Doing Lunch

Natural History, March, 2000 by Doranne Jacobson

Dedicated teams of couriers bring home-cooked meals to workers in India's commercial center.

Crowded in with the rest of the midmorning passengers on Mumbais commuter trains are the dabbawalas, men who convey heavy loads of metal lunch pails--dabbas--from their clients' home kitchens to the clients' workplaces in offices, mills, and factories. In this modern Indian metropolis of more than 15 million, formerly called Bombay, many workers go out for lunch, but others prefer traditional home-cooked meals--in part because different dietary precepts distinguish the many religious, ethnic, and caste groups that populate the city.

In addition to being or not being vegetarian, various groups observe prohibitions against eating certain spices, vegetables, and other foods, and they obey particular caste and kosherlike rules of ritual purity that govern the preparation of meals. As a consequence, the curries, breads, and rice dishes prepared by a mother, wife, or trusted cook will be pure, delicious, and familiar. In addition, home cooking enhances family relationships and is cheaper than restaurant food. Fixing a freshly cooked Indian meal is time consuming, however, and often the food is not ready until after a worker has left home for the day. Somehow the two have to connect at lunchtime. Enter the dabbawalas.

The business of delivering dabbas--also known as tiffins, from an Anglo-Indian word for "lunch"--began more than a century ago, reputedly at the request of a hungry English administrator. From small beginnings, spurred by enthusiastic Indian patronage, Mumbai's unique network of dabbawalas evolved. The profession includes some 3,000 deliverymen and 2,000 supervisors; the latter acquire rights to a collecting territory, pay monthly salaries and expenses, and coordinate the operation. Together these 5,000 men see to the delivery of more than 100,000 lunches daily.

Each carrier is responsible for a particular section of a route and is part of a relay team of at least four members. By following a code of colorful symbols painted on the lunch pails, the largely illiterate dabbawalas can transport meals from outlying neighborhoods to the commercial zones precisely at lunchtime and later collect the owners' empty tiffins for delivery back home. The service costs the clients, who range from mill hands to government servants and corporate executives, less than $10 per month (some parents use the service for schoolchildren, too). For hauling the huge wooden trays or pushing the carts laden with dabbas, a carrier earns about $100 per month.

Dabbawalas are extremely proud of their reliability: lunches are rarely late or lost. The entire system depends on each carrier being unfailingly present and punctual--a rarity in much of traditional India. Trust and cooperation are essential. The tiffin carriers belong to a union, which helps settle grievances among members or between members and clients. But perhaps most important to the success of this complex network is the way dabbawalas are linked through kinship and religion.

Virtually all are migrants from rural villages near the city of Pune, eighty miles southeast of Mumbai, and obtain their jobs and learn the trade through family ties. They wear the traditional white cap and clothing of their region. In "Mumbai's Dabbawalla: Omnipresent Worker and Absent City-Dweller," an article in the March 29, 1997, issue of Mumbai's Economic and Political Weekly, French researcher Alexandra Quien explains that the carriers identify themselves as Marathas, a Hindu group with a martial heritage, and their names suggest roots in the Kunbi agricultural caste. Their families--often poor--remain in the villages, and the dabbawalas' earnings help support them and finance the expansion of their farms. The tiffin carriers visit their home villages frequently and usually retire there.

The dabbawalas' identity and sense of purpose, Quien has observed, is also shaped by reverence for the thirteenth-century poet-saint Jnaneshwar and by membership in a sect devoted to the Hindu deity Vithoba, a form of Vishnu. The tiffin carriers have endowed pilgrims' rest houses at several sites sacred to their sect and wear a rosary signifying dedication to their way of life. On a rare break from their arduous work, a group of dabbawalas may travel together on a religious pilgrimage.

Changes in eating habits and an increase in women's employment, as well as traffic jams and rising costs, threaten to undermine the tiffin carriers' livelihood. But for now the dabbawalas remain an essential fixture of daily life in Mumbai.

Doranne Jacobson ("Doing Lunch"), who has done research in India over the past thirty years, has not engaged the services of the dabbawalas who deliver home-cooked meals in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), but she loves dining out in that metropolis, where she and her family have enjoyed breaks from her rural fieldwork. An anthropologist, writer, photographer, and lecturer based in Springfield, Illinois, Jacobson (right, with two friends) is the author-photographer of India, Land of Dreams and Fantasy (W. H. Smith, 1992) and coauthor, with Susan S. Wadley, of Women in India: Two Perspectives (South Asia Books, 4th ed., 1999). Her most recent article for Natural History was "A Reverence for Cows" (6/99). Freelance photojournalist Kadir van Lohuizen was introduced to the dabbawalas while covering a story in Mumbai on India's "new rich." Based in Amsterdam, he has worked widely in western, central, and eastern Asia as well as in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, often documenting the plight of peoples caught in the midst of war and social upheaval. Van Lohuizen's numerous publication credits include Der Speigel, Le Monde, the Guardian, the Washington Post, and Time. This February he was invited to serve as a jury member for World Press Photo's annual contest.