Tribal Tastes

Lessons in traditional Apatani cooking in Arunachal Pradesh’s Ziro valley

- Prachi Joshi

A cauldron bubbles away on a wood fire in the middle of a dimly lit room that serves as living room, kitchen, dining room, and bedroom. Over the fire, a couple of racks suspended from the ceiling are stacked with a hotchpotch of things—pine wood for the fire, drying corn cobs, and various cuts of pork set out to age. “I have meat aged for a month to that aged for two years,” says my host Yenni Tage, a member of the Apatani tribe living in Ziro, who goes by the pet name, Rani. “I bought some fresh pork from the market for you since some people don’t like the taste of aged meat, but that is what we traditionally cook with,” she explains. I promptly choose to go the traditional way.

Spring is just setting in late March and I’m in Ziro to attend the annual Myoko Festival, a tribal festival that celebrates the friendship between Ziro valley’s eight Apatani villages. This is also the time when rice is sown in the valley’s terraced fields, so Myoko also celebrates fertility with the Apatanis praying for a good crop. Every year, the venue rotates between villages and the festivities last over a month. There’s ritual chanting, revelry fuelled by apong (fermented rice beer), and animal sacrifice presided over by the village shaman.