South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20

Cow Politics: Spatial Shifts in the Location of

Slaughterhouses in Mumbai City

Shireen Mirza

To cite this article: Shireen Mirza (2019): Cow Politics: Spatial Shifts in the Location
of Slaughterhouses in Mumbai City, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00856401.2019.1644766

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1644766

Published online: 20 Aug 2019.

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2019.1644766

ARTICLE

Cow Politics: Spatial Shifts in the Location of

Slaughterhouses in Mumbai City
Shireen Mirza
School of Undergraduate Studies, Ambedkar University, New Delhi, India

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article explores the spatial politics of situating slaughter- Butchering; caste among
houses at the margins of Mumbai city enacted by the sanitary Indian Muslims; caste
civic state and the caste labour of the butcher community. While labour; colonial sanitary
state; cow slaughter; spatial
the sanitary state mobilises colonial discourses of sanitation that states; spatial politics;
deem animal slaughter unhygienic and so needing to be located urban space
at the shifting periphery of the city, an ethnography of the
Muslim sub-castes of mutton and beef butchers suggests that ani-
mal slaughter is a form of caste labour that involves cultivating
hereditary skills of working with flesh, bone and blood, which the
Mumbai butchers refer to as ‘karigari’ (artisanship). Their caste
labour is resisting the reconfiguration of the meat trade, which
they view as fragmenting the community’s control over their
labour. By bringing theories of urban space, state and caste
among urban Muslims into the conversation, the article describes
the ways in which scientific and communal ideas of sanitation are
consolidated along a continuum. It also describes the ways in
which caste and religion condense along an axis to form
analogous structures that are deployed by the beef and mutton
butchers to resist these spatial shifts.

Deonar abattoir, 2016

‘If you go upstairs you will get caught’, a voice calls out. We return down the stairs to
enter the cleaning area of the mutton unit in Mumbai’s largest municipal slaughter-
house at Deonar. (Mumbai was known as Bombay till 1995.) High-pressure outlets
spray water onto the floor, washing away the blood of the slaughtered animals. Younis
Qureshi,1 the beef butcher who showed me the way into the slaughterhouse in the
evening through a small unguarded gate, throws a worried glance as I awkwardly slide
over the wet floor. The voice becomes visible as a younger-looking mutton butcher
stops us at the doorway: ‘Do you have permission to be here?’ he asks. ‘Yes, from the
veterinary doctor’, I confidently declare, hoping he does not probe further. ‘He should

CONTACT Shireen Mirza [email protected]

1. This is a pseudonym that retains the adopted name Qureshi, which is used extensively by the beef
butcher community.

ß 2019 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

2 S. MIRZA

have sent an official to accompany you. What is your business here? You’d better leave
before the guards see you again’.
This was the third time I had been asked to leave the slaughterhouse. Earlier a mut-
ton shop owner (dukandaar) had disrupted my conversation with the beef butchers
belonging to the trade union, the Sarva Shramik Sangh, which was fighting the ban on
cow slaughter imposed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in
Maharashtra. The ban criminalised the slaughter of cows, oxen and bullocks, except for
water buffalo, leading to the sudden unemployment of beef butchers who had worked
at the Deonar slaughterhouse for forty-odd years. They were angry and anxious to dis-
cuss their declining prospects since the BJP had been elected to power in 2014, both at
the state and centre levels. (At the time of writing, it has been voted back into power at
the centre in 2019.) The butchers’ resolve to forge possible avenues for their stories to
be heard helped me gain entry to the slaughterhouse.
Prior to 2014, beef and mutton butchers worked for the Brihanmumbai (Greater
Mumbai) Municipal Corporation (BMC) through private contracts, their day beginning
at 11am, when they stood at the assembly line to slaughter, clean and dress around
500–700 animals a day. Soon after the ban, the assembly line was dismantled, along
with the discontinuation of the bi-weekly beef market for livestock. Today, only 50–70
buffalo are killed daily, providing work for just 30–40 beef butchers. The rest, around
3,000 beef butchers, arrive at the slaughterhouse hoping to get work, but instead return
home in the evening frustrated and penniless. Mutton butchers too have seen a decline
in their workload as the slaughter of goats and sheep for export has been discontinued.
Because animal slaughter is a specialised skill transmitted through caste networks, this
is the only work the butchers have known: ‘Even if we find alternative employment, we
are told “Brother, why are you ruining my work? Please leave”’, they explain.
Caste and labour divisions overlap within the butcher community, with animal
slaughter associated with an encompassing Muslim caste known as Kasai or Kassab. In
practice, however, the encompassing caste title has no effectiveness because intra-caste
divisions between the mutton Bakar Kasai and beef Gai Kasai butcher caste groups,
maintained through endogamy and untouchability, have more salience. The Bakar
Kasais, considered the higher caste, refuse to marry, touch, eat or trade in beef—
viewing the Gai Kasais with indifference at best and suspicion at worst. Antagonism
between the groups can be seen in attempts by the mutton butchers to disrupt the beef
butchers’ efforts to garner support through their conversations with outsiders like me.
Caste divisions between the mutton butchers and the beef butchers are also recorded
in the colonial ethnologies of the Bombay Presidency in which the Gai Kasais were
described as being of marked Afghan descent, speaking Hindustani and Gujarati, and
having Afghan names, with their bearing showing their foreign origin because they
were reported to be ‘tall, sturdy and broad-chested, and many having grey eyes and fair
skins’.2 By contrast, the Deccan Bakar Kasai or Lad Sultanis were described as being
the opposite of the Gai Kasais. Their caste practices were explained as remnants of the
Hindu Lad caste of butchers, retained after their conversion to Islam in Tipu Sultan’s
domain. They were said to have migrated to Bandra from the South Deccan with

2. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, 1882 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1882).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3

General Wellesley’s army in 1803.3 Converts from Hinduism, they were described as
‘middle size, well made, and dark or olive coloured’. They sold only mutton, refused to
touch beef or a beef butcher, had strong Hindu leanings and celebrated Hindu festivals
and offered vows to Hindu gods while employing a Muslim priest or kazi for marriage
and funeral ceremonies.4 Both the Gujarati and Deccan Bakar Kasais were described as
Sunni Hanafi Muslims who lived in endogamous, well-organised communities with a
headman (patel) chosen from the richest and most respectable families who had the
power to fine those who breached caste rules.5
My ethnography amongst both butcher sub-castes, conducted intermittently since
2011 in the new slaughterhouse at Deonar, as well as at Bandra in 2016 where the old
municipal slaughterhouse used to be, confirms these intercaste divisions still persist.
There have been minor shifts such as the Bakar Kasais now identifying themselves as
‘natives’ who hail from the Maharashtrian village of Punthamba, near Shirdi, thereby
securing for the group the ‘safe’ label of ‘native Maharashtrian’. This could be seen as a
response to the Hindu nativist Shiv Sena party to counter the political onslaught
against migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, as well as against Muslim migrants
from South India. By contrast, the Gai Kasais are seen as ‘newer migrants’ from
Uttar Pradesh.
However, caste divisions between the two groups continue to be strictly maintained.
The Bakar Kasais are detaching themselves from the business of selling buffalo meat,
afraid that any association with the beef trade could harm their mutton business. The
Gai Kasais have no interest in the goat and sheep trade, instead using every opportun-
ity to sell beef even when the mutton butchers have gone on strike in the city.
Differences between the sub-castes were explained to me by members of both castes
with great emphasis: ‘Our biradari or brotherhood is different’. I was also told ‘our
modes of doing business are different’ (‘dhandha alag hai’): while the mutton and goat
butchering business works on credit, the buffalo business operates on direct payment.6
Thus, on numerous occasions, I was told, especially by the mutton-trade Bakar Kasais,
that the animals the communities traded in were different, the slaughtering techniques
differed and the spatial divisions within the slaughterhouse ensured no contact.
Furthermore, the cost of dressed mutton and beef was different (goat meat being con-
sidered superior), as were their customers, caste affiliations, profit margins and their
political organisations.
For both sub-castes, the meat trade business is structured through caste networks in
which the skills needed for animal slaughter are taught to male members of the com-
munity as traditional knowledge. This hereditary skill is transmitted from childhood as
a masculine quality from grandfather to father to son (dada pardada, or through the
generations), and it involves knowledge of handling animals and their meat. It includes
knowing how to recognise a healthy animal, knowing every bone in the animal’s
body—where to cut, how much pressure to apply—and how to judge the quality of
meat from the whiteness and thickness of the fat and the pinkness of the flesh in the

3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. I use the term ‘buffalo business’ as my informants do, as part of an official stance maintaining that cows have
never been slaughtered at the slaughterhouse and that buffalo meat is the only meat in which they trade.
4 S. MIRZA

case of mutton, or the redness of the flesh in the case of beef. It also involves knowing
which parts of the animal produce what cuts. Both groups are part of a broader social
ecology of labour that draws on community networks, ranging from animal butchers,
wholesale and retail meat traders, meat shop owners, brokers and dealers in cattle and
buffalo, traders and sellers of offal and meat parts such as liver, kidneys, brains, hoofs
and intestines (if capital is limited) or owning an export meat business (if capital is suf-
ficient). Both groups had obtained official recognition for the encompassing title of
Qureshi under the category of Other Backward Castes (OBCs).7
Yet it was predominantly the beef butchers who relocated to Deonar after 1973 when
all slaughtering operations across the city were shifted after the demolition of the old
municipal slaughterhouse in Bandra, built during the colonial period. Deonar is an outly-
ing area reclaimed by the colonial Bombay municipality (now known as the
Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) in 1900 from Thane Creek to create the oldest
landfill in the city. The location of the new municipal slaughterhouse near the city’s big-
gest landfill was a deterrent to relocating the families of the butcher community. Younis
Qureshi’s family shifted from Bandra after the government promised to issue licences to
butchers so they could practise their traditional labour of animal slaughter, running meat
shops and trading meat in the new slaughterhouse. The family arrived in Deonar in the
mid 1970s when he was a small child, squatting on informally reclaimed land adjoining
the railway at the end of the Harbour line of the suburban rail network. They lived in
makeshift houses (jhoppad patti) until 2000, after which the Maharashtra Housing and
Area Development Authority (MHADA) allotted them a Slum Rehabilitation Allotment
(SRA) flat in Mankurd adjoining the landfill. Lying between the landfill and slaughter-
house are crowded slums predominantly inhabited by Dalits and Muslims, punctuated
by tall resettlement apartment blocks such as the one in which Younis Qureshi’s family
lives. Outside their window large hawks can be seen looking for food, while mosquitos
buzz around the area which was once part of the swampy marshes of Thane Creek before
being reclaimed using waste and sand as fillers.
In conversation, Younis Qureshi reiterated that the discontinuation of cattle slaugh-
ter in Deonar in the name of the ‘Holy’ cow had happened without a rational basis
because, he repeatedly maintained, cows had never been slaughtered there. Everything
there was legal and licensed. Only unproductive bullocks, oxen and buffaloes (bhakad
jaanwar), after being deemed unfit for agricultural work and ploughing, were sold for
slaughter. In order to revoke the ban on cow slaughter, the Sarva Shramik Sangh that
he is part of, along with other beef associations and religious-caste organisations of the

7. Caste among Indian Muslims remains a complicated social structure, given its seeming contradiction of Islamic
doctrine that upholds the ideals of equality and brotherhood between all members of the Muslim community.
Sociological explanations put forward by Imtiaz Ahmad and others maintain that caste is inflected through local
contexts in which linguistic, regional, class and ethnic registers percolate into distinct Muslim cultures. See
Imtiaz Ahmad (ed.), Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims (Delhi: Manohar Book Services, 1973);
Syed Ali, ‘Collective and Elective Ethnicity: Caste among Urban Muslims’, in Sociological Forum, Vol. 17, no. 4
(2002), pp. 593–618; and Tarini Bedi, ‘Urban Histories of Place and Labour: The Chilla Taximen of Bombay/
Mumbai’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 52, no. 5 (2018), pp. 1–35. My ethnography calls attention to the limita-
tions of this explanation. It shows that caste as social structure takes newer forms within new and emerging
class, ethnic and religious structures, and that the case of regional particularity could well be made in the case
of caste among Hindus and other groups. It calls instead for foregrounding caste, not as a stable religious struc-
ture, but as an analogous structure with the flexibility to absorb and respond to shifting capital forms.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

beef community, have mobilised support to lodge a writ petition in the Supreme Court
with the union seeking to build social alliances for the legal battle.
Attending to contests over regulatory state practices and the spatial practices of ani-
mal slaughter as Muslim caste labour, this article throws light on the peculiar ways in
which spatial politics are enacted by the municipal state as well as by Muslim castes. I
deploy the concept of the spatial state in the next section to explain the collapse of
local, national and global spaces within the state as processual, multifaceted and sym-
bolic ways of seeking to regulate urban space. Animal slaughter was deemed by dis-
courses of colonial sanitation as unhygienic, as I show in the second part of the second
section; they now cohere with Hindu nationalist discourses—rejecting both the slaugh-
ter and consumption of meat as polluting caste practices of the Muslim ‘other’. The
merging discourses of colonial sanitation and Hindu nationalism designate the slaugh-
terhouse as a space that is offensive to the human senses, requiring it to be relocated to
the periphery of the city.
State regulatory practices determine the location of slaughterhouses as well as the
design of the slaughtering techniques that affect the caste-taught skills of animal
slaughter. These spatial shifts, I argue, consolidate the movement towards the industri-
alisation and mass-scale production of meat, reconfiguring traditional meat practices
embedded in caste structures. In the third section, I describe changes in the construc-
tion of caste labour as hereditary through the formalisation of labour relations at the
Bandra slaughterhouse by the colonial Bombay government, to the privatisation of the
labour of animal slaughter at the Deonar slaughterhouse. In response to the modern
disciplining of urban space and shifts in labour, I explore the continuation of butcher
community caste organisations in the fourth section even as efforts to Islamise the
butcher community are under way by remaking traditional identities and caste labour
as modes of resisting disciplining practices. Finally, I describe responses from both the
mutton and beef butcher communities to these spatial shifts in the fifth section. These
responses resist the disciplining of urban space that is reconfigured through regulatory
practices of spatial states, to which I now turn.

Spatialising states
The concept of spatialising states has gained currency since Henri Lefebvre’s theory of
capitalism as a spatial process theorised ways through which capitalism has produced
the state and urban space as connected processes.8 Deriving from Lefebvre, the concept
of spatialising states has been proposed as describing the production of space by the
modern interstate system that is imagined in a post-Westphalian regime. It draws on
the idea of the state as authority constituted through the economy, as well as discourses
of capitalism that unfold spatially within states.9 This includes political actions con-
cerning the mobilisation of nationalism as an ideology, and a whole range of state proj-
ects designed to shape and reshape territorial spaces within the broader context
defined by the world market, imperialism and the operations of multinational

8. Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans.) (Malden, MA: Blackwell, [1974] 1991).
9. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, ‘Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory’, in International Political Sociology,
Vol. 3, no. 4 (2009), pp. 353–77.
6 S. MIRZA

corporations.10 Spatial hierarchies of local, national and international regimes are seen
to collapse into multi-scalar hierarchies of state institutional organisation, politically
connecting global governance and flow-based economic transactions with the state’s
internal spatial structure.11
The concept of spatial states complicates a static understanding of state territoriality
as fixed, self-enclosed and bound. Instead it views state spatiality as processual, multifa-
ceted and symbolic—through which state power is both articulated and contested.12
Following these insights that link the geography of the city to the geography of the state
in abstract as well as physical form, this article explores the spatial politics through
which the public slaughterhouse in Mumbai city evolved to undermine the
community-controlled meat business.

Disciplining space
Rose and Osborne describe the Greek polis as an initial representation of the ‘spatial
milieu of immanence’ that acted as a self-sufficient spatialisation of authority.13 They
show that this tendency to natural ‘self-government’ embodied by the polis recurred in
all diagrams of nineteenth-century views of the city, wherein the political stability of
the polis was seen as antagonistic to the disorderliness and dysfunctional forms of the
city. This view produced an urban political discourse consisting of practical knowledge
such as gathering, organising and classifying information related to the perception of
immanent ‘dangers’ in the city. Poverty, crowded slums, processions, political gather-
ings, rebellion, rumours, and the virtues and vices of everyday living were seen as
immanent sites of danger that should be pacified through mundane techniques of gov-
ernance. The point Rose and Osborne make is that underlying the regulatory dis-
courses and technical expertise deployed by spatial states is a moral topography of
mapping space which saw the living body of the citizen as a problem for government.
It tended to pathologise certain kinds of spaces as sites of disorder and disease. Viewed
as a threat, populations and their territories required governance through which the
idea of the sanitised city could be developed. This was done by promising clean water,
the disposal of refuse and sewage, and the provision to the city of hygienic and safe
meat for consumption.
From the perspective of the sanitary state, the slaughterhouse (instituted in India by
the colonial state and maintained by the post-colonial state) was seen as a space of
miasma. This was based on ancient ideas that spaces which produced a miasma, identi-
fied through the foul odours of live animals as well as raw flesh, were potential spaces
for spreading disease. This odour was seen as entering and polluting the body as well
as blocking essential life flows and thereby causing illness.14 Similarly, the germ theory

10. Ibid.
11. James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, ‘Spatialising State: Towards an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’, in
American Ethnologist, Vol. 29, no. 4 (2002), pp. 981–1002.
12. Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004).
13. Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing Cities: Notes on the Spatialisation of Virtue’, in Environment and
Planning D—Society & Space, Vol. 17, no. 6 (1999), pp. 737–60.
14. Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), p. 62.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7

of the nineteenth century also viewed animal slaughter as a potentially contaminating

practice, which led to viewing the slaughterhouse as an offensive space that could
threaten the public health of the city and was therefore in need of regulation, distanc-
ing and an enclosed design. As Christopher Otter argues, the slaughterhouse emerged
only in the nineteenth century, but became, over the course of that century, the only
way in which animals were routinely killed, ending traditional methods of animal
slaughter.15 The establishment of the slaughterhouse in the nineteenth century
occurred simultaneously in the West and its colonies, heralding the advent of the mass,
technological and industrialised production of meat.16 The slaughterhouse therefore
became a discursive space of modernity that symbolised a change in the relationship
between humans and animals in the city.17
In disciplining space through such discursive demarcations, spaces of exception are
created as a space of filth that is dangerous to the senses and to the sanitary health of
the city. Thus spatial states can be seen as constructing ideas of normality via space,
through which they seek to exercise sovereign power. This power cannot be understood
in Schmitt’s sense of ‘he who decided on the state of exception’,18 nor as part of state
sovereignty and law within a juridical order that defines ‘law’s threshold or limit con-
cept’ as seen through an Agamben lens.19 Following Hansen and Stepputat’s insights
on the non-exceptionalist character of the state of exception, the production of spaces
of normality and exception can be located outside the juridical, within the mundane
workings and regulation of social space instead.20 In their mundane workings, spatial
states regulate office appointments, urban zoning laws, taxation and land rights.21 The
slaughterhouse can be seen as the site produced as an exception through the multiple
spaces of the state—national, global and local—that fold into each other, bounded by
the abstract moral–scientific views on hygiene and sanitation as well as danger.
When seen through the perspective of the butchers in the meat business in Mumbai
city, the banality of the sights and smells of animal slaughter offers a perspective that
defies the disciplining of the senses and its shaping of aesthetics. This everydayness of
living with animals, their feed and excrement draws from a wide canvas of the aesthet-
ics of sight and smell, including the distinctive odour, tone, gloss and brightness of the
animal’s pelt and its cut meat. It normalises sights such as the size of the animal’s
testicles, the thickness of the tail, the pinkness or redness of the meat as well as the

15. Christopher Otter, ‘The Vital City: Public Analysis, Dairies and Slaughterhouses in Nineteenth Century Britain’, in
Cultural Geographies, Vol. 13, no. 4 (2006), pp. 517–37.
16. Awadhendra Sharan, In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution, and Dwelling in Delhi, c. 1850–2000 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
17. The historian Richard Bulliet describes this change as epitomised by two periods: domesticity, which includes
daily contact with animals, and post-domesticity, where people are physically and psychologically removed from
animals, yet consume the products they produce, while somewhat paradoxically enjoying very close relation-
ships with them. See Richard W. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of
Human–Animal Relationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). See also Amy Fitzgerald, ‘A Social
History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications’, in Human Ecology Review, Vol. 17,
no. 1 (2010), pp. 59–69.
18. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, George Schwab (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1922] 1985), p. 5.
19. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans.) (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2005).
20. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial
World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
21. Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (New Delhi: Blackwell, 2007).
8 S. MIRZA

white and yellow thickness of the fat, which become indicators of ways of trading in
animals and animal flesh. These aesthetics cultivate skills of working with flesh, bone
and blood that the Mumbai butchers refer to as ‘karigari’ in creating the cleaned and
finished carcasses of animals that are ready to be transported to retail meat shops to be
sold for consumption.
In everyday encounters with the butchers, their intimate handling of animals and
the finesse of their slaughtering techniques can be seen as reversing the modern disci-
plining of the senses. From the butchers’ perspective, the sight of animal blood, bones,
heads and carcasses is normal. Animal slaughter then can be seen as the skill required
to produce resources such as bones for the pharmaceutical and glue-making industries;
animal fat and hides for tanning and leather production; and blood for dyes.22 Animal
blood and bones can also be used as a rich source of fertilizer for gardens and green
spaces in cities. But the slaughterhouse itself is produced as a space of invisibility that
requires relocation to the city’s moving periphery, as described next in the making of
the first modern slaughterhouse in Mumbai, the Bandra slaughterhouse.

The making of the Bandra slaughterhouse

The colonial sanitary state established discourses of modern sanitation that were uni-
versally applied, through which traditional practices of meat slaughtering were gov-
erned and regulated. In the United Kingdom, the Public Health Act of 1875 declared
that cohabitation of human beings and animals in sheds, stables and isolated houses
was a nuisance or injurious to health, and it was proposed that the labour of slaughter-
ing animals be removed to the outer limits of cities.23
The colonial Bombay municipality applied universal sanitary practices whereby the
practice of animal slaughter was linked to the cultural ‘other’ against whom the boun-
daries of the ‘self’ were positioned.24 Not only was the slaughterhouse authorised as a
space of state regulation in its planning, design and spatial location outside city limits,
it was also crucial in constructing both the idea of the ‘sanitised’ colony as well as the
idea of the efficient and benevolent colonial state. Further universal sanitary practices
were locally embedded by emphasising animal slaughter as caste labour—reifying infor-
mal and diverse practices before their formal absorption into and regulation by the
colonial authorities.
In 1866, the Bombay municipality obtained sanction for the construction of a mod-
ern slaughterhouse. All existing meat trade operations inside the Fort area, where the
colonial and native elite resided, were relocated to a large slaughterhouse under one
roof built outside the city limits.25 The low-lying urban periphery along the Mahim

22. Barbara Harris-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), p. 146.
23. David Arnold, ‘Pollution, Toxicity and Public Health in Metropolitan India, 1850–1939’, in Journal of Historical
Geography, Vol. 42 (2013), pp. 124–33.
24. See Shireen Mirza, ‘Figure of the Halalkhore: Caste and Stigmatised Labour in Colonial Bombay’, in Economic &
Political Weekly, Vol. 53, no. 31 (2018), pp. 79–87.
25. The location of the slaughterhouse away from the colonial Fort area and yet providing services to it draws
attention to the literature on the making of public space in the colonies through an uneven development of
water, waste and sanitary infrastructure that marked a dual city thesis between the differentially placed colonial
and native towns in the colonial city. This differential exercise of power interrogates the uniform ordering of
urban space, particularly in the colonies, by both colonial and post-colonial states. Yet the structure of the
slaughterhouse as a modern unit becomes an unequivocal site for the exercise of power in ordering urban
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

causeway across the wetlands of Bandra was selected because the site was close to run-
ning water and a short distance from a railway line.26
The Bandra slaughterhouse was constructed in 1867. It had centralised operations
and contained strong, airy, 200-feet-long structures,27 including a livestock shed on
either side, covered space with standing ground for a week’s supply of livestock (at least
800 head of cattle and 10,000 goats and sheep) and slaughter lines.28 Although the
slaughterhouse was designed according to modern ‘scientific’ principles, religion was
also taken into account. Accordingly, the colonial municipality ensured the spatial
design respected religious sentiments by segregating the pork, mutton and beef slaugh-
tering sections with a high wall. The floors were carefully cleaned by water brought
across the causeway from the Vehar water main that ensured the slaughterhouse oper-
ated in sanitary conditions; blood was washed away as quickly as it was produced.
Space for weekly and half-weekly livestock markets was located near the railway line
so that cattle, goats and sheep could get to the slaughterhouse directly by rail. The
meat trains passed the Bandra station via a siding, which branched into two lines—the
west siding for livestock and the east siding for meat.29 While the meat train was dis-
continued in favour of the bullock cart and road system in January 1879, bullock meat
vans transported the cleaned and dressed halved or quartered carcasses that were hung
in these vans.
The butcher community opposed both the relocation of the slaughterhouse to
Bandra as well as the municipalisation of their community-controlled labour. The colo-
nial sanitary state saw the butchers’ resistance to abandoning ‘traditional slaughter
through manual halal means as part [of] their anti-reform tendencies’.30 In particular,
their protest was seen as ‘engineer[ing] a strike’ by endeavouring to ‘play upon the
prejudices and excite the fears of Hindus by disseminating false reports’ about the
arrangements for the conveyance of meat.31 According to official documents,
the ‘ignorant’ masses actually abstained from eating meat after the spread of fears over
the design of the new slaughterhouse in Bandra. ‘The fact is’, observed the municipal
commissioner, ‘these people have been treated with excessive consideration; their
profits are enormous and the trade being in the hands of a few men, they have, a rather
mistaken idea of their power’.32 Despite the active resistance of the butcher commu-
nity, the butchers eventually relocated to the Bandra slaughterhouse and worked there
providing meat to the inhabitants of the city for over a century.

space by the colonial and, later, the post-colonial state. This does not preclude the use of space by, for
instance, butcher communities that proceeded to build their mosque in proximity to the slaughterhouse and
refused to relocate away from the mosque when the regulation of urban space called upon them to do so. This
can be seen as delimiting the hegemonic power and universal reach of the state. See Raj Chandavarkar, The
Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis:
Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), for more
on this. I would like to thank the first reviewer for making this point.
26. Bombay Act III of 1888.
27. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, 1882.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. R.P. Masani, Evolution of Local Self-Government in Bombay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929).
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 195.
10 S. MIRZA

In 1914, a report by a hygiene expert declared that the conditions under which
animals were killed and meat dressed for sale in the Bandra slaughterhouse were
insanitary; he called for the reform and upgrading of meat slaughtering techni-
ques.33 Remedial measures were proposed, including the construction of a modern
abattoir, alterations to the hours of slaughtering, and provision of a competent vet-
erinary staff to inspect each animal prior and subsequent to slaughter. It was fur-
ther proposed that the prevailing transport of meat to Bombay by bullock cart be
abolished, and arrangements instead be made with the railway companies to carry
meat by train in properly constructed dust-proof wagons.34 The report also pointed
out that the municipality’s arrangements for the retail sale of meat were poor: the
vendors sat or lounged amid the meat being sold; the benches were badly designed;
the cleaning was totally inadequate; there was no provision for the proper collec-
tion and disposal of waste meat and general refuse from the stalls; nor a proper
system of collection and disposal of market sweepings.35 In 1929, the superintend-
ent of markets pointed out the need to build an additional municipal market due
to the existing insanitary conditions at the Bandra slaughterhouse. He asked for
funds to construct a new market on a reclamation site that had been acquired by
the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) in Deonar.
Deonar was planned not just as a modern slaughterhouse but also an ‘abattoir’, thus
adopting the essential principles of hygiene, control and efficiency in the slaughtering
process. It was to be situated on a 126-acre site with up-to-date amenities such as a
livestock market, facilities for the slaughter and skinning of animals and cold storage.
Ancillary industries for by-products like blood, skin and fat were proposed to be built
for Rs20 million by the BMC. The Deonar slaughterhouse was designed along the
assembly line method, where, from the moment it was slaughtered, the animal moved
on an elevated conveyer belt from which it was strung by the hind leg so that at no
point did the carcass touch the floor, and individual workers handled individual car-
casses. The design ensured that even at the loading dock, the carcasses slid along the
conveyer belt onto a hook in the meat van.36 The idea underpinning the design of the
assembly line was to ensure that ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ operations were done at different
levels, with ‘unclean’ operations carried out on the ground floor, while workers in
uniforms and protective outfits stood along the ‘hill’ (elevation), sometimes even being
carried on a moving floor to the point where their task ended.37
Once the abattoir at Deonar was constructed, the existing municipal slaughterhouse
at Bandra was to be demolished. However, the BMC’s sanitary measure became highly
politicised. The decision to demolish the Bandra slaughterhouse and relocate it to
Deonar was described as the ‘biggest scandal of the corporation’.38

33. ‘Report by Dr. Goldsmith on the Meat Supply in Bombay’, in Administration Report of the Municipal Commission
for the City of Bombay, Vol. II, 1914–1915 (Bombay: The Times Press, 1915).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. The Times of India (2 May 1973), p. 4.
37. Ibid.
38. The Times of India (1 Feb. 1973), p. 5, quoting a member of the Jana Sangh.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11

Resistance to relocation of the slaughterhouse from Bandra to Deonar

The relocation of the slaughterhouse was bitterly resisted once again by the butcher
community of Bombay. Conversations with members of both the mutton Bakar Kasai
and beef Gai Kasai communities give texture to this resistance; it becomes clear that
the two communities fought against relocation to Deonar, individually at first, and
then together at the last hour.
An elderly lawyer from the Bakar Kasai community who lives in the Bandra
Slaughterhouse Compound took it upon himself to bring together all the groups
involved in the meat trade—slaughterers, retailers, shopkeepers, traders, brokers, sup-
pliers of goats and sheep, as well as cow, bull and buffalo traders from different
states—under the umbrella organisation of the Federation of Meat Traders, Brokers
and Workers’ Associations, to officially resist the government’s relocation measure.
Within the Gai Kasai community, Nasser Qureshi, a librarian from Lucknow, spear-
headed a month-long hunger strike, declaring death before demolition of the Bandra
slaughterhouse. According to other members of the Gai Kasai community, however,
Nasser Qureshi’s strike was not supported by his community because others had
sought advantage by moving quickly to obtain a licence to operate in Deonar. Likewise,
the Bakar Kasai community blamed itself for being both ethically unprincipled and pol-
itically disorganised: ‘hum yahan sab bikau log hai’ (‘we are not a community of values
or principles’). Some community members, they claimed, had taken the opportunity to
seek municipal jobs offered in Deonar. Most of the mutton butchers refused to relocate
altogether, choosing instead to hold on to their municipal quarters in Bandra and travel
every day to Deonar in shared cars to maintain their businesses.
The mutton butchers articulated a sense of belonging to the Bandra Slaughterhouse
Compound, engendered by the presence of their mosque, the Jama Masjid, built a
short distance away. The mosque was built in 1930 by the community in piecemeal
fashion by selling goat intestines. This was not the only link between the Bandra Jama
Masjid and the Bandra slaughterhouse: the mosque received free water from the BMC
in exchange for the blood and offal of slaughtered animals, thereby obtaining recogni-
tion of the religious caste–community connections of the butchers working at the
slaughterhouse under the BMC. The mosque became both a rallying point of resist-
ance as well as an entry point for later municipal regulation. The long-existing prac-
tice of supplying free water to the Jama Masjid became a controversy within the BMC
in 1971, when opposition to demolishing the Bandra slaughterhouse was widespread.
In the municipality, a member of the Jana Sangh—the political party launched in
1951 that was the predecessor to the present-day BJP—raised the issue with the then
Congress municipal commissioner, S.M.Y. Shastri. The former pointed out that the
corporation had supplied free water to the mosque for the last eighty years, while no
free water was supplied to other religious places in Greater Bombay.39 The commis-
sioner replied that the butchers at the slaughterhouse belonged to a particular organ-
isation (jamat) and the mosque belonged to that jamat and hence the mosque was
supplied with free water.40

39. The Municipal Secretary, BMC Records of Proceedings (Bombay: Municipal Printing Press, 7 Oct. 1971).
40. Ibid.
12 S. MIRZA

Emerging from this sentiment, public discourse around the demolition of the
Bandra slaughterhouse combined the discourse of sanitation with communal discourse,
in which toleration of the butcher community’s resistance was seen as the ruling
Congress Party’s opportunistic appeasement of the Muslim minority. The combination
of scientific and communal discourses did not recognise intra-caste distinctions or
rivalries within the butcher community, seeing the community as a monolithic
religious minority.
However, both castes also articulated their resistance in religious terms, enabling
their official representation by the Maharashtra wing of the Jamat-e-Islami Hind on
behalf of the ‘Muslims of the city’.41 This was followed by a letter from the president of
the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind of Maharashtra. He stated that ‘on behalf of the Muslim
meat eating population of Bombay city … great resentment prevails’ due to news in the
press that the BMC would go ahead with its scheme to introduce mechanised animal
slaughter at Deonar.42 The letter argued that the vast majority of the city’s non-
vegetarian population was Muslim; that from time immemorial they had been able to
purchase meat slaughtered according to halal rules, which was the only meat Islam
allowed them to consume; and that meat procured by a system other than halal would
not only deprive them of their ‘fundamental right to have meat’, but would also hurt
their ‘religious sentiments’.43 It thereby requested the proposed scheme be dropped in
order to maintain the atmosphere of goodwill between all sections of the population.44
In response, the standing committee of the BMC stated:
The main purpose of constructing the new slaughterhouse at Deonar is to shift the
present outdated slaughterhouse located in a thickly populated residential area and
provide better facilities for slaughter under hygienic conditions and to supply wholesome
meat to the consumers. The slaughter of animals will be continued according to the
needs of various communities.45
In addition to representations via the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind itself, the Jamaat was
able to mobilise the support of Congress ministers as well as of the Indian Union
Muslim League councillor on the BMC, G.M. Banatwala, whose party claimed to repre-
sent the national Muslim voice. In the BMC, Dr. A.U. Memon of the Congress party

41. The Jamaat-e-Islami Hind in its original form was a movement and a party formed in Lahore in 1941 in reaction
to the failure of traditional Islam and secular Muslim nationalists to address the concerns of the Indian Muslims
and Islam in the context of growing majoritarian Hindu domination in the Indian anti-colonial movement. The
group, founded by Sayyid Maududi, can be seen as a modern Islamic movement that functions closest to an
Islamist party, with education being one of its core activities. It has a countrywide network, organised into
seventeen zones, presided over by the regional amir. See Bruno De Cordier, ‘Challenges of Social Upliftment
and Definition of Identity: An Analysis of the Social Service Network of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, Meerut, India’, in
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 30, no. 4 (2010), pp. 479–500.
42. BMC Records of Proceedings, 17 Aug. 1965.
43. Ibid.
44. This self-representation of animal slaughter in a religious idiom confirms sociological arguments by Francis
Robinson and others that caste identities among Indian Muslims have been reconfigured into a unified religious
identity, following an inevitable process of Islamisation wherein Islamic orthodoxy is seen to override custom-
centred traditions through the rise of literary forms and technologies of print. See Francis Robinson, ‘Islam and
Muslim Society in South Asia’, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 17, no. 2 (1983), pp. 185–203. Even so,
the existence of intra-caste divisions, as well as the rise of caste organisations like the Bakar Kasai Jamat Trust
and the Jamiat-ul-Quresh Council, confirm that residual caste structures develop alongside religious orthodoxy,
with caste not obliterating but appending religion. I would like to thank the first reviewer for drawing my
attention to this argument.
45. BMC Records of Proceedings, Standing comm. resolution no. 1092, dated 28 July 1965.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 13

raised the question of animal slaughter at Deonar by a method other than the existing
traditional method, which he stated had ‘agitated [the] minds of a section of society’.46
However, despite the strong campaign by the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind to retain the
slaughterhouses at both Bandra and Deonar, the BMC went ahead with the reso-
lution, declaring:
In exercise of the power conferred by sec 400 of BMC Act (Bom.III of 1888), the
Government hereby accord sanction to the proposal of the BMC, to close down, with
immediate effect, all the slaughtering units attached to the various Municipal Markets in
the Suburbs and Extended Suburbs of Greater Bombay.47
Yet, just a week later, via a letter to the mayor, H.S. Gupte of the Shiv Sena, whose
rallying call was Maharashtra for the (Hindu) Maharashtrians, the Indian National
Congress-led Government of Maharashtra directed that the earlier government reso-
lution be treated as cancelled. The mayor informed the House of Corporators about
the state government’s interference in the workings of the municipality.48 The mayor
ruled against the orders and passed a motion stating that the BMC would ‘protest
against the government’ since ‘an injunction had been passed for confirming the sanc-
tion accorded to the corporation for closing the slaughterhouse’.49 Political pressure
from the Congress state government antagonised the Shiv Sena councillors, who were
in the majority in the BMC. The Shiv Sena’s V.R. Bhosale expressed grave concerns
over the inordinate delay since the commissioning of the Deonar abattoir eight years
earlier, arguing that the corporation had spent a considerable amount of money in pay-
ing interest and penalties for not completing the work.50
Then the meat merchants announced their co-operation with the Bandra butchers
and mutton dealers and joined their protest against relocation from Bandra to Deonar.
A meeting of the representatives of the trade was held to stop the supply of animals to
the city in the eventuality that the butchers were forced to shift without the municipal-
ity providing adequate facilities at the new slaughterhouse. They argued that facilities
for holding the bi-weekly livestock market had not been provided. Furthermore, they
demanded a railway siding for the direct unloading of animals at Deonar, as well as
300 residential quarters near the abattoir for the butchers. This reinforced the
Maharashtra government’s stance that the major slaughterhouse could not be shifted
because the ancillary facilities were not ready, and it therefore could not approve the
closure of private chambers at Bandra. An indefinite strike was called by 25,000 butch-
ers, shopkeepers and workers in the meat trade in Bombay city and suburbs to protest
against the BMC’s decision to shift all slaughterhouse operations to Deonar.51 The
president of the Western Suburbs Butchers’ Association warned of statewide agitation
because the shift to Deonar would be completely inconvenient for them.52
However, the Mumbai unit of the Jana Sangh campaigned for the demolition of the
Bandra slaughterhouse. The press also championed the cause of the BMC’s supposed

46. BMC Records of Proceedings, 27 July 1965.

47. BMC Records of Proceedings, 22 Nov. 1971, resolution no. BMC-4171-70303-C.
48. BMC Records of Proceedings, 2 Dec. 1971, resolution no. BMC-4171-7030305-C.
49. BMC Records of Proceedings, 13 Dec. 1971.
50. The Times of India (20 July 1971), p. 5.
51. The Times of India (16 April 1973), p. 5.
52. Ibid.
14 S. MIRZA

sanitary drive, arguing that the slaughterhouse at Bandra and other units attached to
various municipal markets in the western suburbs had outlived their utility and were
inadequate to meet the increased demands of the city.53 The Times of India took a
strong position against the striking butchers, stating:
No one who has seen the old Bandra slaughterhouse and modern one at Deonar is
likely to raise even a whisper of support for the Bombay butchers, now on strike.
Congested and with the haphazard work methods of the butchers, the slaughterhouse at
Bandra was not only a blot on the city, but also an anachronism. The demand for meat
having increased ten-fold, neither Bandra nor the many private slaughterhouse chambers
were in a position to supply hygienic and wholesome meat to the city. Every effort has
been made by the authorities to meet the butcher’s objections, even the religious ones.
There are facilities for 3 methods of slaughter—schechita for Jews, jhatka for Sikhs and
halal for Muslims done by a mulla.54
Allegations were made against members of the Congress party of putting political
pressure on the BMC, and of stalling the shift of slaughtering operations from Bandra
to Deonar for electoral gain. A strong anti-Congress grouping within the BMC pushed
for immediate implementation of the plan, with members of the Jana Sangh, the
Socialist party, Shiv Sena, and Congress-O joining forces against the Indian National
Congress state government, alleging interference with the working of the BMC as well
as delays in relocating activities to Deonar. A dissident member of the Congress, V.G.
Wandrekar, even called the Deonar project the ‘blackest page’ in the history of the cor-
poration.55 Finally, the municipal commissioner announced that the Bandra slaughter-
house would close on 1 January 1973, informing the standing committee that the state
government had issued oral instructions for the closure.
In response, the Federation of Meat Traders, Brokers and Workers’ Associations
announced an indefinite strike that was joined by butchers from the eastern suburbs of
Bombay such as Kurla and Mulund East. The federation demanded an inquiry into the
working of the Deonar abattoir, arguing that no cold storage facilities were available at
Deonar and that, because slaughtering was done at night, the carcasses shrivelled before
they could be moved to retail shops in the morning.56 Its primary demand was to
retain the Bandra slaughterhouse for western Mumbai, since it felt one slaughterhouse
might not be able to serve the needs of the entire city, including the western suburbs
and New Bombay.57 The BMC retaliated by putting added pressure on the butchers by
refusing to renew their meat trade licences, which were scheduled to expire on 30
March 1973, unless their animals were slaughtered at Deonar.58
Eventually, the ideological differences between the political parties in the BMC, and
between the state and federal governments, magically dissolved: the BMC and the
Indian National Congress state and national governments acted together, using police
intimidation to demolish the Bandra slaughterhouse. The mutton butchers told me
that they would never forget the day of the demolition. On Sunday, 29 April 1973, just

53. The Times of India (1 Feb. 1973), p. 5.

54. The Times of India (2 May 1973), p. 4.
55. The Times of India (1 Feb. 1973), p. 5.
56. The Times of India (12 April 1973), p. 9.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 15

as people were waking to the morning call to prayer, they stepped out of their homes
to find the area filled with police carrying guns. They remember that moment as mark-
ing the end of their resistance. Before they could inform each other or had realised
what was happening, they were ringed by armed police as both the mutton and beef
units of the slaughterhouse were demolished. The goats in the slaughterhouse, they
said, died in the untimely rain storm that followed (‘be-mausam baarish’). ‘We were
left speechless’ (‘Hum dang reh gaye’) is how they describe the day of the demolition.
The next day, the Muslim League councillors staged a walk-out from a BMC meet-
ing in protest at the municipal commissioner’s ‘high-handed action’ in demolishing the
Bandra slaughterhouse.59 The municipal commissioner appeared to be acting under
the instructions of the state government, while other councillors had apparently not
been consulted. Around 200 butchers demonstrated outside the BMC building to focus
the attention of the civic authorities on their grievances.60
There were multiple effects from the relocation of the Bandra slaughterhouse to
Deonar. The demand for fresh meat gave rise to an illegal market in which animals
were procured from Kalyan, smuggled into Bombay, and slaughtered in the early hours
of the morning in by-lanes and private homes in the Bandra Slaughterhouse
Compound.61 Business in contraband meat thrived, helped by small meat shop owners
who sold at a price lower than that of the meat from Deonar.62 In July 1973, police and
municipal market staff seized illegally slaughtered animals from two buildings near the
old Bandra slaughterhouse.63 There were also complaints that the meat from Deonar
was not as tasty as that supplied previously from Bandra; a spokesperson for the
Maharashtra Agro and Food Processing Corporation was quoted as saying that if a car-
cass was kept for some time (as had been done at Bandra), the mutton tasted better.64
In particular, the preference for fresh meat also gave rise to trade in contraband pork
since all pig slaughter operations had been shifted to Deonar in January 1972; in the
contraband pork market, the blood of the pig was also supplied, which pork eaters
believed gave the cooked meat better flavour.65 Members of both butcher communities
described the meat business in Deonar as bankrupt, running on loans and incurring
severe losses. They complained that the municipality had actually lost money through
the demolition and the relocation: ‘Everybody knows of the downfall in the revenue
from [the] municipal meat market after the shift from Bandra to Deonar’.

The Bandra Slaughterhouse Compound, 2016

Since the demolition of the Bandra slaughterhouse in 1973, the land on which the
slaughterhouse stood remains vacant. It was not redeveloped as planned by the munici-
pality and is used to park municipal waste trucks. The Bandra Slaughterhouse
Compound neighbourhood was not developed either despite the growing real estate

59. The Times of India (1 May 1973), p. 4.

60. Ibid.
61. The Times of India (14 July 1973), p. 5.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
16 S. MIRZA

market. A significant reason was that the state was unable to relocate the mutton
butcher community as it had intended because the community was entrenched in the
neighbourhood through active caste networks that could not be dismantled easily. This
is perhaps one of the reasons the mutton butcher community in the Bandra neighbour-
hood articulates a sense of belonging, bolstered by the presence of the Jama Masjid.
Community structures like the mosque continue to represent the community-
controlled meat business long after neo-liberal practices have reconfigured the control
of traditional labour practices. The Bandra Slaughterhouse Compound remains as the
headquarters of the mutton butcher community in Mumbai.
One evening as the male congregation was leaving the Jama Masjid in Bandra after
prayers, three elderly men exiting the mosque slowly made their way to a bench at the
crossroads of the neighbourhood. Their tea was brought to them, which they began sip-
ping slowly. ‘If we give up the mutton business (chhote ka dhandha) what else can we do?’
one of them asked. ‘Even if we put our children to study, can they compete with those
who have generations of experience in education?’ His companion on the bench said: ‘My
younger son has got into the fruit business (chhote wala fruit ka dhanda kar raha hai).
The beef business has turned cold after the ban (beef ka dhandha thanda padh gaya hai
ban ke baad)’. ‘Too many problems (bahut masle hai)’, the third occupant of the bench
said. The three elderly men, while belonging to different sub-castes, the Gai Kasai and
Bakar Kasai, shared their bleak assessment of the future of the meat business. However, I
also learned from the departing Friday congregation of a renewed emphasis by religious
leaders and the Bakar Kasai Trust members on the value of taaleem or obtaining an
education in Islamic texts and practices while also emphasising the importance of secular
education as a way of opening up newer avenues and possibilities.66
The effect of the cow slaughter ban on beef butchers has been written about else-
where.67 Its effect on the mutton butchers in Bandra however still remains open to
speculation. When I spoke to the mutton butchers there about the changing work con-
ditions after the ban, they appeared unconcerned. Most of the mutton butchers I met
claimed that ‘the ban against cow slaughter does not concern us’. Some even saw bene-
fits to their business arising from the non-availability of beef. A trustee of the Bakar
Kasai caste in Bandra conceded that the civic norm of locating slaughterhouses on the
boundaries of the city ‘makes sense’ because ‘slaughterhouses are always located outside
the city’. He also maintained that the shift in work conditions from municipal to priva-
tised, where individual owners buy an animal and have it slaughtered at the Deonar
abattoir by paying the necessary municipal licence fee, was ‘only to be expected’.
Nevertheless, the responses to the changes in work conditions among the beef
butchers were not very different from the responses of the mutton butchers. The Beef
Association in Deonar was seeking revocation of the Maharashtra ban on cow slaughter

66. See Zarin Ahmed, ‘Taleem, Tanzeem and Tijaarat’, in Vinod K. Jaiwath (ed.), Frontiers of Embedded Muslim
Communities in India (New Delhi/London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 158–74, for more on the religious discourse
adopted by the caste councils of the Qureshis in Delhi. The Bakar Kasai Trust is a charity organisation
established in 1865. It manages the mosques and other community properties as well as providing financial aid
to meet the educational and medical requirements of the community.
67. See Qudsiya Contractor, ‘Quest for Water’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 47, no. 29 (2012), pp. 61–7; and
Rohit De, ‘The Republic of Writs: Litigious Citizens, Constitutional Law and Everyday Life in India (1947–1964)’,
PhD dissertation, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 2013.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 17

by filing a writ in the Supreme Court—the legal expenses of the suit were being shoul-
dered by the political organisation of the beef butcher community, the Jamiat-ul-
Quresh. The Jamiat-ul-Quresh was established in 1920 with a mandate to distance the
community from its traditional caste identity by adopting the new community name
Quresh, the name of the tribe to which the Prophet Mohammad belonged. It was
working to unite the community under an overarching Muslim identity through which
caste would be transcended68 and its stratification rethought.69 The Jamiat-ul-Quresh
also sought to unify the various castes associated with the ‘unclean’ profession of ani-
mal slaughter in order to convert a pejorative identity into a respectable religious one.
Under its new name, both sectarianism and caste differentiations were discouraged as
part of an all-round increase in caste consciousness.
Matters were still tense in the Bandra Slaughterhouse Compound neighbourhood as
rumours circulated in 2016 about radical shifts in the meat business. Speculation on
the future of the business was rife: the wind, they said, is talking of decommissioning
the Deonar abattoir in the coming months, moving it from Deonar to Dhanu in
Palghar district on the border between Maharashtra and Gujarat. ‘Things are going to
change again’, the Bandra inhabitants told me with a knowing smile.70

Conclusion
This article has explored the spatial politics attendant on the location of the municipal
slaughterhouse on the city’s shifting periphery. The slaughterhouse emerges as a dis-
cursive space of modernity produced through the disciplining of the human senses that
perceive the sights and smells of animal slaughter as disturbing to the senses and as
discharging fluids and substances that are potentially harmful. The institution of the
slaughterhouse is sought to be invisiblised and created as a zone of exception, against
which civic notions of hygiene, urban sanitation and public order can be established.
This requires the spatial location and labour techniques of animal slaughter to be regu-
lated to ensure the provision of ‘hygienic’ meat to the residents of the city.
From a sanitary perspective, meat slaughtering is to be modernised, consolidating a
movement to the mass-scale production of meat by reconfiguring traditional meat
slaughtering practices embedded in caste structures. Universal and historic sanitary dis-
courses, when applied to local practices, were deeply implicated in the colonial munici-
pality formalising and absorbing existing caste labour networks that had traditionally
passed their intimate knowledge of animal slaughter through male members to the

68. Another important feature of the Jamiat-ul-Quresh Council’s activities is its assertion of Qureshi as an economic,
political and social right that significantly exemplified the link between religion and Qureshi politics. For more
details on the Council’s conference minutes that indicate the importance of religious idiom for the unification
of the community towards this political aim, see Kayoko Tatsum, ‘Violence and Citizenship: Muslim Political
Agency in Meerut, India, c. 1950–2005’, PhD dissertation, London School of Economics, London, 2009.
69. The title Qureshi is seen as connecting the different Sunni religious schools such as the Hanafi, Barelvi,
Deobandi and Maliki groups which do not come under the labour and business affiliations denoted by the
larger Qureshi title. Furthermore, the title received official recognition as part of the OBC (Other Backward
Caste) bloc that enabled access to white collar jobs through the reservation of places allocated to backward
castes in educational institutions and government offices.
70. The closure of the Deonar abattoir remains at the level of rumour. While slaughtering operations have definitely
been scaled down in Deonar, especially in relation to the beef business, the BMC has plans to renovate the
existing slaughterhouse.
18 S. MIRZA

next generation. Ethnographic research among the mutton Bakar Kasais reflected a
progressive loss of control over their caste labour, and also described economic losses
in the meat business. The beef Gai Kasais too viewed their meat business as increas-
ingly unviable since the ban on cow slaughter.
Internal community shifts are taking place in response to the sanitary state’s attempt
to reconfigure caste labour, in which traditional caste identity is being reimagined as a
more unified Muslim religious identity that seeks to remake the whole butcher com-
munity’s identity as modern, viable and empowering. This transition of caste identity
to an imagined unified religious identity, however, is incomplete because internal dif-
ferences between the Gai Kasai and Bakar Kasai sub-castes remain. Moreover, residual
caste structures continue to bind together sub-caste social groups along pre-existing
caste lines; the Bakar Kasai Jamat Trust emphasises education over the traditional caste
profession, while the Jamiat-ul-Quresh Council pays the cost of the legal challenge to
the ban on cow slaughter. Caste therefore remains the underpinning structure through
which members of both sub-castes oppose the relocation of the slaughterhouse, as well
as the shifts in labour regimes that spatial relocation and redesigning butchering tech-
niques entail.
The resistance by caste labour groups to the industrialisation of the meat trade and
notions of public order in the sanitary state have not yielded the expected results as the
state’s different spatial structures are consolidated. For instance, the colonial govern-
ment’s scientific ideas of sanitation have been seamlessly blended into the developmen-
tal mandate of the Hindu nationalist state that seeks a ban on cow slaughter and the
upholding of upper-caste Hindu practices. In doing so, spatial hierarchies of local,
national and international regimes collapse into multi-scalar hierarchies of state institu-
tional organisation, in which global governance and flow-based economic transactions
are politically connected with the state’s internal spatial structure.
In order to explain this folding of space within spatial states that consolidate power
and regulate urban space, I have deployed the concept of the spatialising state to
describe the production of space as processual, multifaceted and symbolic. Here scien-
tific ideas about sanitation that designate live animals, animal meat and blood as
unhygienic overlap with religious ideas of stigma and pollution as transmitted through
contact with raw meat, blood, skin and bones. These substances are then not seen as
potential resources that could become manure, leather, medicines, toothpaste or cos-
metics. On the contrary, animal slaughter is seen as a practice that is necessarily dis-
orderly and disturbing to the senses as well as a potential source of disease and
contamination. The sedimentation of scientific and religious ideas of sanitation along
multi-scalar state hierarchies consolidates the power of spatial states by restructuring
urban space.
While the butcher community perceives its trade as karigari or artisanship that
requires attention to colour, texture, tone, smell and touch as well as intricate hand-
work, animal slaughtering, in both traditional upper-caste and sanitary vocabularies, is
seen as polluting, unhygienic and in need of regulation and constant technological
upgrading. Both historic and ethnographic accounts reveal resistance to the sanitary
state’s view by the different sub-castes of the butcher communities who oppose the
regulatory measures of the spatial state. They contest the regulation of animal slaughter
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 19

that dilutes their control of their own communities even as the power of the spatial
state tightens its grip over them.

Acknowledgements
My gratitude to Kama Maclean and Vivien Seyler at South Asia: Journal of South Asian
Studies for their careful editorial work. In particular, Kama’s enthusiasm for the topic has
given momentum and life to the writing. In addition, the article has greatly benefitted
from the suggestions of the three anonymous South Asia reviewers. Earlier drafts of this
paper were presented at the Urban Studies Colloquium at Ambedkar University in 2017,
and the Visiting Fellow presentations at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
(CSDS) in 2015, and I am grateful to my colleagues in both these institutions, in particular
to Awadhendhra Sharan and Ravi Sundaram at CSDS, as well as Rohit Negi and Preeti
Sampat at Ambedkar University, for reading and commenting on earlier drafts. Finally,
Naveen Thayyil has long nurtured the ideas engaged with here while also editing the text,
and I am grateful for his tireless work, which as the case of stigmatised labour best shows,
always goes unnoticed.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This research is part of an ongoing book project funded by the Max Planck Institute for the
Study of Religion and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen, Germany, and the Urban Studies
Foundation International Fellowship. The fieldwork for this article was facilitated by a Seed
Money Grant for Faculty Research from Ambedkar University, New Delhi, India [Grant no.
AUD/PVCO/ACRPM/2017-18/018].