Understanding how Some Temples in Northern Kerala defy Culinary Orthodoxy
– NIRANJANA K V
Known for its culinary practices and cuisine, Kerala holds another curiosity within its temple kitchens. It is not just laddus, payasams or modaks. Many temple prasadams blend vegetarian and non-vegetarian delights. Devotion tastes different and local. Rooted in indigenous Dravidian rituals and local flavors, these rituals reflect a God who feasts like his/her devotees – diverse, earthy, and unapologetic. Kerala’s temple kitchens are a repertoire of taste, with fragments of faith woven into everyday life. The rigid brahmanic framework of purity, sacredness and profanity is absent in these religious landscapes.
In the courtyard of the Parassinikadavu Sree Muthappan Temple in North Malabar, incense vapours mingle with meat and fish. Toddy (the local palm wine) is poured as offering. This is not transgression or rebellion. This is prasadam. Muthappan, the presiding deity, a Shiva-Vishnu fusion ‘eats’ like his devotees ritually on temple grounds. A true embodiment of his legends as a local hunter-fisherman who caroused with common folk. No Brahminical barriers. Just raw, grounded feasting. This version of Hinduism embraces liberation and inclusivity of local traditions and folk. Muthappan’s grilled meat and toddy are memory made edible. Anthropologist David Sutton calls this remembrance of repasts – tastes that preserve folk habits against purity’s tide.
A few kilometres away, Thiruvarkattu Bhagavathi Temple in Madayi, an ancient Bhadrakali shrine, echoes the same. Here, devotees receive chicken curry or roast along with lentils and payasam as prasadam. The chicken is cooked daily and offered to the deity as offering. This divine appetite around meat is a sacred tradition which is untouched by the mainstream temple rituals of Kerala. For locals, this is typical and never out of the fixed paradigm of Hinduism. As Bourdieu writes (1977), it was the habitus woven into the everyday tradition.
Anthropologist G.E. Ferro-Luzzi (1977) notes a geographical pattern in temple offerings of Kerala – no spicy varieties, yielding only sweet, plain payasams; as sanskritization and convergence (identified by M.N. Srinivas) come into play (p. 78). While southern temples
whisper jaggery restraint, northern folk gods demand full flavor. Muthappan’s fish fry and Thiruvarkkattu’s chicken roast beside lentils defy this generalization. Spices unravel. Habitus vanquishing orthodoxy. This defiance peaks in serpent groves. Naga shrines demand raw cracked eggs poured into ant-hill mounds alongside milk (Ferro-Luzzi 1977). At Peralassery Subrahmanya temple, even Brahmin priests permit them, rejecting Sanskritic boundaries.
In ancestral homes that function as sites of worship and are considered shrines of ancestral gods in different parts of Kerala (tharavadu), the worship rituals are often tantric and involve non-vegetarian offerings. Here, God is a deceased ancestor who has attained divinity. Since the ancestor ate meat in life, denying it to them in death would be a breach of filial piety. Sacredness and biography collapse into each other. What the person ate becomes what God receives.
This collapse is more prominent in Theyyam, an ancient and sacred ritual dance tradition of north Malabar region of Kerala (and parts of Karnataka). These gods accept non vegetarian offerings such as meat, fish and liquor including toddy. The deity breathes, speaks, and eats through the body of the performer who hails from a marginalized community. Theyyam does not make the common holy by elevating it, rather insists that the common was always holy. Rooted in native beliefs and culinary practices, these are the living archives of the food traditions and the triumph of indigenous feasting. These fragments are not culinary defiance. These are the lived realities of Malabar, including mine. They are Dravidian gustatory memories resisting Namboothiri reform which sought to map moral hierarchies onto food in divine places (Bourdieu 1977, 1979). ‘God eats like his people’ – sociology’s most profound provocation.
Our practices raise these questions: Which food is pure? Which is not? Who gets to decide that? The upper caste genteel society and their exclusivity have historically dictated what is pure, what is impure and which meats can be eaten. It is therefore significant to situate the politics of meat eating and vegetarianism within conversations surrounding divinity. Identity politics in contemporary India extends its talons into day-to-day culinary practices to the extent of moral hierarchies being encoded into food.
Vegetarianism has always been the marker of upper caste identity. Was vegetarianism holier or was it a calculated decision enacted by a privileged minority, who benefited from an unjust
caste system? Whether food hierarchy was designed rather than discovered is a fundamental notion to be probed. As Ambedkar (1948) notes, vegetarianism wasn’t ahimsa derived piety. It was a casteist strategy of ritual upwardness. Untouchable meat-eating was an economic necessity, not a choice. It was imposed, which ended up shaping their daily dietary practices, thereby shaping the idea of what their God would eat. While Ambedkar located the social position of his people, Gandhi had a different take on this idea. He evaded the food hierarchy and did not acknowledge his positionality. His vegetarianism was framed as a universal ethical selfhood embodying ahimsa and purity with no reference and reverence for whose labor made vegetarian abstinence affordable. He moralised a diet that was already a caste privilege. This hostility continues to exist in the form of aversion and hatred towards the beef eating population of India.
If vegetarianism functions as a medium for reimposing caste hierarchy in its contemporary form, for policing religious beliefs and communal belonging, then affirming a God who eats meat is an absolute defiance of this machinery. To say “our God eats like us” is to reject the decree that purity and worth are measured by the plate. This is what makes the non-vegetarian God politically consequential. It democratizes devotion itself.
Kerala does not have only vegetarian Gods. Through our traditions, the barrier between the sacred and the everyday gets continually blurred. Our traditions also stand as living testimony of resistance to mainstream practices and preferences getting in the way of authenticity. Our traditions are a living memoir of God validating the life of the subaltern as they ‘eat’ like the common folk. This divine appetite is a nod to the labor and palate of the locals. This is not a theological rebellion. It is just an inherited practice that has remained unchanged. Our Gods embrace flavours and the plates of the common folk.
Vegetarianism is not holier. It is merely a mainstream aesthetic that gained momentum. These temple kitchens problematise the mainstream image of a vegetarian God. They ask whose interests were served in constructing this image. When fish is laid before Muthappan’s shrine, when Theyyam artists receive toddy in the deity’s name, when ancestral Gods are served meat, it reflects the memory of a God who recognized his people and ate with them. Our temple kitchens are the living archives of a different form of culinary divinity.
Edited by: Esha Ann Mariya | Design by: Manaswini
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