Dear Mumbai, don’t take this the wrong way. As a person who loves you deeply, I say this with the best intention: Behind your buff, cosmopolitan chest, hides a heart pulsing with prejudice. Your tagline of India’s most open, diverse city, where anyone can make it regardless of background, has always concealed a more complicated reality. The latticework of your neighbourhoods represents much deeper divides, like entrenched notions of belonging, parochial “purity”, and caste-social hierarchy.
In Ghatkopar’s Sambhav Darshan Co-operative Housing Society, a Marathi resident recently alleged that his Gujarati neighbour had objected to his non-vegetarian lifestyle. According to Ram Ringe, the neighbour reportedly said, “You Marathi people are dirty, you eat fish and meat.” According to reports, Marathi families number just four among a predominantly Gujarati, Marwari, and Jain population.
Things reached a fever pitch when the police and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena got involved. A video featuring MNS leader Raj Parte aggressively scolding the society’s Gujarati residents in unprintable language surfaced a few days ago.
“Anybody can live and work in Mumbai, but we will not tolerate insults toward Marathi people for their food choices,” Parte is heard saying—a case of the worst person you know making a great point.
The Ghatkopar incident is a glaring floodlight on Mumbai’s intersecting axes of bigotry that control who belongs where. Across numerous upscale neighbourhoods—Vile Parle, Malabar Hill, Walkeshwar—“vegetarian only” enclaves thrive with formal and informal mechanisms of enforcement. Security guards are instructed to check food delivery parcels at the gate and neighbours will inspect your trash if they suspect you of consuming non-vegetarian food in the confines of your own house.
Cornucopia of biases
A report titled Food Apartheid: Non-vegetarians Not Allowed! cites the example of a Maharashtrian woman whose chawl underwent redevelopment. She felt pressured into telling the society’s new managing committee—comprising vegetarian Gujaratis, Jains, and Marwaris—that her family was also vegetarian. The resident was forced to smuggle non-vegetarian food into the building and light incense to ward off any attention.
Vegetarian supremacy extends beyond residential buildings. Take the stretch from Nepean Sea Road to Chowpatty, where restaurants serving non-vegetarian food have been historically absent or restricted. In the 2004 documentary Cosmopolis, directed by Paromita Vohra, restaurateur Sanjay Narang recalled facing pickets, hoardings, and harassment when attempting to run Roti, a non-vegetarian establishment in Malabar Hill.
“People at the top would throw things on customers, we had to get police protection,” Narang recounted in the film. Other reports speak of customers’ cars getting keyed. Narang said that ultimately, the residents weren’t able to stop them, but he chose to close shop because continuing to do business there became an ordeal, which to my mind, is the same thing.
Can you really impose vegetarianism on a city whose summer air is scented by the aroma of drying fish?
Food “purity” is a cover for a cornucopia of biases. The city’s housing market is institutionalised discrimination—and where you get to live is determined not by your ability to pay rent, but by several other aspects of your lifestyle. Non-vegetarian? Rejected. Minority? Never. Unattached man or woman? Close the door on your way out. Pet parent? Try Pune.
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Gauntlet of rejection
In a stratified city, power is encoded into space. Even Bollywood stars are humbled by Mumbai’s housing market. Actors Saif Ali Khan and Emraan Hashmi have both spoken about being unable to rent in certain parts of the city. In 2004, Laxmi Pandit had to give up her Miss India crown for misrepresenting her marital status on the lease agreement on the 1RK flat she shared with a male model.
A few years ago, when one of my two flatmates moved out of a gorgeous apartment, the broker called to dole out some practical advice: “Just remember one thing haan, find anyone but don’t bring in a Muslim flatmate.” For Mumbai’s Muslims, the housing market operates as a gauntlet of rejection. Brokers often admit that most landlords refuse Muslim tenants outright, based on excuses as flimsy as “education levels” to “terrorism”. When the city’s Muslims inevitably find themselves pushed toward “ghettos”, they are doubly stereotyped.
Muslim women have it the hardest, but it’s no cakewalk for unattached women either. In Shikha Makan’s 2016 documentary, Bachelor Girls, women spoke about facing moral policing, arbitrary curfews, prohibitions on male visitors, and constant, exhausting scrutiny from neighbours.
“Housing discrimination is a very big problem across categories, and gender is common to all subsets… The situation speaks volumes about the way we treat people, about who is more powerful in the smaller ambits of society, in this case, the housing society secretary or committee,” Makan said in an interview.
Single men navigate a different but related set of obstacles.
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A new morality
These divisions hark back to Bombay of the 18th and 19th centuries. Kurush F Dalal, archaeologist, historian, and food anthropologist, recalls a time when each community would live in its own “ghetto”. It didn’t matter if these ghettos were right next to each other—there was no commensality between them. Once the city’s high rises developed, communities began to mix. “You often didn’t know who was living next door,” Dalal said.
The shift, according to Dalal, emerged from two concurrent forces: Right-wing ultra-nationalism and the explosion of Mumbai’s middle class in the 1990s. As people from smaller towns and villages gained economic mobility, they brought with them values from more homogeneous communities, particularly notions of “vegetarian sanctity”. This transformation hardened existing divisions into something more rigid and exclusionary.
“There is now an enormous new morality,” Dalal said. “The government has said that it is okay to discriminate based on food preference [within housing societies]. I just feel very sad about this. Everybody should respect the choices others make—eat and let eat.”
The banality of the bigotry pervading Mumbai is what makes it most terrifying. Its messy, vibrant plurality once made Bombay great, but the city now seems extraordinarily comfortable with its rejections. The polite fiction of “compatibility concerns” hides a very real system of exclusion. And no one is really welcome.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
In Tamilnadu, there is an underground movement that is trying to bring a culture which normalizes ‘Beef eating is okay. But pork eating is dirty and only low class/caste people eat pork’. The government is also appearing to be falling in this trap even though traditionally pork has been eaten widely in Tamilnadu. Tamilnadu should learn from the situation in Mumbai before matters go too far.
It is sad that this piece has invoked paranoia and far fetched conspiracy theories peddled by the far-right. Having grown up in the city, I have seen such unsaid rules segregate people. I have also seen prejudices drive a wedge between people.
The author is pointing out how Mumbaikars must look in the mirror. It is valid. Prejudices exist on all sides of the divide. Perhaps populace needs to be moved away from the respective far-right.
ThePrint has outdone itself again—crying about “vegetarian supremacy” in Mumbai, as if food preference is now a hate crime. This laughable piece is nothing but another elite liberal tantrum dressed up as journalism, throwing around words like “bigotry” to shame Hindus for choosing how and with whom they want to live. Welcome to India, where you can mock Hindu traditions freely but dare not speak a word about real segregation practiced by minority ghettos. The hypocrisy stinks more than the meat they’re so desperate to normalize in every corner.
Let’s be honest—this isn’t about food or housing. It’s about dismantling Hindu identity, brick by brick, culture by culture. The same people who romanticize “halal-only” zones, demand special laws for specific communities, and celebrate ethnic enclaves in the name of diversity, suddenly cry foul when Hindu societies set basic preferences. It’s selective outrage at its absolute worst—an industry built on vilifying the majority and glorifying victimhood politics.
This isn’t journalism; it’s soft Hinduphobic propaganda meant to guilt and gaslight the Hindu middle class into surrendering its way of life. These leftist elites wouldn’t dare call out Islamic or Christian exclusivity, but they foam at the mouth when a Hindu draws a boundary. Enough. Tired of this relentless anti-Hindu spin machine. We don’t need lectures on tolerance from the same crowd that spits venom at Sanatan Dharma while bending over backwards to appease every other group.
Can someone explain how once an inclusive city reached to the current state of an exclusive city?
Mumbai is rich – uber rich. Neither educated nor sophisticated.
How is it that just putting a gate and employing a security sudenly makes that portion eligible for enforcing all kinds of discrimination? Who gives them the right to enforce their prejudice outside the walls of their own flats?
In any other civilised country, people who enforce such “rules” would be thrown in jail for discrimination.
But then…!