Food and accommodation

Illustration/Uday Mohite

In 2001, while making my film Unlimited Girls, this newspaper did a cover story about a man who wanted the Chowpatty Dominoes to be "pure veg". Then, it seemed a laughable oddity and I featured the clip in my film. But the issue grew. In 2004, it led me to make a short film - Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City - about the growing phenomenon of buildings in the same (affluent, majorly Gujarati) neighbourhood that forbade non-vegetarian resident. One building's residents even threw garbage as patrons entered a non-vegetarian restaurant in one of its shop fronts. "No one asked us to leave but they made it such an ordeal to do business that we eventually left." the owner told me. Biases are imposed through an inimical atmosphere.

I obviously opposed this. A part of me wondered though about revulsion, because I have this weird revulsion for tea - my mother says it's because she had a pregnancy-aversion to tea when she was expecting me. I've learned to work around it obviously - tea is ubiquitous in India. We co-exist by overcoming ourselves - the smell of tea, the smell of food, the taste of friendship, our political and moral tendencies.

A man I interviewed, who described himself as a "hard-core"' vegetarian, addressed the question lucidly. "At home, I don't serve non-vegetarian food. But in the office, I don't ask what is in someone's lunchbox. We eat together. I may own the office, but it is a public space where we come together for work." It was a kind of self-aware acknowledgement and accommodation of difference, which he evoked by adding "we are from Bombay, no."

Accommodation is an expansive-sounding word - but like all words its purpose can be distorted with bias. The vegetarian extremism that started to brew in early 2000s Bombay was a veiled anti-Muslim discourse, but also a Shiv Sena versus BJP tussle, rooted in caste and regional dynamics. The lust for homogeneity has only grown and food has been an area where casteism and communalism are violently exercised.

To ignore this larger context of food politics is to perpetuate it. You can talk about accommodation as if it's an automatically fair intent, but structures, practices, rules are shaped to accommodate some and exclude others. IIT Bombay's canteen recently created tables that were veg-only. Considering the canteen actually serves meat to students only once a week (they must buy it otherwise), it already skews to accommodating vegetarians (as so many colleges seem to do, even where all food is paid for).

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When a student staged a symbolic protest against this segregation by eating non-veg food at a veg-table, the administration fined them Rs 10,000. Yet, as the collective Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle pointed out, when students had earlier been harassed for mistakenly taking their non-vegetarian food towards unofficial vegetarian tables, the administration had not intervened. That sounds of a piece with the poor track-record of addressing complaints of caste-based discrimination on campus. To pretend these things are not interlinked is to perpetuate discrimination.

Non-vegetarian food is not a threat to the vegetarian's safety or access, only their tolerance. It may be a source of discomfort, but personal discomforts have to be acknowledged as personal and personally negotiated, not given institutional validity. We enter a public space knowing it is heterogenous - for administrations to do anything which compromises this heterogeneity is simply bad faith.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com