This Bengaluru Neighbourhood Acts as a Bridge to North-East India

In Bengaluru’s Kalyan Nagar, Prithiraj Borah finds that food isn’t used to censor, but rather corral people into communities. Joshua Muyiwa talks to the sociologist about his project that explores the ideas of food and belonging, and the complexities of the North-East identity.

On joining as an assistant professor of sociology at the School of Social Sciences and Languages at the Vellore Institute of Technology in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, Prithiraj Borah suddenly felt like he was “in a remote area” which didn’t have the buzz and bustle of “an urban centre—it was clear”.

He had just moved to Vellore from Mumbai in February of 2024 for this position. And for “the city buzz”, he found himself making more frequent visits to his friends in Bengaluru—a little over 200 kilometres from Vellore.

On one of these weekend getaways, on a post-breakfast stroll around the neighbourhood of Kalyan Nagar in north-eastern Bengaluru, where his friends live, they offhandedly bought pork to cook for their lunch. “And immediately, we wanted to eat it, like we do back home,” recalls Prithiraj over the phone, after an action-packed day of work. For him, ‘home’ means Assam. “We thought of buying fermented bamboo shoots, fresh and dry bhut jolokia or king chillies, akhuni or fermented soybean, and similar kinds of ingredients to prepare the pork.”

Some quick Googling alerted them to Seven Sisters—the Northeast Shop, “which was a short walk from where my friends were staying” and that Sunday’s lunch was sorted. This serendipitous—and satisfying—scene sparked Prithiraj’s project.

For the next eight months, under the India Foundation for the Arts’ Project 560, an invitation to long-term, continuous engagements with the city, Prithiraj catalysed on this early experience. Being a frequent visitor to Bengaluru, and through his network of friends, he proposed investigating the idea of food and its role in building the ‘ethnic’ North-Eastern community in Kalyan Nagar, a neighbourhood in Bengaluru.

“Actually, I’ve always wanted to work on food and culture,” admits Prithiraj. His previous research for his PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay has looked at political mobilisation by Adivasi students in Assam’s tea plantations—the transformation of humour into resistance in the everyday life of tea-estate labourers, the colonial construction of the ‘lazy native’, and the role of trade unions through the lens of Assam’s tea gardens. Tea, a beverage adjacent to food, he sheepishly points out, also reveals the historical knots negotiated in social relationships. And so he jokes that he’s been “working around this topic of food” for a long time now.

‘Homely’ Kitchens

After discovering his favourite ingredients—fermented bamboo shoot and akhuni—and pork dishes that were available within walking distance from his friend’s place, Prithiraj became a regular at these joints. This neighbourhood of tiny lanes lined with brightly-coloured, row-style houses mostly had commercial establishments on the ground floors and tenants on the floors above. Interacting with the business owners and looking around to observe their clientele, Prithiraj’s sociologist cap prompted him “to anyways think about writing a paper on this place, because it seemed very interesting to me. It isn’t spread out or stressful like Delhi or Mumbai, but rather small and tightly-knit together.”

"Kalyan Nagar immediately comes across as a cosmopolitan, secular space where all kinds of food taboos—like the selling of beef or pork too— aren’t maintained too strictly.”

His first observation of this relatively new, post-independence, migrant-dominated Bengaluru neighbourhood was that it wasn’t just home to members of the ‘ethnic’ North-Eastern communities, but also Nepali-speakers from Darjeeling and Sikkim besides students and professionals from the Arab, South-East Asian, and African countries. “Kalyan Nagar immediately comes across as a cosmopolitan, secular space where all kinds of food taboos—like the selling of beef or pork too— aren’t maintained too strictly,” he says. Instead, in this neighbourhood, he found that food isn’t used to censor, but rather corral people into communities.

At his project showcase, Prithiraj took visitors through the map of Kalyan Nagar and photographs from the neighbourhood that depict its foods, ingredients, and spaces.

Receiving the IFA’s Project 560 grant in 2023-24 solidified these thoughts into the project titled Food, Belongingness and Neighbourhood: The ‘ethnic’ Northeastern food preparation in Kalyan Nagar, Bangalore. Through this project, Prithiraj interviewed—formally and informally—various stakeholders in this neighbourhood to understand how these communities and their businesses fit into its landscape

“Most of these establishments are called kitchens, shops, or named after someone,” he shares. Prithiraj hazards that avoiding calling themselves ‘restaurants’ makes these eateries seem “less business-y, less public-facing”. The idea of ‘kitchens’ seems to “send this message of being more private, more homely, more community-facing,” he offers.

The non-business bent to the naming convention of these establishments and eateries signals that while they welcome all, they offer the idea of ‘home’ to a few.

Prithiraj’s observation speaks to the idea that the feeling of nostalgia for one’s food when outside of one’s own place of origin—relatable for most ‘ethnic’ North-Easterners—prompts them to seek their own ‘home food’. Therefore, the non-business bent to the naming convention of these establishments and eateries signals that while they welcome all, they offer the idea of ‘home’ to a few.

Hyderabad-based sociologist Hoineilhing Sitlhou’s paper Food Culture and Identity in Northeast India: Prospects for Social Science Research, which examines the existing research around the region’s food culture and dietary practices, might provide the reasoning behind this choice of separating the private from the public. Sitlhou—one of the few scholars looking at South India, outside of the many studies conducted on the relationship of ‘ethnic North-Easterners’ and Delhi—studied three Hyderabad-based university hostels over a year and found that food “is a socially constructed category rather than merely a biological activity”.

“This acceptance is more in Kalyan Nagar”

In Prithiraj’s own research, he noticed that most projects looking at ‘ethnic’ North-Eastern food focused largely on Delhi. While Delhi is seen as student-friendly, drawing people from across the country and the world, with different neighbourhoods for specific cuisines (Humayunpur for ‘ethnic’ North-Eastern food and Lajpat Nagar for Afghan fare, for example), Prithiraj’s research brought forth viewpoints that complicated this narrative.

“In my own experience too, I’ve found that other residents of Delhi don’t want to taste food from North-East India because they associate it with being smelly,” he explains. “They see it as ‘gandha’ or ‘bad-smelling’ and ‘dirty’, pointing to the practices of caste and racial discrimination surrounding food habits.”

Prithiraj assumed that this same attitude might exist toward ‘ethnic’ North-Eastern food in Bengaluru, more specifically in Kalyan Nagar, but he was proven wrong.

There’s already an existing food culture around pork in Karnataka and most of South India, he offers up as an explanation. “While the methods and ingredients of the pork preparations in this region might be different, there are communities like the Coorgs [Kodavas] in Karnataka within these regions that are fine with consuming it. This isn’t the case in Delhi, or in most of North India. Here, it comes across as simply putting a new ingredient, as yet another pork delicacy to taste and try,” he says. “Pork itself isn’t a brand-new thing for the people of this state.”

In his interviews with the people behind these businesses, Prithiraj found that their landlords “might not like the smell of fermented bamboo shoot or akhuni, but they don’t discriminate or ban the use of these ingredients either. In fact, many people who aren’t from the region are curious about the ingredients, interested in understanding their use and purpose in the recipes, and generally inquisitive about food from the region. They’re even game to make it,” he tells us.

“This acceptance is more in Kalyan Nagar; I can’t speak for the other neighbourhoods in the city,” he says of his months-long research. “I’ve seen lots of people—local students and families—besides ‘ethnic’ North-Easterners visit these shops and kitchens quite regularly in this area. Some of them as regularly as the other North-East people,” he shares.

All of these takeaways from his project might confirm biases. One, ethnic eclecticism exists across Bengaluru, but Prithiraj quickly points to the single neighbourhood of Kalyan Nagar as his focus. And second, that everything and everyone from the eight states of North-East India are monolithic. Here, Prithiraj presents his own complex and complicated relationship with this identification to steer us closer to a semblance of the truth.

The Misnomer of a ‘North-East identity’

It is only during his college admissions process that Prithiraj began understanding his identity and its politics within the state of Assam.

“I don’t identify as Assamese,” Prithiraj tells us, deep into our phone conversation. He’s from Assam, but identifies more strongly as being from the Koch-Rajbanshi community he belongs to. “There are a lot of ongoing identity movements—along the lines of ethnicities and languages—taking place in Assam. A lot of people in the state might call themselves Assamese because they speak, read, and write the language, but they might not identify as such,” he explains.

It is only recently that he discovered this specific identity marker, and found pride in it. “I’d always thought of myself as Assamese. Though I’m from a lower-caste background, I had never questioned being Assamese. It was while presenting my caste certificate for college admissions that I met a few other students who identified as being from the Koch-Rajbanshi community,” he says.

From these students, Prithiraj learned about the origins and language of the Koch-Rajbanshi community, and conducted his own research. They encouraged him to acknowledge and own his new-found identity. “In Assam, the Koch-Rajbanshi community is fighting for its own autonomous state called Kamatapur,” he shares. “And so even within the state of Assam, I’m an outsider, though I might be understood as being North-Eastern by people from within the region and even those outside of it.”

These micro-community affiliations are seemingly reflected in the food cultures of North-East India. Prithiraj points out that the ingredients and products available in Kalyan Nagar mostly represent the ‘home food’ of people from Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram, but are sold more sweepingly as ‘ethnic North-Eastern food. “And being from Assam, or more specifically at my home, we don’t eat these dishes. We eat pork and bamboo shoots, but we don’t eat bamboo shoots with pork. Even my parents won’t accommodate the smell of fermented bamboo shoots in their home,” he says.

"Even within the state of Assam, I’m an outsider, though I might be understood as being North-Eastern by people from within the region and even those outside of it.”

While working on this project in Kalyan Nagar, Prithiraj became close friends with businesswomen who were impressed because he “would eat singju [a Meitei snack of seasonal vegetables tossed with ngari or fermented fish]” or joking “that he couldn’t handle the spice” because he was Assamese.

For Prithiraj, one of the most important takeaways of this project has been the opportunity to translate the subtle yet significant differences between the many ethnic communities in North-East India. “We shouldn’t see this entire region as a single, homogenised unit, but rather we need to understand that each of these communities need to be addressed individually. This neighbourhood offers a possible entry point to the region’s distinct diversity,” he says, as he invites us to experience it for ourselves.