When Techi Nimi remembers her years at boarding schools, it is laced with memories of hunger. She longed for Arunachalee food, which was never served.
Feminist anthropologist Dolly Kikon and peace researcher Joel Rodrigues present a wide-ranging set of stories and essays accompanied by recipes in Food Journeys: Stories from the Heart (Zubaan, 2023). They bring together poets, activists, writers, and researchers who explore how food and eating allow us to find joy and strength while navigating the history of militarisation in Northeast India.
Read this excerpt from Civilising the Tastebuds, an essay from Food Journeys written by Techi Nimi, a research scholar in anthropology whose interests lie at the intersection of Indigenous youth aspirations, mobility, and kinship.
My love and appreciation for homegrown, homecooked, traditional Arunachalee cuisine is rooted in my personal experience of feeling disdain and shame towards it. My disdain sprang from my mother’s proclivity for tending to our pig’s appetite before ours and spending her after-work hours in her vegetable garden rather than with us. My mother’s way of recovering from her tedious bank job was to water her vegetables and shovel out the weeds from between them.
As a child who grew up in an age where we didn’t have to cultivate our own food in order to satiate our hunger, her toiling away in the fields seemed ridiculous to me. I mean, the concept of physically straining oneself in one’s vegetable garden, in order to find relief from the physical exhaustion and pain that comes with a job and advancing age, is something only my mother’s generation would be able to comprehend and justify fully. As the years progressed, I would come to appreciate her, her pigs, and her vegetable garden a lot more than I did when I was younger.
My shame, unfortunately, stemmed from other people’s perceptions of tribal cuisine and their assumptions that our food was visually and gastronomically repulsive. It was only heightened by my dining experiences at boarding schools, where tribal food was not even deemed a cuisine, let alone served in those large dining halls. My fellow students would ask me whether we ate cockroaches, elephants and dogs. Little did I know that it wouldn’t help my cause when I once proudly said in my defence, ‘No, I don’t eat those. I have only ever tasted monkeys, porcupines and wild deer’. I assumed we were cataloguing the many kinds of cuisine we had tried in the little time that we had inhabited the earth, and this backfired to such a degree that I would carry the sheer horror of it my entire life.
I would begin to distance myself from my own food; food practices and ingredients that bore the history of my ancestors and their story of survival. It would only be later in life that I would realise that a seemingly innocuous action like eating is not only used to ridicule Indigenous food choices and customs, but is also a key component of the larger objective of civilising Indigenous tribal students.
Arunachalee food can be best described as simple yet robust in flavour, at least for us Arunachalees. ‘It has no colour and looks bland,’ most of my non-Arunachalee friends would say. ‘But it has heaps of bamboo shoot,’ would always be my answer.
Everyday Arunachalee food typically consists of rice, seasonal greens with bamboo shoot, and a meat of some kind (fresh, smoked, aged) seasoned with garlic, ginger, chillies, local herbs, and again, heaps of bamboo shoot. If you enter an Arunachalee kitchen on a typical day, you see a space that I like to call ‘the realm of bamboo shoot and meat’. However, these realms shift and alter as a result of the diversity of tribes and terrain across the state.
The simplicity of Arunachalee cuisine is best explained by a Nyishi delicacy called eyup choih, which translates to dried bamboo shoot chutney and requires only two ingredients: dried bamboo shoot and fire-roasted chillies. Eyup choih is often served as a side dish to meat dishes. Grandma says that it is the only authentic chutney that Nyishis would eat back in the days when other seasonal greens were unavailable, long before the term ‘chutney’ replaced the Nyishi term ‘choih’. It was served along with the meat that men of the village brought back from a hunt. It was simple and quick to prepare for the men, who would be exhausted and hungry from their hunting expedition.
To prepare eyup choih, one simply needs to roast some chillies over fire and add some dried bamboo shoot soaked in water before pounding them together with a mortar and pestle. It is traditionally served with roasted meat, although it may also be eaten as a side dish to complement everyday meals, which centre rice. Personally, I like to add some roasted fermented dried fish to it, mix it with hot rice, and eat it out of a steel tumbler, the courtesy of which I dedicate to our long-term helper from Assam—originally from Bangladesh.
The simplicity of Arunachalee cuisine is best explained by a Nyishi delicacy called eyup choih, which translates to dried bamboo shoot chutney and requires only two ingredients: dried bamboo shoot and fire-roasted chillies.
The food on your plate informs the place that you presently inhabit. It is in these plates that we are introduced to not-so-familiar amalgamations of different food items, such as doi-seera-gur (curd, beaten rice, jaggery) eaten for breakfast during my early boarding years in Tezpur, Assam, or the discovery of grated coconut in chicken curry during my high school days in Bangalore. The foreignness of these textures remains vivid in the memory of my tastebuds. I still haven’t gotten around to liking doi-seera-gur or the grated bits of coconut in South Indian curries, but no matter how much I disliked them, their presence on my plate affirmed the history, culture, and culinary preferences of the spatial location in which I dwelt at the time.
I was four years old when I insisted that I wanted to study in a boarding school in Assam where my elder cousin sister studied. The school, which no longer exists, was located in Parvatinagar in Tezpur and housed between 100 and 200 students, mostly from Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. Every time they served doi-seera-gur for breakfast, my four-year-old self would throw such a fit that our principal would take me to her residence to serve me Nutella-smeared chapati. She would then go on to tell me how a certain Dr Goswami’s wife’s secret to her youthfulness was that she ate doi-seera-gur for breakfast. This did not make me like it.
(L) Arunachalee food consisting of rice, meat and bamboo shoot, served on a local leaf ‘okam’ foraged from the jungle during special occasions and festivities. (R) Grandma praying for her grandson before he leaves for Delhi. This is usually followed by handing out some money.
The boarding school in Tezpur is where I learned how to eat with a spoon and fork without them clanging against the steel plates we ate from after a quick prayer to the Holy Trinity. This was where I learnt how to chew without opening my mouth or making chewing sounds. My father is known in the village for being the person who, even if he is eating the simplest of meals, can still make someone hungry. One can hear the crunch of boiled mustard leaves and sumptuous chewing noises when he is eating. It almost seemed unnatural and unappetising to me when I was told to not make a sound while chewing. If we were caught doing that, one of the matrons would immediately say, ‘Don’t eat like a junglee.’
Being called a junglee is something that one wishes to avoid, even as a kid. It didn’t hurt less than it does now. So naturally, from eating off the same plate with my parents and siblings in a tribal household, where my father would chew the meat first to soften it before hand-feeding it to us, I transformed into a ‘civilised’ girl who knew her table manners and learnt noiseless chewing.
Most days they would serve Assamese cuisine, like omita sobji (Papaya curry), aloo pitika (mashed potato with diced chillies and onion, topped with mustard oil), and the everpresent daali (lentil soup). On Bihu, we would be served pithas, jol paan for prashad, and masor jhul (fish curry). I especially miss the khichdi and pumpkin curry that they served during Saraswati pooja. But as the holidays approached, I couldn’t wait to get home to eat pork and bamboo shoot, chicken and bamboo shoot, mithun and bamboo shoot—mainly anything with bamboo shoot.
It almost seemed unnatural and unappetising to me when I was told to not make a sound while chewing. If we were caught doing that, one of the matrons would immediately say, ‘Don’t eat like a junglee.’
I would tell my parents about the new kinds of meals that I had tried and demonstrate the table manners I had learned. When they didn’t know what rajma (kidney beans) was, I would laugh at them and make fun of my father for eating loudly. I attempted to continue my table manners and silverware etiquette at home, only to end up eating with my hands because—trust me when I say this—eating mithun and local chicken with a spoon is not a pleasant dining experience.
The dining hall of a boarding school in Arunachal, on the other hand, was a whole different realm. Situated in Lohit district, the dining hall of this residential school imploded with aromas which transported me to the food that I had only seen in Hindi TV serials. Rice, daal, fried vegetables, sambaar. Samosas and kachoris for evening snacks. Mondays were for pulao, drunk on refined oil and soya chunks.
For someone coming from a family where the sight of fried food was a rare occurrence, the dining hall of this school was gastronomic nirvana. Instead of tables and chairs, as at my former school, the students sat in long rows facing each other on mats whose lengths never seemed to end. This time, instead of ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen,’ we recited Om Brahmarpanam, which was not only difficult at first but also took longer to finish.
I recall staring at other students as their lips formed the Sanskrit words with such ease, and wondering whether I would ever be able to do the same. The Sanskrit utterances seemed so strange, so novel, and yet fascinating. A year into my stay at this school, I would master the language and be able to recite the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita like a pro. However, despite the fact that my lips and memory were sufficiently trained for the language, I was never able to grasp the meaning of the verses. It was almost as if the cable running from my brain and lips had been severed just before reaching my heart and soul.
The dining rules nevertheless elated me, since all of the food served had to be eaten with our hands—unlike my former school in Assam, where my friends and I were chastised for foregoing cutlery to suck the bone marrow from our goat curry, and made to sit at a separate table from those eating with a fork and spoon as punishment. The elation and excitement that I felt over the new dining rules of my new school lasted until I realised that we were supposed to eat Maggi noodles using our hands as well. We were only permitted to carry a steel plate, a steel tumbler, and a steel bowl from home. No cutlery allowed.
I don’t now recollect how I sneaked a spoon into the dining hall one day. It was Sunday, which is Maggi day. As I began to dig my spoon into my Maggi to lift a spoonful, our dining in-charge looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘Oh, finally you tribals have learnt how to eat with spoons’. The spoon was confiscated. The incident made me realise the agency I lacked within the premises of this school, in my own state, a tribal state.
As I take you on my culinary journey, I expect that it is dawning on you, as it did on me, that education is not the sole, core goal of boarding schools or missions such as these. Included in their goal is the assimilation of tribal children into their ways by means of ‘civilising’ not only their conduct and outlook in life, but even their taste buds. When basic agency associated with one’s choice of food is abused, it results in the justification and perpetuation of unequal relationships of power, not just in society, but also in our memories of childhood.
Like a traveller who, upon sampling various cuisines from around the globe, eventually yearns for home and homecooked meals, I gradually but almost naturally developed a longing to eat ‘home food’, except that I was already in Arunachal Pradesh. No matter how delightful it was to savour the many delicacies presented every day in our dining rooms, nine months of being deprived of our own Indigenous food was wearing on many students. I knew this because the subject of longing for food that we ate at our homes came up unprompted, over and over again, in most of our conversations.
One possible counter-argument could be that practically every student prefers home-cooked meals to those provided in hostels. However, this school, though based in Arunachal, did not serve us Arunachalee food. There was no sight of boiled leafy vegetables, or bamboo shoot, or meat of any kind in our daily meals. Home food to us is tribal food. In the future, I would discuss this with other Arunachalee friends who studied in other hostels based in Arunachal, and learn that it is not uncommon for most educational residential institutions to not serve local tribal cuisine to their students.
Predictably, my immediate memory of my time in boarding schools is of hunger. I was always hungry. This is not to suggest that they were starving or underfeeding us, but rather that the food that was provided to us in abundance was not ours to begin with. I was hungry for Arunachalee food. I recall us girls strolling around the school campus to collect some ferns, dhekia, as we called them, and boiling them in our steel bowls over a candle.
At some point, the flames from the candle would heat up the steel, so each one of us would take turns holding the bowl over the flames until we couldn’t anymore, before handing it on to the next girl. The cycle would continue until the dhekia was properly cooked and our hands partially burnt. At times, we would crave meat. Once, when we expressed our desire to be served some sort of meat dish ever so occasionally, the same dining in-charge who commented on tribals finally learning how to eat with spoons angrily remarked, ‘I will not serve any non-veg food in my mess. I don’t even breathe near people who eat meat.’ She was at that moment surrounded by hundreds of tribal children whose dietary habits most certainly included meat-eating.
I recall us girls strolling around the school campus to collect some ferns, dhekia, as we called them, and boiling them in our steel bowls over a candle.
However, contrary to the popular stereotype that Northeasterners use meat as a central ingredient to their dishes, we actually eat a lot more vegetables than that. This is evident in the continued existence of kitchen gardens in the backyards of many tribal homes, including my own. We, like every other family from a meat-eating culture, are delighted when we are presented with a meat delicacy because just like any other family in the world, not everyone in Arunachal or the Northeast can afford to buy meat on a regular basis.
The only reason why meat seems to show up on our plates on more than an occasional basis is that Indigenous people have mastered the art of meat preservation via techniques of smoking, sun-drying and even pickling. The practice of sharing meat with our neighbours and clan members, rather than hoarding the surplus, is central to our Indigenous way of life. We have learnt how to utilise every part of an animal, from its jowls to its tongue to its feet, even its skin. To us, it is not about being junglees, but rather about deeply honouring and respecting a life that has been taken away for our food consumption.
Through the practice of eating and sharing every part of a deceased animal, Indigenous societies like ours maintain kinship and sustain bonds that extend beyond clan-members and humans to include the animals that we consume. Indigenous knowledge of food preservation has contributed to the birth of delicacies such as dingkio (Mithun jerky), yamter (dried meat and chilli pickle), and peha (fermented soybeans), which not only have longer shelf lives but continue to nurture and sustain many Arunachalees living far from home.
This excerpt is from ‘Food Journeys’ edited by Dolly Kikon and Joel Rodrigues. Excerpted with permission from the author Techi Nimi, and Zubaan.
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