'Meat' the New India

In the debates around food, the Ramayana and vegetarianism, the distinction between Hindu and Hindutva is becoming increasingly clear

In the run-up to the Ram Mandir inauguration, one could observe a striking phenomenon – the ‘Hindutva’ mask coming away to reveal the ‘brahmanatva’ face, which has always been, to mix metaphors, the ‘brain’ behind the ‘muscle’. What do I mean? Read on. 

A Maharashtra politician, Jitendra Awhad, made bold to say that Rama of the Ramayana hunted and ate meat and therefore he was a ‘non-vegetarian’ and thus belonged to the ‘Bahujan’ (majority), and not the ‘elites’ (read Brahmins), and all hell broke loose! Those who felt offended raged that “Hindu sentiments” had been hurt. How dare he say that Rama ate meat! 

One ‘Mahant’ in Ayodhya was so enraged that he declared he would “kill him myself” if action wasn’t taken against Awhad by those in authority. He fumed that Awhad had “spoken ill of Rama”, that he had “denigrated Hindu religion”. Another priest chipped in, saying “Awhad does not know the scriptures” and “does not know of the life and deeds of Rama!” 

One wonders who knows and who doesn’t. And one wonders who these “pious” “vegetarian” people are who wish to kill a human being for merely saying something they do not agree with. The Hindu way to resolving a disagreement such as this is to sit down with the text of Valmiki Ramayana and for both sides to argue what the many references to hunting, yagna, meat, etc., in the epic mean. The one with the better tarka (reasoning, logic, argument, conjecture) wins the debate. The ‘Hindutva’ way is to foment anger and violence over the issue, in ignorance of the Hindu tradition of debate and by taking on the character of foreign religions in settling matters. 

Netflix was forced to take the film Annapoorani off the air, six weeks after it had been released and had been reigning at No 1 among movies on the OTT platform in India. The producers and artistes had to apologise for making the film. The story is of a daughter of a priest who defies the family’s orthodox ways and aspires to be a chef who makes meat dishes. In that film, too, it was a reference to Rama eating meat that got the goat of the “hurt sentiment” brigade. The official censor board had cleared the film but the unofficial mob censor declared war against it.  

Now, if these were merely instances of fanatic individuals acting against what they deemed to be “denigration of Hinduism”, “denigration of Rama”, etc., that would be one thing, and bad enough. But in an India in which Hindutva has crept into the ruler’s seat, it has policy implications as it dictates the law of the land and the mores of New India (or is it ‘Viksit Bharat’ now?). 

The UP government, for instance, banned the sale and consumption of meat in Ayodhya in the belief — or to cater to the belief of a section — that Rama was a pure vegetarian and that non-vegetarianism, not just eating beef but any kind of meat at all, is taboo in Hinduism.

 A food delivery app that had until recently demonstrated the courage and chutzpah to resist the imposition of social mores by the moral police had no choice but to fall in line — because now, the rule or directive had come from the government itself, not some mob. The sentiment of the mob has become the sentiment of the government!

Even in the case of Annapoorani, the I&B ministry stepped in to question how the Censor Board had cleared something that “hurt Hindu sentiments.”

The Prime Minister himself undertaking an 11-day fast and rituals to ‘purify’ himself to perform the consecration of Ram Lalla (in violation, according to the Shankaracharyas, of scripture and longstanding separation of the spiritual and the temporal in Hindu India, not to speak of the Constitution) was one of a piece with the Brahminical thinking reflected in these incidents. One, of course, admires his ability to do so, even if one must jokingly point out to him, “the Brahmins have totally got you, Modiji!”

In the past, governments have also sought to stop giving eggs to schoolchildren as part of the mid-day meal scheme — an acute instance of a government relying on the religious notions of a minority of people to deny a certain kind of food and nutrition to even those who have no problem in consuming it. That ban has, of course, been lifted for now but the issue is made into a controversy every now and then.   

Does eating meat make you un-Hindu? Is it “speaking ill of Rama” and “denigration of Hinduism” to say that Rama hunted and ate meat? If so, is eating meat itself to be considered a “denigration” of Hinduism? Does no Hindu eat meat? Does eating meat make you ‘impure’ and not eating meat make you ‘pure’? Should governments go by these notions of purity, adopt them itself and, worse, impose them on citizens? What should the 70% of Indians who consider themselves Hindus but eat meat, including beef, make of all these notions that have come to light in the run-up to the Ram Mandir inauguration? Are they to consider themselves Hindus any longer? Should they give up eating meat to remain Hindus? Should the government, the Hindutva hordes, and the legislatures dictate to them whether or not they can eat eggs and meat? 

(And once they can impose food choices on citizens, governments and mobs may also want to dictate to citizens — especially girls and women — what they can wear and what they cannot, whom they — especially girls and women — may or may not fall in love with and marry. Sounds like a blueprint for Viksit Bharat, eh?)       

Now, in the spirit of the Hindu way of enquiry and debate, let’s ask whether Rama, in Valmiki’s Ramayana, ate meat or not, in the first place. If he did, then this whole business of “hurt Hindu sentiments”, etc., is false and concocted. If he didn’t, then the next questions will arise that one can debate further – such as, if Rama didn’t eat meat, does it mean no Hindu should?

In light of this, would it be fair to impute, as the reactions to Awhad and the film Annapoorani did, that if you eat meat, then you are un-Hindu, impure and dirty; that if you eat meat or you say that Rama ate meat, you denigrate Hinduism? What should the 70% of Indians who consider themselves Hindus but eat meat make of these sentiments expressed by a few who claim to be the protectors of Hinduism? Don’t these imputations hurt the sentiments of this 70% of people – nearly a billion of them?  

To those who spoke of “hurt sentiments” when Awhad said Rama ate meat, I would like to ask: How come you didn’t feel hurt, shamed, defiled, and did not raise your voice when those who released from jail the 11 gang rapists of Bilkis Bano, and the murderers of her entire family, including her three-year-old child, justified their release by saying that they were “Sanskari Brahmins?!” 

A parting note

Raja Ramanna, one of the great scientists of this country in the last century and who made India a nuclear weapons power, wrote on the very first page of his autobiography of sorts (titled Years of Pilgrimage) that when Homi Bhabha packed him off on a ship to England to study nuclear physics, the first thing he — a Hebbar Iyengar from Melkote — learnt to do on the ship was to eat beef! Did he become a non-Brahmin, un-Hindu, or a traitor by that act?  

Many years ago, The Economist had a clever tagline: “Not all mind-expanding substances are illegal.” Sanskrit literature, the likes of Ramayana and Mahabharata, and even the holiest of our scriptures, are such “mind-expanding substances”. Read them, and you will ask yourself, “Why have we become such narrow-minded bigots despite being heirs to a vast and magnificent civilisation in which each of us could be whoever and however we wanted to be and yet belong to that great ocean of multiple currents of thought that it encompasses?”