Culinary Traditions of Northeast India: Culture, Identity and Literature 

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Concept Note

The praxis of food studies, within contemporary paradigms of literature and cultural studies, has emerged as a pertinent interdisciplinary field of investigation, examining how everyday culinary traditions and food habits are intricately connected to broader structures of identity, indigeneity, culture, beliefs, and history. The multifaceted discourses on food studies demonstrate how each culinary practice is mostly constituted by the intersection of gender, caste, ethnicity, social beliefs, religion, and indigenous epistemologies within the wider socio-political and historical paradigm. The recent scholarly intervention in the food humanities has also positioned food as a crucial mechanism for understanding how the dynamics of food may function as a site for identity formation, cultural memory, ecological ethics, social practices, and decolonisation. In recent times, A number of scholars, including Sidney Mintz, Pierre Bourdieu, Arjun Appadurai, Claude Fischler, Krishnendu Ray, and Deborah Lupton, have conceptualised food not simply as a substance but as a symbolic, sociocultural, and historical construct through which the dynamics of identity, power structures, social hierarchies, and cultural memory are situated and negotiated. Likewise, contemporary discussions and debates surrounding sustainability, ecological balance, biodiversity, indigeneity, culinary nationalism, food security, and food sovereignty have also provided fresh perspectives for understanding indigenous, distinct, and culturally diverse culinary traditions. Such perspectives situate food not simply as a matter of consumption and taste, but rather as a crucial site where cultural identity, memory, ecological epistemologies, community agency, and questions pertaining to representation and sovereignty intersect.

Within contemporary scholarship on food studies, the pioneering works of Sidney Mintz and Christine M. Du Bois (2002) have aptly illustrated how food cultures are deeply rooted in broader socio-cultural, political, and historical dynamics. Claude Fischler’s work “Food, self, and identity” (1988) conceptualises food as a significant symbolic mechanism through which individuals and communities situate the dynamics of identity, belonging, memory, and social distinction. In a similar vein, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979) crucial theorisation of taste as social distinction further advances our understanding of how culinary practices and choices function within the dynamics of class, status, and symbolic capital. In the context of South Asia, Arjun Appadurai’s discourses on food as reflected in “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia” (1981) and his interrogation into the making of a national cuisine remain indispensable for interrogating how food becomes a medium through which rank, inclusion, exclusion, and cultural legitimacy are negotiated, structured, and contested (Appadurai, 1988). Moreover, Arjun Appadurai has shown how food functions as a dense social fact, a semiotic system through which questions of rank, intimacy, exclusion, and belonging are negotiated. In a similar vein, Vandana Shiva’s (1988) scholarship helps us to understand how food is deeply rooted in ecological preservation, indigenous epistemologies, biodiversity, and struggle over sovereignty within the landscape of India.

Within such mainstream discourses, the foodways of Northeast India remain persistently either misrepresented or underrepresented, despite encompassing a wide variety of culinary practices deeply embedded in its indigeneity, epistemology, cultural memory, history, ecology, and folklore. The eight states of Northeast India: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura, constitute one of South Asia’s most culturally complex and ethnically heterogeneous regions. Home to over 200 distinct indigenous tribes and diverse social groups, the region’s native yet distinct food habits and culinary culture extend beyond the gastronomic practice to embody complex socio-cultural histories of indigenous epistemologies, ecological beliefs, myths, cultural memory, and folklore. The region’s foodways are characterised by a profound diversity of indigenous food preparation techniques and ecological adaptations, including foraging, bamboo-based preparation, steaming, and smoking. Amongst the Bodos of Assam, for instance, fermented fish, bamboo-shot preparations, and rice beverages reflect the connection between food, seasonality, and indigenous epistemology. Likewise, Assamese foodways incorporate rice, leafy greens, khar-base preparations, and a variety of seasonal and fermented foods. Bengali communities in Assam and the wider Northeast sustain distinctive rice-based preparations, fish-centred culinary practices, along with dried fish, and other seasonal vegetable preparations. In Arunachal Pradesh, Adi and Aptani food practices incorporate fermented bamboo shoots and foraged foods, highlighting the inherent relation between culinary culture and the ecological world, while Naga communities sustain bamboo shoots, edible wild leaves, herbs, and meat. Likewise, Manipuri Meitei culinary practices depend heavily on ngari, soibum, and hawaijar, while the Khasi, Jaintia, and Garo of Meghalaya draw upon smoking, fermentation, bamboo, and locally available wild vegetables and spinach. The Mizo culinary practices include boiling, smoking, and steaming, while Sikkim’s Lepcha food tradition incorporates the wild plants, seeds, and roots. Similarly, the Tripuri, Chakma, and Barman communities of Tripura employ bamboo-based preparations, fermented fish, and locally and seasonally produced vegetables and plants in distinctive preparations. These diversities in the culinary traditions and preparations, therefore, not only reflect regional variations but also function as a crucial site where social identity, tradition, gender roles, cultural survival, ecological ethics, and the innate relationship with the environment are constructed, sustained, and, at times, negotiated. Furthermore, the culinary practices and food habits of Northeast India also culminate in sites of exoticization, stereotyping, racial discrimination, commodification, and systematic marginalisation within the broader hegemonic nationalist and global culinary tradition.

In this context, the present volume intends to create a significant interdisciplinary platform for critically engaging with the culinary traditions of Northeast India beyond exoticization and peripheral representation. Thus, the proposed volume aims to examine food not simply as an indicator of culinary tradition but as a dynamic socio-cultural practice and tradition through which the heterogeneous indigenous communities of Northeast India negotiate cultural memory, identity, indigeneity, belonging, power structures, and ecology. The central objective of this volume is to interrogate and understand how the heterogeneous food cultures of Northeastern India have been frequently interpreted, represented, negotiated, and contested within the landscape of Indian mainstream and regional narratives. The volume particularly encourages submissions that foreground narratives of the region’s heterogeneous food cultures, while also focusing on marginalised voices, indigenous epistemologies, ecological ethics, oral histories, folklores, regional variations, and decolonial approaches to diverse food traditions. We warmly invite scholars and researchers from diverse disciplinary locations to contribute to this important academic endeavour.

Contributors may explore, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Food, literature, and the Mainstream Gaze
• Food, Identity, and Fiction
• Food Narratives, Ecology, and Social Identity
• Culinary Traditions and Cultural Imagination
• Foodways, Indigeneity, oral traditions
• Bodo cookery, Taste, and the Politics of Difference
• Tribal Cuisine, Indigeneity, and Decolonising Culinary Epistemologies
• Northeastern Cuisine, literature, Cinema, Representation
• Tribal food, Taste, Visual Culture
• Food, Identity politics, Belonging
• Food, Ecology, and Cultural Memory
• Gender, Domestic labour, and Culinary practices
• Culinary Practice, Gender, Body, and Everyday Life
• Food, Caste, Marginality, Religion
• Gastro-politics and food as semiotic
• Food, Memory, and Trauma
• Ritual, Food practices and sacred cuisines
• Food, Conflict, Migration, and Borders
• Assamese Cuisine, Culture, and Heterogeneity
• Vegetarianism, Non-vegetarianism, and the Conflict
• Food Security, Ecological consciousness, and Survival
• Culinary nationalism and regional identity
• Food discrimination and racial politics
• Food, Ecology, and Climate Change
• Food, Language, and Translation
• Food, Taste, and Resistance
• Indigenous food sovereignty and Sustainability
• Ecocritical approaches to food cultures
• Food, Biodiversity, and Environmental Humanities
• Food, Tourism, and Cultural Identity
• Indigenous food, Ritual, and Practice
• Tribal food, Stereotyping, Racism
• Culinary representations in literature, Cinema, and Media
• Food, indigeneity, and decolonial perspectives
• Tribal cuisines and decolonial perspectives
• Indigenous agriculture and ecological resilience
• Food aesthetics and material culture
• Postcolonial approaches to culinary histories
• Community kitchens and collective food practices

Intended Contribution

This edited volume seeks to make a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the emerging fields of Food Humanities, Cultural Studies, Indigenous Studies, Literary Studies, and Northeast Indian Studies, thereby critically foregrounding the complex culinary culture and food habits and their literary representations in the context of Northeast India. The volume aims to address this critical scholarly lacuna by positioning food not merely as a material or gastronomic category, but as a powerful cultural and political text through which questions of ethnicity, memory, migration, gender, ecology, land, belonging, and resistance are articulated and negotiated. It seeks to examine how food habits and culinary practices are represented in literary texts, oral narratives, folklore, memoirs, and digital cultures emerging from the region, while simultaneously interrogating issues of stereotyping, racialization, commodification, and cultural appropriation associated with Northeast Indian cuisines. In doing so, the collection aspires to create a significant scholarly archive that repositions Northeast Indian food cultures within broader discussions of identity politics, social histories, cultural representation, and decolonial knowledge production in South Asia and beyond.

Editors

 Prof. Dipendu Das, Department of English, Assam University, Silchar

 Joy Paul, ICSSR Doctoral Fellow, Department of English, Assam University, Silchar

 Chinmoyee Saikia, Research Scholar, Department of English, Assam University, Silchar

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts should be approximately 250-300 words with 5–6 keywords.
• Full chapters should be between 5,000 and 6,000 words, including abstract and Works Cited.
• All submissions must be original and unpublished.
• Authors must submit AI-detection and plagiarism reports, generated through Turnitin or DrillBit, along with their full chapter submissions.
• Manuscripts must strictly follow the APA 7th edition, formatting and citation style.
• Use Times New Roman, 12-point font, double spacing, and 1-inch margins.
• Contributors are requested to include a brief bio-note of 100-150 words, along with the abstract.
• Submissions should be sent in MS Word (.doc/.docx) format.

Publisher

Peter Lang has expressed a strong interest in the proposed volume. Further details regarding publication procedures will be shared in due course of time.

IMPORTANT DATES

Events                                                 Deadlines

Submission of Abstracts                    30th October 2026

Notification of Acceptance                15th November 2026

Submission of Full Chapters             20th February 2027

Submission: All abstracts and queries should be sent to: foodculture.neindia@gmail.com

References

Appadurai, A. (1981). Gastro Politics in Hindu South Asia. American Ethnologist, 8(3), 494-            511. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1981.8.3.02a00050

Appadurai, A. (1988). How to make a national cuisine: Cookbooks in contemporary India.    Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30(1), 3–24.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.).            Harvard University Press.

Fischler, C. (1988). Food, self and identity. Social Science Information, 27(2), 275–292.

Mintz, S. W., & Du Bois, C. M. (2002). The anthropology of food and eating. Annual Review            of Anthropology, 31, 99–119.

Shiva, V. (1988). Staying alive: Women, ecology and development. Zed Books