Eating Singju and Kangsoi in Delhi’s Humayunpur

An old Caucasian man walks the streets of Humayunpur in the evening, a tote bag on his shoulder, selling incense sticks to the restaurant owners. It is not part of some cultural tradition. The restaurants — almost all of them run by migrants from the Northeastern states of India and serving food from their region — burn the incense not at an altar, but at the entrance or the periphery of the restaurant.

In the early 2000s, when the effects of India’s economic liberalisation a decade prior were experienced across the country, young people from the eight Northeastern states started migrating to Delhi to study or to work, mostly at the newly emerging call centres. Munirka and Humayunpur became the two neighbourhoods where these people found a sense of home, the former for its proximity to the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the latter for its affordable rentals. Food cultures and flavours from these states also travelled to Delhi, as migrants began to cook dishes from their homelands in their new kitchens. These flavours were met with responses from mainlanders, to whom these foods were largely unfamiliar.

‘It is a sort of compromise,’ says Thangkhansuan, as an explanation for the incense. Thangkhansuan moved to Delhi from Arunachal Pradesh, a Northeastern state neighbouring Manipur, in 2016 to pursue his master’s degree in Sociology, and currently lives in Humayunpur. ‘I was once asked by a landlord to light an agarbatti if I was cooking “smelly food”.’

These negotiations and assumptions have frequently been a part of the living experience of students and young professionals who have moved to Delhi from the Northeast. ‘My Sociology professor asked me if I ate snakes,’ says a Delhi-based professor, who prefers to remain anonymous. She came to Delhi from Manipur in 2007 as a young professional to pursue a master’s degree in Sociology. As a woman, her experience was even more unpleasant.

‘What we ate and who we met, both were under scrutiny,’ she says.

A similar experience led Beauty Thounaojam, who also moved to Delhi from Manipur, to pursue a PhD intersecting food, migration and identity. ‘When you cook, we vomit,’ she was told by her landlady, who lived one floor below her and is from a dominant caste. This comment was followed by a week’s notice to vacate the flat. ‘The incident made me think, was our food really smelly? Was I crossing a line?’ Beauty says.