Breaking Bread

IT IS CLOSE to nine at night in Mumbai’s Jogeshwari neigh­bourhood, and Iqbal Ahmed is taking deep drags from his bidi, while punching num­bers into a calculator. He mumbles to himself, writes a few numbers and then repri­mands himself as he deletes them, punches a few more keys, until he finally arrives at the figure.

“18,000,” he says. “Pakad lo [Estimate about] 20,000.”

Ahmed is talking about the number of pavs his National Bakery churns out in a single day. All around him is the all-perva­sive smell of flour. Inside, in a large room, groups of men, caked in flour, are kneading vast amounts of dough, shaping them into small balls that are filled into metal trays.

Ahmed stubs his bidi at the entrance. And then walking into the room with rapid strides, issuing commands that send his orderlies scurrying away, guides us through rows and rows of metal trays, until we finally arrive in front of a shiny metallic oven. Ahmed switched from a kiln that used firewood to this gas-pow­ered oven about three years ago after neighbours began complaining about the smoke emanating from the bakery. He spent
₹3.7 lakh on the oven and his margins have since become tighter.

Today, however, he runs a loving hand through the machine, as though it were a living thing.

“I was thinking I made a big mistake,” he says, referring to the costs of running the machine. “But I know today. Maybe others won’t survive, but my bakery will.”

The pav is arguably Mumbai’s favou­rite kind of bread. It is consumed both as a street snack and at home; enjoyed just by itself, dipped in tea; or as an accompa­niment to every kind of meal from spicy meat dishes to vegetarian fare.

It is now also at the centre of a crisis.

Mumbai’s need for pav is met by many tiny bakeries spread across the city, most of which use firewood to fire up their ovens. It is no secret that many of them even use scrap wood that contain adhesives and other chemical residues harmful to the environment. The city’s authorities have now set the bakeries—along with restau­rants and roadside vendors—a deadline of July 8 to switch to cleaner sources of en­ergy like electricity or Piped Natural Gas (PNG). The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) sent notices to around 650 bakeries last year, and the Maharash­tra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) followed suit with notices to nearly 300 bakeries last month.

The city’s authorities were willing to handhold the bakeries through this tran­sition, bakery owners say, but they are now insisting on quick compliance after a Bom­bay High Court order in January insisting that all eateries switch to cleaner fuels.

“The industry is going to collapse overnight,” says Nasir Ansari, the presi­dent of the Bombay Bakers Association who owns bakeries in Goregaon and Vile Parle. “Nobody is going to be able to meet the deadline. Some of us may manage to make the transition. But most bakeries are going to need help.”

But what will happen if the authori­ties insist on the deadline? “You will have a huge shortage of pavs overnight. There will be no pavs to go with your keema or anda,” he says. “Not even for vada pav. Imagine that.”

The push to make bakeries switch to cleaner fuels is linked to the city’s battle with air pollution. Since 2022, air pollution has cropped up as a major issue in Mumbai, with BMC issuing the Mumbai Air Pollu­tion Mitigation Plan (MAPMP) in 2023, in which smoke and emission generated from bakeries and eateries were identified as one of the key sources of the city’s air pollution.

A report published by the Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) last year found that around 47 per cent of the city’s bakeries use wood and scrap wood as fuel, and that 72 bakeries they surveyed emitted around 80,381kg annually of par­ticulate matter (PM) 2.5. Hema Ramani, an environmental consultant with Asar who is working with BMC on the project to switch bakeries to cleaner energy sources, says bakeries contribute between 5 to 6 per cent of the total air pollution in Mumbai. “Most of these bakeries operate in densely populated residential areas and are signifi­cant sources of PM2.5 pollution—fine particulate matter known for its severe impact on respiratory health. This not only affects the health and well-being of bakery workers but also residents living nearby,” Ramani says. “Just like every in­dustry faces a turning point, the time for bakeries to play a leadership role and lead transition is now… In the larger interest of public health and the environment… it is crucial for bakery owners to take the lead in adopting cleaner energy, with support from the government,” she adds.

The pav may appear to be a quintes­sentially Mumbai staple today, but its origins are foreign. It is believed the Por­tuguese brought this bread first to Goa, when they established a colony there. The word for bread in their language is “pao”. Lizzie Collingham in her book Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, writes that when the Portuguese established a base in Goa they missed their leavened wheat bread. For the Portuguese, Collingham writes, it was not simply a matter of miss­ing the taste of crusty loaves. “Wheat bread was of enormous religious signifi­cance to sixteenth-century Europeans. It was the only substance with which it was permitted to celebrate Mass and the Por­tuguese settlements were populated by large numbers of Catholic missionaries.” Making bread, however, wasn’t easy then. The biggest hurdle was the unavailability of yeast. Until someone discovered that toddy worked as a good substitute. “The ingenious Goan cooks used toddy… to ferment the dough, with, as a European traveller in Goa in the 1630s found, good results. He reported that ‘good white wheat bread’ was available in Portuguese India… Even when India was under British rule in the nineteenth century, and many British foods had been introduced into In­dia, according to a British soldier on leave, the Portuguese in Goa continued to make the best leavened bread in western India.”

The pao, or pav, then travelled to Mum­bai, it is believed, through the capable hands of Goan bakers. Kurush F Dalal, an archaeologist and culinary anthropologist in Mumbai, points out that while Goan bakers played a big role in popularising the bread in Mumbai, there might have already been some presence of the bread here, given that the Portuguese were in Mumbai before the British (the region that is today known as Mumbai was un­der Portuguese rule from 1534 to 1661, before it was handed over to the British). “I’m guessing the Portuguese and the East Indians were already very much here, and then came the Goans, who were some of the first bakers of Bombay,” he says. “And then to make matters more interesting, you have Iranians coming down [to In­dia as refugees] in the 19th century. They were all trained bakers, who knew how to work with yeast—something most Indians didn’t—and thanks to this [their expertise in baking], they flourished in the bakery business.”

THE BREAD, HOWEVER, wasn’t an instant hit. Mohsina Mukadam, a food historian, points out that many Hindus, especially upper-caste communi­ties, stayed away from the bread. “It was seen as unhygienic because there was a rumour that the dough was kneaded by feet,” Mukadam says, a rumour that has proved enduring, with oft-repeated myth that the word “pav” originates from the Hindi word for feet. “And there was also this political aspect to it—with many Hindus linking bread [given the association of sac­ramental bread with communion] with conversion.”

There was also the fact that many upper-caste groups worried that the food might be ‘impure’ and contain animal products, since bakeries tended to be pre­dominantly run by Muslims, Christians and Zoroastrians.

The resistance towards pav, and other breads, by many upper-caste Hindus con­tinued well into the second-half of the last century. It began changing probably in the 1970s and 1980s, Mukadam reckons, when more women started joining the workforce, and the lure of something as convenient as pav became too irresistible to concern oneself over notions of purity.

The pav’s rise in Mumbai is also con­nected to the working class nature of the city. It gives basic sustenance; is conve­nient to carry around if you are on the run, like most Mumbaikars invariably are; it goes with almost every palette; and, per­haps most importantly, it is cheap.

It was also being consumed by the workers in the city’s textile mills. Some believe that a version of today’s popular pav bhaji emerged during the time of the American Civil War (1861-65). It is claimed that the disruption in cotton supply due to the Civil War increased opportunities for traders with more work at the mills in Mumbai and led to the creation of a dish of mashed vegetables and pav that could be rustled up quickly at unusual hours by stalls outside mills and trading areas. Mukadam however considers this to be just a myth, with no evidence pointing to the creation of such a dish at that time.

Dalal believes that some early version of the pav bhaji might have been served in textile mills in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. “It was definitely not the standardised pav bhaji we find today, and I don’t know what it contained, but something like this was being served to mill workers to stop them from going off for long lunch breaks,” he says.

The other popular snack containing the pav—in fact, the snack most syn­onymous with the city—is of course the vada pav. The item however emerged very recently, probably in the early 1970s. The person credited for having first come up with the snack was a man named Ashok Vaidya, who ran a stall selling batata vadas (deep fried potato patties) outside the Dadar railway station. “The apocryphal but very acceptable story is that his customers kept complaining that while his vadas were good, they were very hot and diffi­cult to manage while boarding the train,” Dalal says. “Legend has it that the guy who ran a stall next to his was an omelette pav seller. So one day, in an absolute flash of in­spiration, Ashok Vaidya leaned over to the omelette seller’s cart, flicked a few pav, and popped his vadas inside pavs. And that’s how the first vada pav was born.”

That was also the story Vaidya often used to tell. Mukadam however thinks Vaidya could have also been inspired by the naan chaap, another Mumbai dish where a meat patty is held in a pav-like bread, some­times also referred to as lamba pav.

The vada pav emerged at a time when the nativist politics of the Shiv Sena was just taking root in the city. Udupi restau­rants, started by South Indian entrepre­neurs, had already taken over the city by then. And now refashioning the vada pav as a snack of the soil, Sena egged on Marathi youths to establish vada pav stalls both to foster entrepreneurship and to counter the growth of Udupi establish­ments. This was also the period when unemployment was rife with the closure of many textile mills, and vada pav stalls soon began mushrooming across the city.

Back at National Bakery in Jogeshwari, standing across from his gas oven, Ahmed is telling us how he got into the business of making pavs. He moved from his home­town Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh to Mumbai more than 20 years ago, and found a job supplying pavs from factories such as this to different shops. About five years ago, he climbed one rung higher on the ladder. He leased this bakery, National Bakery in Jogeshwari, from its owner.

“It has all changed so much, this whole business in the last few years. And now there is this new rule too,” he says, looking around at this room in the bakery.

This bakery, he tells us, was established in the 1970s. But then he gazes up at its ceil­ing, filled with soot, and at the wooden beams holding it up, and he wonders if it is not much older.

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