The apartheid of Udupi restaurants 

Editor’s Note: This week we bring you an excerpt from ‘Curried Cultures’. Stig Toft Madsen and Geoffrey Gardella trace the Brahminical roots of Udupi restaurants. These establishments once banned Muslims and Dalits, but were forced to change by market forces. It’s an interesting story about how capitalism created the impetus for inclusion. This excerpt has been published with permission from ‘Curried Cultures’,’ published by Aleph Book Company.

The Udupi and Kota Brahmins carried with them discriminatory traditions from the South Kanara region. One such feature was caste segregation. In temple rituals, Brahmins have often been served separately with food made in a separate kitchen. The tradition of separate kitchens has not been transferred to the Udupi restaurants, but many Udupi hotels originally had dining areas exclusively for Brahmins. 

Some of these facilities have been simple small rooms with low wooden chairs. Major Udupi restaurants and hotels, including Udupi Sri Krishna Vilas and the New Woodlands Hotel, maintained separate dining sections for Brahmins till the late 1960s. Udupi Sri Krishna Vilas also had a separate section for Muslims. Other restaurants went so far as to bar Muslims until 1947. 

A gross form of discrimination, common to religious and commercial settings, has been the exclusion of Dalits. Many restaurants, including Udupi restaurants, have denied Dalits admittance, or demanded that they eat outside from special utensils to be cleaned or disposed of by themselves. Restaurants agreeing to admit Dalits did so at the risk of boycott.

According to Galanter, access to hotels and restaurants has been a central political issue since 1923 when “the Bombay Legislative Council resolved that Untouchables be allowed to use all public watering places, wells, schools, dispensaries, etc.”. Thirty years later, cases of discrimination relating to the use of shops, restaurants, hotels, and places of public entertainment constituted the majority of cases registered under the anti-disabilities legislation. 

In the 1950s and 1960s Madras courts were more active than courts elsewhere pursuing cases of discrimination, but nowhere did the move to abolish untouchability lead to massive litigation. In Madras, activists staged repeated demonstrations against the

extension of orthodoxy into restaurants. The Dravidian leader Ramaswami Naicker personally painted over the word Brahmin on a restaurant signboard.

In 1938, he incited antiHindi riots during which crowds attacked “coffee stalls run by Brahmans”.  Again, in 1957, a campaign was launched to “erase the word Brahmin from hotel name-boards . . . since such display is irrelevant in a secular state”. 

Slowly, commensal seclusion and the practice of untouchability have been eroded by commercialization, political activism, and legal reform. The establishments run by Udupi Brahmins played an important part in the expansion of civic space by exposing caste-centered traditions of ritual purity to the forces of change. As a result, seclusion and segregation are now much less frequent.

The broadening of the customer base is paralleled by the changing demographics of the workers. According to a survey by Iversen and Raghavendra (2006), in one small village restaurant, the kitchen staff is still Brahmin, though even here tiffin and coffee preparation is done by non-Brahmins. As one moves to larger towns and cities, most cooks are not Brahmins, but from castes such as Bunt and Billava. 

Iversen and Raghavendra attribute this change to the expansion of the menu to cover North Indian and Chinese food, which are not part of the traditional repertoire of the South Indian Brahmin cooks. This has opened the door for other cooks. Moreover, fewer Brahmins are choosing to enter the cooking trade, encouraging owners to become flexible in their hiring. In both cases, it is market forces that have prompted the change. 

Exposing traditional commensal apartheid to capitalism has led to inclusivist secularization, but as Iversen and Raghavendra’s title, “What the Signboard Hides” indicates, change may hide behind an unchanging facade.