There is no end to Malayali hypocrisy. Despite all the recent brouhaha over beef, the buffalo meat is actually not served in the Kerala House dining hall. In fact, beef was never served in the dining hall for staying guests or visitors. It was relegated to the staff canteen kitchen far away from the main kitchen, making its status evident as working class food.

The Kerala House beef fry was made famous by a cook, N Sukumaran, who started running the staff canteen in the late 1990s. “I think it was AR Raju who started the staff canteen in the 1980s. It always served beef, but then it was a small lossmaking operation meant only for the employees. I turned it around when hundreds of Malayalis, particularly journalists and Delhi Police cops, started visiting the canteen,” says Sukumaran, who many believed cooked the best beef fry north of the Vindhyas.

Unlike other state bhawans, the socalled Samridhi restaurant in Kerala House is no real restaurant; it is just one half of the staff canteen. Still, much of beef-hating Delhi was aghast to know that Malayalis not just eat cow and buffalo meat, but also flaunt it. What really irked the Tuesday vegetarians was that unlike the Christian North East, these darkskinned, lungi-clad, cow-eaters of the South have some of the richest temples in the country built centuries ago, they still send Malayali Brahmin priests to Badrinath, and yet are incorrigibly irreverent.

Sure, Malayalis hate to conform and love to be contrarian. For some, the whole point in buying and eating beef in Delhi is to prove a point that we disagree with the imposition of majoritarian food habits. Malayalis dug out a Sanskrit term from their favourite dictionary, Sabdataravali, to prove that an ancient ideal Brahmin was also called a ‘gokhnan’ because he was supposed to serve beef to his guests. But Malayalis serve heaps of hypocrisy along with their political correctness. No Malayali, however much he or she loves beef, will serve it for weddings. Hindus wouldn’t want to break the barriers of a vegetarian tradition and Christian and Muslim beef-eaters wouldn’t want to invite derision by serving cheap meat.

Beef was always a cheap source of protein for the poor working class people of India, especially the Dalits, and Kerala is no exception. Conversion to Christianity since the Portuguese times sanctioned the food habits of the working classes and then the British gave beef the respectability of the food of the Colonial master. But the British presence alone cannot explain the mainstreaming of beef in the Malayali menu. After all, the great anglophiles of Kolkata, Mumbai or Delhi are no beef lovers despite hosting the British for so long.

As the upper caste leaders of the underground Communist party began living with the working classes, organising them against feudal exploitation, they dropped all taboos and began eating whatever was served and available. Though most of the first generation Communists were teetotallers and vegetarian Gandhians, the younger lot among them ate all that they got with relish and made it intellectually fashionable to do so.

Traditionally alcohol was brewed or distilled and served by non-vegetarians, mostly beef-eating working classes. So all those who crossed the threshold of alcoholism obviously were introduced to beef delights. No wonder, beef fry remains Malayalis’ favourite cocktail snack.

Then in their desperate attempts to shake off poverty, Malayalis have been constantly crossing the seas and breaking the taboos, not letting anything stop them from making their lives better. Choice of food obviously is the last thing in mind when someone is ready to risk his life on an illegal dhow across the sea to prosperity. Then, a Malayali is not a sore thumb. He tries to merge with the backdrop. He will never utter the word beef in a crowded DTC bus.

There has never been an anti-Hindi agitation in Kerala. We don’t think much about Malayalam, anyway. If Hindi will fetch us our daily bread then Hindi, why not? If someone calls us Madrasi, we will pretend to search for a Chennaiite in the crowd. We are not really cowards but we are clever enough to avoid a fight where we are sure to get hurt.

But in a group we are terrific fighters. In Kerala, we always fight for our rights and for the rights of the penguins of Antarctica. By the way, please do not misconstrue this to be some Left conspiracy. Our big writers and filmmakers are not Communists. OV Vijayan had walked out of the party when Soviet Union invaded Hungary. Adoor Gopalakrishnan is avowedly anti-Left and so are most of them.

There was one Nair who ran a small restaurant in Mayur Vihar Phase I, serving excellent beef fry. He was the official caterer for Mayur Vihar’s Uttara Guruvayurappan temple, too. He never mixed the cow and Malayalis’ cowherd God, Guruvayurappan.

Within the cosy comfort of Kerala Bhawan, as the proud citizens of the Republic of Malayalidom, we fight for our right to eat what we choose to eat. But if given an opportunity to run the BJP office canteen, we’ll turn complete cow worshippers.