Konkan, Maharashtra – Summer in Maharashtra's Konkan region has long been a time of vibrant culinary traditions, with families bustling about their kitchens, transforming the season's produce into jars of pickles - sweet and tangy. But this year, an unwelcome guest has disrupted the rhythm of this age-old practice: climate change.
A Cyclone's Legacy
The story begins a few years back, in 2020, when Cyclone Nisarga, fueled by unusually warm ocean waters, ravaged the Konkan region.
The cyclone's impact extended far beyond the immediate destruction. It disrupted the delicate balance of the ecosystem, leading to delayed fruiting and maturing of summer produce. And as the locals know all too well, when nature's schedule is thrown off, so are the traditional practices that have sustained them for generations.
Pickle Problems
On 20th of May, we visited a small village by the name Purye (near Chiplun) in the Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra to meet Swati Virkar who has been making pickles for many years. In the recent past, she has teamed up with a few other women from her village to form a self-help group to create and take forward the pickle-making & food traditions from the region. She shared with us that pickle-making, an important part of Konkan's summer tradition, relies on the timely arrival of mangoes and Karvanda (also known as karonda) berries. But this year, the usual produce has been replaced by scarcity. Also, the fruits, slow to mature in the erratic weather, are simply not ready when they should be.
For the women who have spent their lives making pickles, this is more than just an inconvenience. It's a disruption of their cultural heritage. The drying process, a crucial step in pickle preparation, requires the harsh summer sun. But with surprising spells of rain along with surprising dust storms and cloudy weather, it is causing unnecessary inconvenience. Many women are turning to cooking the ingredients on a stove rather than keeping it under the sun, which affects the taste, texture & nutritional profile of the pickles.
Difficult Choices
For many locals, the challenges of climate change are compounded by economic pressures. As shared by a group of women with us on a local bus while returning to Mumbai, the time-consuming tasks of farming and preserving food through pickling are becoming increasingly difficult to balance with the need to work in nearby factories to make ends meet.
A Call to Action
The future of Konkan's pickles, and so much more, hangs in the delicate balance. It's time we listened to the wisdom of the land and its people before the climate worsens further over the coming years bringing an end to age old traditions of pickle making.
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