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‘I don't eat meat’

Discourse on food among transnational Hindus

Jennifer B. Saunders is at the Department of Religion, Denison University, Granville, OH 43023, USA. Email: saundersj{at}denison.edu.

Hindu transmigrants use discourse on diet as a way to maintain connections with India, as well as to construct Indian, Hindu and caste identities. In this article, I argue that such discourse on food is a meta-discourse that reframes the symbolic meaning of food in the transnational context. This article examines a transnational Hindu community's discourse on food, and pairs R.S. Khare's arguments about the communicative function of food in a South Asian context with transnational and performance theories, as well as with Arjun Appadurai's argument about the significance of imagination in creating lived realities. Through their narratives involving food, this community is actively engaged in shifting the meanings of what it eats to emphasise their connections with each other, and with India. Thus, a vegetarian diet and the use of ‘authentic’ Indian ingredients become the symbols of Indian identity through discourse, which is then solidified through the acts of cooking and eating. This article is based on fieldwork conducted with an extended transnational Hindu family and its social networks in both India and the United States between 1999 and 2004.

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