Newly Frugal Indians Revive Tiffin Tradition

Homemade Lunch Delivery Surges

MUMBAI -- Outside one of this city's busiest railway stations, Vilesh Shinde balanced 50 metal containers on a wooden board atop his head and rushed into the thick morning traffic, sprinting through the financial district to deliver home-cooked meals to his newest customers: young Indian professionals.

Shinde is one of Mumbai's approximately 5,000 dabbawalas, or lunch deliverymen. Dressed in white caps and starched chef's smocks, bearing foot-tall lunch pails known as tiffins, the fast-moving dabbawalas are a symbol of old India who not long ago appeared to be an endangered species.

With incomes rising and the Indian economy rapidly growing, sociologists predicted the demise of the dabbawala. That is, until the global financial crisis in the past year caused many middle-class urban Indians to return to the tiffin, shunning the city's more expensive restaurants and cafes in favor of the way their grandparents used to eat.

For about $6 a month, the dabbawalas collect lunches from white-collar workers' homes in the city's vast outskirts and deliver them, still hot, directly to their desks in the bustling city center. The business dates back 125 years, to a time when British colonial administrators wanted homemade meals they knew their foreign stomachs could safely handle.

For office workers feeling the economic pinch, Indian women's magazines and talk shows are recommending the dabbawala over debt.

"There's so many more tiffins these days. We can't be late and let down the newcomers. So we have to work really quickly," said Shinde, 32, a third-generation dabbawala whose clientele has doubled in the past three months. "I thought about computer classes. But I stayed with this. I heard there were no jobs. Plus, my customers are always happy to see me."

In the late 1990s, India's burgeoning economy unleashed an explosion of street-food stalls, air-conditioned cafes and international fast-food chains. Suddenly, young Indians wanted lattes with their lentils. The chains successfully Indianized just about every cuisine imaginable: Think masala muffins or McDonald's Chicken Maharaja Mac, two grilled chicken patties with smoke-flavored mayonnaise on a sesame seed bun. Going out to lunch became a status symbol among India's emerging middle class.

Now such spending seems reckless. The engine is slowing, and to many people here, that's not all bad.

"The dabbawalas are part of a culture, an era in India, where frugality and an authentic taste of home were very serious virtues," said Harish Shetty, a prominent psychiatrist in Mumbai. "We all predicted that this would die out. What young person would want to be a dabba in the heat and traffic? What young person wants to bring their lunch to work in India's version of a brown bag? But we were wrong. Now in times of recession, we are finding the old ways still work. That's very comforting."

But the dabbawala revival is not just a matter of rupee-pinching. The lunch deliveryman has recently become a pop-culture icon, with a cult status built on nostalgia for old-time Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay. A retro-looking dabbawala appears on coffee mugs and coasters. Psychedelic posters show a white-uniformed dabbawala dreaming of hundreds of tiffins, which swirl around his Gandhi topi, or trademark white cap. There's even an online video game in which players are given a map of an Indian city and must deliver food on time.

In 2006, when more and more urban professionals were dining out or eating lunch at corporate cafeterias, Manish Tripathi, a software engineer, set up a Web site and text-messaging service to boost business for dabbawalas. He was quickly adopted as an honorary dabbawala, because most of the lunchbox carriers aren't computer literate.

But it wasn't until the economic crisis that tiffin services reported a surge in customers not only in Mumbai, but also in Chennai, New Delhi and Bangalore, especially among university students and young workers at high-tech companies.