Introducing Shālikūta – a project dedicated to gathering facts and stories about Indian heritage rices, and to building a library (or a dictionary, if you prefer) which you can visit, browse, and use to revel in the pleasures of learning about one of our oldest and civilizationally most important of cereals: rice.
Vrīhi [व्रीहि] is perhaps our oldest name for “rice,” but śāli or shali [शालि], śāli and vrīhi are also a medicinal duo, with shali rices and particularly ṣaṣṭika [षष्टिक] shali or short-duration shali rices being the most valued: sweet, cold, and light for digestion, strength giving, in Suśruta’s account. The Bhāvaprakāsha Nighantu mentions “śāli dānya“: “good quality rice, which is white although its outer covering is not removed,” grown in winter. Mahāśāli or raktaśāli, the great red rice known as chennellu in Kerala today is one among the plants of the śūkadhānyavarga, as all awned or “bearded grains” are classified in the Carakasaṃhitā sūtrasthāna, and it is medicinal. Ṣaṣṭika śāli or the 60-day-ripening śāli is none other than what we call njavāra [‘wild water grass’] used topically and consumed internally as therapeutic, and recommended for daily use in the Suśrutasaṃhitā Sūtrasthāna.” Oryza nivara, tellingly, is the wild progenitor of Oryza sativa, cultivated rice–suggesting a venerable lineage for śāli rices as among our earliest cultivars.
As a category, śāli rices echo the old and still-lived idea that food is our first and perhaps most important source of medicine; Tuktuk Kumar (1988: 130-32) notes the term’s penetration into several Indian languages, allowing us to adopt it also as a word for rice in its own right. Śālikūṭa [शालिकूट] then literally means “a heap of rice,” but alludes to a granary or storehouse. Metaphorically, Shalikuta is for us a building storehouse of knowledge about rice.
Who we are
We are a group of writers, bloggers, researchers, story-tellers, home-cooks, photographers, and entrepreneurs, united by a common love of our diverse regional Indian cuisines and cooking practices. We are also a group of rice enthusiasts, with many curiosities about India’s astonishingly diverse array of regional rice varieties, cuisines, and rice cultures. What do we really know about the rices we consume? Is rice just a blank palette on which we dollop other tastes—or is it a flavor and a value and a set of unique properties unto itself that we have forgotten to truly appreciate?
Why rice, why this project?
Rice is central to Indian lifeways and a crucial part of India’s ecological biodiversity. It is our word for food in most Indian languages: the Sanskrit anna is rice, anna is food. 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. Yet many of us know precious little about this vast diversity of our heritage rices, limiting consumption to just a few common ones, which are by now largely hybrids and modern input-heavy high-yielding varieties bred by agricultural research institutes and companies alike–focused on output quanta, claiming to address problems of hunger and social distress, but often equally profiteering and damaging both soil and lifeways of the very communities they are tasked with aiding.
Heritage grains, on the other hand, have come to us via other, older methods of the unschooled agricultural science produced by the living worlds of Indian farmers who have largely been driven as much by the need for subsistence as for prosperity. Rice farming has traditionally been enmeshed with other systems of food production, whether aquaculture or dairy farming, and has had the capacity to be largely self-regenerating. The rice plant stands in verily as a metaphor for this holistic approach: as the Tamil Nadu agricultural scientist-turned organic farmer has said, “அடி காட்டுக்கு நடு மாட்டுக்கு நுனி வீட்டுக்கு” [the bottom [of the rice stalk] is for the wild, the middle is for the cattle, and the top is for the house]. Indian rice farming has also been historically deeply attuned to ecological rhythms and often fragile realities, and is deeply embedded in cultural life–producing it, in no small measure. So, all over India are unique, varied and incredibly rich traditions of farming, cooking, healing, worshipping; laden with cultural and religious symbolisms, rice is both a grain and a cosmology unto itself. The history of our subcontinent and a great many stories of the present could very well be told through rice.
With urbanization, industrialization, and globalization increasingly disrupting older foodways, however, these interrelationships which have for so long sustained us are fast-fraying. We are losing our proximity to the natural world, both physically and conceptually. Our daily meals come hardly from the wild, rarely from even kitchen gardens, and almost always from commercial establishments which cut us off even further from the ecologies of farming and food production. We seek uniformity and consistency and stability in our food sources enough that what we eat is increasingly less and less biodiverse, more and more packaged and chemically laden. We have become simply consumers, taught and guided by those who sell rather than by our own experiences of growing or living in tune with the realities of production.
Yet as the world warms, microplastics enter our bloodstreams, and our soil, water and air become chemically saturated, it is becoming critically important to restore the nourishments of earlier centuries and the enormous adaptability and resilience of our traditional foodways. As Dr. Sanjay Patil [scientist with BAIF] said to me on phone in a conversation on rice ecotypes: “We look for stability and uniformity, and this creates narrowness but nature wants variability.” We need now more than ever to return to that variability: to know our plants, seek them out, and give them as much space and as many reasons to thrive as we wish for ourselves. Our health, the quality of our lives and that of our next generations may well depend on it.
Shalikuta is a step in that direction. We are lucky in India to have a food system that is still not irrevocably industrialized, and enough small farmers and producers who now assume the all-important role of becoming custodians of traditional knowledge [TK]. In building a library for native/heritage rice that is informed by traditional knowledge and modern science alike, our hope is to re-learn our own cultural and ecological richness, honor our native agricultural traditions and those who continue to live them, understand our own cultural practices more, become more climate-adaptable, rediscover the many wonderments that a life more attuned to the natural world affords, and channel them all into the way we eat and the way we think about food in modern India.
Our prayer
Our opening homage is to the Goddess Annapurna, the deity of food, She who is whole, She who is complete, pictured here atop a mound of beautiful speckled semi-polished thondi rice from Wayanad in Kerala. We come to her as Shiva once did, with a beggar’s bowl and a prayer: Mother of the Worlds, we beg alms, food, knowledge.
अन्नपूर्णे सदापूर्णे शंकर प्राण वल्लभे। ज्ञान वैराग्य सिध्यर्थं भिक्षां देहि च पार्वति॥
Sources
Kumar, Tuktuk. 1988. History of Rice in India: Mythology, Culture, and Agriculture. New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House.
Nileema Shisode, 2023. “To review the properties of rice and wheat according to its types as in Ayurveda.” Journal of Preventive Medicine and Holistic Health. 9(2):66–75
