In her journey to reconnect with her ancestral roots after moving to Kerala, Shruti Tharayil discovers how her familial practices during the month of Karkkidakam are intertwined with cuisine, climate, and local ecosystems.
Shruti Tharayil
As a migrant family from Kerala living in Maharashtra, the only festivals we celebrated during my childhood were Onam and Vishu. I often felt envious of my peers from school and neighbourhood, especially those from the Northern part of India, because of the range of festivals they got to celebrate throughout the year. As a community that was trying to fit in with the larger local society, we often celebrated local festivals rather than holding on to the ones that were part of our culture. I moved back to Kerala three years ago, and my gradual return to my ancestral roots opened up a world of festivals and celebrations I didn’t know existed. These festivals didn’t migrate with us because they were intertwined with the land and local seasons of Kerala, which we couldn’t take along with us. It was only three years ago that I first heard of Karkidakam—the last month of the Malayali solar calendar.
As a millennial, the first thing I did when I heard of Karkidakam was to Google it to see what the ‘world’ had to say about it. I came across a plethora of articles talking about rejuvenating Ayurvedic treatments conducted during Karkidakam—also called the month of Ramayana, as this is when Keralites read the Ramayana—the application of henna, the ritual of dasha pushpam1 drinking oushada kanji (a rice-based porridge with herbs) along with patthila thoran (a dish made from 10 leaves). Since then, it has taken me two years of exploration, digging into my family’s rituals and practices, and a lot of conversations with other Malayalis through my platform ‘Forgotten Greens’2 to understand the intricacies of Karkidakam—and I’m still learning. According to my understanding, Karkidakam is a celebration of the treasures of Kerala’s biodiversity and a certain surrendering to the bounty of nature during the months of heavy monsoons. This article is an attempt to document the different practices of Karkidakam through the lens of the lived realities of my community; the ezhavas.
Karkkidaka Kanji with patthila thoran
Oushadha Kanji
Vilasini ammama prepping for pathila
When I was a child, I remember Karkidakam was not a time of much sunlight. It was our version of winter. Without sunlight, our immunity would go down and the labourers of land would have to stay at home. We drink the kanji to strengthen our back and boost our immunity.
–Vilasini ammamma [grandmother], 80.
One of the most common practices of Karkidakam across communities in Kerala is the preparation of a porridge made from different medicinal herbs and spices, commonly called oushada or marunnu kanji which translates to medicinal porridge. My mother recollects how they would buy different ingredients of the kanji from the local vaidhyan(herbalist) and process it at home. Due to the varied properties of different medicinal ingredients added to the kanji, it is advised to be consumed strictly by adults. Today, the kanji mix is a very common off-the-shelf product found in Ayurvedic and other medical institutions. Nevertheless, there are still families like mine who prefer to stick to the traditional practice of buying the ingredients separately and then processing them at home. The different ingredients of the kanji play different roles in building the immunity of the body and strengthening the backbone.
Karkidaka kanji ingredients
A typical kanji comprises ingredients such as ooshali (Lepidium sativum), manjal (Curcuma longa), vellulli (garlic), jeerakam (cumin), kaduku (mustard), kakum kaya (Entada rheedii) and coconut milk. The ingredients are sun-dried, ground to a powder mix and boiled with traditional rice. The gruel is slow-cooked over medium heat and tempered with ulli (shallots) with pashuvin neyyu (clarified cow butter) and consumed over 10 days. As we consider it a medicine, we avoid flavour-enhancing ingredients like salt. The more I learn about the gruel, the more I am in awe of the ancestral knowledge that was more in touch with their land and knew what to consume from nature seasonally. This knowledge came from an intimate relationship the ancestors built with their ecosystem, which, unfortunately, is fast disappearing today.
Patthila Thoran
Patthila thoran is another dish cooked commonly during Karkidakam. Patthila literally translates to ‘ten leaves’, and is a dish cooked with foraged greens with a generous garnish of coconut and sometimes boiled lentils. Throughout Kerala, patthila is cooked differently depending on the socio-geographical locations of the communities cooking it. The recipe differs according to the greens available in the backyard of each family and the knowledge of the wild edible plants of the forager. If you Google ‘patthila thoran’ you will find a plethora of articles and videos attempting to list the names of the 10 leaves which are cooked. This is an impossible task as the thoran is cooked based on the basic principle of consuming foraged greens that grow during the monsoons. The Western Ghats receive heavy rains from the months of June to September and different communities spread across the Ghats engage with various festivals and rituals that include the monsoon greens of the particular region. This is the season when social media platforms such as Instagram will sport gourmet images of Patrodes3 cooked out of Colocasia leaves and fritters made from Senna Tora leaves. Plants like Colocasia and Senna Tora which pop up during monsoons are high in calcium and iron which, when consumed, build immunity for the system.
A mix of cultivated and uncultivated greens for pathila thoran
Flavorful Sides
Because of the heavy rain during Karkidakam, venturing out to buy vegetables is mostly avoided. My mother remembers how in her childhood, the closest shop selling vegetables was near the angadi, the village square, which was a few kilometres away. The availability of a wide variety of vegetables is more of a recent development. According to her, the fruits and vegetables available during summers like raw mango, jackfruit and jackfruit seeds were pickled in brine or sun-dried for consumption during the month of Karkidakam. Uppu manga chammanthi (brined mango chutney) is a very common side dish still consumed with the oushada kanji at my home. Dried fish takes over the cuisine during this time since fresh fish, which is an integral part of most of Kerala cuisine, go into their breeding season. Dried shrimp chutney and unakka meen varuthathu (dry fish fry) are an integral part of the monsoon cuisine in my family.
Ready-to-Make Karkidakam
Like every other festival or spiritual practice, the market has banked upon Karkidakam. Today, ‘Karkidaka kanji mix’ is widely available in shops in Kerala. With the modernisation of Ayurveda, the subaltern medicine systems of communities like the Ezhavas for whom herbal medicine was a way of life is getting sidelined. The widespread availability of ready-to-make Karkidakam kits is slowly resulting in the disappearance of the traditional knowledge system held together by the women of my community. The popular notion of Karkidakam being the month of reading Adhyathma Ramayanam Kilipaatt byThunchath Ezhuthachan, which is the local version of Ramayana, does not apply to my community. In my explorations of Karkidakam which were heavily influenced by internet searches, I often felt discouraged as I did not see these popular practices being followed by my community. As I dived deeper into my inquiry, I realised the popular results didn’t reflect the lived realities of my immediate caste-based community.
Our traditional communities’ ways of living were deeply intertwined in the rhythms of nature and if we look deeply into each of our community histories, we will find harmonious ways of co-existing with local ecology. If we see these festivals and practices for what they have to offer us, we will find ourselves paving our way back to connecting to the different aspects of our biodiversity and our community commons, through practices such as collective foraging and a rethinking of rampant urbanisation and concretisation. These practices will enable us to share knowledge systems instead of hardened rituals and practices with the upcoming generations. With the recent ecological catastrophes our society has been witnessing, I believe seasonal practices like Karkidakam are our way to bridge the disconnect and pave our way back to nature. For me, it has been a journey of homecoming and embracing the rituals of my caste-based community; of understanding that Karkidakam is as diverse as the varieties of traditional rice in Kerala.
About the Author: Shruti Tharayil lives engaging with each day as a possibility of exploring ways to unlearn, reimagine and recreate every aspect of her life. She co-runs the space Unlearning Ashram in Calicut, Kerala, and is the founder of Forgotten Greens, an initiative focussing on reviving and reclaiming the fast disappearing knowledge systems of uncultivated greens. Apart from working on her offerings, you will find Shruti engrossed in gardening, crocheting, cooking or just daydreaming about a wild edible plant. You can follow her work on Instagram [Forgotten Greens, Unlearning Ashram] and on Facebook.
Such an informative and well written article!
Exquisite!
Very True .My Grandmother used to say that since not much vegetables were cultivated they used to cook the greens freshly sprouting during the rains