At a producer’s food processing unit in Meghalaya.
Indigenous temperate fruit jams of The North East Store.
King Chili (Ghost Chili) hot sauce of The North East Store.
A recent spurt in e-commerce websites offering tough-to-procure ingredients and food items from India’s eight north-eastern States is good news for homesick north-easterners and foodies craving a taste of the exotic
Do you know what axone, ngari and anishi are? Or u-morok,
perhaps? If you, like most of us, are lost in a quagmire of semantic
ambiguity and haven’t got the foggiest idea, don’t worry. The chances of
you having ever encountered the aforementioned words are woefully low.
But for Paiwang Yanthungo, axone (fermented soya beans), ngari (fermented fish), anishi (dried taro leaves) and u-morok (king
chilli) are more than just the mere sum of their alphabet parts. Their
very mention throws up fond memories and results in a salivating mouth
for the 24-year-old Bengaluru-based MBA student, who calls Nagaland
home. And, until a few months ago, Yanthungo had to rely on either
friends or relatives visiting him from Nagaland or on his annual trips
back home to Kohima to replenish his constantly diminishing stockpile of
the same. Not anymore.
Thanks to a sudden spurt in
e-commerce ventures offering tough-to-procure ingredients and food items
right from Arunachal Pradesh to Tripura and in between, homesick
northeasterners scattered all over India are able to jazz up boring
office canteen dals and instant noodles with their favourite
pickles and condiments that reflect the culinary diversity of the
country’s eight northeastern States.
One such online
set up is Mumbai-based Gitika’s PakGhor on www.yummade.com started by
former marketing whiz Gitika Saikia, originally from Assam. “I decided
to be a part of this e-commerce venture because initially my customers
had to come home to collect the items. Everything is online now and
purchasing is much more convenient, so why not food? Plus, it has helped
me increase my customer base,” she says. Stocking a limited range of
artisanal pickles, including the fiery hot bhoot jholokia (Assamese king chilli) and the rather exotic-sounding bamboo shoots and tenga jalphai (Indian olive) pickles, Gitika prefers to concentrate only on taste and quality and not quantity.
Offering
a mindboggling 1,600 food and handicraft products in its portfolio,
sourced from more than 100 suppliers and artisans, Bengaluru-based
Giskaa.com claims to be India’s largest online store for northeast
products, delivering orders all across India and also overseas to places
such as Malaysia, Tanzania, Abu Dhabi and even Costa Rica. Its rather
strange name is an acronym formed by taking the first letter of the
names of the capitals for each of the eight northeastern States: G –
Guwahati/Gangtok, I – Imphal/Itanagar, S – Shillong, K – Kohima, A –
Agartala and A – Aizawl.
“I have lived outside of
Manipur, my home State, for the last 23 years. While living in
Bengaluru, traditional Manipuri food was something that I missed every
day. The northeast population living in the major Indian cities is huge,
estimated to consist of close to a million people. Most of them will
share the same sentiment,” says Meghanath Singh, Giskaa’s CEO,
explaining why he began the venture. “I was constantly yearning to
contribute something to my home State and the northeast region combined.
I also had a strong passion to start a company of my own, so I took the
plunge and quit a comfortable and relatively well-paying IT job in July
2014 to start Giskaa,” he says.
Mr. Singh along
with his partners Surchand Wahengbam and Ratheesh Elayat also hopes to
make Giskaa a platform for artisans from the northeast to professionally
showcase their products. He wants to promote them to a large mainstream
Indian audience. “The people and culture of northeast India are often
misunderstood and misinterpreted. Most of it is due to lack of awareness
and knowledge of the region. A platform like ours would definitely go a
long way in bridging this gap and bring the northeast closer to the
mainstream,” he says.
Based out of Shillong,
Meghalaya and once again founded by three friends, Catherine Dohling,
Trideep Rabha and Dhawal Singh, The www.northeaststore.com may operate
on a much smaller scale than Giskaa, but its game plan and focus is just
as intense. “We source our products straight from the makers and
producers as well as from NGOs, government groups and self-help groups
who directly support local farmers and artisans. We follow an
inventory-based model as opposed to a marketplace, where we hold stocks
of products that we source,” says Dohling, who is quick to add that
running a business like theirs is not free of setbacks. “Product
discovery is quite a challenge as there are many unique items being made
in small, remote villages, which very few people are even aware of.
Also, there is lack of e-commerce specific infrastructure within the
region. For example, quality packaging material needs to be sourced all
the way from Delhi.”
But hurdles aside, a quick
glance at Gitika’s PakGhor, Giskaa and The NorthEast Store’s Facebook
pages reveals a bunch of very satisfied customers. Take Mumbai-based
Kingshuk Bhattacharya, for instance. He writes: “It was really awesome
to get to know about this initiative [Giskaa]. I am from Tripura and
[living] out of the State for 30 years now. It was a welcome sight to
see that I can now get my share of ngari, fermented soya and yongchak (a type of Manipuri bean) sitting in Mumbai!”
And
it’s not just homesick northeasterners who are patronising these online
stores; even nostalgic expats are joining the bandwagon. “One story
that comes to mind is that of Andrew Hoffland from New Delhi. He used to
work in Nagaland as a teacher 20 years ago. Since he left, he did not
have access to products from there and when he discovered us, he was
very glad to be able to buy food and products from Nagaland. It felt
good to hear that he was delighted to taste these items again,” says a
contented Dohling.
But perhaps the best way to
summarise this interesting new trend is to take a leaf out of Giskaa’s
tagline that says it all in four simple words —Bring Home The Northeast.
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