Ethnic and Racial Studies

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Dirty food: racism and casteism in India

Dolly Kikon

To cite this article: Dolly Kikon (2022) Dirty food: racism and casteism in India, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 45:2, 278-297, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2021.1964558
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ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES
2022, VOL. 45, NO. 2, 278–297
https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2021.1964558

Dirty food: racism and casteism in India

Dolly Kikon
School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

ABSTRACT
This article traces how food cultures in India reiterate social hierarches and caste
logics of cleanliness and purity. Religious, intellectual and aesthetics battles about
food preferences underline how the upper caste sensibilities justify and regulate
everyday consumption and dietary practices. An integral part of Brahminical
power is based on regulating and upholding dietary taboos grounded on caste
ideology. Drawing from my ethnographic research on racism, migration,
impunity in India over the last two decades, I examine key debates on racism
and casteism, and illustrate how the rise of food-based discrimination against
migrants from Northeast India is founded on an upper caste practice and logic
of contamination, filth, and hygiene. I offer the concept of ganda (dirty) food
to highlight how casteism and racism are informed by an upper caste
reasoning of superiority, contamination, and privilege in India.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 20 August 2020; Accepted 29 July 2021

KEYWORDS Food; Northeast India; casteism; racism; violence; impunity

Treating caste as a form of race is politically mischievous; what is worse, it is

scientifically nonsensical. (Béteille 2001)

Caste is like racism … (Gidla 2018, 7)

Introduction
This essay is based on my ethnographic work spanning over two decades in
India, and my experiences as a Naga anthropologist from India. For migrants
from Northeast India, racism and casteism marks their lives, like diseased
bodies they are thrown out of accommodations, workplaces, and their lives
reduced to filthy citizens. I was, like many tribal migrants, labelled as dirty
and smelly. As a result, my interest to study food and consumption practices
in India led me to explore themes of transgressions (Kikon 2013), militariza-
tion (Kikon 2015), and racism (Kikon and Karlsson 2019). My quest to

CONTACT Dolly Kikon dolly.kikon@unimelb.edu.au

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDer-
ivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distri-
bution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered,
transformed, or built upon in any way.
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 279

explore the roots of the constant harassment and violence that migrants from
Northeast India face led me to attend to encounters of Dalit experiences. This
essay examines how food and consumption practices in India produce a dis-
tinctive social and political order founded on race and caste hierarchies. This,
in turn, intimately shapes interpersonal relations and lays down moral values
that actively reproduce caste hierarchies and racial prejudices.
Everyday racism for migrants from Northeast India in metropolitan cities
across India is routine. Harassed and assaulted for their east Asian looks
(Kamei 2017), reports and literature on racism in India are focused on experi-
ences of migrants from Northeast India (Golmei 2017) and African countries
(Prabhu 2017). Hate crimes, sexual assault, and stripping are reported regu-
larly (Andre 2016). For Northeast migrants, most of their accounts about
racism and casteism have been centred on food choices such as fermented
beans, plants, fishes, and meat. While these actions can be categorized as
social exchanges and differences about food choices, they signify a pattern
of labelling founded on the caste system. In the last decade, food-based dis-
crimination experienced by migrants from Northeast India has been
addressed in different forums and debates about racism. Yet, there are chal-
lenges of discussing racism in India. The historian Yengkhom Jilangamba
points out , “ … most Indians see racism as a phenomenon that exists in
other countries … [and] see themselves as victims” (Yengkhom 2012). This
means everyday experiences of routine racial profiling, verbal abuse, sexual
assault, physical assault, and caste-based police violence India, according to
Yengkhom is a “never ending nightmare” for many minorities and oppressed
groups, yet they are not framed as incidents of racism and racialization.
Racism against migrants from Northeast India goes beyond the existing
conversations about colourism/dark-skinned discrimination. The attacks on
“black people who live or travel in India”1 have gained attention in the
public sphere and it focused on the experiences of people from Africa
living in India (Roy 2014), but these developments are often denied as
racial violence by authorities in India as racial violence.2 On the one hand,
there is an implicit assumption that racism is part of racial sociality in India.
It seems to imply that the only way the majority of the population in India
will relate to people from different races like migrants from Northeast India
is to call them chinky (derogatory reference to small-eyed people). On the
other hand, there is a culture of impunity because law-enforcing agencies
like the police and government offices reproduce the existing caste- based
discrimination and racism.
Attempts to obliterate racial discrimination institutionalize racism in India
(Ngaihte 2014). It is common to cast aspersions on the character of the
victims and not perpetrators, thereby normalizing racial violence. In addition,
law-enforcing agencies often refuse to register cases against perpetrators and
add immense pressure on victims of racism to withdraw the case. What
280 D. KIKON

constitutes everyday experiences of racism and caste-based discrimination

for migrants from Northeast India? For Lawrence Liang and Golan Naulak
calling someone chinky or any verbal harassment, snideness, and physical
attacks are all acts of racism (Liang and Naulak 2014). Although there is a ten-
dency to erase conversation about racism and play it down by attributing
such practices as stemming from ignorance, the routine racial profiling of
people from Northeast India to deprive them of housing or deny their
access to shops and other services calls for our attention to explore the
relationship between casteism and racism.
I draw upon food and eating practices to show how caste terms, such as
filthy and dirty, references which mark Dalit communities as polluting
bodies, are often applied to communities from Northeast India. Of course,
the Dalit experience is distinct and cannot be compared with encounters
between the Indian state and citizens from Northeast India. In the Northeast
case, their food culture and dietary practice are categorized within a civiliza-
tional framework of savagery that unsettles the national sensory and social
order. On the contrary, irrespective of the caste violence against Dalits, “ …
their Indianness has never been questioned” (Ngaihte 2014, 15). In this
sense, the unclean food from Northeast India is marked as contamination
both at the olfactory and the visual register in the national imagination. In
addition, food cultures also differ given the regional diversity in Dalit and
tribal communities across the country. Yet, what is similar is the persistence
of mainstream caste Indian society to label Dalit lives and food practices
from Northeast India as ganda (dirty). Unlike the vegetarian (to denote the
upper caste Hindus) and non-vegetarian distinctions (to denote other
caste/religious groups) (Hansen 2001; Holwitt 2017), the racism against
people from Northeast India is because of the “smelly” food they cook and
eat. Such violent reactions stem from a conditioned caste knowledge about
sensorial order and aesthetics.
The prejudiced treatment emanating from ignorance of the eclectic food
cultures in Northeast India (Kikon 2013) and the lack of knowledge about the
region often means racism is downplayed (McDuie-Ra 2012a). It seems to
suggest that Indian racist culture is a result of citizens who are unaware
about diversity, while reiterating caste sensibilities about pure and impure
food cultures as the norm. Here, casteism and racism feed off each other.
The disgust towards food that communities from Northeast India consume
signifies how caste authority and privilege reproduces politics of purity and
civic order. For instance, in 2007, the Delhi Police brought out resources
such as booklets and awareness campaigns that highlighted how migrants’
cooking and eating smelly food were disturbing the social order and peace
(Dholabhai 2007). Reinforced as dirty and lacking taste and aesthetics
within caste logic, casteism and racism determines the relationship
between everyday practices of food and consumption. Certain kinds of
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 281

food like beef or fermented fish, considered as nourishment for body and
healthy, are condemned as dirty and impure. For instance, landlords and
neighbours find the food migrants from Northeast cook and eat stinky and
revolting. These everyday racial and casteist regimes of labelling cooking
and eating of migrants from Northeast India illuminate how caste and
racism operates on a foundation of superiority. What is the logic of labelling
food cultures as dirty and in some instances as unsuitable for human con-
sumption? Power dynamics and intellectual reasoning that creates and per-
petuates beliefs of superior and inferior food cultures is founded on caste,
but often presented as a civic nuisance. Thus, the 2007 Delhi police campaign
against fermented food eaten by migrants from Northeast India in New Delhi
became an issue of law and order.
Food is an important optics to understand racism in India (Debbarma
2016). The upper caste food has become a norm even in canteens across insti-
tutes of higher learning like university dining spaces across the country.
Writing about his experience as a graduate student from Northeast India in
Hyderabad, Debbarma describes how food from home (Northeast India)
was cooked and consumed, “hidden, away from public view” (Debbarma
2016, 27). This discrimination against people from Northeast India and dis-
taste for their food cultures, among other things, is founded in India’s militar-
ized relationship with its citizens from Northeast India. The racialized regime
marks them as visible minorities (Baruah 2005) and citizens without an Indian
face. Here, their cultures, including taste and food culture, also represent
something that is foreign and a matter of concern (Wouters and Subba 2013).
Connecting the history of militarization, counter insurgency operations
and impunity in Northeast India highlight how racial profiling and violence
that surface in food-based discrimination accounts are normalized (Kikon
2019). As soldiers posted in Northeast India for counter insurgency operations
return “home” to mainland India (Kikon 2019, 176), the profiling of visual
regime is mapped onto cultural and social practices including food. Thus,
the visual regime is racialized as a project to discipline and create desirable
citizens, while reinforcing a politics of superiority founded on caste and
race even in the dietary culture. By this logic, to bring the tribal communities
from Northeast India within the caste Hindu fold would mean, first and fore-
most, transforming their food choices and eliminating beef, pork, and other
unclean tribal food choices. Therefore, food cultures from Northeast India
not only draw our attention to structures of caste violence and racial discrimi-
nation, but also importantly highlight how militarization has enabled a
superior upper caste authoritarian power to reproduce inequality and impu-
nity. Reiterating Anand Teltumbde, Dalit activist and thinker, this essay out-
lines how state violence (against Dalits) and armed conflict (in Northeast
India) are fitted into a citizenship framework perpetuating racial discrimi-
nation against people from Northeast India (Teltumbde 2009). The following
282 D. KIKON

sections examine how everyday experiences of eating and cooking in con-

temporary India allow us to, “see caste and race” (Teltumbde 2009, 17).
First, I examine key debates equating caste and racial discrimination in
India, drawing on Dalit experiences with marginalization and structural vio-
lence. Particularly focusing on the forms of pollution and filth connected
with consumption, I show how notions of cleanliness are founded on caste
logic. By connecting the experiences of untouchability and Dalit accounts
about cooking and eating, I illustrate the cause of pollution and filth is inher-
ently built in the caste system. This shapes the casteist-racist treatment
accorded to food that migrants from Northeast India cook and eat. The har-
assment, bullying, and race violence experienced by migrants from Northeast
India as communities eating unclean food represents caste logic. “Filthy” food
practices, in that sense, are defined as public nuisance where pollution is
rooted in a “caste culture” that privileges the upper caste practices and sen-
sibilities (Teltumbde 2014, 11). This caste hierarchy, as I illustrate in this essay,
normalizes discriminatory practices and inequalities.
Second, I examine how contamination founded on caste sensibilities are
established as civic concerns. From housing associations, university canteens,
to personal kitchens in neighbourhoods, regulating and cooking and eating is
situated on a dominant caste principle. I propose the term ganda (dirty), a
Hindi term that often categorizes food culture from Northeast India in
urban India, to highlight how food perpetuates racism. Dwelling on Dalit
lived experiences with food and consumption, this essay illustrates how Brah-
minical meanings of impurity and sacredness dictate what clean and unclean
food is. Juxtaposing Brahminical dietary consciousness and Dalit political
voices, I use ganda (dirty) food as a conceptual lens to illustrate the political
and aesthetic debates on casteism and racism. This essay foregrounds eating
cultures and food accounts of hunger, violence, shaming, and everyday har-
assment for eating smelly and filthy food in contemporary India. Ranging
from meat, fish to fermented vegetables and roots, labelling food as ganda,
I assert, originates from dominant caste practices and logic about contami-
nation, filth, and hygiene.

Racism and casteism in India

While the race and caste debate in India is an old one, these positions have
remained, at best, theoretical and intellectual exercises for scholars and gov-
ernment bodies. The opposition against Dalit organizations to include caste
in the agenda at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia and related Intolerance (WCAR) at Durban in South Africa in 2001
reveals the caste mentality of the Indian state (Teltumbde 2009). The basis of
casteism and racism is discrimination that traces the descent of skin colour,
caste categories, and social hierarchies. Calling out the racism and violence
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 283

against people from Northeast India, Teltumbde asserts that racial discrimi-
nation is a violation of human rights, and cannot be labelled as anything
else (Teltumbde 2009).
Yet, the debate about racism and casteism in India following the above-
mentioned UN Conference was different. After Dalit rights groups from
India proposed that caste violence should be recognized as a form of
racism, the government of India and prominent Indian scholars rejected
this comparison. Among other things, those, who critiqued the Dalit assertion
to recognize caste violence as a form of racism, underlined that the concept
of race was European and thus, a foreign concept. By that logic, while caste
was native and could be traced to Indian society, the confusion, eminent
Indian sociologist Béteille (2001) noted, was created by confused colonial
anthropologists in British India. He concludes that these views are now,
“regarded as worthless from the scientific point of view”. The classification
of races in India such as Aryan, Dravidian, and Mongoloid were linguistic or
regional categories and had nothing to do with race. While acknowledging
many forms of discrimination “in the contemporary world”, describing all
such actions, as racial discrimination, according to Béteille, was an irrespon-
sible act. With a stern and uncompromising tone, he equated victims of
racial discrimination as actors who were using race as a weapon to legitimize
or call for violence. Béteille further noted:
We cannot throw out the concept of race by the front door when it is misused
for asserting social superiority and bring it in again through the back door to
misuse it in the cause of the oppressed. The metaphor of race is a dangerous
weapon whether it is used for asserting white supremacy or for making
demands on behalf of disadvantaged groups.

Béteille’s essay highlights how discrimination is a global phenomenon yet

erases assertions that caste violence and racism often feel like one and the
same. His essay is prescriptive and refuses to have a dialogue about the con-
ditions of structural violence and impunity that Dalit right groups have docu-
mented over the decades. Equating caste and race discrimination stems from
“scientifically nonsensical” claims (Béteille 2001). Critiquing Béteille’s position,
sociologist Kannabiran (2001) argued that the 2001 caste and race debate in
India erased the experiences of Dalit community. For Dalit assertions, Kanna-
biran notes, race and racial formations are central. One cannot map Dalit poli-
tics of belonging, resistance, and solidarity by rejecting their oppressive
experiences. The Dalit political experience is ultimately founded on resisting
“all forms of descent based on discrimination and exclusion” and is a transfor-
mative one (Kannabiran 2006, 57).
The 2001 debate on race in India was an intellectual project that erased the
Dalit experiences of caste. Led by “Indian elites and the government” the
experts and intellectuals proposed technical concepts and academic
284 D. KIKON

language from classical texts (Teltumbde 2009, 17). The display of superior
knowledge, the upper caste intellectual articulation, and aesthetics of criti-
cism from Indian intellectuals relegated Dalit people’s experiences of caste
violence as academic themes and theoretical topics open for debate. The
post-Durban race debates in India was a revelation. Disciplines, such as soci-
ology, anthropology, and political science, blurred the lines and aligned with
the bureaucracy and state power to reject the experiences and assertions of
Dalit rights groups (see Yengde, this special issue). Far from decolonizing the
disciplines, these debates exemplified how the academy and experts were
part of a project that aided state power and administration.
As part of the caste-race debate in 2001, sociologist Dipankar Gupta called
our attention to understand politics and identity in India and argued that
caste identities are central to politics and public life in the country. Thus, it
is, “a self-defeating project for any self-respecting activist” to equate caste
and race (Gupta 2001). Since 2001, the important debates about racism in
India have emerged that have shaped conversations about citizenship, mili-
tarization, migration, and justice (Baruah 2005; Thounaojam 2012; Kikon
2015; McDuie-Ra 2015; Debbarma 2016; Bora 2019; Haokip 2020; Rai 2021).
Today, one witnesses race concepts like “racial Indianization” to signify
how race is inherently embedded in the caste system (Das 2014a, 2014b).
Drawing out the similarities between Dalit experiences of casteism and
racism against African Americans in the United States, Gidla (2018, 7) reflects:
In Indian villages and towns, everyone knows everyone else. Each caste has its
own special role and its own place to live. The Brahmins (who perform priestly
functions), the potters, the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the washer people, and
so on – they each have their own separate place to live within the village. The
untouchables, whose special role – whose hereditary duty – is to labor in the
fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are
not allowed to live in the village at all. They must live outside the boundaries
of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to
come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat
sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils. There are thousands
of other such restrictions and indignities that vary from place to place.

These routine acts of caste violence operate on grounds of caste impunity.

Describing the rape culture, sexual violence and brutality that Dalit women
have experienced at the hands of the dominant upper caste men, Geetha
(2013) draws our attention to a culture of caste impunity in India. A culture
where the upper caste perpetrators grant themselves the legal immunity,
“as they attack and destroy dalits and adivasis” (Geetha 2013, 16). Such prac-
tices of caste impunity, according to V. Geetha, reinforce the caste/class
divide, including gender relations. If one recognizes how the caste divide is
perverse in everyday lives of citizens, it means that caste practices essentially
constitute the foundation of Indian culture (Teltumbde 2014). Caste culture,
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 285

in that sense, dictates all conversations and practices. This includes, as Tel-
tumbde highlights, governance matters and national cleanliness drives,
such as Swachh Bharat, the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s mission
for clean India (see Gupta, this special issue). Calling out the caste ethos
that shapes the national culture in India, Teltumbde describes how the
meaning of a civic sense to maintain cleanliness is discriminatory and casteist.
Such national cleanliness drives and civic concerns are established on the
labour of Dalit people. Teltumbde asserts, “India cannot be swachh (clean)
without the caste ethos being completely eradicated” (Teltumbde 2014, 12).
Practices of upper caste purity-pollution regulate labour, movement, and
consumption practices in a caste-ridden society (Guru 2000). It is everyday
activities, highlights Gopal Guru, like going to the market, buying food, and
strolling on the street that reproduces marginalization and makes them
visible in the material realm. Among other factors, the material forms of pol-
lution and filth are marked on the position and labour that Dalit members
perform. Guru notes:
They (Dalits) are scavengers, sweepers, ragpickers, coolies; they do other kinds
of odd jobs which are not only considered to be unimportant, but a sense of
wretchedness and filth based on the notion of purity-pollution is attached to
them (Guru 2000, 113).

The equation of the Dalit body with filth, unclean, and pollution is perva-
sive in upper caste actions and minds. This casteist trope and practice racially
mark people (bodies, labour, and skin) from Northeast India and their food
cultures. Casteism and racism that people from Northeast India suffer
opens out the contours and connections that Dalit voices have raised
about identifying racism founded on the caste system. This is why terms
such as filthy, shitty, and unclean are normalized by houseowners and neigh-
bours to refer to food that migrants from Northeast India cook and eat in
metropolitan cities across India (Kikon 2015).
Unlike Dalit communities in villages and urban cities who are recognized
by their occupation (Guru 2000; Gidla 2018), racial regimes and physical cat-
egories mark the migrants from Northeast India. Their “unIndian looks”
(Wouters and Subba 2013) serve to make them vulnerable targets of everyday
discriminatory practices. Informed by caste and racial reasoning the upper
caste are superior citizens, the caste-race violence is institutionalized.
Racism and casteism in India, in that sense, draws on a divine order of super-
iority. Thus, the upper caste elites, who project themselves as working
towards a casteless society, have the choice to overwrite their upper caste
identities. These privileged professional identities expose their upper caste
privileges. This is not the case for other social groups (Deshpande 2013).
Although Dalit assertions for equating caste discrimination with racism
were rejected and labelled as “nonsensical” (Béteille 2001), the growing
286 D. KIKON

culture of racism and hate crime in India have been brutal. Racial profiling and
raids carried out by members of legislative assembly,3 the police,4 and neigh-
bourhood vigilante groups across metropolitan India have become routine
(Chenoy 2017). Besides experiences of being harassed, assaulted, and
raped, (Kharel 2014), migrants from Northeast India have been humiliated
and discriminated for their food culture. In the following section, I examine
dietary choices and link it to caste logic about contamination to highlight
the pervasive ways racism and casteism is perpetuated every day across
the country.

Ganda (dirty) food

Caste contamination is pervasive (Synnott 1991; Wurgaft 2006). It is perceived
as porous and insidious, and an outstanding example of everyday caste
culture is visible in food and consumption practices. Details of touch, pol-
lution, and filth highlights how an upper caste account of nutrition and
balanced diet is represented as the norm. As food and consumption are
mapped onto principles of a caste order, cooking and eating of lower caste
and communities outside the caste system are labelled as dirty. Given that
food is a tangible material need for human societies, the infrastructure of cas-
teism and racism in categorizing food cultures as clean and dirty plays a
powerful role in establishing order (Appadurai 1981). Smell is central to
many cooking activities across many metropolitan suburbs in India. Masala
and fermented food items have strong smells. Yet, the conflicts over
cooking and eating smelly food are pinned on minority groups like migrants
from Northeast India. This means defining smelly food as dirty is dictated
based on a dominant system of dietary order and taste. This order and restric-
tions on cooking and consumption in India, Appadurai (1981) notes, is
founded on a moral cosmological meaning founded on the Hindu caste
system.
Categorizing food from Northeast India as ganda (dirty) reinforces a major-
itarian food culture in India. Instances of conflict, regarding dirty stinky food,
are visible from the dining halls of hostels in esteemed educational centres,
such as University of Hyderabad, University of Delhi, and the Indian Institutes
of Technology (IIT) across India (Debbarma 2016; Baruah 2020) all the way to
exclusive housing associations strictly for vegetarians and the upper caste
Hindus (Holwitt 2017). However, cooking and eating ganda (dirty) food are
presented as a civic nuisance that disturbs the peace and aesthetics of the
place. The consequences are, as Debbarma (2016) highlights, physically
removing functions of cooking or eating smelly food to maintain the upper
caste status quo and food culture.
Accounts of cooking and eating highlights caste humiliation and violence.
This experience is a collective one, and shows how social hierarchies are
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 287

maintained. Food, according to Guru (2019), plays an important role in produ-

cing cultural identities, particularly the assertions of superior cultures. Thus,
recognizing Dalit and tribal food cultures have become central to activism
on social justice and equality in India. Just like the assertions of tribal food
cultures and histories from Northeast India, the Dalit struggle is also about,
“personal and political dignity” (Rawat and Satyanarayana 2016, 2). For
migrants from Northeast India, their fight against racism is about challenging
the stereotypical figure of the primitive (Baruah 2005), a subject that needs to
be moulded into an ideal citizen. Caste perceptions of food cultures from
Northeast India reinforce the stereotype of the primitive, and inferior race
and reinforce racism and casteism. Hence, everyday activities like cooking
and eating unsettle the values of dominant caste societies and their sensibil-
ities of hygiene and cleanliness.
An integral part of Brahmanical power is based on controlling and defining
what clean and dirty food is. Writing about Dalit food culture in India, Deepak
(2018) highlights how the upper caste households uphold such dietary
taboos and taste as part of culture and tradition, and supress the caste
origins of their dietary culture. Behind the façade and aesthetics of cuisine,
cooking and eating in India is grounded in caste ideology (Dhillon 2014).
Brahmanical food system is created as a civic and cultural norm that corre-
sponds to the social, emotional, and spiritual realm of the country. Yet, this
national dietary consciousness is exclusively for the well-being of the upper
castes (Appadurai 1981). Therefore, food system contributes in producing
the untouchable. Valmiki’s (2003) life reiterates this point. His work, Jhoothan
(leftover) draws our attention to poverty and his experience of violence and
humiliation from the upper caste members of the society. He shows us how
food and consumption highlight collective hunger and humiliation. The
torment and grief of Dalits forced to eat the leftovers of the upper caste
Hindus is an integral part of caste history in India.
Contrary to the representation about Indian cuisine as rich and diverse, an
upper caste culture dominates and dictates food practices. Increasingly, social
exclusions grounded on caste dietary sensibilities influence and define civic
sensibility, social relations, including accommodation choices in urban
India. For instance, housing complexes exclusively for the upper caste
owners, who are “pure” vegetarian, are not new (Holwitt 2017). Food is a
deeply political topic. Critiquing the Bhartiya Janata Party’s election mani-
festo to ban beef in 1996, Illaiah (1996) argue that such food ban campaigns
emerge from a Brahmanical Hindutva consciousness. Underlining the upper
caste logic in regulating food practices, he explains how Dalits and Bahujan
castes, besides Muslims and Christians, do not share this dietary ethos of
Brahmins (Illaiah 1996). However, the 1996 BJP beef ban manifesto was
upheld by the Supreme Court in 2005. Currently, 24 out of 29 states in
India have laws that prohibit cow slaughter (Deshmukh 2019). By 2011, the
288 D. KIKON

sentence for infringing this ban was extended from six months to seven years’
imprisonment (Dutta 2015).
For Illaiah (1996) debates about homogenizing Hindu culture is, among
other things, founded on homogenizing dietary practices. This includes
banning beef. The upper caste members not only prohibit beef as food for
themselves but also impose this prohibition on other castes and religious
communities. While the realm of purity and sacredness is defined and prac-
tised by the upper caste groups, the responsibility to maintain purity is rele-
gated to the lower caste groups like the Dalits. The upper caste Hindus seek
the services5 of Dalits to dispose garbage and carcasses of cattle and humans
(Deshmukh 2019), thereby normalizing categories like unclean and filthy, and
assigning them to labour, food, and communities. Such practices reify the
upper caste culture in India (Teltumbde 2014).
The emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene is a significant in relation to food
culture from Northeast India. In recent years, the widespread concerns about
clean and unclean meat have led to new penalties. In 2020, the dog meat ban
in Nagaland, a tribal hill state in Northeast India, started a national debate
about what constitutes clean and safe food. In this case, statutes like the
Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) Regulation 2011, the
Indian Penal Code (1860), and the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals Act
(1960) were invoked simultaneously to define edible food. It meant classify-
ing some animals as filthy and/or ridden with diseases making them unfit
for human consumption, as opposed to the ones that are clean and
justified as food (Kamei 2020; Kikon 2020b; Sanghvi 2020; Wijunamai 2020).
The dog meat ban ticked all the boxes for civic concerns. It was an unclean
meat of an animal that the nation cared and loved. It was a win-win case.
Another example as I noted earlier is the 2007 Delhi Police booklet: A text-
book with racist guidelines for migrants from Northeast India living in metro-
politan cities. Among other pieces of advice, the focus on cooking and eating
“smelly food without creating ruckus in neighbourhood” stood out (Dholab-
hai 2007). Scholars working on everyday racism and experiences of Northeast
migrants have highlighted the racist tone of this booklet (McDuie-Ra 2012b;
Kikon 2015).
Racism, food, and experiences of Northeast migrants have also become
part of mainstream cinema in India. So widespread is the connection of
smelly food with people from Northeast India that the 2020 film Axone (Fer-
mented soyabeans) captured the anxieties of migrants from the region living
in Delhi. This film drew in conversations about food, racism, casteism, and citi-
zenship (Sharma 2020; Deka 2020; Cornelious 2020; Rajpal 2020; Kikon 2020).
Food from Northeast India is compared to the smell of septic tank and shit.
The reference is widespread and its association with filth reflects a caste sen-
sibility. This sense of superiority stands parallel to the attributes rendered to
Dalit people and lives that are, in Teltumbde’s words, “destined to remain
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 289

unclean” (2014, 12). Racism and casteism thrives in mundane spaces such as
the classrooms, graduate hostels, shopping malls, and neighbourhoods.
Writing about everyday racism in India’s capital New Delhi, Baruah (2020)
describes how one has to learn the “risk/reward in reacting to them” to the
violence and dehumanizing aspects of racism. Everyday racism and casteism
in a graduate hostel at the University of Delhi, according to Baruah, is that
moment, “when your mainlander seniors are loudly complaining about the
‘stinky food’ that your Manipuri and Naga seniors have cooked/brought to
the dining hall” (Baruah 2020).
The origin of such repugnance and disgust emerges from the “social psy-
chology of the Hindus” (Ambedkar 2016, 144). Pollution, Ambedkar notes, is
so embedded in the Hindu caste system that the “Shudras” were prohibited
from walking on the street where a Brahmin walked or entered a market. The
Dalit body was a “pollution bearing presence” (Ambedkar 2016, 142). Among
other things, Ambedkar underlines how food practices, such as cooking and
eating, played an integral role in retaining the purity and distinction of the
Hindu social organization (Ambedkar 2016). Therefore, routine food
shaming in hostel dining rooms at Delhi University or across campuses of
the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) reveals a thriving caste culture.
Perception is the first step towards forming beliefs about food cultures.
Guru and Sarukkai (2019) describes how the formation of perceptions
informs and shapes our social world and sense of belongingness in society.
By underlining the social as an “act of sensing” experiences around us, they
caution us against the pervasiveness of universalizing and homogenizing
what constitutes the social. For Guru and Sarukkai, there are multiple
socials, and they are particular and specific to communities. An upper caste
social world is exclusive. It keeps out Dalits, tribal communities, and those
outside the caste system. This underlines how the corporeal body is not an
individual but part of the collective social structure (Guru and Sarukkai
2019). Thus, the perceptions and reaction of disgust to stinky food is both
a social reaction (of the upper caste group who controls and regulates
order) and a social experience (of Dalits and tribal communities who are
humiliated).
Dwelling on the perception about food practices, it is apparent how
different life experiences, often contradictory, take place simultaneously.
According to Rosalind Morris, it can be an action or a reaction which gives
rise to a perception. These are feelings and may range from alienation,
anger, repugnance, and humiliation. In this sense, Morris notes, “simultaneity
always seems linked to moral or political” structures and practices in one’s life
(Kentridge and Morris 2014, 15). The perception of food culture from North-
east India as ganda (dirty) shapes a politics of the present and the future sim-
ultaneously. First, there is a social conditioning about clean and dirty food
that is elevated as knowledge. Second, there is an erasure of conversations
290 D. KIKON

about taste as consumers of dirty food are condemned as unclean. Under

such circumstances, how do tribal and Dalit communities adopt cooking
and eating practices to explore politics of belonging and justice?
It is a political act when one adopts food as a lens to engage with caste
hierarches and norms. It is a moment when new sites of resistance emerge.
Memories of growing up, family connections, gender relations, and everyday
experiences are reframed as part of a larger social world. These are no longer
individual accounts, but events that trace collective histories about how
certain caste practices are allowed to thrive. Therefore, the routine food
shaming, which appears as an individual reaction to certain food, is drawn
from the proscriptions of a society that constantly maps food and taste of
other societies on a caste register. Thus, the emphasis that food eaten by
people from Northeast India is stinky invites us to focus on privileging the
senses to perform (the visible actions of disgust) caste hierarchies. Such
moments offer us an important insight into how caste attitudes of ganda
(dirty) influence and legitimize racism and casteism.
There is a collective ambivalence among the mainstream upper caste com-
munities when it comes to eclectic food practices. Uppuleti (2020) describes
her memories about eating Usillu (termites) with her grandfather, and
growing up in Telangana. She centres food and consumption to highlight
her lived experiences as a member of a Dalit community in the state. Dalit
cuisine and the erasure of Dalit food from the public is glaring. Uppuleti’s
essay opens up a world of conviviality and the flavours integral in Dalit,
Bahujan, and tribal worlds that is otherwise relegated as ganda (dirty) food
within a caste framework. Uppuleti describes the roasted winged termites
as her favourite monsoon snack. Comparing the texture to goat and beef
fat, she recalls how her grandfather and father both relished roasted termites.
The taste is not limited as an individual memory. She connects it as an impor-
tant collective history of her family and the Madiga people, a leather tanning
animal scavenging Dalit community. Uppuleti reminisces how roasted ter-
mites are a delicacy, yet remain invisible because taste and food are
derived from an upper caste food culture in India (Uppuleti 2020).
Linking accounts of food and repugnance highlights how hierarches and
norms about taste and disgust come about. Food across Northeast India is
significantly diverse and seasonal; however, dominant food taboo culture
erases a cosmology of eating cultures. Writing about the seasons and the eco-
tonal world along the foothills of Assam and Nagaland in Northeast India in
2009–2010, I experienced similar pollution and dietary restrictions that
existed in the upper caste Hindu households and Muslim families. The
taboo about eating beef and pork or maintaining a strict vegetarian diet
was palpable. Yet, the everyday lives of the tribal communities living in the
area contrasted with these dominant food taboos and transgressions. For
instance, during the summer it was red ant eggs, monsoons were time to
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 291

enjoy frog caught from the paddy fields, and by the winter it was time to
relish the crabs and snails as streams and ponds dried up. The abundance
of these food items often, “occupied a position of ambiguity in the existing
dietary proscriptions” (Kikon 2013).
Where do aquatic insects/snails, bees, red ants, silkworms, woodworms,
field rats, and edible insects stand in the food hierarchy? Dalit food culture,
like many tribal cuisines from Northeast India, includes Panje (chicken feet),
innards of animals and bee larvae. Food writer Deepak (2018) describes
how some Dalits continue to stand up for their traditional food cultures,
but many have also become vegetarian or given up eating beef in fear of
being attacked by right-wing Hindu vigilantes known as gau rakshaks (protec-
tor of cows). Artist Rajyashri Goody’s project to document Dalit food culture
encompasses the politics of resistance and calling out the violence of the
caste system that dehumanizes Dalit people.6
Conflicts and battles over food practices highlight how concerns about
dietary choices remain deeply political (Niyogi 2019). In 2012, violence
erupted after Dalit students organized a beef festival in Hyderabad to cele-
brate their food culture and protest the domination of Brahmanical food
culture (Rao 2012). In 2017, two constables from the Nagaland Armed
Police were interrogated by the police after a complaint about “foul smell”
from their kitchen.7 The caste reaction against dirty food is a constant
anxiety.8 The boundary between vegetarians as the upper caste Hindus
and non-vegetarians belonging to lower caste/Muslim/Christian commu-
nities is a simplistic distinction. Yet, recognizing vegetarianism as a practice
associated with the upper caste practice is to recognize how smell is
central in shaping, food-based exclusion and caste discrimination (Holwitt
2017). Vegetarianism is a dominant marker for the upper caste housing
associations, which is masked in a language of taste and aesthetics (Bray
2005). Urban developers and real estate agents in Mumbai, who sell gated
apartments to the vegetarian upper caste Hindu Marwari and Guajarati Jain
communities, are aware that their clients, “would not tolerate the smell of
non-vegetarian food in their building” (Holwitt 2017, 338). This feature is
also visible in metropolitan cities like Chennai (Menon 2012). Even food
odour is a threat to caste purity. This element of smell represents a
defining aspect of racist and casteist practice. While there is silence about
smell as an element that organizes and perpetuates racism and casteism,
lived reality underlines how the repugnancy of dirty food is even inscribed
and, “caste into the built environment” (Lee 2017, 473).
Migrants from Northeast India face difficulties in securing accommodation
due to their food culture. They also experience racism and food-based dis-
crimination on daily basis. The relation between food and community,
viewed though the caste logic dirty food, becomes an entry point to chal-
lenge the upper caste logic and sensibilities. If delicacies such as silkworms,
292 D. KIKON

red ants, and winged termites are considered as dirty food, fermented food
such as herbs, vegetables, and legumes are described as stinky. The upper
caste anxiety of filthy bodies (Dalits) and dirty food (from Northeast India)
is deployed to oppress marginalized communities and diverse food cultures.
The secular and civic regulation to clean the nation rests on a caste philos-
ophy to govern dirty and inferior citizens. It is Brahminical logic that
defines the boundaries of order, civility, cleanliness, and hygiene.

Conclusion
Caste hierarchies inform taste, spatial order, and produce everyday racism.
Tracing racism and casteism debates in India, I focused on the Brahmanical
ideology of purity and filth. Informed by a caste sensibility, the essay exam-
ined the domination of the upper caste culture that pervades across dwell-
ings, dietary cultures, and labour practices. Thus, the reference of what
constitutes cleanliness and hygiene is manifested in everyday discrimination
that migrants from Northeast India experience in metropolitan cities. Their
experiences of humiliation and violence, as I elaborated in this essay, have
led to social movements for equality and justice. It has also led to important
conversations about food cultures, belongingness, and political represen-
tation. Similar to Dalit assertions about embracing collective political experi-
ences as quest for resisting caste violence, migrants’ experiences from
Northeast India and their experiences of discrimination have shaped collec-
tive understandings of racism and casteism.
I offered the concept of ganda (dirty) food to illustrate how everyday civic
concerns are embedded in a caste logic of order and purity. Racism and cas-
teism experienced by migrants from Northeast India, as I elaborated in this
essay, highlights how caste purity perpetuates racism. Food prepared with
ingredients from their homelands in Northeast India, such as fermented
bamboo shoot, soybeans, herbs, and plants, is perceived as polluting the
upper caste spaces. The racism that migrants from Northeast India experience
due to their dietary choices offers us layered understandings about racism as
part of the caste system in contemporary India. This essay highlights how
everyday racism and casteism is established on caste impunity. To challenge
the caste and superior race logic in India, as I have elaborated in this essay,
also means interrogating the caste food hierarchy and meanings about
purity. The representation of diversity is incomplete when a large section
of its citizens is condemned and abused for their food culture. Who has the
monopoly of banning food or defining what is edible? This essay shows
that the power of dictating what citizens should eat rests on an upper
caste logic about food cultures and sensory regimes. The silkworms,
winged termites, river snails, and fermented bambooshoot on our plates
 ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 293

calls us to understand, engage, and fight against everyday racism and caste-
ism in contemporary India.

Notes
1. Refer to https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47042681.
2. In 2016, a female student from Tanzania was stripped and beaten up along with
her friends in the Indian city of Bangalore. The police chief described the inci-
dent as, “a case of road rage and nothing to do with racism.” In contrast, the
Tanzanian government noted that the “student was attacked because of her
race and colour.” In 2017, a Sudanese student was beaten up by a mob in
Noida, a suburb in Delhi, on allegations of practising cannibalism. The Indian
Ministry of External Affairs refused to view the case as racist in nature, and an
Indian politician from the Bhartiya Janata Party noted that Indians could not
be racist because “we” were living with “the entire south … Tamil, Kerala, Kar-
nataka and Andhra”, to suggest that the Southern region of the country were
inhabited by people of “darker complexions” (Prabhu 2017). Alluding to the
racial features based on colour to mark the southern region of India is not
new though. Often, this has been highlighted to amplify the diversity within
the country and how its citizens react to, what Hardgrave refers to as “racial var-
ieties” in India (Hardgrave 1965, 3).
3. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Somnath-Bharti-led-the-group-
that-attacked-us-Ugandan-woman-says/articleshow/29189160.cms.
4. https://hrln.org/litigation/delhi-high-court-tells-delhi-police-to-stop-unnece
ssary-harassment-and-unwarranted-interrogations-in-wake-of-tibetan-prote
sts-government-assures-immediate-release-of-all-arrested-detained-tibetans.
5. Calling for the political and economic emancipation of the “Untouchables”
(Shudras), Ambedkar writes that as long as the caste system remains a funda-
mental foundation of Hindu civilisation, the Shudras will be relegated to
render service and be subservient to the upper castes (Ambedkar 2016). This
subservience and oppression is reinforced by the upper caste groups who
justify how the caste system is based on a division of labour (Teltumbde 2014).
6. For Goody, Dalit literature contains vivid and complex description of food. It is
often not about recipes, but “hunger, eating, cooking, joy and trauma” and
encompass the everyday struggle and resistance in the caste dynamics of the
country. See, http://www.rajyashrigoody.com/eat-with-great-delight/. From
various literary descriptions, she has created a booklet of recipes. Through
her works, she challenges the propagation of Indian food as largely vegetarian,
with a few references to chicken and mutton. Yet, many Dalits also feel anxious
of cooking and eating their traditional food or beef since these food are labelled
as impure and unclean (Deepak 2018). This shame and humiliation is visible in
Valmiki’s (2003) autobiography, Joothan and the anthology of Marathi Dalit Lit-
erature, Poisoned Bread (Dangle 1992). Also see, https://www.
studiointernational.com/index.php/rajyashri-goody-interview-eat-with-great-
delight-dalit-caste-system.
7. https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/nagaland-police-constables-cat-
meat-delhi-animal-board-4458761/.
8. In the politics of caste homogeneity and the country’s secular ideology (Illaiah
1996), there are meat distinctively marked as unclean and banned from
294 D. KIKON

consumption. Hindu caste superiority is maintained by observing a food hierar-

chy between vegetarian Brahmins and the other lower cases. Chigateri (2008)
shows us how Dalits and Muslims have been lynched for allegedly slaughtering
cows and trading beef. Chigateri further notes that the strongest critiques of
caste food practices have come from Dalit communities. Calling it a form of
injustice grounded in the political-economic societal structure, Chigateri
(2008) argues that ban of beef consumption in India is a dominant-caste
Hindu ideology.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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