Strange food, strange smells: vegetarianism and sensorial citizenship in Mumbai’s redeveloped enclaves

Abstract

This paper inquires into the meaning of food – specifically of food smells – for issues of urban citizenship in the context of urban renewal in Mumbai. The city’s southern neighbourhoods are currently being transformed by a process of chawl-redevelopment. Chawl-redevelopment is the primary governmental tool to open these areas up for new residential developments by demolishing old structures and constructing new high-rise enclaves for the rich, while simultaneously promising to provide in situ rehousing to the old, lower middle-class residents. A common feature of these new building complexes is that the most prestigious and luxurious new apartments are sold exclusively to vegetarians. While segregation between vegetarians and non-vegetarians in the real estate market is anything but a new phenomenon in Indian cities, I argue that both popular understandings of this practice and scholarly debates about citizenship fall short of grasping its complexity by essentializing affects or effects of food-based exclusion. Using the concept of sensorial citizenship, the paper analyses the mutual relation between rights and aesthetics in order to understand issues of exclusion and belonging in the contemporary Indian metropolis.