The following are notes from a discussion on food cultures among dalits. The editorial team held this discussion with Gogu Shyamala, a well-known writer and a research fellow at Anveshi, and Dr. B. Venkat Rao who is an Assistant Professor at the English and Foreign Languages University. The discussion was marked by the pleasure of recollecting foods eaten during childhood and the laughter and enjoyment that comes while sharing this experience with friends. It was also marked by a sober attempt to understand and critique the discrimination and even violence that differences in food cultures produce and the overall politics that structures something so seemingly basic and simple as food.

Gogu Shyamala who is from the Telangana region began by saying that during her childhood the madigawada in her village was a world in itself. There was very little contact with the upper-castes. So, they did not feel discriminated for eating beef. Indeed, during that time meat meant beef, nothing else. It was called the pedda kura (big curry). The katika caste people who are butchers would bring beef in baskets and sell it in the madigawada. Mutton was offered at the durgah on special occasions and was often referred to as chinna kura (the little curry). Chicken was believed to be a green vegetable!

They ate beef once in every two-three days and that was considered to be the most satisfying meal. They believed that Madiga youth grew strong because they ate the big curry. In fact, curry was anything with some pieces of beef in it. They also made a soup from the bones.

Shyamala said that beef was usually from buffaloes. They never ate meat from dead animals and neither did they ever kill a milk-yielding cow for meat. Buffaloes, oxen and goats were usually sacrificed at village goddess temples and there used to be frequent quarrels over sharing the meat. Generally, it was the Madigas who used to cut and cook the meat on festive occasions. She recalled that when she was around 16—17 years old, some Madiga youth in her village refused to sacrifice the animals at the temple. They invoked the law against animal sacrifice and sought the help of the police to enforce this law. Usually the sacrifices had the tacit support of the police who stayed away from these events. Although they routinely abused the dalits for being beefeaters, the upper-castes were keen on continuing these rituals in which caste hierarchy was strictly observed and the Madigas were forced to kill the animals in sacrifice. The refusal of the Madiga youth was aimed at resisting this upper caste domination in the ritual space of the temple and over the food culture of the Madigas. So, while they enjoyed eating beef, they did not want to be forced to sacrifice the animals. For them it was an assertion of their self-respect.

Apart from beef, Shyamala said that on rare occasions her family ate the meat of rabbits. Her grandmother used to catch and cook crabs in the fields. The whole family used to eat the crabs but no one else knew how to cook them. Eating fish was also rare—it was only during the rainy season when the streams and wells were overflowing that fish was easily available.

However, the more commonly consumed food items were jonna rotte (maize roti) and dal soup. They also ate other cereals like korralu, taidalu and paddy. Though BPT seems to be the standard variety now, she recalled how they were familiar with several different types of paddy like krishna neelalu, gosha vasalu etc. They used nalla kusumalu and tella kusumalu which are the black and white varieties of safflower oil seeds for extracting cooking oil. They made polelu, a sweet made from wheat flour and jaggery on festival days. The day following the festivals was usually reserved for eating beef.

Venkat, who is from the village, Panchalavarama in Guntur district in Coastal Andhra, remarked that his experience was close to Shyamala’s and that beef was a very common food item in his community of Malas. Curry meant beef—they hardly ever made any curry without pieces of dried beef or dried fish. However, curiously, the slaughter for beef was always announced using code words. For instance, early in the morning, someone would go around their neighbourhood calling out “Morning Jasmines” or “Ramakoti Mithai” (sweet offered as part of worshipping Rama!).

Venkat remarked that it was only after entering school that he experienced the stigma attached to eating beef. The teachers often abused Mala children saying that they were idiots because of their habit of eating beef. They had a Brahmin teacher, who only ate milk and fruits and who urged his students to give up meat-eating in general and beef-eating in particular.  Many students actually stopped eating meat after joining school.

Shyamala added that in her case too it was only after joining the social welfare hostel that she realized that beef-eating was looked down upon. She also said that she really missed beef while she was in the hostel and for a long time she could not stomach the mutton served there.

Venkat mentioned that they never killed a she-buffalo for meat and he was not even aware that the cow was eaten. The beef they ate came mostly from male buffaloes. It was only after coming to Hyderabad did he realize that cow meat was eaten. Shyamala said that eating cow was a practice mainly in Nalgonda district. Venkat also added that the meat of dead animals was seldom eaten. However, he recalled one instance when the meat of a dead ox was distributed among his relatives.

Venkat further spoke about the wide variety of meats they used to eat during his childhood. They ate snails found in the fields which were very tasty. They also ate the meat of tortoise, wildcat, cranes, nippu kodi, (ostrich? pheasant?) and sometimes donkey meat usually sold by Koya tribesmen. Eating pork was also a common practice and they ate dry beef during the lean season. Besides all these, they ate rice, different lentils like green gram, red gram and black gram. They never bought vegetables but ate whatever was available in the fields—brinjal, gherkins, cluster beans, pumpkin, ladies finger, cucumber etc.

Venkat noted that during his research on conversion in coastal Andhra, he came across Church records from around the 1850s, which mentioned that pork was a very commonly consumed food item during that time. During the famines of 1851 and 1861, all classes and castes ate beef and ate the meat of dead animals too. However, in later periods, the injunction against beef seems to have come into vogue again. The Malas of the Godavari districts, for instance, don’t eat beef.

Sambaiah said he was from the Gundimeda village near Vijayawada also in coastal Andhra, and therefore shared a great deal of the food culture that Venkat discussed. He wanted to add that as children they used to collect the eggs of cranes and crows in the fields and make omelettes. Or they would boil them after coating them with cow dung. They also caught rats in the fields, which they would roast and eat with a bit of salt. They ate whatever they could get in the fields, whether it was groundnuts or lentils or even snails. Sam also mentioned that an uncle of his was very fond of fried uusulu, a type of insect generally found in the rainy season.

Shyamala said that they too ate whatever was locally and freely available. They ate roasted palm kernels, palm fruits, different kinds of berries, the juicy bark of the date trees and so on.

Venkat spoke of the Beef Festival that he and other students of the DBMSA (the Dalit Bahujan and Minority Student Association) had organized in 2004 when he was a research scholar at CIEFL (now EFL University). There was a lot of opposition and the cooks from the hostel mess refused to cook the beef. So, the students themselves cooked and served the beef. Venkat also spoke of their struggle against the hegemony of vegetarianism in the hostel menu and their efforts to make meat and eggs part of the regular menu in the hostel not “extras” to be paid for. He said the common practice was to serve eggs for Rs. 3, fish for Rs. 10 and chicken for Rs. 15 extra in addition to the common meal, which was vegetarian. They opposed this practice and made these items part of the menu with the option that vegetarians could take a fruit or sweet in lieu of these.

Tharakeshwar also recalled how he had eaten beef for the first time when he was in college. (His family did not eat beef.) However, later it became a regular part of his diet. When he was in hostel in the University of Hyderabad in the late nineties, it was a regular practice among his friends to either go out to eat beef or cook it in the hostel room. Needless to add, it was never served as part of the meals in the hostel mess.

–Conducted and recorded by  Uma Bhrugubanda

 

Sambaiah Gundimeda is a Research Fellow at Centre for Social Development, Hyderabad.  V.B. Tharakeshwar and  Uma Bhrugubanda teach at English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.