In Delhi’s Muslim areas, the vibrant food culture has a hidden ingredient: religious segregation

The most crowded public spaces in Delhi’s Muslim neighbourhoods are not parks, libraries or plazas. They are shawarma stalls, kebab shops and roadside eateries. At these food outlets in densely populated neighbourhoods, customers can seldom find an empty table to sit and enjoy their food. Most of the patrons often eat by the roadside.

This is not because Muslims love food more than others. It is because leaving these neighbourhoods is perceived to be dangerous due to the violence they may face in Hindu-majority areas. By flocking to shops located on tightly packed streets, Delhi’s Muslims are seeking safety in numbers.

To some, these food streets are where Muslim culinary traditions live and thrive. But they also represent the general lack of public spaces in the ghettos where Muslims live.

With no parks or walkable streets, Muslims wishing to spend leisure time have few options but to visit food shops. This has contributed to the development of a unique food culture among Delhi Muslims, a factor that is often ignored, while being regarded as a characteristic of these neighbourhoods.

For my PhD research into urban precarity among Delhi Muslims, I wanted to make the study less about consumption and more about consumers. I approached the owners of Instagram-famous shops near Delhi’s Jamia Nagar area to hear about how they perceived this growing food culture.

I found that they were rarely willing to answer questions about the reality that had sparked this phenomenon. Doing so would mean acknowledging the combination of segregation and that the lack of public amenities had contributed to the popularity of their establishments – perhaps even more so than the food that they served.

Some might argue that this culture thrives in Delhi’s Muslim neighbourhoods simply because people enjoy eating out. But a walk through the colonnades of the upmarket Connaught Place area, where people sit in parks, on pavements, rather than in restaurants, demonstrates that the real difference is choice. In Muslim neighbourhoods, food culture unfolds in public because there are few alternatives.

The mushrooming food cultures of Old Delhi and Shaheen Bagh have irked Hindutva supporters. They often make claims that the food is contaminated. One popular conspiracy theory suggests that Muslim vendors spit in the food before serving it to Hindus.

This cooked-up narrative seeks to limit interactions between the two communities, while also enforcing an economic boycott of Muslim-owned shops and eateries. It is a narrative that has emerged precisely because these food streets have become popular – making Muslims more visible.

As the academician Ghazala Jamil has shown in her work on Delhi’s neighbourhoods, when upper-class, upper-caste adults of other communities visit Old Delhi to eat, it is not just food that they are seeking. These neighbourhoods located around the Jama Masjid are seen as exotic, strange – even dangerous.

Everyday life in these mohallas has been fetishised, commodified and made available for consumption by eager visitors who see themselves as daring enough to traverse the untraversable, Jamil writes.

But beneath this conspicuous consumption is the stark reality that Muslim neighbourhoods suffer from unwalkable streets, no parks for leisure and a growing sense of insecurity that makes residents unable to leave these ghettos.

From a distance, the food shops in these neighbourhoods seem appetising. From within, for residents, this food culture is a spatially constrained delicacy.

The food stalls are substitutes for facilities the city has failed to provide, functioning as informal places where people stand, talk, eat and briefly occupy space in neighbourhoods designed to be passed through rather than lived in.

But this is also a creative response to urban exclusion. These stalls and shops are an expression of Muslim food culture, but they must be recognised as symbols of everyday insecurity. In their celebration of “Muslim cuisine” is also the taste of segregation.

Saiyid Ashraf Husain Jafri is a PhD candidate in sociology at Ibn Haldun University, Turkey.