The Concern is Not What Sudha Murthy Eats but Why She is So Scared of the Spoon

The horror of pollution, the grotesque considered of it, the disgust — all of this wants to be analysed.

What are the boundaries of this disgusting panic?

How lots of periods does a spoon need to be washed just before it loses its “non-veg” stigma?

What about the table and the chair that the meat-eater sat on? Can a “pure vegetarian” sit on them?

What about the air?

Can Murthy breathe in the exact molecules of oxygen that could have been contaminated by the proximity to cooked meat?

These are not factitious queries in a place where by people today are lynched to dying on mere suspicion of eating beef. Numerous Savarna media personalities like Vir Sanghvi and Padmaja Joshi between other people occur out in defence of Murthy, ridiculing a caste “angle” in this equation.

This is a unusual defence since it is nicely regarded historically and sociologically that prohibition on inter-eating between communities is one particular of the main tenets of maintaining untouchability.

If we appear at Murthy’s responses — which are routinely produced by Savarna people about us each working day — from the lens of disgust relatively than simply just fixating on the issue of meat, it can make far far more sociological sense to see it as an extension of caste prejudice.

Pollution is a spectrum inside the caste praxis. Most Savarnas have intricate inter-neighborhood and particular negotiations of defining what is polluting and what stages of pollution are suitable, and what is completely reprehensible.

For some Brahmins, culturally and ideologically taking in meat is not a problem of air pollution but somebody from the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) moving into the inner sanctum of sure temples is wholly unacceptable.

For other Brahmins, a mere spoon becomes an object of dread.

In the India of these days, Savarna vegetarianism has huge company and clout. It sets the rules of the industry, housing, community discourse, and socio-cultural establishments and has appear to outline the face of Indian nationalism.

A nutritious nation is crafted on the elementary theory of human equality and fraternity among its citizenry. Caste pollution politics and the tapestry of the ‘disgust’ it results in is fundamentally divides the citizens and rationalizes seperation. Hence it is effectively anti-countrywide.

The highly effective would do very well to reflect on what type of nation they want to generate and live in, and ideally, it is not one where by they are fearful and repulsed by normally sanitised cutlery.

(Ravikant Kisana is a professor of Cultural Experiments and his analysis seems to be at the intersections of caste with buildings of privilege and well-known tradition. He is obtainable on Twitter/Instagram as ‘Buffalo Intellectual’. This is an view piece and the sights expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is dependable for them.)