The Shālikūṭa Project

The Shālikūta project was convened by Deepa Reddy in 2019, and introduced in early materials that are largely reproduced in this post: “Introducing Śālikūṭa.” What follows below is a somewhat more formal project description.

What is Shālikūta?

Shālikūta is a collaborative project dedicated to gathering facts and stories about Indian heritage rice and building a “library”: part pharmacopoeia [in that it documents the nutraceutical properties, from folk and scientific sources], part cookery book [in that it includes recipe compilations], part cultural resource [in that it documents cultural practices]. Shali is a Sanskrit word that describes winter-ripening, medicinal rices and it is a word for rice itself. Shālikūta is literally “heap of rice” or a granary; figuratively it is our “heap” of stories, properties, and cultural uses collected to allow those who visit and browse the opportunity to reconnect to this civilizationally most important of our cereals.

WHAT ARE OUR GOALS?

What are our goals?

The aim of this project is to document and catalog all extant folk rices, the existing traditional and scientific knowledge available about their neutraceutical uses, the many layered ways in which these varieties are embedded in local cultural ecologies–and to create a living archive of this knowledge. With what voice do our hundreds of rice cultivars speak? And what do they have to say?

What we eat has been monocultured, packaged, processed, transformed and entirely divorced from its origins by the time we know it as “food.” How do we bring an awareness of ecology and an appreciation of history on to our everyday plates? Are there ways for us to expand the biodiversity of our plates, to adapt ourselves as quickly as the rice plant does to the realities of a changing planet?

We are specifically interested in how farmers grow, harvest, store and process rice in step with ecology and in ways that are thought to enhance their natural medicinal/nutritional properties; folk insights about regional rice and their value in Indian diets or for the treatment of specific ailments; and how rice must be prepared or served such that they can best benefit those consuming them. We therefore seek to document heritage rice properties from four distinct perspectives: growing, milling/processing, cooking, and healing.

We also find much beauty in rice itself: the huge diversity of color, aroma, texture, size and more is a source of endless fascination, and, we find, an invitation to so much local creativity in cookery. Every Indian has a love for rice, a habit of eating rice, and a story to tell about rice–usually a local variety from a native region or one remembered from childhood which is prized, hoarded as much for its taste as for the memories of cuisine and culture it carries. Rice vies perhaps only with water in defining terroir in India. Our aim is to draw on this native understanding and attachment, capture the nutritive, aesthetic, and cultural qualities of folk rice varieties, and build a storehouse of the cultural knowledge that exists about them all.

WHY RICE? WHY THIS PROJECT?

why rice, why this project?

Civilizationally, rice is one of our most important cereals. Diets, communities, and entire lifeways are built around rice production and consumption in all the rice-growing regions of India. Laden with cultural and religious symbolisms, rice is both a grain and a cosmology unto itself.

Rice landraces are also a crucial part of India’s ecological biodiversity. Cultivated rice in India has, over the centuries since its domestication in the subcontinent, evolved into an astonishing array of over 60,000 landraces, adapted to diverse soil and climactic conditions [Debal Deb, Seeds of Tradition, Seeds of Future, 2000]. The push to development coupled with the logic of the Green revolution, however, has created a far greater valuation of the so-called “high yielding varieties” [HYVs]. This threatens the decimation of folk rice varieties, many of which are drought or flood-tolerant, and have unique medicinal, nutritional, culinary and cultural value. Concerted documentation coupled with conservation initiatives are the only viable pathways to reclaiming these landraces from extinction. A greater consciousness about our own indigenous biodiversity, a greater appreciation of the value of rice in the Indian diet, and therefore a greater demand for local rice varieties all play important roles in ensuring that growing heritage rices remains an economically sustainable option for small farmers.

There are of course many Indian organizations, associations and individuals doing the critical work of conservation farming and seed banking, and the work of phytochemical documentation and analysis remains the purview of established research institutions. Much still needs to be done, however, to establish the utility and relevance of these efforts to daily life in India. Although there is wide discussion in the scientific community of the medicinal and nutritive properties of specific rices, the data is often difficult for lay-readers to parse, its utility beyond the lab bench is often very unclear, it has not been comprehensively compiled for all folk rice varieties—nor is it made fully accessible to people seeking to use these rices as part of their daily diets. There is a great deal of traditional knowledge [TK] about folk rice varieties, but this, too, exists only in dispersed and diffuse form, as local lore which provides fodder for researchers and social media influencers alike, but which barely informs daily eating habits or therapeutic practice outside specific communities/regions.

As a result, our most ready knowledge about folk rice comes from sellers who market it or celebrity-influencers who promote it. Such understanding tends to be eclectic, cherry picking details rather than providing holistic overviews, and subjects rice to the same trends that drive or depress the popularity of any other commercially produced food. It becomes easy, even logical, for instance, to malign rice as straightforward “carb” which the fitness-conscious or insulin dependent must beware of–making room for “diabetic-friendly” products. Treating rice merely as a starch undermines and belittles local and indigenous medical understandings of rices, which have a finer-grained, deeply contextual, and complex grasp of the diversity of rices and their equally diverse properties, and their important roles in Indian ecologies.

By contrast, we have few resources that survey classical texts for insights about Indian rice cultures; there exists no pan-Indian “anthropological survey” of folk rice varieties akin to R.H. Richcharia’s exhaustive germplasm collections or Debal Deb’s 1400-odd seeds painstakingly conserved at his Basudha farm in southern Odisha. We are, in fact, yet to fully write our own Indian cultural history of rice.

This is the yawning gap which Shalikuta seeks to fill. We want to find the folk rices which are still alive an well, whether they are being grown in small family farms for subsistence or for commercial sale. We want to complement conservation efforts and scientific studies by telling stories of rice in ways that make folk rices interesting, aesthetically appealing, nutritionally valuable, and accessible to all people in all parts of India. Via our own research, collaborations and crowdsourcing, we want to build a living archive of knowledge about rice that reinforces its centrality to our cultural histories and our identities: as the anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney said for Japan, to rice as self. We hope that creating a storehouse of such knowledge will enable consumers to make more informed and discerning choices in seeking out rices for their daily use and bringing greater biodiversity to common diets.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

why does this matter?

Our indigenous knowledge systems need to be more meticulously investigated and recorded so that:

We acquire a far deeper appreciation for and relationship with this most critical staple cereal of Indian diets, we remain more connected to the sources of our food, and more attuned to the environments in which they are produced;
We arm ourselves against the threat of biopiracy and assert our collective rights to our heritage, indigenous knowledge, and innovation;
We create a baseline of knowledge for others to research further, verify, validate, and build upon;
We ensure that farmers can have viable economic reasons to continue to grow lesser-known rice varieties by helping to create markets for these;
We enable consumers to make more conscious, informed, responsible, and discerning choices about the cereals available to them in order to build more healthy diets rooted in local supply and knowledge;
In times of rapidly accelerating climate-change, we teach ourselves resilience and adaptability: rather than expecting uniformity and consistency, how to cook with varying staples, season-to-season and year-to-year, and still ensure balanced diets with both nutritive and curative properties.

OUR METHODOLOGY

What is our methodology?

Our methods are broadly anthropological, and draw both on secondary data as well as field visits both to identify rice varieties and then to learn as much about them as possible from local informants [farmers, millers, healers, cooks, development workers, scientists and researchers, conservators, seed-keepers, food writers, grandmothers and other knowledgeable family-members]. Where field visits have not been possible, or as a supplement to them, we have gathered what data we can on phone calls and Whatsapp chats. At times, we work in collaboration with friends who are themselves investigating plants and their associated ethnobotanical knowledge. We may yet begin to crowdsource some of our information via social media networks.

“Finding rice” has presented many challenges. Distances to travel to find local sources are daunting. Not all rices are grown every season, farmers sometimes will not sell just samples but only 25kg bags, and even after a rice is procured, data about it can prove spotty. Getting locals to speak about all the rices they may have grown or encountered in full and rich detail can be challenging when there are more than a few varieties to discuss–and multiple field visits to the same location are a practical impossibility given distance, the fact that we are mostly women, and that this project is entirely self-funded.

Our methodology has had to mould itself around these basic realities, making this project one that each of us lives with in the most intimate ways. We have combined family holidays with research visits. At times, we have had upwards of 20 rice varieties sitting on our shelves, occupying desk-space and fridge-space lest the whole grains turn rancid or the weevils multiply. The rices we list are ones we have eaten, soaked, ground, cooked, photographed and analyzed; served to our family, friends, and others happening by. In all these ways, Shalikuta has been part of how we have lived since the inception of this project in 2019.

The Shalikuta Library therefore:

only reports what we presently know, so there may be gaps or our data may be incomplete at times;
may be updated with new and/or corrected information as we find it: hence the idea of a living archive [have a correction? let us know!];
does not claim to verify either the scientific data or the folk knowledge, but only to document what we find reasonably credible or insightful;
is focused on documenting extant folk rices, not those which we have not been able to ourselves lay our hands on–so all the rices reported on Shalikuta have come through one or more of our own kitchens; and
lists sources for the procurement of good quality rices, where available [we receive no compensation, nor do we promote any individual or company in this regard].

who funds shalikuta?

Who funds shalikuta?

We are at present completely self-funded. We receive no external money from any private or public entities. We also do not do promotions of any sort; farmers or producer companies listed in the Shalikuta Library are good sources we have found and wish to share. We do not receive nor do we seek compensation for listing their names in our pages.

acknowledgements

We are grateful to all those who have, over the years, been generous with their time, knowledge, contacts, guidance, and support for Shalikuta even when our progress was at its most halting. There are too many to acknowledge in a single page; we will name those who have helped us out in our Rice Library and in other posts as the opportunity arises.

For the look of our website and how it functions–we’ve done it all with WordPress and an array of plug-ins, but:

Khushboo Biyani has been a friend to the project from its inception, giving generously her time and creative energies to produce the site logo and its working-hands banner images.
Steven over at LyraThemes never failed to answer an email asking for ideas, code, and support.

Both for content and site infrastructure, we couldn’t have done it without you all.

Permissions

All WRITTEN MATERIAL on this site has been prepared to inform and educate the public on the richness of this most common, but varied and unique, of our resources, which is rice. We are putting what we know and have learned into the public domain as part of our efforts to synthesize and present India’s traditional knowledge [TK].

WRITTEN CONTENT: You may share the written content on this site as long as you attribute and/or cite the source [using bibliographic conventions and URL link-backs], use it only non-commercially, and distribute your contributions under the same license as indicated here:

Shalikuta Heritage Rices of India by Shalikuta Collective is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

PHOTOGRAPHS: ALL photographs are our own unless otherwise indicated, and are explicitly NOT to be copied or reproduced without prior permission. Please write to us before using any of our images; we retain full copyright on these. ©Shalikuta Heritage Rices of India