Gut Ecology: Meat Science, Modernity, and Carrion Aversion in Gandhi’s India

This essay examines debates about carrion eating in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century India. Although proscriptions against carrion eating among the noncaste Hindus were entangled in Indian anticolonial, nationalist, and cow-protection movements, “Gut Ecology” places the subject in the material contexts of bacteriology, the study of zoonotic disease, and the emergence of meat science. The essay focuses on an exchange of letters (1933) between M. K. Gandhi and Dr. G. V. Deshmukh, the first president of the Indian Medical Association, in order to explore historical and theoretical relationships among affective, political, and scientific culture.