Though no country in the world is as strongly associated with vegetarianism as India, a number of recent studies have purported to establish that by far the greater majority of Indians are non-vegetarians. The history of vegetarianism in India begins not with the Aryans, as is commonly believed by Hindus, but in the aftermath of the introduction of Buddhism and Jainism in the sixth century BCE. Though orthodox Hindus are shocked to hear it, the early Aryans were almost certainly beef-eaters. Unlike the Indus Valley people, who were agriculturists and traders, the Aryans were a pastoral people, and they slaughtered cattle as food. Neither the early Indus Valley people nor the early Aryans venerated the cow. Though the Buddha was an exponent of ahimsa, or non-violence, he was not himself a vegetarian, and it is said that his last meal contained pork. Nonetheless, given the Buddhist emphasis on ahimsa, vegetarianism received much impetus. The Buddha’s slightly older contemporary, Mahavira, the founder of the religion that would come to be known as Jainism, took the precepts of ahimsa much further, and it is the complete reverence for all forms of life that made it impossible for those who embraced Jainism to practice agriculture. The upper castes, who found members of their community deserting the "Hindu" fold for Buddhism or Jainism, increasingly came to adopt vegetarianism.

In 1977, the Marxist historian R. S. Sharma, then Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Delhi University, published his textbook Ancient India. He wrote that the ancient Aryans were beef-eaters, adding in explanation that "it is because of the prominence of pastoral life that beef-eating prevailed in Vedic times." He maintained that long after agriculture had commenced, the practice of beef-eating continued among certain classes of people, especially "artisans and agricultural labourers". Sharma had said nothing exceptional, and the weight of much Indological scholarship was behind his work; even the staunchly Hindu nationalist writer, K. M. Munshi, had once noted, without a trace of embarrassment, that "in spite of Jainism and Buddhism, fish and meat, not excluding beef, were consumed extensively by the people." Yet Sharma’s remarks were construed as conveying his advocacy of non-vegetarianism, and particularly beef-eating; and so Sharma was charged with deliberately offending the sentiments of orthodox Hindus among whom the consumption of beef cannot be contemplated. A local Hindu leader demanded the "immediate banning of Prof. R. S. Sharma’s Ancient India" for his references to beef-eating in Vedic India. While more than ably defended by professional historians and much of the print media, Professor Sharma’s supporters appear not to have understood that the anxieties his remarks had raised were not to be resolved solely by recourse to an ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ history. It is often a thin line that divides Hindus from Indian Muslims, and a beef-eating Hindu, by virtue of the transgression implied in the act, can be inferred to have become akin to a Muslim. If a circumcised penis remained one of the few ways to distinguish Hindu and Muslim men during the horrendous killings accompanying the partition, the all-consuming anxiety over beef-eating is better understood. Where substantive differences are minimal, and certainly subservient to common cultural practices, symbols are the preeminent way in which differences are exaggerated in order to permit the drawing of boundaries.

It is no exaggeration to say that for some Indians, their vegetarianism is itself their dharma. Doubtless, there are many communities where the consumption of meat or fish is very common. This is true, for instance, of people living in the coastal states, such as Kerala and West Bengal, and the entire west coast of India, as well as Bengal, is renowned for its seafood dishes. Among Muslims, as well, the consumption of meat is very common, and in finer cuisines associated with Muslims, meat dishes often predominate. In north India, among Punjabis, chicken and mutton (goat-meat) dishes are relished. Nonetheless, the perception of India as a paradise for vegetarian food is not entirely mistaken, whatever the statistics and anthropology texts may have to say about this matter. There are communities, for instance Jainas and Vaishnava Hindus, where vegetarianism is strictly observed, but millions of other Indians are vegetarians as well. Even in many Indian families where meat is consumed, it is done no more frequently than one day a week, usually on a Sunday afternoon. For many other families, meat — again, usually chicken or mutton — is partaken three or four times a year, most often at weddings.

The history of vegetarianism in India, however, goes well beyond the history of specific food practices in regional communities. Vegetarianism is also a matter of sensibility, of the ethos of a culture. Orthodox Hindus and Jainas, for instance, do not use garlic or onions in their cooking, much less have raw onions in their salad. Clearly, this prohibition has no relation to the taking of life, but every relation to the properties ascribed to various foods. Certain foods are ‘hot’, others are ‘cold’; foods are also categorized according to their supposed internal propensity to excite the passions. Whatever the medicinal properties of onions and garlic, these foods are believed to be base in some respects; more significantly, both onions and garlic give out strong smells, and it is argued, not unreasonably, that consumption of these items obfuscates the richer and softer tastes and smells associated with vegetables. Similarly, it is common to find in middle class families in north and central India women who do not partake of meat, fish, or eggs, though the men in their families do so. The consumption of meat is sometimes associated with masculinity, or with the violent conduct to which men are more often prone: to eat an animal is to turn oneself into an animal as well. Though this formulation may not describe precisely the views of Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps India’s most famous exponent of vegetarianism, it is unequivocally clear that Gandhi sought to draw a close association between the practice of vegetarianism and the observance of non-violence, understood both as the renunciation of violence and positively as conduct leading to the good of others. Gandhi attached great importance to diet, and argued vigorously that vegetarianism was more conducive to a life led according to the precepts of ahimsa. In this manner, as in many others, Gandhi had tapped on to beliefs widely shared in India.

Though India is often and justly described as a land of many religions and innumerable languages, it might well be described as a land of festivals as well. One conventional authority, the Encyclopedia Brittanica, rather unabashedly and with the customary cavalier attitude with which India can be treated, says of Hindu festivals that these arecombinations of religious ceremonies, semi-ritual spectacles, worship, prayer, lustrations, processions (to set something sacred in motion and to extend its power throughout a certain region), music, dances (which by their rhythm have a compelling force), magical acts -- participants throw fertilizing water or, during the Holi festival, coloured powder at each other -- eating, drinking, lovemaking, licentiousness, feeding the poor, and other activities of a religious or traditional character. No example is adduced of "lovemaking", but one might reasonably infer that the reference is to some tantric practices.

As in any old civilization, most of these festivals have religious associations, as is the case with Holi, Dusshera, Krishna Janmashtmi, Hanuman Jayanti, Ganesh Chaturthi, Muharram, Shivratri, and Diwali or Deepavali; many are also, in a country which is still predominantly rural, associated with the harvesting of the crop, as is true of Pongal-Sankranti in South India, or otherwise commemorative of the sacred ties with the land that Indian villagers have. Still others, such as Karwa Chauth, the observance of which is strictly restricted to Hindu married women, are not festivals as such though there may be something of a festive air attached to these occasions. Some festivals are observed throughout the country, or in a greater part of it; others, such as the famed snake race of Kerala, have peculiarly regional associations. Yet others, most notably Diwali and Holi, have been instrumental in forging ties among older diasporic Indian communities, and in such far-flung places as Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana, these festivals are celebrated with a pomp and vigor not always witnessed in India itself.

The partition of India is a signal event in world history, not merely in the history of the Indian subcontinent. British rule became established in eastern India around the mid-eighteenth century, and by the early part of the nineteenth century, the British had tightened their grip over considerable portions of the country. The suppression of the Indian revolt of 1857-58 ushered in a period, which would last ninety years, when India was directly under Crown rule. Communal tensions heightened in this period, especially with the rise of nationalism in the early 20^th century. Though the Indian National Congress, the premier body of nationalist opinion, was ecumenical and widely representative in some respects, Indian Muslims were encouraged, initially by the British, to forge a distinct political and cultural identity. The Muslim League arose as an organization intended to enhance the various -- political, cultural, social, economic, and religious -- interests of the Muslims.

The bulk of the scholarly literature on the partition has focussed on the political processes that led to the vivisection of India, the creation of Pakistan, and the "accompanying" violence. Numerous people have attempted to establish who the "guilty" parties might have been, and how far communal thinking had made inroads into secular organizations and sensibilities. Scholarly attention has been riveted on the complex negotiations, and their minutiae, leading to partition as well as on the personalities of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Azad, Patel, and others, and a substantial body of literature also exists on the manner in which the boundaries were drawn between India and Pakistan, on the western and eastern fronts alike. (In general, however, the partition in the Punjab has received far more scholarly attention than the Bengal partition.) There has been much speculation about the role of the British in hastening the partition, and Gandhi’s inability to prevent it; indeed, some Hindu ideologues have even suggested that, whatever his stated opposition to the bifurcation of India on religious grounds, Gandhi is more properly viewed as the ‘Father of Pakistan’ rather than the ‘Father of the Indian nation’. Whatever the "causes" of the partition, the brute facts cannot be belied: down to the present day, the partition remains the single largest episode of the uprooting of people in modern history, as between 12 to 14 million left their home to take up residence across the border. The estimates of how many people died vary immensely, generally hovering in the 500,000 to 1.5 million range, and many scholars have settled upon the nice round figure of 1 million. There is nothing nice or comforting about this somewhat agreed-upon figure, and it is interesting as well that few scholars, if any, have bothered to furnish an account of how they came to accept any estimate that they have deemed reasonable. We know only that hundreds of thousands died: in South Asia, that is apparently the destiny of the dead, to be unknown and unaccounted for, part of an undistinguished collectivity in death as in life.

In recent years, the scholarly literature has taken a different turn, becoming at once more nuanced as well as attentive to considerations previously ignored or minimized. There is greater awareness, for instance, of the manner in which women were affected by the partition and its violence, and the scholarship of several women scholars and writers in particular has focussed on the abduction of women, the agreements forged between the Governments of India and Pakistan for the recovery of these women, and the underlying assumptions -- that women could scarcely speak for themselves, that they constituted a form of exchange between men and states, that the honor and dignity of the nation was invested in its women, among others -- behind these arrangements. Earlier generations of scholars hardly bothered with oral histories, but lately there have been a number of endeavors to collect oral accounts, not only from victims but on occasion even from perpetrators. These accounts raise important questions: should the partition violence be assimilated to the broader category of genocide so widely prevalent in the twentieth century? or was the violence of the partition something very different, a kind of uncalculated frenzy? was it really a time of insanity? can the partition justly be differentiated from the bureaucratized machinery of death installed by the holocaust perpetrated against the Jews? why do we insist on speaking of the violence as merely "accompanying" the partition, as though it were almost incidental to the partition?

There was a time, not long ago, when scarcely any attention was paid to the partition. Perhaps some forms of violence and trauma are better forgotten: the partition had no institutional sanction, unlike many of the genocides of the twentieth century, and the states of Pakistan and India cannot be held accountable in the same way in which one holds Germany accountable for the elimination of Europe’s Jews or Soviet Russia accountable for the death of millions of peasants in the name of modernization and development. It is also possible to argue that the partition theme gets displaced onto other forms of expression. But it can scarcely be denied that now, more than ever, it ha has become necessary to adopt several different approaches to the partition, taking up not only the questions covered in the more conventional historical literature -- the events leading up to the partition, the ideology (indeed pathology) of communalism, and the immediate political consequences of the partition -- but also the insights offered by film, literature, memoirs, and contemporary political and cultural commentary. Of course, the consequences of partition are there to be seen: India and Pakistan continue to be embroiled in conflict, and Kashmir remains a point of contention between them. The psychic wounds of partition are less easily observed, and we have barely begun to fathom the myriad ways in which partition has altered the civilizational histories of South Asia. If the partition appeared to some to vindicate the idea of the nation-state, to others the partition might well represent the low point of the nation-state ideology. Will the people of South Asia ever leave behind their partitioned selves?

India has one of the oldest film industries in the world. Though the first film advertisement in India appeared in the Times of India on 7 July 1896, inviting people to witness the Lumiere Brothers' moving pictures, "the wonder of the world", it was not until early 1913 that an Indian film received a public screening. Rajah Harischandra was an extraordinary commercial success: its director, Dadasaheb Phalke, who is now remembered through a life-time achievement award bestowed by the film industry in his name, went on to make a number of other films drawing upon themes derived from the Indian epics. Phalke could not find a woman to play the female roles, being turned down in this endeavor not only by 'respectable' women but by prostitutes, and had to resort to the expedient of choosing a young man, A. Salunke, to play the female roles in his early films. Among the middle classes, that association of acting with the loss of virtue, female modesty, and respectability has only recently been put into question, whatever degree of emulation actresses might appear to receive from an adoring public.

While a number of other film-makers, working in several Indian languages, pioneered the growth and development of Indian cinema, the studio system was beginning to emerge in the early 1930s. Its most successful initial product was the film Devdas (1935), whose director, P.C. Barua, also appeared in the lead; the Hindi re-make of the original Bengali film, also directed by Barua, was to establish the legendary career of Kundanlal Saigal. The Tamil version of this New Theatres release appeared in 1936. "To some extent", note the authors of Indian Film, "Devdas was a film of social protest. It carried an implied indictment of arranged marriage and undoubtedly gave some satisfaction on this score to those who hate this institution" (p. 81). The Prabhat Film Company, established by V. G. Damle, Shantaram, S. Fatehlal, and two other men in 1929, wasalso achieving its first successes around this time. Damle and Fatehlal's Sant Tukaram (1936), made in Marathi, was the first Indian film to gain international recognition, winning an award at Venice. The social films of V. Shantaram, more than anything else, paved the way for an entire set of directors who took it upon themselves to interrogate not only the institutions of marriage, dowry, and widowhood, but the grave inequities created by caste and class distinctions. Some of these problems received perhaps their most explicit expression in Achhut Kanya ("Untouchable Girl", 1936), a film directed by Himanshu Rai of Bombay Talkies. The film portrays the travails of a Harijan girl, played by Devika Rani, and a Brahmin boy, played by Ashok Kumar, whose love for each other cannot merely be consummated but must have a tragic end.

The next significant phase of Hindi cinema is associated with such figures as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, and Guru Dutt. The son of Prithviraj Kapoor, Raj Kapoor created some of the most popular and memorable films in Hindi cinema. Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951), Shri 420 (1955), and Jagte Raho (1957) were both commercial and critical successes. Many of his films explore, in a rather benign way, the class fissures in Indian society. Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin ("Two Acres of Land", 1954), which shows the influence of Italian neo-realism, explored the difficult life of the rural peasantry under the most oppressive conditions; his film Devdas (1955), with Dilip Kumar playing the title role in a re-make of Barua's film, was a testimony to the near impossibility of the fulfillment of 'love' under Indian social conditions, while Sujata (1959) pointed to the problems posed by marriages arranged by parents without the consent of their children. Meanwhile, the Hindi cinema had seen the rise of its first undisputed genius, Guru Dutt, whose films critiqued the conventions of society and deplored the conditions which compel artists to forgo their inspiration. From Barua's Devdas (1935) to Guru Dutt's Sahib, Bibi aur Gulam (with Guru Dutt and Meena Kumari),the motif of "doomed love" looms large: to many critics, a maudlin sentimentality characterizes even the best of the Hindi cinema before the advent of the new or alternative Indian cinema in the 1970s.