The Meat Of The Goddess

On the sixth of September, in Liluah, a man from Chhatarpur — thirty years old, if the papers are to be believed, which is to say young enough that he has not yet had time to notice how much of what he says was said before him by men who did not survive the telling — stood among his devotees and issued an appeal to the Hindus of Bengal. Do not sell non-vegetarian food near the idols, he said. During Navratri especially. And those who eat meat on such occasions? He called them pakhandis — hypocrites, impostors, religious frauds; an old word for the man whose piety is more costume than conviction. It fits him better than his own dhoti, because the whole enterprise of telling an entire ethnic group what to do about its stomach is itself a performance, a role played before an audience that has not yet agreed to be there.

A babaji. The word baba comes from Sanskrit bāp, father, via Persian and Hindi, a title of tenderness, the kind of word a child uses when the world hurts. He has taken it as a brand. Bageshwar Dham, head priest, Divya Darbar where he identifies devotees’ problems without being told about them — which is either miracles or showmanship, and I am an atheist who spent fifteen years in American healthcare research learning that the two are usually the same thing at different resolutions. The chief minister of West Bengal welcomed him, dined with him, invited him to open a center here. And then the babaji walked into Liluah and issued his appeal over our luchi.

So let me say this plainly, because plainness is the only currency I hold: Durga Puja is not your jurisdiction, sir. Not his, not yours, not any one man’s stomach-decree delivered from a Madhya Pradesh temple to a Bengal that has been eating fish since before your temple had a roof.

But let us go wider first, as is the habit of this blog — wide, then deep, like a flood that only later remembers it was once a raindrop. The question underneath the question is not whether Bengalis will eat mutton on Navami. They will. Have been for centuries; animal sacrifice at Kali Puja and Durga Puja, and meat offered as prasad, are traditions older than any modern party, and Dilip Ghosh, the Panchayat Minister, had the sense to say so: meat offered as prasad is tradition, not compulsion. No, the question is why a politician’s new state needs a religious man to hand him a stick for the thali, and why we keep handing it over with both hands and calling it culture.

The etymology, since one is owed. Meat has the more interesting history. Old English mete meant food in general — nourishment, sustenance, something to eat. Only later did the word narrow toward the flesh of animals. The word itself carries an old linguistic fossil: once, mete simply meant food. The boundary was made sharper by culture, cuisine and language; it was not handed down engraved on the molecular structure of a carrot. You are arguing about where to draw a line that a medieval kitchen drew with a knife on a crust.

Now here is the part they cannot legislate away, and I will say it in the toilet language this blog exists for: even the strictest vegetarian eats an ecosystem. Every apple you bite is riddled with mites — Pyri, Eriophyid mites so small your grandmother’s microscope would have needed a prayer to see them; every strawberry carries its own little population of arthropods; the banana carries its own microscopic tenants, and the cauliflower you serve as purity is a body of living tissue that has been quietly eating something since the seed. The line between vegetarian and carnivore is not a law of nature. It is a zoom level. Pull back the magnification and the boundary dissolves: there are no vegetables in nature in the culinary sense, only plants that have never met a human mouth, and every plant you eat is full of life forms too small to be seen, so the entire edifice of veg-nonveg discrimination is a matter of scale, not substance — a difference of lens, not of reality. You cannot sieve out the smaller life from the fruit any more than you can separate the oxygen from the air you are using to breathe while you object.

This is the wonderment I mean, though I wear it as a snarl: that a single strawberry, for instance, is a galaxy of organisms; that the mites on our orchards have been there since orchards were young; that we have never eaten anything pure and will never eat anything pure, purity being a word for what happens when you stop looking closely enough. The Gita itself, in chapter seventeen, verse eight, classifies food — rasyāḥ, snigdhāḥ, sthirāḥ, hṛdyāḥ — juicy, oleaginous, substantial, agreeable to the heart — and notice it says nothing of purity from smaller life. The sattvika diet is described as pleasant, not as pristine. Pristine is a later commercial invention.

And yet here stands the babaji with his appeal, and here stand the politicians who invited him. Samik Bhattacharya, state president, had to issue damage control on the seventh: “How can Bengalis not have fish and meat? Even Swami Vivekananda said Ma Kali will have mutton.” Then, in the same breath, no sin in advocating vegetarianism — a sentence so double-glassed that light cannot pass through it. Agnimitra Paul says we save money to have mutton and fish. Tapas Roy: each religion has its own rules, people will eat whatever they want. Tathagata Roy: those who want to follow him, do so; those who, like me, will eat non-veg anyway, will ignore him — so what is all this hullabaloo? The CPI(M) says blame the ones who invited him. Congress files a police complaint at Bhawanipur against the babaji for hurting Bengali sentiments. Sentiments. As if the stomach were a sentiment and not an organ with its own alibis.

Why do they need this? Let us reason without naming our tools, as is proper. A new government in Bengal, freshly installed and saffron at its heart while wearing the state like a borrowed shawl, tends to reach for the stick early. The goon’s first act is never against the enemy; it is against the neighbor’s kitchen table. Durga Puja has always been the territory of Bengali adversarial one-upmanship, that annual piss-match where every committee outdoes the last with bigger idols, brighter lights, louder drums, and a government that has just arrived tends to know exactly how to flex: take the one festival where Bengalis are most themselves — the fish-frying, the luchi on Ashtami, the goat on Navami — and run a trial over it. If you can make the pandal obey, the whole city has been made to kneel without a single law being passed. The controversy may not really be about meat. It is a cheap test of cultural authority: who gets to tell Bengalis what belongs on the festival table? And every “we save money so we can have mutton” is a small flag planted in the clay idol’s mud.

And they need it to be true even while they deny it, because a government that has larceny to hide needs diversions, and a populace that is already gullible will follow any voice loud enough — religion and god being fictions that are now commerce and propaganda objects, which the babaji knows in his bones, because his Divya Darbar is a product line. Pushing the limit to a comic level costs nothing and buys two things: a headline, and a demonstration that some stick has been handed over. The VHP issued an advisory asking organizers to keep non-veg away from pandals, then clarified it was not a blanket ban; the babaji ignored the clarification; the politicians applauded the original. This is how it works now: an advisory becomes a diktat in transit, and every man in saffron or white who objects calls it personal opinion while the personal opinion gets state dinners.

I am writing this knowing it is anathema to post publicly, which is to say I am already a pariah as an atheist — and I did not arrive at the pariah stage by design. It was drawn out: clueless childhood, then withdrawn witless, then the slow graduation into this inveterate, insolent, tactless, guileless, crusty middle-aged man who cannot keep his mouth shut about food laws because he once spent fifteen years in American healthcare research learning that a population’s belief in what is good for it is almost never correlated with what actually is. I post some of these essays on LinkedIn, where pretension is the default atmosphere, and they land like an honest, ugly stain on a whitewashed post-truth wall — because the default behavior there is to hide the human inside the animal within and blow the trumpet of the resume persona. But I cannot stay quiet, which is to say the quiet itself has become a symptom, and the symptom will outlive me.

So: no fondness for any deity or deification, which is to say I will eat whatever I like — fish on Ashtami because the luchi demands it, mutton on Navami because Kali’s own tradition asks for it, and the strawberry on Sunday morning knowing exactly what lives in its flesh, all of us knowing, none of us sieving. The babaji can keep his appeal; the zoom level has already been pulled back, and at this magnification every thali — vegetarian, non-vegetarian, saffron-blessed or otherwise — is equally full of the small dead, which is to say it is all meat in the end, only some of it politely.

The mites are real. The firman is not.

P.S. — Dhirendra Krishna Shastri, head priest of Bageshwar Dham, Chhatarpur; his Liluah remarks of September 6, 2026; Samik Bhattacharya’s press conference of September 7, 2026; the Bhawanipur police complaint filed by West Bengal Congress on September 8, 2026.