Pakistani Muslim and vegan are identities that, for most people, would be mutually exclusive.
After all, one of the defining features of Pakistani cuisine is its meat-heavy dishes. Some might even point to this as what differentiates Pakistani food from Indian food: while they have the same roots and mostly use the same spices, Indian cuisine has far more vegetarian dishes due to its multi-faith population. Pakistan, on the other hand, is a Muslim-majority nation — so meat is often the star of its meals.
Nihari, biryani, haleem, aloo keema, chicken salan, aloo gosht. These meals filled my belly and grounded me in my culture as a child, in a world where other signifiers of my origins (like language) were becoming elusive.
But the sharing of meals means more to me than just another desperate diaspora girl’s last clutches to a culture that sometimes feels out of reach. In a world that’s becoming increasingly individualistic and fragmented, the act of feeding each other is community in action — a way for women from different worlds to connect. For me, it’s also defiance against the colonial regime… which became a lot more complicated when I could no longer eat the food on their table.
I was vegetarian for two years before I went vegan full-time. Initially it was just convenience — I didn’t really like meat very much, and I was often choosing vegetarian food when eating out with friends because it was easier than investigating whether the place was halal. Plus, it was cheaper and I was a student. Being vegetarian at home was easy — there was usually at least one vegetarian main or side that I could eat, and at the very least, there was always daal chawal.
Soon I started to engage with the political implications of a plant-based diet, and after much debating with vegan friends, it became clear to me that I could no longer live true to my values while also eating animal products. And so, I transitioned into veganism — imperfectly, and with some difficulty, but it was worth it.
People always ask me what the hardest thing to leave behind was. I’ve heard every iteration of “I could never live without cheese” that you can think of (hey Muslims: it’s the “but not even water?” of the vegan world). But the truth is, the hardest part wasn’t leaving out any specific meals — it was leaving out my family, who I suddenly was avoiding meals with and rejecting the care of.
Because it is care when an aunty insists you have a helping of her kabab, or a nani makes you nihari, stewed overnight with hours of labour. The passing down of these ancestral recipes has tied daughters to their mothers and grandmothers for centuries. The divide between our generations means we are rarely speaking the same language — literally and figuratively — but “come and eat” is a string of words that’s universal.
Despite repeating this to myself like a mantra, attending family functions became difficult. How were they to know that ghee would make the meal unsuitable? Or that I can’t drink their chai now? It became easier to avoid eating with the family than having to see them crestfallen that I wouldn’t eat what was offered.
“How can someone be vegan and Muslim? Didn’t God provide us with animals so we may eat them? Why would you prohibit something for yourself that God themselves has allowed you to do? Do you think you know better than God? What if your husband decides he wants to eat meat again?”
These are questions various family members and friends of relatives asked me over the dinner table as I only picked at some samosas while everyone else tucked into their biryani and nihari. As if it wasn’t bad enough to be constantly defending my faith as a visibly Muslim woman out in the real world, I now had to do so with my family too. Every wedding where I only ate plain rice, or Eid lunch where I only had a snack, resulted in confused interrogation at best, frustration and hurt feelings at worst, because the rejection of someone's food is a rejection of their soul. And how could I do that in good conscience?
The truth is, I couldn’t. Sometimes I would allow myself to be peer pressured into nibbling on a buttery naan just to end the confrontation. The result was almost always intense guilt (and an upset stomach), only further spurred by not only family who inadvertently made me feel difficult for requesting daal or chole while rejecting the main meal, but also non-ethnic vegan friends who couldn’t understand that these rituals could be just as integral to who I am as my dietary choices.
However, allowing a rift in my relationship with my family was unacceptable to me. I was already feeling the thread holding me to my ancestry fraying as I partnered outside my culture (uncommon already in Pakistani households, and even more so for women). I was determined to have my (vegan) cake and eat it too, and if that meant I had to either starve or make it myself, then so be it.
The blessing of veganism was that it taught me to be a better, more creative and intuitive cook. And with these new skills came an opportunity to give back — to be the one giving care instead of receiving it, to bond with the women in my family by asking for advice on how to make new versions of traditional meals without sacrificing taste and authenticity. Because really, so much of community is in the abandonment of ego. In asking and needing — something that eldest daughters like me can find hard to do.
I began perfecting vegan versions of family favourites like butter chicken and gulab jamuns, and built a hobby in vegan cooking. Before long, I started bringing my own dishes to family dawats, which I would get my aunties to try and then provide feedback on, a practice women have been partaking in since the beginning of time.
In the three years since I went vegan, my family went from knowing nothing about what the word event meant, to inventing soy kebabs and calling Pakistani restaurants in advance to ensure there would be vegetarian options for me that would be free of ghee and butter. Diverging in what I ate should have pulled me away from the culture, but it didn’t — because what makes our culture isn’t actually the food, I’ve come to learn.
It’s the sharing of it.