Veg Only delivery? It’s not just about dietary preference. It’s how caste works, too
The smell of food, in particular meat and fish, in the Indian context, is often used to frame the distancing practices of caste
Zomato- recently announced a “Pure Veg Mode along with a Pure Veg Fleet” option for vegetarian customers on the food delivery app. Though the nomenclature was changed later to “Veg Only mode”, the idea remained the same: food from vegetarian-only restaurants will now be delivered by a specific fleet of delivery agents in order to ensure that such food does not touch or catch the smells of meat-based foods. The initial roll-out even included a visual segregation: the vegetarian-only fleet was to be marked by the colour green, as opposed to Zomato’s red uniform. However, on feedback that this might invite a backlash from housing societies and endanger delivery agents, Zomato announced a roll-back.
Explaining the rationale behind forming a fleet to deliver only vegetarian food, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal wrote on March 19 on social media platform, X: “But why did we need to separate the fleets? Because despite everyone's best efforts, sometimes the food spills into the delivery boxes. In those cases, the smell of the previous order travels to the next order and may lead to the next order smelling of the previous order. For this reason, we had to separate the fleet for veg orders.”
For many of us, it seems clear that this policy furthers caste-based norms of purity and segregation. Caste functions by controlling the interaction between bodies and objects to avoid pollution and maintain purity. Such control is exerted over sensory experiences and prohibits touch (physical touch, sharing spaces such as houses and offices and social contacts such as marriage and friendships), taste (sharing of food and water), and smell (of other bodies and bodily fluids and excreta, of polluting objects such as leather, meat, fish). Sights and sounds of other castes, especially those on the margins of the caste system, are policed too.
Food, being deeply sensorial in nature, is an important vantage from which to understand caste discrimination and segregation. The smell of food, in particular meat and fish, has often been the point of contention. Odours are not just physical phenomena but carry with them meanings and values. In the Indian context, this meaning is often framed through the distancing practices of caste. While they are often encoded as concerns of hygiene, sanitation, or even personal preference, in fact, casteist norms of purity and pollution often lie at the heart of these practices. As I wrote in Words that Smell: Caste and Odors in Hindi Dalit Autobiographies, a chapter in the anthology, Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats [2023], published by the Pennsylvania State University Press, sensorial separation of food (such as that rolled out by Zomato), has discriminatory and violent implications for populations that are meat-eating, including marginalised groups like Dalits, Muslims and Christians.
Read edited excerpts from my piece:
“The odours described in Dalit autobiographies are equally important in terms of understanding the politics of remembering and forgetting. Sensory perception is not merely a biological process but instead, a social and political phenomenon that actively produces the world around us. Odors are present all around us and have an influence on how we inhabit space, create memories, evaluate people and places, and interact with our environment. The carriers of smells—bodies and objects—are political actors constructed through their location in power/knowledge. The politics of odour derives from aesthetic, moral, and social power, which inheres in their description and classification. The power or knowledge to name an odour as good or bad, as disgusting or pleasant is ultimately an exercise in politics (see also McClelland in this volume). Within the discourse of caste, the power of pollution makes the issue of odours more urgent. Why do certain odours pollute? Can an odour “pollute” one’s caste status?
(...)
Hans Rindisbacher [in Smell of Books] has argued that in the European context, as public spaces became more sanitized, smells retreated to passages in books, which became more sensuous than actual spaces. This process was more complicated in the case of caste. Under the influence of colonial modernity and the postcolonial developmental state, public space was sought to be ridden with caste-based identities while, at the same time, Brahmanical sensibilities were normalized as the default.
For instance, [Om Prakash] Valmiki writes [in his autobiography, Joothan] about the behaviour of the upper castes in his village:
“If we ever went out wearing neat and clean clothes, we had to hear their taunts that pierced deep inside, like poisoned arrows. If we went to school in neat and clean clothes, our classmates said, “Abey, Chuhre ka, he has come dressed in new clothes.” If we went wearing old and shabby clothes, then they said, “Abey, Chuhre ke, get away from me, you stink.”
“This was our no-win situation. We were humiliated whichever way we dressed.”
Similarly, Surajpal Chauhan, in another Dalit autobiography [Tiraskrit], writes about coming back to his village from the city. On the way, he asked an old upper-caste man for water. The man asks Chauhan who he is visiting in the village, thereby eliciting his caste identity. On realizing that Chauhan belongs to the “untouchable” family in the village, the older man says, “When those born of Bhangis and Chamars come back from the cities wearing new clean clothes, we cannot even identify whether they are Bhangi or not.” [Author’s translation]
Attempting to dispel the myth of the absence of caste in the modern public sphere, Valmiki comments on the identification of caste through uniforms issued to municipal sanitation workers. Lacking resources to buy woollen clothes, Valmiki manages to procure a “khaki jersey from a municipal employee.” Although the jersey he got is dyed green, his college mates still call him a “sweeper.” Both Chauhan’s civil “city” clothes and Valmiki’s “khaki jersey” do not conceal their caste identities, hinting at the larger failure of the modern public space and the state to dispel caste hegemony. Dalit literature and politics have simultaneously engaged with the emancipatory potential offered by modernity and the Indian nation-state while also engaging in a deep critique of “triumphant nationalism,” “privileged modernity,” and “civilizational claims of Indian nation-making.”
Both Valmiki and Chauhan challenge the myth of a “modern” nation-state and an egalitarian public sphere by pointing out how bodies and spaces were marked as “lowly” and “smelly.”
In postcolonial India, caste was viewed as the remnants of a rural feudal order that still held some power and significance in village economies and was studied in benign categories like the jajmani system. As a result, it was understood that antimodern practices such as untouchability would simply wither away from the impact of development. Simultaneously, legal and policy measures created a public sphere devoid of untouchability, and this was by default understood to be a public sphere without caste.
The decades following independence would, however, prove that the obituary of caste was far from written, and in fact, it would adapt itself to not just modernity and democracy but to the nation-state itself. The “transcoding” of caste [idea borrowed from M.S.S. Pandian] in urban contexts only attempts to flatten the visual markers of caste. This chapter argues that while urban and modern contexts may provide this visual anonymity from the oppression of caste identities, other sensory markers, such as odours of the body, flavours of food, and accent of speech, have continued to give away caste and cause the extenuation of oppressive environments.”
Shivani Kapoor is an Associate Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University. The excerpts have been published with permission from Pennsylvania State University Press. The views expressed are personal.
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