From The Forest, A Lesson In Fortitude And Fostering Community

Text by Shinjini Dey

A simple meal of ningro saag and rice. Photo by Partha Pratim Dey

We’re picking ferns for dinner, Mala Didi and I. We’re a few metres beyond the thin perimeter of a bamboo fence — a joke, really — the gaps wide enough for crouching women or our four dogs. We push aside the large fronds and flowerheads and pick the small green whorls of fiddlehead at our feet.

 “Don’t take more than three,” Mala Didi instructs as she moves nimbly through the undergrowth, the dogs guiding her step on the incline. “The plant won’t grow back if you do.”

I follow her, knees stained with mulch, my back cold in morning mist, and listen when she tells me the black ones—kalo or kali ningro—taste better. Fiddlehead or ostrich ferns cover patches of forest where we live, their stems lean and tall, ending in tight, light-green coils. I’ve never cooked with them, but Mala Didi will later explain the rough outlines of a recipe and divide the spoils between her Nepali household and our Bengali one. My sister, sitting on the porch steps, is waiting with a bunch of pumpkin flowers she has picked, which we will dip in batter and fry until brown, while Mala Didi will take the leaves home to make saag. We’ve never foraged for produce before, not since we were kids play-acting with miniature steel utensils and powdered chalk, the weed becoming an ingredient, the idyll almost absurd.

Mount Hermon village is near the Sum Forest in Darjeeling district. Photo by Partha Pratim Dey

We live in a leased cottage at the top of a village near the Sum Forest, a small forest area in the northern part of Darjeeling district, where the rolling hills are dotted with squash vines and tree tomatoes, and the clucking of chickens is loud even at dusk. We always bought everything, even the produce from the village, from local markets or ration stores.

There had been no occasion to consider alternatives to grocery shopping until June 2017, when Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) troops of the Indian army arrived, suddenly occupying our small Indian town. Their terrifying uniforms stretched throughout the northernmost Darjeeling district of the state of West Bengal—part mountain, part plain—covering every inch of the mountain-towns that dot the foothills of the Himalayas. They moved upwards, setting up camps as they went; first to the municipality of Kurseong, then to the central Darjeeling town, then down to the valley to reach Pathleybas, barging into homes on their way. 

They marched into forests to hunt down leaders of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), a party formed to demand that these very areas be granted recognition as the separate state of Gorkhaland. We could hear their armoured cars from our house. On the news, we heard that shots had been fired. Was it a blank shot? Had the bullet hit a target? Were they killing people at the rallies?

We felt like deer caught in headlights. Mala Didi and I occasionally stopped our picking to listen for sirens. We heard only the invisible hand of the market receding to reveal a military occupation.

***

On May 16, 2017, West Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, announced that Bengali would be taught as a compulsory subject across the state. The decision was widely celebrated in the metropolises. It affirmed a regional pride and cultural supremacy and protected a historical legacy. The rest of the state, however, covers heterogeneous terrain and is home to disparate linguistic and ethnic populations. Some belong to tribal communities and Vimukta groups (also called ‘denotified tribes’) such as the Gond, Baiga or Santhals, while others are descendants of migratory workers during the British Raj, of Odia, Nepali and Limbu origin. Others still are political refugees from Tibet. Some, like the Bhutias or Lepchas, are indigenous inhabitants of the land whose connection to it predates colonial intervention. For such a diverse populace, the decision arrived like a hegemonic injunction with the weight of the state bearing down on it. Even as oversight, it was still an insult, revealing an attitude of systemic cultural erasure and neglect.

In Darjeeling and Kalimpong, however, the decision put language and identity on the chopping block. The people clamoured,reviving a long-simmering demand for separate statehood—“We want Gorkhaland!”—and it roared through the hills. Rallies were organised, processions continued late into the night, and state properties were burnt or vandalised. The GJM was at the helm,stealthily supported by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ruling right-wing party in India, and the other prominent local parties (such as the Gorkha National Liberation Front, Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists, Akhil Bharatiya Gorkha League) joined almost immediately.

Despite the large Nepali population in and around Darjeeling, dishes like sel roti are seldom offered in local restaurants. Photo: Swapnet at English Wikipedia, CC by S-A 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons

On June 9 , the West Bengal government called in the army to quell the agitation, and the army fired shots into crowds. Following this, on June 15, the GJM called for an ‘indefinite shutdown’ of all services in the district—a bandh or curfew. Shutters were pulled and people descended to the streets, waving cameras, capturing lathi charges and the death of protestors. Civilian protests grew, as did a social media presence, and on June 18, internet services were shut down, leaving the entire district in an eerily disconnected haze for over three months. 

Amidst this, the popular movement, especially against the state of West Bengal and its Bengali-speaking populace, reached a fever pitch and debates about ethnic disenfranchisement, lack of public services, casual racism and fears about citizenship simultaneously echoed in the public sphere.

This iteration of the popular movement, more than the racism that had fuelled the 2010 agitation, was rooted in fears of cultural erasure and discrimination, where all language, tradition and cuisine was subsumed by the legitimisation of Bengali or nationalist pride. The fears are not baseless. Within India, the active articulation of ethnic identity and traditional culture of the people of Darjeeling is disavowed, ignored, or subsumed into familiar tropes. Darjeeling is imagined as a tourist destination, a landscape of tranquillity, mountains and colonial architecture. Brochures make communities part of the setting. Tollywood films play in major theatres, and the land itself is occupied by the commercial interests of Marwaris or Bengalis.

In the town, eateries cater to the Bengali tourist, offering commonplace Bengali cuisine or familiar Tibetan fare. None of the dishes eaten in the Nepali or Lepcha household—churpi ko achaar, rai saag, sel roti—can be found on the menu, except by word-of-mouth. 

***

At the time of the agitation, the bandh meant that the local markets for raw produce or staples were shut. Within the town and its peripheries, the back door to some ration stores would open for a few rushed minutes, enough to gather vegetables, oil and grains, sometimes bought on credit. Every week or so, the curfew would be called off for half a day to ensure that people could shop and local economies could survive the loss.

But most agricultural production in Darjeeling, much like the rest of the country, is a commercial cash crop and monocultural production, regional imports and exports regulated by a market. Subsistence farming is done on a very small scale, which is then hoarded and preserved. The bulk of vegetables or meat consumed in the mountainous districts are brought in from other regions in the state, truck after truck climbing the hills for a price. When the Gorkhaland ‘shutdown’ was declared illegal and unconstitutional, few drivers took the risk of transporting goods on roads monitored by CRPF cadre or GJM militias and commercial food resources depleted.

Given the dearth of regular market fare, the community began to rely on foraged ingredients such as pumpkin leaves (above) and fiddlehead ferns (below) for sustenance. Photos by Partha Pratim Dey

In meeting halls prior, the political parties followed food production and distribution through this route with rhetorical flourish. For years leading up to the agitation, GJM spokespersons emphasised the downward transportation of resources (tea, cardamom, cinchona, etc.) from hill to plain — an ‘okalo’ movement that never comes back up (‘oralo’) the mountain. No profits, benefits, even resources are returned to the populace residing in these hills, they repeated. The agitation was no exception. The populace was familiar with the reality that Darjeeling is an extractive industry—from mountain to the plains, from the rural to the city, and from the city to the imperial countries beyond.

Sara Besky, scholar of Darjeeling’s Fair Trade policies, refers to a ‘spatial’ vision of justice, by drawing attention to the bandhs for Gorkhaland. Each procession would begin at the podium of the party office, near what the locals call ‘lower Bata’,  and the leaders of the movement would urge the protestors to move upwards, towards the highly-trafficked tourist centres of Chowrasta. Countering the supply chain of resources that only ever find their way down to the mainland of plains and cities, the processions loudly drew attention to an economic logic that exploited the producers that live and survive in this district. On its way, they also reclaimed the space of Darjeeling’s roads as their own to narrativise. As part of the political action, the bandhs disrupted smooth global supply chains by refusing to send crops downhill. Simultaneously, supply chains for food resources into the town were halted before they could travel uphill.

In this landscape of contested political and cultural pathways and spaces, the town and the village relied on a vast kinship network for information about the availability of ingredients; gossip and old wives’ tales became sustenance. To supplement this, they foraged for fresh ingredients: mushrooms, watercress, mustard, tomatoes, pumpkins. On greater inclines and in smaller villages, various kinds of saag exchanged hands, such as shishnu leaves—thin, serrated leaves with narrow thorns all over their tops—for a soupy broth, radish stalks and leaves for gundruk (or fermented leafy greens that are dried and cooked with), and fiddlehead ferns for ningro saag.

***

Darjeeling’s saag varieties include shishnu greens, rai saag or mustard leaves, colocasia or taro leaves, or saag made from radish, pumpkin, and even squash tops. The fiddlehead or ningro, an edible fern (elsewhere known as dhekia xaak, lingru, linguda) grows year-round, particularly from April to May. The vegetable preparation is simple: the ferns are washed thoroughly, then dropped into tempered oil, with some garlic stirred in. Some households add curd or softer forms of churpi, a fermented buttermilk cheese.

Ningro or fiddlehead ferns are an uncelebrated, quotidian part of everyday life in Darjeeling. But they are an important source of nutrition and kinship for the community. Photo: Tammy, CC by 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons

The most interesting thing about ningro saag is that it is not cultivated, grown as a cash crop to be harvested later in the season. It grows wild. You will be surprised by it beneath a mossy patch on a stone wall or find a clump of black ningro as you walk through forest trails. Women and small farmers do supplement their livelihoods by selling ningro saag at small markets, but the plucking is a mundane activity. Children walking home will pluck and place the ferns in a school bag, plantation workers will clean ningro while waiting for transport. It grows indiscriminately, sometimes in backyards and gardens, but mostly along roads and paths of the forest that no one can claim as their own.

***

The forest is not a source of abundance in my childhood memories. Strained to remember, I think of my mother reminding me that flowers are not to be plucked, that plants are alive and breathing, that gardens are someone else’s property. There are different values accorded to the living in our unorthodox Bengali household—there is a ritual particularity to tread around instead of a localised familiarity with forest ecosystems. Ten years old, I’m taking a shortcut through a tea plantation, listening as the Nepali women in front of me describe the best parts of the bush, watching as they pick little white Koirala (mountain ebony) flowers for pickling. Caught between two cultures, I never knew how to distinguish food from property, material from excess, sustenance from waste.

In the first week of the agitation, Mala Didi sends over a tiffin container of cooked ningro, and my sister and I make a meal of it—daal, rice, some dalle achaar, the ningro saag. The achaar, made of fiery dalle chillies, is red, spicy and tangy and with the crunchy, slightly nutty and sweet, blackish-green saag, the plate juggles contrasts. My mother fusses about what she should send over. Finally, my father is sent to bring in the small flowering banana blossom growing in our backyard, and she sends a very Bengali mochar ghonto over. The mochar ghonto is usually made with chopped coconut, but even without it, the insides of the blossom are cooked with some sun-dried bora or small yellow gram cakes, resembling a characteristic Bengali mash (or bhorta) that takes on the browning of the pan. 

When we meet next, we talk of nothing but food, complimenting flavours and sharing recipes. When my father manages to find some dried shrimp from a woman carrying it in a basket, we announce a feast. We fry, then coarsely grind the shrimp with aromatics, then make simple fried rice out of it. We serve this whenever people come over to talk about politics, sometimes handing them a small bottle with more of the addictive stuff. We have potlucks between small households. For a few months, we only eat what the forest provides. There is too much, so we share.

When we stop seeing paramilitary troops marching down our thin forest trails, thoroughfare within the village becomes regular. We are always accompanied by food, the ingredient as much a part of our conversation. Dropping off foraged flowers is an excuse to go out, and we return with details about the rallies of the day, discussing self-determination and food sovereignty. Our meals are no longer quotidian: they’re a mix of different ingredients and recipes, eaten on the go or with large groups. Each day there’s something we recognize from the backyard or the forest on a pristine plate. We eat meals so strange and diverse, we must transform ourselves to understand it. 

In such a short period, the smooth functioning of global supply chains of capital, routed through accumulation and extraction, hit a snag, tugging at the carapaces of the community. The strikes in Darjeeling affected the tea-and-tourism economy that kept it afloat. However, an alternate economy of barter, sharing, and foraging of resources and information emerged throughout the district, keeping the community and the popular sentiment flowing for months after its end.

These alternate economies aren’t isolated phenomena; they proliferate within robust social and ecological ecosystems over time and space, especially when food availability is threatened. Dolly Kikkon in her documentary, Seasons of Life, deftly shares the sustainable foraging and fermenting of bamboo shoots across North East India, where tactics of starvation (such as burning of fields or killing of poultry) are used as methods of counterinsurgency. Similarly, the historical event of the Bengal famine of 1943 can be located within the denial policy of the British Empire, where rice was taken from rural Bengal to deny it to an advancing Japanese army. Deep in the viscera of such an engineered crisis, kolmi saag (water spinach) or kochu saag (taro leaf) was foraged and shared by rural communities.

Plucking and foraging ningro saag is a quotidian activity in the districts of Darjeeling and Kalimpong. All the new franchise restaurants and imported vegetables do little to ease a perpetual food scarcity among lower income groups in the locale. Besides, ningro is delicious, a familiar staple, and abundantly available. Even now, through the COVID-19 pandemic, ningro patches spread faster than they can be plucked. Economic stasis doesn’t mean the end of a world, but the proliferation of local kinships and comfort. We share the forest, all of us who live here, despite the many contradictions that keep us in place—that of class, culture, ethnicity, linguistic identity, gender and ability to move—all of us contained in the royal plural that makes and marks this community.

Monoculture farming and corporate monopolies determine how a culture is to be perceived, profited from, and even plated. But forests, much like cultures, are never static, fixed to the root.They grow and shift across nonlinear pathways when the community and the ecosystem is allowed full expression, control and security. No one really owns the land and the food it provides; we just live and remake ourselves within it.