Barley harvest & rice planting - jun 2004

It's time to harvest the barley. A couple of years ago I tried cutting some with the commonly used sickle (and mutilated my big toe instead). This year we watch Begu and Shanta, two women from the village, separating the chaff from the wheat. An ancient electric standing fan provides the necessary wind. Shanta stands with a flat wicker basket filled with chaff & wheat mixed in front of and slightly above the fan, and gently shaking the slightly tipped basket blows the chaff a few metres away while the barley grains falls down. In an earlier age without electricity people used to go up to a particularly windy spot close to the village to do the same job, while in Europe hand driven wind machines were used. After a lot of persuasion Woody and I have a go as well and inevitably get laughed at (good-naturedly) because of our clumsiness. I wouldn't want to do it for a living. 5 minutes of basket shaking and chaff & barley flying around and my unexercised arms and shoulders hurt.
[See bigger picture in photo diary]

The barley harvest lasts a couple of weeks here. The village courtyards are packed with straw, "teams" of 2 to 3 cows are driven in tight circles over it, the hooves stamping out the grains. Most of the cows or bulls wear muzzles to prevent them from gobbling up the work intensive crop. There are other ways of threshing too, people with very little barley do it all by hand, taking bundles and beating them hard against the floor. Growers next to a road have an easier life: they spread it out and let cars, trucks and rickshaws going over the straw do all of the work. While it is common to see combine harvesters in the Punjab and threshing machines in Ladakh, the harvest of barley or oats in the upper Kullu Valley is mostly done by hand. Probably because the corn is grown in tiny patchwork fields and the grain purely for personal use and for fodder for the cow, the logic possibly is that a machine would just cost money but wouldn't earn any more income. And since most of the work is done by women anyway why bother and make the harvest work easier?!

Shimla is probably the most popular destination in Himachal Pradesh for Indian tourists. It's well known for tourist events and festivals specially organised for holiday makers. Manali on the other hand, though also extremely popular as a holiday area, barely manages to put up one festival a year aimed as entertainment for the hordes of honeymooners and holiday makers. This year's 3 day summer festival is a promotion exercise by Fuji film. A few stalls around the Ram Bagh amphitheatre sell kiddies tapes, aromatic oils and the usual 'stuff' found in every general store. The main attraction is the arena where in the evening energetic Punjabis from a Patiala tour group swirl around in their colourful puff-sleeved costumes to drums and flutes. Unfortunately the weather has gone haywire this year, so the rain on the last day of the event makes the expected spectators stay away. Never mind, we've got an umbrella.

You see it on the menus in Old Manali's cafes and restaurants: local red rice, but it's actually not grown around this village anymore, the more profitable apple crops took over long ago. Just a few km south though, big patches of rice still can be found, which makes the landscape on the east bank between Manali and Naggar particularly beautiful in summer. I've seen rice planting in South East Asia (and obviously on the telly) before, but never in this area. So, it's the first time today; around Jagatsukh most of the terrace fields are already freshly planted with the bright green young rice. "Runi karna", the local expression for rice planting, usually takes place from the upper to the lower regions, and we're lucky, a bit further down the hill towards the river a group of cheerful women wade ankle deep in mud and water, a few encouraging comments from them and I am in the same position with a bundle of rice plants in my left hand, sticking a couple of plants at a time finger-deep into the mud, trying in vain to keep them in rows. Woody declined politely to participate (sticking to Kullu Valley traditions that women do the field work). Ramde, Thakeri, Kesari, Ritu and Droptri, the rice planting women, are all from Jagatsukh, they work with a phenomenal speed (about 237 times faster than me), chatting and laughing while they are at it. In spite of being a farmers daughter I give up after 15 minutes or so, covered in water and mud and richer for the experience.
[See bigger picture in photo diary]

Instead of going by bus we're taking the "scenic" walking route from Prini to Jagatsukh via Shuru and Banara villages. On the way we have a quick look at the new Shavani Mata temple in Shuru on which work is almost completed. After a photo drop in Banara we're heading down to Jagatsukh to have not a pub crawl but a chai crawl through the village. A few days ago we took a load of pictures of women preparing rice plants and planting them; delivering these to various houses is a major task since Jagatsukh is fairly spread out and sits on a slope (and we're fanatics when it comes to avoiding uphill walks). By the end of the day half of the village population has seen the pictures, since we need directions at every corner. Our stomachs are filled to the brim with chai and we can look forward to a walk back to Manali in the dark, because as usual we're too late for bus or rickshaws. A real fun afternoon it was though. Read more in the blog.

Time yet again for another village walk along a path half way up the hill running parallel to the Beas river from Dhungri to Shaleen. On the terraced fields just before Brord a lot of activity is going on: on the bright green patches of rice nurseries women prepare rice for planting, while on other fields there are rows of bent over women sticking plants into water and mud and on others bullocks prepare the ground, pulling a kind of giant wooden rake driven on by male villagers. A couple of kids use the flooded fields as muddy swimming pools. The broad path leads past the big waterfall between Brord and Parsha villages and then winds up the forested hillside to Shaleen. Considering that this village always looks like high above anything else from the other side of the river it’s quite a pleasant and not-too-steep a walk. Some spots offer great views over the valley, in particular onto the area around Jagatsukh, now a sparkling bright green with the freshly planted rice. Never mind the wet shower of insecticides I received from above walking past one of the many apple orchards - it's "spraying season" as well.