Bovine politics exposes fault lines within contemporary Indian society, where eating \nbeef is simultaneously a violation of sacred taboos, an expression of marginalized \nidentities, and a route to cosmopolitan sophistication. The recent rise of Hindu \nnationalism has further polarized traditional views: Dalits, Muslims, and Christians \nprotest threats to their beef-eating heritage while Hindu fundamentalists rally against \nthose who eat the sacred cow. Yet close observation of what people do and do not eat, \nthe styles and contexts within which they do so, and the disparities between rhetoric \nand everyday action overturns this simplistic binary opposition. \nUnderstanding how a food can be implicated in riots, vigilante attacks, and even \nmurders demands that we look beyond immediate politics to wider contexts. Drawing \non decades of ethnographic research in South India, James Staples charts how cattle \nowners, brokers, butchers, cooks, and occasional beef eaters navigate the \ncontemporary political and cultural climate. Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian \noffers a fine-grained exploration of the current situation, locating it within the wider \nanthropology of food and eating in the region and revealing critical aspects of what it is \nto be Indian in the twenty-first century.