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New Delhi, India – Bidotama, 26, is in the kitchen stirring peanuts in a pan. Every few minutes, she turns to her best friend, Mardza, 25, who is busy chopping tomatoes and slicing U-morok, a hot chilli variety, that will go into the special chicken curry bubbling on a two-burner gas stove. They speak in their native Meitei language and chuckle as they continue cooking. In the living room, Akoijam Sunita, 45, is moving a mixture of black perilla seeds, ginger and salt between a heavy pestle mortar and an electric grinder, hoping to get a grainy texture and not a paste. The graininess is key to getting thoiding asuba, a Manipuri side-dish, right. Bidotama, or Bido as she likes to be called, and Mardza dressed in those comfy, furry pants the young like to live in these days, have been up since 4:30am cooking for a Sunday lunch service that they run out of Akoijam’s three-bedroom apartment in New Delhi.
Until May last year, both Bido and Mardza worked as digital marketing managers in Imphal, the capital of Manipur in India’s northeast. Akoijam, or Akoi as she is referred to, was their Delhi-based team leader. Mardza and Bido cooking food for Lombard Kitchen at the New Delhi apartment of their friend, Akoi
Now Bido and Mardza are Akoi’s house guests and she is their business partner in the lunch service they have started in an attempt to rebuild their lives after they were wrenched from their homes in Manipur in the wake of ethnic violence that broke out in May. It has left over 200 people dead and thousands injured, and turned the beautiful, scenic state with the world’s only floating national park, into a ravaged war zone.
A day after violence erupted, Manipur was placed under curfew and an internet ban was imposed that lasted till December. In those seven months, many businesses shut down, including Bido and Mardza’s. In the clashes between the dominant, largely Hindu Meitei community and the minority Christian Kuki-Zo community, many have lost their homes and continue to live in relief camps in Manipur or, like Bido and Mardza, fled the state fearing for their lives and in search of a livelihood.
[Clockwise from top right] A pressure cooker with dal, chayote squash, lightly boiled Manipuri chicken curry with king chillies and kambong kanghou, a stir-fry dish made with brinjal, crispy peanuts and water bamboo
In the New Delhi apartment, all three women find solace in cooking, eating, talking about their food and running the Lomba Kitchen. “This meal from Lomba Kitchen is Yum Gi mathel,” types Akoi on her phone as she composes a brief note about the Manipuri dishes. She will WhatsApp it to customers as the food parcels are sent out for delivery later in the day. Their enterprise is named after a purple-coloured herb that looks like lavender and has a citrusy aroma and a peppery taste – the Lomba. It flowers around October-November and is used as a garnish in several Manipuri dishes. “The name Lomba has meaning … When we think of winter, we think of Lomba. It reminds us of home,” says Bido. Akoi crushes some Lomba flowers and sprinkles them on eromba, a mash made with yendem (colocasia) stalks, beans, sponge gourd, potatoes and fermented grilled fish. In the text she is sending to customers, she calls it “an object of our unconditional love”. It’s 7am, and New Delhi’s temperature has dropped to a freezing single digit. But Akoi’s apartment, where the Sunday lunch menu is slowly coming together, is warm with the aroma of Manipur.
Akoijam Sunita, 45, at a pop-up dinner she hosted in Bengaluru, India, recently
‘Dirty food’ Roughly 1,500 miles from New Delhi, Manipur is one of the seven ‘sister states’ in the northeast that is geographically connected by a narrow 200km (120-mile) strip of land called the Chicken’s Neck to India’s mainland. Most people from the northeast have distinct physical features and culinary traditions that add to India’s much-vaunted diversity. But incidents of racial discrimination, even verbal and physical abuse for their food choices, are routine in cities they migrate to, like New Delhi and Mumbai. Staples like fermented bamboo shoots, soya bean paste and dried fish are added to northeastern dishes for their meaty, savoury aroma and umami flavour – one of the five core tastes that include sweet, sour, bitter and salty. In her 2022 paper on “Dirty Food, racism and casteism in India”, anthropologist Dolly Kikon gives the instance of landlords and neighbours finding the food cooked by people from the northeast “stinky and revolting”, a reaction that, she says, stems from “ignorance of the eclectic food cultures in northeast India”.
The 2019 Bollywood film Axone, about a group of friends cooking the northeastern delicacy akhuni (or axone) with pork and strong-smelling, fermented soya beans, captures the hate that northeastern food often faces in the rest of India. “My food has been so racially attacked that I always wanted to do something around food … When they [Bido and Mardza] came to stay here, we started talking about cooking … Maybe invite people over for a Manipuri meal,” Akoi says and then laughs as she adds, “But we didn’t have a dining table.” Cooking chicken with king chilli
‘The drums fell quiet’ ”I’m here and she’s over there. We have a river in the middle,” says Bido, gesturing to explain where she and Mardza live – across the Nambul river that runs through Imphal, a city where the sun comes up early and the streets get crowded by 6am. On alternate days, Bido and Mardza would set off around 4am to buy vegetables from the Ima Keithel or Mothers’ Market, the largest all-women market in the world. And then they would cook for both their families before heading to work. May 3, 2023, was no different. After finishing work, Mardza filled petrol in her car, dropped Bido and went home. It was around 8pm when Bido heard someone banging an electric pole with a stone – a common way to alert the neighbourhood and get people to gather for any information or disturbing news. ngari, a dried, fermented fish, being grilled
Bido came out and heard from the people who had gathered that there had been clashes between members of the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities in Churachandpur, a hill district 200km (120 miles) from Imphal. Houses were being burned and there had been incidents of firing. “It started raining,” says Bido, and under the soft solar street lights, she saw a religious procession coming her way. “I could see women on horseback, people dancing and singing because Lainingthou Sanamahi, considered the king of all gods, was returning to the local shrine,” Bido says. The chatter in her community about the violence was getting louder and suddenly, she recalls, “The procession stopped … The clarinets, the drums fell quiet … It was eerie.” The Meiteis, who are politically strong, live in and around the Imphal valley, occupying about 10 percent of the state’s land. Kukis live predominantly in the hills and are listed as Scheduled Tribes, a constitutional protection given to historically disadvantaged tribes. It comes with certain guarantees, including job reservations and land rights. For years, Meiteis have been demanding their inclusion in the Scheduled Tribes list, which would entitle them to jobs and government loans, and also give them the right to buy tribal land in the hill districts. Their demand has been rejected in the past, but on March 27, 2023, a court directed the Manipur government to consider including Meiteis in the Scheduled Tribe list, triggering protests and clashes. Manipuri chicken and dal, prepared at Lomba Kitchen in New Delhi
“Our neighbourhood was not affected by violence,” says Bido, but adds that there was constant fear of being attacked, often fuelled by rumours. May 5, 2023, was one such night when a rumour swirled about three armed Kuki men hiding in the river. “Everyone was so delusional, so paranoid,” Bido recalls. At 1am, several men from her locality jumped into the river and began searching for the armed men. On Mardza’s side, people were out with big flashlights scanning the water for signs of humans. Bido could not…
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