The Tamil movie Annapoorni was released in theaters on Dec 1, 2023, followed by its post-theatrical release on Netflix toward the end of last year. Promptly, within the first week of the new year, it has gathered attention, not toward its very interesting plot of a woman (daughter of a temple chef) who wants to learn how to cook gourmet dishes herself and excels at the profession despite sabotage. But because it was reduced to a montage of love jihad, meat-cooking/eating, and bruised Hindutva sentiments. Netflix pulled the movie worldwide on January 11, 2024; Zee5, the production house, issued an apology, and it became as though this narrative was never told (or heard).
Much has been written about this movie, including a piece describing the exact text from Valmiki’s Ramayan that enraged viewers. However, this article does not intend to talk about the culinary preferences of deities, but rather the food preferences of a majority of Indians today. Contrary to layperson beliefs that India is primarily a vegetarian nation, according to NFHS-5 (2019-2021), nearly 83% of men and 71% of women consumed non-vegetarian food daily, weekly, or occasionally. Then why was there outrage at the premise of the movie, where the Brahmin daughter of the temple cook, responsible for making prasadam, wanted to cook and then eat chicken?
Disgust is an interesting emotion. Specifically in the context of meat and food, it has kept us alive. Imagine smelling rancid or rotting food; often, our first reaction is disgust. Disgust, thus, makes us avoid harmful food and prevents us from consuming it with some immediacy. Disgust is good. Disgust is useful. Some may consider meat-eating to be disgusting because of environmental concerns; people who follow a vegetarian diet have substantially lower carbon footprints, for instance. However, others consider meat-eating to be morally reprehensible, impure, outrageous, and dirty.
But why?
In India, the food one consumes and their caste identity is intertwined. That is, many people who are strict or “pure” vegetarians are likely to be dominant-caste Hindus, who also may also dictate social norms, policies, and laws in India. This implies that often, we make (quick) impressions about the caste and the moral character of the person based on the food they consume. That is, a vegetarian diet is associated with not just a dominant-caste identity, but also signals moral superiority, and especially among vegetarian dominant-caste persons, symbolizes association with their specific ingroups.
Coming back to Annapoorni, this is certainly not the first time a movie has been taken down or banned because it hurt the sentiments of dominant-caste Hindus. Though what causes outrage among these groups is not glaringly obvious, there are some common strands. Our sense of what is acceptable and what is right and wrong are influenced by the social worlds we inhabit. Thus, when dominant caste Hindus surround themselves with other dominant caste Hindus, it is likely that they together moralize vegetarianism. This phenomenon is called “social contagion” or “moral contagion” where social networks transmit moral ideas like the spread of a disease. Note here that we are not calling moral ideas diseases, but rather that moral ideas spread from person to person within the same group the way a disease could spread from person to person within the same group.
Further, moral emotions such as disgust are key to the spread of moral and political ideas. Similarly, anger and disgust together are powerful antecedents of moral outrage. Thus, since a majority of norm-initiators as well as norm-enforcers are dominant-caste Hindus, notions of disgust as a response to non-vegetarianism and moral superiority attached to vegetarianism get spread faster. Therefore, when we make friends or live among people from similar castes, and experience anger or disgust, as in the case of eating meat, we would experience a sense of moral outrage.
Finally, we might express more moral outrage than we strictly feel, if we want to signal that we belong to a particular group, and especially when there is social feedback. Thus, individuals may exaggerate how they actually feel about meat-eating depending on who they are surrounded by and especially who they want to be surrounded by. Think of it as a domino effect of moral contagion.
Even in a fictional space, a Brahmin woman cooking and eating meat is morally reprehensible, not only because art could imitate life, but also because food and righteousness are deeply connected in India. When her father sees Annapoorni eating chicken, his solution to right this wrong is to get her married, perhaps to counter the “what will people say” retort. And when the people in question extend to other dominant-caste Hindus, not just in the movie, but throughout the nation, the moral outrage can be amplified. When a film like Annapoorni is banned worldwide, the “threat to creativity” is real.
Hansika Kapoor and Arathy Puthillam
