Eating Under Surveillance: Beef, Caste and Regulation of Food in Contemporary India

In contemporary India, food has emerged as a central arena in which hierarchy is enacted through the monitoring and policing of everyday food practices. Dietary choices, particularly those concerning beef, have shifted from matters of personal or community consumption to sites of institutional regulation, moral scrutiny and, in some instances, coercive enforcement. Drawing on historical scholarship on cattle and meat consumption, B. R. Ambedkar’s analysis of untouchability, sociological theories of purity and distinction, and contemporary media and policy materials, this article traces how bovine symbolism has been reconfigured within caste-inflected and majoritarian political frameworks. It argues that the regulation of food operates as a technology of stratified citizenship: vegetarianism accrues social value as a form of symbolic capital, while beef consumption becomes stigmatized, surveilled and at times criminalized. Moving from the historical sacralization of the cow to the institutionalization of dietary hierarchy in housing and education, the escalation to vigilantism and punitive state action, and the amplification of dietary polarization through cultural production, the analysis demonstrates how everyday acts of eating become subject to governance.