Pooka Pillai writes: As recent events show, ideas about who belongs and who doesn’t often come down to food
During the Spanish Inquisition, it was often the telltale fragrance of food being cooked in olive oil that led the authorities to the houses of their victims. These were almost always the Conversos (Jewish converts to Catholicism) and Moriscos (Spanish Muslims) who had remained stubbornly stuck in their old dietary habits and therefore, according to the inquisitorial logic, also their heretical beliefs. Good Catholics, the so-called cristiano viejos (old Christians), cooked their food in lard. They ate pork, eels, cuttlefish and rabbit and, unlike the cristiano nuevos (Jews and Muslims who had recently converted) had no use for ingredients like saffron, coriander, cinnamon and almonds. And so, servants and other conveniently placed persons – butchers, grocers etc – were instructed to watch out for and report anyone using the forbidden ingredients, flouting Christian culinary convention by making unleavened bread or cooking dishes like long-stewed sheep’s head, and following “heretical” dietary restrictions, like the Jewish prohibition on mixing meat with dairy. In 15th-century Spain, even what you didn’t eat could get you burned at the stake.
New India isn’t close to touching the height of food-based othering that Old Spain did at the peak of the Inquisition. However, recent events have caused some anxiety. Take the attempt to force meat shops in Delhi to stay shut during the ongoing Navratri festival, coming on the heels of the call to boycott halal meat issued by Hindu outfits such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal in Karnataka and the characterisation of halal food as “economic jihad” by BJP national general secretary C T Ravi. There was also an attempt in November last year in several cities in Gujarat to restrict street vendors from selling meat and eggs.
In a letter directing the closure of meat shops during Navratri, the South MCD mayor Mukkesh Suryaan wrote, “People forgo even the use of onion and garlic, and the sight of meat being sold in open or near temples makes them uncomfortable.” A similar logic, premised on “hurt sentiments” was used against street vendors selling meat and eggs in Gujarat. Those outraged might bubble over with questions: What about onion and garlic sellers, then, why only meat shops? What about non-Hindus who are being deprived of meat and fish during a festival they don’t even observe? What about the livelihoods of butchers, meat retailers and even restaurants and ancillary service providers like delivery boys and transporters? What about the majority of Hindus who, because of their caste or other intersecting identities, either don’t observe Navratri or don’t adhere to the prescribed dietary restrictions?
But the unvarnished fact is that none of these questions matters because this latest imposition, like others in the past, is not beholden to any rationale acceptable to those who value such things as personal choice and individual rights. It is driven solely by the desire to place a singular, pan-Indian Hindu identity over all the others that exist in this country. That this identity has little basis in lived reality is well-documented, including in Isn’t This Plate Indian?, a pioneering work led by sociologist Sharmila Rege in documenting Dalit food practices in Maharashtra. It is in service of this larger identity that the various bans and restrictions, such as the beef bans in several states, are imposed. Indeed, they are the very scaffolding on which this idea of pan-Indianness is constructed.
To go back to the Inquisition, it should be noted that it was part of the larger project of defining the newly-unified Spain after the Reconquista was completed in the 15th century. An essential part of this project was identifying all those who rightfully belonged in this new kingdom, a task that couldn’t be accomplished without first identifying those who didn’t belong, that is, the enemy. The Moors had already been expelled and in the absence of external enemies, as the Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco pointed out in his essay ‘Inventing the Enemy’, an internal one is always invented. In 15th-century Spain, these internal enemies were the Conversos and the Moriscos. It is disturbing that internal enemies could be marked out in New India as well.