Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia

5. Udupi Hotels: Entrepreneurship, Reform, and Revival

91 Five Udupi Hotels Entrepreneurship, Reform, and Revival Stig Toft Madsen and Geoffrey Gardella And then in Madras it was different. The restaurants and hotels that were vegetarian were clean (though the popular nonvegetarian or “military” places, as they were quaintly called, were as bad as anything in the North). The cleanliness and the vegetarianism were connected; they were both contained in the southern idea of brahminism. At the Woodlands Hotel I stayed in a clean room in an annexe, and ate off banana leaves (for the sake of purity, and the link with old ways) on marble tables in the air-conditioned dining-room. There were gardens and an openair theatre or stage in the hotel grounds. V. S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now This chapter examines the evolution of a traditional Brahmanical food practice in the modern world. Traveling in southern India, as Naipaul did, one sooner or later encounters Udupi restaurants and hotels, such as the Madras Woodlands.1 We will pursue the historical and geographical origins and the economic developments of some of these hotels and restaurants, and tell the story of the circular movement that transforms Brahmanical orthopraxy into a wider force for secularism that, in turn, revives religious beliefs and practices. We will narrate the story of Udupi restaurants (confusingly - known as “Udupi hotels” in India) from the 1920s, when entrepreneurs from the Udupi area on the Kanara Coast made their first moves outwards, till today, when the culinary power of Udupi hotels has reached as far as the Silicon Valley in California. We will argue that Udupi hotels have contributed to the processes of secularization and modernization by exposing traditional dietary practices associated with temple and village rituals to 92 • Cities, Middle Classes, Public Cultures the combined forces of the market, state law, and politics. Thereby, Udupi hoteliering and catering have been instrumental in the transformation of commensal orthodoxies lying at the very root of Hindu religious identity and Brahmanical tradition. In her book The Consuming Body, Pasi Falk observes that, “the rituals involving not only eating (meal) but also other activities concerning food function as the integrative mechanism of society. The primitive society is in a fundamental sense an ‘eating-community’” (Falk 1994: 20). This is true of Hindu communities too. As noted by Appadurai, “food is a central trope in classical and contemporary Hindu thought, one around which a very large number of basic moral axioms are constructed and a very large part of social life revolves” (Appadurai 1988: 10). Thus, Hindu dietary custom prescribes rules that dictate who cooks and who serves, who may have commensal relations with whom, and the purity or vulnerability of the food or drink consumed (Weber 1958: 43). Among these, commensality, or “interdining,” has been held by Conlon (1979: 157) to lie at “the root of all caste distinction.” Commensal apartheid has existed at least since the time of the Manusmriti (generally dated between 200 b.c.e. and 200 c.e.), as commensal rows or “feeding lines” consisting of people of the same caste or subcaste have repeatedly defined or objectified group identity (Derrett 1968: 176). As commensality has been a principal structuring mechanism in Hindu caste society, both in its civilizational centers and in the agrarian hinterlands , reform of the social and religious matrix of Hindu civilization is integrally tied to changes in dietary practices. In modern times, civic organizations , such as caste associations, and the state have endeavored to eliminate dietary discrimination between various castes, especially those against the untouchable castes. While these attempts at social and legal reform have been important, we find that commensal reform in the public sphere has, to a considerable extent, ensued by the operation of market forces unleashed by entrepreneurs. It is not that the Udupi Brahmins and other entrepreneurs saw themselves as reformers promoting new norms of “compulsory table community,” to use Weber’s terminology (Weber 1958: 24). They may rather have been the unconscious accomplices of history, but by earning a living, in contravention of the norm that food is for giving and not for selling , they have taught South Indians to eat old and new types of food in a commercial, and yet culturally acceptable, setting.2 They have also created a model that could be emulated by other castes, thereby setting in motion a process of “ethnic succession” in a key sector of the modern economy.3 Udupi Hotels...