Food for Dissent, Resistance & Solidarity
Farah Yameen looks at the symbolic role food has played in protests across the Indian subcontinent over the last several decades.
When the farmer protests against the Farm Bills broke in September this year, Manjeet Singh was busy touring the villages near Moga collecting sugar and grain. It is exactly what he had done earlier this year when the anti-CAA protests in Delhi occupied the city streets for weeks. When a protest breaks out, Manjeet takes his megaphone-fitted vehicle, mobilising sustenance for long sit-ins. It is often through these mobile megaphones that villages are alerted to the rise of a resistance. Manjeet is not the first of his kind, nor the only one. Almost a century ago, the Akalis of Punjab famously traveled to the kingdom of Travancore (now, Kerala) to set up a community kitchen for the Vaikom Satyagraha (1924-25) against untouchability. Manjeet and others like him carry whatever is collected through community, to keep a protest fed. To him, the ideology of the protest is not as important as the principle of community service. ‘If they are sitting there for so long, who will feed them?’ A protest must be fed, and the protest against the farm bills has foregrounded food as both a site and modus of resistance.
‘It is strange that you ask about food. When protesting, we often forgot about eating unless reminded.’ Leonard Dickens, who recalls the protests at Hyderabad Central University against the caste oppression that led to the death of Rohith Vemula, does not remember much eating at the site of protest itself. He does not think this unmindfulness of food is glorious or heroic. Narratives of valiant protests in which the banality of the quotidian are forgotten often obfuscate the damage they do to the bodies of dissenters. Now, when his students join protests he advises them to be fed and rested.
When he was a student himself, his reprieve was evening cook-ins after long days of dharnas and sloganeering. The food of choice, says Simi, who frequently hosted these gatherings, was meat. Most boarding students could not afford to cook non-vegetarian food on the hostel premises. On campus the flesh of certain animals was a touchy subject. Tempers frayed, solidarities were built, and long arguments of secularism ensued when banned flesh was suggested as a possible offering at events. At Simi’s home, however, cooking this meat was comfort, and recognition that one was safe and in the presence of friends.
Protesters in Grande Prairie raising awareness for farmers in India currently standing off with the government over changes to agriculture legislation | Image by John Watson
In public, eating the same meat is a more deliberate decision, a protest against targeted food policing, and an affirmation of community identity. Reporting about community kitchens at Shaheen Bagh inevitably zoomed in on the biryani calling on its associative narratives as ‘Muslim food’ and therefore apt for a ‘Muslim’ protest. Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations in university campuses deliberately serve meat that has been actively targeted by the state, as an expression of dissent. In smaller districts and tehseels, eating while dissenting is less spectacle, more expedience, forethought, and a cautious act of building trust.
In 1978, Rajinder Ravi accompanied other members of the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsha Vahini to launch the Bodh Gaya Bhumi Mukti Andolan against the local mahant’s control over large tracts of land on which Dalit labourers toiled with little compensation. The city-dwelling men and women of the Vahini were greeted with well-warranted suspicion among the landless labourers and small farmers of Bodh Gaya. To build trust the Vahini chose the approach of ‘de-classing and de-casteing’ themselves.
The landless labourers, and the marginal landholders of Bodh Gaya accepted their work and let them into their homes, sharing their bedding and floors with them. In the season of rice, they shared their scanty supply of rice. To supplement the rice, they would pick whatever edibles greens were growing by the wayside, for vegetables. In the harvest season when the mice emerged, the locals would eat them roasted over fire and seasoned with salt and chillies. Ravi was among those who ate the mice with his hosts as an act of ‘de-casteing’. In heavy rains, there were similarly roasted fish, snails, and crabs from ponds and puddles. If there was dal, it would be cooked in an abundance of water so it sufficed for the family and the members of the Vahini they were hosting. Through nearly nine years of this movement, the villagers of Bodh Gaya shared their meals and hunger with the members of the Vahini until the land of the mahant was finally seized and allocated to those who worked on it.
There is context to this commitment to assimilation. Arkotong Longkumer writes of the ‘urban legend’ among RSS workers, of a young Gujarati pracharak who was served a jungle rat for dinner in Arunachal Pradesh. The pracharak could not refuse, for refusal would undermine the Sangh’s ‘mission of cultural adaptability’. His hosts were pleased as he had hoped they would be. Much to his dismay, however, he was served jungle rat every single day of the week, a cardinal violation of his caste’s rules. Longkumer also quotes an unnamed journalist from Shillong, who was told by the then Governor of Meghalaya, Padmanabha Krishna Acharya, that he ate beef to assimilate with the tribals in Meghalaya. The moralities that emerge from the collision of social orders that do not share a table, disrupt, at least in the moment, the obsession of maintaining caste and religious purity in favour of the movement.
When Yogini moved to Nandurbar to join the Narmada Bachao Andolan, she encountered the same dynamics playing out between the tribals of the villages in Nandurabar and the caste Hindus of Nimar in Southern Madhya Pradesh. The two met when the dam devastated their lands. The people of Nimar were vegetarian, and unused to sitting out on the streets and eating. The ways of the protest were new to them. The Nandurbaris, on the other hand, were both foragers and cultivators. They ate animals, food that grew in the forests, and also that which they grew themselves. But for the dam, considerations of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ would never have allowed them to eat together.
When the protests began, the people of Nimar would volunteer to cook, so they were sure of the ‘purity’ of their food. But in rides to protest sites, or away from home in Nandurbar, the resistance work made their caste prejudices untenable. On marches, they learnt to share jowar, bajra and sweet wheat rotis with the Nundarbaris. In Nundarbar they ate the rice, dal, and the khichri made for them by the Nandurbaris. In cities, these allies in dissent served together at gurudwaras and ate at community kitchens serviced by Sikhs and Muslims. The differentials of caste were not erased through the movement. Instead, as in all things humans, compromises were found, and affections that grew from familiarity and sharing a space, a pain and a roti allowed unusual collaborations.
Millet rotis of jowar, bajra, kodo, and even wheat kneaded with fat and jaggery, accompany long marches in protests across the country for they are easy to carry, slow to perish and amenable to sharing. The Nandurbaris learnt to travel with rotis that could be shared should the next person be unable to carry one, or run out. Gopi Krishna, who identifies as a nomad and is on the move for weeks, both on account of his identity and in solidarity with various causes, says that these sturdy rotis can be carried as a plate with a piquant chutney in the centre, while a person walks and eats. They last for days, even up to a week, if they are not devoured before. Of course, carrying your own food and other provisions is also insurance against ‘pollution’ by the other. But commensal moralities rarely survive in sustained protests. To feed another person, and to share a meal is an act of social intimacy that, especially in cultures like India, creates affinities and obligations born out of a sense of indebtedness to the hearth and hand that feeds. Words like namak halal and namak haram refer to this understanding, that one is indebted to the salt, a metonymy for all food.
The farmers who fed the police officers on the Haryana-Delhi border even as news of lathi charges and tear-gas shelling on farmer processions broke headlines, invoked this same cultural wisdom. A young farmer proudly declared that this was the form of dissent they had inherited from the legendary Bhai Kanhaiyya, disciple of Guru Tegh Bahadur who fought the Mughals, and also fed them.* In refusing the food offered by the government at meetings, the union leaders refused to be indebted to those who oppressed them.
As symbolic acts such as these become pivotal to reporting, the optics of feeding and eating in protests become more deliberate. Solidarities are built not merely in the act of feeding and being fed but in the circulation of visuals of allyship through food. Trucks come down from Punjab to serve langar to anti-CAA protestors in Delhi. Photographs of skullcap-bearing Muslim men serving at the farmer protests signal that the debt has not been forgotten. Food is cooked, served, shared, refused, and photographed as an act of solidarity, and, increasingly, as an open declaration of alliance with the dissident.
(*As told to the Media Vigil team)
Banner image credit Manish Swarup.
Farah Yameen is a public historian with a special interest in urban foodways and food history.
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