Diet & Divinity

A new type of politics is playing out in India. The politics of ‘prasad’.

Unfolding in the famous Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh and television screens in homes across India is the controversy centred around the Tirupati laddu. The claims are that the laddu has been defiled, that the ghee used to make it has been adulterated, and that traces of animal fats have been found in the ghee. And the controversy rumbled on.

But in West Bengal, the echoes of this controversy have been drowned out by the preparations for Durga Puja, the state’s paramount festival which is incomplete for many without indulging in fish and meat. On Maha Navami, when many in the north don’t eat meat during their fast, many queue for hours in Bengal to have the customary mutton curry. And then, soon after, on Kali Puja, goats will be sacrificed in many parts of the state and the sacrificed animals will be served as “proshadi mangsho” or blessed meat to devotees.

This binary reflects India’s secularism that blends several shades of culture, draws from diverse heritages and is powered by the belief of multiple communities. The ‘prasad’ incident is one of religious beliefs and sentiment – which, while not alien to West Bengal – isn’t the throughline of devotion in the state.

Sacrificing animals as part of religious ritual has long been the norm among Shaktos (devotees of the Mother Goddess or Shakti) in West Bengal. In the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, a five-volume book detailing conversations with the 19th-century seer Ramakrishna, which is considered sacred by millions of devotees today, Ramakrishna refers to eating fish as a form of prasad by Goddess Kali. His disciple, Swami Vivekananda, was a great cook and his specialty was nothing less than meat. Before becoming the ‘Swami’, he had been very fond of mutton cutlets and never missed a chance to have it with his fellow disciples.

Dietary choices don’t reflect religiosity, but they do often form the core of politics. Attempts to polarize religious sentiments is nothing new in India. At an election rally in Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir, Prime Minister Narendra Modi argued that the opposition didn’t care about the sentiments of Hindus since, "in the month of Sawan, they went to the house of a person who was handed a punishment by a court and is on bail and enjoyed mutton,” suggesting that the eating meat during the Holy month displayed a “Mughal mentality.”

But in Bengal, this politics plays out in reverse. In the same election campaign, chief minister Mamata Banerjee said at a public meeting in Jalpaiguri, “If anyone eats fish, even then BJP has a problem. Who are you to decide what we will eat or wear.” In the past, she has made thinly veiled references to the BJP as the “paneer party” and used the saffron party’s alleged intentions of policing diet in West Bengal as another instance of their inability to comprehend the eastern state.

This dichotomy has much to do with how Bengalis view Hinduism. This view was explained by Kshitimohan Sen – a scholar, Sanskrit professor and the grandfather of Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen – when he talked about how cultural diversity and the historical layout of different regions have resulted in Hinduism assimilating to local cultures, and their preferred protein.

The Teli community in West Bengal are fully omnivorous, but the same community in Gujarat don’t eat meat. This has as much to do with region as it does with culture – it isn’t accidental that drier northern states have more vegetarians while coastal states have many more non-vegetarians.

None of this is to say that sentiments hurt by the ‘prasad’ controversy aren’t important, but that the four-thousand-year-old religion of Hinduism isn’t a unitary thing. It is a religion where divinity resides not just in majestic public temples, but also in the small temples tucked away in millions of homes. Devotion can’t just be expressed by dietary restrictions, but also myriad other ways.

And within that diversity there is space for more than one way of believing.

Views expressed are personal