Food city: Ahmedabad as a globalised vegetarian space

Abstract

Existing studies, highlighting that dining out forms an important part of public cultures in India, have focused on the growing influence of consumer cultures on India’s middle classes and their identity formation. However, insufficient scholarly attention has been paid to the distinctly different ways in which middle-class experiences with modernity and cosmopolitanism unfold across different cities in India and in the worldwide South Asian diaspora. This article argues that in the major Gujarati city of Ahmedabad, middle-class engagement with new and global culinary practices is couched within dominant, regionally coloured vegetarian cultures, redefining vegetarianism as integral to the project of modern middle-class identity among certain upwardly mobile social groups. This ethnographic study of popular pizzerias sheds light on the transformative capacity and significance of vegetarian food. From being a symbol of exclusionary bourgeois hegemonic cultures, it has turned into a consumer item regarded as accessible and desirable for supporting middle-class aspirations to experience ‘global’ forms of consumption. The concluding analysis suggests that, since there are many diverse, cosmopolitan urban spaces like Ahmedabad, more research is needed especially on how global Gujarati food culture has been developing.