Ashley (extreme left) with friends at the Eat-what-you-like, multiple options dinner hosted by him in Delhi a year ago
On this day, October 14, last year, NP Ashley, a Muslim hosted a 'Pork Dinner' to combat growing religious extremism
Some months ago, Sugathakumari, a Malayalam writer and a supporter of the Hindutva ideology, criticised Beef Festivals which came up protesting against cow-protection groups' deadly misbehaviour, asking a rhetorical question: "Have you ever thought how much provocation it will cause if somebody were to conduct a pork festival to insult Muslims?"
Last November, Hanuman Sena, a hard Hindutva group, did hold a "Pork Festival" in Kozhikode in an unsuccessful attempt to provoke the Beef Festivallers. Having organised a Muslim-hosted pork dinner as a protest-demonstration to the murderous mob of Dadri, these events gave me a chance to think to myself: what are they even trying to do or warn people against? I thought the pork dinner had already happened, though not with their intentions. In fact, if anything, it nullified their very frame.
When Teesta Setalvad asked me to write a piece for Sabrang on the Pork Dinner event on its first anniversary – today, October 14 — I was both hesitant and lost: hesitant because it had already given me a lot of embarrassing public attention from national and international media for what I deemed was a purely personal response to the insufferably inhuman discourses around beef and a vacuum of action. Lost, because I had already said everything in the many interviews and a post-event piece in Huffington Post. What more do I say about that small little staging of the everyday as a political statement? What made that minor step to have the "table-turning" effect that it did?
An Indian Brahmin, who doesn't eat beef serving beef, or an Indian Muslim who believes pork is haraam serving pork to his friends can very well be part of the idea of India. When the choices we are given make us feel like we are in some food Kurukshetra or jihad, embodying a different possibility helps.
Topical sentimentality or sensationalism is as limited and limiting as exceptionalist celebration is. Any step needs to make a point and find a way to be typical — to show some ability to give socio-political insights. Both the event and its reception fell short of that. This write-up is an attempt to make those connections, in retrospect.
Just like the false opposition between Hindu and Muslim was created and propagated in the non-existent Hindi-Urdu language divide, beef-pork divide is ingrained in the debates of the subcontinent. In the colonial text of creating oppositional categories, assigning of communities to Hindu and Muslim categories allowed a certain performance of anti-colonialism in the form of 1857 mutiny (The immediate reason for the mutiny was the rumour of gun powder being made of beef and pork meat, taught the school history texts). Then we got stuck with it, playing it up from time to time.
Had the Hindutvavaadis, who bought into colonial vertical divides, not readily borrowed from this inventory, they wouldn't have brought in pork ever into this debate for it really is a weird short hand: beef means Muslim; pork means anti-Muslim.
Asserting beef-eating right as a citizenship right, questioning who has to do the looking after, skinning when it dies and who has to bury it (like the Dalits of Una have asked — and Jignesh Mewani is taking it forward in one of the most amazing struggles of modern India) as a matter of interrogating the socio-economic content of the symbolicity of beef and criticising in no uncertain terms the acts of gau rakshaks as people who believe in the law of the land, are all steps of political resistance.
But, in addition, an inclusive political ethos also requires positions that waste the charged, antagonistic paradigms is my sense. Rather than answering wrong questions, there is a need to present glimpses of a model as to what kind of a society we envisage. An Indian Brahmin, who doesn't eat beef serving beef, or an Indian Muslim who believes pork is haraam serving pork to his friends can very well be part of the idea of India. What is so new in this? Nothing. But when the choices we are given make us feel like we are in some food Kurukshetra or jihad, embodying a different possibility helps. The actualisation of the promise called India requires inclusivism to be nurtured and there is a culinary angle to it.
Pork dinner is clearly middle class and urban. It can't pretend to be rural or lower class. Just like our communalism, our secularism has also been caste-blind. The frame of this event doesn't address these issues. Just as much as it is important not to universalise the particular, thinking and performing politics in one's givens is also pertinent. In the perpetual war-condition that media and politicians force us to live, scarily and agitatedly in consolidating the existing categories, there is a space outside where there can be negotiations. The saturation of the middle class, urban and communal debates integrates the nation into a debate we could easily do without; it is important to point to this characteristic. Not destroying, but playing off is what we can do with a symbol. Rejecting a set question paper was a beginning point for this.
Any nation requires a people who believe in some kind of shared destiny. In the absence of such entities, we start creating community narratives around losses: the Golden India before the arrival of the British, the Golden Bharat before the arrival of the Muslims and the Christians, the amazing period during which Islam ruled the world or the wonderful heydays of the Roman Empire. To avoid this danger, looking out forward and pointing to what we might envisage is an important part of becoming a people.
Does the gesture have all these at the heart of it? I can't say. But as thoughts from a dead end, and as intended for an inclusivist milieu, I hope it is not clearly out of place to think of such possibilities, post facto.
(Social commentator and dramaturge, NP Ashley teaches English at St. Stephen's College, Delhi)