The North Eastern identity, mainland India and a dish in Gurgaon

I had a dish earlier this week at Together at 12th that affected me deeply and got me thinking about my roots and what they mean. It was a bamboo cooked chicken with chilli but the dish evoked thoughts, memories and emotions that I didn’t expect and I wanted to capture why. 

The use of bamboo is pervasive in almost all the tribal communities of the North East. The dishes are simple, using techniques like boiling, steaming, smoking and fermenting, with chilli and bamboo shoot often being the ingredients that are used to draw out flavour either through contrast or intensity. Sometimes the food is cooked in a bamboo, giving off a slightly challenging, funky smell that people from the plains can sometimes find “difficult” but which feels like a whiff of nostalgia and happiness to those of us who have grown up with special memories of this food. 

I wrote last year that North Eastern food is the next big cuisine in India’s food scene. But I always assumed that would be limited to things like using smoked pork or bhut jolokia, or the Khasi black sesame pork that my mom has taught a few leading chefs (though they do their own riff on it). Ultimately, these are all easily digestible and understandable iterations of our cuisine that speaks to the cultural open mindedness of some of our more experimental eaters while never pushing anyone to go beyond their comfort zone and explore the North East beyond the conveniently packaged bits. If we lived in the west, they would call it cultural appropriation but since we don’t and since I come from a time when people didn’t know the difference between Ceylon and Shillong, I feel that even the smallest of steps that creates a cultural bridge to the North East for mainland Indians is a good thing. 

At some level it’s because I feel that we don’t really truly believe that our culture can be fully understood. And also because we look at our culture and put it in a box. Tribal and almost insular. When I think of the food of the tribes in the north east, I find it hard to imagine it presented in a way that is modern or contemporary. It’s strange. We look at our values and the role of women in society, our tastes in music or fashion and we think of ourselves as progressive and modern. But when it comes to interpreting and presenting our culture in a modern way, in a sophisticated way that leans on our heritage but looks towards the future, we struggle to break free from some vague sort of primitivism complex in our roots. 

So it was almost emotional for me to see a North Eastern dish presented in a way that felt so authentic and tasted so authentic but that was cooked and presented in a way that felt modern and contemporary. It was a Bamboo Chicken inspired by Chef Vanshika Bhatia’s visit to the Garo hills as well as eating Assamese tribal food. She marinates the chicken in fermented bamboo, green chili, garlic and coriander leaves over night. Then it is mixed with par boiled meghalayan black rice and cooked in a bamboo on top of charcoal. 

It’s classic North Eastern cooking technique but cooked and served with no fuss or drama, in a way that really feels modern, contemporary and sophisticated. At a time when we are all struggling to create North Eastern food in a way that looks at our culture as something exotic and thereby reinforces the sense of the “other” while also creating a bridge to us, this dish really pointed a way forward, a way that looks at us and our culture as something worth celebrating but not exoticising. 

At a time when the North East is burning and my hometown has no internet, when the traumas of the eighties and nineties are being reborn, the fault lines of tribe and ethnicity and religion and nation and identity have pushed their way to the surface like gaping wounds on the face of society, it is a timely and pertinent reminder that the North East and our culture, our identity, our hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations deserve to be looked at like anyone else... and not as an exotic “other” but with trying to actually understand us as equal citizens who belong to this country.