Food is politics. Food is identity. Food is identity politics – especially when it comes to ‘taboo’ foods. Monidipa Mondal zooms in on the identity statements people intend to make when they break food taboos, the ones others choose to hear, and the interplay between the two.
When I was young, my mother was fond of reminding me: “Aap ruchi khana, par ruchi pehenna.” (meaning “eat to please yourself, dress to please others”). I have never pinned down the origin of the saying but even as a child, the first part of it always made me wonder. Not surprisingly, the saying was only brought up when she needed to emphasize the second part – not as a prelude to offering me whatever I wanted to eat but as an admonishment for refusing to dress appropriately for any occasion.
Of course, we live very far from an “aap ruchi khana” world, and nearly all of us have a personal story to relate. Everyday, we deny ourselves something we’d like to eat, for reasons as dire or trivial as the lack of immediate access, illness, fear of weight gain, or even the simple inability to cook. Why we don’t eat exactly what we want every time is the subject of a much larger cultural study, so I will write here about an important aspect- taboo eating , the things we’re not allowed to eat and what they make us…
Growing up in a Bengali middle-class household in Calcutta, I faced fewer taboos about eating than many communities. I was never forbidden to share a classmate’s lunch. My mother – being the first woman from our conservative family with a job and battling the guilt of neglecting her child –was happy that I ate at all.
It was not until my late teens, I discovered, that eating beef was ’wrong’, and I only discovered it when I saw it in a list of rebellious acts to perform if you wanted to be ‘cool’, along with smoking, drinking alcohol and staying out late. My friends and I were ‘cool’, so, of course we did all that – buying our beef rolls for five rupees from the shops at Park Circus, Kidderpore or the Anwar Shah Road crossing. The taste did not appeal to me. I was not a big fan of even the ‘allowed’ red meats. But ‘I eat beef ’ became a statement of identity, a way of separating yourself from the ones who shrank from it.
Even in my late twenties, as I have shed most of the identity statements we used to make as teenagers, it is the one that I hold on to.
Why is such an identity statement important? Many would argue that it’s not; that it is mere tokenism that does nothing to solve greater, more complex problems. It certainly does not make you equal to the more serious victims of prejudice. But such tokenism is still important precisely because it manages to elicit a response, and it cannot be called unimportant as long as it does so. It is not merely a ‘fashion statement’ – often no more than a statement, certainly, but one that goes deeper than just fashion. It is important because an act of eating, drinking or smoking certain things immediately interrupts the signals you send out, alters your reputation and politicises your existence even in the apparently educated, presumably non-judgmental environments. It is important because you cannot eat that thing without setting those negative reactions off.
As a woman and a smoker in India, I have repeatedly encountered situations in which I was judged more sexually available as soon as I pulled out my pack of cigarettes. Absolute strangers have interpreted it as the permission to come up and inquire about my ‘boyfriend status’. Absolute strangers have stopped considering me a ‘nice girl’ any more. My respect for tradition and any other conservative point of view I hold have been instantly dismissed. As long as I am making that statement even without the intention of making it, how can I call a schoolgirl ‘misguided’ for taking up smoking precisely for the intention of seeming more ‘cool’? She is not misguided. She did not create the statement. The statement is larger and more pervasive than anything one schoolgirl can affect. While she sends out a few signals by embracing it, she will also be sending out an opposite set of signals by NOT choosing to do so. And if we must dismiss such tokenism as frivolous and misguided, why should that only apply to the perception that ‘She’s not as cool as us because she does not smoke’ ? Or “she’s a ‘bad girl’ because she does?” Is it solely because it is unanimously accepted that smoking is an filthy habit? No? I did not think so either.
I would like to conclude with a conversation I recently had with a Tam-Brahm young lady on campus. She is a vegetarian but she generously suffers meat-eaters who are not Hindu, but a Hindu eating beef is absolutely beyond her comprehension.
“Why must you eat it?” she asks me.
I don’t even like beef and she knows it, but I’m too preoccupied to pursue this conversation, so I take the selfdeprecating shortcut and tell her, “To make a statement.”
The flippant admission makes my friend deeply unhappy. So the next question she asks is: “But you are a Brahmin?”
The reader may appreciate at this point that she is not quite the caste-upholding monster, at least not enough to automatically detect a person’s caste by their surname. She is no worse than any other urban middle-class girl who presumes from our largely similar education and tastes, that we come from the same kind of background and have the same politics.
“I’m not,” I inform her. “But no one in my family eats beef either, and they’re equally outraged by the fact that I do.”
But my friend has zoned out at that first sentence and is now happy to let me be. As long as I cannot tarnish the sacred Brahminical pinnacle of Hinduism in a foreign country, I can live with whatever depravity I indulge in.
Evidently, even my statement isn’t strong enough since I wasn’t even born in a caste valuable enough to lose. Aap ruchi khana, indeed.
