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Prithiraj Borah remembers experiencing food-based discrimination firsthand in the summer of 2018 while working on his Ph.D. Borah, who was studying at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay back then, had travelled to Delhi for research and was invited to the home of some friends who lived in Munirka, South Delhi, near the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus.
“We were making something with akhuni (a fermented soybean product commonly used in Naga cuisine) when a neighbour knocked at the door and said that you cannot cook this here,” says the Vellore-based researcher and scholar.
Prithiraj Borah
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SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
It got him thinking about how people of “mainstream” India often had prejudices against food consumption, particularly from the Northeast, leading him to start reading and reflecting on the issue. But then the pressing demands of his Ph.D. took over, and he could not take the idea further, he says. Then, in February 2023, he moved to Vellore, Tamil Nadu, to teach at the Department of Social Sciences and Languages at the Vellore Institute of Technology. Since he had a friend in Bengaluru, 200-odd-km away, he decided to visit the city two months after shifting to Vellore.
That was when he first encountered Kalyan Nagar, where his friend was staying, and discovered the many shops and restaurants selling food catering specifically to the Northeastern community. “Kalyan Nagar is a relatively new neighbourhood, and many migrants stay here,” says Borah, pointing out that the area is home to not only people from the Northeast but also Nepal, Nigeria and Bhutan. “Some of them are working as chowkidars or delivering food for Zomato, Swiggy or Dunzo. There are also people working in corporations, teaching at the university, even students,” he says.
The neighbourhood’s incredible diversity, which, in turn, had led to the mushrooming of businesses catering to this massive influx of people from the Seven Sisters, got him thinking again about food and identity. “I wanted to look at this aspect of food and belonging in Kalyan Nagar,” he says.
Food and identity
In August last year, Borah applied to the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) Project 560, an initiative that supports projects that engage with Bengaluru in different ways. He submitted his proposal to “examine notions of ‘belongingness’ and ‘neighbourhood’ through an understanding of food habits of the ‘indigenous’ and ‘tribal’ communities from the northeast in Kalyan Nagar,” as the IFA website puts it, and was eventually selected.
According to the IFA website, the project fits the mandate of the Project 560 programme since it interrogates ideas around migration, labour, identity and belongingness in the microcosm of a neighbourhood, thereby enabling a layered understanding of the city. “Food becomes an important reason for people from various communities across the northeast to come together and feel a sense of camaraderie and belonging while they stay in Bangalore, far away from their homes,” it states.
“There is no single northeast culture and much food diversity,” says Borah.
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Prithiraj Borah
Borah began his fieldwork in February this year, travelling to Bengaluru from Vellore every weekend to explore the food culture of Kalyan Nagar. As someone with a sociology background, he took an ethnographic approach towards the project, something he has been doing since his master’s, which he completed at IIT Guwahati. He began identifying and visiting shops run for and by the northeastern community that supplied food and ingredients specific to the community’s culture.
He adds, however, that he was mindful of the many differences between the various tribes who inhabit the northeastern part of India. “As I wrote in my proposal, I did not want to homogenise any culture, identity or religion,” he says. “There is no single northeast culture and much food diversity.”
Photo stories
A map of Kalyan Nagar is splayed across a soft board in Bangalore’s Creative Space, an art and performance venue located in Kalyan Nagar’s HRBR Layout. Several photographs depicting the signboards of these various shops, such as Victoria’s Kitchen, North East Shop and Seven Sisters, are tacked onto this map, while long lines of other photographs, offering viewers a glimpse of these stores’ offerings, cascade over the mirrored walls of the space. In another corner of the room are a couple of stores selling goods from the Northeast: packaged snacks, dried fish, coffee and more.
We are at Food, Belongingness and Neighbourhood, a photo exhibition capturing narratives around northeast food in Kalyan Nagar, one of the key outcomes of this project. He says some of the other outcomes are likely to become part of a short video documenting northeast food stalls in that neighbourhood, a few oped articles about the experience, and a final report about this project.
Borah, who is not a trained photographer, taught himself to handle a camera specifically for the project, spending hours lingering around the stores trying to document them visually. At first, he visited these shops — buying various items and striking conversations with the people who ran them. “I would click random pictures of them cooking, showing only their hands and feet, avoiding their face,” he says. “Slowly, I built a rapport with them,” he says.
Once the people Borah was interviewing became comfortable with him, they began allowing him to roam around their kitchen to take photographs and gave him more detailed interviews; one even invited me to her church one day, he says. These spaces often became a place for conversation, whether about discussing personal problems or exchanging opinions on history, politics or philosophy. “It is also an open discussion space for the community,” he says.
Insights and observations
Borah, an Assamese, also talks about being made fun of by the people he interviewed. “People often don’t like Assam because it is a caste-Hindu society that often discriminates against tribal people,” he says, recalling how when he went to buy Singju (a spicy Northeastern snack with Manipuri origins), people would say, “Oh, you Assamese people eat Singju too,” he says.
As both an insider and an outsider to the larger northeast community, he approached it as such, questioning the fixed binaries between the two while doing his ethnographic research. “This insider-outsider debate always exists in ethnography,” he says. While his caste and community affiliations did make him an outsider, things evolved over the course of his research, he says. “Maybe I was different from what they were expecting,” he believes. “I am not going to say that I became an insider, but I managed to work as both,” says Borah, who attempted to question the fixed binaries of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ through this project.
He shares some of the other insights he gleaned from his ethnographic research. For instance, he noticed that the Tangkhul Naga community was the most dominant community here, much like in Mumbai or Delhi. ‘They have a stronghold in any city,” he believes. Another thing he observed was that women ran the majority of these shops. Since many of these tribes were matriarchal or matrilineal, women of the northeast were often more autonomous and independent, he says. And yet, “it is a two-sided coin, though, since it also means the burden on them increases.”
From his conversations with proprietors, Borah also discovered that running a business in Bengaluru is challenging since the northeast is not so well connected to this city. Unlike in Delhi, where there are direct flights from Dimapur, Kohima or Imphal, people often need to take a connecting flight to get to Bengaluru, he says. “The airport is also so far away. You need to struggle so much to get those foods,” he says.
On the positive side, however, he believes Bengaluru, unlike Delhi, is more accepting of varied food cultures. “Even if you are cooking pork, dry fish or bamboo shoots, people will not come and disturb you,” he says. “In fact, when I was doing my fieldwork, I even noticed many Kannada-speaking people coming and eating at these restaurants, excited to taste the food there.”
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