Chicken Nation: Permissibility, Power, and the Social Life of Meat in India

Abstract

This article examines the cultural and political significance of chicken in contemporary India, situating its circulation within histories of caste hierarchy, religious distinction, and majoritarian politics. While scholarship has foregrounded beef as a site of prohibition and public confrontation, this study turns to chicken as the meat of permissibility, tracing how power operates through the normalisation of everyday consumption within shared systems of production and exchange. Drawing on ethnographic research, media discourse, and literary and visual cues, shows how the expansion of the poultry industry since economic liberalisation starting in the late 1980s has reshaped access and aspiration across regions and classes, even as distinctions of purity and pollution continue to organise how chicken circulates socially. As chicken moves from school meal programmes and roadside stalls to domestic kitchens and multinational fast-food chains, it accrues moral and symbolic value through idioms such as ghar ka khana and bahar ka khana, which structure care, indulgence, and ritual inclusion. The article argues that ordinary infrastructures of market growth and household routine sustain hierarchy through repeated acts of classification within common material networks, showing how identity and authority are worked out through everyday practices of differentiation.