My Tamil ancestors ate meat.
Not just chicken or goat—the modern-day socially acceptable forms of non-vegetarianism—but deer, rabbit, squirrel, crab, fish, and even peacock. They hunted, they cooked, they shared. Their diet reflected the forest around them, the rivers that nourished them, and the rhythms of a land that had not yet been restructured by caste purity or Vedic superiority.
They had a deity. Not one with a Sanskrit name or an elaborate mythology crafted by Brahmin poets. This was a living deity—perhaps a stone under a neem tree, or a terracotta horse standing guard at the village edge. A deity who received offerings of food, drink, and yes—sacrifices. Not out of bloodlust, but reverence. Not as violence, but as a sacred transaction between the living and the divine.
All of this was before my culture was slowly pulled into the all-encompassing umbrella of what we now call “Hinduism.”
When people speak of Hinduism today, they often mean the polished, temple-centered, vegetarian, Sanskrit-chanting variety—where gods sit on lotuses and sages float in yogic trance. But that’s just one layer. Beneath it lies a buried civilization. A Tamil, tribal, earthy civilization, whose practices didn’t always align with the codes of Manu or the hymns of the Rig Veda.
My ancestors weren’t waiting for Ram or Krishna to arrive in their imagination. They already had stories, spirits, and sacred spaces. What they didn’t have was a concept of “pollution” tied to food or blood. What they didn’t need was a caste system dictating who gets to speak to god and who doesn’t.
Over time, the absorption happened slowly—strategically. Deities were co-opted, rebranded, sanitized. The meat offerings were replaced with fruits and flowers. Sacrifice became a sin. Animal blood became “impure.” What was once worship became superstition. And those who held on were labelled “lower.”
But memory is a stubborn thing.
It lives in the whispered stories of grandmothers. It survives in folk songs and regional festivals. It hides in recipes passed down quietly, without the need for explanation. It rises in the smell of dried fish in a Tamil home. It survives in the refusal to forget.
This isn’t about glorifying the past. It’s about naming what was erased. It’s about recognising that Tamil culture is older than Hinduism as we know it. And that our gods didn’t need to be tamed to be true.
If we have to reclaim anything today, maybe it’s not just land or language. Maybe it’s memory. Maybe it’s the right to say: my ancestors ate meat, made sacrifices, worshipped differently—and were no less spiritual for it.