One Table, Many Tongues

Dr Rajkumar Ranjan Singh *

A Ngari shop vendor selling directly from a Ngari Chaphu at Imphal in 2008 :: Pix - Duran Thiyam

Beneath Manipur’s famously divided politics, a quieter story is simmering in its kitchens—one where the fermented-fish pots of the Manipur valley and the smokehouses of the Highlanders turn out to share more than either side usually lets on.

On a Sunday afternoon in Imphal, a pot of chagempomba — broken rice, fermented soybean and smoked fish, simmered slowly together into a thick, savoury one-pot meal—is about as close as Meitei cooking comes to a weekly ritual.

A hundred-odd kilometres away, in the hills of Chandel or Ukhrul, a different pot is on the fire : pork strips, smoked for days over an open hearth, bound eventually for a plate built around the same staple grain and, more often than not, the same underlying instinct for fermentation.

These two kitchens rarely turn up in the same conversation. Politically, Manipur’s Meitei-majority valley and its Highlanders have, for much of the past three years, been defined chiefly by what divides them.

But look closely at what is actually cooking on either side of that line, and a quieter, less-told story starts to surface—one of parallel invention, shared taste, and a culinary kinship that neither hill nor valley households seem to fully realise they share.

A KITCHEN DIVIDED BY GEOGRAPHY

The differences are real, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The Imphal valley is wet-rice country —fish-rich, vegetable-heavy, meat playing a supporting role. The surrounding hills are a harder landscape of shifting and terraced cultivation, where diets lean more heavily on meat, foraging and smoked protein. Rice, maize and millet fill the hill granary; fish and paddy fill the valley’s.

That divergence is not an accident of taste. It is what several decades of ecological and dietary research on the region describes as a direct adaptation to terrain — different raw materials producing, quite naturally, different- looking plates. It is precisely because that split is genuine, though, that what the two sides have in common turns out to be worth noticing.

THE COMMON JAR

Start with fermentation, and the picture changes fast. Manipur’s communities—valley and hill alike—do not treat fermented food as an occasional delicacy. A 2012 study in the Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge went as far as calling it ‘an intrinsic part of the traditional diet system and the cultural integrity of all ethnic communities’ in the State.

In the valley, that means ngari and hentak, pungent fermented fish used the way a stock cube might be used elsewhere, and hawaijar, a fermented soybean paste. In the Naga hills, the very same soybean, fermented the very same way—boiled, wrapped in leaves, left ten to fifteen days—turns up as axone (also spelled akhuni).

Among Kuki and closely related Mizo communities, it turns up again as bekang. Three communities with little historical contact independently arrived at the same fermented soybean paste — and gave it three unrelated names.

Fermented bamboo shoot follows an identical pattern: soibum and soidon, two valley preparations, sit alongside comparable fermented-bamboo dishes built into hill cooking, such as the Angami pork-and-bamboo classic thevo chu. Nobody appears to have borrowed the idea from anyone else.

Three (at least) linguistically and politically distinct communities, working independently, solved the same problem —protein scarcity, a humid climate, no refrigeration—with the same fermentation science, and then named the result in three different languages.

ONE CURRY, MANY NAMES

Follow that fermentation jar far enough and it leads, again and again, to the same pot. Hawaijar, the valley’s fermented soybean, sits at one end of it. Chagem-pomba — broken rice cooked down slowly with that same fermented soybean, smoked fish and herbs — sits close by, known in Meitei households by that name and, among a number of hill communities, simply as chagem.

In between sits eromba, mashed vegetable and chili bound together with fermented fish. Wikipedia’s own reference entry does not hedge on who eats it : eromba is listed flatly as ‘an ethnic dish of the Meitei and Naga communities of Manipur’— no qualifier, no separate hill version, one dish claimed by both.

Even eromba’s defining ingredient changes name at the State’s ethnic boundary without changing its job. In the valley it is ngari; among Kuki and other Chin-related communities, whose culinary vocabulary reaches across the international border, the equivalent fermented fish paste is ngapi — the standard term across Chin State in neighbouring Myanmar.

Two words, two political geographies, the same jar of fermented fish doing the same work in the pot. Stir in soibum or soidon, the valley’s fermented bamboo shoot, and the picture is complete: one curry family, wearing several names, cooked by communities that this past three years have more often been told what divides them than what is, quite literally, simmering in common.

Singju Festival at Marjing Polo Complex, Heingang - 28 December 2022 to 08 January 2023 :: Pix - Khaba Kh

Even the dish names travel further than expected. Singju, usually filed under Meitei cuisine, is also the name Tangkhul Naga cooks in Ukhrul district give to a favourite lotus-root salad of their own—a different recipe, the same name, on opposite sides of the hill-valley line.

Chamthong, or kangshoi, meanwhile, is the mild, oil-light stew that rounds out the everyday table on the valley side, with a version traditionally cooked, oil-free, for someone running a fever.

ONE BEAN, FOUR NAMES

The clearest single illustration of the pattern is smaller than a soybean vat: yongchak, the large, pungent stink bean that grows across both valley and hill districts. Meitei cooks turn it into eromba and yong-chak singju.

Kuki house- holds know it as janglha, cooked with meat or fish. The Rongmei, a Naga community, call it kampai. Hmar cooks, from the Kuki-Zo side of the map, call it zawngta and pair it with saum, a distinctively Hmar fermented pork.

Four communities, four names, four recipes — and one shared plant, valued in strikingly similar ways by all of them. It is, in miniature, the same lesson the fermentation jar teaches at larger scale.

RICE, THE GREAT UNIFIER

If fermentation is Manipur’s most distinctive shared technology, rice is its most basic shared fact. It anchors the Meitei valley diet by a wide margin. In the hills, terraced and shifting rice cultivation covers the great majority of cultivable land, with maize and millet playing a supporting, not a leading, role.

Among Kuki-Zo communities the pattern repeats again. Whatever else changes from one community’s kitchen to the next, the plate itself — rice at the centre, everything else arranged around it—does not.

A MEAL THAT DOES MORE THAN FEED

Food in Manipur is also, on both sides of the hill-valley line, how kinship gets renewed. Among the Meitei, the festival of Ningol Chakkouba brings married daughters back to their childhood homes for a feast hosted by their parents—a formal, food- centred reaffirmation of a bond a marriage has otherwise moved out of the house.

Among Naga communities, comparable feast- based rites bring people together around rice, smoked pork, bamboo shoot and rice beer, and ‘feast of merit’ traditions — in which a host distributes food and drink to the wider community — function to establish social standing through the act of collective eating.

The festivals are not the same, and this piece is not claiming they are. But the underlying logic is : in both worlds, a hosted, ritually marked meal, not an exchange of money or goods, is the mechanism through which a community renews its bonds and marks its hierarchies.

WHERE FOOD REALLY DOES MARK A LINE

None of this should be read as a claim that Manipur secretly eats as one. Food draws real boundaries too — including inside the Meitei community itself.

The seventeenth-century conversion of the Manipur royal court to Vaishnavism introduced vegetarian norms with no equivalent in the older Sanamahi religious tradition, reshaping elite, and eventually broader, Meitei dietary practice in a way that has no parallel in the meat-forward diets of the hills, or indeed among Sanamahi-revivalist Meitei themselves.

Food, here, marks a genuinely internal divide, not just a hill-valley one.

POLITICS ON A PLATE

Food and politics have been entangled in Manipur for well over a century. In 1904, Meitei women mobilised against a colonial-era ban on rice exports in an episode remembered as the Nupi Lan, or Women’s War — an early instance of access to a staple food becoming, quite literally, the ground on which a citizenship claim against colonial authority was staked.

The pattern has not disappeared: hill produce still moves into valley markets, and valley and manufactured goods still move into the hills, a long-standing economic interde- pendence organised substantially around food that continues today, disruptions from the State’s recent troubles notwithstanding.

A SHARED REPUTATION, FOR BETTER OR WORSE

There is a final, easily missed thread. Step outside Manipur altogether, and its communities’ food habits stop marking them apart from one another and start marking them apart from everyone else.

Sociological research on North-eastern migrants in Indian cities documents landlords citing the smell of pork, beef or fermented foods like akhuni or ngari as grounds for refusing tenants—Meitei, Naga and Kuki-Zo migrants treated, in that specific and painful context, as a single culturally distinct group rather than as separate communities at all.

Inside Manipur, in other words, food tends to illustrate difference. Looked at from outside, or from underneath the politics, it tells a rather different story — of three communities that, without much apparent contact or intention, kept arriving at the same fermented jar, the same rice-centred plate, and the same instinct to gather people around a meal.