Horrors of Caste and Class in India’s Meat Production
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh
Biography
Poulomi Choudhury (she/her) is an Irish Research Council Scholar at University College Dublin’s School of English, Drama and Film. Her doctoral project, ‘Fleshy Food Resources of the Future,’ examines the role of animal agriculture and meat in the current and ongoing climate crisis through an analysis of twenty-first-century literary works.
Introduction
Poulomi Choudhury was hosted by the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Edinburgh during her EARTH Scholarship, where her research focused on developing a chapter of her PhD thesis through an ecocritical and postcolonial reading of meat eating, specifically through an analysis of Vandana Singh’s science fiction short story ‘Are you Sannata5139?’ (2018). Her research developed in the ‘3M’s: Making, Method, Multispecies’ Cluster, where she contextualised the ‘making’ and writing of the transnational literary work through an interdisciplinary ‘method’ highlighting the sociopolitical dimensions of meat eating. This was done by critiquing the place of animals within ‘multispecies’ relationality and acknowledging that meat culture’s (Anne Potts 2016) continuation and its concurrent contributions to perpetuating the capitalistic mode of production depends on the intersecting denigration of women, queer people, disabled people, people of colour, immigrants, and crucially for this project, of caste minorities and nonhuman animals.
Research
My doctoral project examines the role of animal agriculture and meat in the current and ongoing climate crisis. I analyse a corpus of twenty-first-century literary works that belong to the sub-genre of abatthorror, which I define as horror fiction that centres around the abattoir and representations of splatter, violence, and cannibalism. I investigate the ways in which these works produce fleshy equivalences between the meat of animals and humans and argue that horror provides the necessary tools through which the ideology of violence that is baked into the very structures of meat production can be questioned and critiqued. It makes visible the ‘absent referents’ (Carol Adams) of splatter and bloodshed inherent in the slaughter, value production and consumption of nonhuman animals. I argue that the provocations raised by cannibalism in abatthorror fiction can expose the systemic issues of carnism and meat culture in the context of contemporary hyper-consumption and that these issues intersect with other forms of oppression and exploitation, such as colonialism, racism, casteism, sexism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy. The analysis adopts a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, drawing on theories and concepts from critical animal studies, ecofeminism, critical disability studies, postcolonial studies, and horror studies. 
During my EARTH scholarship, I was hosted and mentored by postcolonial studies scholar Dr. Sourit Bhattacharya. This opportunity allowed me to research, develop, and discuss my writing on the complex and thorny politics surrounding meat prohibitions and consumption in India, specifically through Vandana Singh’s science fiction short story ‘Are You Sannata3159?’. This story is part of the 2018 collection Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Although it follows science fiction conventions, ‘Are You Sannata3159?’ is firmly rooted in horror aesthetics. Set in a future India, the narrative depicts the extreme division between the wealthy, who live in the tall towers of Upside, and the poor, who inhabit the subterranean realms called Patal. The underworld is lawless, marked by ecological devastation, precarity, warring street gangs, and rat-folks rumoured to eat the dead. The establishment of a slaughterhouse and the promise of well-paying jobs bring a glimmer of hope to Patal. However, the workers there are forced to consume a drug-infused drink that induces ecstasy, alienation, and disassociation, which keeps them from realising that in addition to killing animals (including bulls, cows and goats), they are also slaughtering some of their community members.
Focusing on the depiction of institutionally sanctioned cannibalism in the story, my analysis underscores the weaponisation of nonhuman animals under the right-wing Hindutva political regime while also being critical of the alternative — anti-Hindutva “meat-eating activism” — performed by some Indian liberal leftists in the name of aligning with marginalised communities. My analysis extends to the intertextual allusions in ‘Are You Sannata3159?’, referencing earlier stories of cannibalism in science fiction and Indian folklore, such as the subterranean cannibal Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and the depiction of the cannibal race of Rakshasas in The Ramayana. While the dominant narrative describes Rakshasas as polluting, cannibalistic creatures, counter-narratives reveal that these stories may highlight racial, colour, and community distinctions established by the so-called elite “Aryan conquerors”, reflecting early accounts of colonisation in the region.
A version of this research was presented at the ‘Meat in the Arts and Culture Conference 2024’ organised by StOMAC at the University of Glasgow (3 July 2024) and at the Global Connects 2024 event on 18 July 2024. The paper, ‘Horrors of Class and Caste in Vandana Singh’s ‘Are You Sannata3159?’ (2018)’, develops an ecocritical, postcolonial reading of meat-eating and cannibalism in the short story within the context of India’s unique meatscape. It critically responds to this literary work that imagines a future where procurement, slaughter, and processing of meat are carried out by society’s marginalised people, whose bodies are figuratively (through labour) and literally (through cannibalism) subsumed within extractive, capitalistic, and hierarchical systems of production.
