A Case Of Cultural Erasure
Text and photographs by Amrita Amesur
Naga cooking is deeply evolved, nuanced and pieced together with sustainably grown and reared wild and farmed produce. But it is poorly understood in mainland India, and has often been subject to cultural policing. The ban on dog meat is symbolic of this lack of understanding.
In March 2020, just as India was hit with the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government imposed a three-week national lockdown that came into effect virtually overnight. This lockdown triggered the reverse migration of migrant workers. Over the course of the next few months, millions of workers walked thousands of kilometers from Indian cities back to their home villages.
Amidst this catastrophic state of affairs, while grappling with a veritable healthcare crisis, some politicians concerned themselves with — and spent their considerable resources towards — policing the dietary habits of indigenous tribal highlanders from a remote and ignored corner in the North East of India.
Towards the end of June 2020, Twitter was swamped with images of dogs wrapped in gunny bags. The allegation being levied was that they had been smuggled from mainland India to the borders of Nagaland, for consumption by the Naga tribes. “All the dogs are now being brought in from outside the state as Nagaland has eaten all its own dogs” said Maneka Gandhi, a member of Parliament belonging to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which governs the country. Known as an animal activist, Gandhi is the founder of an animal rights NGO called People for Animals. On June 30, 2020, Gandhi shared photos of captured dogs, displayed outrage at the widespread consumption of dog meat in Nagaland and beseeched readers to protest these practices by writing to Nagaland’s Chief Secretary, Temjen Toy. In her post, Gandhi exhorted readers to condemn this ‘illegal’ practice and be ‘bearers of change’ by ensuring that there were immediate injunctions placed upon dog bazaars and restaurants in Nagaland.
This photograph with accusatory claims was all it took for people across India to become openly racist towards Nagas. The voices included self-professed animal lovers, activists, animal rights organizations and compassionate citizens alike. In turn, Nagas were subjected to death threats, hatred and vitriol, and accused of being brutal beasts who openly consume dogs, which are meant to be companion animals. The ban of dog meat was a catalyst for a deeper prejudice against the Nagas. One Mumbai-based animal rights activist, Hema Choudhary, even threatened to “boycott Nagaland,” and “cut their necks,” among other things, on her social media account. In response to PFA’s incendiary post, a number of Nagas protested and demanded an apology. “We ran a [Twitter] campaign against PFA after their insensible comments to sensationalize dog meat consumption. When we asked for an apology, all they did was change their caption without even a hint of [an] apology,” said Albert Rutsa, a member of the Angami tribe from Kohima, when I asked him about his thoughts on the PFA’s campaign.
Buoyed by this wave of outrage on social media and hastened by pressure from animal rights organizations, a slew of legislations were passed overnight to calm the collective conscience of the country, criminalizing and prohibiting anything to do with trade, sale or consumption of dogs. These regulations ranged from the Indian Penal Code to food safety laws, rounded off with prevention of animal cruelty laws. By July 3, 2020, as each of these legal and penal provisions were invoked or brought into effect. Chief Secretary Temjen Toy tweeted that the Nagaland government had decided to ban dog meat related practices in the state.
Thus, another door was effectively closed on a culture already struggling to withstand the intolerance of a saffron-washed system. While India’s beef ban — and the lynchings that followed it — was motivated by religious fundamentalism, the dog meat ban is an attempt to ‘civilize’ and reform tribal communities. As Dolly Kikon, an anthropologist at Melbourne University belonging to the Lotha Naga tribe of Nagaland pointed out in her essay titled The Politics of Dog Meat Ban in Nagaland, “Unlike the cow debate, the one on dog meat does not centre around religion but on a civilisational logic. Of all animals, stray dogs in contemporary India are the flagships of ethics, care and rights…Everyday food choices force us to deal with broader issues of caste violence and ultra-nationalism in India.”
Having campaigned for years against dog meat trade, the Humane Society of India hailed the ban as a “turning point in ending the cruelty of India’s hidden dog meat trade”. People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, India (PETA) called the dog meat trade not just cruel, but dangerous, linking its consumption to a variety of serious and potentially deadly diseases akin to the spread of the novel coronavirus, allegedly through Chinese live meat markets.
The urgency to enforce these regulations points to a fundamental double standard. The fact is that the government routinely captures stray street dogs for sanitary reasons, and transports them to the North Eastern borders. Besides, the Nagas are afforded protection under Article 371A of the Constitution to carry out their customary cultural, social and religious practices without the interference of the central government. This is the fundamental basis and genesis for the creation of the state
In the media sensationalism over dog meat, cultural nuance was lost and this practice was divorced from its regional, racial and cultural context.
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The Nagas are a group of tribes with distinct cultural and culinary practices, who were clubbed together after India’s independence. Pictured here is the last Angh (or chief) of the Konyak tribe, wearing a crown of boar horns and a brass necklace of carved heads, signifying his status as a headhunter. As Konyaks were the last to convert to Christianity among the Nagas, the ancient practice of headhunting prevalent amongst most Naga tribes ended with his generation.
In Sanskrit and modern Hindi, the word Naga means a serpent. But who are these people, and how did they get this name? The Nagas are a group of various tribes, indigenous to the lands spanning current-day Nagaland, which extends to pockets of Myanmar, the hilly regions of Manipur, and slivers of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. Located in the upper reaches of the North East of India, this region is isolated geographically and culturally from the mainland, connected solely by the Siliguri Corridor — referred to as the “chicken’s neck” — which runs 14 miles wide at its narrowest.
The Nagas are of various ethnicities and are indigenous to these regions. They bear East Asian facial features, speak Sino-Tibetan languages, and are starkly different from the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian populace of mainland India, with entirely different culinary and cultural practices.
There are many explanations for the name. Some trace it to the Assamese ‘noga’ or the Hindi ‘nanga’, meaning naked. Many of these tribes were nude before British colonizers imposed a sense of shame regarding the practice. However, none of these explanations are entirely valid because a collective Naga identity is a postmodern concept. According to Hidden World of Nagas: Living Traditions in North East India and Burma, by Aglaia Stern and Peter Van Ham, the term ‘Naga’ was actually applied to these highlanders by those living in the plains, and thereafter popularized by the British to collectively refer to thousands of small villages and their clans. Even though they were grouped together by British colonialists to make sense of what they called the “ethnographic chaos” of the region, they were in fact, rather different in language, customs and political systems.
Those differences are what caused the highland clans to frequently war amongst each other and why different tribes settled on high-vantage hillsides. They were far from the collectivized unit that they were eventually forced to become in independent India, where they have been since subject to the normative standards of colonial, and later, secular India.
“The [dog meat] ban is just another tool to obliterate our culture so we can be absorbed into ‘their’ culture,” said Aketoli S Sumi, a research scholar from Nagaland University, who belongs to the Sumi Naga tribe from Zunheboto. “But we’re different, we can’t be them. Our food, our habits, customs, dress, songs, worldviews etc. are different from them. They don’t want to see that.”
Nagas who end up migrating to Indian cities like Delhi or Bengaluru for college education or a career, are routinely harassed, face casual, and sometimes dangerous, forms of racism and discrimination. Both men and women from the North East face sexual harassment in these cities, often presumed to be promiscuous due to their sense of style, beauty and distinct facial features. Racist slurs such as ‘chinki’ became so commonplace that in January 2015, it was criminalized in Delhi, with a jail sentence of five years.
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This is a tea estate belonging to Phejin Konyak, the author of the acclaimed book on Konyak tribes, The Last of the Tattooed Headhunters, along the upper reaches of Shiyong village in Mon, Nagaland. Photo credit: Nishant Sinha
Naga cuisine, which involves a substantial amount of meat and fermented preparations, is poorly understood in mainland India. On my visit to Nagaland, I noticed that most Nagas grow their own food organically using ancestral methods of farming, rear their own animals responsibly, feed those animals organic produce and treat them with reverence. As the paper Shifting Cultivation: An ‘Organic Like’ Farming in Nagaland in the Indian Journal of Hill Farming notes, the present agricultural practice of Nagaland is organic by default, because the farmers of the region don’t use chemical fertilizers or pesticides, but only locally available farmyard manure.
The people cut and clean their own meat. In a typical Naga household, nothing is wasted. “We do not waste a single piece, everything from nose to tail is either eaten or used for a different purpose,” says Rutsa. All the skeletal ornaments seen in Naga homes are remnants to honor the life of each animal.
“Nagas have a very peculiar lifestyle, totally different from the mainland and we are constantly in a state of being apologetic for who we are, our lifestyle, our food and our culture in general,” said Rutsa. “It’s true we eat almost anything that moves, but we are also very respectful of what we eat or for that matter, any living creature. We allow for each to thrive.”
Nagas, like others in the North East of India, love tamul paan or fermented beetlenut. They often consume it as a digestif post meals.
Naga cooking is deeply evolved, nuanced and pieced together with available wild and farmed produce. It is enriched with fermentation and packed with umami flavors, typically associated with flavors of the Far East, such as fermented fish, soybean paste and bamboo shoot. Cured and smoked meats are also everyday ingredients. Rice is a staple that forms an integral part of their diet, and usually comes from their own fields. These meals are supplemented with wild foraged greens and herbs, which are essential on every plate. A fresh, hand pounded chutney made with bhut jolokia chillies, dried, fermented fish called ngari and tomatoes, forms a central part of all meals.
While a majority of Nagas converted to Baptist Christianity and Catholicism with the advent of missionaries during colonization, they continue to believe in animism, which accounts for their deep-rooted reverence for nature and life in all its forms. According to the Nagas, dog meat has always formed a part of their tribal culinary tradition. In certain tribes, dogs were sacrificed by priests as part of animistic rituals to ward off evil spirits. The blood of a black dog is also reportedly given as part of tribal medicine practices to anyone who is anaemic. “Some tribal people let a patient who is low in blood drink a black dog’s blood for improvement”, explained Zubenthung Odyuo of the Lotha tribe, who lives in Dimapur.
While it is true that dog meat is a part of Naga cuisine, its occurrence in the Naga diet is rare at best. “Only a fraction of the Naga population eats dog meat,” explained Sumi. “Even for dog meat-eating Nagas, it is not in our culture to eat the meat of one’s own pet or hunting dogs. So what others are projecting us to be is totally false.”
If one were to go to Nagaland and speak to the people there, one would see that the stigma of dog eating has long been felt and understood. There are very few homes and families that even consume it once a year, if at all. “We never ate dog meat at home and it was very rare that we have heard of or knew of anyone eating dogs.” said Susanna Assumi Agersnap, a Nagaland native who currently lives in Denmark.
With many Nagas seeing dogs as companion animals, they feel conflicted about consuming them. “I, for one, have always been against it. It’s just my opinion that dogs were domesticated for companionship for man, so eating dogs seems wrong. That’s different from eating cows or goats that were bred for food,” said Agersnap, while clarifying that this was her personal opinion that is at odds with her upbringing, the beliefs of her family and the popular sentiment among Nagas residing in Nagaland. Those opposed to the practice support the ban, seeing it as an ethically progressive step and a necessary change in narrative.
But there are others who are mindful of the rights of those who continue to follow the practice. “Personally, my family has not been affected because we don’t consume dog meat. However, our people have been mocked and taken for a ride. The cultural impact of this [ban] is huge,” said Sumi.
The author enjoys a meal at the home of Lanu Marsosang Jamir and his family, who belong to the Ao tribe. She says about the meal: “They cooked beautiful Ao-style chicken amruso with bamboo shoots for me and their famed Naga pork axone with fermented soybean paste for my friend, and served the meal upon stunning, hand-carved Balsa wooden plates.”
But the unanimous sentiment about this abrupt injunction and penalty on their way of life is that it is yet another nail in the coffin of a marginalized people, hammered in by the Indian administration. “Once you trample over people’s culture, impose your own belief system on them, get the law to dictate what they should eat — all in the name of cuteness — you violate the basic principles of a pluralistic liberal democracy” says Odyuo, questioning why the ban should not be extended to all forms of meat. “While the concerns are noble and I’m against cruelty against animals (not just dogs), I believe the kitchen should be the last thing people try to dictate. It is easy to be in the comforts of our home and point fingers at someone else culture, but we should also take into account their lifestyles and living condition before we try to impose on someone else’s diet,” said Rutsa
But as products of an industrialized and sanitised food culture that is conveniently devoid of blood and guts, we’re afraid of coming face to face with how our food is produced. The Naga way of life thus becomes the target of an impulse to ‘civilise’, which is referred to as food fascism. As an extension of this, in many Indian cities, landlords insert clauses into apartment rental agreements stating certain kinds of foods cannot be prepared in their apartments, curtailing the ability of tribal peoples to find housing.
The constant sense of shame about their looks, food and culture is deeply internalised amongst all tribes from the North East of India and makes it impossible for them to assimilate in any meaningful way with mainland India. Because of this complex racial, geographical and cultural divide, along with harassment by mainlanders, most Nagas refer to those from mainland India as Indians, and themselves as Nagas.
“We do not feel seen or represented in the larger media and culture of India,” says Tonikali Sema, an artist and farmer belonging to the Sumi tribe from Luzheto village near the Naga city of Dimapur, who moved to Northern California several years ago. “We kind of see a world without us as normal. So, it does not come naturally to our primitive tribes to assimilate into a culture that already erases our identity in so many ways.”
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A village gate demarcates a ‘khel’ or a community of sorts in Chizami, a town in the Phek district of Nagaland where the Chakesang tribe lives. Villages are divided into several khels, based on similar spoken dialects, commonality amongst clan members and geography. Due to the threat of invasion by neighbouring tribes, Naga villages are usually built at a height and have thick, fortified walls.
In addition to cultural erasure, the modern history of Nagaland has been shaped by the military occupation of the state for over six decades, under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 (ASFPA). This draconian legislation offers unfettered power to the armed forces to maintain public order in ‘disturbed areas’ with immunity against prosecution (and other protections) for any actions they may perform to maintain the peace. The AFSPA has yet to be lifted, despite reports of grave human rights violations by the armed forces against indigenous people. The law traces its origin to an ordinance originally passed in 1942 to suppress the Quit India Movement, which evolved into a draconian principle etched into the Constitution. This in turn empowered the enactment of the AFSPA, which takes almost the same shape and form as the colonial law.
“There is so much fear and distrust passed down generationally, [and the] trauma from the India army occupation in Nagaland, has perpetuated cycles. It’s not been a healthy exchange of culture but a subtle suppression and erasure of our indigenous identity,” said Sema.
At the heart of the issue, truly, is the resistance of much of the North East towards assimilating with and acceding to the mainland, whose culture and politics are fundamentally different. This is a debate that was never given time of day since the formation of independent India, and continues to be suppressed by way of further military, political and cultural subjugation of indigenous peoples.
It is because of these reasons that the North East remains insulated. Even as post-modern India embraced and cultivated its national identity, independent of its colonial masters, the state became to the Nagas what the British had been to India — colonizers under the righteous veil of trying to civilise native people. “I believe we have been put up against a yardstick which people have composed as the criteria to be recognized as a ‘civilised state’. Some of our dietary choices do not qualify according to these people and hence they take it as a responsibility to civilise us,” said Rutsa.
In all of this, the beautiful aspects of Naga culture remain unfamiliar to outsiders. Even though the region has opened up to tourism more extensively in the last decade, this hasn’t done very much to alleviate the perception of mystery and alien remoteness. The ban is thus a consequence of well-cemented racial and cultural biases driven by the definition of what it means to be Indian, and by extension, who is excluded from that premise. What it has achieved, however, is the further erosion of the already meagre agency that minorities enjoy — to freely practice their lifestyle without being policed by the state. Nagas find themselves constantly on the defensive without being given the benefits of context and nuance that may be afforded to more familiar cultures. It is yet another case of food choices highlighting the fault lines of caste, class, race and privilege in India.
As a Hindu woman of Indo-Aryan descent from mainland India, I’m not here to explain, defend or rationalize the consumption of dog or any other meat by a tribal indigenous people who have lived off the land, reared animals, hunted and gathered in forests since time immemorial. But it’s necessary to question the blanket authority of governments, petitioners and politicians to enforce preconceived notions of cultural normalcy, and to put an end to the muzzling and erasure of a historically misunderstood group of people.
