After a Glasgow Restaurant Erased Northeast India From Its Map, Lovlina Borgohain Asked a Familiar Question: Where Are We?

During a celebratory dinner for India’s boxing contingent at the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Assam-born Olympic medalist Lovlina Borgohain looked down at a napkin and saw a familiar erasure. Mister Singh’s India, a long-running curry house on Elderslie Street that markets itself as “the Home of Curry,” had printed a map of India that cut off the Northeast. The same truncated outline appeared outside on the restaurant’s branding. Borgohain, who had just taken silver in the women’s 75kg division, said the omission hurt.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way. I felt a little hurt by this. In the map of India, our North East is missing,” she said in a video that spread quickly from the dinner. “As someone from the North East, that really hurts us.” She raised the issue with the owners. According to Borgohain, they first described the artwork as a British map, then apologized and said they would change it. Boxing Federation of India president Ajay Singh, who was also at the table, later told reporters there was no confrontation: the restaurant accepted the mistake and promised a correction. Mister Singh’s followed with a public apology, saying it would take immediate steps to replace the logo with a proper map.

That sequence could end as a one-day sports sidebar. For a food desk, the napkin is the point. Diaspora Indian restaurants do not only sell meals. They often become the default cultural authority for diners who never visit Guwahati, Imphal, or Kohima: the wall art, the logo, the “Indian” on the awning, and the menu that still reads like a greatest-hits tape of butter chicken and tikka masala. When that imagery drops an entire region, it rehearses a smaller idea of India than the one Borgohain carried into the ring.

Decoration is never just decoration

A map on a napkin looks like stationery. In practice it teaches. Guests learn which geography counts as India before the first papad arrives. Mister Singh’s has served Glasgow for roughly three decades and has hosted visiting teams before; that longevity is why a wrong outline matters more, not less. The room was presenting itself as a proud Indian house while visually editing out Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim, the eight states usually grouped as the Northeast.

Reporting on the dinner also noted that the same branding mishandled parts of Jammu and Kashmir. Borgohain’s public comments stayed on the Northeast. That focus is enough for this desk. The culinary version of the same habit is already familiar: “Indian food” abroad still often means a Punjabi-leaning, curry-house grammar, while highland, fermented, bamboo, and mustard-oil kitchens from the Northeast stay off the printed page.

What disappears when the Northeast disappears

Assamese tables lean on tenga sour fish, khar alkaline greens, sesame, bamboo shoot, and pork in many community kitchens, with ingredients such as kaji nemu (Assam lemon) that do not behave like a generic curry paste. Naga cooking builds smoked meats, axone (fermented soybean), and intense chillies including bhoot jolokia. Manipuri plates bring eromba, black rice, and fermented fish pastes such as hentak. Those are not exotic footnotes. They are everyday food for millions of Indians whose states vanish when a logo stops at Bengal or the Brahmaputra never appears.

Inside India, dedicated Northeast rooms are still scarce outside a few metros, though Hyderabad’s Aakhol and other Assamese and Naga projects show demand when someone finally prints the cuisine by name. Abroad, the gap is wider. British and American “Indian” dining built itself for a cautious majority palate and a labor history centered elsewhere on the subcontinent. Northeast cooks and diners have had to ask Borgohain’s question for years: where are we, if even the map on the napkin cannot find us?

What better representation looks like

Responsible representation is not a scavenger hunt for authenticity theater. It starts with accurate geography when a restaurant claims India as its brand, then with menus that can say Assamese, Naga, or Manipuri without collapsing them into “tribal specials.” It means sourcing and staffing that match the claim, and it means treating Northeast diners as part of the house, not as a surprise guest who has to correct the stationery mid-celebration.

Mister Singh’s apology and promise to redraw the logo are the minimum repair. The larger work for diaspora Indian restaurants is the same work hyper-regional kitchens are already doing with Chettinad, Kerala, Bengali, and Gujarati rooms: stop selling a flattened country and start naming the places that cook. Borgohain did not ask for a lecture. She asked to be on the map.

Further reading

• Hyderabad Finally Has the Assamese Restaurant Expats Were Waiting For
• Beyond Butter Chicken: Why South Asian Dining Got Hyper-Regional
• Why “Indian Food” Is the Wrong Menu Category
• Scotland’s Only Bib Gourmand Indian Kitchen Just Took the City Centre
• Most People Only Know Mahua as Liquor. This Festival Puts It on the Plate.
• GOLDSEA: India’s impact on American food culture