The Invention of Vegetarian India: Marathi Dietary Politics,1900-1960 (360G-Wellcome-218146_Z_19_Z)

What made vegetarianism the dominant trope for understanding India’s diet, given that the majority of Indians are meat-eaters? I address this puzzle through an investigation of popular literature on diet and nutrition published in India between 1900 and 1960. Given the pre-eminence of Western Indian—particularly Marathi—publishing on dietetics, I focus on this region’s publications as a case study to gain insight into the rise and consolidation of the idea of India as ‘naturally’ vegetarian. In particular, I investigate how debates on what constituted a scientific diet for India both informed and were informed by contemporary social and political debates about something apparently unrelated: the Indian caste system. I will ask: to what degree were Indian dietetics’ re-framing of ‘scientific’ and ‘natural’ food practices instrumental in sustaining a caste-based social order? And to what extent did meat, milk, fasting and eating a ‘balanced diet’ come to function as wider discursive technologies of cultural governance? By situating Marathi dietary modernity within the broader context of the global rise of ‘nutrition’, I will explore if, and how, the emergence of nutritionism in India simultaneously made the everyday act of eating into an assertion of social power.