A bloody mess? Butchers, planners and the battle for Shahjahanabad
Simon Harding
7th December 2009
The air is thick with flies. In front of me, in a space no larger than a walk-in wardrobe, three men are hard at work. Squatting down on the dusty floor, they hack, slice, crack and chop at large pieces of meat with heavy metal cleavers stained brown by age. The hum of the insects and the metronomic clonking of iron on bone provide a macabre soundtrack to this, my first visit to an Indian butcher’s shop. Nondescript hunks of animal lie strewn around the tiny shop, identifiable to the novice only by the occasional butchering oversight: a hoof here or a tail there. The whole place has the sharp, irony smell of blood. This shop, assures my friend and dinner host, is the best place to get beef. He orders a kilogram. The hacking quickens as the butchers work on the order. For Hindus eating meat is often considered impure and is generally not encouraged. Although many Hindus do eat chicken and goat, few will touch pork and beef remains the ultimate taboo. India’s Muslims, on the other hand, have fewer hang-ups. Consequently, most of Delhi’s butcher’s shops are owned and frequented by Muslims. “I am a particularly pure person”, my Muslim host assures me with a wry smile, “I eat goat, beef and even pork. Sometimes I drink alcohol. I am so pure; none of these things can impurify me”.
Old Delhi is the centre of the city’s meat trade. The old walled city of Shajahanabad, built by the Murghal emperor Shajahan (builder of the Taj Mahal) in 1639 as his new capital, with its tiny winding lanes, dead ends, hidden courtyards, animals, beggars and stupefying congestion, it’s as hard on the cartographer as it is on the outsider. To this day Old Delhi remains at the heart of life for the Muslim community, indeed it is one of the few majority Muslim areas of the capital. India’s largest mosque, the Jama Masjid, which can accommodate 25,000 worshippers, sits proudly in the centre. Surrounding it, one of Shajahan’s greatest architectural achievements, are oily mechanics shops, legions of dhabas (snack stalls) and row upon row of butcher’s shops brimming with buckets of chicken pieces and bathtub sized vats of goat meat, all fresh and all for sale within spitting distance from a World Heritage Site. But all this could be about to change.
After a five year struggle, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi succeeded in closing Old Delhi’s largest abattoir in October this year. The Idagh slaughterhouse behind the city’s hectic main thoroughfare, Chandni Chowk, had supplied meat to shops in the area for over 130 years. Shop owners in the nearby lanes would go to Idagh to buy their stock wholesale; livestock owners would take their animals there to have them slaughtered. But now Idagh stands empty.
The old slaughterhouse didn’t go without a fight. The Delhi Meat Traders Association held a 15 day strike which saw the cost of meat rocket around the city. Closing Idagh would not only end a century long tradition, claimed the Association, the MCD’s proposed alternative site in Ghazipur would also create unemployment, increase the retail cost of meat and make business next to impossible for meat shops in the Old City. Questions are also being raised about the health implications of building a slaughterhouse next to a large open drain, which runs close to the Ghazipur site.
The MCD claims that imported German technology at the Ghazipur will make the whole slaughtering process more efficient and hygienic and that the relocation of the industry 20km away to the city’s eastern fringe will take a dirty, smelly trade away from a densely populated area. But the butcher’s still don’t buy it. ‘German technology’ means mechanisation, they say, which means that 7,800 of Idagh’s 8,000 workers will lose their jobs, many of them poor migrant workers from Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh. The new location would force businesses in the Old City to drive for over an hour to buy their stock, drastically increasing transportation costs and possibly negating any improvement in hygiene standards as carcasses spend long hour stuck in traffic jams in rusty unrefrigerated vans. All this, and the alleged inability of the Ghazipur plant to slaughter the 10,000 animals per day required to feed the city, will push up the price of meat for consumers, worsening already serious food price inflation.
But despite their best efforts, the Association finally agreed to cooperate with the MCD and move to the Ghazipur plant earlier this month. In place of the old slaughterhouse will sit a new shopping mall built and run by the giant Indian company Reliance. Without a local source of meat, many butcher shops in Old Delhi will surely go out of business.
In its purest form the battle between the MCD and the butchers was a fight between different ideas of what Old Delhi is and what sort of business should happen in its narrow lanes. For the bureaucrats at the MCD, the Old City is a potential tourist goldmine waiting to be tapped. All that is needed is for the area to be cleaned and packaged for wealthy Indians and Western tourists and their cameras. Buildings need to be preserved, protected from their inhabitants and their messy, noisy activities. The place has to be sealed and presented as a piece of India’s Murghal past. For the butchers, Old Delhi is their workplace, the centre of their business-world and in many cases the world of their fathers and their grandfathers whose houses, skills and shops they inherited as temporary guardians; in charge only until the next generation is old enough and wise enough to take over. For them, history and culture are alive in everyday life. It can be smelly, messy and occasionally bloody; it's not something to be displayed like a painting or some exotic eastern fairground side show.
“You take away the butchers and what ‘heritage’ do you have left?” exclaimed my host, a noted social activist, “the area and its people will lose their identities. They will become cut off from their own histories, which is not only sad, but also very dangerous. When you don’t know who you are you will believe anything anybody tells you”.
As the meat trade packs its cleavers, knives and grimy aprons and heads to the periphery of this enormous city it is clear that the MCD and its vision of an Old Delhi brimming with high end retail outlets and crisp tourist rupees hot from the airport ATM has emerged victorious. By banishing messy, ugly, but ultimately vital business to the rural-urban hinterlands, the MCD is hurting small meat traders, low paid migrant workers and hard-up consumers struggling with rampant food price inflation. Reliance and a few other big businesses may benefit from a few extra square metres of real estate, tourists and rich locals may breathe a sigh of relief at no longer having to face Old Delhi, red in tooth and claw, but it comes at a price; hundreds of years of tradition wiped out, community cohesion shattered and family businesses and traditional skills all lost.