Chicken liver from Marathwada's Dalit kitchens

"If anything has lived, we will eat it," my father once boasted.

- SAMAR HALARNKAR

He certainly did, trying beetles in Mizoram and rats in Nagaland and, along with my mother, encouraging us to enjoy the blood curries and sundry offal specialities of north Karnataka. With that kind of an upbringing, it was easy to eat a seven-course snake meal in Vietnam.

But this pleasure over being an omnivore reveals my family's privilege, even though my father came from modest I-bought-my-first-shoes-at-21 origins. We could make choices that, as Shahu Patole indicates in his book, Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada, were not available to people like him at the bottom of Hindu society.

Patole's book deals primarily with the lowest of Dalit subcastes in the Maharashtra region of Marathwada: the Mahar and the Mang, whom even other Dalit subcastes regard as untouchable. So strong is the hold of caste, subcaste and sub-subcaste that the Mahar themselves had seven subcastes, who once shared food but would not intermarry, differences that have largely disappeared with their conversion to neo-Buddhism.

Translated recently from Marathi to English, Patole's book reveals how dead animals and how they are eaten are central to the Dalit identity. It is likely to be uncomfortable to many upper-caste Hindus, who would rather not acknowledge such realities.