Northeast India Could Become the Centre of Cultural Diplomacy between India and Taiwan

  Keywords: Northeast India, Taiwan, Cultural Diplomacy, Indigenous Cultures, Traditional Knowledge

 Date: 20th September, 2025

India’s Northeast is home to Austroasiatic tribes and most recent anthropological research, including linguistics study, has proven their connections with the Austronesians, the indigenous population of Taiwan, maritime Southeast Asia, parts of mainland Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar. 

"Aboriginal culture is symbolic to (sic) Taiwan because the aborigines are from the Austronesian ethnic group, which means they have no direct relationship with Chinese Han culture," said Shen Ming-Shih, Director of the division of National Security Research and acting deputy CEO at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defence and Security Research.

The Austronesians, who today belong to 16 tribes in Taiwan, seemingly originated in Taiwan and began migrating southward around 5000 years ago across the sea, to the Philippines and, on to other regions.  Austroasiatic languages belong to a group spread over Vietnam, Cambodia, Southern China, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar including parts of India’s northeast. 

"Although Taiwan's connection with China began around the Ming Dynasty, the aborigines had already been in Taiwan. This history also allows Taiwan to connect with Southeast Asian and Pacific countries and strengthen cultural exchanges," said Shen.

The cultural exchanges that Taiwan wants to strengthen can open a new diplomatic avenue with India because India's Northeast, the home to diverse tribes, including Austroasiatic ones belonging to the Munda and Mon-Khymer branches, not only features a large linguistic, cultural and ethnographic cluster but also a massive labour force of interest to Taiwan. 

The region has great tourism potential and offers a growing market and economy whose exports of tea and ethnic products already amount to 400 million dollars equivalent. 

There has long been a debate about the cultural connection between the Austronesian and the Austroasiatic populations and in the past two decades, studies have revealed more evidence of this link. The two groups have different origins but they have much in common.

Waruno Mahdi, a celebrated linguist from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, Germany wrote a research paper in 2024 that empirically proved the linguistic connection between the Austronesian and the Austroasiatic tribes, including those of the Munda and Mon-Khymer branch that dwell in Northeast India. 

Mahdi’s paper titled "Austroasiatic loanwords in Austronesian Languages" is based on his decades-long research on the lexical borrowing from Austroasiatic into Austronesian languages and he proves the historical contacts and reciprocal linguistic influences between the two branches. Other researchers have found similar connections between specific tribes belonging to the two main branches of the ethno-linguistic family. In addition, several genetic studies also prove the historical connection.

In 2013, Andrea Acri and Alexandra Landmann organised a collaborative project that culminated in a conference on “Cultural Transfer in Early Monsoon Asia: Austronesian-Indic Encounters” at Singapore’s Yusof Ishak Institute. Along with Roger Blench, Acri and Landmann wrote a volume titled “Re-connecting Histories across the Indo-Pacific” which was the result of 14 scholars from multi-disciplinary fields coming together at Yusof Ishak to investigate the cross-cultural connections in the Indo-Pacific region.

"Indeed, many ‘local’ small-scale societies and cosmopolitan cultures in the region stretching from Eastern India and Southeast Asia to China and Japan were already plural from the earliest times, yet retain some remarkable common features, such as wet-rice monoculture and houses on stilts (Abalahin 2011, p. 661),” wrote the three authors in the volume.

They also found common religious structures such as their “dual organisation and a focus on an ancestor cult, often vaguely defined as ‘shamanic’ or ‘animist.’ Remarkably similar head-hunting and burial practices characterise the religion of Naga tribes of Eastern India, as well as the former and present religions of some Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic-speaking ethnic groups settled in Myanmar, and might have been once widespread in maritime Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and the whole of Oceania.”

Dr. Poonam Sharma, a post-doctoral researcher at the International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS) at Taiwan’s National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu is originally from a small town called Diphu in central Assam. Sharma finds a distinct similarity between the local vegetable market of Assam and the local produce she finds in the morning markets of Hsinchu that are, incidentally, not found in New Delhi’s markets because north India offers a different food culture and produce basket. 

Hsinchu’s vegetable market not only reminds her of her mother’s kitchen in Assam but makes it easier for her to feel at home in distant Taiwan because she even finds "chayote, roselle leaves, sponge gourd, jackfruit seeds, and sesame seeds" in abundance in Taiwan. This helps her feed her family, including her school-going daughter, with her mother’s time-tested traditional recipes.

Chayote, called “Iskos” in Assamese, is a common vegetable in Assam, used for cooking a rich cuisine consisting of curries, stir-fries, and even a kimchi-like dish called “Khar”. In Chinese, Chayote is called "fóshou gua." Northeast India, one of the largest producers of bamboo in the world, also shares with Taiwan and other Southeast Asian countries a rich bamboo-shoot based cuisine. Prof. Shen too vouch for the many similarities between the fare of Taiwan and the cuisines of Southeast Asian nations, including a variety of meat dishes. 

Similarities in dietary habits have been evoked by those who advocate for promoting labour migration from Northeast India to Taiwan. India and Taiwan established a Memorandum of Understanding in 2024 to promote labour cooperation to help Taiwan meet its labour shortage crisis in the manufacturing industry. Though there is no official preference for any region, some voices support a partial or major intake from Northeast India. Prof. Shen believes that similarities in dietary habits can be a major attraction, and he regards it as more important than the aboriginal connection.

“I think the diverse culture of Taiwanese cuisine is more likely to attract these immigrant workers, because the proportion of Taiwanese aborigines is not high, and they may not be able to have extensive contact with Taiwanese aborigines,” he remarked, adding that if these agricultural labourers go to Taiwan's mountainous areas, where some Taiwanese indigenous people live, they will have the opportunity to interact with them and should be able to integrate quickly.

Gary Smoke is the Director/Vice-President of the Indigenous Bridges, a charitable foundation with a vision to preserve Indigenous culture and wisdom. His organisation runs the Indigenous Bridges Youth Ambassador program (IBYAP) that brings youth from various indigenous groups together from around the world for empowerment and leadership building. On July 20, Gary’s team, along with the young ambassadors from the aboriginal communities of Taiwan, started their Pacific Northwest Tribal Canoe Journey, trying to emulate the historical migration of the Austronesians. 

“There is also much to be learned from indigenous history. Indigenous people are the people closest to the land. They have developed techniques and processes that have provided for their existence without the convenience of modern technology,” said Smoke. This traditional knowledge, according to him, could become a connecting vector between Taiwan and Northeast.

Ideas such as creating a single market for ethnic products from the indigenous tribes of Northeast India and Taiwan are being explored. Smoke said, “Certainly, I believe this is possible, and we have explored this in the past. However, current law requires government approval, and that always takes time.”  

The traditional knowledge can gain more influence and recognition if further strengthened through efforts to create a joint global market and marketing strategy for ethnic products of the indigenous communities from the two sides. 

India has established the Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India Ltd. (TRIFED) under its Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs and has launched multiple promotion campaigns for products from the tribal communities of India’s Northeast according to a ‘local to global’ strategy for establishing markets within India and abroad.

There is a need for more research on the cultural connections between India Northeast and Taiwan to strengthen people-to-people ties. As the Indo-Pacific region becomes the fulcrum of intense geopolitical and geoeconomic contests, this Austroasiatic-Austronesian connection has all the potential to promote cultural diplomacy.

Venus Upadhayaya is a Senior Journalist and a MOFA 2025 Taiwan fellow. She’s a visiting scholar at National Chung Hsing University, Taichung. 

 Disclaimer: The views expressed above and the information available are those of the author/s and can therefore in no way be taken to reflect the position of Asian Confluence

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