Food is worth considering as food for thought. No country on earth has turned the question of what to eat into as combustible a civilisational argument as India has. In the rest of the world, dietary choice is a matter of health, taste, or private conviction, and in some cases, faith. Vegetarianism has an exceptionally deep Indian pedigree in the idea of ahimsa, given philosophical force by Buddhism and Jainism, and subsequently absorbed and elaborated within Hindu tradition. This gastronomic migration addresses the crisis of conscience humanity has been wrestling with for centuries: is cruelty for pleasure and cruelty for survival the same? The argument that humans are genetically meat eaters because of their teeth is a tad specious; the prehistoric context has changed. Homo sapiens no longer prowl the primeval swamps searching for a juicy baby Megaloceros. They now go to McDonalds, live in condos and drive smoke-spitting vehicles. On social media—the arbiter of the times—every culinary controversy lights spontaneous outrage against the BJP’s vegetarian push. Such outrage is not just 21st century. They are the latest skirmishes in an at least 25 centuries old argument. A longer argument needs to be laid out; historical, textual, philosophical, and political, before returning to the present controversies with better tools for inspection and introspection. The particular equation of vegetarianism with Hindu virtue, spiritual discipline, and Indian national character which now dominates public rhetoric is, in large part, a product of the convergence of the colonial and nationalist period.
The British colonial administration and ethnography was obsessed with classifying Indian communities, whose customs they did not understand. They labelled vegetarian a ‘high’ caste practice and meat-eating, martial communities (Rajputs, Sikhs and tribal groups) which they recruited into the colonial army as ‘martial races’. This colonial hierarchy is what Indian nationalists absorbed and, in complicated ways, resisted. Dalit meat eaters were a different matter altogether, to be mobilised against the Brahiminical leadership of the agitating Congress Party. More consequentially, the rise of organised cow-protection movements from the 1880s onward associated with reformers like Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj turned the cow specifically, and vegetarian restraint more broadly, into a potent symbol of Hindu communal identity. This syndrome, studied in depth by historians such as Sandria Freitag, was often explicitly counterposed to Muslim beef consumption. Such movements amidst several outbreaks of communal violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had embedded cow protection permanently into the vocabulary of Hindu-Muslim communal politics well before Independence.
The result, by the time of Independence in 1947, was a template in which vegetarianism carried the prestige of nationalist virtue, upper-caste ritual purity, and via cow protection, communal Hindu identity, all bundled together. Such a collection had not existed in this form in neither the Indian classical nor medieval periods. From the very start, it sat awkwardly, over an overwhelming demographic majority which continued to eat meat, fish or eggs as gastronomic and nutritional sources.
The Table As A Political Battleground
The national palate has become a battleground, especially after the BJP came to power. A couple of eggs served to school children or a kosha mangsho at a pujo pandal is now a referendum on Indian-ness. The only-vegetarian buffet served to head of states at the BRICS summit has stormed social media, polarising public opinion. This is not the first time the Narendra Modi government is accused of imposing its dietary ideology at state functions. This argy-bargy is a peculiar paradox since the peninsular foodgraph cannot be dissected without nuance and its philosophical context. According to Anthropological Survey of India data, nearly 70 per cent of the Indian population is non-vegetarian while 39 per cent of Indian adults call themselves ‘vegetarian’. However, 81 per cent of the vast majority of our countrymen, especially Hindus, refrain from eating meat on certain holy days like Deepavali or Vishu. This duality points to the remarkable dietary flexibility of Indians. Food is both cultural and geographical; as well as deeply religious in nature. Bengalis, irrespective of politics, rose as one in vociferous protest against Bageshwar Baba’s appeal in Kolkata to eschew non-vegetarian food during the five days of Durga Puja. The fact that Swami Vivekananda ate meat was quoted by BJP state president Samik Bhattacharya who asked ‘outsiders’ not to dictate Bengal’s food choices. Even Sanjeev Sanyal, strict Bengali and member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, tweeted, “Meat is core to Shakta Hinduism. It is offered to Ma Durga and Ma Kali as part of the ancient rituals. The Prasad eaten by the devotees on Navami/Dasami at Durga Puja is meat. Any interference in this sacred ritual will not be tolerated.” The temperature cooled down after chief minister Suvendu Adhikari was photographed eating fish inside a temple on the auspicious occasion of Kaushiki Amavasya: the temple’s official prasad includes a fish head, fried fish, and basanti pulao. This would seem horrifying to many a South Indian Brahmin or North and West Indians. And in Punjab, too, where the stereotype of a burly Sikh plunging into butter chicken with gusto is a cliché: 66.7 per cent of the state’s population identifies as vegetarian. The endless contest between both habits is also ethnic in nature, since the people of the South, East and the North East are predominantly non-vegetarian. The Tamil Nadu government’s proposal to include chicken biryani in school nutrition schemes is explicitly framed by regional pride as a corrective to what Tamils, and some other South Indians, frame as the imposition of North Indian, upper-caste vegetarian values on the rest of the country. But students in these states who do not eat meat have the option of eating bananas in their afternoon school meal.
A Cultural Misunderstanding
Food in India has never been only about nutrition. Its definition concerns specific religions, castes, geography, climate, communities, family memory, rituals, and ideas of what food is pure and impure. A household of a Jain, a Kashmiri Pandit, a Bengali Shakta, a Kerala Christian, a Tamil Brahmin, a Muslim, or a Goan Catholic will take their own food practices as perfectly normal but will regard each other’s food as unusual, inappropriate, or even forbidden. The sociological mistake is to imagine that vegetarianism is the original and universal Indian tradition. So is the extreme contrary position, that vegetarianism is alien to India. Both propositions are historically untenable. Vegetarianism has an exceptionally deep pedigree in India in the idea of ahimsa, which is entrenched deeply in Jainism and Buddhism and later was absorbed into important strands of Hindu thought. If ahimsa is taken seriously as an ethical principle, vegetarianism offers a practical way of reducing participation in violence—the Bhagavad Gita classifies non-vegetarian food as tamasic, which hinders the soul’s evolution. Spirituality apart, well-planned vegetarian diets can be nutritionally adequate and provide substantial quantities of fibre, legumes, grains, nuts, and vegetables. Depending on what replaces meat, vegetarian diets may have advantages for cardiovascular and metabolic health and environmental sustainability. But by treating vegetarianism as automatically synonymous with health or virtue is to digress from the essential debate. A diet consisting largely of refined carbohydrates, sugar, fried food, and highly processed substitutes is not healthy simply because it is meatless. Paneer-heavy restaurant food, deep-fried snacks and sweets are vegetarian, but their status cannot satisfy a nutritional certificate. The opposite is an equally common error. Eggs, fish, and meat provide highly bioavailable protein and micronutrients. In school feeding programmes like in West Bengal, for example, to demand eggs is not an argument made against vegetarianism, but a plea for giving children an inexpensive and standardisable nutrition.
All The World Is Plate
The morality of eating animal flesh is not a modern belief system. It is one of the oldest continuous ethical arguments in recorded human history, running in parallel and sometimes in direct conversation across Greek philosophy, Indian religion, Christian monasticism, Enlightenment rationalism, Victorian reform movements, and 20th-century philosophy. “You are what you eat,” was an epiphany of naturopath Dr Henry Lindlahr and his axiom. A diet comprising raw fruits and vegetables, whole grains, minimal animal products, no stimulants, and frequent fasting was his solution to reducing toxins in the body. His son Dr Victor Lindlahr adopted a more sensible approach: “If you planned to bake a cake, you would assemble in proper proportions the necessary flour, eggs, milk, and baking powder; similarly to have good health, you must supply your body with foods that contain all the different elements your body needs in their proper amounts.” He is probably the world’s first modern dietician: the first medical professional to suggest a daily diet of specific composition: 12 ounces of protein foods, 12 ounces of fat, starchy and sugary foods, and 36 ounces of “protective foods,”: basically raw and cooked fruits and vegetables.
The single most consequential sentence in the modern history of animal ethics was written by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1789: “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but, ‘Can they suffer?’” This became the philosophical foundation of the modern animal-rights movement, in both the West and India. The pivotal point came in September 1847 when the Vegetarian Society founded in Ramsgate, England, popularised the word ‘vegetarian’— purportedly derived from the Latin vegetus (whole, sound, fresh, lively).
The First Salt Movement
Henry Salt, an English schoolmaster and reformer, published Animals’ Rights; widely regarded as the first exposition of animal-rights philosophy. Salt’s thought directly influenced Mahatma Gandhi. Modern India’s most politically consequential vegetarian did not derive his convictions solely from ancient Hindu or Jain sources. He encountered organised, ideological Western vegetarianism directly in London where he was living in the late 1880s. Its doctrine reshaped his own relationship to diet. Gandhi joined the London Vegetarian Society in 1888, served on its executive committee, and wrote articles for its journal, The Vegetarian. His relationship with Salt, whom he met and with whom he held extensive discussions, is widely regarded by historians of food cultures as a cultural crossroad—where the ancient Indian tradition of ahimsa converged with the emerging Western movements for vegetarianism and animal rights in one historically transformative figure. By the time he returned to India, Gandhi had welded both streams into a moral force that gave torque to a unique mass anti-colonial movement in a way tradition nor violence had achieved on their own. The line most frequently attributed to Gandhi in contemporary animal-rights discourse is “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”— an ubiquitous disquisition in animal activist literature, although its precise textual origin within Gandhi’s collected works is disputed among scholars.
The Politics Of Food
The single most inconvenient fact for claiming vegetarianism—the original, authentic core of Hindu religious practice—lies in the Vedic yajnas as oft quoted by meat advocates as canon. The oldest layer of Indian religious life includes the hymns of the Rigveda (1500-1200 BCE) and the ritual manuals of the Brahmanas which describe a sacrificial religion in which cattle, goats, sheep, and even horses—as in the ashvamedha—were ritually sacrificed to the gods, and then eaten by the priests and patrons of the rite. The most contentious of historians meet an intellectual road block when they come upon the Sanskrit Vedic word for distinguished guest, goghna—literally “one for whom a cow is killed”. This vocabulary preserves the memory of a hospitality tradition built around animal slaughter, not against it. Meat offered in sacrifice was considered sacred, its consumption a religious act binding gods, ancestors, and the living. This is not a marginal or contested point among historians of religion; it is the consensus. The contrary question to be asked is whether only ‘purified’ or ‘blessed’ flesh was to be eaten, or all flesh? Yet, the most popular assertion that the ancient Indian cultural acropolis favours meat is not as simple as that. Post the direct references in all four Vedas to hunting and animal sacrifice, Upanishadic texts reinterpreted sacrificial Vedic language that describes ‘killing’ as metaphorical; the Vedas do not prescribe a single uniform diet for all Hindus. Barley, rice, wheat, pulses, curd, and fruits enter the Vedic food vocabulary. Vegetables and edible plants—various greens, roots and other plants are options on the table. Soma, a ritual plant or preparation is of enormous importance in the Rigveda, although its botanical identity remains disputed. Ascetic and vegetarian rules show up in the later Vedic period, in the Upanishads, epics, and the Puranas where the concept of ahmisa emerges for the first time. In the fifth and sixth centuries BCE, a collective cluster of renunciate movements called the shramana tradition appeared, with Jainism offering a new ethical concept at the centre of religious life: non-injury to living beings as a serious spiritual discipline, and not a dietary preference. The Buddha’s position was subtler; the early monastic code, as recorded in the Jivaka Sutta of the Pali Canon, permitted monks to eat meat under the ‘threefold purity’ rule: if they had not seen, heard, or suspected that the animal had been killed specifically for them. This was the middle path between Vedic sacrificial license and Jain absolutism: meat was not forbidden, but its acquisition was hedged with an ethic of non-complicity in killing. Later Mahayana texts, especially in East Asia, moved toward stricter vegetarianism. Emperor Ashoka (268-232 BCE), who converted to Buddhism after the bloody conquest of Kalinga, is frequently invoked as proof that ancient India embraced animal welfare at the level of the state. But his Rock and Pillar Edicts, inscribed across the subcontinent, do restrict slaughter: it lists definite species not to be killed on certain days. Read the edicts closely and a more interesting picture emerges: Ashoka was not decreeing universal vegetarianism; he was regulating and gradually reducing slaughter, particularly in exclusive royal and ritual contexts to be adopted after Vedic sacrificial tradition had already flourished for a thousand years.
If there is one text that should end, once and for all, the claim that classical Hindu law demanded vegetarianism, it is the Manusmriti itself which is back in political verbal warfare summoned by Rahul Gandhi. Compiled in stages roughly between the second century BCE and the third century, it is the most influential of the Dharmashastra law codes. Chapter 5, verses roughly 27 through 56, is a tortured passage. It states that meat obtained through proper rituals, offered to gods and ancestors, and taken without malice, is not sinful: indeed, some verses say refusing meat offered in a shraddha (ancestral rite) is itself a wrong. In the same breath, other verses praise the man who abstains entirely from meat as someone in a higher, more meritorious state. They warn of karmic consequences for those who kill animals for pleasure or in excess. This is not sloppy textual editing; it reflects a genuine, unresolved tension within Brahmanical thought between an older sacrificial worldview that sanctified ritual meat-eating and a newer ascetic ideal, absorbed partly from the shramana movements which hail abstention as spiritually superior. A civilisation capable of producing both a strict Jain monk’s alms bowl and a Charaka Samhita prescription for meat broth will never fit into a single dietary lunch box.
The Mosaic—A Thousand Regional Kitchens
From a North Indian, urban, upper-caste vantage point, it is easy to imagine Hindu India as vegetarian by default. The regional record shows something closer to the opposite: vegetarianism as a strong regional and caste-specific practice within a much larger, older, and more widespread tradition of meat and fish consumption. Bengali Hindu Shaktism—the worship of the Goddess in her many forms, Durga and Kali foremost among them—has historically included conducting bali in temples during Durga Puja and Kali Puja. Kashmiri Pandits, whose ritual purity credentials are beyond dispute by any traditional Hindu measure, have an equally longstanding meat-centred culinary tradition, especially around lamb, documented in their wazwan feast culture. The Gowda Saraswat Brahmins of coastal Karnataka and Goa are fish-eating Brahmins. Coastal Andhra, coastal Karnataka, Kerala, and much of Tamil Nadu carry similarly old traditions of fish and meat consumption across caste lines. Tamil Sangam literature, some of the oldest secular poetry in any Indian language, describes feasts of meat, toddy, and fish as markers of chiefly generosity and hospitality—Purananuru poems celebrate Tamil chieftains precisely for the abundance of meat served at their courts. In contrast, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and the Marwari-Jain merchant belt represent the strongest, most historically continuous vegetarian tradition in India, shaped heavily by the commercial and social influence of Jain and Vaishnav trading communities. This is the demographic and cultural heartland from which the political and administrative class draws its values—for or against, to promote vegetarian as the default option at the national level.
Caste, Purity, and Ambedkar’s Challenge
No honest account of this subject can avoid caste, because dietary purity in India has never been only about animals. BR Ambedkar’s essay collection The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables (1948), makes caste a deliberately provocative historical statement: beef-eating was common even among Brahmins in the Vedic period. He wrote that the gradual adoption of vegetarianism by upper castes was intertwined with the rise of Buddhism and the Brahmanical response to it. The stigmatisation of beef-eating—and of the communities, largely those now identified as Dalits, who continued to eat beef, often out of economic necessity—then became a central marker used to justify their exclusion and untouchability. The sociologist MN Srinivas’ concept of ‘Sanskritisation’ as the process by which lower and middle castes historically sought upward mobility partly by adopting the customs, including vegetarianism and abstention from alcohol, which were associated with Brahmins and other dominant castes. It is the flip side of the same phenomenon: vegetarianism spread partly as an aspirational marker of higher status, not merely as a spontaneous ethical or religious conviction held uniformly across Hindu society. This is why, even today, caste and vegetarianism correlate strongly across Indian survey data: vegetarianism is disproportionately practiced by upper and dominant castes, and meat-eating disproportionately by Dalit, Adivasi, and many OBC communities. This is the substantive core of the Opposition’s charge, that a vegetarian default at government functions or in school meal policy amounts to imposing a specific caste and regional norm under the more comfortable, harder-to-challenge banner of ‘Hindu’ or ‘Indian’ tradition.
The Republic Enshrines an old Ambiguity
Independent India’s Constitution reflects the same unresolved tension. Article 48, a Directive Principle of State Policy, directs the state to “take steps for prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle”. The result has been a patchwork of state-level cow slaughter and beef bans of wildly varying strictness, from near-total bans in Gujarat and Haryana to no restriction in West Bengal, Kerala and much of the Northeast. Kerala’s Left-affiliated Youth Congress and student groups have, at various points, organised public beef-eating festivals explicitly as acts of political protest against such bans, turning the plate itself into a placard. Faced with a debate this loud, the temptation is to look for a tidy resolution: declare one side historically correct and the other a modern distortion. Historically, India has never had one food culture to defend or betray. It has had, for at least two and a half thousand years, several coexisting and often mutually critical food cultures: Brahminical and Charvaka, Bengali Shakta and Gujarati Jain, Tamil Sangam feast and Marwari fast, Dalit subsistence and upper-caste Sanskritisation, all layered on top of one another, sometimes in the same family, often in the same region, and occasionally in the same person across a single lifetime like Gandhi for example.
What has changed is not the coexistence of these traditions but that vegetarianism, historically concentrated among specific North Indian, upper-caste, and mercantile communities to present itself, through the institutions of the state, as the one true religion and the others as departures from Indian tradition. That is a political and administrative choice, dressed in the language of timeless tradition. Vegetarianism, as an ethical and ascetic tradition, carries the genuine moral weight of the ahimsa lineage and increasingly credible environmental arguments. It is now an instrument of caste and regional hegemony when treated as a uniform national practise rather than a personal or community choice. Non-vegetarianism, which is of nutritional value for the poor, is present in some of India’s oldest literary and religious traditions, and has a materialist lineage stretching back before the Common Era must reckon honestly with the ethical weight of animal suffering and the environmental costs of meat production at scale. Neither tradition is more authentically Indian, or more authentically Hindu, than the other. The textual, historical, and demographic record simply does not support that ranking in either direction.
What India’s plate actually shows, set against its own long history, is not a single civilisation betraying its true nature by eating meat, or being corrupted into false purity by rejecting it. India, a genuinely plural civilisation, which is currently arguing, through food, about who gets to hold the pen when the story of ‘authentic India’ is written.