Bekang Um: All Wrapped Up in Banana Leaves
Volume 3 | Issue 7 [November 2023]

Lalhriatzuali Bungsut

Volume 3 | Issue 7 [November 2023]

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I watch my mother scrape off bits of sticky, pungent bekang um from a spoon onto a lush banana leaf and then pass it to me to wrap up with a piece of string. No verbal communication necessary, our hands move in silent synchrony. The ritual of preparing bekang um, or fermented soybean, has cemented itself as part of my upbringing, not only being a ritual that connects me to my mother, but my mother to hers, and to my Mizo heritage.

The process of making bekang um, which takes around 2 to 3 days, begins with cooking the soybeans in a pressure cooker, and releasing them onto a pre-laid base of banana leaves in a deep wide box-like container, with a cloud of steam that always fogs up my glasses. After sprinkling in baking soda, the leaves are folded backwards over themselves, to cover the cooked soybeans. At this moment, both my mother and my hands come together to hold some leaves in place while some extra banana leaves are being placed as a cover, all four hands crucial to keep everything intact. The bundle is then left atop the oven or in a similar warm place for a few days to ferment.

“Many women even my age don’t know how to make bekang um these days,” my mother would remind me, spreading a blanket and old fuzzy bathrobe atop the bundle to keep the warmth in. With her constant reminders, this ingredient became synonymous with the remains of the culture I was born into and constantly struggle to keep hold of. More than preparing a mere ingredient, I was conserving living history in our small cramped kitchen, carrying out the same actions that so many women before me had, a type of education that I could only have received in that space.

It was only recently that I came to recognize the significance of this ingredient. As a child, hearing my mother say she came across soybeans and banana leaves would make me groan in anticipation of the tedious process that lay ahead. In addition to the process, the smell and taste of bekang um made me turn my nose up in disgust. The only desire conjured up by seeing the brown paste-like mass is one of never wanting to let it past my lips. Its characteristic smell, which many claim to be its most appetising feature, does little to rouse my appetite. This distaste, much to my mother’s disappointment, has failed to disappear with time.

A year or two back, I ate dinner at a friend’s house. As is polite for a female guest to do, I helped my friend and her mother chop vegetables for the meal, chatting over the cutting boards. While exchanging our personal recipes for instant ramen (always add the chilli powder to the water first, no really, it makes miles of a difference), bekang um somehow came up in the conversation. I confessed that I didn’t like the taste, as her mother teasingly remarked: “Your tongue is just like that of a white person.” I managed to shake off the embarrassment at the time, but the guilt still lingered. The connection that I could have established with the generations before me through eating the same food as they did had been severed by my preference for a foreigner’s food. Although I suppose I can’t help liking or disliking certain foods, by disliking this ingredient, I am at least, at the subconscious level, choosing not to partake in the consumption of a food that I can proudly call my own, in favour of a borrowed cuisine.

I wasn’t the only student in my mother’s workshops on making bekang um—eager mothers from the neighbouring houses filed in through our front door and crowded our kitchen table to learn the same. This ingredient can be found in a number of variations and different names across kitchen tables in Nagaland, Nepal, Manipur, Meghalaya, and Arunachal Pradesh. My childhood home of Berkeley, California, would fling its doors open to the few Northeast Indian women of the area who would bond over sharing tips that had made their culinary experiences in the States more bearable, such as which supermarkets sold the bamboo shoots or fermented fish that reminded them of their homes. Among the shared knowledge were lessons from my mother to the other women on how to prepare fermented soybeans. The outcomes of their own attempts at preparing this ingredient would send the women running back to our kitchen: when their soybeans had turned out too soft, the mothers would come to find out where they had gone wrong, and when they were perfect, they would eagerly share their creations with us as a token of their appreciation for this newly acquired skill.

While this ingredient brought Northeastern women together in the States, this ingredient serves to ‘other’ Northeastern residents living in the metropolitan cities of India. The pungent smell of bekang um has often elicited negative reactions from the neighbours of those who cook with this ingredient. In some apartment complexes, Northeastern residents have occasionally been requested not to cook with fermented soybeans due to the ingredient’s distinct and overpowering smell. In her article “Fermenting Modernity,” Dolly Kikon draws attention to how the New Delhi police released a ‘guideline’ for Northeastern residents and visitors in 2007, suggesting that they should avoid cooking with fermented soybeans, for the sake of avoiding conflict with others. Similarly, several Northeastern migrants living in the metropolitan capital city of New Delhi have reported their rental prices being increased because of their cooking ‘smelly food’, or to make up for inconveniencing their neighbouring tenants, as McDuie-Ra illustrates on his illuminating article on Northeast migrants in Delhi. The attack on and prohibition of the consumption of a food that is a part of one’s culture is ultimately an act of erasing one’s culture as a whole, relegating their tastes to being of less importance than the comfort of their neighbours.

While some things remain constant – the taste of bekang um, the process of making it, my mother’s love for the ingredient – my understanding of its importance has significantly changed over time. As I wind a piece of string over and around the bundle of banana leaf-bound sticky, warm, fresh-off-the-oven bekang um, the lengths this ingredient has travelled to land into my hands occurs to me, and all that this food represents when consumed away from the comforts of its points of origin. By writing about this food, I keep it alive in a different way – less sensory, yes, but less ephemeral, a way of appreciating it for what it does, and not just for what it is. Perhaps thinking about bekang um in this way, recognising its value as a product of Mizo lineages makes my appreciation for it just as meaningful as my being able to stomach the food would have been.