In its dominant representations, India is a mostly vegetarian civilisation. Dietary prohibitions there are many: the sacred cow among the Hindus, the impure pig among the Muslims, meat absent from Jain and Buddhist practice. To these religious prescriptions is added, among a large part of non-vegetarian Hindus, a customary avoidance that no sacred text prescribes, but which goes back to an old association of the pig with impurity. The formal religious prohibition and the social convention thus overlap to restrict the consumption of pork well beyond the Muslim population alone. These constraints largely explain why cased charcuterie holds a marginal place in the Indian food landscape: meat, when it is prepared, is prepared rather as kebab, as kheema (a minced-meat dish), as curry or as a ball, formats that require no casing.

Where a tradition of cased sausage has nonetheless formed, it is almost always the fruit of a meeting with a European colonial presence. The best-documented case is that of Goa, where the Catholics, heirs to four centuries of Portuguese presence, transformed the Iberian chouriço into a sausage fermented with chilli and palm vinegar. This preparation is called choris in Konkani and, on its own, constitutes the essence of the cured charcuterie of the Indian subcontinent. The chapter ‘The circulations’ retraces its Seville–Lisbon–Goa journey within the wider framework of the Iberian transplantations towards Asia. A neighbouring case is met in Sri Lanka, where the Portuguese occupation of Ceylon left the lingus, whose name derives from linguiça; this product, having become industrial, is the subject of an entry in the Supplement.

Other Indian communities eat pork (the Christians of Kerala, the tribes of the North-East, including the Naga, the Anglo-Indians, heirs to the British presence), but their preparations almost always take other forms: pork ularthiyathu simmered in Kerala, whole smoked pork in Nagaland, pork vindaloo in Anglo-Indian cooking. None of these traditions produced a stable, cased sausage attested in documentary sources. This silence is significant and deserves to be noted: Indian charcuterie, in the sense the book intends, is almost entirely summed up by Goa.

Two Himalayan sausages extend the section northward, outside the Indian subcontinent proper. The Nepali gyuma and the Bhutanese juma belong to the continuum of high-altitude blood sausages that crosses Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh and the high valleys of Nepal, and are bound by the same logic of the complete use of the yak or the sheep slaughtered in the high mountains. The gyuma is that of the communities of Tibetan descent in Nepal (Sherpa, Limbu, Rai); its proper Tibetan cousin, the gyurma, is treated in the East Asia section. The Bhutanese juma, spiced with local Sichuan pepper and chilli, illustrates the chilli intensity typical of the kingdom’s cooking.

The western Indian Ocean is treated here in a dimension at once limited and real. The Mascarene Islands (Mauritius and Réunion) produced a genuine Creole charcuterie, inherited from the French and British colonisations: the Réunionese boudin créole pimenté, lifted with kaffir lime and chilli, and the Mauritian saucisse créole au massalé, scented with a blend of Indo-Tamil spices proper to the island, each the subject of an entry; the Réunionese saucisse fumée that enters the rougail is described in the Supplement. The other islands of the zone (Madagascar, the Comoros, the Seychelles) developed no documented cased charcuterie tradition: their food cultures rest on other modes of preparing meat, and their absence from the book reflects that reality rather than a lack of documentation. What justifies grouping this handful of islands with the Indian subcontinent, despite their heterogeneous cultures, is the thread of the Indian Ocean trade routes: these islands were, for centuries, stages in the spice trade, and this circulation marked their cuisines.