There is a sentence in Duncan McDuie-Ra’s 2012 ethnography of Northeast Indian migrants in Delhi that has stayed with me since I first read it.
Describing why the city’s new service economy — its malls, spas, high-end restaurants — had come to prefer workers from the region, he wrote: “The demand for their labour is due to their un-Indian ‘exotic Asian’ appearance and a reputation for being hardworking and loyal.”
The sentence is clinical, as academic sentences tend to be. What it describes is not. It describes a labour market that has learned to want you for how you look while you serve, and to remain indifferent to whether you ever own anything. McDuie-Ra called this dynamic precisely: inclusion without ownership.
More than a decade after he published Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail, the dynamic has not changed. It has been aestheticised.
Why they leave, and what the data actually captures
Every data set on Northeast outmigration comes with a caveat worth stating upfront. The 2011 Census recorded that around 30% of Northeast inter-state migrants cited work and employment as their reason for moving — up from 17% in 2001.
But the Census systematically undercounts women’s economic migration: female movement is typically recorded as migration “due to family,” even when women take up employment after arriving. The real driver is larger and more complicated than the headline figure suggests.
What no Census category captures at all is the specific weight of what pushes women out.
In a separate study, McDuie-Ra documented how decades of AFSPA, insurgency, and counterinsurgency had produced what he called a “frontier culture of violence” that falls with particular force on women.
The NFHS-4 (2015–16) recorded spousal violence prevalence of approximately 55% in Manipur — the highest of any Indian state at that time. For many women, migration is not a career calculation. It is the only door that opens.
The education system offers no anchor. None of the Northeast’s own state universities appear in India’s top 50 in the NIRF 2024 rankings — the closest was Gauhati University, at 57th place.
Young people who leave for degrees, as many did through the 2000s, find little reason to return. Their employment follows their education south, and the hills are left a little emptier.
Sikkim sits outside this particular story. Its net migration rate was positive in 2011 — it was receiving people, not losing them.
Sikkimese women who move to Delhi are not, in aggregate, fleeing structural collapse. What brings them tends to be more specific, more interior, more their own.
The ownership gap
Here is the fact that ought to unsettle easy assumptions about Northeast women and economic agency. According to a Lok Sabha written reply by the Ministry of MSME Tripura leads all of India with 66% of its MSMEs owned by women. Mizoram is at 60%. Manipur and Nagaland are both at 53%. Sikkim at 46%.
These are not rounding errors. They are, from Lok Sabha data, a portrait of a region where women’s enterprise ownership is a cultural inheritance — built from matrilineal traditions, self-help group networks, and centuries of women holding the economy of the hills in their hands.
That inheritance does not cross the Brahmaputra. A field survey of 225 Northeast migrants working in Delhi found that 73% are employed in the informal private sector, without social security of any kind — in salons, call centres, airline cabins, reception desks, mall floors.
The sample is small; the pattern, as McDuie-Ra showed a decade earlier, is not.
The structural explanation is best understood through its mirror image: the Marwari migration. When Marwari traders moved into Assam in the 19th century, they did not begin at the economic margins.
Within decades they had come to dominate indigenous finance and trade — a community from the dry towns of Shekhawati that, by 1963, Time Magazine estimated controlled 60% of Calcutta’s commerce, 45% of Bombay’s, and held half of the capital in India’s private sector.”
Thomas Timberg, in his foundational study, identified the mechanism: joint family systems, a credit network that spanned the subcontinent, institutional trust that travelled with the community across every new border it crossed.
That is what portable capital looks like. The Northeast woman who arrives in Delhi carries none of this infrastructure. No credit history the formal economy will recognise. No community network that pre-establishes her as creditworthy to a banker or a landlord.
The gap between the Marwari who opens a shop and the Northeast woman who works the counter of someone else’s is not a gap in ambition or ability. It is a gap in what the system was built to carry.
The café that sold you the prayer flags but not the politics
Consider the lungta. In Sikkim and across the Himalayan communities, these prayer flags are strung at mountain passes, outside the homes of newborns, at the thresholds of transition — each colour carrying specific meaning, each flag a small act of community prayer sent into the wind. They are not decorative. They are devotional.
Walk into the right café in Hauz Khas and you will find them above your table, between the Edison bulbs and the exposed brick, lending the room a pleasant sense of elsewhere.
The ‘elsewhere’ is the product. The lungta — stripped of the passes and the births and the prayers — have become atmosphere, which is to say they have become revenue.
Delhi’s Himalayan café landscape has expanded considerably in the past decade. Yeti — The Himalayan Kitchen, a multi-city chain built by founders with no Northeast connection — serves Jhol momo and Wai Wai Sadeko to considerable commercial success, surrounded by prayer wheels and Tibetan masks.
It is not alone, and it is not villainous. But it completes, at the level of culture, what the labour market accomplished at the level of work: the Northeast is welcome as aesthetic; its politics is not.
The Northeast has a great deal of politics. Decades of AFSPA. Land rights movements. The renewed violence of the CAA and NRC debates. The specific, quotidian, documented experience of being called “chinky” on a Delhi street, or hired precisely because you look un-Indian enough to make a restaurant feel cosmopolitan. None of this appears in the Himalayan café. What appears is momos and mood lighting.
The word the café has borrowed and emptied — chautari — originally named something rather different. In Nepali and Sikkimese tradition, the chautari is the stone platform beneath a tree at the side of a mountain path: a resting place where travellers stopped to share food, news, and the political intelligence of the hills.
It was, long before the concept of a restaurant existed, a space where culture and politics moved together. What the Himalayan café has done with it is, in its small way, exactly what the labour market did with the people.
One kitchen in Jangpura
My mother has been building enterprises for thirty years. Momo stalls at Sikkimese melas. A canteen at Sikkim University. A paying guest house in Gangtok that was full of warmth and genuine respect for young people’s freedom — and that put me through Lady Shri Ram College for Women in Delhi on what it earned.
None of this was recorded. No credit history compounded. No business was ever formally registered. She built all of it inside a violent marriage, not in spite of that life but as the means by which she kept her heart free inside it.
Four years ago she left — voluntarily, walking into a new district of Sikkim, a hill town called Pakyong where the air is cleaner and the past is someone else’s problem. Last year she came to Delhi, to live with me.
She is 48. She did not come here to be saved. She came here, in Ravish Kumar’s phrase, ishq mein shehar ho jaana — to fall in love with a city by being changed by it.
This May/June, if the fundraising holds (and here is how you can support it), she will open Chautari — Taste of Sikkim — a ten-seat kitchen in Jangpura. Momo, Shyaphaley, Wai Wai Sadeko, Aloo Chewra, thukpa.
The counter will carry products from women’s self-help groups in Sikkim — rhododendron juice, churpi, teas, pickles — giving hill producers a formal market route that currently doesn’t exist for them. Surplus returns to community mental health and livelihood causes in Sikkim. Fair wages from day one.
The name is deliberate. A chautari where the food comes with its history attached. Where the politics is not left at the door.
The campaign needs Rs 11 lakh of which Rs 5 lakh has been raised, almost entirely by people who have already eaten my mother’s food and are trying to eat it again.
The remaining Rs 6 lakh is the distance between informal and formal — between thirty years of enterprise that the economy declined to record, and one kitchen registered in her name.
If you have eaten Himalayan food in Delhi and paused, even briefly, to wonder who made it: here, finally, is one answer.
Also Read: How a new crab spider connects Manipur and China
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