There is a story in my family, always told and retold to laughter guaranteed. My maternal uncle, famously mischievous at age 10, was on his yearly summer vacation to his grandmother’s home. The home was really a sprawling estate, located in a small West Bengal town a little way from Kolkata. Dida — as my uncle, my mother and their cousins called her — was famously brahminical, age 70. No onions, nor any kind of garlic ever crossed the threshold of her house. The floors would be cleansed with gangajal after workers of other castes came through — collecting garbage, picking up laundry, carrying fresh mishti. Workers who did all the tasks that reproduced dida’s Brahmin home into a beautiful and impeccably-run vacation spot for her visiting gaggle of grandchildren.
On these trips, my uncle was often up to no good. One afternoon, tired of the elaborate but strictly allium-free meals served from dida’s kitchen, he sneaked off to the local sweet shop and filled his 10-year-old belly with a chicken roll and fish chops. Upon his return, he climbed into dida’s expansive four-poster bed, snuggled up to her and said. “Dida, I am so full! Will you rub my tummy for me?” And so she did. A few minutes into dida’s hand laying upon his happy, protuberant stomach, my uncle seized his moment. “Do you know what it is full of, dida? Chicken roll, fish chop!” A scandalised dida took flight, rushing towards the bathroom, shouting “Hey Ram! Hey Ram!” She bathed not just her hand but her entire body, head-through-toe, with the same gangajal she reserved for the waste collectors and housekeepers. All the cousins agog with giggles. Got her!
The chicken rolls and fish chops were inside my uncle’s tummy and his grandmother, of course, outside. But everyone participating in and later recounting the prank was intimately aware of how caste rules of touch had been broken — this unique texture of touch, after all, was the crux of the joke. Just as dida, my uncle, my mother, and his cousins knew, I too, in turn, was taught to know this way in which touch is mediated by savarna bodies. The layers of fat and flesh that separated my uncle from his dida were not sufficient to protect her from caste contamination – much like how dish soap and metal cannot guarantee that Sudha Murty’s spoon will remain untouched by “non-veg” foods when she travels.
As part of my day job as an anthropologist, I spent two years conducting an ethnography of food media content creators in India, most of them middle-aged women who make recipe content on YouTube and Instagram. A majority of them, as content creators in India tend to be, were savarna (dominant caste), and sometimes Brahmin women. Directly and indirectly, these women taught me a great deal about food and the enduring body politics of caste. Historically, the most punitive norms around the body politics of caste and food have stemmed from Brahminical prescriptions around touchability and purity. Yet, these norms are not exclusive to Brahmins, but are embodied by others from savarna groups, who have taken up such Brahminical prescriptions themselves. While the particular norms might differ based on caste group, region, generation and other factors, what remains common is a kind of common sense around touch norms that, importantly, rarely needs to be stated explicitly in caste terms. And therein lies the rub.
Indeed, during my time in the field, few of my interlocutors ever mentioned their caste, either to me, or to their audiences. A few were vociferously anti-caste, while others said they were against caste or that caste has no place in a progressive Indian society. Some mentioned that they were beyond caste altogether, or a couple said they did not even know what their caste was. But whether we stated it or not, we all shared knowledge of how caste inhabited our savarna bodies. If I told them the family story about my uncle’s chicken-roll-belly-rub, everyone got it. Everyone laughed.
In one rare instance of caste disclosure during my fieldwork, one of my interlocutors told me offhand, “I have dishes from all over India on my YouTube channel, but what my viewers come for is the Tam Brahm recipes.”
“How do they know they are Tam Brahm recipes,” I asked her. “Do you mention your caste in your posts?”.
“No,” she replied with a smile. “They just know.”
In a longer article elsewhere, I use feminist and anti-caste theories about bodies and embodiment to explain how someone might “just know” caste, even when it is not explicitly stated. Here, I consider the reverse. Murty’s case is an excellent example of how savarnas re-signify caste-based behaviours as anything but caste. This flipped logic is often used as a defense against claims of casteism — if caste is not named explicitly, if it’s not a beef lynching or obvious slur, if it is couched in the language of personal preference, animal welfare, “culture” or “family traditions”, then it is cannot be caste. Why drag caste into everything? Many coming to Murty’s defence, in explaining why she might carry a separate spoon to avoid touching a “non-veg” one, are drawing on a similar strategy of elision, just as savarna content creators might elicit caste without naming caste in their posts. If it is not explicitly about caste, if caste is not overtly stated in language, then it can be defended as having nothing to do with caste, or that it was not meant to be or known to be casteist.
But savarna bodies know caste. They share caste via more than just language. As my creator friend evasively observed, caste doesn’t have to be named for people to “just know” it. And nowhere is this subtle form of knowing more viscerally palpable than in encounters with meat. Several of my interlocutors were “strict” or “pure” vegetarians, others were not. Many had complex and nuanced views of meat-eating and what they considered “non-veg” – alliums, eggs, “outside” food, mushrooms. But the individual foods themselves did not determine their distinctions between “veg” and “non-veg”. Rather, the line between veg and non-veg was drawn and maintained by unstated forms of sensory regimentation through which caste’s body politics are enacted.
In contemporary India, meat threatens to touch savarna bodies through all the senses, not merely through direct, tactile contact, the act of consumption, or utterance. Savarna folk sense meat through their eyes, when they recoil from a photo of beef pepper fry. Caste tingles under their skin, when someone brushes the “non-veg spoon” against the common rice pot. They smell caste in the office microwave, when a co-worker has reheated their mutton curry for lunch. They try to ban non-veg street food from public view, and eggs from sharing a schoolroom with “pure vegetarian” children.
These ideas about meat, how it is sensed and its propensity to touch without touching, are not reducible to personal preference. People can of course choose to eat whatever they like (except of course, when they cannot). But the very notions that meat can touch and therefore contaminate bodies even after a spoon has been washed, or across a child’s tummy, or through the senses of sight, sound, or smell — these are not individual preferences. They are rooted in how caste, as a social regime, shapes and disciplines bodies through the metaphysics of touchability and untouchability.
Philosopher Sundar Sarukkai writes that the sensory notions of ‘touch’ and ‘untouch’, on which the caste order is based, are not about physical contact or tactile experiences. Rather, touch is a moral sense. It is virtual and abstract. It is the ritual, not literal, bridging of a moral distance between two caste-marked bodies and objects. Those who were born and raised in savarna families, as I was, know this moral quality of touch intimately, whether or not they choose to name it as such.
Dida’s story might appear antiquated, extreme, a relic of casteist practices past. But dida’s body politics and the ones surrounding the Murty episode are the same, generations later. The first has a more obvious casteist, religious connotation: “Hey Ram! Hey Ram!”. The other is caste recast — in the liberal language of choice, personal preference, or even animal welfare. Yet caste lives on in savarna bodies. Rather than feigning ignorance and joining projects of caste obfuscation, instead of re-signifying caste as anything but, it is for savarna folks to name and make explicit that which their bodies already “just know”.
Sucharita Kanjilal is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, New York. Her research focuses on food, digital economies and feminist approaches to studies of global capitalism. Previously, she was a journalist with Scroll.in and the Hindustan Times in Mumbai.