A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Hindu newspaper, online on September 4, 2023 & in print on September 10, 2023. You can find The Hindu article online here. The byline on this is mine, as are most photographs unless otherwise noted, but both the essay below and the version in The Hindu have benefited from inputs from all of us in Shalikuta. With thanks also to Maiyam Vijhay who drove with me to Thiruduraipoondi & to Devi Lakshmikutty of Biobasics for an insightful conversation shortly after.
Have you ever stopped at a market grain merchant’s stall—or even these days the local supermarkets which sell more than a couple of rice varieties in bulk bins—and just read the names of heritage grains? You might, because they’re fascinating, and reading them is like thumbing the pages of some old book of esoteric insights whose import you don’t yet fully comprehend. Rices like Maapillai samba, Thooyamalli, Gobindo bhog, Krishna Kamod and Ambe mohar have become common, but there are countless others from all corners of India: Kuzhivedichan, Thavala Kannan, Pimpudibasa, Sukhdas, Radhunipagol, Tudse, Dabhda.
What do all these names mean—what stories do they tell? When I first started researching Indian heritage rices for a documentation project I’d convened with five others called Shalikuta, rice names presented themselves as trailheads saying: “Start Here.” So, we did.
India was once home to over 100,000 folk landraces or rice varieties distributed and conserved in small farms across the country. A great many of these have been replaced by HYVs (High Yielding Varieties) from the 1970s on—or simply lost thanks to agricultural industrialization. What remains is a small fraction, and can only remain so if farmers actively embrace the work of conservation and rigorously maintain the genetic purity of landraces to safeguard not just India’s plant genetic heritage but the specific neutraceutical and gustatory properties of each rice.
This was the focal point of a keynote address given by Debal Deb—agricultural scientist, renowned “rice warrior” and himself conservator of over 1,400 landraces at his Odisha farm—at this year’s annual Nel Thiruvizha or Paddy festival held in Thiruduraipoondi this past June 17-18: a key Tamil Nadu farmers’ traditional seed-exchange event. An array of paddy was on display at the festival, lovingly presented, propitiated, and labelled—but Deb’s talk and his work in general gestures to the notion that the names given to these old rices have descriptive value at multiple levels.
Some rice names are easily readable. Ambe mohar and Iluppai poo samba promise us the scents of mango and mahua blossoms, Thooyamalli the pure white color of jasmine. Rajamudi boasts royal patronage (it was once grown for the Mysore Wodeyars, prized enough to be accepted in lieu of taxes owed), any rice called Gobindo bhog must be finely aromatic if it’s to be Krishna’s food, and Njavara with its potent medicinal value is ‘wild water grass,’ like the “Nivara” of the old texts.
Other rice names convey multiple and scattered bits of information: details about grain size or growing seasons which have historically signaled quality and character, speaking simultaneously to both growers and consumers. Raktasali is a red-bran rice which ripens in winter (shali), and sali rices are considered sweet, cooling, light, and strength-giving, preferable over sastika (60-day) and vrihi (autumn ripening) grains. Tulasi vasanai jeeraga samba, a very popular biriyani rice these days, speaks of scent (tulasi), size-shape (small-slender like jeera seeds), and grown in the samba season (August-January). A rice like Thavala Kannan presents a grain plump enough to be nearly round, like the frog eyes of its name, presumably allowing farmers to distinguish it from other short, “mota” varieties, but also signaling to cooks that this is no long grain. Similarly, Macchakanta, whose awn or the spine attached to the end of the grain is long and strong, much like a fish bone.*
Some naming conventions are derived from old taxonomies created by Kashyapa in the 800 CE agricultural treatise Kashyapiyakrishisukti, and later Caraka and Sushruta; some are clearly modern assignments. The odd name like Kuzhivedichan for example has a distinctly folksy feel, referring to this rice’s capacity to grow out of a pit or presumably from some depth, and Kattuyaanam tells you of a rice that grows so tall, elephants could hide in those paddy fields.
Naming conventions can follow regional protocols, too, calling out specific cropping seasons and the consequent qualities or properties of the rices grown in those seasons. Tamil Nadu rices typically have two-part names: the first half is a general descriptor and the second half names one of three cropping seasons. Samba is July/August-December/January, Kar comes after Samba (January-March or March-June; these rices are sometimes collectively called just “kar arisi,” denoting properties as with “shali” or “vrihi” rices), and then there’s Kuruvai (April-July). Maapillai-samba: the bridegroom’s rice, valued for its strength-giving and fertility-enhancing capacities, is a samba season rice. Kulla-kar and Poongar (Poon-kar) are both Kar rices. And so on. [See A. Sathya, 2014 and Biobasics, “What’s in a name?” for more on this.]
Then there are the rice names which specifically aid botanical identification. Deb cited Karnataka’s Ratnachoodi in his talk: the rice stalk has a ring resembling red jewelled bangles, as the name suggests. Elsewhere he has observed that Bengal’s Khejur chhari and Narkel chhari have clustered branches which bear striking resemblance to date palm and coconut inflorescences, respectively [1]. Similarly, the panicles of Tulsi mukul and Tulsi manjari recall the shape of Tulasi inflorescence, Tamil Nadu’s Garudan samba paddy has a white patch as on the neck of the Brahminy Kite, and Gujarat’s Pankhari dangar and Bengal’s “Pakhi” variety are bird-like: with wings (“pankh”) extending from the grain’s top, or elongated awns like birds’ tails.
Such names are marvelously evocative, of course, and even at times humorous, telling stories of the natural world and its many inter-linkages and resonances, but they are hardly only just that. They demonstrate the keen observational capacities, wit, and descriptive prowess of those many unnamed, unknown farmers that Deb called out in his talk, whose meticulous efforts generated all our thousands of heritage grains in the first place.
It is this native scientific sensibility, equally at risk of being lost, that Deb is most passionate about recovering and re-infusing into rice conservation. Traditional farmers were adept at distinguishing varieties by the flowering time, basal leaf sheath color, flag leaf angle, panicle length, grain size, shape and color variations, Deb has often said [2]. Although names alone cannot record all the 56 morphological characteristics farmers need to observe and track to ensure genetic purity, they do sometimes capture key identifiers. They can help distinguish plants that should be removed from a field in a process called “rouging,” or they can confirm that the plants growing in a field are indeed of a kind.
Not all rice names are this precise, however. Garib sal (the “poor rice”) is ironically the one with ∼15 mg/kg silver concentrated in the aleuronic layer of the rice bran, or in proportion to the silver present in the soil [3]. Our famed Basmati (“fragrant rice”) is on its own a very loose descriptor and even a catchall category for long grain aromatic rice grown in no less than 7 states of the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) on the foothills of the Himalayas [Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, parts of Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir]–as the GI tag issued to “Indian Basmati” recognizes. Dehra Dun Basmati remains the most famous of the lot, but there are many claimants to the basmati title and we know the best by the location qualifier to “basmati,” not by the rice name alone.
Still other rice names appear straightforward marketing tools—Radhunipagol, for instance, which implies that the rice has such aroma, it will drive any cook (radhuni) mad (pagol) [4]. Indeed, Himanshubhai—a dynamic lawyer working with tribal farmers in Dang to revive several heritage rices and who runs a “Tribal connect” outlet in Ahmedabad—responded to my question about the documentation of rice properties with just that: those are marketing tools, he said, their importance comes in only after cultivation processes have been streamlined and standardized [5].
The marketing value of a name notwithstanding, those that do call out the attributes of each rice are also crucial supports to memory work that our largely oral traditions have always relied heavily upon, and which remain extolled as “mana paadam”/memorization, still vitally important to traditional education and methods of knowledge-transfer. The Nel Thiruvizha acknowledged this obliquely, by having a few young children recite, from top-to-bottom and entirely from memory, all the hundred-odd names of rices revived, conserved, and now grown in Tamil Nadu by local farmers.
Such memory practices and names do a lot more than just remind and entice; they help us understand the still vast array of heritage rices by telling us something about them, helping us to get to know them, remember them, choose between them, and by such methods safeguard them for all the time to come.
[*]My thanks to Debal-da for the detail and the correction; the prior version of this essay had erroneously noted Macchakanta grains to be like fishbones (22/6/2024)
[1] Deb, Debal. “Rice Cultures of Bengal.” Gastronomica 1 August 2021; 21 (3): 94-5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2021.21.3.91
[2] Deb, Debal. Seeds of Tradition, Seeds of Future: Folk Rice Varieties of Eastern India. RFSTE, New Delhi, 2005: second page at the top.
[3] Sen Gupta, Soujit; Ananya Baksi, Priyabrata Roy, Debal Deb, and Thalappil Pradeep. “Unusual Accumulation of Silver in the Aleurone Layer of an Indian Rice (Oryza sativa) Landrace and Sustainable Extraction of the Metal.” ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2017: 5(9), 8310-8315 DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b02058
[4] This is an example shared by Sibendu of @pickletopilaf
[5] Interview conducted with Sheetal Bhatt, March 31
