November 22, 2010
Undergraduate research abroad: Max Chaoulideer
First-year undergraduate student conducts independent summer research project on diet in Hyderabad with COSAS support
Max Chaoulideer is a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, currently majoring in Fundamentals. The summer before beginning his studies at the U of C, he worked in an animal behavior lab at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, studying eusocial insect species. The work of the lab was recently accepted for publication in the Journal for Insect Physiology. During his first college year, Chaoulideer worked with Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty (History/SALC) and began discussing an independent research project on South Indian cuisine. He then applied for and received support from the Committee on Southern Asian Studies (COSAS) for a one-month summer research trip to Hyderabad. COSAS/SALAC Program Assistant Brian Ashby interviewed Max via email about the experience.
Describe your project, and the ideas behind it. What was its inspiration? Who are your collaborators? And how did you settle on Hyderabad?
Before I came to UChicago, I spent two months in Bangalore. Even though I was busy researching social wasps, the inevitable cultural osmosis a place like South India creates quickly made clear to me the degree to which cuisine (the when, where, what, why, and how of eating) reflects the complexities of the many cultures in such a South Indian metropolis. More specifically, the importance of the “veg” (vegetarian) vs. “non-veg” dichotomy was overwhelming in its pervasiveness. Unlike in the West, where being vegetarian is largely a moral or aesthetic choice made by an individual, I found that people identified deeply with one or the other lifestyle and adhered to it purely out of respect for their religious tradition. Over the two months I spent in Bangalore the nuances of various peoples’ food restrictions began to reveal themselves to me, and it became increasingly clear that understanding the social framework of food restrictions and having a better sense of their roots would be a fantastic (and probably delicious) way of better understanding a place with such a foreign blend of cultures. So this past summer, along with a friend, Olivia Woollam, and with a lot of help from Tarini Bedi at COSAS and Dipesh Chakrabarty, I went back to South India, this time to Hyderabad – a melting pot of religions, cultures, and more importantly, cuisines – for a month-long pilot study of the “veg”/”non-veg” dynamics in the city.
Photos by Olivia Woollam
You organized home-stays with various Hyderabadi citizens using the website couchsurfing.org. Can you describe this website's subculture, and how it works in South India? Who did you meet this way? Who didn't you meet? How did it facilitate your research?
There were a number of logistical difficulties we were trying to figure out: finding a place to stay, having a way of penetrating into the private home lives of strangers, having a mechanism by which to get the information we wanted, financial worries, etc... All of these issues, I realized at one point, would be solved at once through the incredible institution of couchsurfing. Two million hosts and travelers (“surfers”) from around the world coordinate their traveling and their hosting through the online website couchsurfing.org, a travel networking site, which is becoming increasingly popular, especially among younger travelers. The idea is that, if your dates match theirs, you go for a few nights and spend a significant amount of time with the host(s), getting to know one another and enjoying oneself. In Hyderabad alone there were over 600 “couches” available – we stayed with single men, couples and families. The benefits for the traveler are obvious: getting to know a city from the inside through locals, eating local (and free!!) food, having a place to stay (also paid for simply by being an engaged guest), and meeting a huge variety of people. The hosts’ incentive is both to expand the couchsurfing network and to be exposed to people from backgrounds they would otherwise have no exposure to. This was, for both me and Olivia, our first time couchsurfing, as it was for several of our hosts, and it was magnificent! Although we only found Christian and Hindu hosts (i.e. no Muslims), the range of people we met was incredible, and, even aside from the project, completely changed the trip for the better. Moreover, we were thrown across the barrier of intimacy and had a perfect entry into the otherwise impenetrable private lives and stories of locals. We were able to talk about somewhat taboo topics such as caste, class, religion and morality, which turned out to be at the heart of understanding food restrictions. In short, I don’t know how we would have eaten well, gotten to know the city, and met Hyderabadis, let alone progressed on our project, without couchsurfing.
Your project investigated relationships between understandings of ancient systems of diet regulation and contemporary science, in a city now well-known as a hub for jobs and education in hi-tech industries. What theories or conclusions would you venture, based on your experiences, about the role of food at the intersection of differing philosophies of science in today's India? How do these ideas vary across generations?
After only a month in Hyderabad, I would hesitate to posit some overarching theory about the various ways young people reconcile their dogmatic dedication to science with their strong adherence to tradition, or in this specific case with food restrictions. We did, however, gain some insights from those people we talked to, particularly one woman who I met on the plane. Her family is Jain, the religious group with the most stringent food restrictions, but she is also an engineer and lives her life in accordance with modern science. After telling me emphatically that she doesn’t “do anything [she] can’t justify with science,” I was curious how she justified to herself practices such as not eating onions (observant Jains don’t eat anything that involves killing an organism to render it edible – all roots fall into this category). After a moment of hesitation she explained that her aunt had once told her all the scientific reasoning behind their food habits, and she had “forgotten this one.”
I later met her aunt who, like other Jains and strict vegetarians we met, had an elaborate quasi-science to explain all the traditions they upheld. There were a variety of accounts people upheld as to why humans are not fit to eat certain foods based on anything from dental structure to intestinal length to the kind of work assigned to certain castes. Every person had a slightly different account of what it was that explained the unhealthiness or religious profanity of meat or eggs or garlic. I haven’t checked the scientific validity of their claims, but my general sense was that the younger generations and those aware of the allure and power of science felt a need to justify a traditional, religious knowledge with scientific knowledge. In many ways, scientific conceptions of what is healthy align with the old religious food ordinances, and the quasi-science therefore makes some degree of sense.
Interestingly, a number of the Jains and vegetarians we met had a strong moral language behind their abstinence. This was the norm for young people who held onto their food traditions: they blended modern-sounding nutritional claims with ethical claims about what is best, in order to validate their families’ particular restrictions and rituals. In a way it doesn’t matter if it’s quasi-science as long as it suffices as a reconciliatory tool to patch the gap between their religious tradition and their science. What is interesting is to see which people uphold their traditions despite science, who does so because of science, and who abandon their family’s gastronomic beliefs completely.
You lived and worked with a variety of people from Hindu, Muslim, and Jain backgrounds. What did you learn from each? Was your project more or less well received among particular religious communities?
We didn’t really get a chance to talk to Muslims, which was a shame, but among the others it was always the Jains who were most excited about our project and went the furthest out of their way to help us and inform us. The aunt of the woman from the plane actually drove us several hours to go talk to a renowned guru who specializes in food prescriptions! With that said, almost everyone else was at least intrigued by our project, and I think tickled that we were in India to learn from them as opposed to imparting some “Western wisdom” to them.
Can we hear a bit about your stay in the "Film Nagar" neighborhood and your interactions with the Telugu film industry?
The actor we stayed with, Ganga, was unsuccessful to the degree that he had to work the customs night shift at the international airport an hour away. His place was strangely the most dilapidated of all the places we stayed, and although his house was surrounded by massive "Tollywood" stars' mansions, he did not make it quite that far. There were moments when I wished we had met a richer and more successful actor, but I think this guy had more character than they might have had... and better stories to tell.
Poster for the Tollywood film "Maghadeera" (2009)
Where do you see this project going in your remaining three academic years and summers at the U of C? And after? What do you imagine as its final output?
Originally, before Dipesh and Tarini talked some sense into me, this was going to be a two-month-long project with four or five people, with hopes of producing a documentary and/or a narrative cookbook. Of course, we conducted a much more modest (and realistic) study this summer, mostly feeling out the city, and discovering which questions were most interesting.
Professor Stephen Palmie, who teaches a course on The Anthropology of Food and Cuisine here at the U of C, expressed potential interest in collaborating, so were something to occur in the future I would love to try to involve him. At some point I absolutely want to go further with this study, interview many more people, possibly learn Telugu (or at least Hindi), and simply be back in the wonderful city of Hyderabad. Whether that will be in my time at this university or not is very much up in the air, but if I got the funding and had the motivated people there to help me, nothing would be more exciting than returning and really getting to the heart of the interesting questions, whether in the form of a short documentary, a photo-riddled narrative cookbook, or a straight academic article.