Eating Karma in Classical South Asian Texts

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Wendy Doniger

Food and eating function in South Asia to define the person more than anything else, even sex. Yet the precise nature of that definition has been debated, often to the death, for over two millennia. In this essay, I will outline the main parameters of that debate and argue that these myths, which may strike us as bizarre, simply develop in details unfamiliar to us many of the deeply submerged assumptions built into our own mythologies of food.

You Are What You Eat

You are what you eat" is a cliche both in our society and in ancient India, though it has different meanings there. It represents the traditional view set forth by the classical texts on the caste-system, which define the person by what he (rarely she) does (and does not) eat. The Laws of Manu, composed in the early centuries of the Common Era, goes into obsessive detail on the subject of food taboos, always emphasizing the negative, i.e., the foods not to be eaten. The class of prohibited food follows the general rule that good people have a narrower window of opportunity, of possibilities, than bad people; the higher you are, the less you can eat. (This applies to sex, too: if a Brahmin observes all the days of abstention listed in various parts of the text, he can have sex with his wife minus four days a month.) A typical list of forbidden fruits goes like this:

   Garlic, scallions, onions, and mushrooms, and the things that grow from
   what is impure, are not to be eaten by twice-born men. The red sap of
   trees, and any exudations from a cut (in a tree), the "phlegmatic" fruit,
   and the first milk of a newly-calved cow--you should try not to eat these.
   (And do not eat) a dish of rice with sesame seeds, or a spice cake made of
   flour, butter, and sugar, or a cake made of rice, milk and sugar, if these
   are prepared for no (religious) purpose; or meat that has not been
   consecrated; or food for the gods, or offerings; or the milk of a cow
   within ten days of calving, or the milk of a camel or of any animal with a
   whole, solid hoof, or of a ewe, or of a cow in heat or a cow whose calf has
   been taken from her; and avoid the milk of women, the milk of all wild
   animals of the wilderness except the buffalo, and all foods that have gone
   sour or fermented. But among foods that have gone sour or fermented, yogurt
   can be eaten, and all foods made with yogurt, as well as whatever is
   extracted from auspicious flowers, roots, and fruits.

   Do not eat carnivorous birds or any birds that live in villages, or any
   whole-hoofed animals that have not been specially permitted; or little
   finches, the sparrow, the aquatic bird, the goose, the waterbird, the
   village cock, the crane, the wildfowl, the moorhen, the parrot and the
   starling; birds that strike with their beaks, web-footed birds, the
   paddy-bird, birds that scratch with their toes, and birds that dive and eat
   fish; or meat from a butcher or dried meat; or the heron or the crane, the
   raven or the wagtail; or (animals) that eat fish, or dung-heap pigs, or any
   fish.... You should not eat solitary or unknown wild animals or birds, nor
   any animals with five claws, not even those listed among the animals that
   may be eaten. They say that, among the animals with five claws, the
   porcupine, hedgehog, iguana, rhinoceros, tortoise, and hare may be eaten,
   as well as animals with one row of teeth, except for the camel. (The Laws
   of Manu, 5.5-14, 17-18)

This text also supplies loopholes for times when one is in extremis (the Sanskrit term is apad, designating a disaster or emergency) and can eat any food whatsoever--even meat from a cow or a dog, or food bought by killing your son:

   Ajigarta, famished, stepped forward to kill his own son but was not smeared
   with evil, for he was acting to remedy his hunger. When Bharadvaja, who had
   amassed great inner heat, was distressed by hunger with his sons in a
   deserted forest, he accepted many cows from the carpenter Vrdhu. When the
   sage Vamadeva, who knew the difference between right and wrong, was in
   distress and wanted to eat the flesh of a dog in order to save his life's
   breath, he was not smeared (with evil). When Vishvamitra, who knew the
   difference between right and wrong, was distressed by hunger, he set out to
   eat the hindquarters of a dog, which he received from the hands of an
   Untouchable. (The Laws of Manu, 10.105-108)

Killing a cow is worse than killing a dog, and eating the meat of either pollutes you, though for opposite reasons: because the dog is impure, and because the cow is pure. The myth of the sage who eats dog meat (or the meat of a cow or a human boy) during a famine is a paradigmatic moral dilemma that does, in fact, have evil consequences in the texts that tell the stories at length (Mahabharata, 13.94-95). Eating a dog or a cow, on the one hand, or eating your son (or eating food gained by having your son killed), on the other, raise entirely different moral questions. The story of the dog-eating sage is often connected with the story of Agigarta and his son Shunahshepha (whose name means "Dog-penis"). Ajigarta's attempt to sacrifice his son, Shunahshepha, was reported first in a text composed in the 8th century BCE (Aitareya Brahmana, 7.13-16) and retold many times in ancient India. Though it is true that Ajigarta is not punished as a criminal, the text certainly depicts him as a most unsavory character, and his son brutally rejects him when he attempts to "re-adopt" Shunahshepha after Shunahshepha has become a king. These moral dilemmas are posed in very different terms in devotional literature a millennium or so later, in texts in which a god may test the faith of a devotee by asking him to kill, cook, serve to the divine guest, and, finally, eat his own son (Shulman, 1993).