Dirty food: racism and casteism in India

This article traces how food cultures in India reiterate social hierarches and caste logics of cleanliness and purity. Religious, intellectual and aesthetics battles about food preferences underline how the upper caste sensibilities justify and regulate everyday consumption and dietary practices. An integral part of Brahminical power is based on regulating and upholding dietary taboos grounded on caste ideology. Drawing from my ethnographic research on racism, migration, impunity in India over the last two decades, I examine key debates on racism and casteism, and illustrate how the rise of food-based discrimination against migrants from Northeast India is founded on an upper caste practice and logic of contamination, filth, and hygiene. I offer the concept of ganda (dirty) food to highlight how casteism and racism are informed by an upper caste reasoning of superiority, contamination, and privilege in India.

This article traces how food cultures in India reiterate social hierarches and caste logics of cleanliness and purity. Religious, intellectual and aesthetics battles about food preferences underline how the upper caste sensibilities justify and regulate everyday consumption and dietary practices. An integral part of Brahminical power is based on regulating and upholding dietary taboos grounded on caste ideology. Drawing from my ethnographic research on racism, migration, impunity in India over the last two decades, I examine key debates on racism and casteism, and illustrate how the rise of food-based discrimination against migrants from Northeast India is founded on an upper caste practice and logic of contamination, filth, and hygiene. I offer the concept of ganda (dirty) food to highlight how casteism and racism are informed by an upper caste reasoning of superiority, contamination, and privilege in India.

Introduction

This essay is based on my ethnographic work spanning over two decades in India, and my experiences as a Naga anthropologist from India. For migrants from Northeast India, racism and casteism marks their lives, like diseased bodies they are thrown out of accommodations, workplaces, and their lives reduced to filthy citizens. I was, like many tribal migrants, labelled as dirty and smelly. As a result, my interest to study food and consumption practices in India led me to explore themes of transgressions (Kikon 2013), militarization (Kikon 2015), and racism (Kikon and Karlsson 2019). My quest to explore the roots of the constant harassment and violence that migrants from Northeast India face led me to attend to encounters of Dalit experiences. This essay examines how food and consumption practices in India produce a distinctive social and political order founded on race and caste hierarchies. This, in turn, intimately shapes interpersonal relations and lays down moral values that actively reproduce caste hierarchies and racial prejudices.

Everyday racism for migrants from Northeast India in metropolitan cities across India is routine. Harassed and assaulted for their east Asian looks (Kamei 2017), reports and literature on racism in India are focused on experiences of migrants from Northeast India (Golmei 2017) and African countries (Prabhu 2017). Hate crimes, sexual assault, and stripping are reported regularly (Andre 2016). For Northeast migrants, most of their accounts about racism and casteism have been centred on food choices such as fermented beans, plants, fishes, and meat. While these actions can be categorized as social exchanges and differences about food choices, they signify a pattern of labelling founded on the caste system. In the last decade, food-based discrimination experienced by migrants from Northeast India has been addressed in different forums and debates about racism. Yet, there are challenges of discussing racism in India. The historian Yengkhom Jilangamba points out , “ … most Indians see racism as a phenomenon that exists in other countries … [and] see themselves as victims” (Yengkhom 2012). This means everyday experiences of routine racial profiling, verbal abuse, sexual assault, physical assault, and caste-based police violence India, according to Yengkhom is a “never ending nightmare” for many minorities and oppressed groups, yet they are not framed as incidents of racism and racialization.

Racism against migrants from Northeast India goes beyond the existing conversations about colourism/dark-skinned discrimination. The attacks on “black people who live or travel in India”1 have gained attention in the public sphere and it focused on the experiences of people from Africa living in India (Roy 2014), but these developments are often denied as racial violence by authorities in India as racial violence.2 On the one hand, there is an implicit assumption that racism is part of racial sociality in India. It seems to imply that the only way the majority of the population in India will relate to people from different races like migrants from Northeast India is to call them chinky (derogatory reference to small-eyed people). On the other hand, there is a culture of impunity because law-enforcing agencies like the police and government offices reproduce the existing caste- based discrimination and racism.

Attempts to obliterate racial discrimination institutionalize racism in India (Ngaihte 2014). It is common to cast aspersions on the character of the victims and not perpetrators, thereby normalizing racial violence. In addition, law-enforcing agencies often refuse to register cases against perpetrators and add immense pressure on victims of racism to withdraw the case. What constitutes everyday experiences of racism and caste-based discrimination for migrants from Northeast India? For Lawrence Liang and Golan Naulak calling someone chinky or any verbal harassment, snideness, and physical attacks are all acts of racism (Liang and Naulak 2014). Although there is a tendency to erase conversation about racism and play it down by attributing such practices as stemming from ignorance, the routine racial profiling of people from Northeast India to deprive them of housing or deny their access to shops and other services calls for our attention to explore the relationship between casteism and racism.

I draw upon food and eating practices to show how caste terms, such as filthy and dirty, references which mark Dalit communities as polluting bodies, are often applied to communities from Northeast India. Of course, the Dalit experience is distinct and cannot be compared with encounters between the Indian state and citizens from Northeast India. In the Northeast case, their food culture and dietary practice are categorized within a civilizational framework of savagery that unsettles the national sensory and social order. On the contrary, irrespective of the caste violence against Dalits, “ … their Indianness has never been questioned” (Ngaihte 2014, 15). In this sense, the unclean food from Northeast India is marked as contamination both at the olfactory and the visual register in the national imagination. In addition, food cultures also differ given the regional diversity in Dalit and tribal communities across the country. Yet, what is similar is the persistence of mainstream caste Indian society to label Dalit lives and food practices from Northeast India as ganda (dirty). Unlike the vegetarian (to denote the upper caste Hindus) and non-vegetarian distinctions (to denote other caste/religious groups) (Hansen 2001; Holwitt 2017), the racism against people from Northeast India is because of the “smelly” food they cook and eat. Such violent reactions stem from a conditioned caste knowledge about sensorial order and aesthetics.

The prejudiced treatment emanating from ignorance of the eclectic food cultures in Northeast India (Kikon 2013) and the lack of knowledge about the region often means racism is downplayed (McDuie-Ra 2012a). It seems to suggest that Indian racist culture is a result of citizens who are unaware about diversity, while reiterating caste sensibilities about pure and impure food cultures as the norm. Here, casteism and racism feed off each other. The disgust towards food that communities from Northeast India consume signifies how caste authority and privilege reproduces politics of purity and civic order. For instance, in 2007, the Delhi Police brought out resources such as booklets and awareness campaigns that highlighted how migrants’ cooking and eating smelly food were disturbing the social order and peace (Dholabhai 2007). Reinforced as dirty and lacking taste and aesthetics within caste logic, casteism and racism determines the relationship between everyday practices of food and consumption. Certain kinds of food like beef or fermented fish, considered as nourishment for body and healthy, are condemned as dirty and impure. For instance, landlords and neighbours find the food migrants from Northeast cook and eat stinky and revolting. These everyday racial and casteist regimes of labelling cooking and eating of migrants from Northeast India illuminate how caste and racism operates on a foundation of superiority. What is the logic of labelling food cultures as dirty and in some instances as unsuitable for human consumption? Power dynamics and intellectual reasoning that creates and perpetuates beliefs of superior and inferior food cultures is founded on caste, but often presented as a civic nuisance. Thus, the 2007 Delhi police campaign against fermented food eaten by migrants from Northeast India in New Delhi became an issue of law and order.

Food is an important optics to understand racism in India (Debbarma 2016). The upper caste food has become a norm even in canteens across institutes of higher learning like university dining spaces across the country. Writing about his experience as a graduate student from Northeast India in Hyderabad, Debbarma describes how food from home (Northeast India) was cooked and consumed, “hidden, away from public view” (Debbarma 2016, 27). This discrimination against people from Northeast India and distaste for their food cultures, among other things, is founded in India’s militarized relationship with its citizens from Northeast India. The racialized regime marks them as visible minorities (Baruah 2005) and citizens without an Indian face. Here, their cultures, including taste and food culture, also represent something that is foreign and a matter of concern (Wouters and Subba 2013).

Connecting the history of militarization, counter insurgency operations and impunity in Northeast India highlight how racial profiling and violence that surface in food-based discrimination accounts are normalized (Kikon 2019). As soldiers posted in Northeast India for counter insurgency operations return “home” to mainland India (Kikon 2019, 176), the profiling of visual regime is mapped onto cultural and social practices including food. Thus, the visual regime is racialized as a project to discipline and create desirable citizens, while reinforcing a politics of superiority founded on caste and race even in the dietary culture. By this logic, to bring the tribal communities from Northeast India within the caste Hindu fold would mean, first and foremost, transforming their food choices and eliminating beef, pork, and other unclean tribal food choices. Therefore, food cultures from Northeast India not only draw our attention to structures of caste violence and racial discrimination, but also importantly highlight how militarization has enabled a superior upper caste authoritarian power to reproduce inequality and impunity. Reiterating Anand Teltumbde, Dalit activist and thinker, this essay outlines how state violence (against Dalits) and armed conflict (in Northeast India) are fitted into a citizenship framework perpetuating racial discrimination against people from Northeast India (Teltumbde 2009). The following sections examine how everyday experiences of eating and cooking in contemporary India allow us to, “see caste and race” (Teltumbde 2009, 17).

First, I examine key debates equating caste and racial discrimination in India, drawing on Dalit experiences with marginalization and structural violence. Particularly focusing on the forms of pollution and filth connected with consumption, I show how notions of cleanliness are founded on caste logic. By connecting the experiences of untouchability and Dalit accounts about cooking and eating, I illustrate the cause of pollution and filth is inherently built in the caste system. This shapes the casteist-racist treatment accorded to food that migrants from Northeast India cook and eat. The harassment, bullying, and race violence experienced by migrants from Northeast India as communities eating unclean food represents caste logic. “Filthy” food practices, in that sense, are defined as public nuisance where pollution is rooted in a “caste culture” that privileges the upper caste practices and sensibilities (Teltumbde 2014, 11). This caste hierarchy, as I illustrate in this essay, normalizes discriminatory practices and inequalities.

Second, I examine how contamination founded on caste sensibilities are established as civic concerns. From housing associations, university canteens, to personal kitchens in neighbourhoods, regulating and cooking and eating is situated on a dominant caste principle. I propose the term ganda (dirty), a Hindi term that often categorizes food culture from Northeast India in urban India, to highlight how food perpetuates racism. Dwelling on Dalit lived experiences with food and consumption, this essay illustrates how Brahminical meanings of impurity and sacredness dictate what clean and unclean food is. Juxtaposing Brahminical dietary consciousness and Dalit political voices, I use ganda (dirty) food as a conceptual lens to illustrate the political and aesthetic debates on casteism and racism. This essay foregrounds eating cultures and food accounts of hunger, violence, shaming, and everyday harassment for eating smelly and filthy food in contemporary India. Ranging from meat, fish to fermented vegetables and roots, labelling food as ganda, I assert, originates from dominant caste practices and logic about contamination, filth, and hygiene.

Racism and casteism in India

While the race and caste debate in India is an old one, these positions have remained, at best, theoretical and intellectual exercises for scholars and government bodies. The opposition against Dalit organizations to include caste in the agenda at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and related Intolerance (WCAR) at Durban in South Africa in 2001 reveals the caste mentality of the Indian state (Teltumbde 2009). The basis of casteism and racism is discrimination that traces the descent of skin colour, caste categories, and social hierarchies. Calling out the racism and violence against people from Northeast India, Teltumbde asserts that racial discrimination is a violation of human rights, and cannot be labelled as anything else (Teltumbde 2009).

Yet, the debate about racism and casteism in India following the above-mentioned UN Conference was different. After Dalit rights groups from India proposed that caste violence should be recognized as a form of racism, the government of India and prominent Indian scholars rejected this comparison. Among other things, those, who critiqued the Dalit assertion to recognize caste violence as a form of racism, underlined that the concept of race was European and thus, a foreign concept. By that logic, while caste was native and could be traced to Indian society, the confusion, eminent Indian sociologist Béteille (2001) noted, was created by confused colonial anthropologists in British India. He concludes that these views are now, “regarded as worthless from the scientific point of view”. The classification of races in India such as Aryan, Dravidian, and Mongoloid were linguistic or regional categories and had nothing to do with race. While acknowledging many forms of discrimination “in the contemporary world”, describing all such actions, as racial discrimination, according to Béteille, was an irresponsible act. With a stern and uncompromising tone, he equated victims of racial discrimination as actors who were using race as a weapon to legitimize or call for violence. Béteille further noted:

We cannot throw out the concept of race by the front door when it is misused for asserting social superiority and bring it in again through the back door to misuse it in the cause of the oppressed. The metaphor of race is a dangerous weapon whether it is used for asserting white supremacy or for making demands on behalf of disadvantaged groups.

Béteille’s essay highlights how discrimination is a global phenomenon yet erases assertions that caste violence and racism often feel like one and the same. His essay is prescriptive and refuses to have a dialogue about the conditions of structural violence and impunity that Dalit right groups have documented over the decades. Equating caste and race discrimination stems from “scientifically nonsensical” claims (Béteille 2001). Critiquing Béteille’s position, sociologist Kannabiran (2001) argued that the 2001 caste and race debate in India erased the experiences of Dalit community. For Dalit assertions, Kannabiran notes, race and racial formations are central. One cannot map Dalit politics of belonging, resistance, and solidarity by rejecting their oppressive experiences. The Dalit political experience is ultimately founded on resisting “all forms of descent based on discrimination and exclusion” and is a transformative one (Kannabiran 2006, 57).

The 2001 debate on race in India was an intellectual project that erased the Dalit experiences of caste. Led by “Indian elites and the government” the experts and intellectuals proposed technical concepts and academic language from classical texts (Teltumbde 2009, 17). The display of superior knowledge, the upper caste intellectual articulation, and aesthetics of criticism from Indian intellectuals relegated Dalit people’s experiences of caste violence as academic themes and theoretical topics open for debate. The post-Durban race debates in India was a revelation. Disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and political science, blurred the lines and aligned with the bureaucracy and state power to reject the experiences and assertions of Dalit rights groups (see Yengde, this special issue). Far from decolonizing the disciplines, these debates exemplified how the academy and experts were part of a project that aided state power and administration.

As part of the caste-race debate in 2001, sociologist Dipankar Gupta called our attention to understand politics and identity in India and argued that caste identities are central to politics and public life in the country. Thus, it is, “a self-defeating project for any self-respecting activist” to equate caste and race (Gupta 2001). Since 2001, the important debates about racism in India have emerged that have shaped conversations about citizenship, militarization, migration, and justice (Baruah 2005; Thounaojam 2012; Kikon 2015; McDuie-Ra 2015; Debbarma 2016; Bora 2019; Haokip 2020; Rai 2021). Today, one witnesses race concepts like “racial Indianization” to signify how race is inherently embedded in the caste system (Das 2014a, 2014b).

Drawing out the similarities between Dalit experiences of casteism and racism against African Americans in the United States, Gidla (2018, 7) reflects:

In Indian villages and towns, everyone knows everyone else. Each caste has its own special role and its own place to live. The Brahmins (who perform priestly functions), the potters, the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the washer people, and so on – they each have their own separate place to live within the village. The untouchables, whose special role – whose hereditary duty – is to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all. They must live outside the boundaries of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils. There are thousands of other such restrictions and indignities that vary from place to place.

These routine acts of caste violence operate on grounds of caste impunity. Describing the rape culture, sexual violence and brutality that Dalit women have experienced at the hands of the dominant upper caste men, Geetha (2013) draws our attention to a culture of caste impunity in India. A culture where the upper caste perpetrators grant themselves the legal immunity, “as they attack and destroy dalits and adivasis” (Geetha 2013, 16). Such practices of caste impunity, according to V. Geetha, reinforce the caste/class divide, including gender relations. If one recognizes how the caste divide is perverse in everyday lives of citizens, it means that caste practices essentially constitute the foundation of Indian culture (Teltumbde 2014). Caste culture, in that sense, dictates all conversations and practices. This includes, as Teltumbde highlights, governance matters and national cleanliness drives, such as Swachh Bharat, the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s mission for clean India (see Gupta, this special issue). Calling out the caste ethos that shapes the national culture in India, Teltumbde describes how the meaning of a civic sense to maintain cleanliness is discriminatory and casteist. Such national cleanliness drives and civic concerns are established on the labour of Dalit people. Teltumbde asserts, “India cannot be swachh (clean) without the caste ethos being completely eradicated” (Teltumbde 2014, 12).

Practices of upper caste purity-pollution regulate labour, movement, and consumption practices in a caste-ridden society (Guru 2000). It is everyday activities, highlights Gopal Guru, like going to the market, buying food, and strolling on the street that reproduces marginalization and makes them visible in the material realm. Among other factors, the material forms of pollution and filth are marked on the position and labour that Dalit members perform. Guru notes:

They (Dalits) are scavengers, sweepers, ragpickers, coolies; they do other kinds of odd jobs which are not only considered to be unimportant, but a sense of wretchedness and filth based on the notion of purity-pollution is attached to them (Guru 2000, 113).

The equation of the Dalit body with filth, unclean, and pollution is pervasive in upper caste actions and minds. This casteist trope and practice racially mark people (bodies, labour, and skin) from Northeast India and their food cultures. Casteism and racism that people from Northeast India suffer opens out the contours and connections that Dalit voices have raised about identifying racism founded on the caste system. This is why terms such as filthy, shitty, and unclean are normalized by houseowners and neighbours to refer to food that migrants from Northeast India cook and eat in metropolitan cities across India (Kikon 2015).

Unlike Dalit communities in villages and urban cities who are recognized by their occupation (Guru 2000; Gidla 2018), racial regimes and physical categories mark the migrants from Northeast India. Their “unIndian looks” (Wouters and Subba 2013) serve to make them vulnerable targets of everyday discriminatory practices. Informed by caste and racial reasoning the upper caste are superior citizens, the caste-race violence is institutionalized. Racism and casteism in India, in that sense, draws on a divine order of superiority. Thus, the upper caste elites, who project themselves as working towards a casteless society, have the choice to overwrite their upper caste identities. These privileged professional identities expose their upper caste privileges. This is not the case for other social groups (Deshpande 2013).

Although Dalit assertions for equating caste discrimination with racism were rejected and labelled as “nonsensical” (Béteille 2001), the growing culture of racism and hate crime in India have been brutal. Racial profiling and raids carried out by members of legislative assembly,3 the police,4 and neighbourhood vigilante groups across metropolitan India have become routine (Chenoy 2017). Besides experiences of being harassed, assaulted, and raped, (Kharel 2014), migrants from Northeast India have been humiliated and discriminated for their food culture. In the following section, I examine dietary choices and link it to caste logic about contamination to highlight the pervasive ways racism and casteism is perpetuated every day across the country.

Ganda (dirty) food

Caste contamination is pervasive (Synnott 1991; Wurgaft 2006). It is perceived as porous and insidious, and an outstanding example of everyday caste culture is visible in food and consumption practices. Details of touch, pollution, and filth highlights how an upper caste account of nutrition and balanced diet is represented as the norm. As food and consumption are mapped onto principles of a caste order, cooking and eating of lower caste and communities outside the caste system are labelled as dirty. Given that food is a tangible material need for human societies, the infrastructure of casteism and racism in categorizing food cultures as clean and dirty plays a powerful role in establishing order (Appadurai 1981). Smell is central to many cooking activities across many metropolitan suburbs in India. Masala and fermented food items have strong smells. Yet, the conflicts over cooking and eating smelly food are pinned on minority groups like migrants from Northeast India. This means defining smelly food as dirty is dictated based on a dominant system of dietary order and taste. This order and restrictions on cooking and consumption in India, Appadurai (1981) notes, is founded on a moral cosmological meaning founded on the Hindu caste system.

Categorizing food from Northeast India as ganda (dirty) reinforces a majoritarian food culture in India. Instances of conflict, regarding dirty stinky food, are visible from the dining halls of hostels in esteemed educational centres, such as University of Hyderabad, University of Delhi, and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) across India (Debbarma 2016; Baruah 2020) all the way to exclusive housing associations strictly for vegetarians and the upper caste Hindus (Holwitt 2017). However, cooking and eating ganda (dirty) food are presented as a civic nuisance that disturbs the peace and aesthetics of the place. The consequences are, as Debbarma (2016) highlights, physically removing functions of cooking or eating smelly food to maintain the upper caste status quo and food culture.

Accounts of cooking and eating highlights caste humiliation and violence. This experience is a collective one, and shows how social hierarchies are maintained. Food, according to Guru (2019), plays an important role in producing cultural identities, particularly the assertions of superior cultures. Thus, recognizing Dalit and tribal food cultures have become central to activism on social justice and equality in India. Just like the assertions of tribal food cultures and histories from Northeast India, the Dalit struggle is also about, “personal and political dignity” (Rawat and Satyanarayana 2016, 2). For migrants from Northeast India, their fight against racism is about challenging the stereotypical figure of the primitive (Baruah 2005), a subject that needs to be moulded into an ideal citizen. Caste perceptions of food cultures from Northeast India reinforce the stereotype of the primitive, and inferior race and reinforce racism and casteism. Hence, everyday activities like cooking and eating unsettle the values of dominant caste societies and their sensibilities of hygiene and cleanliness.

An integral part of Brahmanical power is based on controlling and defining what clean and dirty food is. Writing about Dalit food culture in India, Deepak (2018) highlights how the upper caste households uphold such dietary taboos and taste as part of culture and tradition, and supress the caste origins of their dietary culture. Behind the façade and aesthetics of cuisine, cooking and eating in India is grounded in caste ideology (Dhillon 2014). Brahmanical food system is created as a civic and cultural norm that corresponds to the social, emotional, and spiritual realm of the country. Yet, this national dietary consciousness is exclusively for the well-being of the upper castes (Appadurai 1981). Therefore, food system contributes in producing the untouchable. Valmiki’s (2003) life reiterates this point. His work, Jhoothan (leftover) draws our attention to poverty and his experience of violence and humiliation from the upper caste members of the society. He shows us how food and consumption highlight collective hunger and humiliation. The torment and grief of Dalits forced to eat the leftovers of the upper caste Hindus is an integral part of caste history in India.

Contrary to the representation about Indian cuisine as rich and diverse, an upper caste culture dominates and dictates food practices. Increasingly, social exclusions grounded on caste dietary sensibilities influence and define civic sensibility, social relations, including accommodation choices in urban India. For instance, housing complexes exclusively for the upper caste owners, who are “pure” vegetarian, are not new (Holwitt 2017). Food is a deeply political topic. Critiquing the Bhartiya Janata Party’s election manifesto to ban beef in 1996, Illaiah (1996) argue that such food ban campaigns emerge from a Brahmanical Hindutva consciousness. Underlining the upper caste logic in regulating food practices, he explains how Dalits and Bahujan castes, besides Muslims and Christians, do not share this dietary ethos of Brahmins (Illaiah 1996). However, the 1996 BJP beef ban manifesto was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2005. Currently, 24 out of 29 states in India have laws that prohibit cow slaughter (Deshmukh 2019). By 2011, the sentence for infringing this ban was extended from six months to seven years’ imprisonment (Dutta 2015).

For Illaiah (1996) debates about homogenizing Hindu culture is, among other things, founded on homogenizing dietary practices. This includes banning beef. The upper caste members not only prohibit beef as food for themselves but also impose this prohibition on other castes and religious communities. While the realm of purity and sacredness is defined and practised by the upper caste groups, the responsibility to maintain purity is relegated to the lower caste groups like the Dalits. The upper caste Hindus seek the services5 of Dalits to dispose garbage and carcasses of cattle and humans (Deshmukh 2019), thereby normalizing categories like unclean and filthy, and assigning them to labour, food, and communities. Such practices reify the upper caste culture in India (Teltumbde 2014).

The emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene is a significant in relation to food culture from Northeast India. In recent years, the widespread concerns about clean and unclean meat have led to new penalties. In 2020, the dog meat ban in Nagaland, a tribal hill state in Northeast India, started a national debate about what constitutes clean and safe food. In this case, statutes like the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) Regulation 2011, the Indian Penal Code (1860), and the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals Act (1960) were invoked simultaneously to define edible food. It meant classifying some animals as filthy and/or ridden with diseases making them unfit for human consumption, as opposed to the ones that are clean and justified as food (Kamei 2020; Kikon 2020b; Sanghvi 2020; Wijunamai 2020). The dog meat ban ticked all the boxes for civic concerns. It was an unclean meat of an animal that the nation cared and loved. It was a win-win case. Another example as I noted earlier is the 2007 Delhi Police booklet: A textbook with racist guidelines for migrants from Northeast India living in metropolitan cities. Among other pieces of advice, the focus on cooking and eating “smelly food without creating ruckus in neighbourhood” stood out (Dholabhai 2007). Scholars working on everyday racism and experiences of Northeast migrants have highlighted the racist tone of this booklet (McDuie-Ra 2012b; Kikon 2015).

Racism, food, and experiences of Northeast migrants have also become part of mainstream cinema in India. So widespread is the connection of smelly food with people from Northeast India that the 2020 film Axone (Fermented soyabeans) captured the anxieties of migrants from the region living in Delhi. This film drew in conversations about food, racism, casteism, and citizenship (Sharma 2020; Deka 2020; Cornelious 2020; Rajpal 2020; Kikon 2020). Food from Northeast India is compared to the smell of septic tank and shit. The reference is widespread and its association with filth reflects a caste sensibility. This sense of superiority stands parallel to the attributes rendered to Dalit people and lives that are, in Teltumbde’s words, “destined to remain unclean” (2014, 12). Racism and casteism thrives in mundane spaces such as the classrooms, graduate hostels, shopping malls, and neighbourhoods. Writing about everyday racism in India’s capital New Delhi, Baruah (2020) describes how one has to learn the “risk/reward in reacting to them” to the violence and dehumanizing aspects of racism. Everyday racism and casteism in a graduate hostel at the University of Delhi, according to Baruah, is that moment, “when your mainlander seniors are loudly complaining about the ‘stinky food’ that your Manipuri and Naga seniors have cooked/brought to the dining hall” (Baruah 2020).

The origin of such repugnance and disgust emerges from the “social psychology of the Hindus” (Ambedkar 2016, 144). Pollution, Ambedkar notes, is so embedded in the Hindu caste system that the “Shudras” were prohibited from walking on the street where a Brahmin walked or entered a market. The Dalit body was a “pollution bearing presence” (Ambedkar 2016, 142). Among other things, Ambedkar underlines how food practices, such as cooking and eating, played an integral role in retaining the purity and distinction of the Hindu social organization (Ambedkar 2016). Therefore, routine food shaming in hostel dining rooms at Delhi University or across campuses of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) reveals a thriving caste culture.

Perception is the first step towards forming beliefs about food cultures. Guru and Sarukkai (2019) describes how the formation of perceptions informs and shapes our social world and sense of belongingness in society. By underlining the social as an “act of sensing” experiences around us, they caution us against the pervasiveness of universalizing and homogenizing what constitutes the social. For Guru and Sarukkai, there are multiple socials, and they are particular and specific to communities. An upper caste social world is exclusive. It keeps out Dalits, tribal communities, and those outside the caste system. This underlines how the corporeal body is not an individual but part of the collective social structure (Guru and Sarukkai 2019). Thus, the perceptions and reaction of disgust to stinky food is both a social reaction (of the upper caste group who controls and regulates order) and a social experience (of Dalits and tribal communities who are humiliated).

Dwelling on the perception about food practices, it is apparent how different life experiences, often contradictory, take place simultaneously. According to Rosalind Morris, it can be an action or a reaction which gives rise to a perception. These are feelings and may range from alienation, anger, repugnance, and humiliation. In this sense, Morris notes, “simultaneity always seems linked to moral or political” structures and practices in one’s life (Kentridge and Morris 2014, 15). The perception of food culture from Northeast India as ganda (dirty) shapes a politics of the present and the future simultaneously. First, there is a social conditioning about clean and dirty food that is elevated as knowledge. Second, there is an erasure of conversations about taste as consumers of dirty food are condemned as unclean. Under such circumstances, how do tribal and Dalit communities adopt cooking and eating practices to explore politics of belonging and justice?

It is a political act when one adopts food as a lens to engage with caste hierarches and norms. It is a moment when new sites of resistance emerge. Memories of growing up, family connections, gender relations, and everyday experiences are reframed as part of a larger social world. These are no longer individual accounts, but events that trace collective histories about how certain caste practices are allowed to thrive. Therefore, the routine food shaming, which appears as an individual reaction to certain food, is drawn from the proscriptions of a society that constantly maps food and taste of other societies on a caste register. Thus, the emphasis that food eaten by people from Northeast India is stinky invites us to focus on privileging the senses to perform (the visible actions of disgust) caste hierarchies. Such moments offer us an important insight into how caste attitudes of ganda (dirty) influence and legitimize racism and casteism.

There is a collective ambivalence among the mainstream upper caste communities when it comes to eclectic food practices. Uppuleti (2020) describes her memories about eating Usillu (termites) with her grandfather, and growing up in Telangana. She centres food and consumption to highlight her lived experiences as a member of a Dalit community in the state. Dalit cuisine and the erasure of Dalit food from the public is glaring. Uppuleti’s essay opens up a world of conviviality and the flavours integral in Dalit, Bahujan, and tribal worlds that is otherwise relegated as ganda (dirty) food within a caste framework. Uppuleti describes the roasted winged termites as her favourite monsoon snack. Comparing the texture to goat and beef fat, she recalls how her grandfather and father both relished roasted termites. The taste is not limited as an individual memory. She connects it as an important collective history of her family and the Madiga people, a leather tanning animal scavenging Dalit community. Uppuleti reminisces how roasted termites are a delicacy, yet remain invisible because taste and food are derived from an upper caste food culture in India (Uppuleti 2020).

Linking accounts of food and repugnance highlights how hierarches and norms about taste and disgust come about. Food across Northeast India is significantly diverse and seasonal; however, dominant food taboo culture erases a cosmology of eating cultures. Writing about the seasons and the ecotonal world along the foothills of Assam and Nagaland in Northeast India in 2009–2010, I experienced similar pollution and dietary restrictions that existed in the upper caste Hindu households and Muslim families. The taboo about eating beef and pork or maintaining a strict vegetarian diet was palpable. Yet, the everyday lives of the tribal communities living in the area contrasted with these dominant food taboos and transgressions. For instance, during the summer it was red ant eggs, monsoons were time to enjoy frog caught from the paddy fields, and by the winter it was time to relish the crabs and snails as streams and ponds dried up. The abundance of these food items often, “occupied a position of ambiguity in the existing dietary proscriptions” (Kikon 2013).

Where do aquatic insects/snails, bees, red ants, silkworms, woodworms, field rats, and edible insects stand in the food hierarchy? Dalit food culture, like many tribal cuisines from Northeast India, includes Panje (chicken feet), innards of animals and bee larvae. Food writer Deepak (2018) describes how some Dalits continue to stand up for their traditional food cultures, but many have also become vegetarian or given up eating beef in fear of being attacked by right-wing Hindu vigilantes known as gau rakshaks (protector of cows). Artist Rajyashri Goody’s project to document Dalit food culture encompasses the politics of resistance and calling out the violence of the caste system that dehumanizes Dalit people.6

Conflicts and battles over food practices highlight how concerns about dietary choices remain deeply political (Niyogi 2019). In 2012, violence erupted after Dalit students organized a beef festival in Hyderabad to celebrate their food culture and protest the domination of Brahmanical food culture (Rao 2012). In 2017, two constables from the Nagaland Armed Police were interrogated by the police after a complaint about “foul smell” from their kitchen.7 The caste reaction against dirty food is a constant anxiety.8 The boundary between vegetarians as the upper caste Hindus and non-vegetarians belonging to lower caste/Muslim/Christian communities is a simplistic distinction. Yet, recognizing vegetarianism as a practice associated with the upper caste practice is to recognize how smell is central in shaping, food-based exclusion and caste discrimination (Holwitt 2017). Vegetarianism is a dominant marker for the upper caste housing associations, which is masked in a language of taste and aesthetics (Bray 2005). Urban developers and real estate agents in Mumbai, who sell gated apartments to the vegetarian upper caste Hindu Marwari and Guajarati Jain communities, are aware that their clients, “would not tolerate the smell of non-vegetarian food in their building” (Holwitt 2017, 338). This feature is also visible in metropolitan cities like Chennai (Menon 2012). Even food odour is a threat to caste purity. This element of smell represents a defining aspect of racist and casteist practice. While there is silence about smell as an element that organizes and perpetuates racism and casteism, lived reality underlines how the repugnancy of dirty food is even inscribed and, “caste into the built environment” (Lee 2017, 473).

Migrants from Northeast India face difficulties in securing accommodation due to their food culture. They also experience racism and food-based discrimination on daily basis. The relation between food and community, viewed though the caste logic dirty food, becomes an entry point to challenge the upper caste logic and sensibilities. If delicacies such as silkworms, red ants, and winged termites are considered as dirty food, fermented food such as herbs, vegetables, and legumes are described as stinky. The upper caste anxiety of filthy bodies (Dalits) and dirty food (from Northeast India) is deployed to oppress marginalized communities and diverse food cultures. The secular and civic regulation to clean the nation rests on a caste philosophy to govern dirty and inferior citizens. It is Brahminical logic that defines the boundaries of order, civility, cleanliness, and hygiene.

Conclusion

Caste hierarchies inform taste, spatial order, and produce everyday racism. Tracing racism and casteism debates in India, I focused on the Brahmanical ideology of purity and filth. Informed by a caste sensibility, the essay examined the domination of the upper caste culture that pervades across dwellings, dietary cultures, and labour practices. Thus, the reference of what constitutes cleanliness and hygiene is manifested in everyday discrimination that migrants from Northeast India experience in metropolitan cities. Their experiences of humiliation and violence, as I elaborated in this essay, have led to social movements for equality and justice. It has also led to important conversations about food cultures, belongingness, and political representation. Similar to Dalit assertions about embracing collective political experiences as quest for resisting caste violence, migrants’ experiences from Northeast India and their experiences of discrimination have shaped collective understandings of racism and casteism.

I offered the concept of ganda (dirty) food to illustrate how everyday civic concerns are embedded in a caste logic of order and purity. Racism and casteism experienced by migrants from Northeast India, as I elaborated in this essay, highlights how caste purity perpetuates racism. Food prepared with ingredients from their homelands in Northeast India, such as fermented bamboo shoot, soybeans, herbs, and plants, is perceived as polluting the upper caste spaces. The racism that migrants from Northeast India experience due to their dietary choices offers us layered understandings about racism as part of the caste system in contemporary India. This essay highlights how everyday racism and casteism is established on caste impunity. To challenge the caste and superior race logic in India, as I have elaborated in this essay, also means interrogating the caste food hierarchy and meanings about purity. The representation of diversity is incomplete when a large section of its citizens is condemned and abused for their food culture. Who has the monopoly of banning food or defining what is edible? This essay shows that the power of dictating what citizens should eat rests on an upper caste logic about food cultures and sensory regimes. The silkworms, winged termites, river snails, and fermented bambooshoot on our plates calls us to understand, engage, and fight against everyday racism and casteism in contemporary India.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Refer to https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47042681.

2 In 2016, a female student from Tanzania was stripped and beaten up along with her friends in the Indian city of Bangalore. The police chief described the incident as, “a case of road rage and nothing to do with racism.” In contrast, the Tanzanian government noted that the “student was attacked because of her race and colour.” In 2017, a Sudanese student was beaten up by a mob in Noida, a suburb in Delhi, on allegations of practising cannibalism. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs refused to view the case as racist in nature, and an Indian politician from the Bhartiya Janata Party noted that Indians could not be racist because “we” were living with “the entire south … Tamil, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra”, to suggest that the Southern region of the country were inhabited by people of “darker complexions” (Prabhu 2017). Alluding to the racial features based on colour to mark the southern region of India is not new though. Often, this has been highlighted to amplify the diversity within the country and how its citizens react to, what Hardgrave refers to as “racial varieties” in India (Hardgrave 1965, 3).

3 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Somnath-Bharti-led-the-group-that-attacked-us-Ugandan-woman-says/articleshow/29189160.cms.

4 https://hrln.org/litigation/delhi-high-court-tells-delhi-police-to-stop-unnecessary-harassment-and-unwarranted-interrogations-in-wake-of-tibetan-protests-government-assures-immediate-release-of-all-arrested-detained-tibetans.

5 Calling for the political and economic emancipation of the “Untouchables” (Shudras), Ambedkar writes that as long as the caste system remains a fundamental foundation of Hindu civilisation, the Shudras will be relegated to render service and be subservient to the upper castes (Ambedkar 2016). This subservience and oppression is reinforced by the upper caste groups who justify how the caste system is based on a division of labour (Teltumbde 2014).

6 For Goody, Dalit literature contains vivid and complex description of food. It is often not about recipes, but “hunger, eating, cooking, joy and trauma” and encompass the everyday struggle and resistance in the caste dynamics of the country. See, http://www.rajyashrigoody.com/eat-with-great-delight/. From various literary descriptions, she has created a booklet of recipes. Through her works, she challenges the propagation of Indian food as largely vegetarian, with a few references to chicken and mutton. Yet, many Dalits also feel anxious of cooking and eating their traditional food or beef since these food are labelled as impure and unclean (Deepak 2018). This shame and humiliation is visible in Valmiki’s (2003) autobiography, Joothan and the anthology of Marathi Dalit Literature, Poisoned Bread (Dangle 1992). Also see, https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/rajyashri-goody-interview-eat-with-great-delight-dalit-caste-system.

7 https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/nagaland-police-constables-cat-meat-delhi-animal-board-4458761/.

8 In the politics of caste homogeneity and the country’s secular ideology (Illaiah 1996), there are meat distinctively marked as unclean and banned from consumption. Hindu caste superiority is maintained by observing a food hierarchy between vegetarian Brahmins and the other lower cases. Chigateri (2008) shows us how Dalits and Muslims have been lynched for allegedly slaughtering cows and trading beef. Chigateri further notes that the strongest critiques of caste food practices have come from Dalit communities. Calling it a form of injustice grounded in the political-economic societal structure, Chigateri (2008) argues that ban of beef consumption in India is a dominant-caste Hindu ideology.

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