Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India

Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating
beef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized
identities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu
nationalism has further polarized traditional views: Dalits, Muslims, and Christians
protest threats to their beef-eating heritage while Hindu fundamentalists rally against
those who eat the sacred cow. Yet close observation of what people do and do not eat,
the styles and contexts within which they do so, and the disparities between rhetoric
and everyday action overturns this simplistic binary opposition.
Understanding how a food can be implicated in riots, vigilante attacks, and even
murders demands that we look beyond immediate politics to wider contexts. Drawing
on decades of ethnographic research in South India, James Staples charts how cattle
owners, brokers, butchers, cooks, and occasional beef eaters navigate the
contemporary political and cultural climate. Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian
offers a fine-grained exploration of the current situation, locating it within the wider
anthropology of food and eating in the region and revealing critical aspects of what it is
to be Indian in the twenty-first century.