Men and women eat together, within the house. The right hand is used in eating. Leaf-plates are most used, but platters of pot-metal are also found. No knife is used in eating: the meat is cut up beforehand.
The first meal is cooked and eaten at 7 or 8 a.m., and consists of rice. The evening meal is cooked after the day’s field-work is over, unless there be a cook in the house. At each meal a pinch of the food is put aside for the God (ārnàm).
The national drink is rice-beer (hòr, hòrpō), which is made by each household for itself. The rice is cooked, and well broken up on a mat. It is then mixed with a ferment called thàp (Bengali, bākhar), made of powdered rice with certain kinds of leaves pounded into it, and the whole dried for use as required. After this has been thoroughly mixed with the boiled rice, the latter is heaped up and covered with plantain leaves, and put aside in the house. In three or four days, in the hot weather, fermentation sets in; in the cold weather a longer time is required. It is then put into an earthern jar or kalsī (Beng.) and water added, after which it is emptied into a conical basket, whence it is allowed to strain through a bamboo joint into a pot below. To make hòr (Ass. modh), rice is taken from the basket and warmed with water, which is strained off, and is the modh or hòrpō; the rice is thrown to the pigs. The better and stronger beer is that which was drained off the original conical basket, and is called hòr-ālàng.
Āràk (Hind.) is the spirit distilled from the fermented rice mixed with water. The still is a rude one of earthern pots connected by a bamboo. A stronger stuff is made by distilling hòr-ālàng.
Hòr will keep good for two months if left untouched. It is a common family drink. Gourds are used for keeping it in and carrying it about for use.
Drunkenness is not common in the villages, and the ceremonies and festivities at which beer is drunk are not noisy. The mē or general council, however, when large quantities are consumed, is sometimes noisy.
Opium is used to a large extent by the Mikirs as by other Assamese (Mr. Allen states that nearly all male adults indulge in it). Tobacco is smoked, and also chewed with betel. The bowl of the tobacco-pipe is made of burnt clay or of bamboo root. Betel-nut (kōvē; Khasi, kwai) is largely consumed in the usual way, with lime and pān-leaf (bīthī); and (as among the Khasis) time and distance are computed by the interval required to chew a nut. (The phrase is ingtàt ē-òm-tā ēr, “the time it takes to chew the nut and pān-leaf red”: ingtàt, roll for chewing; ē-, one; òm, chew; ēr, red.)
[1] One is tempted to conjecture that this statement is an error based on a confusion between the Miris and the Mikirs in Colonel Dalton’s notebooks. The custom referred to obtains among the Miris. [↑]
[2] In the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for 1874, p. 17, there is an illustration and description of a Mikir “bachelors’ house,” or teràng, by Mr. C. Brownlow, a tea-planter in Cachar. The group of Mikirs among whom it was found lived at the head of the Kopili river, looking down on the Cachar valley. [↑]