His granddaughter is said to have advised Gandhi on her visit to Sevagram to rename it Kolagram, or pumpkin-village, so tired was the five-year old of eating pumpkins every day. His disciples were expected to do the same. Be it satyagraha, fasting, non-violence, or food, depriving and disciplining his body was his primary weapon of warfare. If one man put his body at the core of his politics, it was Gandhi.
Nico Slate at Carnegie-Mellon University has beautifully brought together Gandhi’s engagement with food in his book, Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind. Much of it was political, meant to turn the conscience against the oppressive conditions of production that food entails. Yet not all of his whimsical experiments with food were an extension of the Caste Hindu, Vaishnav thought he internalised and has often been called out for. He even perfected the production of almond milk in his ashram. Intermittent fasting, only raw food, abstaining from salt and sugar, and veganism, you name it and he had tried it. If one man managed to make vegetarianism a mainstream nationalist agenda, it was Gandhi.Ī zealous vegetarian, even vegan, Gandhi experimented so often with food and fad diets he would put our average millennial to shame. The many meat-eating Indians of all religions were neither a part of these discussions, nor a subject. When these articles and intense discussions said “Indian” they meant Caste Hindus, many of whom were already vegetarian. Then the discussion primarily pivoted around whether Indians should consume meat to acquire physical strength like the Europeans, who had used it to subdue the Indian population, or stick to vegetarianism seen as suited to the tropical climate. Food, especially the eating or giving up of meat, has recurred in upper-caste discourse since the early days of resistance to colonialism in 19th century Bengal.
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