Punjabi vegetarian food histories: means, institutions and changing choices

Food and means

In 1892, Karnal’s gazetteer linked grain dishes, vegetables and dairy to daily life, and infrequent meat to affordability. Its observations concern a historical Punjab district now in Haryana; they neither establish one vegetarian motive nor describe all households.[1]

A vegetarian business across Partition

G. S. Paul’s 2016 reporting on Kesar Da Dhaba describes an Amritsar menu of vegetarian dishes centred on mah di dal with breads. The family history places its earlier establishment in Sheikhupura in 1916 and its move to Amritsar after Partition. Interviewee Vijay Mehra describes copper cooking vessels and family involvement in the initial preparation of the dal. Here vegetarian food is a particular commercial practice, transmitted and marketed by a family. Its survival does not demonstrate that every Punjabi restaurant or displaced household followed the same food rules.[2]

Religious practice contains distinctions

Eleanor Nesbitt’s 2015 study, as described in its published abstract, examines langar and earlier Sikh texts and disciplinary traditions. She reports that those older sources do not give a consistently clear prohibition of meat-eating and identifies differences between organised groupings. That scholarly conclusion cautions against treating a vegetarian communal meal as a complete description of every Sikh’s private diet.[3]

What a later survey actually asked

Punjab’s 2019–21 NFHS table records consumption frequency among women and men aged fifteen to forty-nine. For chicken or meat, 70.2 percent of women and 42.1 percent of men answered never. Eggs and fish have separate rows. These are answers to specific food-frequency questions, not a census of people declaring themselves vegetarian. The table demonstrates variation within the surveyed population without explaining whether cost, preference, household custom or religious practice motivated an individual answer.[4]

The figures concern the Indian state in that survey period. They cannot be extended to Pakistan’s Punjab, every age group, or an unchanged diet across the region’s past.[4]