[Mr. Desai scouted the city for locations for his café. He found 10 places appealing, but nine owners refused to rent space to him because he wanted to serve food that had meat in it. “It is because the Gujaratis don’t want to eat meat in front of their family members or their friends,” said Mr. Desai. “Many friends advised me not to serve nonvegetarian food and they warned me about the agitations.”]
By Zahir Janmohamed
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| Amit Bhargava/The New York TimesA bucket vendor wheeling past Topaz restaurant, left, and Vaibhav restaurant, right, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, on March 20, 2002. |
Himanshu Desai, a 53-year-old businessman, runs a fast-food restaurant, Sandwichworkz, near the Indian Institute of Management campus in Ahmedabad, the most populous city in the western state of Gujarat. Mr. Desai, a tall, portly man who was born near the Gujarat city of Surat and grew up in Delhi, serves meat food— an uncommon choice in the state capital, especially for a Hindu. His friends advised him against it, pointing to the brisk business vegetarian food outlets did in Gujarat. “When KFC came to Gujarat, there were agitations,” said Mr. Desai, laughing. “My father taught us that eating meat did not make us lesser Gujaratis or lesser Brahmins.”
After finishing college in Delhi in the mid-1980s, Mr. Desai moved to Ahmedabad, where he met his wife, Takshashila Desai. Yet he was uncomfortable living in the city, as he felt pressure to hide his consumption of food. “It was something forbidden,” he said. “Back then we had to go to some dark alley across town in the Old City and find a Muslim joint just to eat nonvegetarian food. It was never like that in Delhi.”
The Desais grew tired of the resentments of the vegetarians and left for Nigeria in 1999, when a friend offered him a job as a cotton trader. In Lagos, Mr. Desai fell in love with a French cafe and began to appreciate the social functions of a café. The Desais hoped that someday they would start one of their own, by the sea or up in the mountains.
After several years in Africa, followed by a short stint in Singapore, the Desais moved in 2008 to Oklahoma City, where most of their extended family had settled. Mr. Desai was 48 when they arrived, and the economic recession had already hit the United States. He found a job as a collector for Capitol One Bank but faced challenges. “My accent was very visible,” said Mr. Desai. “The customers would often refuse to talk to me.” They assumed he was calling from India. “I faced a lot of abuse because of the accent and the feeling that Indians are taking away American jobs,” Mr. Desai recalled. Mrs. Desai worked at a Subway sandwich store.
Three years later, in 2011, Mr. and Mrs. Desai were “fed up with the racism” and tired of the “lack of opportunities” in the United States. They returned to India with the old dream of a restaurant of their own in the mountains or by the sea. The Desais couldn’t afford the mountain resorts, the coastal cities, or the capital, New Delhi. They returned to Ahmedabad.
Mr. Desai scouted the city for locations for his café. He found 10 places appealing, but nine owners refused to rent space to him because he wanted to serve food that had meat in it. “It is because the Gujaratis don’t want to eat meat in front of their family members or their friends,” said Mr. Desai. “Many friends advised me not to serve nonvegetarian food and they warned me about the agitations.”
Eventually, Mr. Desai found a landlord who had lived in the United States and owned a space adjacent to the Indian Institute of Management, where students from all corners of India studied. There were two nonvegetarian restaurants across the street, a Subway sandwich store and a Domino’s pizza outlet. Mr. Desai was euphoric and moved into the space last fall.
He named his café Sandwichworkz. A large number of customers walked out after noticing offerings with meat on the menu. “I guess I chose the wrong name for a city like Ahmedabad. An ordinary Gujarati cannot even begin to think that a sandwich can have meat in it,” said Mr. Desai. He seemed exasperated. “I am tired of this attitude in Gujarat that because I only eat vegetarian food I am better than you, or that I am less of a proud Gujarati because I eat meat. ”
In 2011, KFC opened its first location in Gujarat but faced protesters, who held up signs that read, “KFC Go Back.” Most companies, Mr. Desai said, have learned that “if you want to succeed in Gujarat, you should serve vegetarian-only food.” He pointed out that Subway opened its first-ever vegetarian outlet in Ahmedabad, with a Jain counter. (Many Jains are not only strict vegetarians but refuse to eat potatoes, garlic or onions.) In March, The Times of India reported that KFC had announced plans to offer more vegetarian fare in Gujarat. McDonalds intends to establish vegetarian outlets in the state.
Mr. Desai, whose wife is a strict vegetarian, is struggling to stay in business but remains somewhat hopeful. “Ahmedabad is changing slowly,” he said. “About 10 years earlier, you had go across to the Muslim part of town to have nonvegetarian food. You can say that now you do not have to hide as much to eat nonvegetarian.”
Few places would embody that cultural change as much as Pleasure Trove, an upscale restaurant, which serves meat. It opened in 2008 by the Ashram Road area of Ahmedabad in a mostly vegetarian, Hindu area. Zakir Dauwa, a 33-year-old Muslim, owns Pleasure Trove, where dinner for one costs at least 500 rupees, or $8 — rather expensive for Ahmedabad.
Mr. Dauwa pointed out that only two restaurants served meat on the long Ashram Road. He is in the middle of negotiations to open two new nonvegetarian restaurants in mostly Hindu areas of the city.
In the aftermath of the 2002 sectarian riots in Gujarat, fear would have made it unthinkable for a Muslim to run a nonvegetarian restaurant in a primarily Hindu part of Ahmedabad. But Mr. Dauwa believes things are changing. “It is because of the goodness of the H-class people,” he said. “They are giving us space now.” He said “H-class” instead of “Hindu,” he explained, for fear that anyone hearing him might mistakenly think he was speaking ill of the majority community.
Mr. Dauwa belongs to the Chiliya sect of Shia Muslims, a community famous for running restaurants and hotels across Gujarat, which mostly serve vegetarian food. During the 2002 riots, many Chiliya-owned businesses were attacked, despite their vegetarian menus and names like Abhilasha, which means desire in Hindi. Mr. Dauwa’s businesses were among those ransacked by mobs. “We lost a restaurant or two in 2002,” he said.
A 2008 report by Harvard Law School students supervised by a Harvard lecturer, Sharanjeet Parmar, estimated that Muslims in Gujarat lost 3,800 crore rupees, or $760 million, “through the large-scale destruction of homes, businesses and properties. These losses continue to economically cripple the Muslim community six years later,” the report found.
But Mr. Dauwa does not want to look back. “We had insurance,” he said. “It is no big deal.” He paused. “I do not want to talk about 2002.”
Mr. Dauwa is equally cautious when he speaks about Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat today and during the 2002 riots, who is the de facto prime ministerial candidate for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in India’s national elections in 2014. “Putting 2002 aside, you can say that he is an efficient leader. Business is good. And that is good for us.” A few moments later, Mr. Dauwa added, “But this is putting 2002 aside.”
Muslims, who number about 9 percent of Gujarat’s population, are not the only meat eaters who are treated as outsiders in Gujarat. Low-caste Hindus and non-Gujarati Hindus are also often denied housing because of their diets. Mr. Desai said he has been denied accommodations because “many housing societies have strict by-laws against consuming meat or eggs.”
There are indications that the consumption of meat has increased in Gujarat. Yet eating meat still carries a stigma in the state. Asking whether someone eats meat is often a sly way to ascertain the person’s caste, and some in Gujarat see it not as a dietary choice but as a rejection of Hinduism and the Gujarati identity itself. In Gujarat, there is often a sense that meat eaters are an entirely distinct, and often lesser, category of people. “Maas khane wale logon ka vyavhar alag hota hai,” Mr. Modi once told a journalist from an Indian magazine – “Meat-eating people have a different temperament.”
In 2003, marking the 135th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth in Gujarat, Mr. Modi said, “Gujarat’s main strength lies in its vegetarianism.” Last year, when a reporter asked Mr. Modi to explain the high rates of malnourishment in Gujarat, he cited vegetarianism as a possible cause, adding, “Gujarat is by and large a vegetarian state.”
For the past two years, I have been living and working on a book in Juhapura, a Muslim ghetto in Ahmedabad where an estimated 400,000 live with little in the way of paved roads, schools or government facilities. It was once a mixed area, but Hindu-Muslim riots in the city in 1985, 1992 and 2002 changed that, and I have been able to find only six Hindus in Juhapura now. My apartment there, for example, was once occupied by a Hindu-Muslim couple, but after the 2002 riots, the Hindu wife felt uncomfortable living in all-Muslim Juhapura and the husband felt uneasy as a Muslim in Gujarat. Today they live outside of Mumbai and vow never to return to the state.
A few months ago, I invited a few Hindu friends to attend a wedding near my apartment. One of them refused. “I do not like the way Muslims chew chicken from the bones and then toss them all over the wedding grounds,” he said. He had never visited Juhapura and never attended a Muslim wedding. “This is what I have been told,” he said. Later, I convinced him to visit Juhapura. He found it “fine” but was bothered by the “smell of non-veg food.” It was an odd thing to say—we were standing nowhere near a restaurant that served meat.
But attitudes are changing, according to Mr. Dauwa. “More people, especially businessmen from China and Japan, are visiting Gujarat and many of them want non-vegetarian food,” he said. “And also, Gujaratis are becoming wealthier, and when they live abroad they pick up nonvegetarian eating habits.”
Mr. Dauwa has found that the path to commercial success lies in staying away from discussions of politics and the 2002 riots. We spoke about Mr. Desai and his Sandwichworkz a few miles away. I mentioned that Mr. Desai would refuse to serve rude customers. Mr. Dauwa laughed. “That is not a luxury I have,” he said. “I want to be the kindest I can be. I greet and welcome each customer myself. I ask about their meal, make sure everything went all right.” He sees Pleasure Trove as a bridge to improve relations with the Hindus of his city. “We have improved relations with H-class people through this restaurant,” he said. “You can say that food is bridging the divide.” Mr. Dauwa paused, and then offered a faint smile. “A little bit.”
Zahir Janmohamed, a writer from the United States, lives in Ahmedabad.
