India (56 page)

Under the modern version of the queen empress Victoria’s doctrine of multiculturalism, each new community was encouraged to go its own way and to create miniature, ghettoized versions of the society it had left behind—even as the home countries themselves progressed. Postcolonial guilt or presumption had placed Britain in a weaker position in relation to its own citizens than India. The more traditional or regressive members of a community were presumed by many Europeans to be the most convincing representatives of their people. A second-generation Pakistani who dressed up in an Arab robe in London and grew an orthodox beard was thought to be “authentic.” Other British Pakistanis, who led a more regular life, often had trouble escaping the presumptions created by these supposed representatives. In many cases they shared the view of the Karachi-born
hero Chuck in H. M. Naqvi’s novel
Home Boy
, who is arrested in New York after 9/11. Asked by a policeman for some insight into Islamic terrorism, his first thought is that he has no special idea: “But like everybody, I figured the hijackers were a bunch of crazy Saudi bastards.”
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The absence of a sense of belonging or loyalty engendered by multiculturalism led directly to the obscenity of the 7/7 bombings, when men who were born and bred in England blew up themselves and their fellow citizens, since their only allegiance was to a synthetic external identity. So it was in Victoria’s own country that her words of 1858 resonated now most strongly: “We disclaim alike the Right and the Desire to impose our Convictions on any of Our Subjects.” The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has described this philosophy as “part of the character of Great Britain … Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness.”
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Integration is welcoming; it says, join us. Multiculturalism says, go to your ghetto.

B
USINESS SCHOLARS
have been much taken by the efficiency of the dabbawallas of Mumbai, the white-capped men who push handcarts stacked with metal tiffin carriers containing people’s lunch. Some analysts believe they offer a new model of management, others that they follow the five-forces theory or have six-sigma performance. They are part of a complex network, the product of an established, self-regulated business which operates in one of the world’s densest urban environments. Each day, the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association delivers 200,000 dabbas, or stacked containers of food, from homes to offices using only bicycles, local trains and handcarts, with each box marked with a series of coloured numbers and letters. The dabbawallas follow two slogans, “War Against Time” and “Work Is Worship,” and start and complete their mission between the hours of 9 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. each day. Their managers claim an error rate of 1 in 16 million.

I was interested to know what lay behind the way the dabbawallas worked: was it a business model or a social model? Getting to meet them was more difficult than I had expected. The secretary of the dabbawallas, Gangaram Talekar, said a payment of Rs5,000 [$110] was required to watch them in operation. When I reached the appointed meeting place near Andheri railway station early one morning, nobody was there. The station
was packed with commuters, beggars, flower vendors, weighing machines and newspaper sellers, and in the street outside, at the sign of the golden arches, Chatpata McAloo Tikkis and Paneer Salsa Wraps were on sale. My appointed dabbawalla, Vittal Sawant, appeared forty minutes late, a wiry figure pushing a sturdy bicycle. He was flustered: his war against time was getting off to a bad start. Soon we were joined by a local journalist who had come to interpret his Marathi, and along with him a crew from a television channel who wanted to film me doing the rounds. I was starting to share Vittal’s discomfort, and before long we were drawing a crowd.

He had to visit thirty-three residences and collect a dabba (he pronounced it “dibby”) from each one, hook it to his bicycle and land up at the railway station in time for a collective departure. Some of the stops were easy: he wheeled his bike to the front door, took a container from an unseen person and attached it to the frame with a piece of string or a metal hook. At another place he ran up flight after flight of steps to reach the correct door of an apartment block, followed by me and the film crew, shouted “Dabbawalla!” and found the packed meal was not quite ready. While the dal was put in one aluminium bowl, the rice in another, the subzi in another, and the last chapatti waited to be cooked, he knelt down and painted a code of coloured letters and digits on the circular lid of a new container. As the dabba was passed out of the door to him and he prepared to rush down the stairs, he was called back again: the housewife wanted to slip in a note for her husband. With Vittal’s bicycle now decorated and growing heavy with dabbas, he had to push it rather than ride it as he had done earlier in the morning.

In the streets around Andheri station, I caught sight of other dabbawallas pushing their bicycles, and at the platform a storm of activity began as men parked their bikes, grabbed and exchanged dabbas and slotted them into large, painted wooden crates at high speed, almost as if they were doing it by intuition. Vittal’s cousin Kailash had stopped off at a Hare Krishna temple on his way to work, and now he was jumping athletically down to the tracks to pick up a box. By the time the train drew into the station, each man had a heavy wooden crate balanced on his head, and now a riot of pushing began as they tried to get them all aboard an open cabin before it pulled out. One man, who was trying to grab a last dabba from his bicycle, was left behind.

Although each of the dabbawallas was wearing a white cap, some were dressed in kurta pyjama and others in shirt and trousers. They came in all shapes and sizes: an old man with a huge white moustache, a young man
in a yellow T-shirt. Some deceased dabbawallas had even had their place on the team taken by their widows, like Mrs. Parvatibai from Karale and Mrs. Laxmibai Bagade from Santa Cruz, although none were here today. Crammed into the cabin, taking a rest before the next burst of work, we rattled through the suburbs of Mumbai as the life of the city went on beside us.

It appeared that all the men came from the same close-knit community. “Hindu Maratha, all Hindu Maratha,” said one. The warrior caste of Maharashtra, the shock troops of Shivaji, who had fought and beaten the Mughals. Except for an activist from the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, they all supported Shiv Sena, a party which hoped to return the people of Maharashtra to their days of perceived martial glory, and had started stalls around the city selling “Shiv Vadas”—vegetarian burgers which they thought were in keeping with tradition. “It’s thankless being a dabbawalla,” said one of them. “Each household pays Rs280 [$6] a month for the service. I make at most Rs4,000 [$88] per month. I want my children to do a clerical job or work with computers, not this. Can I be a dabbawalla in London?”

We passed Grant Road station, where a stack of dabbas that had been tied together was handed out to the platform from the moving train while we continued to Churchgate. This was a big station in south Mumbai, a mile or so from the Taj hotel. The action began again as hundreds of dabbawallas converged from different trains and stacked big, carefully balanced handcarts with about 120 tiffin boxes each, the process working smoothly as the codes were matched with the delivery routes and the workers ran back and forth. There was almost a fight when a passer-by appeared to touch a dabba with his foot.

Vittal explained the markings to me, which were designed for people who might not be able to read. The number painted at the centre of the lid indicated the destination station, in this case Churchgate; the mark at 12 o’clock was the originating suburb; at 3 o’clock was an abbreviation of the delivery address; at 6 o’clock was the owner’s name; at 9 o’clock were coded letters showing the home delivery route for the return of the dabba. Within this, innumerable variations were permitted—there was no standard tiffin carrier—and some were made of plastic, although most were stainless steel. Some were printed or painted with special codes because they were destined for a large office or came from a communal kitchen. Others used an additional form of marking, the numbers and letters painted in certain colours. When the handcarts were packed and stacked, they began to move, each one surrounded by an honour guard of dabbawallas in their
white caps. The carts were surprisingly easy to push, given their size. It was a convention in Mumbai that they were allowed to cross through traffic, a privilege not given to other pushcarts.

We made our first deliveries at the offices. Some of the dabbas were five or six storeys high, containing the varieties of food necessary for an Indian lunch. Although Mumbai has plenty of fast-food stalls, most cooking reflects the national flexibility. In Western countries, a good, regular meal might consist of two ingredients, steak and chips (beef and potatoes) perhaps with salt, mustard and ketchup. In India, a simple vegetarian lunch will contain more ingredients. So packed into a standard three- or four-storey tiffin box like the ones we were now delivering, there might be: cooked white rice; pigeon peas tempered with ground cumin seeds, turmeric, ginger, garlic, salt, red chilli, dried mango powder and oil; small aubergines stuffed with green chilli, turmeric, jaggery, onion, mustard seeds, dried coconut, coriander leaves, asafetida, cloves, cinnamon sticks, peppercorns, tamarind and salt; spinach and tomatoes with ginger, garlic, ground coriander and cumin, salt, fenugreek, chilli powder, oil and garam masala—itself a mixture of ground bay leaves, cloves, cumin, cinnamon, coriander, cardamom, star anise, nutmeg and white pepper; yoghurt with mint, sugar, pomegranate and black salt; cucumber relish; a type of bread, touched with clarified butter and stuffed or layered with spiced mashed potato; a few fresh green chillies; a wedge of lime and two types of achar, or pickle—and one auntie told me a good achar has fifty ingredients, and no, I couldn’t have the recipe.

After lunch, the dabbawallas would pick up the empty tiffin boxes and take them home before the evening rush hour began, by which time they were themselves more than ready to eat. Indian cooking depends on a surfeit of labour, using servants or family members, and the extra family members are nearly always women; few Indian men who do not cook for a living will do so at home.

I went to see Gangaram Talekar at his office beneath a flyover. For a start, I had to hand over Rs5,000. He refused to say a word until he had counted the notes and secreted them in a pouch inside the folds of his shirt. This was the first time I had paid to do an interview in India; I asked for a receipt, but he refused. Accompanying him in his dark office were a statue of Ganesh and some portraits of Sant Tukaram, a seventeenth-century devotional poet and teacher from near Pune, or Poona, an important figure in the Bhakti movement. “He travelled across Maharashtra singing hymns,” Talekar said.

The dabbawallas’ venture had started in 1890, when Parsis who were travelling to work on the new railway system found they could not get their own food at lunchtime. As new mills and businesses opened, other social groups took the chance to have meals delivered, since there was a general caste suspicion of food cooked outside the home. The system worked in Mumbai because the trains were so crowded that you needed people to carry food on your behalf, outside the rush hour. Although the prohibitions on restaurants had largely disappeared now, it was still cheaper to bring your own food from home, and the dabbawallas’ service remained popular.

“At first they used coloured threads, the offcuts from tailoring shops, to mark the tiffin,” said Talekar. “Today we use a number and letter code, although never the number 9.” This was not because it was inauspicious, but because it might be muddled with the Marathi “6,” which looks a bit like a “9” with a tail. “We have never had a strike in 120 years and there are no team leaders, no seniors and juniors. We have never had a police case against a dabbawalla. When bombs were hidden in tiffin tins in other cities in 2002, we told the police we would take responsibility, we would take care of it in Mumbai. We keep full control over our tiffins.”

Why did they wear white caps? “The cap is a computer cover. The mind is the computer—we need it for decoding. Hindus say you cover your head when you are serving someone.” Were there any Muslims on the 800 teams of dabbawallas, which totalled more than 5,000 workers? “We are all descended from the warriors of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. We are the Varkaris.” Almost all the dabbawallas came from the same sub-caste, and could even trace their origins to villages—Akola, Ambegaon, Junnar—in a region outside Pune. They came from a very close social group and had started the system as a way to make a living. Now, they encouraged their children to pursue more profitable lines of work when possible. Their ability to run a complex, intuitive distribution system arose from their homogeneity, which was not unconnected to their chauvinism. “Our customers come from all communities: Christians, Muslims. We couldn’t have a Muslim or a Bihari doing this work. We prefer not to have others joining the dabbawallas because we have complete trust within our community. We know each person, and trust would be broken.”

Gangaram Talekar was adamant the dabbawallas’ system was linked to their social culture, and more specifically to the particular Hindu religious traditions that they followed in his part of Maharashtra, which dated back over centuries. “Our grandparents lived in the mountain ranges, which gave them strength. They were following the Varkari movement and were
known for being polite and for singing hymns. We take our beliefs from our travelling gurus, who have taught us. Our gurus told us to go beyond the mind. We follow and admire the teachings of Sant Tukaram every day: ‘Duty First,’ ‘Work Is Worship,’ ‘Serving Food Is Serving God,’ ‘Unity Is Strength.’ If you are a member of our community, you must do your own duty.”
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India has a deep religious impulse, which is rooted in Hinduism. The excesses of the Hindutva movement, and the risk that any encouragement of spiritual devotion could shake the nation’s post-independence secular consensus, have led many to downplay or even deny this aspect of Indian identity. Amartya Sen, the revered economist, philosopher and social thinker, wrote: “The often-repeated belief that India was a ‘Hindu country’ before Islam arrived is, of course, a pure illusion”—since there were also Buddhists, Jains and a handful of Zoroastrians, Christians and Jews. Nearly every traveller in early India, such as the acute tenth-century observer Al-Biruni, would have disagreed with Sen, viewing the kinds of religious practices and worship that are today called Hinduism as integral to the culture. Sen extended his claim to the present: why should Hinduism be seen as important to a person’s identity, rather than anything else? “For example, the status of being a majority in India can be attributed, among other groups, to …”—and here he lists five categories, including “the class of non-owners of much capital,” “the people who do not work in the organized industrial sector” and “Indians who are against religious persecution.” He could have listed a sixth category: Indians whose names start with a consonant.