India: Non-Veg Is the Norm (Mukul Dube)

[An edited version of the below article appeared on scroll.in on 15 June 2015]

Non-Veg Is the Norm
by Mukul Dube

In India it is routine to hear “Nice party. They served non-veg” and “Are you veg or non-veg?” We see that the expression “non-veg” does duty both as noun and as adjective. In the former role it can stand for flesh, fish or fowl, the sole essential being that whatever it may be, it is not “veg”. In the U.K., incidentally, “veg” means not vegetarian but vegetable, as in the typical meal of “Steak, potatoes and two veg”. In the late 1970s it used to give my English girl friend much pleasure to hear people in India call themselves vegetables. “She did look like an aubergine, you know.”

In http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/the-food-habits-of-a- nation/article3089973.ece of 14 August 2006, Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar speak of the Hindu-CNN-IBN State of the Nation Survey. They say, “the findings [of the survey] show that only 31 per cent of Indians are vegetarians. The figure is 21 per cent for families (with all vegetarian members).” This is in the present. Historians have shown that the people of ancient India, starting with Brahmins, ate many kinds of meat including that of cattle. To call India a vegetarian country when over two thirds of Indians eat meat is imbecility. Yet vegetarianism is assumed to be the norm, encouraged or imposed by the ideologies of religion and caste.

The prefix “non-” is used to indicate negation or absence. Thus there are words like “non-combatant” and “nonsense”. It may also be used to mark a negative quality or a deviation from a norm, as in “non-attractive”. In a land of Hindus a “non-Hindu” is a deviant. In our country, because vegetarianism is wrongly assumed to be the norm, those who eat meat are called “non-vegetarians”. The expression often has a negative connotation: the eating of meat may be seen as a reprehensible act.

Vegetarianism is known all over the world: but it is considered a harmless eccentricity. Humans in nearly the entire world eat the flesh of mammals and birds and fishes. We are, as a species, omnivores, never mind all the ersatz Vedic humbug that flies around in Bharat.

It is only in our India that the expression “non-vegetarian” is found. Indians who go abroad get blank stares when they utter it. No one anywhere says “non-meat-eater” or “non-carnivore”, which would be a good deal more logical.

A meat eating family which lives in Ahmedabad in a housing society owned by Jains recently got forty letters threatening the rape of their daughter as punishment for their “criminal” food habits. It may happen that a sattvik pujari who lives in Birmingham will also face a threat. “You eat kaddu, Panditji -- you die.”