14/05/2026
We do not advocate vegetarianism.
We advocate veganism because vegetarianism is not one universal idea.
In many Western contexts, vegetarianism is often framed around ethics, climate change, animal suffering, or health.
But in India, vegetarianism has historically also functioned through caste hierarchy, ritual purity, and inherited social identity.
Food was never just food.
Who you ate with, what you touched, what you cooked, and what you consumed became deeply tied to ideas of purity and impurity. Vegetarianism became associated with “cleanliness,” ritual status, and upper-caste respectability, while meat consumption became heavily caste-coded and linked to communities treated as socially “lower.”
Scholarship on caste and food politics has repeatedly shown how these hierarchies were socially produced and maintained through everyday practices around eating, touch, labor, and purity. Yamini Narayanan describes this intersection as “casteised speciesism” where caste hierarchy and hierarchy over animals become intertwined.
Her work argues that cow protection politics in India often reinforces both casteism and speciesism simultaneously, while privileging upper-caste Hindu identity through ideas of purity and sacralization.
Narayanan’s research further explores how “pure” and “impure” bodies are socially constructed not only among humans, but also projected onto animals themselves.
This is why caste oppression and animal oppression cannot always be separated from each other.
When societies normalize the belief that some beings are cleaner, more worthy, or more morally valuable than others, hierarchy becomes embedded into everyday life. And hierarchy always creates oppression.
Real liberation requires unlearning domination itself.
