Identities and cultures play an important role in one’s life and personal development. To be able to talk about it and express oneself openly, also forms a precondition of justice in contemporary times.
The crux of the injustice being committed against tribal people and communities consists of “failing to respect their distinctive ways of producing meaning and culture,” as Miller once said (1999).
As a person belonging to the Oraon community of Jharkhand (a scheduled tribe), time and again, I have faced the challenge of being unable to express my identity and culture in front of the mainstream.
This is mainly due to fear, shame, and the pressure of the larger political threat around meat eating as well as its implications. Belonging to a marginalised community comes with a cost. One always has to be cautious about what to reveal and what not to.
The Alienation Experienced By Adivasis Like Me
While writing this, I am reminded of the time in my life when I was first advised on what cultural aspects are expressible and acceptable. The mainstream culture becomes a parameter to judge which practices of a particular culture are morally and politically admissible.
Back in the year 2015, I was casually going through the newspaper—when I questioned the viability of the law restricting beef consumption and the factors determining it.
The ban on beef eating was intensified with the food politics of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). The Raghubar Das government in Jharkhand followed the larger Hindutva agenda by strictly enforcing the Jharkhand Bovine Animal Prohibition of Slaughter Act (2005)—of which I previously knew nothing about.
We were living in Dhanbad at the time. I raised my voice against the arbitrary law and asked my mother about the sheer attack on our identity and food eating habits.
I thundered: “Why should we stop eating beef just because they don’t like it?” It was the first time I was shushed off by her and cautioned against publicly describing what we eat and drink.
It took me years to get over this fear and express my Adivasi cuisine and culture openly. In fact, I am still in the process of coming out.
2015 was also the year 52-year-old Mohammed Akhlaq was lynched by an angry mob of villagers in Uttar Pradesh’s Dadri. They suspected that Akhlaq had beef in his fridge. It later turned out to be mutton. He was killed for nothing.
Adivasi Food Habits Are Different, So What?
In 2019, Adivasi activist and professor, Jeetrai Hansda was arrested for his 2017 Facebook post wherein he highlighted the beef eating tradition of his community.
Jharkhand has 27% tribal population. This includes tribes such as the Oraons, Mundas, Santhals, Ho etc. Each of these sizable communities have different eating habits and practices.
Tribal food habits include diverse meat preparations, but also vegetarian ones. Our food reflects a close relation between nature and the people living in that particular environment.
Some of the staples at my home are chicken, beef, pork, situa (clamshells) and ghungi (a kind of sea-food). We consume simple boiled saag (greens) and maad (rice water) mixed dried saags, too.
When I ended up moving to Delhi to pursue my higher education, I met students from different states. While they could share the food hallmarks of their home states, I trembled with confusion and hesitation as I couldn’t make sense of how to express myself, reminded of my mother’s cautious words.
I would just try my best to avoid getting into such conversations. I would think to myself:
“I wonder how they will react when they find out that the demta’s (red ant) eggs are not only edible, but also delicious? Do they know how meat can be dried and preserved to make it edible for future seasons?”
The Personal And Political Forces That Are At Play
The indifference and injustice meted out to Adivasi people is on two different levels: one is on the personal level, and the other is in terms of the larger political structures. It’s hard to make the distinction of which one leads to the other.
When our personal and cultural understandings are different from the mainstream’s, it makes people from marginalised communities like mine hide our practices. Mainly, we do this out of the shame or fear of facing public prejudice as well as violence.
The height of our fears is reached when the government changes laws for its own political agenda, instead of guaranteeing us our fundamental rights and protecting the distinct cultural aspects that Adivasi communities possess.
The nature of the states changes with that of the government and the way it wields power. Thus, after 2014, I have noticed that the Hindutva agenda of making India great (read: homogenous) again by eliminating all “differences” has been at its peak.
Food politics is closely associated, not with the concerns of animal rights and its impact on the ecology, but with the historical notions of caste purity and pollution.
Policing People’s Food Habits Reeks Of Caste Purity
The category of “non-vegetarian” is not a homogenous entity, because it is not just about accessibility and availability alone, but also cultural factors (caste and religion being chief among them) that determine which foods are consumed by a particular social group. (Sathyamala, 2018)
It’s rather interesting to probe why the beef ban has not been implemented pan-India, and has only been enforced with vigour in a limited number of states.
Beef eating is common among the tribal communities of the central and north-eastern states of India, people from the southern state of Kerala, Muslims everywhere, and more.
The crux of the matter is that the personal has become political. It has been the source of structural violence through legal or extra-legal means, leaving one community to constantly undergo a process of self-reformation to fit into the larger narrative of the nation.
My fight is a fight for cultural recognition endowed with mutual respect. For this is a must for justice to prevail in its truest sense!
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This is the first part of the three-part series on ‘asserting Adivasi identity through food, festivals, literature and culture‘ as a part of the Justicemakers’ Writer’s Training Program, run in partnership with Agami and Ashoka’s Law For All Initiative. The second and final parts can be found here and here.