If I want bread and omelette for breakfast in a hotel in Hyderabad today, I will have to go to any of the three big railway stations or to the old city. All the Irani hotels have become vegetarians! There are two reasons. Although Hyderabad is predominantly ‘non-veg’ its vegetarian population has increased in number and power. Both the ownership and clients have changed. Many owners are Gujarati and Marwari owners. Secondly, many of these vegetarian clients don’t like non-veg places. So while a non – veg person can visit a veg place the reverse is not true.
It has happened in my lifetime. Urban Non-Veg spaces have been taken over by Vegetarians. I call it ‘counter revolution’ because it is anti-poor.
So who are these vegetarians?
About 90% of vegetarians in the world live in India. However, most Indians are not vegetarians. We are, ‘largely a drinking, smoking and meat-eating people’, as Dr. Kumar Suresh Singh put it. Also, most of the vegetarians In India are concentrated in the few states of North West India – Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Western U. P. The reason is quite simple. Vegetarians depend on milk for their source of animal protein and these states produce a lot of milk. In the whole of North Eastern India, Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand Odisha, Eastern U. P. and in Chhattisgarh, there are practically no vegetarians. In South India and in Maharashtra only traders and Brahmins are vegetarians!
Although small in number, vegetarian Indians enjoy much more power than their numbers indicate. This is mainly due to the fact they are upper caste Brahmins and Bania traders from Western India, mainly Gujaratis and Marwaris, the prime movers of Indian capitalism. There is also a powerful group of South Indian Brahmins who are important in bureaucracy and education, who are ‘pure’ vegetarians and wield considerable power. Gandhi also made it an integral part of his moral precepts and influenced the Indian public policy and behaviour vis-a-vis diet.
Vegetarians and vegetarianism
Vegetarianism is not the same as being a vegetarian. From the beginning of human evolution man depended upon proteins from animals. It has remained an essential part of human diet till today. Vegetarian food can be defined as consisting of animal proteins derived from milk products alone. The logic being that there is no direct killing of animals. Using the same logic some people permit eggs as vegetarian food. There is even a concept of treating infertile eggs as vegetarian eggs!
Vegetarians and Sanatan Dharma
In the Hindu tradition the word ‘religion’ is called ‘Sampradayas’. These are divided mainly in two types – Vedic and Ved Bahya. Vedic sampradaya are also called ‘sanatan’. Apart from belief in Vedas they also follow Manusmriti. They are mainly the three upper castes-Brhmins, Kshatriya and trading castes and some peasant classes in North West India. Among the Ved Bahya Sampraday the most important ones are Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Lingayats. However most of the artisan castes also belong to these traditions.
While all Sanatanis are not vegetarians, most of the vegetarians are. Similarly most of the artisan castes are not vegetatians but some are. Practically No SC/ST is a vegetarian.
In the Ved Bahya sampradayas, Jains and Lingayatas are vegetarians whereas Buddhist are not,
Combat Vegetarianism
It is the power of these Sanatanis that is making it so difficult for the poor to have access to non veg food. So access to non veg food implies a class/caste struggle even though they are a majority. Is it anything strange in a country where the majority of people are poor!
*****
References
1. Vegetarianism and Communalism
Published in Frontier, August 31-September 6, 2008, Kolkata
Also in the book, Losers Shall Inherit the World by T. Vijayendra, Hyderabad, 2009. 2010 and 2012
2. Sharab, Shabab Aur Kebab: Morality in Political Discourse in India
Published in 3 parts in Countercurrents daily starting from 07/03/2022
https://countercurrents.org/2022/03/sharab-shabab-aur-kebab-1/
https://countercurrents.org/2022/03/sharab-shabab-aur-kebab-ii/
https://countercurrents.org/2022/03/sharab-shabab-aur-kebab-iii/
3. The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, 2009
by Lierre Keith published by PM Press.
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T Vijayendra (1943 – ) was born in Mysore, grew up in Indore and went to IIT Kharagpur to get a B. Tech. in Electronics (1966). After a year’s stint at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, he got drawn into the whirlwind times of the late 60s.
Since then, he has always been some kind of political-social activist. His brief for himself is the education of Left-wing cadres and so he almost exclusively publishes in the Left-wing journal Frontier, published from Kolkata. For the last ten years, he has been active in the field of ‘Peak Oil’ and is a founder member of Peak Oil India and Ecologise. Since 2015 he has been involved in Ecologise! Camps and in 2016 he initiated Ecologise Hyderabad. In 2017 he spent a year celebrating the Bicentenary of the Bicycle. Vijayendra has been a ‘dedicated’ cyclist all his life, meaning, he neither took a driving license nor did he ever drive a fossil fuel-based vehicle.
He divides his time between Hyderabad and organic farms at several places in India, watching birds and writing fiction. He has published a book dealing with resource depletion, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, a novella, an autobiography and a children’s science fiction story on the history of the bicycle, apart from booklets on several topics. His booklet, Kabira Khada Bazar Mein: Call for Local Action in the Wake of Global Emergency (2019, https://archive.org/details/kabira-khada-bazaar-mein) has been translated into Kannada, Bengali and Marathi and is the basic text for the emerging Transition Networks in these language regions. His last book ‘Vijutopias’, which has 12 short stories, is an entertaining book full of hope and energy in these dismal times.
Email: [email protected]
