14 January - 13 February 2007
Medak District, Andhra Pradesh, India
Every year in mid-January India-wide there are celebrations around the harvest of crops, one such festival is the Makar Sankrati. On that day several version of prayers are performed on the field for the crops that start coming in. This day of harvest is considered all the more auspicious when it occurs in a leap year. In the Southern State of Andhra Pradesh, in Medak District’s Pastapur village communities celebrate the diversity of their seeds in a unique month long Mobile Biodiversity Festival.
1. The festival is inaugurated in a gathering of mostly women seed keepers and the surrounding villages. Even the venue of the event is made beautiful by a resplendent decoration of leaves, seeds and flowers.
2. For days the communities prepare over a dozen carts that display the local seed varieties of greens, beans, corn, millets and other “coarse” cereals that the community has grown and sown during the year.
3. The village sanghams (women self-help groups) from the vicinity gather for the inaugural ceremony bringing with them a sampling of their best seed in little earthen pots.
4. A seed exhibition is put out for display even at the venue of the event. It is by the efforts of the women farmer that in these parts many lost varieties have been brought back into life.
5. Each cart carries with it not only seed but a message of diversity.
6. The livestock is as much celebrated, especially the animals that will pull the carts through villages in the coming month long route of the festival. Traditional handiwork is used to even bedeck the cattle.
7. The festival also gives an opportunity to local artisans, musicians and dancers to keep alive their art and craft. The local bugle heralds the start of the seed procession which travels from village to village in the Medak District.
8, 9 & 10. As the music sounds the women rise with their many pots and proceed to arrange them in the seed mandapam – the main tent of the opening ceremony singing songs of the seeds that they bear. A “mandapam” is typically a word used for the hall outside a temple complex, but this is no less than their religion and just as sacred.
11. “Seed Sovereignty” is what is being asserted here. As farmers and activists from around the globe gather in February in Mali, Africa to talk about Food Sovereignty, it is initiatives such as these that they will be talking of how to strengthen so that peoples not only have enough to feed themselves but also the independence to decide what they want to grow, that too with dignity.
12. The carts are then readied to hit the road. All ages coming together…
14. The procession begins…
15. Special dishes are prepared from the very same grains that they have grown. Guests from all over India and overseas partake of the feast a hearty millet meal served in traditional style on banana leafs. Here a group of farmers from the neighbouring State of Tamil Nadu take in the tastes and flavours.
16. The festival not only catches the interest of Andhra farmers, but that of farmers of Punjab in North India as well. Punjab having suffered the worst of the “Green Revolution” and farmers there having lost their seeds are eager to learn start afresh with seed-saving.
17. A must stop en route is at the home of the main seed-saver in Gangwar village.
18. Villagers gather on the rooftops to get a good view of the seed procession as it passes.
20. Parading past Machnoor village, as the festival draws to a close in the ramparts of the green school – Pacha Saale, deep lessons for the new generation.
21. The traditional drummers lead the way.
25. The seniormost member of the women’s Seed Sovereignty Trust.
26. As it plods along over dried out sugarcane, the seed festival makes a statement against the monocultures that industrial agriculture perpetrates. Further ahead from where the festival will gather at its closing is a sugar factory; farmers “hooked” to the market grow only the cane and no more.
27. At the concluding ceremony of the biodiversity festival the women bring their seeds to their own little shared community storehouse, no cold vaults, no accession numbers...as the festivities ebb the celebration of the seeds continues everyday on their fields.
28. The gathering pledges to continue to save seed and diversity, which alone will give reason to celebrate again year after year. It is the power of the language of seeds that brings farmers from other parts of Asia to witness, seen in the forefront a farmer from Cambodia.
29. Little Salome of Gangwar wonders how her village draws so much attention this time of the year, as the two young things grow may they know that they are those who are striving to keep farming such that allows for a better future for them both.
