By Imlisanen Jamir
For Naga people, feasting has always been the primary language of celebration. This is not new. We have long measured joy in firewood burned, animals slaughtered, and the number of people fed without restraint. Generosity has always been a cultural muscle we flex instinctively — an inheritance from village kitchens where abundance meant community, not competition.
But even with such deep roots, it’s worth asking what feasting has come to mean today. The question is no longer “Are you celebrating?” but “How much meat is on the table?” The size of the feast has become the shorthand for sincerity. A celebration isn’t judged by the laughter around the hearth but by how heavily the plates bend under meat.
The feast has become a spectacle, a statement. Abundance is proof of love, status, and capability. And because everyone knows this unspoken rule, the pressure is relentless. No host wants to be remembered for “not enough” — it would be social humiliation dressed as politeness. People cook and serve out of fear of being talked about. Warm hospitality turns into quiet anxiety.
Hospitality becomes labour. The kind of labour that begins before sunrise and stretches until the last guest leaves, leaving not a trace of tiredness on the face of those who cooked. The season expects smiles even when the hosts are exhausted. It demands participation even from those who desperately need a moment to sit and breathe.
This isn’t a rejection of the feast. Naga food culture is rich, proud, and deeply communal. Meat is not just meat — it is history, identity, resistance against being told what we should or should not eat. But the pride that once stemmed from community is too often expressed now through excess. We rely on surplus to communicate what words supposedly fail to say: welcome, celebration, respect.
Yet culture is not fragile. It does not need to be padded with kilos of flesh to survive.
Maybe the more dangerous thing is how quickly we normalize exhaustion — especially women’s exhaustion. The hands that feed us work the hardest, speak the least, and are noticed only when the plates run dry. Behind every feast is a human cost we seldom acknowledge, because the show must go on.
So perhaps, in this season of feasts, we can make space for a different kind of pride. The pride of presence. The pride of enough.
What if we measured hospitality not by leftovers stacked in refrigerators, but by the comfort our guests felt? What if the greatest offering wasn’t a mountain of meat, but the time we gave each other? What if enough was enough?
We don’t need to abandon the feast to reclaim its meaning. We only need to remember that the table is a place for people — not performance.
That the best celebrations are not eaten — they are shared.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
