Author – Mrinal Borah

“The State Government has decided to ban commercial import and trading of dogs and dog markets and also the sale of dog meat, both cooked and uncooked. Appreciate the wise decision taken by the State’s Cabinet,” read the tweet of Nagaland’s Chief Secretary Tamenjen Toy on 3^rd of July 2020. The first reaction was a reminder to me were the voices including mine over the ban on beef by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party led NDA in 2017. However, there lied a difference and this time the food culture of the Nagas was not an important thing to talk. These two bans are built on two different plethora of arguments where one is broadly based on ‘cruelty’ and the other of ‘piousness’. The views expressed towards the beef ban mostly originated from the liberal ideas of food where the criticism rightly pointed out the upper caste dogmas related to the ban. There were criticisms coming from different quarters that opined on it and swayed public conscience. However, the dog meat ban came with acceptance and applause as it seemed like a response to ‘cruelty’ and ‘cruelty’ was subjective for a cow, chicken, goat and a dog. To understand this we need to make the idea of food, culture, caste, religion, geography and race to be clubbed to make it intelligible.

The Chinki & the Dabangg….

On 30^th January 2020, the Indian newspapers were filled with two kinds of news articles: one about the patient detected and the other that Coronavirus has been declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization. The following days or rather months would be so unprecedented that the world would follow up with a herd of news, one which stinks of Orientalism and the other of conspiracy theories. Initial news on Covid-19 centred on the wet markets in China that sold bat meat and others consumed widely across the Chinese nation. Social media was filled with hate messages that joked and ridiculed the food habits of the Chinese. This should not come as a surprise to many, as just like dogs, bats are usually eaten in South Asian or South-East Asian countries. To add to it, COVID-19 became an excuse to punch, spit and abuse the cultural other, ‘the small-eyed’ Northeasterners. Coincidentally during the same time period, I was watching an Axomiya movie with a friend by the name ‘Aamis,’ a movie that was shot in Assam. The context of the movie is different in a sense that it was based on a psychological thriller, where the male protagonist takes the female protagonist to a small roadside hotel by a tea garden in Assam to relish special meat. The special meat they had over lunch that impressed the lady was bat meat. Basically, a date over bat meat! Shocked?

Very recently Netflix, a popular Internet entertainment service, released a movie called Axone. Axone is a dish made of fermented soybeans that is consumed in the form of pickles, chutneys, with pork, etc. The movie based on the dish is quite well discussed and reviewed today. It talks about the struggle that a few friends faced while cooking Axone for the bride. I remember friends who travelled to study in big metros of India and were thrown out of their homes for cooking this food. This same story would be shared by several people who would cook fermented fish, akhuni, tungrymbai, bamboo shoot, etc. A song called Akhuni that is loosely based around the dish speaks of the treatment that a person from the Northeast receives while getting a home in the metro cities of mainland India. When contacted, Daniel Langthasa, the singer of Akhuni, mentions the moral policing the youth of Northeast have to go through and he rightly puts it in his song, “Chinki (It is a racial slur) aur Dabang (A term denoted to the masculine man) .. Yo Yo.. turn the music down.. Warna Aunty police bula legi.. Toh party kiski chalegi?” Daniel tells me that the song is a parody of several issues that are centred around the questions of identity and especially the Racist moral lessons one is taught in the mainland. He also categorically pointed out how taste and smell are socialized, where one finds it “foul and the other mesmerizing”. In the film, the smell of Axone or Akhuni is equated to that of the smell that comes out while cleaning a septic tank. The expression is definitely not quite shocking as most of the food cooked is touted as smelly and sometimes tenants come with verbal notes of the prohibition against cooking such food before signing rent agreements.

The food Ideology of the Asians was under question in case of Coronavirus, and unfortunately, the oriental outlook of the western media on judgement over food was widely circulated. This led to hate campaigns early in March and April on social media and many such hate remarks were made through social media posts in India as well. Such biased views immediately led to a quick racialisation of the virus, and the people belonging to the northeastern part of India that ‘look Chinese because of their Mongoloid features,’ were attacked and ridiculed in broad daylight, calling them the spreaders of the disease. This exposed the racist outlook of the mainland Indian population once again, exemplifying the ways through which an ordinary person from the Northeast faces racist attacks in big cosmopolitan cities across India.

They are all same!

Covid-19 or Coronavirus made ‘bat meat’ and a ‘biological lab in Wuhan’ as the boxing bags for people’s hate imagination, which is further fuelled by the daily evening media stories. The brunt of which was faced by people of the region, the State created this fear into the minds of the people in the name of the virus causing such attacks out of paranoia and the cultural other was easily created. The causal reason for these attacks was none other than Racism!

The #BlackLivesMatter movement has gained traction in the USA and resulted in a call for justice for the Blacks, but here in India, in the puddle of myriad problems, the racism of this kind is usually seen as an exception. We are still unsure of expecting movements, at least on Twitter and not on the Parliament Streets like #KukiLivesMatter, #NagaLivesMatter, #MeiteiLivesMatter, etc., This is because the ignorance is such that the entire Northeastern region is seen as one even today, in spite of having 385 culturally distinct groups in the entire region and seven different states once we cross the chicken neck.^[1] #MyFoodMyChoice should be the trend today that to expose the racist and casteist understanding of food by the State and the society today.

Concluding at the end!

The dominant politics of the State in India in the course of the last six years, i.e., after the rise of the right-wing government, dominated the politics of food ideology. Consumption of beef was in question, leading to violent outbreaks in many parts of the country. The taboo around food, which was the subject of people’s everyday life, especially in ‘mainland’ India, was now a subject of the State. The State was building around the self-consciousness of a dogmatic, feudal and archaic idea of a particular upper-caste social group. The State initiated the curtailment of rights over food on the basis of belief and taboo. Today, the dogma seems to have trickled down and the effects can be felt on people, whose racial characteristics do not fall in line with the mainland racial characteristics. The State was asserting its ideas, politics and ideology over the people albeit the freedom of people’s choice of diet. Hegel says on freedom that, “The idea that freedom of thought and mind is indicated only by deviation from, or even hostility to what is everywhere recognised, is most persistent with regard to the state. The essential task of a philosophy of the state would thus seem to be the discovery and publication of a new and original theory.” The State here foregoes its responsibility on the thought of reinventing freedom while imposing rules based on myths, perception and dogmas. The cultural complex of a region that has a historical association with Southeast Asia is judged from the lens somewhere from the West of the region! Whether it is cow, dog or mutton peeking onto a plate is not welcome. The ban is nothing but a racial way of looking at a region long seen as uncivilized and not part of the mainstream.

^[1] See, K.S. Singh’s edited book People of India published by Anthropological Survey of India

Mrinal Borah; Research Scholar at Special Centre for the Study of North East India at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. The author can be reached at mrinal.borah123@gmail.com.