Back to the Future: Traditional rice varieties and agrarian memory in South India
Anjana Ramkumar
Cornell University
On a sultry summer morning in June 2023, Thiruthuraipoondi, a small town in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, was gearing up for its annual paddy festival. At its 15th iteration that year, the festival was among the most popular of its kind, drawing thousands of farmers from across Tamil Nadu annually. Notably, the event was a celebration not just of rice, but rice of a particular kind. The festival featured exclusively what were considered to be “traditional” or “heritage” varieties. In the 2023 festival, visitors are greeted with a large display of rice panicles as they enter the premise, labelled with their varietal names. Information cards flank these displays, detailing forgotten agronomical, and occasionally culinary, properties. At the entrance to the auditorium, traditional agricultural tools used to harvest and process rice post-harvest are featured, signalling to the times in which traditional varieties were prevalent. As the formal stage program kicks off inside the auditorium, a six-year-old wows the audience by reciting from memory the names of more than 100 traditional rice varieties. In a contemporary system where modern rice varieties are known by numbers rather than names, the recital showcased a different rice nomenclature of the past. This commemoration of traditional varieties, and the exercises of memory that it entails, are core components of a larger project to revive them.
Having been displaced extensively from Tamil Nadu’s agrarian landscape from 1970s, traditional rice varieties were revived in pockets of the state from the early 2000s. Spearheaded by an agroecological social movement, this revival critiqued industrial agriculture and proposed an alternative known locally as “natural farming.” In doing so, the movement made an argument as to why the grains of Tamil Nadu’s agrarian past were relevant for its present and future, emphasizing their nutritional value, cultural significance and ecological advantage. . While this argument is contested, it did pick up steam over subsequent decades. Today, traditional rice varieties are becoming popular in Tamil Nadu’s public realm for several reasons. From a production-centric angle, they are prized for their compatibility with low-input agriculture which reduces expense for farmers and enhances the ecological sustainability of rice cultivation. These varieties are also increasingly premium commodities with growing market demand. They are valued for their superior nutritional profile, their medicinal properties, and the nativity that they are considered to embody. In response, traditional rices are being cultivated by a few farmers in contemporary Tamil Nadu. While each of these factors offer rich fodder for discussion, I focus on a question that cuts across them: How are these once-lost grains remembered today as part of efforts to revive them? I outline how traditional rice varieties become discursive objects as natural farmers construct Tamil Nadu’s agrarian past, contemplate its present and envision its future.
Since its inception in 2007, the paddy festival in Thiruthuraipoondi has provided a valuable space for both the material exchange of heritage seeds as well as ideological exchange among natural farmers in the form of forums, workshops and keynote speeches. In addition to celebrating heritage seeds, the memory work performed at the festival also includes reflections of loss that seek to explain how, and why, these varieties are no longer prevalent in the regional food system today. A key component of such reflections is the Green Revolution.
Images: A display of traditional rice varieties greet visitors as they enter the paddy festival venue in Thiruthuraipoondi, Tamil Nadu. Varieties are labelled with their respective names and information cards are placed above. (Photo Credit: Deepa S Reddy)
The Green Revolution introduced fertilizer-responsive high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of rice to Tamil Nadu. That, along with the implementation of a policy environment designed to support HYV cultivation and procurement, led to a rapid decline in the cultivation of traditional varieties in the state. While the Indian Green Revolution is considered in global public discourse to be a timely technological intervention that boosted food production and averted mass starvation in the country, the collective memory of the event among natural farmers in Tamil Nadu registers on a different note. To them, the narrative of the Green Revolution is not one that prevented tragedy, but rather produced a tragedy itself. It was an intervention that destroyed the wealth of native crops and crop varieties, as in the case of rice, in Tamil Nadu. This reckoning with loss is situated within a broader ideological critique of the Green Revolution that extends to question the intervention’s motives and to contest the premise upon which it was legitimized. Such a critique parallels recent scholarship that present alternative histories of the Indian Green Revolution (Cullather, 2010; Patel, 2013; Kumar, 2019; Stone, 2019). For instance, the claim that India was underproducing cereals and that it was on the brink of a famine is highly contested by both natural farmers in Tamil Nadu as well as scholars. While the latter emphasize problems of distribution and access to food caused by India’s uneven terms of integration into the global economy, the former emphasize Tamil Nadu’s agroecological heritage and recall an ideal and desirable agrarian past in their contestation.
In Tamil Nadu, natural farming is also known as “heritage agriculture”. Conversations with natural farmers on why they chose to adopt this alternative practice would often inadvertently reference the past, where respondents would note the wealth of biological resources that was once harnessed by farmers in Tamil Nadu. Such references took many forms, drawing on themes of biological pest control, crop rotation practices and techniques for seed selection/storage among others. For instance, the traditional practice of cultivating urad beans (Vigna mungo) following the major rice crop of the year served to enhance soil health given the former’s nitrogen-fixing properties as a legume. Today, urad beans are rare finds in farmers’ fields and are imported into India in large quantities.
In these conversations, natural farmers emphasized the ingenuity of heritage agriculture, highlighting its ecological sustainability and cost-effectiveness. Such revering of the past is often accompanied with parallel critiques of the present. For instance, recollections of ecological sophistication of bygone agricultural practices highlight the agency of a rice farmer and his intimate knowledge of his field and its surrounding ecology. This is contrasted with the rampant farmer de-skilling that has taken place since the Green Revolution, reducing farmers to passive recipients of knowledge from extension and commercial agents (see Flachs & Stone 2019). As a retired civil servant-turned-natural farmer wryly commented, “Nowadays, the farmer goes to the agri-input store for every small thing. He buys bags and bags of chemicals without having any clue as to what he is buying, and applies it indiscriminately to his fields.”
For natural farmers in Tamil Nadu, traditional rice varieties are key components of this lost agroecological heritage given their belonging to a pre-Green Revolution past. The nostalgia with which these grains are spoken about is telling in this regard. For example, an article in the popular agroecology-focused bi-monthly “Kumudham Manvaasani” (Kannan, 2018) notes the following when extolling the benefits of traditional varieties: “How many people in this generation have gotten the opportunity to eat Kichali Samba and Thanga Samba rice? Oh! Can that exquisite taste be expressed in words?” Here, nostalgia for the past is paired with critiques of the present and, by extension, anxieties about the future. A major discourse around traditional rices that demonstrates this temporal continuum is woven around the question of health.
A key argument made of Tamil Nadu’s agroecological heritage is that it allowed for the sustaining of a much healthier population than today. An avid conserver of traditional varieties for the past 5 decades, Theerapan, a 70-year old natural farmer notes the following: “As far as I know, in those days, the number of hospitals in TN was very very small. Now, they are numerous. The reason for this is the chemical fertilizers. The poisonous nature of food is a discovery of science…inorganic rice is not good for the people. Naturally farmed traditional varieties have high nutrition content. They are tasty to eat and they are also good for health.” The decline in the population health that Theerappan alludes to refers primarily to lifestyle diseases. The incidence of diabetes in Tamil Nadu, for example, has steadily increased over the past decades among the middle and upper class (Pradeepa & Mohan, 2021). This prevalence of diabetes has popularized traditional rice varieties for two reasons. First, traditional varieties have, on average, a lower glycaemic index compared to HYVs. Second, they are typically consumed with their bran, in contrast to the fully polished white rice derived from HYVs, allowing them to better moderate blood sugar levels. Diabetes has been such a strong motivation for consuming traditional rice that natural farmers often get asked specifically for “sugar rice”, referring to traditional varieties that are beneficial to diabetics.
Diabetes is but one health condition that is illustrative of broader trends in declining health. The sleuth of medical conditions that are rising in incidence in Tamil Nadu today – including childhood obesity, infertility and cardiac stress – are juxtaposed with memories of past where the health of the Tamil population was believed to be better. Natural farmers I spoke to would cite the physical strength and stamina of able-bodied men in those days, they would note ancestors who lived to ripe old ages without any medical conditions and they would attribute these to lifestyles built around traditional agriculture. These new diseases are then rationalized as the result of the shift away from traditional diets. The proposed solution is to then return, at least in part, to food cultures of the past. The magazine article quoted earlier conveys this sentiment. It extends on its nostalgic take of traditional varieties by calling for their re-introduction into present-day diets as follows (Kannan, 2018): “If we eat traditional rices, will we get diseases? Only when traditional rices come into full utilisation, will Tamil people’s health and well-being flourish.” The article concludes with a punchy call: “Let’s cultivate traditional varieties; Let’s regain the lost well-being of the Tamil people!”
The representations of Tamil Nadu’s agrarian past, the claims of health and vitality of that era and the solutions proposed for a brighter future are, unsurprisingly, heavily contested. My attempt here is not to evaluate these narratives for their accuracy, but rather to demonstrate how curated memories of agrarian pasts can serve as powerful tools in informing present struggles and in aspiring for particular futures. These temporal linkages are crucial in framing what is desirable, what is achievable and the path forward in pursuing these. While the narratives outlined have originated primarily from among natural farming networks in Tamil Nadu, they have been received rather warmly by the state’s middle and upper-class consumers, broadening their appeal in the public sphere. Discourses about the past and future are powerful for they do not only enable ideological reflections on change but also shape material realities of the present. The return of traditional rice varieties to the fields of Tamil Nadu today and the continued celebration of the paddy festival in Thiruthuraipoondi every year are testament to that.
References
Cullather, N. (2010). The hungry world: America's Cold War battle against poverty in Asia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Flachs, A., & Stone, G. D. (2019). Farmer knowledge across the commodification spectrum: Rice, cotton, and vegetables in Telangana, India. Journal of Agrarian Change, 19(4), 614-634.
Kannan, S. (2018) Aarogiyam Tharum Parambariya Nel. Kumudham Manvaasanai. Issue 41: May 1 – May 15.
Kumar, R. (2019). India’s Green Revolution and Beyond Visioning Agrarian Futures on Selective Readings of Agrarian Pasts. Economic and Political Weekly, 54(34): 41 – 48.
Patel, R. (2013). The long Green Revolution. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1): 1-63.
Pradeepa R, Mohan V. (2021). Epidemiology of type 2 diabetes in India. Indian J Ophthalmol, 69(11) : 2932-2938.
Stone, G.D. (2019). Commentary: New histories of the Indian Green Revolution. The Geographical Journal, 185(2): 1-8. DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12297