Dr John Mohan Razu
Professor of Social Ethics
Urban India is expanding and growing. One way pulls from rural-to-urban is happening at faster levels and not in vice vera. The reason being, agriculture in rural India is no more sustaining those millions of landless who work as labourers, rigid feudal system (land lordism), caste atrocities, poor wages, so on and so forth. Thousands of people and families are migrating to big cities and towns every day. This push and pull dynamic has changed the nomenclature from ‘agricultural society’ to urbanising society. Urban India is pulling the rural India in such powerful ways that require abundant labour for urban India for various purposes.
When thousands and lakhs of people migrate for work in varied fields the urban planners and the state governments should provide ‘housing facilities’ to everyone. Those in the real estate business to accommodate are going vertically by constructing multi-storeyed tenements filling the vacant places and India’s metropolis looking like concrete jungle. Those who can buy and afford go accordingly and those can afford rentals choose apartments that suits them. Those who are poor who cannot afford and pay huge rentals live in the slums and pavements.
Those labouring castes/classes are non-vegetarians and those working in tech-parks and professionally educated dominant castes and classes with salaries over and above Rs. 70,000 would like to buy or go for rentals in the muti-storeyed tenements are by and large belong to the ideology of ‘Vegetarianism’ is making its stupendous sweep across the urban housing in India, wherein real estates’ owners and urban housing planners, and bureaucrats belong to the ideology of vegetarian class-castes. The owners of the multi-storeyed tenements and others who bought the flats belong to the ideology of vegetarianism.
Let me bring-in some concrete examples. Shrepati Arcade at Nana Chowk, located in South Mumbai, entered the city’s imagination in 2002 as an engineering and real-estate milestone at 45-floors and around 161 metres, it was that the tallest occupied residential tower in India. In another case, the detail has outlasted the height record is not architectural, but it is social. The tower’s developer, R.C. Chaturvedi, “we realised that most of the clients showing interest were vegetarians, who were keen to buy the apartments in the tower. But we requested them and explained to them that this would be a vegetarian society. They respected our decision.”
More than two decades passed-by, the building’s identity is a veg-only zone remains intact. However, we see the growing tendencies that housing societies and neighbourhoods as spaces where personal preference, community power, and public claims of equality are continually negotiated, and often contested. Issues like vegetarianism can be a matter of individual taste, but in many communities, it is also a matter of ritual practice and group identity. In Mumbai’s property market, it has periodically become a screening device—sometimes openly stated, sometimes silently enforce—determining who can live where, and at what cost.
A recent controversy illustrates how contemporary marketing can amplify an old practice. A real estate agent posted a video promoting a high-value flat in Tardeo—priced at around Rs. 6.5 crore—attached to a ‘veg-only’ condition. The clip went viral, then triggered criticism from political parties and social media users, after which the agent apologised. The speed of the backlash made the episode seem like a new flashpoint, but property market observers know how veg-only buildings, and clusters have existed for decades. The difference today is that the condition is more easily recorded, shared and debated publicly, rather than remaining an informal understanding between brokers and resident communities.
“Vegetarianism” clustering is taking place in many parts not only in Mumbai, but right across the cosmopolis and metropolis. The very logic of “vegetarianism” is insidious. There are multiple motives behind insisting on vegetarian-only residency, and they do not all carry the same weight. Some views as ‘purity’ as against ‘impurity’ or ‘purity’ Versus ‘pollution’. In the pretext of ‘religious discipline, ‘ritual purity’, and sensory comfort they do not want the smell of meat in corridors, the possibility of cooking odours entering ventilation shafts or shared spaces being used for non-vegetarian catering. Others fume it as a lifestyle choice akin to rules about noise, pets, or smoking. In this view, a building is a shared environment, and residents can seek neighbours with compatible habits.
What is interesting that the same rule can also operate as a proxy for excluding particular communities especially those such as Christians, Muslims, Dalits, and Tribals. In this process there is social transformation taking place by ways of excluding a select communities as the dominant communities as part of social preference by ways of physical partition The ideology of ‘vegetarianism’ societies can be seen across regions and cities in India. It is being deliberately promoted all – in the name of ‘dietary brand’ across the neighbours. Those who promote ‘vegetarian only’ have the object of keeping their property clean and maintain its sanctity. They basically oppose the non-vegetarians’ in order to affect the atmosphere or purity of their homes. Ultimately, they give their flats on rental or sell in the name of trust.
In all it reflects Untouchability and pollution that the dominant Hindus who have ritualised and strictly follow by not giving their flats to non-vegetarians as it is easy for them to trace who by and large belong to Christian and Islam and more specifically to the Dalits and the Tribals. This how the Urban India functions and believes-in. Caste is the core and the base structure of India and now manifests in the name of “Vegetarianism” an ideology that run vertically differentiating the communities on the basis of ‘pure’ and ‘polluted’.
