Meat, Myths and Marginalisation

Sometime in 2012, researcher and author Zarin Ahmad—who has been studying the butchers in India for a while now—shifted her gaze towards the Qureshi butcher community in Delhi, who had just gone through a cinematic representation in Gangs of Wasseypur. Ruthless, violent and excessive, this Anurag Kashyap style of representation pushed Ahmad to dig out the true story of the community. “My attempt here is not to critique the film which is a revenge drama; it carries with it cinematic licence and is contextualised in a certain historical, social, and political milieu. However, what is interesting is the fact that a film or popular culture brings the Qureshis to the national mainstream (though in a one-sided way),” she writes in her latest book titled Delhi’s Meatscapes: Muslim Butchers in a Transforming Mega-City (Oxford University Press).

VICE: Very early on in the book, you establish your position as a woman in what is a male-dominated terrain—a butcher’s space. Did the conspicuity of being a woman in such a space ever unnerve you?
When I decided to do fieldwork in the abattoir and livestock market, I knew that it was a male domain, and I was prepared for it. The one thing that I tried to do was to be as unobtrusive as I could. Women do not go to the livestock market and abattoir as buyers. But as a researcher, I did. However, I did not have access to certain spaces—I could not attend congregational prayers on Friday, listen to the Imam’s sermons, or participate in the post-prayer discussions after people left the mosque. I could not sit around at tea stalls and have uninhibited personal conversations with Qureshi men over tea, as I did with the women. I could not pillion-ride on a motorcycle and travel through the by-lanes. There was always a gendered distance which they maintained consciously, and which I too accepted. But, as a woman, I had access to the inner sections of Qureshi homes, where often strict purdah is maintained.

Why did you feel an academic representation of the Qureshis was required?
There is no academic or non-academic work on the life of such a significant part of our lives. From our plates to our politics, meat touches our lives in so many ways. Yet there is so little we know about it. So, I thought it was important to document the story of meat and those who work with it: the history, the economy, the spaces that meat occupies, and the never-ceasing political debates around it.

Could you talk about being a Muslim and how it became a tool to investigate a subject like this in our present-day environment?
When I first went on the field, the butchers were unsure of my presence because they have been at the receiving end of so much demonising and misrepresentation that they are wary of outsiders. Being a Muslim did not make a difference initially. I was an outsider (probably assumed to be a journalist) and not from the milieu. It was only much later when I was accepted as a person who did not intend to harm them that they felt confident enough to include me in their conversations. As a Muslim, it was easier to understand colloquial terms which draw upon religion. These cultural references made communication easier.

What difference do you see in the kind of violence incited by meat that has taken place in India historically, as also recent events like the Dadri lynching in 2015?
The terrain of Indian politics is replete with instances where meat has been invoked time and again as an emotive and politically sensitive lever in order to mobilise and create political constituencies. Some of the conversations that I documented talk about how trucks plying between UP, Rajasthan, Haryana are often stopped at checkpoints and state borders. They are compelled to offer bribes at every checkpoint. Butchers and animal handlers are often mistreated. In one of these conversations recorded in 2012, an animal handler says that "they do not beat us but treat us badly". This fervour and violence has increased in recent times, and cow activists have been emboldened to take the law in their hands. There is immense fear not just among butchers but also livestock dealers, transporters and animal handlers.

How has the stigma of 'dirty' informed everything from caste relegation and marginalisation, to a particular image in popular opinion?
Anything to do with flesh and blood is considered physically and ritually polluting, and those who touch and work with meat and dead animals occupy the lowest rankings in existing Hindu caste hierarchies. Communities who work with meat (khateek) and dead animals (chamar) are ranked the lowest in prevalent caste hierarchies. While Islamic tenets do not consider blood or meat to be ritually polluting, Qureshi butchers are among the lower biradris in the hierarchies that exist among Muslims in India. They are affected by the larger pan-Indian perceptions about meat and hence, cannot escape the stigma and sensitivity attached to their work.

Do you think these qualities translating in pop-culture as hyperbolic representations is deeply problematic? In Gangs of Wasseypur, there was extreme (and visually graphic) violence attached to this representation…
Yes, such depictions are often violent and graphic. But apart from theit depiction in popular culture, there are multiple axes along which meat is marginalised in the everyday—morality, legality, pollution (both ritual and physical), sanitation, religion and the palpable political sensitivity of cow-slaughter. There were other experiences during my fieldwork which I should flag. Often, auto drivers refused to go to Idgah; some even cautioned me against going there or to the abattoir saying that it was not safe. If the profiling and a priori assumptions were a bit unsettling for me as a researcher, it is obviously much more compelling for those who live and work there, leading to extreme forms of segregation.

Why did you decide to zero in on only Delhi as a site for your investigation?
Delhi makes an interesting vantage point in studying meat. The historical shifts, urban transformations, cultural multiplicities—all make the story of meat intriguing and diverse.