Ethical Practice, Trade, and Food: Muslim Restaurants in South Mumbai

Main Article Content

Shaheed Tayob https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9585-4580

Keywords

Food, ethics, Islam, moral economy, religion

Abstract

The production, consumption, and distribution of food is central to many religious practices and often considered distinct from the capitalist imperative to market, commodify, and profit. Yet, even scholarship that overcomes the now outdated binary of morality or religion versus the immoral market, continues to represent religion as a distinct sphere of life, with a moral content contrasted or compared to market practice. It is considered an achievement to note how religious practice exhibits affinities with market developments. There is little recognition of how religions as discursive traditions are inseparable from questions of consumption, trade, and exchange, which render the very distinction of religion versus market as an obstruction to analysis. Through an ethnography of the narratives and material practices of two Muslim-owned restaurants in the old Muslim quarters of South Mumbai, I show how different calibrations of Islam are materialized in restaurant spaces and trade practices in the city. Within the context of increasing marginalization of Muslim bodies and food practice in Mumbai, I argue that the restaurants constitute a complex and differential moral economy of food, poverty, care, and aspiration.

Abstract 139 | PDF Downloads 55

References

Appadurai, A. 2000. Spectral housing and urban cleansing: Notes on millen-nial Mumbai. Public Culture 12, 3: 627-651. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.1215/08992363-12-3-627
Asad, T. 1986. The idea of an anthropology of Islam. Qui Parle 17, 2: 1-30. doi: https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.17.2.1
Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Benthall, J. 1999. Financial worship: The Quranic injunction to almsgiving. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5, 1: 27-42. doi: https:// doi.org/10.2307/2660961
Breman, J. 1996. Footloose labour: Working in India’s informal labour economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.1017/CBO9781139171076
Césaire, A. 2001. Discourse on colonialism. In Césaire, A. (ed.): Discourse on colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Chandavarkar, R. 1994. Migration and the rural connections of Bombay’s workers. In Chandavarkar, R. (ed.): The origins of industrial capitalism in India: Business strategies and the working classes in Bombay, 1900-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.1017/CBO9780511583551
Chandavarkar, R. 2009. Sewers. In Chandavarkar, R. (ed.): History, culture and the Indian city. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511642036
Chigateri, S. 2008. ‘Glory to the cow’: Cultural difference and social justice in the food hierarchy in India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Stud-ies 31, 1: 10-35. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400701874692
Chopra, P. 2011. A joint enterprise: Indian elites and the making of British Bombay. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. doi: https://doi. org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816670369.001.0001
Chopra, P. 2019. Worthy objects of charity: Government, communities, and charitable institutions in colonial Bombay. In Kidambi, P., M. Kamat, & R. Dwyer (eds.): Bombay before Mumbai: Essays in honour of Jim Masselos. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780190 061708.003.0009
Comaroff, J. & J.L. Comaroff 2000. Millenial capitalism, first thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12, 2: 291-348. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.1215/08992363-12-2-291
Dumont, L. 1981. Homo hierarchicus: The caste system and its implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gandhi, A. 2016. Delicious Delhi: Nostalgia, consumption and the old city. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 23, 3: 345-361. doi: 10.1080/1070289X.2015.1034130
Ghassem-Fachandi, P. 2012. Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu nationalism and an-ti-Muslim violence in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691151762.001.0001
Govindrajan, R. 2018. Animal intimacies: Interspecies relatedness in India’s central Himalayas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Green, N. 2011. Bombay Islam: The religious economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975165
Gupta, R. 2015. There must be some way out of here: Beyond a spatial con-ception of Muslim ghettoization in Mumbai. Ethnography 16, 3: 352-370. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138114552941
Gupta, R. 2019. A postcolonial civic? Shi’i philanthropy and the making and marking of urban space in Mumbai. Available at: https://allegralabora-tory.net/a-postcolonial-civic-shii-philanthropy-and-the-making-and-marking-of-urban-space-in-mumbai-muhum/. (Accessed on November 25, 2021.)
Guyer, J.I. 2004. Marginal gains: Monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Keister, L.A. 2002. Financial markets, money and banking. Annual Review of Sociology, 28: 39-61.
Khare, R.S. & M.S.A. Rao 1986. Introduction. In Khare, R.S. & M.S.A. Rao (eds.): Aspects in South Asian food systems: Food, society, and culture. Durham: Carolina Academic Press.
Kidambi, P. 2007. The making of an Indian metropolis: Colonial governance and public culture in Bombay, 1890-1920. Aldershot: Ashgate Publish-ing.
Kidambi, P. 2019. Introduction. In Kidambi, P., M. Kamat, & R. Dwyer (eds.): Bombay before Mumbai: Essays in honour of Jim Masselos. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/ 9780190061708.001.0001
Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Masselos, J. 1993. The city as represented in crowd action: Bombay, 1893. Economic & Political Weekly 28, 5: 182-188.
Masselos, J. 2007. Change and custom in the format of the Bombay Mohur-rum during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 5, 2: 47-67. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00856408208723036
Maurer, B. 2006. The anthropology of money. Annual Review of Anthropolo-gy 35: 15-36.
Mauss, M. 2002. The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic socie-ties. London: Routledge.
McFarlane, C. 2008. Governing the contaminated city: Infrastructure and san-itation in colonial and post-colonial Bombay. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, 2: 415-435. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00793.x
Mehta, S. 2005. Maximum city: Bombay lost and found. New York: Vintage Books.
Mittermaier, A. 2019. Giving to God: Islamic charity in revolutionary times. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Moumtaz, N. 2021. God’s property: Islam, charity, and the modern state. Oakland: University of California Press.
Rudnyckyj, D. & F. Osella 2017. Introduction: Assembling market and reli-gious moralities. In Rudnyckyj, D. & F. Osella (eds.): Religion and the morality of the market: Anthropological perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316888 704
Samantara, P.S. 2016. M.F. Hussain: Bringing modernism to Indian art. Cul-ture Trip. Available at: https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/mf-hussain-bringing-modernism-to-indian-art/. (Accessed on December 15, 2016.)
Sutton, D. 2013. Cooking skills, the senses, and memory: The fate of practi-cal knowledge. In Sutton, D. (ed.): Food and culture. Abingdon: Routledge.
Tayob, S. 2020. Halal consumption as ethical practice: Negotiating Halal cer-tification in South Africa. Islamic Africa 20: 71-93. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.1163/21540993-01101006
Van der Veer, P. 2016. Who cares? Care arrangements and sanitation for the poor in India and elsewhere. In Van der Veer, P. (ed.): The value of comparison. Durham: Duke University Press.

Similar Articles

1-10 of 70

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.