India: 'Bharatiya Sanskriti Rakshaks' - Dictating the culinary choices of students (Janaki Nair)

The Hindu, November 10, 2014

Dictating the culinary choices of students

by Janaki Nair

With a new government led by Narendra Modi in place, the ‘Bharatiya Sanskriti Rakshaks’ have been emboldened to demand separate vegetarian mess in institutions of higher education

A recent attempt to revive culinary segregation, reportedly among the well-fed denizens of institutions of technical learning, with the endorsement of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), is designed to control what students eat on campus. In response to the anguished plea purportedly by some parents of youngsters who join IITs, IIMs and medical schools across the country, the MHRD has thought fit to ask these august institutions to report as to what steps they are taking to safeguard Bharatiya sanskriti (Indian culture).

The immediate provocation is what the complainants — one being Shankarlal Satendra Kumar Jain, speaking on behalf of parents — call the propagation of Paschyatik sanskriti (western culture) through the sly introduction of eggs, meat and fish into the diets of the hard-working students who make it to these institutions (at least one complaint has come from Kota, Rajasthan, which hosts the academic centres that prepare students to crack the tough entrance exams to these institutions).

In a letter sent to several institutions of higher learning, the ‘Bharatiya Sanskriti Rakshak’ as the group describes itself, claims that previous complaints to the MHRD fell on deaf ears, and met with the response: “IITs, etc are institutions of learning, not for [saving] religion.” With the new government led by Narendra Modi in place, the ‘Bharatiya Sanskriti Rakshaks’ have been emboldened to demand separate vegetarian mess in these halls of learning.

‘Meatarian cuisines’ not western

We know too well that “meatarian cuisines” (a term coined by social activist and academic Kancha Ilaiah) are no western imposition. It calls for a high degree of wilful ignorance on the part of Indians to make such an assertion.

The Kodavas’ famed love for pork (and rum), even at weddings, may make the Rakshaks shudder, but most wedding guests are happy eating it. The Nairs and Chettiars; Mangaloreans and Kurubas; Nadars (Hindu and Christian) and Gowdas; even the Gowd Saraswats are no closet ‘meatarians’. Enough said.

But here is incontrovertible evidence from K.S. Singh’s painstaking and meticulous Peoples of India project: “In spite of the higher value attached to vegetarianism, only about 20 per cent of [Indian] communities are vegetarian. There are vegetarians who eat eggs, fertilised or non-fertilised. There are also vegetarians who abstain from onion and avoid garlic. Men are mostly non-vegetarian; women consume alcohol in a number of communities. Smoking is common, chewing of tobacco and the use of snuff is also very widespread, and the chewing of betel is common in several communities.” He concluded: “We are, therefore, largely a drinking, smoking and meat-eating people.”

It is the dangerous ignorance of what happens, and is supposed to happen, in universities that is of more interest here. For some time now, feminists, among others, have made efforts to point out that a university is not, and cannot, be a family. It is structured precisely to encourage critical thinking about naturalised spaces such as the family, about such ascribed categories such as caste and religion. There is much learning in universities and institutes of higher education but, equally important, there is much unlearning too — of habits, of attitudes, of stereotypes and of prejudices — as students of all castes, tribes, regions, languages and sexualities mingle, in the process learning tolerance for others.

Cultivating tolerance

Tolerance is not just a passive putting up with but an active acceptance of, and engagement with, difference. This is why legions of students, in different parts of the country accept the imposition of one regional cuisine as a culinary limitation of their mess cooks, rather than as a perpetration of violence on their food cultures. They realise that new institutional spaces fashion whole new ways of being. So many students set aside their taste for mustard sauce, fermented fish, coconut gravies, and goat head curry until they can go home to satisfy their taste buds.

It is striking that the call for the “separate” mess comes a full circle from a century ago, though emerging at a very different point. In the early twentieth century in the princely state of Mysore, for instance, caste-based hostels were established as a way of ensuring greater inclusion of those previously excluded from institutions of elementary and higher education.

Adi Karnatakas, Lingayats, Kurubas and Vokkaligas were able to enter schools and colleges in the big towns only because of the sectarian hostels in these places. The preservation of their distinctive food cultures was the premise on which families allowed attendance at school. (They still retained some injunctions against women’s education).

We have travelled a long way from those days: our democratic republic carved out a new space in the university system, through which new futures could be imagined. After a brief interregnum of communal dining, are we returning to a newly secularised caste order? And is it just a co-incidence that this call comes at a time when we may be justifiably proud of the greatest achievement of all: namely, that our students and faculty members are finally reflecting the complex mix of tribe, caste, region, religion, gender, and sexuality that constitutes our democratic republic?

There are clearly many reasons to urgently educate the petitioners, especially since their ignorance contradicts the other current move to ensure a requisite level of patriotic pride in the (largely imagined) ancient past while striving to achieve global rankings. Even Ayurveda, with which our present Minister for Health and Family Welfare Harsh Vardhan is so enamoured, is replete with ‘meatarian’ recipes: anthropologist Francis Zimmermann reminds us that Ayurveda sanctions the use of deceit, if necessary, to urge those who are hesitant to eat meat for therapeutic purposes.

Will institutions capitulate to the new demand? Will the petitioners next demand information about the food habits of the teachers, and staff and whether they are of a satvik or a tamasik quality? We don’t know yet, but if they do, it will be an aggressive assault on civilisational values, and not their protection.

(Janaki Nair is Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.)