What’s in a Name?
21–09–2018, Mumbai, India: Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.
Good Morning Everyone. It’s The Friday Post on a hot Friday morning. In today’s post, I want to talk about an experience I had while I was completing my internship with PepsiCo. The internship required me to travel a great deal through the towns and villages of Gujarat. I have never enjoyed travelling; nevertheless, I can see the merit behind it. There are many experiences travelling endows on its practitioners; some of them change our perspectives in their entirety. I had many such experiences during my two months of internship, one of which I am sharing here.
A young man with a stubble ambled across the restaurant and sat opposite me. It was the sweltering summer of 2015 and I was in the quaint little town of Surendranagar in Gujarat for a field visit during my internship with Pepsi. My visits involved going from restaurant to restaurant and understand their apprehensions about my employer. It was evening. I was at a restaurant named Gurukripa, a nondescript eatery the likes of which dot an India caught in the transition between urban and rural.
The man greeted me with the familiar AssalamuAlaikum, literally meaning “peace be with you”. My beard gives me away as a Muslim so I am pretty used to this by now. He introduced himself and asked me if I was a manager or in some authoritative position at Pepsi. I answered his questions. He introduced himself as the owner of the restaurant and we talked business for some time. All this while, I wondered why his restaurant was named Gurukripa.
This was one of the cultural changes I faced after shifting from Calcutta. Back home, restaurants had a clear naming pattern as far as I was concerned. Muslim hotels that served halal food were named Rahmania, Aminia, and Muhammadia. Non-muslim hotels which served vegetarian food were named Sri Krishna, Sri Balaji, and Ma Kali. Non-Muslim hotels which served non-vegetarian food were named Oh Calcutta and Elite and one could not be sure if the meat they served was halal or not. There were clear ways to establish the ownership and menu of a restaurant. Of course, these are my deductions and not backed by scientific data. Yet, I found these patterns to come true a ridiculous number of times.
When I moved to Hyderabad, this myth was not really busted. Restaurant names in Hyderabad followed this pattern but there was a significant number of data points that broke this pattern. The biggest difference, however, was the omnipresence of halal meat everywhere. The supply chain for meat — both chicken and mutton — has one crucial element, the slaughterers. Back home in Calcutta, and in almost all the cities I have lived in, the goat slaughtering part of the business is largely managed by Muslims. However, the chicken industry in Calcutta is largely managed by non-Muslims and hence the chicken on your plate will not necessarily be halal. This wasn’t the case in Hyderabad. It was a pleasant surprise for me at least.
Ahmedabad was a bigger change. There was a restaurant named Pleasure Trove which my friends used to frequent. In Calcutta, I would have safely assumed the place would be serving non-halal meat and would have avoided non-vegetarian there. To my surprise, not only did the place serve halal meat but was also owned by a Muslim. Not that the ownership matters but this was breaking a pattern — a restaurant owned by a Muslim given a secular name. In Calcutta, this was hardly the case. A secular name was largely for the upscale eateries when I was growing in the former Capital.
The Pepsi internship took me places, literally. I roamed a total of eight cities and towns of Gujarat over six weeks and saw the local markets up and close. Because my work involved a lot of meetings and discussions with owners of restaurants, I discovered that a lot of secular-named restaurants were owned by Muslims. Cafe Honest, for example, is a franchise having a very large Muslim ownership. In fact, a lot of restaurants having names like Cafe Ashish were owned by Muslims. (A lot of these belonged to a community of Muslims called the Chelias. I will perhaps talk more about them and their community model of business in some other post.) The slaughtering business, in most of Gujarat, is largely managed by Muslims and hence the hesitation of food being halal or not was also not there in my mind while I lived there. The bigger benefit, of course, was that the pattern of restaurant names I had formed in my head no longer held true.
I lived in Patna next for some months and the pattern I observed was very similar to Calcutta. Next came Mumbai which again belied my observations from Calcutta. I live opposite a Muslim restaurant named Choice. I have also travelled a lot now — Bangalore, Hubli, Dharwad, Bijapur, Tirupati, Vijayawada, Guntur, Delhi NCR, and quite a few other places. I have made it a point to try and observe the naming patterns in all the places I get to stay for a significant amount of time in and see if I can find any reasons for the patterns I notice.
One clear reason I have figured out is the education of Muslims in the area. While Calcutta Muslims are largely backward and socially underdeveloped. The cities like Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad have a lot of educated Muslims in comparison. As a result, they choose secular English names like Paradise and Honest for their restaurants.
Another reason could be signalling — with a Muslim name you’re confirming the food is halal. In a city where all meat is not halal, — Delhi and Calcutta — it makes sense to tell your clientele what you serve. So a Kareem’s or Shiraz is only making sure the Muslim clientele doesn’t have to think twice before entering. I remember a restaurant in Bangalore, Ruchi’s, where the manager himself told me proactively that the food is halal.
Location matters too. If the eatery is in a Muslim suburb or an area populated by Muslims where many non-Muslims do not venture, I have a theory the restaurants tend to be named with Muslim names. On the other hand, if in a more mixed part of the town, the place is likely to have a more secular name.
The last reason is what the stubbled owner of Gurukripa told me as we got chatting. He told me he and his family had been running the restaurant for decades now. They were locals there, living quite closeby if I remember correctly. They were also spiritual disciples of a saint. When I told them that I did not subscribe to the ideology that disparages Sufism, he told me more about the saint. He felt his success and prosperity was because of the saint’s blessings. He also told me that his shop was named something else earlier, a clearly Muslim name. However, it was burned down during the storm, or toofan, as he called it. Having travelled through Gujarat and having met and talked to a lot of people, I knew toofan was the name they used for the riots of 2002. A lot of businesses were attacked based on their names. After they rebuilt the eatery, his saint advised him to name it Gurukripa. This was done as a safety measure so that maybe their source of income could be spared in future riots.
I don’t know when I will be shifting to a new city. If I do, I am pretty sure I will subconsciously start noticing the naming patterns of eateries in that city. Till then, live long and prosper!
The author is a routine Engineer-MBA with a nine-to-undefined job and lives under the illusion that he can write. He also blogs here.
