Agriculture festivals in India: How climate change will shape the way we celebrate harvest

But the laburnum blooms earlier each year, not waiting for mid-April, when the sun moves to the Medam rashi (Aries) and, according to the traditional Malayalam calendar, a new year — and a new agricultural cycle — begins. The kanikonna makes its appearance as early as February now. By the time Vishu is celebrated, summer is already here and the rhythms of life, established a long time ago, when people first began coaxing food out of the earth, seem increasingly out of step with the natural world.

Around India — and the world — the transition from winter to spring/summer is an occasion to celebrate and express gratitude for the abundance of the fields. From Holi to Bihu, Gudi Padwa to Ugadi and Puthandu, the festivities are marked by music and dance, prayers and other rituals and, most importantly, the preparation of feasts using the very wealth reaped from the soil. But as the seasons change out of schedule, or behave uncharacteristically, how might these traditions change? And if, as a result of these vagaries, crops mature too late, or too early or not at all, what do we have left to give thanks for?

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The story goes that the goddess Parvati was once so angry with her consort Shiva, after he described food — her gift to the people — as “maya” or a mere illusion, that she withdrew from the world in order to teach him a lesson. Bellies pressed inwards with hunger, and people of every age, from infants to the very old, cried out for a morsel. As famine descended on the world, only one place still offered sustenance — Kashi, where Parvati appeared as Annapurna and fed all those who sought her out. This is where Shiva, having understood the importance of the goddess’s work, arrived in the form of an aged beggar and asked for her forgiveness. And thus, the famine ended.

Hunger, whether it emerged from divine wrath or not (in most cases, human actions and policies were as much, if not more, responsible) is the single most important factor in shaping human history. “The history of human diet is the history of adapting to whatever conditions people found themselves in,” says archaeologist and culinary anthropologist Dr Kurush F Dalal. Around 12,000 years ago, when human beings first settled down, there was an abundance of food, following the end of the last great ice age. As the population of a more relatively food-secure species grew, the cultivation of plants began, developing independently in different regions around the world. “It was a very long and very complicated process but simply put, agriculture marked a paradigm shift in the human diet. It became centered around grains, which could be grown once a year, but stored and consumed throughout the year,” says Dalal.

Not that hunger ever went away — as humans grew more dependent on agriculture, it metastasized into famine. Crop failures as much as war and social systems that entrenched unequal access to resources led to periods of mass starvation when people had to resort to a way of life abandoned long ago, of foraging in the wilderness for weeds, seeds and even tree bark. In the Indian subcontinent, one of the most devastating examples of this is the Bengal Famine of 1943 when the British wartime policy of denying rice and boats — the latter essential for transporting food — in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Japanese troops led to the death of an estimated three million people. Survivors and eye-witnesses offer nightmarish accounts of subsistence on wild greens and tubers, leaves and flowers, the starchy water left over from cooking rice and even small snails found in puddles and ponds.

Similarly, in Rajasthan, during the droughts and famines that afflicted the region, hardy wild plants were consumed, from bark to seeds to leaves, to stave off starvation. For example, MM Bhandari in ‘Famine Foods in the Rajasthan Desert’ (1974, Economic Botany) records that during the severe famines of 1899 and 1939, people stripped off the bark of the “khejra” (khejri) — an iconic plant of the desert, much loved for its young pods, sangri. This bark was then “dried and ground with any available coarse grain to augment the meagre meal contained in it and give it more substance.”

Will a future threatened by the climate crisis bring back such contingencies? We have estimates today that portend a future of hunger, if we don’t act quickly and effectively. They foretell a disruption — already underway in many parts of the world — to the way we grow our food. According to data from the National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture, out of India’s 573 agriculturally-relevant rural districts, only 59 (about 10 per cent) face “low” or “very low” climate risk. At 310, over half (54 per cent) such districts face “very high” or “high risk” — 109 are at “very high” risk and 201 are at “high” climate risk. The remaining 204 (36 per cent) are at “medium” climate risk.

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Not bark, not seed, not leaf. Other solutions may already exist. “We have forgotten the times that we have really come from,” says KG Sreeja, “Many of the agricultural systems we developed, particularly in places that don’t offer the most hospitable of environment, really emerge from our negotiations with nature.” Sreeja is director, research, at the Kochi-based Equinoct, which, as their website informs, “provides science-based solutions for addressing the impacts of climate change.”

We are talking about the Pokkali rice cultivation that is found in the coastal areas of Kerala’s Alappuzha, Ernakulam and Thrissur districts. A unique salt-tolerant variety that has been cultivated in the region for centuries precisely because it grows where no other kind of rice will, Pokkali may be an ideal candidate to feed people in a future where the sea has intruded far into the land. Sreeja and her team have been studying the potential of this rice variety — which is prized equally for its unique flavour — as a way of understanding how hyperlocal solutions to an otherwise vast and unmanageable global problem might be developed.

Around the world, there are similar attempts to look back at the past — or explore the potential of the present — as a way to prepare for the future, from millets and pulses to grass and seaweed. For example, salicornia, (also known as glasswort or sea asparagus) which thrives in salty, marshy lands, on beaches and in mangroves, was for long prized as an nutrient-rich “vegetable” during the harsh winter months in the colder coastal regions of northern Europe. Even as it has emerged as a haute cuisine replacement for table salt in recent years — thanks to its natural, herby saltiness — it is being researched as yet another important addition to cornucopia of the future. Another example is the cactus pear or prickly pear which, besides having high heat tolerance and low water requirement, is also a perennial. Used as food and fodder in arid regions for centuries — Mexico has a range of recipes, including taco filling, for nopales (the fleshy pad of the cactus) — its potential as a scalable crop is being studied at the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas.

Sreeja says, “When it comes to the changes that are happening, whether in the seas or on the plains, they are something we have committed to living with as the human race… no amount of optimism, AI or modelling or machine learning will stop these changes. What will come to our aid is agency, the spirit of having survived as a race on this planet.”

In the Vishus, Bihus and Ugadis of the future, is this — the human spirit and agency — what we will give thanks for?