Food war: Being a non-vegetarian in Mumbai isn’t easy

Being a non-vegetarian in Mumbai isn’t easy. Housing colonies, and even chunks of suburbs like Vile Parle, have a strict ‘no carnivores’ policy. Even your eating out choices are restricted. Suparna Thombare reports

Sudha Deshpande has to sneak in meat through her society gates each time she craves for non-vegetarian food. She has been living the life of an under-cover non-vegetarian for the past 10 years. “I loved the society and the locality. The broker, himself a vegetarian, refused to sell the flat to me because I was non-vegetarian. So I had to lie and get the flat  from the builder,” says Deshpande.

Deshpande is not the only one. Several non-vegetarians have gone through house-hunting hell trying to find a flat in vegetarian-dominated pockets with unwritten rules on non-vegetarian residents. In fact, anyone hunting for a house will vouch that your food preference is the first thing a broker will ask you. “There are owners who have strict instructions not to get any non-vegetarian clients so I cut them off at my level,” says a broker refusing to be named.

In 2003, Parel resident Amar Khamkar, put up a fight against a housing society that refused to sell a flat to him because he was a non-vegetarian Maharashtrian.  He held several meetings with the secretary and tried convincing the members that it wasn’t fair but nothing worked. “I had the money but they would lie to me saying the bookings were full or would quote a price three times higher than the original one,” he says.

Aditya Pandya, who writes on real estate says it was a personal experience while trying to sell his flat in a Kandivali society made him realise how divided the city is over the issue of food preference.

“Jains and Gujaratis are a majority in the area in Yoginagar where I had my flat. There was a Jain temple attached to the building. When we decided to sell the flat, we were sure that we would get a good premium because of the presence of the temple. But there was a non-vegetarian family living on the ground floor, and nobody would buy the flat.

Non-vegetarians refused to buy it since the majority living there were vegetarians and vegetarians wouldn’t buy it because of the one non-vegetarian in the building.” Pandya explains that it is difficult to define a particular area or suburb as a vegetarian zone but the vegetarian clusters existing all over the city are “becoming more visible”.

First, it was vegetarian apartment blocks. Then it was vegetarian neighbourhoods. Now, some militant vegetarians in Mumbai are demanding meat-less supermarkets and shopping malls. Recently, the Marwari Ekta Parishad protested against meat being sold at the new retail chain of the Aditya Birla group.

There have been several instances in the past where vegetarians have put pressure and succeeded in getting restaurants in their area to serve just vegetarian food. Marine Drive caters only to herbivores  now. Dominoes, Pizza Hut and many other small-time restaurants on that stretch are exclusively veggie.

Many  have even shut down. The vegetarians say it is all for tradition. “A Marwari family can’t support slaughter. Should commercial interests be allowed to overtake our culture and tradition?” asks an indignant Narendrabhai Parmar of Marwari Ekta Parishad.

But can the choice of one section of society take over entire public spaces? Filmmaker Paromita Vora’s short film Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City explores this issue. It talks about the politics of food, and divisions over class, caste and food in the city. 

“These unsaid differences over food have always existed. The trouble begins when people try to control public space. This turns into land politics,” says Vora. “People can come together to build their own society based on their preferences, but they are being intolerant of others. You need to be tolerant in a city like Mumbai. You can’t go around telling people how to run a business or how to mould public spaces.”