VOICES DEVDUTT PATTANAIK SHAMPA DHAR-KAMATH RAVI SHANKAR ANAND NEELAKANTAN DR DEEPALI BHARDWAJ SWAMI SUKHABODHANANDA THE NEW SUNDAY EXPRESS MAGAZINE BUFFET PEOPLE WELLNESS BOOKS FOOD ART & CULTURE ENTERTAINMENT SEPTEMBER 20 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 ESSAY The Republic of the Plate Vegetarianism, Meat, And the Making of Indian Identity By RAVI SHANKAR F ood is worth considering as food for thought. No country on earth has turned the question of what to eat into as combustible a civilisational argument as India has. In the rest of the world, dietary choice is a matter of health, taste, or private conviction, and in some cases, faith. Vegetarianism has an exceptionally deep Indian pedigree in the idea of ahimsa, given philosophical force by Buddhism and Jainism, and subsequently absorbed and elaborated within Hindu tradition. This gastronomic migration addresses the crisis of conscience humanity has been wrestling with for centuries: is cruelty for pleasure and cruelty for survival the same? The argument that humans are genetically meat eaters because of their teeth is a tad specious; the prehistoric context has changed. Homo sapiens no longer prowl the primeval swamps searching for a juicy baby Megaloceros. They now go to McDonalds, live in condos and drive smoke-spitting vehicles. On social media— the arbiter of the times—every culinary controversy lights spontaneous outrage against the BJP’s vegetarian push. Such outrage is not just 21st century They are the latest skirmishes in . an at least 25 centuries old argument. A longer argument needs to be laid out; historical, textual, philosophical, and political, before returning to the present controversies with better tools for inspection and introspection. The particular equation of vegetarianism with Hindu virtue, spiritual discipline, and Indian national character which now dominates public rhetoric is, in large part, a product of the convergence of the colonial and nationalist period. The British colonial administration and ethnography was obsessed with classifying Indian communities, whose customs they did not understand. They labelled vegetarian a ‘high’ caste practice and meat-eating, martial communities (Rajputs, Sikhs and tribal groups) which they recruited into the colonial army as ‘martial races’. This colonial hierarchy is what Indian nationalists absorbed and, in complicated ways, resisted. Dalit meat eaters were a different matter altogether, to be mobilised against the Brahiminical leadership of the agitating Congress Party More consequentially, the rise . of organised cow-protection movements from the 1880s onward associated with reformers like Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj turned the cow specifically, and vegetarian restraint more broadly, into a potent symbol of Hindu communal identity This . syndrome, studied in depth by historians such as Sandria Freitag, was often explicitly counterposed to Muslim beef consumption. Such movements amidst several outbreaks of communal violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had embedded cow protection permanently into the vocabulary of Hindu-Muslim communal politics well before Independence. The result, by the time of Independence in 1947, was a template in which vegetarianism carried the prestige of nationalist virtue, upper-caste ritual purity and via cow , protection, communal Hindu identity all bundled , together. Such a collection had not existed in this form in neither the Indian classical nor medieval periods. From the very start, it sat awkwardly over an overwhelming , demographic majority which continued to eat meat, fish or eggs as gastronomic and nutritional sources. THE TABLE AS A POLITICAL BATTLEGROUND The national palate has become a battleground, especially after the BJP came to power. A couple of eggs served to school children or a kosha mangsho at a pujo pandal is now a referendum on Indian-ness. The only-vegetarian buffet served to head of states at the BRICS summit has stormed social media, polarising public opinion. This is not the first time the Narendra Modi government is accused of imposing its dietary ideology at state functions. This argy-bargy is a peculiar paradox since the peninsular foodgraph cannot be dissected without nuance and its philosophical context. According to Anthropological Survey of India data, nearly 70 per cent of the Indian population is non-vegetarian while 39 per cent of Indian adults call themselves ‘vegetarian’. However, 81 per cent of the vast majority of our countrymen, especially Hindus, refrain from eating meat on certain holy days like Deepavali or Vishu. This duality points to the remarkable dietary flexibility of Indians. Food is both cultural and geographical; as well as deeply religious in nature. Bengalis, irrespective of politics, rose as one in vociferous protest against Bageshwar Baba’s appeal in Kolkata to eschew non-vegetarian food during the five days of Durga Puja. The fact that Swami Vivekananda ate meat was quoted by BJP state president Samik Bhattacharya who asked ‘outsiders’ not to dictate Bengal’s food choices. Even Sanjeev Sanyal, strict Bengali and member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, tweeted, “Meat is core to Shakta Hinduism. It is offered to Ma Durga and Ma Kali as part of the ancient rituals. The Prasad eaten by the devotees on Navami/Dasami at Durga Puja is meat. Any interference in this sacred ritual will not be tolerated.” The temperature cooled down after chief minister Suvendu Adhikari was photographed eating fish inside a temple on the auspicious occasion of Kaushiki Amavasya: the temple’s official prasad includes a fish head, fried fish, and basanti pulao. This would seem horrifying to many a South Indian Brahmin or North and West Indians. And in Punjab, too, where the stereotype of a burly Sikh plunging into butter chicken with gusto is a cliché: 66.7 per cent of the state’s population identifies as vegetarian. The endless contest between both habits is also ethnic in nature, since the people of the South, East and the North East are predominantly non-vegetarian. The Tamil Nadu government’s proposal to include chicken biryani in school nutrition schemes is explicitly framed by regional pride as a corrective to what Tamils, and some other South Indians, frame as the imposition of North Indian, upper-caste vegetarian values on the rest of the country But students in these states who do not eat meat . have the option of eating bananas in their afternoon school meal. A CULTURAL MISUNDERSTANDING Food in India has never been only about nutrition. Its definition concerns specific religions, castes, geography , climate, communities, family memory rituals, and ideas , of what food is pure and impure. A household of a Jain, a Kashmiri Pandit, a Bengali Shakta, a Kerala Christian, a Tamil Brahmin, a Muslim, or a Goan Catholic will take their own food practices as perfectly normal but will regard each other’s food as unusual, inappropriate, or even forbidden. The sociological mistake is to imagine that vegetarianism is the original and universal Indian tradition. So is the extreme contrary position, that vegetarianism is alien to India. Both propositions are historically untenable. Vegetarianism has an exceptionally deep pedigree in India in the idea of ahimsa, which is entrenched deeply in Jainism and Buddhism and later was absorbed into important strands of Hindu thought. If ahimsa is taken seriously as an ethical principle, vegetarianism offers a practical way of reducing participation in violence—the Bhagavad Gita classifies non-vegetarian food as tamasic, which hinders the soul’s evolution. Spirituality apart, well-planned vegetarian diets can be nutritionally adequate and provide substantial quantities of fibre, legumes, grains, nuts, and vegetables. Depending on what replaces meat, vegetarian diets may have advantages for cardiovascular and metabolic health and environmental sustainability But . by treating vegetarianism as automatically synonymous with health or virtue is to digress from the essential debate. A diet consisting largely of refined carbohydrates, sugar, fried food, and highly processed substitutes is not healthy simply because it is meatless. Paneer-heavy restaurant food, deep-fried snacks and sweets are vegetarian, but their status cannot satisfy a nutritional certificate. The opposite is an equally common error. Eggs, fish, and meat provide highly bioavailable protein and micronutrients. In school feeding programmes like in West Bengal, for example, to demand eggs is not an argument made against vegetarianism, but a plea for giving children an inexpensive and standardisable nutrition. The Karma Kitchen H induism’s approach to vegetarianism centres on the principle of ahimsa. The Bhagavad Gita advocates for a sattvic diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, and dairy, and excluding meat, fish, and eggs. The Gita teaches that our food choices deeply affect our physical health and consciousness. The Manu Smriti states that five people share equal karma from killing animals to eat: the animal raiser, butcher, seller, cook, consumer. This distribution of moral responsibility implicates entire systems of production and distribution, not just individual dietary choices. The Hindu understanding of universal consciousness is described thus: “Behold the one indestructible being pervading all creatures; the imperishable within the perishable.” (Bhagavad Gita 13.27) Many Hindus interpret these teachings as a call to abstain from animal-derived products, viewing vegetarianism or veganism as a way to practice non-violence and compassion in daily life. ALL THE WORLD IS A PLATE The morality of eating animal flesh is not a modern belief system. It is one of the oldest continuous ethical arguments in recorded human history, running in parallel and sometimes in direct conversation across Greek philosophy, Indian religion, Christian monasticism, Enlightenment rationalism, Victorian reform movements, and 20th-century philosophy “You are what . you eat,” was an epiphany of naturopath Dr Henry Lindlahr and his axiom. A diet comprising raw fruits and vegetables, whole grains, minimal animal products, no stimulants, and frequent fasting was his solution to reducing toxins in the body His son Dr Victor Lindlahr . adopted a more sensible approach: “If you planned to bake a cake, you would assemble in proper proportions the necessary flour, eggs, milk, and baking powder; similarly to have good health, you must supply your body with foods that contain all the different elements your body needs in their proper amounts.” He is probably the world’s first modern dietician: the first medical professional to suggest a daily diet of specific composition: 12 ounces of protein foods, 12 ounces of fat, starchy and sugary foods, and 36 ounces of “protective foods,”: basically raw and cooked fruits and vegetables. The single most consequential sentence in the modern The morality of eating animal flesh is one of the oldest continuous ethical arguments in recorded human history, running in parallel and sometimes in direct conversation across Greek philosophy, Indian religion, Christian monasticism, Enlightenment rationalism, Victorian reform movements, and 20th-century moral philosophy Turn to page 2