Our last piece had ended with a suggestion that the categorisation of those who consume food as vegetarians and non-vegetarians is only partly correct and though the category ‘vegetarian’ is valid, the opposite, i.e., ‘non-vegetarian’, is a false category since no one is purely non-vegetarian. Those categorised as ‘non-vegetarians’ consume, aside from meats, a wide range of foods, including grains, lentils, vegetables and dairy products. Some among them consume all kinds of meats while a few consume only some of the meats, so they might have their differences about which meat to consume and which to avoid. However, all of them are united in consuming meats and a whole lot of stuff which is non-meat and can, therefore, be described as omnivores with some qualifications.

COMMERCIAL BREAK
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING

We have shown that the veg and non-veg division is invalid and if the pure vegetarians insist on being categorised separately, then they will need to accept a new method of culinary classification, foods with meats and food without meats. In fact, this classification does exist in Hindi and is known as samish and niramish — with meat and without meat.

You can call this hair-splitting and you might be right. We are raising this issue to foreground, the fact that all overarching categories are inaccurate just as all generalisations are wrong. Take this category of food — ‘South Indian’ — found on the menu of most eating joints in large parts of North India.

Everything that is served in the name of South Indian is as vegetarian as everything served in the name of Indian. Then why can’t the two be clubbed and included on the meatless menu and why don’t we gather all the vegetarian dishes prepared across the length and breadth of India to create a ‘Pan-Indian Vegetarian Menu’?

The idea itself will send shivers down the spine of most of those who find nothing wrong in creating sweeping categories like Indian, South Indian, Mughlai and Chinese. Do you see the possibility of the dumplings made from the gritty buck-wheat flour from Ladakh being relished by a vegetarian from UP? Or, a veg pulao-eating Punjabi shifting to the red rice of Kerala or the sticky rice eaten with bamboo pickle that many in the eastern parts of India prefer? Or, would you like to replace your mango pickle with pickled fern leaves?

Do you see the point that I have been trying to make through my recent articles? The convenient culinary categories we have created are as inaccurate as our idea of who we are. The moment we create a category of food that we call ‘Indian’, we exclude all food that is not included in that category as ‘non-Indian’. What about those who only eat the kind of food that we have declared non-Indian? Who are they, won’t they automatically become non-Indians? When our ‘Indian’ menus include only non-meat preparations, don’t meat eaters become non-Indians? When we classify all food coming from the four southern states as South Indian, aren’t we placing them beyond the pale? And, pray, what do we have on offer in the name of South Indian: Vada, dosa, and idli? Where are the payas, the avial, the pongal, the poriyal, the appams, the Mysore-pak, the rasam, the pesarattu, the curd rice, and the besi bele bhat?

What is served in the name of South Indian food in large parts of North and Central India are only easy to make snacks and nothing that forms the staple food of the Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malyalam speaking populations finds even a mention in our menus.

Just as the phenomenal variety of meat preparations from Rajasthan, Punjab, UP, Delhi, MP, Bihar, Bengal, and elsewhere find no mention in our ‘Indian Menus’ so also the ‘South Indian menu’ presents a rather stark image of the food consumed by 25 crore Indians that inhabit the five southern states. No mention is made of the fish, prawns, lobsters, scallops and the unlimited variety of seafood and every other kind of meat that a majority of the population of these states consumes on a daily basis.

We live in total denial of the limitless variety of food, both meatless and with-meat consumed by those who inhabit the North-eastern states of India. None of our restaurants that proudly declare to be specialising in ‘Indian food’ have anything that can remotely be described as ‘North-eastern food’. What is served in many of our restaurants as Chinese is a strange mish-mash of what we believe is Chinese food. Our attitude to the 4.6 crore people who live in Assam, Arunanchal, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura is defined in a major way by our belief that they eat Chinese food.

This rather myopic vision of Indian food and even a more shortsighted view of who is an Indian and who is not, that cause these culinary categories, needs serious review. In our view, if this is defined by our idea of India, then that too needs a course-correction.

The author is a historian