A new book documents the missing culinary habits of a community

livemint.com:

Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada, the English translation of his 2015 Marathi book, Anna He Apoorna Brahma. This is pertinent in the context of the regular debates that rage in the country about vegetarian and non-vegetarian dietary habits, notions of purity and ethics of food, and the idea of free will. Yet, while discussing the culture of food, we tend to ignore why certain communities eat the way they do—is it out of choice or compulsion? Patole writes that food habits and caste cannot be separated in Indian culture.

“Just as caste is cemented at birth, so is diet," he states. In his book, Patole looks at the primary diet of the erstwhile Mahar and Mang communities—the two main Dalit castes in Maharashtra that suffered under untouchability—and looks at the social hierarchies that informed their food habits. “These castes and food habits have both been neglected," he writes.

Patole, a retired government officer, makes it clear that the purpose of writing the book is not to demote or oppose vegetarianism, or to promote eating of meat. Rather, this is an exercise to document the food culture that he observed while growing up in a village in Osmanabad. “There is a belief that a person is what he eats.

But did you give us an option or a choice to eat what we wanted? We were relegated to the ‘tamsik’ category—our communities had to clear carcasses of dead animals, and eat that flesh," Patole had said in an interview to Lounge in 2021. Patole first thought of writing the book in 2012 at the behest of his socialist friend, Jaydev Dole. “Our food histories don’t find space in the mainstream narrative," he says on the phone.