A Presumably True Tale of Pork by a Naga Fan
Jim Wungramyao Kasom
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f Pork were a person and if I were to write a biography about Pork, the first line would read: When Mr. Pork visited Naga Inhabited Area for the first time during winter, he was stunned by the overwhelming number of fans there. Never had he seen so many wild and devoted people at the same place in his life.
When a non Naga friend told me that Naga eats ‘anything that moves’, I was smiling. But when he precisely put the percentage of ‘anything that moves’, down to 97%, I retorted that it wasn’t quite true. It would have been more agreeable if he had told me that Naga vegetarians eat Pork. For Nagas a festive meal is never complete without pork.God has blessed the Nagas with perfect genes and metabolism rate for pork activities. A average Nagas can eat as much pork as he wants and never bother about heart diseases or obesity (not until lately- city dwellers have began to feel weight issues). One of my friend’s father who have had a stroke still thinks that occasionally swallowing 4-5 pieces of pork does not do any harm, though he had been advised by the doctor not to touch any. His children are obliged to sympathize with him because he had sacrifice a great deal by bringing down the consumption from average half kilo to 4-5 pieces. It was like his right to live.
Imagine any Naga occasion without pork. Our forefathers must have gotten tired of eating buffalo and chicken. So they must have gone to Imphal to try new stuff. They found this little spiky hair animal running around, ‘oh oh oh’, so they decided to try their luck. It reveled their taste. So they kept going back. When the English Missionaries came, they must have been stunned to see these little hogs running around in the open space without any fence. They would have said, ‘hog, hog everywhere’. Our forefathers like ‘hog’ more than ‘oh oh oh’. So they decided to adapt into English hog. (Tangkhuls and some other Naga tribes called it hog).
The way Naga like to eat pork is with lot of garlic, ginger and red chili powder. In the olden days they cooked with lot of chili powder. When the chili is cooked for too long, it loose its kill and the tendency to stir up soppy stomach. Now there are more than one way of cooking pork. Though most common ways are to cook with bamboo shoot and fermented soybean.
Places like Delhi Haat, Nagaland Restaurant and Nagaland Kitchen (both in Delhi) score because they serve good pork. Though they have westernized it into grilled or roasted pork.
Pork has amazingly important medical value. My dad’s best smoke pork are made out of boiled or raw pork kept in granary for at least 3 months after drying in the fire. And here the weather has to be just perfect, dry and chilly. That is the best time to eat. It serves good up to a year or so but when it is kept for more than that it becomes displeasing to the taste. An enormous slab of pork was stashed away on my first birthday. I saw that as a dwindling black piece of meat with my own eyes when I was around 13 years of age. One of my neighbor’s mother came to ask for a piece of it. Grandma cut just a tiny piece and told me that it does wonder to a bad stomach. How ironic but it’s all true!
It is more that just the taste. It is the fat bonding that makes it an important part of what we are; the outgoing and ‘take life easy’ attitude of the Nagas exudes in the way we munch on pork.
