Hacker News Reader

Vegetarian is a huge identity marker. Quote from a professor from my college to my then girlfriend about me - “I wish he was at least a vegetarian”. I happen to be a vegan now and I have a lighter complexion and I clearly get assumed to be “upper caste” and somehow “smart” goes along with it.

Answering to GP above - I don’t mind talking about it but some bar conversations have opened with it. That’s not pleasant. It’s not a light subject. It’s like me opening with some light chat about racism in America. It requires nuance to understand how deeply and yet subtly embedded caste is in India. You can’t get a house for rent in certain neighbourhoods of even major metros. It’s the reason I don’t use a last name at all. Not even legally. If people shun the practice of disclosing the caste it’ll one day disappear. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

> It requires nuance to understand how deeply and yet subtly embedded caste is in India

And this is the nuance I'm talking about. I understand vegetarianism definitely has positive connotations in India, but it's rarely about caste, which is what we're looking at here.

There's a lot of different opinions in a country of a billion people, but just labeling it as caste isn't going to do any of it favors.

> It’s not a light subject

None of it is. It's not fun being a vegetarian in the States; doesn't mean people have ostracized vegetarianism because they love their meat burgers. Two different things here, we can't get to the root of things if we don't parse them properly.

> vegetarianism definitely has positive connotations in India, but it's rarely about caste,

I’m not sure which part of India does this apply to. As an Indian living in India (born brought up, working now etc), almost every single instance vegetarianism was brought up in a discussion, it was immediately followed up with caste.

Sure, India is vast, but I just don’t know a place where diet is decoupled from caste.

Talking about myself, though I’m a Maratha Kshatriya my parents somehow didn’t prefer non vegetarian. So I ended up growing up a vegetarian dude. Only to be mocked by my relatives later in life “what kind of a Maratha are you who doesn’t eat meat”

I'm a total outsider and don't know a thing about the caste system, so forgive me being ignorant: how do others know to which caste someone belongs? Would it be possible to claim another caste and just roll with it? What if one changed their surname to something usually associated with a certain caste?

No intermarriage for thousands of years. People look different because the genetics are different.

> Would it be possible to claim another caste and just roll with it? What if one changed their surname to something usually associated with a certain caste?

It is entirely possible, however it does require you to learn nuances of that caste. Otherwise you will get caught out especially while discussing with elders. That said when it comes to marriage there’s no way to hide your caste. The priest knows your parents their relatives and what not. Their surnames being different will cause all kinds of red lights to go off.

Also, for governmental purposes you are expected to produce “caste certificate” which you can’t forge. So it’s not unusual for people in India to marry into lower caste to reap the benefits of governmental reservation.

So, the answer is nuanced. If you want to take advantage of surname in a private company like say Cisco then go for it. For any other purpose, changing surname alone isn’t sufficient. In fact it’s impossible to hide your caste.

While we are at it, it’s worth noting that “caste” refers to two distinct and intertwined hierarchical structures called “varna” and “jati”. Which means even among Brahmins (the upper most caste, intact Brahmin is a Varna and not Jati) there’s a hierarchy, priest being the top most. Jatis are sometimes referred as “sub-caste”.

This Jati is so pervasive in India that even the non-Hindu religions such as Sikhism and “Lingayat” which were explicitly formed to be away from the Hindu caste system couldn’t escape it. So we now have a few dozen Jati within Sikhism and Lingayats with an overly of Verna.

As an academic topic it’s a fascinating one. The roots of this codified structure is still not clear, it’s an active area of research. Recent advancements in human evolutionary genetics is revealing some interesting insights but long way to go.

This might be related. Supposedly these were "sketches used by the police in the USSR to identify suspects based on race" - https://i.redd.it/4qzg51sezz751.jpg

The person who responded had a bunch of good points, but one thing they didn't specifically respond to, is how members of my caste (Brahmins, top of the heap) would know how someone is NOT a brahmin.

So if you aren't a brahmin, you probably haven't had the same childhood experiences of temple-going and specific rituals. If I really want to ferret your caste out, I might casually quiz you on this background, maybe even in the context of innocently joshing about, "hey, wasn't that weird our moms would make us do blah blah blah." And if you didn't respond right away with a story about how your parents did that same thing, I'd maybe start to become suspicious ...

If you ever let slip that someone in your family got a job because they utilized an affirmative action program (called "reservations" in India,) it'd sound weird, and I'd get suspicious ...

If I started a joke about how some brahmins are better than other brahmins (yep, that exists. I know because I am the best Brahmin.) and you seemed clueless about the typology, I'd get suspicious ...

You do this enough times, I'm gonna cross you off my party list.

It's not 1:1, but there's a clear correlation. To caricature a bit, the Brahmins at the top of the hierarchy can afford to have an elaborate "pure" vegetarian diet with lots of ghee etc (the Jains, mentioned earlier, even exclude root vegetables that would kill the plant), somewhere around the middle of the pile you start eating animals because you need to get your protein where you can, and at the very bottom are the outcastes who do the dirty jobs like butchering animals.

Yes well if we want to go all Veblen, we can see that throughout the world, not just India.

But let us be real here, there are a lot of people in poverty following vegetarian diets, especially because meat doesn't always come cheap in India, and dal/milk relatively are. Some follow it because they were raised in a vegetarian culture. Some do it because they dislike the thought of eating animals.

Brahmins aren't always rich/powerful, and the "lower castes" aren't always that hard off, and this has been the case throughout history.

Some of my friends my well-to-do friends eat meat (sometimes including beef) just fine, some don't. Same with people from different socio-economic levels. This just doesn't reflect reality any more.

Sure, we're generalizing about over a billion people here. But I still contend that if you were to take statistically significant samples across the caste hierarchy, you'd find more vegetarians up top.

Possibly. Wish we had numbers, but I'm not sure if survey respondents would always speak the truth :)

There's actually a huge regional aspect to it - western states have a large veggie population that traverses many classes.

I straddled a lot of classes growing up in India, and I can assure you that most people don't eat meat "to get their protein". If they are culturally inclined to do so, they'll eat it because it's tasty, it's a delicacy. I know a couple families which used to be able to afford chicken only once every few months. They were definitely impoverished, but when you're impoverished in India you definitely can't afford meat (the government has rations of rice, sugar etc, and you barely afford some basic veggies -meat is typically 5-10x more expensive). Heck, even eggs are too expensive for a large fraction of the poor here.

> the Jains, mentioned earlier, even exclude root vegetables that would kill the plant

Really? So no haldi?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism

Correct. No haldi, no ginger, no onions, no potatoes, no carrots, ...

True, I suppose I should have been just as surprised by garlic/ginger/onion - the four just seem such basic staples in Indian cooking (and garlic/onion more generally).

The funny thing about infiniteness is that half of it is still pretty infinite - and that also works with garlic, ginger, and potatoes, at least (I don't know if it's true of all roots and bulbs though) in that they'll sprout from a part.

Although I appreciate that's probably not the point. But if it were, one could have parts packaged for sale, with the regulated promise that the rest of it was replanted, analogously to religiously-compatible slaughter.

That would not capture Bengali and Kerala brahmins. In Kerala its kosher and common for a brahmins to have beef. Meat is a regular part of diet of Bengali brahmins, to the extent that they can afford it.

> you start eating animals because you need to get your protein where you can

Animal protein is more expensive to produce than plant protein, the result of nothing less than thermodynamics.

You are the only one talking about vegetarianism.

It's fairly obvious that from the traditionalist point of view of the poster's friend a Brahmin is expected to care more than inferior people from no-good castes about religious and semi-religious precepts like not eating lard (to avoid eating inappropriate animals, not because lard isn't vegetarian).

Not always. As I mentioned, an American (not of Indian origin, and presumably without thinking about caste) warned me about rennet when he knew I was a vegetarian. Please don't misunderstand my words.

I talk about vegetarianism because the GP talked about it through the lens of caste, and I stated that I thought otherwise.

I'm actually vegetarian myself, though I typically don't assume tortillas contain lard (unless the places name is actually in spanish lol). This particular example (because we had a deeper conversation) was definitely about how Brahmins were supposed to be pure.

Heh, have had some similar conversations myself (how people like me are "supposed to be more X/less Y"). I've had little patience for those, and have let my own opinions be known. Thanks for adding some more colour.