Dietary diatribes

The battle between Mumbai’s Non-Vegetarians and Vegetarians bears distinct shades of the burlesque — what with Bal Thackeray’s rampaging hordes even having come up with a cunning plan to set up stalls peddling bombay duck and chicken outside the pristine precincts of the city’s ‘pure vegetarian’ residential enclaves. While such rough and ready remedies cannot be condoned, it would be difficult to quarrel with the rationale behind the Shiv Sena’s latest campaign. The target of its wrath at the moment are housing societies in the metropolis which steadfastly refuse to admit non-vegetarians. Such blackballing, in effect, results in the meat- and fish-eating Maharashtrians being rendered outcastes in their own backyard.

The stand-off threatens to open old wounds, recalling as it does old ethnic and communal battles that Mumbai has witnessed, time and time again. This would be most unfortunate and would be going against the instincts of a metropolis that has grown and prospered precisely because it greeted disparate folk with an equal welcome. They came, not just from places like Lisbon and Liverpool in an earlier era, but from coastal Ratnagiri, the Hindi heartland, and the deep south. The urban enterprise, which is all about cooperation in collapsed spaces, depended crucially on the ability of people to adjust to each other’s traditions and mores, even as they compromised on their own. This is why caste divides, going back several hundreds of years and which were preserved scrupulously in a village setting, crumbled amidst the crush of everyday commuting and community housing.

The attempt to build gated communities and cosy enclaves where like-mannered people live together goes against the grain of urban experience and is bound to invite attrition. This is what is happening in Mumbai today. Earlier, Muslim families were at the receiving end of such covert, and overt, discrimination, with many finding it impossible to buy or hire a flat in a non-Muslim locality. At this rate, Mumbai, like Ahmedabad, co-uld evolve not as a vibrant megapolis showcasing a hundred different communities living in harmony — but as a unwieldy collection of ghettoes, a city divided against itself.