this thesis suggests that the food practices of north Indian Hindus can be better understood against the backdrop of socio-economic changes that have swept India post-1990 as Hindus create and re- create their social identities in a rapidly changing world. iv CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. iii Abstract .................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ......................................................................................................... vii List of Tables .......................................................................................................... vii Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Embedding and Contextualising My Research Question ............... 13 1.1 Hindu food as Vegetarian Food ...................................................................... 13 1.2 Changing Practices, Changing Country—An Alternative to Food Binaries .. 15 1.3 Impact of Broader Social Changes on ‘Everyday’ Practices.......................... 17 1.4 Food Practices—Performative and Discursive Spaces of Modernity ............ 30 1.5 Meat and Modernity—Qualitative and Symbolic Changes ........................... 36 1.6 The Developmental State and its Imaginings ................................................. 42 1.7 The Anthropology of Food ............................................................................. 45 1.8 Hindu Food Practices: Anything but Deterministic ....................................... 53 Chapter 2: Field Site Dehradun ............................................................................ 66 2.1 Dehradun—A Brief History ........................................................................... 67 2.2 Dehradun of Today ......................................................................................... 74 2.3 Data Collection—Field Site (Sushant Lok) and the Selection of Households 77 2.4 Sources of Data .............................................................................................. 91 Chapter 3: Everyday Food Practices in Sushant Lok ........................................ 95 3.1 Changes to the ‘Everyday’ ............................................................................. 96 3.2 Manoj’s World—Home and the NGO Office ................................................ 97 3.3 The Everyday Food Practice of Participant Households in Sushant Lok ..... 101 3.4 Structure and Variation ................................................................................ 103 3.5 Other Changes: Kitchens, the Green Revolution and Shopping .................. 109 3.6 Processed Food ............................................................................................. 117 3.7 Meat and Eggs .............................................................................................. 120 3.8 Everyday Food Practices and the Social World ........................................... 124 Chapter 4: Practices of Meat Consumption ...................................................... 128 4.1 Caste and Regional Affiliations ................................................................... 129 4.2 Meat at Home—Sunday Lunch and Masculine Spaces ............................... 130 4.3 Eating (Meat) Out in Urban India ................................................................ 147 4.4 Ideas of Masculinity—Eating Meat and Defending the Cow ...................... 154 4.5 Meat, Hospitality and Celebrations .............................................................. 164 Chapter 5: (Re-)creating Identities—Renunciation and Adoption ................. 175 5.1 Meat and the Identity Politics of Caste ........................................................ 175 5.2 Fieldwork—Changing Practices Observed within Households ................... 179 5.3 The Overlap of Religious and Secular Reasoning ........................................ 187 5.4 Meat and Individual Identity Formation ...................................................... 191 5.5 What is a Vegetarian Household? ................................................................ 192 5.6 The Process of Normalisation ...................................................................... 195 Chapter 6: Conclusion ......................................................................................... 202 6.1 My Research Question ................................................................................. 202 6.2 Data Collection and Limitations ................................................................... 203 v 6.3 Locating the Thesis in the Traditional Conceptualisation of Hindu Food Practices ......................................................................................................... 205 6.4 Key Findings ................................................................................................ 207 6.5 Observations