{"id":310216,"date":"2026-04-27T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=310216"},"modified":"2026-04-23T19:12:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T23:12:31","slug":"7-books-about-the-messy-politics-of-indian-meals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/7-books-about-the-messy-politics-of-indian-meals\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Books About the Messy Politics of Indian Meals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We were at Carter Road, fingers still sticky from the Belgian waffles we\u2019d just demolished, when Bani admitted she\u2019d been forbidden from drinking water at my house. \u201cBecause you\u2019re a Muslim and eat meat,\u201d she added guilelessly. Bani and I went to school together in Mumbai, and had been friends for nearly seven years at that point. When my parents couldn\u2019t pick me up from a birthday party a few years earlier, hers had offered to take me in until I got a ride home. At lunch, when Bani needed someone to accompany her to the school gate, where she\u2019d collect her lunch box from the dabbawala<\/em>, she\u2019d tilt her head at me, wiggle her fingers in a walking motion, and mouth, \u2018Coming?\u2019 It was Bani who introduced me to Retrica, the vintage-inspired camera app that was all the rage in middle school, and appeared in almost every selfie of mine thereafter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So really, it should\u2019ve stung\u2014should\u2019ve smarted\u2014that someone I\u2019d grown up with could even bear to nurse a thought so acrid, so casually cruel. But at thirteen, in the greenness of teenagehood, I took great pride instead in being the Muslim that could stomach an insult, proffer a critical remark with no hint of defensiveness, brag about never having kept a fast during Ramadan\u2014so I merely shrugged and nodded in acquiescence. By the time we\u2019d left the waffle shop and stepped into the mugginess of Mumbai, the sky was tinged with magenta and Bani\u2019s remark had already faded from consciousness. This was in 2014, shortly after the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party rose to power in India in a landslide victory, ushering in a new era of Hindu nationalism which sought to sweep religious minorities to the sidelines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twelve years on, Bani\u2019s remark seems to have foreshadowed a chain of events unfurling in the political landscape of India: reports of cow vigilantes lynching Muslims on suspicion of eating beef, non-vegetarian renters being denied housing in major Indian cities, beef being banned in twenty out of twenty-eight states. What is it about food, I wonder, that can drive one to murder, to be entirely stripped of remorse? Why does the aroma of a certain meal feel like an insult so personal, so scathing, that the only acceptable response is hot, vicious rage? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer lies in the fact that food and politics are immersed in a strange dance, of sorts, where one not only informs but also augments the other\u2014a fact reinforced by political scientist Gopal Guru, who argued that food is a \u201csite of humiliation\u201d for Dalits in a caste-based system like ours. In 2011, the India Human Development Survey found that women in about a quarter of Indian households eat last, stoically gleaning the remnants once the men had eaten their fill. For those hovering at the margins\u2014women, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis\u2014these facts underscore a jarring truth: food isn\u2019t merely fuel, it determines if they get to survive at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The seven books below encapsulate this sentiment by asking questions that are as jarring as they are necessary: what is acceptable to eat, who is handed the leftovers, whose meals are considered dirty, who toils in the kitchen. And somewhere in between stories of vengeful women, debates about inter-dining, and ethnographic accounts of the beef ban, we stumble upon the realisation that food can be both life-affirming and life-destroying, all at once. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Chhaunk<\/em><\/a> by Abhijit Banerjee<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

How are roadside chowmein and foreign policy related? What does a disappointing New Year\u2019s Eve have in common with Universal Basic Income? Few authors can extrapolate the dreary slog of everyday life to economic theories without being overly didactic, but Banerjee suffers from no such predicament. Every chapter begins with a juicy anecdote about food\u2014in one, a sanyasi <\/em>suckles lasciviously at a ripe mango on a crowded train, putting on a show for his scandalised audience; in another, a group of friends skip lunch to make their evening meal of sutli kebabs<\/em> feel more rewarding, only to find that hunger has fettered every ounce of their mental energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, almost as if by chance, Banerjee begins to drift away\u2014drawing unexpected parallels to Xi Jinping\u2019s domestic policy, India\u2019s malnutrition problem, the erosion of democracy, undertrial prisoners. Nothing is too frivolous, everything is related, and it almost always circles back to food. But while Chhaunk <\/em>is a sobering reminder that the personal has always been political, Banerjee\u2019s writing is laced with levity, making it an easily digestible read in spite of its heft. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada<\/em><\/a> by Shahu Patole<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Amidst an ever-swelling pile of desi<\/em> cookbooks, Shahu Patole\u2019s memoir stands out, not only for the age-old recipes etched into its pages, but because its very existence is an act of subversion. It is true, after all, that Dalit recipes never wriggle their way into the mainstream, into the glossy cookbooks that sit smugly on front-facing displays in bookstores; that has long been a feat reserved only for the upper-caste. \u201cEven my own siblings didn\u2019t like my writing this book in such great detail,\u201d Patole admits in the preface. \u201cBut this is the story of the food my parents ate and their parents ate\u2014an acquired taste, one acquired through centuries of discrimination.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through a series of vignettes, we learn how Dalit communities\u2014often driven by paucity\u2014use every part of the animal in their cooking, how non-vegetarianism is weaponised to uphold caste hierarchies in India, how some ingredients have historically only been available to the upper caste. And upon reaching the raw, tender marrow of the book, we find ourselves stumped by a more rudimentary question: why has nobody even noticed that Dalit recipes are missing from mainstream media?<\/p>\n\n\n\n