How Food Has Sustained and Strengthened Shaheen Bagh as a Bulwark Against Hate

As you walk down the ‘chalis futa‘ (40-feet) road in Shaheen Bagh, you’re immediately met with the unmistakable fragrance of Mughlai food wafting through the air, inviting you on. Soon enough, kebabs and tikkas start to make their appearance, roasting on grills outside dozens of restaurants lined up on both sides of the street. If you had visited Shaheen Bagh in 2020 during the anti-CAA protests, you might find this description of the chalis futa road incongruous with your memory – and you won’t be wrong.

Three years ago, this nondescript lane in a working-class, Muslim-majority neighbourhood of Delhi was home to a few utility stores, a handful of eateries, one cafe and beauty salons. In the years since, it has emerged as a major food hub, serving everything from Mughlai to Nepali and American to Italian cuisine.

“From an obscure ghetto in Delhi, Shaheen Bagh turned into a household name. Ninety percent of its shops are now food-based. The protest clearly had a huge impact on the food culture of the neighbourhood,” says Aasif Mujtaba, one of the key organisers of the Shaheen Bagh protest.

It is not surprising that Shaheen Bagh has turned into a bustling centre for food. Food was always at the heart of the peaceful protest there, led by local Muslim women who blocked a main highway running past the neighbourhood through the harsh winter months of 2019-2020. As hundreds of protesters staged a continuous sit-in, locals, volunteers, students and allies pulled together to provide resources for the women and children braving hunger, cold and illness to fight against an unjust citizenship law.

Soon enough, community kitchens sprang up, volunteers joined hands to collect food and water from different parts of the city, gurudwaras began sending in food, farmers from Punjab set up langars (community kitchens), and many other individual initiatives began to take shape to ensure that protestors had enough healthy and tasty food available every day. It wasn’t rare to find people showing up at the protest site with huge thermoses, handing out cups of hot tea to the women gathered in protest.

“Whichever space women occupy, its value automatically goes up. Shaheen Bagh’s value increased because of our protest in 2020. That is why business in the area has improved and so many new restaurants have popped up,” says Shabeena, a local resident of the neighbourhood who was an active participant in the anti-CAA protest.

“The women of Shaheen Bagh haven’t given up on the community work of the protest days. We still help each other out and hold meetings if a problem arises. We often meet up for tea and food at these new restaurants,” she adds.

This community-building and radical emancipatory potential of food is often blunted by capitalist nation-states which try to turn food into privatised, consumable commodities. But food isn’t just that. A simple plate of biryani offered to a tired protester becomes a powerful bond that cuts through social stratifications. Despite several attempts by right-wing politicians to paint the biryani as a symbol of anti-nationalism at both the Shaheen Bagh and farmers’ protests, it is the way in which people from all communities prepared, enjoyed, and shared the dish at the protests that turned it into an important metaphor for inclusivity.

At the same time, in a country like India, food has multiple social meanings and brings people together just as easily as it sets them apart. It can come to symbolise different solidarities and conflicts. In this context, turning biryani or beef into symbols of anti-nationalism seems like “an attack on the ways of being of the marginalised”, as Paridhi Gupta wrote in her book The Contentious Biryani: Rice, Nation, and Dissent.

After all, meat is a huge part of the food cultures of several religious and oppressed caste communities. By attacking food, you also delegitimise a community’s history and culture. Over the last few years, the Muslim community’s food choices have been villainised. Lynchings and attacks on Muslims based on mere suspicions about the kind of meat they have in their fridge is testimony to this phenomenon. And yet, despite all the hate, the chalis futa road has become a thriving destination serving the same stigmatised food.

“Hate cannot sustain for long. Through the protest days, the right-wing demeaned Muslim women, the neighbourhood and our food. But, at the end of the day, people who came to Shaheen Bagh from outside only received love and delicious food. Naturally, even after the protest ended, they came here looking for the same hospitality and delicacies. Food is a form of resistance, yes. But it is also a culture and legacy,” adds Mujtaba.

Also Read: How Rightwing Media Outlets’ Obsession with Shaheen Bagh Led to False Reporting

The fact that the community has embraced dishes that are vilified as ‘Muslim food’ speaks volumes about the emancipatory and commercially advantageous possibilities of food. “Rent in the neighbourhood has gone up by two times. Popular restaurants from Old Delhi are opening up outlets here when earlier they probably would have gone to Zakir Nagar. All of this has become possible because of the protest days. People came here, explored the area, got to know locals, ate at the few eateries that existed then, and realised just how much potential the area has,” says Mohammed Azeem, the manager of Cafe Temptation, which became hugely popular among journalists, activists and politicians during the protest.

Today, strolling through the chalis futa road, taking in the alluring scent of freshly cooked biryani, it is impossible to not think of the myriad ways in which food became a highly contested category in 2020. In a sense, the new food street of Shaheen Bagh is an enduring legacy of the food culture that developed in the neighbourhood during the protest. Despite being called “mini-Pakistan” pejoratively by reactionary politicians, Shaheen Bagh, with its countless new restaurants, continues to bring people together through food. The barricades that once held its unlikely protest together are now a gentle reminder to the year that changed everything.

Tanushree Bhasin is a New Delhi-based writer and photographer.