Over the past few weeks, the sight of Ashokans standing in long queues for a cup of coffee from Blue Tokai has become fairly regular. In place of the cheap white cups from VOW cafe (usually seen in dustbins after they had been used), fancy sea-blue cups accumulate on the tables of the noisy Library Cafe. On the other end of the campus, one can see cardboard boxes with leftover pizza from Domino’s overflowing not only from dustbins but also from random corners of the mess, the lawns, and even the classrooms. As huge corporate chains like Dominos and Blue Tokai slowly make their way into Ashoka, one could easily forget that it is a university located in rural Sonipat. For a university that was in hot water over its lack of diversity not too long ago, a shift towards a ‘big-brand’ consumerist culture is certainly cause for concern. With Roti Boti and Amul Cafe closing, and Rasananda remaining non-operational (with no updates on its reopening), the university’s minimal connections to regional culture and community through affordable, local food seem to be gradually disappearing. In its place is emerging a campus food culture catered specifically to upper-caste, upper-class metropolitan taste buds.
The issue of a limited palate is not a new one for the university. It is not just the case that the dining menu reflects a Savarna bias; there has also been a deliberate effort to limit exposure to foods from marginalized communities, leading to the cultural exclusion of certain student groups. One only has to think back to when the Northeast Collective, a student club, proposed a food festival to showcase foods from Northeast Indian states in April of 2023. Elvia Dey (ASP ‘25), a core member of the collective, remarked on the setbacks they encountered in using the mess’s kitchen space, “We had been emailing Student Life Office (SLO) to approve the food fest and they told us to go and meet them in their office… they said we cannot approve the cooking of pork for the food fest since the mess only cooks chicken and mutton.”
Excluding a specific group of people and denying a valuable opportunity for the student body to foster inter-regional solidarity through food, based solely on the preparation of a certain type of meat, does not inspire confidence in the liberal culture the university promotes so fervently. The refusal to allow students to use campus facilities for their meat-based food preparation aligns Ashoka with an unsavoury national trend among Indian universities of segregating students based on their dietary practices.
The most recent case that comes to mind is that of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), where the administration restricted some areas for vegetarians after a few students reportedly marked a part of the mess as ‘Vegetarians Only.’ “There is no doubt that there are some people who can’t resist the view and smell of non-vegetarian food during their dining, this may create health issues as well,” stated an email sent out by the administration.
In India, an aversion to meat— and, by extension, to meat eaters— is actually quite common. The sensory rejection of non-vegetarians is not merely an individual issue, as framed by the IIT Bombay administration, but a socio-political problem directly tied to caste discrimination. Historically, the preparation and consumption of food in South Asia has been dictated by caste hierarchies. Stories detailing practices of untouchability— being unable to eat with Savarnas, being refused food and water, and food being shaped by economic inequality— are a familiar part of Dalit narratives. One of the most pervasive methods of enforcing this form of caste discrimination has been through differentiating between the ‘pure’ upper castes, who consume vegetarian food, and the ‘impure’ lower castes— a term that implies barbarity, pollution, and untouchability— who eat non-vegetarian food.
Within the rise of Hindu nationalism, this policing of meat-based diets practiced by Bahujan and Muslim non-vegetarian communities has taken on a militant aspect. Longstanding myths that portray vegetarianism as emblematic of Indian food are being promoted to reinforce the normalcy and hegemony of Savarna culture, while laws are being enacted to institutionalize this hierarchy. Mandates to shut down meat shops, host ‘all-vegetarian’ banquets for visiting dignitaries, and the rise of violence by self-proclaimed gau-rakshaks, who accuse Dalits and Muslims of cow slaughter and beef consumption, are simply continuations of the long historical effort to ostracize Bahujan castes.
The irony here is that many Savarna castes do eat meat, and most Indian universities also offer certain non-veg dishes as part of their menus. As journalist Vinay Kumar writes— “Meat-eating Brahmins historically have found excuses to accommodate their meat-eating.” The issue, in both the case of IIT Bombay’s spatial segregation and Ashoka’s spatial discrimination, lies within the exploitative caste belief that Savarnas can dictate the lives of Bahujans, Muslims and other minorities— “Meat for me and mine, but not for thee and thine.”
Over the past few months, Ashoka has had to confront its long-standing caste issues. While the university is still far from achieving caste equality among the student body, it may be time for us to evaluate the caste practices that shape everyday campus life, with food being a particularly visible example. In April 2024, the student body had the chance to do the same during the Phule-Ambedkar Memorial Week, organized by the Young India Fellowship’s Learning and Engagement Committee. Visual artists Rajyashri Goody and Sri Vamsi Matta discussed caste, food, and oppression, drawing from their experiences as Dalit practitioners to explore how caste shapes dietary habits and enforces food-based segregation. The session allowed students to think about caste-based food practices in a critical manner, exposing the casteist histories behind seemingly innocuous discourse regarding food.
Challenging everyday caste practices, Vamsi Matta critiqued the term "jhoota," a common word used for leftovers, which originates from "jhootan," another name for the Valmiki community, who survived on discarded food from Savarnas. The word carries connotations of impurity, and its casual use both invisibilizes and institutionalizes the community's trauma of deprivation, while simultaneously ostracizing them for this imposed condition. While “jhootans” and their “jhoota” remain stigmatized as polluted, dominant Savarna groups overlook the systemic causes behind this notion of impurity.
It was the context of these conditions that was the focus of Goody’s session, explaining how Dalit food practices emerge from caste-imposed restrictions rather than personal choice. She illustrated this with the example of the puran poli as made by the Mahar and Mang communities in Maharashtra. By Savarnas in the region, the Maharashtrian dessert is eaten with saffron-infused milk, while Dalits usually use gulvani, a flavoured watered-down substitute made by boiling jaggery and dry ginger. In fact, dishes with milk and ghee often tend to be a delicacy only Savarnas can avail and indulge in. These dietary practices are not choices, but really outcomes of cultural and economic deprivation, which through time have been cemented into the everyday lives of these communities.
Goody’s talk aimed to sociologically document the historical deprivations faced by marginalized communities and the practices that emerged from them. While Ashoka’s predominantly Savarna student body may not be fully positioned to engage in this preservation, given our regular consumption of dishes like kheer, puran poli, and modaks during upper-caste Hindu celebrations on campus, we have a moral and academic responsibility to examine the fraught histories behind these delicacies. As put by Tusshar (YIF ‘24), an organizer of the Pule-Ambedkar Week, “In academia, we understand power, structures, and frameworks, which help us understand caste and how it operates in society. But then we should also want to see how that structure informs the everyday, on how you see a person from an oppressed caste, how their mental health functions, how they interact with their food, and how there’s an intersectional nature to our society as well.”
Setting aside social responsibility for a moment, we also owe it to our classmates and friends— whose appetites are marginalized and cultures ignored— to make them feel seen and acknowledged. “From my personal experience, I came to this university and everything changed— the environment, people, and place. We feel closest to our home and comfortable when we eat food that belongs there. I have never seen initiative taken to represent food from the Northeast. If the university is all about inclusivity and accommodating differences, something should be done to make us feel comfortable,” reflected Lamkhogin Haokip (ASP ‘25), another core member of the Northeast collective. Despite such feelings from the student body, the dining team has little qualms about serving selective dishes from international cuisines every Friday. Is serving a French Ratatouille more important than providing a chance to students from the Northeast to present their native food?
By turning away from the cultural diversity of the people around us in favour of faceless capitalist chains and more “sophisticated” food options, the university is making a familiar yet deeply disheartening mistake. While we have opened up our educational space to marginalized sections of society, integration remains a theoretical ambition as our culture is dominated by mainland Savarnas in all aspects of university life. In refusing to make space for the cuisines that facilitate the inclusion of marginalized segments of students within campus culture, Ashoka is not only perpetuating the broader trend of prejudice and racism rooted in food practices but also alienating a significant portion of its own student body. These students do not just have to grieve the loss of their own food, but also navigate a world of culinary plates that are unaccommodating to their palates. A culture of conformity emerges, in which one has to adjust to the specific urban palette dominating the campus.
The student body’s reluctance to engage with issues of cultural hegemony has led us to monotonous (and ridiculously expensive) diets, which bear little to no signs of the diversity of Indian food practices and do nothing to satiate our multicultural appetite. If our culture of eating is to change, the student community must take the first step by being more open to diverse culinary traditions. The simple act of critically and enthusiastically exploring food practices, be it our own or of others’, within the public platform of a university campus transforms the personal act of eating into a political statement of diversity. In this way, we not only nourish ourselves but also nurture an environment that celebrates our collective cultural heritage.
(Edited by Devadeepa and Srijana Siri)
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