RICE AND INHERITANCE OF LOSS

Rice museums aren't just about reviving heritage varieties. They tell stories of the industrialisation of agriculture

- Deepa S. Reddy and Anjana Ramkumar

The revival of heritage rice varieties in India seems to have fostered the emergence of a small but notable crop of displays and exhibits describing themselves as "rice museums". Informational exhibits at research institutes and paddy breeding centres are in themselves nothing newthe Indian Council of Agricultural Research's Central Rice Research Institute in Odisha's Cuttack, for example, has had an Oryza museum since 2008. But at parallel focus on collecting and exhibiting specifically "folk" or "heritage" rice varieties as reminders of what we once grew and how we once ate was becoming evident. These heritage rice displays are responses to the environmental and cultural losses precipitated by industrialised agriculture: not merely collections of artefacts but themselves evidence of the work of revival and reclamation.

In 2006 and 2009, respectively, two farmers-turned-conservators in Karnataka's Mandya district, Syed Ghani Khan and Bhattada "Paddy" Bore Gowda, established rice museums in their homes-reflecting the larger farmer-driven revival of rice under way in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, under the auspices of the "Save our Rice" campaign started in 2004 by Thanal, in Kerala. Khan would eventually expand his into a full-fledged "Rice Diversity Centre" showcasing varieties extensively displaced by high-yielding varieties (HYVs) during the 1960s' Green Revolution. In 2017, the All India Trinamool Congress in West Bengal announced the construction of a folk rice museum at the Agricultural Training Centre at Fulia, intending to showcase 450 varieties. Assam's Kaziranga National Orchid and Biodiversity Park, opened in 2019, includes an extensive heritage rice exhibit. In Kerala, the Aluva State Seed Farm now thinks of itself as a "museum of indigenous rice varieties" and there have recently been announcements of a Pokkali rice cultivation museum in Kottuvally.