Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture

Foreword

I am writing this foreword in Patna, Bihar. Bihar is where Sir Albert Howard was sent in 1905 by the British Empire to “improve” Indian agriculture. When Howard came to Pusa in 1905 as the imperial economic botanist to the government of India, he found that crops grown by cultivators in the neighborhood of Pusa were free of pests and needed no insecticides or fungicides. “I decided that I could not do better than watch the operations of these peasants and acquire their traditional knowledge as rapidly as possible,” he wrote in An Agricultural Testament ([Goa: Other India Press, 1940], 164). “I regarded them as my professors of agriculture. Another group of instructors were obviously the insects and fungi themselves . The methods of the cultivators, if followed, would result in crops practically free from disease, the insects and fungi would be useful for pointing out unsuitable varieties and methods of farming inappropriate to the locality.” Within five years, Howard’s “professors—the peasants and the pests” had taught him “how to grow healthy crops, practically free from disease, without the slightest help from mycologists, entomologists, bacteriologists, agricultural chemists, statisticians, clearing-houses of information , artificial manures, spraying machines, insecticides, fungicides, germicides, and all the other expensive paraphernalia of the modern experiment station.” Howard could teach the world about sustainable farming because he had the humility to learn it from practicing peasants and from Nature herself. Sir Albert Howard is known as the father of modern organic agriculture , but the Indian peasant was his teacher. Howard believed that the cultivators of the East had a lot to teach Western experts about disease and pest control and about how to break Western reductionism’s vicious and Foreword violent circle of “discovering more and more new pests and devising more and more poison sprays to destroy them” (Ibid., 162). An agriculture of permanence grows out of a sacred relationship with the earth. Wendell Berry said, “eating is an agricultural act,” and one could add that “agriculture is a spiritual act.” The act of growing and giving food in abundance is the highest dharma. As the Taittiriya Upanishad states: From food [anna], verily, creatures are produced Whatsoever [creatures] dwell on the earth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For truly, food is the chief of beings. . . . (Taittiriya Upanishad 2.2, in The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, 2nd English ed., trans. Robert Ernest Hume [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931], 284) Beings here are born from food, when born they live by food, on deceasing they enter into food. (Ibid., 3.2, 290) Food is alive, it is not just pieces of carbohydrate, protein and nutrient, it is a being, it is a sacred being. Verily, they obtain all food Who worship Brahma as food. (Ibid., 2.2, 284) When agriculture is a sacred duty for maintaining life on earth, the seed is sacred, the soil is sacred, the cow is sacred, and the trees are sacred. The inspiration for starting Navdanya came to me from the sacred seed. The seed for the farmers is not merely the source of future plants or food; it is the storage place of culture, of history. Seed is the first link in the food chain. Seed is the ultimate symbol of food security. Free exchange of seed among farmers has been the basis of maintaining biodiversity as well as food security. This exchange is based on cooperation and reciprocity. A farmer who wants to exchange seed generally gives an equal quantity of seed from his field in return for the seed he gets. Free exchange among farmers goes beyond the mere exchange of seeds, however; it involves the exchange of ideas and knowledge, of culture and heritage. It is an accumulation of tradition, of knowing how to work the seed. Farmers gather knowledge about the seeds they want to plant in the future by watching them actually grow in other farmers’ fields. This x Foreword knowledge is based on the cultural, religious, gastronomic, and other values the community accords to the seed and the plant it produces, as well as its drought, disease, and pest resistance. Paddy, for example, has religious significance in most parts of the country and is an essential component of most religious festivals. The Akti festival in Chhattisgarh, a center for the Indica variety of rice, reinforces the many principles of biodiversity conservation. In the south, rice grain is considered auspicious, or Akshata. It is mixed with “kumkum” and turmeric and...