Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
embodied in the shiny purple tasteless brinjal, named after an emblem of urban amoral-
ity—disco dancing.
Assessments of deterioration of flavor and morality have been documented elsewhere
in India and the world. Other research finds farmers reflectively critical in their deci-
sions to adapt agricultural technologies (Witcombe, Virk, and Farrington 1998); they
are nostalgic for flavors of indigenous foods grown with organic fertilizer, even as they
eagerly plant and profit from hybrid varieties grown with chemicals (Gupta 1998; Vasavi
1999; Wadley 1994). Greek anthropologist Seremetakis describes a discourse of “taste-
lessness” that is “common in discussions of modernity” (1996: 8).13
The discourse on modern tastelessness in Rajasthan is echoed in reverse by the kinds
of exclamations I overhear complacent shoppers making in my hometown food coop
over the unsurpassed flavor—to take a recent example—of organic grapes. Hang the
cost! The difference is that poor and frugal Rajasthani farmers have had to give up their
preferred flavors, whereas middle-class shoppers in Ithaca can afford to reclaim and
savor the naturally delicious, and simultaneously experience the moral gratification of
supporting environment and local workers.
Although several chapters in this volume treat activist and commercially successful
alternative food movements, what I have encountered in Rajasthan is a discourse of aware-
ness united with resignation: a world in which good flavors are knowingly sacrificed in the
name of economic betterment. Such sacrifice constitutes the pursuit of tasteless profits.
Moreover, the decline of flavor is deeply embedded in, and complexly interwoven with,
other declines—a set of conditions that makes reversal inconceivable to many.
Although it does not speak of flavor, the following passage, elicited in oral history
interviews, voices one of the clearest expressions I have recorded of a very common
interwoven set of critiques of changing times. The speaker is Damodar Sharma Gujarati,
a Brahmin, and one of the oldest men in the village when Bhoju Ram Gujar and I inter-
viewed him in the 1990s:
Damodar: The Kali Yuga [degenerate era] has come 100%. People used to be very
happy and generous, but now they are misers. It used to be if I had grain and saw a
hungry person I would give, and even if only women were home and one had no
grain, she could borrow from another and clean it and grind it and make bread so
no one could go to bed hungry.
And there was so much power in the grain that when you boiled it, it spit
[literally, it kicked] so no one could stand near the pot. But today there is no such
spitting, no strength in the grain. . . . Just as the strength of grain is finished, so is
people's love.
Bhoju: O.k., people have changed because of selfishness, but there is no selfishness
in grain, so what happened?
Damodar: It is because we don't use goat dung and cow dung fertilizer any more.
From urea more heat grows in the grain, and from this people also have greater
heat. And that is why people have much more anger and egotism. People today get
angry very quickly at everything.
[Gold and Gujar 2002: 308-309]
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