Meat on and off the Royal Menu: The Medieval Delight of the Mind & the Erasure of Meat from Indian Recipe Collections

ABSTRACT

A close study of the twelfth-century Delight of the Mind’s (Mānasollāsa’s) section on cooking called “The Enjoyment of Food” reveals that meat dominated the royal menu in medieval South India. The valuable recipes in this Sanskrit royal encyclopedia’s section of 258 verses on food detail primarily how to prepare wild fish and game, but also meat from tortoise, bandicoot, ram (mutton), other domesticated animals, and an array of delectable foods of the period. Consuming almost all animals that moved in the kingdom formed part of Western Chalukyan emperor Someśvara´s assertion of royal dominion, yet investigation into this recipe collection’s textual history as well as that of other royal recipe collections suggests that the once abundant meat recipes have often been removed from the record, leaving the false impression of more vegetarian dietary practice than really pertained to South Asia’s past. This later “veggie-washing” concerns Hindu ideologies of nonviolence and the disavowal of animal slaughter in ritual sacrifice, both of which originated in Jain and Buddhist ideologies yet have become attached to Hindu ideals of vegetarianism, forming part of a new moral culinary imperative that has advanced over roughly the second millennium of the Common Era. Exploring this topic using the lens of power and politics as they relate to food and dining allows the reader to observe shifts in royal culinary writing as these texts became permeated with religious ideals.

KEYWORDS:

• Medieval India
• cookbooks
• culinary history
• Indian history
• royal power & politics
• meat-eating
• vegetarianism
• Hindu ideology

Introduction: Meat and Royal Prerogative

Recipe for BBQ’d Bandicoot from The Delight of the Mind (Mānasollāsa) 1131 CE

The bandicoot rats living in the fields near the riverbanks that are big, black and well-fed are the variety called mayiga. Put these in boiling water holding them by their tails, then, taking them out of that water, pluck the hairs from them. Cut open their bellies, split open their intestines [to remove the organs], and marinate them in sour ingredients and the saṃbhāra prepared spice mixture [= ginger, etc.] along with salt. Skewering them on sticks, roast them on embers until the skin on the outside becomes crispy from the burning heat. Then sprinkle finely-ground salt, pepper, dried ginger, and cumin on these well-cooked bandicoot rats.¹

Recipe collections from South Asia’s history undeniably contained meat preparations.² Yet, if one examines how these medieval and early modern texts have been copied, compiled, edited, and translated into later manuals and editions, one finds meat staunchly absent from the menu. This article explores the presentation of meat preparation and meat consumption primarily in one medieval royal recipe collection, the twelfth-century Sanskrit Delight of the Mind (Mānasollāsa), and thinks through evidence of the erasure of meat preparation and its consumption from the subsequent textual record of this and other recipe collections. An examination of medieval Indian recipe traditions and their later textual history allows us to gain a better view of historical diets in practice, culinary cultures, dietary ideals, and the developments of modern Hindu ideologies and philosophies surrounding food. Following this recipe trail will require us to consider notions of religious ideology, politics, and power in relation to royalty and sovereignty, at times in the Foucauldian sense, and at other times more recent theorization of hard and soft power in order to better trace this re-fashioning of the culinary past. This whole endeavor will aid our understanding of how and why some content is preserved while other content is cut from recipe collections, revealing this re-fashioning of India’s culinary traditions through its historical textual record.

In terms of ideology, the royal and warrior class (kṣatriya) ideal widely endorsed the consumption of meat, historically and up to the present day, as is evident in text, visual images, and practice. This contrasts with the Brahmanical or Brahmin (priestly and scholarly class, brāhmaṇa) ideal of pure vegetarianism, untainted even by the consumption of chicken eggs. Of course there are exceptions to this normative social order expressed in food – take for example the Sanskrit comedy the Decoration of the Onion (Palãņdumaņdana Prahasana), a seventeenth-century farce whose vegetable and other food characters, all Brahmins, jokingly declare that “fish are the bananas of the sea” for some subsets of regional Brahmins.³ The reader should keep in mind that the ideal does not always play out in practice. Nonetheless, the erasure of meat from historical recipe collections becomes apparent upon careful study of culinary texts from India.

For this study, a close examination of select meat preparations and the meat-eating priorities expressed in the encyclopedic Delight of the Mind (Mānasollāsa) will provide source material for our exploration of royal meat recipes and their erasure from the subsequent textual history. The massive Delight of the Mind covers wide-ranging topics of knowledge, from caring for plants and ruling a kingdom through Roman Empire-style spectacles involving elephant races and fights, to the finer arts of dance, music, singing, and literary recitations. Indeed, no practical or theoretical science falls beyond the scope of this royal composition, completed in 1131 CE by King Someśvara III (r. 1126–1138), whose prosperous reign was indicative of the powerful Western Chalukyan kingdom of Kalyāṇa (973–1200 CE) at its heights. The Western Chalukyan Empire was a major polity with a relatively long reign of stability over a vast area of northern Karnataka and the Deccan. Chalukyan rule was marked by mercantile prosperity, religious plurality, and flourishing artistic, architectural, and literary developments.⁴

This prosperous atmosphere also drove the creation of culinary writing. King Someśvara III produced culinary writing that was instrumental to the development of the Sanskrit culinary sciences (pāka or sūpaśāstra) both as a domain of practical knowledge and as a royal project; indeed, culinary writing was an explicitly royal project. King Someśvara was an influencer and a taste-setter in many areas, but, most valuably for us, established a culinary culture and wrote culinary information steeped in local specificity, as was so much of the scientific knowledge, theory, and rules on statecraft and kingship written into the Delight of the Mind. Within this royal encyclopedia, we find a lovely recipe collection nestled in the third of the encyclopedia’s five books. Called “The Enjoyment of Food” (annabhoga), this culinary “grammar” of its day presents a rich assortment of practical recipes as well as some theory of cooking, e.g. what, how, and with whom the king should eat, what vessels to use, what order dishes should be eaten in, and what the best cuts of meat are from a given animal. The recipe section collects some very familiar foods – dosa and idli – with less expected ones – wild boar dishes and the barbecued bandicoot rats that began this article. Many of the recipes are eminently replicable to this day in modern kitchens. The collection is dominated by meat dishes, with over half of its total verses discussing meat: 131 out of 259 verses describe meat preparations ranging from organ meats and seafood to game birds.⁵ Note that the diversity of meat appearing in this recipe collection includes the whole gamut of wild game, mutton or ram meat (domesticated), wild caught freshwater fish, and the meat of countless other beasts, but does not contain any recipes or culinary advice for cow, water buffalo, or similar bovine meat.⁶

The entire “Enjoyment of Food” is a delight to read, as Someśvara’s writing entertains as well as instructs: in his recipe for cooked tortoise, the king explains that tortoise meat – in case one does not move in royal circles and has not tried it – tastes like cooked plantain.⁷ The modern reader relishes in discovering the medieval Deccan comparand of plantain, familiar to eaters in Someśvara’s day, used as chicken is used to describe every exotic meat served today. While the elite pundit-poets in the king’s circle might have sampled the royal fare of marinated, spiced tortoise, there are other culinary descriptions to intrigue us, some coming from a position of power and authority.⁸ Someśvara’s somewhat eccentric taste preference for the biggest and blackest of barbecued bandicoot rats is not the usual dish of royal refinement today. Consuming bandicoot rats – at least in modern India – is a more common dietary practice among tribal (Adivasi), lower caste, and non-caste members. It is not something one would expect a king or an upper-caste pundit to eat, so only a royal writer very confident and sure of his stature could include such a recipe. Note that Someśvara’s recipe for barbecued bandicoot is the very last recipe included in the section on cooking meat: black bandicoot is his final word on meat-eating.

The remainder of this article will present evidence of meat-eating as a marker of royalty and as a significant priority written into historical culinary manuals. I will illustrate how King Someśvara in particular articulated a hegemonic, imperial culinary philosophy throughout his recipe collection and I will use textual evidence of royal cooking and dining in the twelfth-century Chalukyan palace complex to support this idea of his imperial culinary philosophy.⁹ This will be followed by a discussion of the various ways that meat preparation has been erased from South Asian historical culinary manuals. My evidence will illuminate a deliberate effort to erase carnivorous practices from the historical record, although there were varying motivations for such textual reediting. Evidence of one attempt to erase meat from The Delight of the Mind is echoed in other South Asian recipe collections, suggesting a semi-frequent history-altering priority of the later compilers, editors, and translators over the centuries. Finally, this article will close with a brief discussion of why a king needed to know how to cook in the first place and remind readers of what is lost when meat-cooking and meat-eating are erased from India’s culinary past.

Overall, this article’s close textual study enhances our understanding of India’s culinary past with detailed passages concerning cooking, dining, and recipes translated for the first time, bolstering the historiography of food in premodern Asia along the lines of recent work on Asian food history by Eric Rath and Miranda Brown, for Japan and China respectively.¹⁰ This study is significant as it is one of few studies of precolonial South Asian food history to have appeared in many decades that analyzes premodern Indian texts on cooking in their original language, in contrast with recent South Asian food histories covering the precolonial period that rely on English and secondary sources, summaries, and translations from long ago.¹¹ While the study of South Asian culinary cultures and food history for the colonial and postcolonial periods is becoming a burgeoning field,¹² academic attention for any period prior to the European encounter is largely absent. The early modern Mughal period during and immediately prior to the arrival of larger influxes of Europeans is perhaps the only exception to this gap in the historiography. Divya Narayanan, Neha Vermani, and others have introduced a relative boom of scholarship on Mughal culinary culture using the vast array of Persian language sources.¹³ Their work considers food as a politico-cultural instrument worthy of historical study as well as tracing broad patterns of dietary change over time, much as my present exploration does while utilizing non-Mughal examples for royal Indian culinary cultures. Finally, as my topic concerns meat-eating and the desire to remove meat from the record, I must acknowledge significant prior work on the reality of meat-eating in Indian history. This is best exemplified by the ground-breaking and thoroughly documented work of D. N. Jha, especially his discussion of meat consumption within Hindu or Brahmanical ritual sacrifice and in ritual practice. Edeltraud Harzer has most recently developed such work for the ancient period, primarily using the Hindu epics and Buddhist doctrine for textual support. Both scholars wrote largely on the ancient period prior to the period under study here.¹⁴

Royalty and Meat: World-Possessor Eats All

Carnatic Chili from The Delight of the Mind

You’ll need to boil chunks of good cleaned meat [mutton] cut to the size of big gooseberries in water with ground mustard seed along with dried ginger powder. Then, put this liquid from cooking in an empty pot and marinate the meat in something sour (perhaps tamarind). Take an equal amount of [this boiled spiced] water as the volume of meat pieces and add rock salt into this. Then put in ground fenugreek seeds and a handful of cilantro leaves and remove from the flame. As a variation, heat ghee in a different pot. When the ghee is hot, add garlic, asafetida, and then add the prepared meat into this sthāli pot. Cover it for a little while, watching it carefully, and then remove the cooked dish from the flame. This delicacy [the variation] is known as “puryalā,” “meat fry.”¹⁵

Fifteen meat recipes after this spicy meaty stew, deep in Someśvara’s discussion of meat, we find a recipe for “variety meat sizzlers” (varṇaśuṇṭhaka, meaning various organ meats), essentially pancreas and liver sizzlers. Someśvara puns the various sorts and “colors” of offal and transfers that idea to the verb he uses to communicate that he is the one “describing” the recipe: “One should sprinkle rock salt on them along with very finely ground pepper; this [dish] is called varṇaśuṇṭhaka (meat chunks in various colors), colorfully described by Soma, King of the Earth.”¹⁶ This verse in particular illustrates King Someśvara’s approach to eating and ruling through the term he uses for king or emperor here: bhūbhuj. Conventionally meaning ruler or governor (bhuj) of the earth (bhū), Someśvara plays on the fact that √bhuj means to enjoy, consume, utilize, and exploit, with the first bhū (earth) literally meaning every being that exists. This term and related ones to describe a king were in vogue since the Gupta period for designating the political hierarchy; it was understood that sovereigns “enjoyed” the worldly spheres.¹⁷ When Someśvara says that he consumes and enjoys all that exists, he is also referring to the kingly delights and enjoyments (bhogas) discussed as royal practices of pleasure and luxury throughout his encyclopedic work. It is particular to the station of a king to consume and enjoy everything and to command and possess all, which here includes possessing all worldly knowledge – not least of which are the culinary sciences – as well as possessing and eating all creatures that crawl, swim, or fly on and perhaps beyond the king’s territories.

Someśvara’s repeated use of these terms to refer to himself is deliberate at the same time as effecting the imperial culinary philosophy that he promulgates in both of these compositions: the Delight of the Mind and the mostly prose piece he wrote that describes the centuries of his family’s rule before his arrival to the throne, the Rise of King Vikramāṅka (Vikramāṅkābhyudaya). Culinary philosophies are not necessarily imperial. Sometimes they are religious or soteriological in nature, as Patrick Olivelle has well delineated for Brahmanical India, with social and hierarchical, worldly and otherworldly implications for what one consumes or does not consume (best summarized in the idea “you are what you eat”).¹⁸ Culinary philosophies can even incorporate scientific theories with moral underpinnings, as in the humoral theory widely touted in the āyurvedic system. Culinary philosophies could even be theocratic or republican, depending on the values in place in a given historical context.¹⁹

Imperial Culinary Philosophy

The Description of the Palace Kitchens from The Rise of King Vikramāṅka, also composed by King Someśvara III (author of The Delight of the Mind), telling of his grandfather’s reign and lifetime

Elsewhere, another area [in the palace complex] is equipped with work stations directed by chefs, with attractive roads leading to the markets,²⁰ with work stations filled with individuals skilled in the [whole] range of cooking, equal in skill to the trio [of legendary master chefs] Nala, Bhīma, and Gaurī (= Goddess Parvatī). [The place] is busy with those artistic in arranging food, which comes in five forms: that which is licked, that which is sucked, that which is drunk, that which is chewed or broken into pieces, and that which can be eaten without chewing much.²¹ Here it is busy with those who are puffed up at the height of their careers, producing milk sweets, sweet chilled cream rabri, round sweet modakams, flat sweet cakes, sesame fried cakes, tender flour cakes coated in sugar and ghee, sweet ghee pooris,²² idlis, dosas, sweet ghāris,²³ pooris, channa dal vadas, all assortment of rice dishes, porridges, kitcherees (often sesame rice dishes), milk porridges, and sour mango kadhis.²⁴ It is bustling with those expert in preparing pomegranate juice, Indian gooseberry nectars, tamarind and jujube powders, juices of mango leaf, channa, gooseberry, lime, citron, and fresh ginger. It is bustling with those expert in cooking meat, seafood and fish varieties, varieties like wild boar, tawny deer, ruddy deer, sambar deer, the pointy-horned antelope, hare, porcupine, the Indian hedgehog, monitor lizard, the shaggy-coated rallakā doe, he-goats, the lāvaka quail, partridge, peacock, the vartīra quail, curlews (krauñca), jungle fowl, sparrow, and fish – both shellfish and scale fish – such as the striped rājīva fish, the tiger-faced baghar catfish, the red carp, the pāṭhina catfish, tortoise, and crab, each combined with prepared spice mixtures of turmeric, coriander, asafetida, dried ginger, black peppercorns, and cumin seed, and cooked with onion, … (text continues describing the preparation of fruit dishes, vegetable dishes, seasoned dishes and those fragrant with resins, gums, spices, yogurts, buttermilks, milks, ghees, and pickles).²⁵

The philosophical tenets determining how and what one eats are clearly imperial in Someśvara’s writing. Someśvara commands, possesses, consumes, and enjoys almost everything in his kingdom that moves. For food, he conquers the unconquered, tames the untamed, and eats seemingly all of the creatures that walk, fly, or swim in his territory – all the way down to the black bandicoot. Such consumption is a marked way of showing dominance over all. Someśvara especially prioritizes cooking hunted wild game and wild fish; his writing illustrates in verse and prose what images of hunting parties project about royal power. These are symbolic representations – but also practiced in diet in life – of a king’s prowess and hierarchy over others, communicating his ability to subdue rebellions, the peripheries of his empire, and uncivilized/untamed behavior more generally.²⁶

The Rise of King Vikramāṅka reveals the culinary processing that happened within the palace as well as the consumption and enjoyment of every wild winged, legged, scaled, and shelled beast in the twelfth century. Village animals, including domesticated chicken, domesticated pig, and cattle,²⁷ are not to be consumed because they “belong” and are already part of the kingdom. The king under normal circumstances does not need to consume or exploit the domesticated to display his dominion, whereas a prince or king with an eye to expansion does need to consume, domineer, and control those elements and animals that are outliers – or at least show a display of such consumption. This is the same sort of performance, in this case, both literary and dietary, that a king makes when going on an excursion or hunt in the wilderness, forest, or “foreign” land (araṇya) in order to make evident his control and potential for subduing tribal communities and outsiders beyond his kingdom: in a display of power. This is effected more through show (the hunt) than by action (battle or war).²⁸ This show of power is expressed textually in The Delight of the Mind’s “Enjoyment of Food” in the explanation of how to prepare all sorts of wild beasts: wild boar, deer, flying fowl, roasted tortoise, crab patties, and bandicoot.²⁹ Set within complex recipes detailing preparation, this conspicuous consumption might not seem so conspicuous,³⁰ but the Rise of King Vikramāṅka’s list of animals being prepped in “The Description of the Palace Kitchens” at the start of the present section is undeniably a lexico-literary display of his imperial culinary philosophy, here, expounding expansionist imperial power.

Many of these animals – like the lone-ranger of the forest, the sambar deer – also appear in The Delight of the Mind interspersed between more “civilized” animals like domesticated goat and ram. The mix of wild animals among domesticated makes the The Delight of the Mind’s list less obvious, but the Rise of King Vikramāṅka goes to great lengths to make clear that almost nothing is beyond the reach of the emperor’s mouth or his dominion. The frequent imperial consumption of “non-group members”³¹ and the directly stated preference for the “fringes”³² (big, black bandicoots) suggest a deliberate attempt to expand, consume, and exert power beyond one’s own boundaries, both social and territorial, in terms of kingdom and diet. Someśvara was titularly and literally his self-descriptor: Bhūbhuj, ruler of, consumer of, and enjoyer of the earth, this whole world.

As the passage of food preparation in the palace kitchens illustrates, the royal prerogative to eat anything that moves, especially whatever is beyond the tamed and already controlled confines of the kingdom’s social structure – including domesticated pigs, chickens, and similar – is the directive of a bhūbhuj, a world ruler who consumes and enjoys all that exists on earth.³³ Someśvara’s Rise of King Vikramāṅka admirably demonstrates this in the descriptions of culinary preparations. Someśvara’s attention to detail in cooking preparation as method is also evident in the Rise of King Vikramāṅka’s kitchen description when he discusses how to season meats: by combining them with a saṃbhāra spice mixture³⁴ that is gathered together and made ready long before cooking. Someśvara uses this terminology repeatedly in The Delight of the Mind’s recipe section, and this term is also used in the same sense in other historical South Asian culinary manuals, including in the Sanskrit Nala’s Mirror on Cooking (Nalapākadarpaṇa).

The Erasure of Meat

The fact that over half of The Delight of the Mind’s culinary section concerns meat preparations communicates Someśvara’s priority of expressing dominion over all and the king’s prerogative to consume anything he wishes, especially meat. Lavish details describing countless varieties of meats in The Rise of King Vikramāṅka confirm this hegemonic imperial culinary ideal. Yet this obsessive royal focus on eating animal meat was not without later controversy, as I discuss in this section. One extant manuscript copy of The Delight of the Mind held in a Varanasi collection does not contain the section on preparing meat at all in its much shorter “Enjoyment of Food” section.³⁵ This, I conclude, is a later elision on the part of copyists due to what was perceived as the violent and non-sattvic (= not “pure,” not “good”) nature of meat-eating, hence the desire to remove such elements from the work. However, the meat portion must have always been a significant part of The Delight of the Mind’s culinary section, since all other extant manuscript copies, six in number, do contain the written content on meat dishes. Further, The Delight of the Mind itself provides evidence in its own inner textual coherence: “The Enjoyment of Food” contains recipes for meat dishes that Someśvara also discusses in a different part of the encyclopedia, in the ritual Vāstūpaśamana section that instructs on consecrating a space with the temporary installation of deities. In this religious portion, “meat pieces” (māṃsakhaṇḍaka) along with blood-red yogurt rice or yogurt rice with literal blood should be offered to the female deity who stands in the south-eastern direction, Vidārī, in an offering somewhat akin to appeasing this demoness.³⁶ “The Enjoyment of Meat” describes meat pieces in the recipe that I have called Carnatic chili with almost identical phrasing for “pieces of meat” as in the ritual section (māṃsasya khaṇḍakān). Other meat recipes in “The Enjoyment of Food” include meat pieces (khaṇḍaka) in the dishes’ name, including an upakhaṇḍaka made with dried fatty meat chunks that are later roasted and puffed up on coals (like subcontinental chicharrones). Someśvara declares that these upakhaṇḍaka “are better than any vegetarian fare” one can eat, a subtle critique of vegetarians.³⁷ He also gives a recipe for upakhaṇḍa made from venison (from female deer in this case) cooked in medallions.³⁸ The consistency of dish names and lexical phrasing for meat across sections of the encyclopedia confirms the placement of meat recipes as original to the text and not interpolations.

Someśvara does not include recipes in “The Enjoyment of Food” for every dish offered to deities in the ritual portion of his text.³⁹ But he does refer to a number of other meat dishes served to deities in this ritual manual that appears in an earlier portion of the encyclopedia, including a chunky meat pulao that should be offered to another deity as well as a meaty rice preparation and “bloody” meat rice to be given as bali offering to rākṣasas (demons and semi-divine beings with varying degrees of benevolence or malignance), again showing consistency across the text in recording meat dishes. Most modern temples today in India give bali offerings outside the temple proper using rice with watery vermillion (the sindoor made from turmeric and slaked lime) as a stand-in for blood to propitiate certain deities in the modern, vegetarianized rendering.⁴⁰ It is clear from the numerous meat dishes mentioned in the ritual propitiation section of The Delight of the Mind that a great deal of meat cooking went on in the palace complex, and obviously not only for ferocious deities. While fierce deities needing appeasement might prefer fresh raw blood on their rice, the king preferred his blood cooked, as he instructs in “The Enjoyment of Food” in his recipes for blood sausage and for “black-cooked” mutton, in which the blood drained from the ram after slaughter is saved in a covered pot until use and poured back into another pot that is cooking chunks of meat, well-salted and savored with sour ingredients, likely with the sour acid tenderizing the meat. This blood preparation is cooked all the way through, seasoned with hing (asafetida) and cumin using the technique commonly known as tarka or chownk and then sprinkled with camphor, cardamom, and pepper, all ground, producing what Someśvara calls “a delicacy or specialty called ‘Black-Cooked’ Preparation (kṛṣṇapāka).”⁴¹

With the inclusion of the recipe for “meat pieces” in “The Enjoyment of Food” that corresponds to the dish mentioned in a different portion of this vast encyclopedia, we have no reason to doubt that the meat recipes were not originally part of Someśvara’s writing, especially with the prominence of meat-eating in the royal Hindu diet.⁴² The meat section is not an interpolation but rather an integral part of Someśvara’s culinary sciences. The removal of the meat section from only one of many manuscript copies available to us today reveals the desire of an individual scribe – likely a vegetarian Brahmin himself, as the scribal class was primarily Brahmin and upper caste– to leave the meat portion out. Removing the meat recipes vegetarianizes the text in order to adhere more closely to the values and practices of various Hindu communities of the Common Era, especially the second millennium CE, in line with post-Common Era Brahmanical ideology, when more and more communities adopted a vegetarian or reduced meat diet.⁴³

Cutting Meat Out of the Diet

Other historical South Asian culinary texts reveal evidence of editors erasing meat from the culinary record. I will remark briefly on three other instances where religious stringencies have altered the candid reading of older culinary texts from South Asia, resulting in later editions, compilations, and translations that cut out meat recipes almost entirely and reedit India’s culinary past, although with differing motivations.

An early Sanskrit recipe book roughly contemporaneous with The Delight of the Mind, Nala’s Mirror on Cooking (Nalapākadarpaṇam) likely dates to the twelfth-fifteenth centuries, although the received text as we have it today likely integrates earlier content, especially the theoretical portions (the lists of rules for cooking and common mistakes made by cooks). I have argued that Nala’s Mirror was composed in a royal setting due to its author’s pen name, the subject matter, and intended audience: a royal chef cooks for a king, the book refers repeatedly to serving food for the king, and the writing reads as entertainment in a royal court.⁴⁴ What matters for our examination of removing meat from the historical record is that the author declares in his introduction that one content chapter will cover meat and vegetable dishes, while a close inspection of the recipes in that chapter reveals exclusively vegetable preparations. It might be possible to set out to write a topic and then fail to include it, but it is in a set of five metered verses in the first chapter where we find the table of contents that deliberately describes the whole cookbook (NalaPD vv. 1.28–32). Someone intending to write a vegetarian cookbook would have no need to write a verse recording that meat dishes will follow. As some other content discussed in these verses is also missing from the cookbook, I have concluded that a process of redaction occurred some time after the original composition of Nala’s Mirror on Cooking, with the table of contents written at the earlier time of original composition. The evidence that clinches my argument is the fact that one actually can find meat recipes in this cookbook in chapters other than the meat and vegetable section, suggesting that the meat recipes have only been effectively excised in one cut from their most obvious location – where the author said the meat would be – whereas we find dishes that call for meat in other chapters that have not been declared outright as meat sections, as in the chapter on rice and grain preparations, where we find a wild chicken pulao-type preparation. The removal of meat from Nala’s Mirror on Cooking was virtually complete, except where meat had slipped through less obvious, vegetarian-seeming cracks, “hidden” between recipes for a rice dish aromatized with camphor and musk and served with pieces of papad and another rice preparation with saffron, pandanus blossoms, ginger, onion, coriander, ground cumin, and methi powder. The erasure of meat from Nala’s Mirror was most likely a relatively early process of redaction that revised an even earlier cookbook composed in Sanskrit. With an intended upper-caste audience, this editing process of “cleaning the cookbook up” to historically later vegetarian preferences – moral preferences rather than taste preferences – meant removing the obvious meaty portions; nonetheless, traces of meat still remain: in the middle of verses rather than in declared chapter titles and “hidden” between other vegetarian preparations.

The next historical recipe collection that has deliberately removed meat dishes from the royal record is the Ocean of Shiva’s True Nature (Śivatattvaratnākara), another royal encyclopedia project of compiling practical knowledge that dates ca. 1709, composed by King Basava (r. ca. 1684–1710 CE) for his son. King Basava ruled in the latter period of the Vīraśaiva-practicing Keḷadi kingdom that flourished from roughly 1500 CE to 1763 CE in Karnataka and was eventually absorbed into the Mysore kingdom. This royal house and the Keḷadi kingdom as a whole were publicly pronounced Vīraśaivas, ardent worshippers of Lord Shiva and part of a movement for social reform which had long been a strict vegetarian sect. It is only natural that King Basava the staunch vegetarian, when writing the three cooking and dining portions of his book, utilized the sweet and savory bread and idli recipes from The Delight of the Mind and a wide variety of vegetable preparations from Nala’s Mirror, but cut out the meat recipes from King Someśvara’s “Enjoyment of Food.” It was common for South Asian editors of compilations and omnibus-type digests to reproduce large passages from earlier works while also selectively trimming content to their liking, often to highlight their interpretation of an issue under debate, whether legal, religious, literary, or otherwise.

A final example of an Indian recipe collection that has had its meat removed is Curiosities about Consuming (Bhojanakutūhalam). This vast royal encyclopedia was completed in the last decade of the seventeenth century and focuses entirely on food, dining, and consuming, covering the agricultural output of crops, nutritional benefits of raw materials, cooking, religious duties involving food, ideal times of day and year for eating and what to eat at those times, and the consumption of other forms of consumer culture. Recipes appear scattered amidst a great deal of other content in this work, but they are all found in one general section of the three, warranting my designation as a recipe collection. This work has recently received problematic attention in an English-language publication by an āyurveda-advocating organization in Bangalore (the Centre for Theoretical Foundations [CTF]) funded by the nationalist AYUSH department of the Indian government before AYUSH became its own national ministry. The volume claims to publish a “translation” of Curiosities about Consuming (Bhojanakutūhalam). This modern publication of dubitable quality only addresses Curiosities about Consuming’s āyurvedic content pertaining to the traditional medical tradition, ignoring all other types of information about food. More problematically, only some content from this encyclopedia has been “translated” into English in this modern print book that does not retain the original order of the Sanskrit text. It leaves out entire sections, including all discussions of meat and meat recipes that appear throughout the original text of Curiosities about Consuming.⁴⁵ The CTF’s open claims to “(t)o cater to the need of the Āyurveda fraternity” combined with the fact that the organization that funded this project of the CTF was formulated in part with Hindutva priorities brings into question the polemical way this historical text is being presented to the Indian public today, with a vegetarian vision of the past that is not at all representative of historical reality.⁴⁶ Note that an understanding of the classical āyurveda medical tradition as vegetarian is a modern revision, as tḥe classical texts were replete with meat and alcohol as medical remedies.

Is it problematic that the meat has been cut out of these recipe collections? For a food historian still working to pinpoint an exact century and provenance for Nala’s Mirror on Cooking, the removal of recipes from this collection is a serious loss for our field and one that hinders a more complete understanding of the text, even when we can recover some sense of erased dietary practices and meat preparations through other textual sources. The erasure of meat from the Ocean of Shiva’s True Nature bothers me not at all, since the manuscript record of preexisting texts (like The Delight of the Mind) that King Basava utilized to compile his encyclopedic work allows us a fuller look at dietary practices as they were before this king trimmed and edited which dishes to include according to his taste and religious restrictions, restrictions that were the current, de rigor practices of his day; in other words, he wrote as he ate. Additionally, Basava’s massive editorial project has allowed me to recover other missing recipes from Nala’s Mirror on Cooking through the sections that he did include, including recipes no longer retained in the received text of Nala’s Mirror after the process of redaction it underwent. Basava’s editorial practice (which included trimming the meat recipes) effectively illuminates other historical dishes that had been obscured by copyists. However, the very recent excision of meat from the twenty-first-century edition of portions of Curiosities on Consuming remains a contestable practice, as modern readers of this new English version have no way of knowing that the order of content in the book has changed, nor that content has been removed from the book.

Politics and Power Seen Through Meat: What is Lost When Meat Disappears from the Plate

I started this article with a discussion of how meat-consuming was an act of power and authority among royalty throughout South Asia’s history. Consuming and enjoying others (other animals and non-group members) meant controlling others. The Delight of the Mind provides excellent examples of how this imperial culinary philosophy plays out on the table and is consistent with how this theory and ideology appear—i.e. royalty and high class as consumers – again and again in the literature of South Asia for a period spanning over a thousand years.⁴⁷ Correlative to this is the fact that writing about consuming—particularly writing about consuming meat—bolsters the performance of such acts of power (in the act of eating), with royalty as authors and authorities who control avenues of knowledge. In all these cases, control over who decides what is good to eat and how to prepare it is entirely a royal and courtly project. The question remains: why should a king write about this? Why does a king need to know and instruct on how to remove the hair from a bandicoot or drain the blood from a ram, since he would likely never perform such tasks?

A discussion of Foucauldian notions of knowledge as power and discourses as a way of molding this power is immediately applicable to the medieval South Asian milieu. The Chalukyan king presents himself as controlling knowledge, and this is a presentation of power just as meat in the dining hall, kitchens, and royal recipe collections presents and performs power. But The Delight of the Mind itself provides discussions to inform our readings of power in a section that juxtaposes śastravinoda, entertaining with weapons (for a modern western example, one might think of sparring in fencing), with śāstravinoda,⁴⁸ where being authoritative on all sorts of practical sciences provides pleasure and entertainment in the same way that master chefs on TV and social media channels do today. Someśvara writes these two topics of knowledge, śastravinoda and śāstravinoda, one after the other, in his discussion of leisure and entertaining. Both types of cultural knowledge do entertain, and the entertaining (along with the display of weaponry) allows a leader to wield soft power, with the added benefit of maintaining abilities and skill for war times of hard power.⁴⁹

The realm of soft power aptly summarizes why it matters for the king to control knowledge about fine cooking and about dining with elites; each area is a “potent shaping force of culture and power.”⁵⁰ Entertaining with meals as suggested in “The Enjoyment of Food” is an attractive, persuasive power to be wielded over those in the king’s political and social circle, and not only over the neighboring subservient vassals that appear again and again in The Delight of the Mind’s passages. Royal projects of power and dominion were certainly projected across the dining hall, where it mattered in what order individuals at the court were served, on what sort of serving dishes, and which VIPs were invited to join the king after dinner for drinks and entertaining.⁵¹ Acts of soft power via attraction and persuasion also occurred regularly at the Chalukyan palace dining hall through the placement of individuals according to rank and status⁵² and through acts of consuming certain foods and drinks in certain ways, for example, when and which foods and drinks were consumed at outdoor palace grounds garden parties, where the chef was present to aid the king in describing the menu of dishes to be served. Expressions of soft power were enacted through the consumption of food – including meat – and not only through controlling the knowledge that promulgates these cultural assets.

Which forms of culinary cultures survive over generations? Which forms of a single culinary culture survive on paper or palm leaf? Already by the late medieval period but more obviously in the centuries following, the shift to vegetarianism was observable, as the vegetarian castes were, generally speaking, castes of higher social power.⁵³ The process of choosing recipes to include in collections was selective in terms of what was maintained and what was erased. While the prominence of meat-eating as a kingly performance of power and royal prerogative has been observable throughout the historical period and into the modern era (consider for example the Maratha Thanjavur royal example of the last and present centuries), newer reform Hindu expressions have made vegetarianism the attractive ideal across large swaths of the population, because this dietary ideal has been practiced by socially powerful groups. Examining these cookbooks over time, comparing across recipe collections, and unearthing what has been erased along the way allows us to see that the earlier hegemonic, imperial culinary philosophy gives way to a new moral culinary imperative.

A historical shift in ideals is one thing, but it is altogether another thing when the new Hindu ideal whitewashes the past, for we must take into account what is lost when meat is erased from the culinary record. What is lost is the richness of past culinary cultures that embraced many forms of river fish, shellfish, and exceptional wild exotics such as tortoises and sambar deer.⁵⁴ What is lost is also the truth about what was consumed and continues to be consumed on the subcontinent and on the Deccan as the particular context. The re-writing of South Asia’s culinary past inevitably prioritizes one or a few narratives to be represented. Is the recent CTF’s re-creation of a strictly vegetarian Curiosities about Consuming representative of the historical, political, and religious complexities evident in the culinary manuals themselves, manuals that openly joke about fatty meat crisps being far tastier than any vegetarian fare could be? Of course not.

In the present socio-political moment, it is more pressing than ever to present the meaty priorities underpinning the courtly South Asian recipe manuals which have been getting blotted out of the record. It is precisely meat-eating that is so crucial to the long-running historical project of royal authority, power, and authorship. In Someśvara’s culinary writing, the instructional goals of teaching recipe preparation in The Delight of the Mind are combined with consuming meat as yet one more medium for wielding the persuasive priorities of soft power and communicating the voracious enjoyment of consuming all others, especially those other than his subjects. This hegemonic imperial culinary philosophy uses meat to express what kings at other times express through the royal hunt, displays of spectacle, pageantry, sport, and skill in weaponry (that is, when not directly participating in battle and expansionist plans).

This article has demonstrated that Someśvara’s imperial culinary philosophy reflects his own status as world emperor and world possessor who eats and consumes everything contained in his dominion. Some parts of the encyclopedia suggest a more expansionist culinary philosophy, as when Someśvara “eats at the fringes,” shown in his fondness for barbecued bandicoot. Reading around The Delight of the Mind and the Rise of King Vikramāṅka helps us understand the purposes and priorities behind culinary writing and the lifestyle of royal entertaining. Throughout, we observe that Someśvara presents “The Enjoyment of Food” as royal, meat-eating, tasty, delightful (manohara), and enticing our senses rather than health-correcting. His writing also suggests that possessing this knowledge and sophistication – in both gastronomic habits and culinary skill – was a high-status marker, as was having the time to write and the leisure to enjoy reading an encyclopedia like The Delight of the Mind, with its descriptions of roasted tortoise, marinated mutton, and aromatics-infused, ghee-drenched preparations. The discussion of power is not an aside but rather is central to delineating the prominence of meat and its subsequent erasure from the historical record, as meat-cooking and eating were clearly linked to asserting and maintaining power in this medieval milieu. The power Someśvara wielded was that of scientific authority, author, entertainer, and consumer of meat, all wrapped into flavorful packets in The Delight of the Mind’s recipe collection.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to to thank all the editors of Global Food History for their close reading and keen appraisal of this article, both of which have strengthened the study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Gutiérrez

Andrea Gutiérrez divides her time between food history of South Asia and animal studies for the region. She is presently working on a monograph on royal dining and the pleasures of the kitchen as gleaned from South Asian culinary history, with a focus primarily on Sanskrit recipe collections. She is also actively conducting research and translating for her upcoming project: writing a history of the captive elephant in South Asia from medieval times to the present.

Notes

1. Someśvara, Manasollāsa of Someśvara III, 132.

2. I use the terms India and South Asia interchangeably throughout this article in agreement with common scholarly usage to describe the region for the pre-modern period. South Asia might be preferred today, but India has been the traditional term used in English to describe the whole region and territory which in present-day encompasses India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Myanmar.

3. Composed in the court of Ram Singh in Jaipur. Miśra, Palãņdumaņdana Prahasana.

4. Dikshit, Self-Government in Medieval Karnataka, 183–4 and Eaton et al., Power, Memory, Architecture: 1300–1600, Chapter 1.

5. The meat section runs from v. 3.13.1417 cd to v. 1547, with the whole “Enjoyment of Food” from vv. 1342–1600. Advice and theory do not make up the bulk of the section; recipes do. Theoretical portions interspersed throughout “The Enjoyment of Food” also include information on procuring, processing, and cleaning meats from slaughtered animals, on the good animal meats to eat, and on what one should not eat.

6. For the transgressive consumption of beef for the colonial period and beyond, see Chaudhuri, Freedom and Beef Steaks.

7. The tortoise is roasted intact in the fire, then the legs and head are removed, followed by marinating in citrus, and then another round of cooking and coating in spices, Mānasollāsa, 132, vv. 3.13.1537–38.

8. This recipe collection in question was authored by the king himself, while other collections were composed in royal courts. During this era, court poets (when not the king himself) were often pundits and scholarly figures, but also frequently were military leaders holding positions of great power in the courts. See Gurevitch, “The Uses of Useful Knowledge,” 256–286, for rich information on military leaders-cum-court-composers at the Chalukyan court during the period preceding the writing of The Delight of the Mind.

9. I am indebted to Rachel Laudan’s innovative work, keen observations, and establishment of terms like imperial culinary philosophy for our field.

10. For example, Rath, Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan; and Brown, “Mr. Song’s Cheeses,” 29–42.

11. Laudan, Cuisine and Empire; and Sen, Feasts and Fasts.

12. For one excellent example, see Ray, Culinary Culture in Colonial India. For an overview of recent scholarship on the colonial and post-colonial period, Fischer-Tiné et al., “Introduction: Feeding Bodies, Nurturing Identities,” 107–116.

13. For one of various recent articles on Mughal food history, see Vermani, “From the Cauldrons of History,” 445–465. Narayanan, “Cultures of Food and Gastronomy,” and Narayanan, “What was Mughal Cuisine,” 1–30.

14. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow and Harzer, “What the King Ate,” 45–58. See also the earliest pioneering steps on this topic by Mitra, Beef in Ancient India.

15. This might be familiar to South Indians today as a variation of meaty spicy mustard kuḻampu, a spicy meat stew or fry. The animal for the meat is not specified in this recipe, but the last animal slaughtered for cooking was a ram (male sheep), so I presume this and the following recipes are to be made with mutton. vv. 3.13.1457–61. Someśvara, Mānasollāsa, 124. Puryalā may be a Sanskritized version of Tamil poriyal, a dish that is pan-fried, as we find many other terms in The Delight of the Mind adapted from Tamil and other vernacular languages in use in the region.

16. Someśvara, Mānasollāsa, 128. A translation like “meat of all colors painted by the King … ” transmits the idea better while losing the pun entirely. Saindhava is rock salt in particular (as opposed to sea salt, etc.) due to this salt’s originating in the Sindhu area, famous since early medieval times for salt production and trade in rock salt, with the Salt Range ending near the Sindh river. See, for example, Sharma, Early Medieval Indian Society, 130–131: “Hsüan Tsang states that Sindh abounds in these metals, and also produces a great quantity of salt – white salt, black salt and rock salt. Since salt was a household necessity, salt merchants from Sindh must have played an important part in trade.” citing Si-Yu-Ki, Buddhist Records of the Western World, 272. In this recipe, cleaned two-inch pieces of pancreas and liver are wrapped using cloth in order to tie them on shish-kabob sticks for grilling on burning charcoals. vv. 3.13.1499–1501.

17. Ali, Courtly Culture, 99 and 114. See also Derrett, “Bhū-bharaṇa, Bhū-pālana, Bhū-bhojana,” 108–23, and Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 317–329.

18. See Olivelle, Food for Thought, Olivelle, “Meat-Eaters and Grass-Eaters,” 99–116, and Olivelle, “Abhakṣya and abhojya,” 345–354.

19. Laudan, Cuisine and Empire, 75, 102.

20. Appears later in this same passage but aids contextualization when placed here.

21. i.e., rice. For a discussion of this topic, see Yagi, “A Note on bhojya- and bhakṣya-,” 378.

22. Ghṛtapūra is a separate sweet dish, like a sweetened poori, also appearing in the Pañcatantra and the āyurvedic Suśrutasaṃhitā.

23. Ghari or Surati ghari is a sweet dish still in Gujarati cuisine today, from the region of Surat. Ghari is made of puri batter, milk “mawa,” ghee, and sugar, made into round shapes with sweet filling.

24. Buttermilk dish prepared with vegetables and spices.

25. Vikramāṅkābhyudaya, 14, lines 9–21.

26. For the hunt’s significance for imperial power in later periods, see Buckingham, “Symbolism and Power, 16, Talbot, “Elephants, Hunting and Mughal Service,” 84–6, and Hughes, Animal Kingdoms for the colonial period of the Raj.

27. v. 1.4.45 and 1.4.48ab |Mãnasollãsa of King Someśvara III, 1:5.

28. Buckingham, “Symbolism and Power.” See also George Hart’s discussion of the king as ordering and controlling the disordered natural state of the world, Hart et al., The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom, xviii.

29. vv. 3.13.1341–1600, esp. vv. 1418–1547 for meat preparations. Mānasollāsa, 2:115–136.

30. Of course it is conspicuous in a way that far precedes Verblen’s nineteenth-century theorization of consumption.

31. Using Olivelle’s terminology, which he adopts from Stanley Tambiah, Olivelle, “Food for Thought,” 32, etc.

32. See Olivelle’s discussion of eating and the typical taboo concerning the fringes of Indian society, namely outcastes, tribals, and foreigners, Olivelle, “Food for Thought,” 33.

33. This differs from someone who is just a lokabhuj, a ruler of people.

34. Someśvara tells us that, in the kitchens, the animal meats discussed above (sparrows, quails, hedgehog, porcupine, antelope, deer, and wild boar, to name a few) are “combined with the sambhar spice mixtures of turmeric, coriander, asafetida, dried ginger, black peppercorns, and cumin seed, prepared with onion.” (Vikramāṅkābhyudaya, 14). Someśvara continues the description with other ingredients such as powdered or ground tamarind, and the juices of Indian gooseberry and the traditionally sour pomegranate, etc., used to marinade the meats.

35. The manuscript without the meat portion is a paper manuscript of the third section (prakaraṇa) held in Varanasi, per my communication with Dr. M. A. Jayashree (Sept. 2018), who is preparing a critical edition of The Delight of the Mind. Most other manuscripts of the Delight of the Mind are held in GOML (Chennai) and the vast majority in Sarasvati Mahal Library (Thanjavur).

36. Mānasollāsa, 2:11, v. 108.

37. Esp. vv. 3.13.1513–1515. Mānasollāsa, 2:129: “Having prepared meat pieces with fat on them by cutting them lengthwise, one should moisten them with asafetida water and mix in salt. One should dry those pieces in the shade with the wind (vāyu); after one, two, or three days, they are roasted in a heap of burning charcoals (embers from a fire) until the pieces puff up; tasty to men, these are called upakhaṇḍaka, and are better than any vegetarian fare.”

38. Called cakkalis. v.v. 1516–1517, Mānasollāsa, 2:129.

39. Vegetarian dishes mentioned in the vāstūpaśamana section, but which do not have a recipe explaining these in the “Enjoyment of Food” include: kṛśara (like kitcheree), śaktu, śaṣkulī, lāja, paiṣṭa, mudga odanam (moong bean rice), jaggery apūpa (sweet appam), and ghee rice. On the other hand, Someśvara does supply recipes in the annabhoga for other dishes he directs to be offered in the vāstu section, such as sweet pāyasam (milky grain pudding), polikās (or bolis), and plain rice.

40. With chunky meat rice/pulao mentioned in v. 95, bloody meat rice at vv. 106–7, and curd rice with blood in v. 108, Mānasollāsa, 2:10–11.

41. 3.13.1469–1475, Note that eating cooked blood is also a delicacy in many Catholic areas of Europe (often in blood sausage), as in Latin America and parts of East Asia.

42. For a thorough discussion of royal meat consumption in South Asia for an earlier period than the The Delight of the Mind see Harzer, “What the king ate,” 45–58.

43. See Alsdorf et al., The History of Vegetarianism. This trend started in the second half of the last millennium before the Common Era, with the increased movement toward practicing nonviolence as a tenet of both Buddhism and Jainism as part of the broader shift away from earlier Vedic practices of animal sacrifice. Already vegetarianism and nonviolence toward animals (except in sacrifice, under certain terms) were taken up by Manu (and reiterated from The Laws of Manu in the epic Mahābhārata around the beginning of the Common Era). Vegetarianism took up greater force on the subcontinent in the first millennium of the Common Era, partly with the Vaishnava Bhāgavata Purāṇa encouraging vegetarianism in the latter half of the first millennium and gaining in popularity in following centuries. For the Shaivite side of things, the Vīraśaivite movement adhered to vegetarianism especially from the 11th and 12th centuries. Both the Bhāgavata and Vīraśaiva movements gained in popularity in the centuries that followed, accounting in part for the continued rise in the popularity of vegetarianism’s ideal status and esteem in the region over the long second millennium.

44. Gutiérrez, “The Curious Case of Nala’s Mirror,” 201–9 and Gutiérrez, “A Genre of its Own”.

45. For the received text of the first portion in Sanskrit (the portion containing the recipes), see Bhojanakutūhalam of Raghunãtha Ganeśa Navahasta. For a summary list in English of topics discussed in the first part of the Curiosities about Consuming, see Gode, “A Topical Analysis of the Bhojana-Kutūhala,” 254–263. See also Gutiérrez, “A Genre of its Own”.

46. For the citation from the CTF, see Gangadharan, “Preface” to Bhojanakutūhalaṃ: An Encyclopedic Work, ix. The editor also writes that Curiosities about Consuming is “in accordance with tenets of Āyurveda,” ibid., “Introduction,” xv. Note that classical āyurveda texts are in fact replete with the use of meat and alcohol in treatments and in recipes. Also note other modern-day politically contentious re-writings and communal distortions of India’s past that attempt to erase historical evidence of meat-eating by Hindu communities. For one set of evidence, see the thoroughly documented historical work of Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow, which debunks the communal myth popular today that Hindus never killed cattle or ate beef, instead citing evidence that beef was consumed in the early Indian diet as well as used medically. In the last years of his life, Jha was accompanied by a bodyguard due to having received multiple death threats in relation to writing The Myth of the Holy Cow.

47. Olivelle, “Food for Thought”.

48. v. 4.1.197 and surrounding, Mānasollāsa, 2:171.

49. Nye, The Future of Power, Chapter 4: Soft Power.

50. Pollock, The Language of the Gods, 186, used in reference to The Delight of the Mind’s treatment of art forms, storytelling, and the arts.

51. Vikramāṅkābhyudaya of Someśvara III, 31–32.

52. Mānasollāsa 3.13.1342 cd-1343, 2:115.

53. Smith, “Eaters, Food, & Social Hierarchy in Ancient India,” 177–205. For later shifts to vegetarianism as attempting mobility within one’s caste and class, particularly in the 20^th century, see the work of M. N. Srinivas, particularly his essay “The Cohesive Role of Sanskritization” published as “Sanskritization,” 1–48. Ironically, the process that Srinivas correctly describes is less usefully named “Sanskritization.” In culinary writing, the process occurs not as Sanskritization but as the opposite: Sanskrit texts that support meat-eating have been “Sanskritized” over centuries to have their meat removed from them to give them a better veneer of what is incorrectly believed to have been the Brahmanical ideal(s) of Hinduism. The irony of this term belies the fact that they do not work at all when used to describe practice: Sanskrit texts of many sorts, religious, medical, dramatic, and poetic, endorsed and revealed meat consumption, so “Sanskritizing” them to make them vegetarian is a hopeless way of describing texts already in Sanskrit. I prefer to label these vegetarian ideals imperfectly as new Hindu moral ideals or reform Hindu ideals rather than Sanskritic or Brahmanical.

54. Similar exotics have been embraced in the recently popular trend of foraging and hunting one’s own dinner, in a new neoliberal culinary philosophy where every man and woman is his or her own king or queen, in control of his/her own body as innermost kingdom.