Cooking the Self: Food, Identity, and Resistance in the Writings of Ao, Kire, and Dai

Abstract Food is not merely a biological necessity but a powerful symbol that embodies the socio-cultural, historical, and political ethos of a community. In the context of Northeast India, a region defined by its ethnic diversity and indigenous epistemes, food practices reveal a significant cultural topography. This paper explores food as a cultural marker and a site of identity formation, resistance, and memory among the indigenous communities of the Northeast. Through a postcolonial literary lens, the study investigates the representations of food in select Northeast Indian literary texts, highlighting how culinary traditions are intricately tied to land, cosmology, and social belonging. Drawing upon authors such as Easterine Kire, Temsula Ao, and Mamang Dai, this paper argues that indigenous foodways function not only as traditional practice but also as a resilient counternarrative to colonial modernity and cultural erasure. Keywords: Foodways, Postcolonialism, Indigenous Literature, Northeast India, Cultural Identity