By: Lalla Maiga
At the 2021 Food Matters and Materialities Conference, Priya Chandrasekaran presented a fascinating discussion on her ethnographic research at Uttarakhand, India, on the millet grain. Her focus on millet encourages us to seek a connection between capitalistic endeavours and environmental justice. Following her presentation, here is what she had to say about the effects of the Green Revolution on millet in our interview.
Credits: Illustration by Kit Chokly.
LM: What is the Green Revolution, and how is it significant to your research?
PC: The Green Revolution is a revolution in agricultural modes of production across global spheres. It began with US social actors and institutions doing research in Mexico to learn about regressive, bad, and dominant genes and how genes pass on traits. In the 50s and 60s, scientists learned to commercialize genetic knowledge on a mass scale by replicating suitable plant genes to export around the world.
India is an interesting place to look at the Green Revolution because it is considered a success story there. Uttarakhand is not mountainous, and it’s just not conducive for the Green Revolution methods, which require areas to grow a single crop year after year, allows the application of pesticides and uses systematized forms of labour to work. This is simply not possible in the mountains. Uttarakhand tells the story of what happens to places that do not fit the dominant narrative of progress. Now, there is a lot of incredible work done by different scholars and activists in India, such as Ravish Kumar, who are looking at environmental issues that have developed from the Green Revolution way of thinking. For me, what is interesting to think about the Green Revolution is what happens when one form of thought or doing something becomes so hegemonic that it squashes out other ways of being.
LM: What got you interested in the study of the millet grain?
PC: I first became interested in millet after visiting Uttarakhand, where I knew I wanted to do some research related to that region. After some conversations with different activists, I was able to narrow down my focus. People spoke to me about millet as a grain that was becoming more important. People within Uttarakhand also wanted to learn more about millet. I did not go into my doctoral research knowing my focus would be on millet, but it became my point of focus in the end.
LM: Is there a specific reason why you decided to focus on the region of Uttarakhand?
PC: It’s complicated, and I am still piecing the ethics of doing research in a place where I do not have ancestral history. But, when I was an undergraduate, I spent a semester abroad in India, and one of the regions was in Uttarakhand. I knew I would do research in India for various reasons, partially because of my family connection to that country. But I knew I could not research my family’s area in India due to the implication of my own caste and class background in the work. I was also influenced partially through my past exposure in the mountain environment of the Andes of Peru in the Himalayas, doing work with quinoa communities. I was also going through an exploratory phase of learning Hindi, and I knew a Hindi-speaking place would make sense. I have a lot of love for Uttarakhand and have developed valuable relationships with people there.
LM: The research institution known as the International Crops Research Institute for the semi-arid tropics (ICRISAT) published on their website homepage ‘Orphan Crops Have Become Sexy’ in an attempt to revitalize the image of millets around the global community.
What are the power dynamics involved with the ICRISAT categorizing millet as a ‘sexy’ grain?
PC: I was floored when I actually saw this because there is no way it’s not imbued with race and gender there. Using the word sexy and sexiness to describe a crop evokes desire. This global institution wants to elicit a desire of consumption, possession and love too from people. This statement is not about people seeking transformation, but rather “how can we take the exoticism of millet and consume it.” It contrasts to food sovereignty movements, such as in Ghana, where people emphasize that our forms of knowledge are necessary for survival in order to survive the assault of capitalism.
Also, it makes me think that women of colour would not write a caption like this, so this just tells you who is shaping these projects. I would like to explore the diversity politics in the way millet is being inserted into globalization.
LM: What do you mean by “the open definition of millet is essential to the meaning” in connection to millet in Uttarakhand?
PC: It is interesting because millet itself is a default category. It’s actually not a scientific category, and it doesn’t define a biological family. It is a grain that is not considered important enough to have an identity. We can think of millets as a category by which people are connected to farmers or how farmers growing the grain can find solidarity by sharing seeds. I think it’s cool to think of millet in these terms because it is all about our relationship to globalization, our practices, and forms of knowledge. The fact that this category suddenly gets valorized brings up the dangers of being valued in the capitalist system and the spaces of empowerment that can be developed. We can see similar examples of that in how certain identities that have been ignored, are now used to claiming power. For example, we can look at how Black Lives Matter has transformed the dominant way of thinking of blackness.
LM: What has been the effect of the pandemic for villages in India?
PC: The major COVID shutdown of 2020 in India left small-scale farmers, small landowners and migrant workers in urban places not able to make a living where they live. The shutdown caused a lot of people to walk thousands of kilometres back to their home villages because there was nowhere else to go. What is going to come out of that remains to be seen because a lot of villages in India have become female-dominated because of male migration into urban centres and, increasingly, whole families. Wealthy people who have benefited from the growing chasm of rich and poor in cities such as Delhi want a hill on the house they can go to once a month or once a year. Land in Uttarakhand is being purchased, not for farming but for a weekend getaway.
I think we have to look at some of the bleakness to see the possibility of moving forward.
Priya Chandrasekaran is a Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies at Hamilton College and was a panel participant at the 2021 Food Matters and Materialities conference. She holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and an MFA in fiction. Thank you, Priya, for participating in this interview.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.