This Cookbook Is Unlike Any Other From India. Pass the Honeycomb, Please!

KHAMGAON, India – Pork rinds. Dried squirrel. Spicy fish eggs. Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada is part anthology, part cookbook and part rebuke to readers, who may presume Indian food is largely vegetarian.

It tells of the culinary traditions of two groups of Dalits, known as Mang and Mahar. Dalits, broadly, occupy the lowest rungs of South Asia’s ancient caste system and were once known as untouchables. They also form a sizable minority: around a fifth to a quarter of India’s estimated 1.4 billion people.

Yet this is a rare book, perhaps the first published in English about Dalit culinary traditions by a person of Dalit caste.

There’s a simple reason for that, says author Shahu Patole, a 62-year-old retired civil servant and a Dalit. “To upper-caste Hindus,” Patole says, “we were not even humans. We were slaves.” Dalit food, Patole says, was not considered worthy of being documented.