Published : Aug 17, 2026 19:27 IST – 8 MINS READ
High-rise buildings in Greater Noida on November 6, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Shashi Shekhar Kashyap
High-rise buildings and gated communities, with their clubhouses and security guards, are widely seen as symbols of urban modernity in India. For young professionals arriving from smaller towns such as Patna, Ranchi, Meerut, and Lucknow to work in the corporate, technology, or media sectors, a flat in Mumbai, Bengaluru, or Delhi-NCR often represents the promise of a safe, modern home.
Beneath that surface, a more conservative filtering system is at work. In the rental market of large residential societies in Delhi-NCR, the first question a prospective tenant is asked is rarely about qualifications, budget, or occupation. It is, instead, some version of: “Are you a pure vegetarian? Are you with family, or are you bachelors?”
Read in isolation, these questions can look like ordinary landlord preferences. But activists and researchers who track the rental market argue that clauses such as “vegetarians only” and “family only” have become coded filters that disproportionately exclude Muslims, Dalits, and people from certain regional backgrounds—using the vocabulary of diet and family to do what a direct refusal on grounds of religion or caste, now widely seen as legally risky, no longer can.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offers one framework for understanding this kind of coded discrimination. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), Bourdieu argued that dominant social classes maintain their position not only through economic capital but also through “cultural capital” and “habitus”—the internalised habits, tastes, speech patterns, and dietary preferences that mark social origin. A class in a position of dominance, Bourdieu wrote, tends to present its own lifestyle and eating habits as inherently more civilised or pure.
Applied to gated communities in Delhi-NCR, a “vegetarian only” clause imposed by a landlord or a Resident Welfare Association can be read as an act of cultural classification: tenants whose diets include meat are cast as less refined, their salary and qualifications counting for less than whether their habits align with those of the dominant group.
Faizan, Anjali Kumari*, and Aqsa Jabeen*—tenants whose experiences of the rental market in Delhi-NCR are recounted below—describe a filtering process that goes well beyond food. Name, caste, religion, regional origin, dress, and family status become markers that brokers and landlords use to decide who is an acceptable tenant. Rarely is it presented as discrimination: a question about a full name, an instruction to a Kashmiri tenant not to have other Kashmiris over, and a landlord’s questions about a woman’s family life. Each one passes as a routine condition of renting, which is part of what makes the pattern difficult to challenge.
Faizan is a freelance cinematographer and photographer who moved to Delhi-NCR from Jaipur. Last year, he spent a month searching for a flat near the Noida Sector 52 metro station where he planned to live with his cousin. The location suited both of them: his cousin was starting college in Greater Noida, and Faizan needed to travel regularly to Delhi and Gurugram for shoots.
His budget, documents, and credentials were in order, he said, but the search in and around Gaur City followed a pattern. He would identify a flat and the next day a broker would call to say the landlords in the building did not want to rent to Muslims. On one occasion, after a broker had gone silent on him, a non-Muslim friend enquired about the same flat and was told directly: “There’s no room for Muslims here.”
Faizan eventually found a room in a servant quarter in a block known informally as “AMU Towers” (known to provide housing for students and alumni of Aligarh Muslim University) within the Supertech Eco Village-1 complex. The search has resumed this year, he said, now that his uncle plans to move in and the two need a larger flat near Sector 52; the old pattern, he said, has repeated itself.
The exclusion did not stay confined to housing. When a company in Noida needed a cinematographer, a non-Muslim friend put Faizan’s name forward. Faizan began preparing for the shoot. When the friend called back, his tone had changed: the client had asked who Faizan was. When told, he responded that he did not want to work with “these bhaijaan people” and asked the friend to find another cinematographer.Â
A similar filtering, but through caste rather than religion, followed Anjali Kumari* when she left Jharkhand for work. She said she had not experienced discrimination tied to her ST identity before she began working with Tata Trusts in Bahraich district, Uttar Pradesh. House-hunting there, she said, routinely came down to one question: “What is your full name?” She recalled landlords’ manner shifting once they heard “Kumari”. Her origins in Jharkhand, and the dietary habits associated with it, compounded the problem, leading in some cases to outright refusals.
The same pattern followed her into fieldwork. “Once my full name was revealed, I was never offered water in a standard steel glass,” she said. “Water was always poured into a disposable or plastic cup, from a distance, to avoid physical contact.” The practice was carried out as though it were unremarkable. One encounter stayed with her: during a session on menstrual health and untouchability, a family that had hosted her for tea asked if she too belonged to the Yadav community. When a colleague answered yes on her behalf and took over the conversation, she was, for the first time in that household, served water in a steel glass, tea in a proper cup, and biscuits on a plate. “It was a bitter mirror,” she said, “showing that even educated professionals are still judged and sorted by their caste and dietary habits today.”
Once people found out Kumari’s* full name, she was not offered water in a steel glass or tea in a proper cup. She, as an educated professional, was still judged by her caste. The image is representational.
| Photo Credit:
Nagara Gopal