A
taste of the Jaggery Festival | Kabbin Habba
Arpita
Gaidhane
You walk into a limbo of sorts, where time
doesn’t quite match up. You know that you have come from the busy lands of
urban living, where efficiency and precision are the highest values. You work
hard, make yourself a part of the world around you and adjust to modernity but
something doesn’t feel right. Now, in this limbo, your heart sings to a tune
that you seem to have forgotten, but you recognize deep within yourself.
There is a freshly built centre in the
middle of a forest. It is nestled in a valley, surrounded on all sides by hills
where birds sing and insects chirp. The red brick of the centre is reminiscent
of local architecture, melding into the land, and the eons that have evolved these
two levels of sloping roof and spread out design. Water springs naturally
behind the centre and irrigates the land around you without any need for
electricity. As you enter, like-minded people express their fascination, waking
from a slow slumber and remembering something that connects them to this land
and the nature that surrounds it.
You are here for the jaggery festival with
BuDa folklore. You have heard that they want to celebrate the harvest season
once more in a region where land-based celebrations are dying out in favour of
modern universal ones. They want to bring back the Aalemane Habba. You have
heard that there will be delicacies and a carnival and it has you intrigued.
How many delicacies could one ingredient possibly produce?
You experience the modern process first. A
motor-run machine presses sugarcane juice into a container that can concentrate
30 tins of jaggery. You are warmly welcomed onto the land and shown all the
details of the process, followed by delicious food. The hospitality of the land
enchants you, the urban stinginess and possessiveness melting away into the
warmth of people’s invitations for you to eat more… innu swalpa! Just a little
bit more!
You return to the centre with the chirping
of crickets, the stars spreading a magical canopy of jewels overhead. The city
almost made you forget your childhood memories of creating your own
constellations among millions of glinting lights. The fragrance of local
flowers and plants gently pervades the crisp cool air around you and contentment
seeps into your bones.
When you finally get to experience the
traditional process of jaggery making, nothing that the invitations said has
you prepared. On one side, you watch fascinated, as bulls walk in circles
around the gana to extract sugarcane juice. Where the modern process could
extract 30 tins, this one merely produces three, but the romance of the
experience is unmistakable.
You want to try pulling the gana too, so
you dance your way to the growing line of fellow celebrators, and try your hand
at pressing sugarcane. Elsewhere, what could loosely be called a carnival is at
play. This is not like any mela you have seen.
.jpg) |
| Timmanna Nayak in his sugarcane farm |
A small, intimate gathering of people
converse and laugh together in a space outside Timmanna Nayak’s home. He is a small
farmer, one of the dying breed that still produces jaggery traditionally. He
nods quietly and smiles serenely, and it is easy for him to meld into the
background and softly hold the space that is before you.
Somewhere, people are learning shedi art
from a Hanmi akka and somewhere they learn to weave baskets from river
reeds. Sometimes dancers come along to share the ancient dances of their
tribes, and all along, the mouth-watering smell of jaggery wafts in the air.
You see expert cooks make Todadevu - unbelievably made only of two ingredients
- sugarcane juice and rice atta, on the backs of tilted pots, and marvel at
their skill to prepare this crisp, golden, almost transparent pancake.
Sugarcane juice, and a myriad of foods you
have never heard of – Huriakki Hunde, Kadabu, Airavata, make their presence
felt with their fast disappearance as people rush to sample every exotic taste.
This is not a mela, you realise, but an
experience of something extremely rare, a culture that is rooted in its land.
Where every element – from food and agriculture, to architecture, art, music,
religion and dance, have evolved naturally from the needs of the earth, and
belong completely to that region. You miss your roots and wonder what they
might have looked like before the urban sprawl took over to make everything the
same. You soak in the ambience, breathing a little deeper as if that breath can
help you take back all that you are experiencing with your senses and your
heart.
You want to take back every piece of art
and craft, every delicious food as a memory and an experience to share with the
world that you have to invariably return to. Maybe you’ll come back and maybe
you won’t, but this experience imprints itself somewhere deep within you, to
energise and refresh in the daily grind of city living. When frustration and
deadlines, conflicts and disconnect erode your being, you will think back to
this limbo – this time away from time, when you went to a centre deep within
the forest and experienced what it means to truly belong to the land and to the
earth. And when you glance over every once in a while at the artwork on your
mantle or the basket on your table, you will sigh content, knowing that
somewhere, somehow, that connection lives and thrives.
