Tastes Like Home: In Indian metros, the birth of the ‘northeast shop’

Shops packed with little known ingredients from the seven sister states are feeding not just its people, but the curiosity of Bangaloreans

He calls it the Frankenstein sauce — a fiery red chutney that “packs a goddamn wallop”, with a touch of Korean Gochujang and an abundance of fermented Naga chillies.

When last December, chef Gautam Krishnankutty, introduced his experimental new sauce on Instagram, the entire batch — 25 bottles — sold out in one hour. Earlier his very unorthodox Chinese Doubanjiang paste, with an unusual dollop of axone, or fermented soybean from Nagaland, was “gone in three hours,” he says.

A few years ago, it would have been hard for the Bengaluru-based chef to even imagine making — let alone, selling — these unusual dishes, contingent on ingredients sourced all the way from Northeast India. “But now the ingredients are just a phone call away,” he says.

Or, if one were to brave the Bengaluru traffic, a drive.

In the heart of the city, in a locality called Ejipura, is the ‘7 Sisters Northeast Shop’, Krishnankutty’s go-to place for “anything Northeast.”

In the tightly-packed space, adjacent to a butcher, bunches of yangchok/petai‘stinky’ beans lie alongside recycled plastic rum bottles filled with fermented bamboo shoot. Churbi cheese cubes from Kalimpong jostle for space with packets of Sirarakhong chilli powder from Manipur. Korean instant noodles hang with an array of beauty products, and behind the counter lined with packets of smoked-pork is the smiling face of Chinaoshim Hongvah, the 31-year-old owner of the shop, also from Manipur.

On a Friday afternoon, Hongvah and his cousin are busy parcelling a package of smoked meat, meant to be shipped to Goa. “Ever since I got on to Instagram, it’s become terribly busy,” he says, his two-year-old toddler strapped to his back.

So busy that in the next few weeks another cousin from Manipur will join him to help around the shop. Or possibly, in the future, open his own.

Across Ejipura — a neighbourhood that is home to several youngsters from the Northeast — is a proliferation of what is described simply as a “Northeast shop”, selling produce from the region, including fresh vegetables, fish, and dry ingredients, sourced from the seven sisters states and beyond — Myanmar, Korea, Bangladesh and Nepal.

“I am so far away in a city that feels nothing like home,” says Hongvah, when he finally catches a break, “But the minute I step into my shop, I get reminded of home.”

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in March 2021. Full article here.

He lost a year of his life when he was wrongfully declared a ‘foreigner’ in Assam

Can this carpenter from Bongaigaon make something of a second chance?

Tiptop Furniture in Assam’s Bongaigaon has seen better days. “But it’s also seen worse,” says Bimal Baidya, owner, proprietor and sole employee of the ramshackle carpenter shop for more than 30 years now.

On a May morning in 1996, back when it was in another location, it witnessed a riot between the Bodos and Adivasis. Next day, the shop was razed to the ground. But Tiptop found another life, in another location. There it witnessed a devastating flood. On that afternoon — sometime in 2002 — as the water levels rose, Baidya climbed on top of one of his chairs. “There was no sign of the rain stopping. So, I kept stacking my furniture — first a table, then an almirah,” says the 61-year-old carpenter. That night, Baidya slept on top of the almirah as the murky water swivelled threateningly all around him. “I thought I was going to die,” he says. But the night passed, the waters abated, and Tiptop moved again.

But through it all — the riots and the floods — there wasn’t a single day Baidya didn’t turn up at his shop. Each morning, his cycle would be stowed away, the shutters pulled up, and a small prayer — incense sticks clasped in his hands — recited.

Till in November 2016, four men from the Assam Police’s border force landed up at Tiptop, and whisked away its guardian. In the one year and one month that followed, all was quiet at the shop. For Baidya, till then the hard-working, friendly, tamul-chewing carpenter of Bongaigaon’s Bou Bazar, was proclaimed a foreigner — a Bangladeshi living illegally on Indian soil, whom everyone was suddenly wary of.

The notice from the Foreigners’ Tribunal (FT) — one of the many quasi-judicial bodies first set up in Assam in the early 1960s to try so-called “illegal immigrants” — had come three years back in 2013. (Official records say that, as of February 4, 2018, there were 899 such detainees in the six detention centres.) “I did not understand anything it said — just that I was a suspected Bangladeshi and that I needed the documents to prove that I wasn’t,” says Baidya. The documents were there, and so was the belief that he was in the clear. “My parents crossed the border in the early 1950s. I don’t even know which part of Bangladesh they came from. These weren’t things one ever felt the need to discuss,” he says.

Yet, in 2016, Baidya found himself in a jail in Goalpara, about 60 km from his home in Bongaigaon. “They told me that I would be out in a week,” says Baidya. But the week turned into a month, and then several more. “I can’t explain what it felt like, only someone who has been in jail will be able to,” he says.

In his 13 months of detention, Baidya lived in a hall with about a hundred inmates — murderers, thieves and dacoits, hardened criminals who had to serve sentences up to a decade. “Yet it was us, the ‘foreigners’, who were treated the worst. ‘OiBangladeshi, get out of the way’ — that’s how they would refer to us.”

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in December 2018. Full article here.

Where The River Bends

Life on Majuli — the world’s largest river island — switches between the loving embrace and frequent fury of the Brahmaputra. Rains in Majuli are not ordinary. With every downpour, the island loses a little bit of itself to the river.

“Don’t go to Majuli, worst time,” came a foreboding text message from a friend. It was raining in Majuli, as it had been raining across Assam that month. And in my neck of the woods, when it rains, it doesn’t just pour — it floods.

Till last month, I was pretending to understand wine, the point of high heels, and Le Corbusier in south Bombay. Now, in more comfortable shoes, I am a journalist reporting from the hinterlands of northeast India. And rains are certainly not something that come in the way of a weekend getaway. Or a good story.

Rains in Majuli, the country’s largest river island, however, are not ordinary. With every downpour, the island that sits near the north bank of the Brahmaputra, loses a little bit of itself to the river, almost as though caught in some sinister game of paper dance. “This one time in Majuli, the road we took in the morning wasn’t there the next day!” came another text from another friend. Too late. I was already on the train to Jorhat from Guwahati.

Much has been written about Majuli in the past — that the world’s “largest river island” is sinking, its land eroding at a terrifying pace because of the great, mercurial river it is encircled by.

To grow up in Assam is to grow up with the Brahmaputra. Over the years, I have picnicked by its banks, eaten its fish, floated on its tributaries on a rubber boat with my father, and dutifully thrown coins into it from the Kolia Bhomora bridge every summer on my annual sojourn to the grandparents’ in Tezpur. For a six-year-old, there are few things as thrilling as watching an infinite river swallow up a 50 paise coin. At 28, at Jorhat’s Neemati Ghat — where one takes a ferry to Majuli — I find a group of women doing the same: paying obeisance to a river that gives them as much as it takes away.

If we pray to the river, it is kind to us,” Dipankar, a monk of Dakshinpat Xattra, tells me the next day. I am in Majuli’s oldest monastery, and there’s a light drizzle falling around us. Like the hundreds of monks who live in the scores of monasteries that dot Majuli, Dipankar was inducted into the order at the age of seven. In the confines of the all-male monastery established in 1854, Dipankar and his dhoti-clad monk fraternity (called bhakats) live, eat, pray, dance, sing, act — and on occasion, play football and volleyball — while keeping alive the teachings of Srimanta Sankardeva, the famous poet-saint of the 16th century. Today, the 60 xattras of Majuli promulgate Sankardeva’s unique “worship through art” approach with music (borgeet), dance (xattriya) and theatre (bhauna).

Over the weekend, the rains gradually abate. The sun shines weakly, and outside every household, a wooden boat is tethered out to dry. Majuli is not your typical tourist town — I see a few resorts, but not a single restaurant. I realise, you don’t go to Majuli to holiday, you go to imbibe its many worlds — its culture and spirituality (within its xattras and its arts), its thirst for modernity (in its towns and its youngsters), its stunning biodiversity (in its birds and fish) and its old-world charm (in the villages and its tribes). These worlds have different dreams, but are bound by a painful reality: the annual deluge. It is then that the boats simultaneously become vehicles, homes and lifelines.

But the floods mean different things for different people. Dhrubo Payeng, a young boy from the Mishing village, tells me that he secretly enjoys the flood. “It cleans up everything, it makes the soil fertile,” he says. The villages that lie on the other side — the “wrong” side —  of the embankment, have a different tale. In Xaalmara, the Assamese village of boat makers, an 85-year-old tells me how one monsoon, his entire family had to live in a boat.

Yet, it’s evident that the Majuli resident does not want to be defined by the floods. They rather talk about the Raas puja. Every November, masks are donned and worries are forgotten, when Majuli becomes a temporary stage for a three-day-long theatre festival in worship of Lord Krishna. “It’s really the resilience of the people that’s amazing,” says the owner of the resort I am staying in. He’s been in Majuli for almost a decade now, and lets me in on a secret that might just change the very discourse on the river island. “Majuli isn’t shrinking, it is actually growing in size — as the river eats away its one side, there’s an equal amount of silt deposition on its other side.” The river gives back what it takes — but that, of course, is another story.

On my ferry ride back to Jorhat, I meet a young girl from Majuli’s Puroni Bari village. Khanjuri is 16 and has recently moved to Jorhat to study — the first time she has stepped out of her little island home. Over the hour-long-journey, she tells me about her life, about how everyone in Majuli is either a born singer, dancer or actor (“It’s the culture of Majuli”), and, about the time when one monsoon, their entire village shifted to a local school. “They say the island is shrinking — perhaps, we have to move to Jorhat then,” she says, matter-of-factly. That’s not a happy prospect. “When I am away in Jorhat, I keep thinking of Majuli,” she says.

Towards the end of our journey, my new friend wants to see pictures of big cities. I show her my best picture of the gothic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel taken on a crisp summer morning. “Wow,” she says. I follow it up with stunning vistas of the Arabian sea, dotted with yachts. “Oh! We own boats too. Every family in Majuli does. Do we really need to go anywhere else?”

And in that moment, as the sun tap-danced on a river filled with lazily floating clumps of water hyacinths, I find no need to contest that.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in May  2018.

The Miyas of Assam, and their char-chapori culture

A proposal for a museum reflecting char-chapori culture has triggered a controversy. Who are the Miyas, what are the char-chaporis, and what is controversial about the proposal?

Months ahead of the Assembly elections, a proposed “Miya museum” reflecting the “culture and heritage of the people living in char-chaporis” has stirred up a controversy in Assam.

What is the controversy?

Last month, Assam BJP minister Himanta Biswa Sarma tweeted out a letter from Congress MLA Sherman Ali that requested the government to expedite the process of constructing a museum “reflecting the culture and heritage of the people living in char-chaporis” in Guwahati’s Srimanta Sankardeva Kalakshetra.

Char-chaporis are shifting riverine islands of the Brahmaputra and are primarily inhabited by the Muslims of Bengali-origin (pejoratively referred to as ‘Miyas’).

Sarma tweeted: “In my understanding, there is no separate identity and culture in Char Anchal of Assam as most of the people had migrated from Bangladesh. Obviously, in Srimanta Sankardeva Kalakshetra, which is the epitome of Assamese culture, we will not allow any distortion. Sorry MLA sahib.”

In response, the Opposition has accused the BJP of trying to polarise the state before 2021 elections.

Incidentally, the museum was recommended in March by a legislative panel — Departmentally Related Standing Committee (DRSC) on Education — comprising BJP and its allies. Asked about this, Sarma told reporters: “Whatever committee, whosoever’s committee has given whatever report… that report will just remain in their files in their cupboards only. The Assam government is clear that in the Kalakshetra there will not be any ‘Miya museum’.”

Who are the Miyas?

The ‘Miya’ community comprises descendants of Muslim migrants from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) to Assam. They came to be referred to as ‘Miyas’, often in a derogatory manner.

The community migrated in several waves — starting with the British annexation of Assam in 1826, and continuing into Partition and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War — and have resulted in changes in demographic composition of the region. Years of discontent among the indigenous people led to the six-year-long (1979-85) anti-foreigner Assam Agitation to weed out the “illegal immigrant”, who was perceived as trying to take over jobs, language and culture of the indigenous population.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in November 2020. Full article here.

Through rain and floods, Assam’s community workers battle pandemic


Floods might be as old as Assam, but fighting a pandemic in knee-deep water is a whole new challenge for even the most seasoned health worker.

It is the wind that has helped Pratima Barman plan her day as an accredited social health activist (ASHA) in Assam’s Dibrugarh district for seven years now.

In the sapori (island) village where Barman lives, a strong gusty wind, coupled with the sight of a brimming Brahmaputra, signals the annual deluge. On such days, the 35-year-old will switch her crisp whilte-and-blue ASHA sari for an older, well-worn one. She will slip on her washed-out rubber chappals, carefully balance her bag on her head, and set out. And then, wading through waters, Barman will call on the pregnant and the sick, the old and the young, and—as she has done over the last three months—seek out those who might be showing signs of a fever, a cold, or a cough. In the evening, she will wash up, sanitising everything from her watch to her bicycle, before entering her house.

Floods might be as old as Assam, but fighting a pandemic in knee-deep water is a whole new challenge for even the most seasoned health worker.

Barman, and her colleagues, are the foundation of the ‘Assam Community Surveillance Program’ — coordinated by the National Health Mission (NHM) — which does door-to-door checks in rural Assam, to find those with symptoms of the novel coronavirus, as well as malaria and Japanese Encephalitis. It is an exercise that has covered more than 30,000 villages so far with an army of ASHAs, anganwadi workers (AWWs), auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs), multi-purpose workers (MPWs), surveillance inspectors, lab technicians, and doctors, spread out across the state during a debilitating flood that, since May, has affected more than 26 lakh people in 29 districts, and claimed 42 lives. Twenty-four have died due to landslides triggered by heavy rain.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in July 2020. Full article here.

Why the gamosa wraps the Assamese society together

The current wave of anti-CAA protests in Assam prominently features the gamosa. Why does this humble piece of cloth remain central to the articulation of Assamese identity?

Ranjan Barman, an 18-year-old resident of Assam’s Lakhimpur, has 22 ‘gamosa’ shirts. Last winter, Barman took a few gamosas — the traditional hand-woven red and white Assamese cloth — to a tailor in his village and gave him exacting instructions to stitch them into a shirt. For the avid TikTok user, the shirt guarantees double the hearts on his 15-second videos, where he lip-syncs Assamese Bihu numbers. 

“Obviously it would,” says Barman, “A gamusa — even the sight of it — makes an Assamese person sentimental.” He recalls how three months ago, he was in Bengaluru with his family for a medical check-up. “The Assamese doctors went out of the way to help us,” says Barman, convinced that the preferential treatment could be traced to only one thing: the phulam, or floral, gamosa tied to his bag. 

In the ongoing wave of protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) in Assam, the gamosa has featured prominently — as men, women and children tied it on their heads, or draped it around their shoulders. It became an intrinsic part of protest gear. 

“It is not easy wearing a Mekhela Chador (the traditional Assamese attire) for every protest, but I can always carry a gamosa,” says 21-year-old Sovangini Talukdar, from Tezpur’s Darrrang College, who attended every CAA protest in December so far.

The rise and rise of the gamosa

The gamosa has traversed beyond Assam — to Delhi (on account of being Prime Minister Modi’s favourite accessory) to the tracks of Finland (when athlete Hima Das won her historic gold in July 2018) and even to outer space (when NASA astronaut Mike Fincke — married to an Assamese — performed Bihu aboard the International Space Station in 2004). 

What explains the ubiquitous influence of the gamosa in Assamese society?

According to Sunil Pawan Baruah, a retired history professor and writer, the gamosa as a “symbol of the Assamese nation” can be traced back to 1916 and 1917, when the Asom Chatra Sanmillan (first student organisation) and Asom Sahitya Sabha (premier literary organisation) were founded. 

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in December 2019. Full article here.

In Assam, a battle to save a rare flower

A group of men and women in Assam are fighting to save a flower — by growing it in their backyards, bonding over it on Whatsapp and a month ago, formally grouping into a society for its conservation

In January 2003, two days before Bihu, Khyanjeet Gogoi, trekking in the forests bordering Dibru Saikhowa National Park, was picked up by the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) — at the time the most dreaded militant outfit of the Northeast.

Held hostage in a secret “jungle” camp on the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border, the militants interrogated Khyanjeet: “Why are you here? What are you looking for?”

“Orchids,” the 23-year-old replied.

It was an answer no one expected. Three days later, the slightly bemused ULFA cadres left Khyanjeet on the banks of a river; he was free to make his way home.

That trip, remembers Khyanjeet, was futile. “I was looking for a rare species of orchid that was apparently growing wild at the national park.” Needless to say, those orchids were never discovered, but the quest continued.

For Khyanjeet, ever since 1994, has been travelling only in search of orchids. Over the years, he has recorded 395 species in Assam alone, discovered 35 new ones, named three himself and cultivated several more in his backyard in the small town of Rupai in Upper Assam’s Doomdooma, where he teaches Biology at a local high school.

Today, the 38-year-old has many monikers in Assam: the orchid expert, the orchid whisperer, the orchid man, and is often called by the government to identify rare species.

“If my friends invite me for a holiday, the first question I ask is: is there a forest near by?” says Khyanjeet, over the phone from Rupai, “Because, if there are forests, then there are definitely orchids.”

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in February 2019. Full article here.

From Mizoram, a ‘magical’ voice that plays cupid on Whatsapp

A Mizo crooner has an unusual side job: she’s a self-styled Whatsapp “artiste” whose voice notes are connecting young lovers across the hilly state

To get by most of her life, Melody G Fanai, has worked an assortment of jobs: at 7, she sold fruits on the hilly roads of Aizawl; at 12, part of a Church choir, she released a cassette of Gospel songs; at  23, she taught Hindi to a motley group of Mizos; at 28, she lent her silky voice to the female characters on local television; and today at 30, she is Mizoram’s favourite crooner, often found, singing her heart out at hotels, concerts, government programs, and on occasion, in her own Youtube videos.

But there’s another side-job Fanai does, one so unique that she is probably the only person in the world doing it. And despite that, not many know that from 2014, Fanai has been hired as a professional “Whatsapp-voice-note-artiste” by girls and boys across Mizoram, most in the throes of young love.

Fanai doesn’t quite remember when she started doing it, or how it really happened. It was probably when her friend recorded a clip of her saying “ka hmangaih che” (“I love you” in Mizo) and forwarded it on Whatsapp. Or it was perhaps when one of her students at the LH Hindi School Chanmari in Aizawl, requested her to “record her magical voice” for a Valentine’s Day message he wanted to send his girlfriend. “It’s been so long — I really don’t remember how it started. Maybe it was in 2014. Is it that big a deal?” asks Fanai, bemused at the supposed uniqueness of her serendipitous side-job.

Now, four years later, thousand odd “voice notes” stored on Fanai’s computer tell different stories: of undying love, of warm birthday wishes, of condolence messages, of profuse apologies and of pleas for forgiveness.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in October 2018. Full article here.

A man disappears from a Manipur village, and returns 40 years later courtesy YouTube

But is homecoming the fairy tale it is made out to be?

Khomdram Gambhir Singh is the most well-travelled man in Khumbong. He’s
seen it all: the Qutb Minar in Delhi, the Taj Mahal in Agra, and the Gateway of
India in Mumbai. He’s seen things no one in his village, in a corner of
Manipur, could dream of.

Among them, was the infinite expanse of the Arabian Sea in Mumbai, filled
with, in the man’s own words, “bada bada jahaaz”. Big, big ships.

There’s another story that has done its rounds in Khumbong market: that
once there was a dinner in film star Dilip Kumar’s house, and Gambhir, then
working with a catering service, helped cook for the feast.

Now 65 and toothless, Gambhir neither denies nor confirms the tales. In the
year since he’s returned to Khumbong, after a four-decade-long escapade,
the initial enthusiasm of telling his story has wound down.

For almost three months after his return, guests from Khumbong and afar
would visit his home, a thatched hut at the end of the little lane in the village.
Gambhir would appear on local primetime news, kitted out in western
formals, and gently answer every question. “What did you eat there?” “Where
did you sleep?” “Did you ever think about home?” “Can you sing for us?”

He was Manipur’s missing man, who had been found 40 years later, singing
on a street in Bandra.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in June 2019. Full article here.

In Arunachal, the Idu Mishmis are protesting a proposed tiger reserve

On March 24, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) chief SP Yadav said that the Dibang Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh would soon be notified as a tiger reserve. The announcement has caused disquiet among the area’s Idu Mishmi people, who feel that a tiger reserve would “hinder their access” to the forest.

Who are the Idu Mishmis, what is their relationship with the forest and why are they resisting the proposed tiger reserve?

The Idu Mishmi, the ‘tiger brothers’

The Idu Mishmi is a sub-tribe of the larger Mishmi group (the other two Mishmi groups are Digaru and Miju) in Arunachal Pradesh and neighbouring Tibet. Known for their weaving and craftsmanship skills, the Idu Mishmis primarily live in Mishmi Hills, bordering Tibet. Their ancestral homelands are spread over the districts of Dibang Valley and Lower Dibang Valley as well as parts of Upper Siang and Lohit. The tribe is estimated to comprise around 12,000 people (as per census 2011), and their language (also called Idu Mishmi) is considered endangered by UNESCO.

Traditionally animists, the tribe has strong ties with the region’s rich flora and fauna. Animals such as the hoolock gibbons and tigers have deep cultural relations with the Idu Mishmi. Tigers are especially important to the Idu Mishmis — according to Idu mythology, they were born to the same mother, and thus, tigers are their “elder brothers”.

While hunting has traditionally been a way of life, the Idu Mishmis also follow a strict belief system of myths and taboos — ‘iyu-ena’ — that restrict them from hunting many animals, including a complete prohibition on killing tigers. Anthropologists and other researchers who have studied the area say that this belief system has led to a unique model of wildlife conservation. “Idu beliefs concerning tigers prevent their widespread and immediate retaliatory killing…it is because of these cultural beliefs that tigers thrive in these areas,” wrote Dr Sahil Nijhawan, who did his PhD in the Dibang Valley, in his research on the subject.

This article was originally published in The Indian Express in April 2023. Full article here.