Eating like a Malayali: Claiming Distinction through Food in a Processual Cosmopolitan

The study is an afterthought of my ongoing PhD research, which was made evident during data analysis. The research is on caste and linguistic-based organisations made by Malayalees, an ethnic-linguistic migrant in the economic capital of India, Mumbai. During my data analysis, I observed that snacks and meals in every field site, from private spaces like homes to public spaces like a community association, offered food local to their native, Kerala. Food allured my field notes and informal discussion while being recluse from my research tools. There is a disjunction in the integration of food of the internal migrants in the urbanisation process. The paper will critically examine the burden on ethnic migrants to create a cosmopolitan life while negotiating conditions to retain their distinction. I argue that ethnic migrant individuals, their families, institutions, organisations and small enterprises create a niche through food to retain their identity, which gets narrower yet diversified in a highly globalized city like Mumbai. Mumbai is an important site because of the son of the soil claim by locals and the history of violence they incurred on the ethnic-linguistic migrants, which also extended to their choice of food. A few decades later, the ethnic migrant organisations negotiated their food choices by calling the boundaries of sacredness and profanity and cryptate their food, such as beef, to avoid friction from the locals. The materiality of migrants building educational, cultural, entertainment, revenue and employment generating sites gives space for the negotiation of the temporal, here food, among many others. Cities often claim credit for an ethnic amalgamation. However, it is the aspirational migrant communities and their institutions which invest in building a processual cosmopolitan.