The Dabba and the Dabbawala

The dabba is the tiered metal carrier in which a meal cooked at home travels to the place of work, and its best-known system of delivery belongs to Mumbai, where the carriers are collected from households in the morning, sorted at railway stations, carried by train and on foot or bicycle to offices, and returned empty in the afternoon. The practice rests on the Indian habit of the cooked midday meal made at home, and on the city's suburban rail lines, which gave a working population a means of moving food as readily as people. Sonal Ved places the dabba within the wider Indian culture of the tiffin, the light meal or the box that holds it, a word that came into Indian English from the British.

A dabba of the usual kind is made of stainless steel, in two to four round containers stacked one upon another and held by a clip or a carrying handle. Each tier holds a different part of the meal: commonly a dry vegetable dish, a dal or a sauced preparation, rice, and flatbreads such as chapati or roti, sometimes with a pickle or a sweet. The tiers keep the dishes apart, so that a wet dal does not soften the bread and each preparation reaches the table as it was cooked. The design is practical and old in principle, since the stacked vessel allows a whole thali to be carried in one hand. The dabbawala is the carrier, and the system's reputation lies in its order rather than in any machinery. Ved's account of tiffin culture treats the delivery as a chain of hands, in which each box is marked with a code that tells the carriers where it was collected, which station it must reach and which building and floor it is for. The code is read by men who know the routes closely, and the work depends on every link keeping to the clock, because a meal that arrives late has failed at its one purpose. The boxes are carried in crates on trains and then divided again at the destination for the last stretch by foot or cycle. What the dabba carries matters as much as how it travels. The meal is cooked in the household, to the household's own taste and custom, so that a dabba from a Gujarati kitchen, a Maharashtrian one and a Parsi one will hold different food in the same steel. The system therefore preserves regional and domestic cooking inside a large and mixed city, and it allows a worker to eat as he would at home, vegetarian or not, with the restrictions of his community observed. The tiffin is an instrument of that continuity, and Ved treats it as one of the places where the Indian home table reaches into working life. The word tiffin is itself a piece of history. It entered Anglo-Indian speech for a light meal taken between the larger ones, and it came to name both the meal and the box that carries it. In India it now covers a wide ground, from the schoolchild's lunch box to the tiered carrier of the office worker and the light afternoon snacks of the south. The dabba of Mumbai is the grandest form of it, and it stands for the principle that a meal cooked with care at home should be eaten at midday, at work, as nearly as possible as it left the kitchen.

The taste of a dabba is the taste of a meal cooked in the morning and eaten some hours later at room warmth, which shapes what is packed. Dry vegetable dishes seasoned with mustard seed, cumin, turmeric and chilli, dals tempered with ghee or oil, rice and flatbreads all keep their flavour as they cool, and a pickle or a wedge of lime brings sharpness back to the plate. The dishes chosen are those that hold, and the household's cooking is at its steadiest in them.