“Human or not, everyone has their own habits and tastes”: food, identity and difference in Muslim South Asia

That India was experiencing a rise in vigilante-style violence linked to the emotive issues of cow slaughter and meat consumption came to widespread public attention in 2015 with a wave of “beef lynchings.” What one ate – beef or not – was being constructed as a fundamental marker of difference between religious communities, and caste groups too. In the communal discourse, protagonists were undifferentiated and immutable: Hindus and Muslims have always been divided, and perhaps inevitably in conflict, because one worships the cow, while the other eats it. As a challenge to this politicized narrative, my article explores how food has been employed as a marker of identity and difference among South Asian Muslims in the modern period. To access more quotidian experience, the main sources are travel narratives, many of which were written by women, who were more occupied with food’s preparation and serving. These writings reveal the ways in which food was used at different historical moments and locations to differentiate between, not just Hindus and Muslims, but also colonizer and colonized, men and women, old nobilities, a new middle class and “the poor,” and Muslims of different regions and locales. As one woman from Delhi indicated during a debate over ghee aboard a pilgrim ship in the early 1920s: “Human or not, everyone has their own habits and tastes.” In other words, food may be a universal human experience, but it is also a means of differentiating self and other that is contingent on history.