The wait for mangoes, a cooling finger millet drink, one hundred coconuts. Abhijit Mohanty documents how summer festivals in Malkangiri, Odisha, preserve foodways of memories.
In Chait Parab, we eat raw mango for the first time,” says Shyam Sundar Khora, 70, the oldest community member in Purlubandha village, about 660 kilometres from Bhubaneswar. Shyam Sundar possesses a wealth of knowledge on the village’s food traditions. “We prepare Amba Choru, a traditional dish made with rice and raw mango, cooked in a fresh earthen pot.”
Chait Parab is a time of festivities. Celebrated throughout the month of April by the Paroja, Koya, Bhumia, and Gadaba communities, it entails time away from working in the fields or ploughing the land. Women—both young and old—sing and dance to folk songs describing the summer and the bounty of fruits it brings along. Eating mangoes before Chait Parab, however, is forbidden. They must first be offered to Hundi Nisani Devta, the village deity, during the festival as ritual, and only then can they be consumed.
Tribal communities have, for generations, celebrated festivals such as Chait, Pusa Puni, Liya Khai, and Gotna Khaoni, many of which are farming festivals, preserving their ancestral food knowledge and culinary heritage. In southern Odisha’s densely forested Malkangiri district—diverse in landscape with ghats and valleys in the east, and bordered by Chhattisgarh’s Bastar in the west and north-west—villages such as Purlubandha hold festivals, or parabs, integral to their cultural identity.
Tribes such as the Paroja, Koya, Bhumia, and Gadaba, as well as the Kondh, Gond, and Santal, make up a significant portion of the much larger indigenous population in Odisha. The state is home to 64 Scheduled Tribes and 13 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), who together make up around 23 percent of the state’s population. Their food systems, livelihoods, economy, and spiritual beliefs are deeply intertwined with the forest ecosystem. For generations, these communities have practised subsistence farming, cultivating traditional crops under mixed cropping systems, including finger, foxtail, barnyard, pearl, and kodo millet, as well as traditional paddy varieties, pulses, maize, oilseeds, tubers, and vegetables that are well-suited to the local topography and climate. These crops require minimal external inputs and are highly nutritious, which means higher food security and ecological balance. However, this rich food heritage is now under threat.
An Erosion of Food Memories
During Chait Parab, male members of the communities would venture into the forest to hunt boar, barking deer, and jungle rooster in order to supplement available foods during the period of scarcity until the festival arrived. Since there are no standing crops during April, communities would have to rely on alternate foods—wild edibles, fruits, and berries, as well as hunting wild animals—while ensuring that these foods weren’t overharvested, and that their forests were protected.
“Hunting in the wild is exhausting,” recalls Shyam Sundar. To quench their thirst and regain energy, the men would drink mandia pej, a porridge made from finger millet flour and rice. However, with the Odisha government’s ban on hunting wild animals,1972, this tradition and food source has since been abandoned. Mandia pej, however, continues to be a staple among the tribal communities—both in their diet and culture.
“It keeps our body cool and aids digestion,” says Laxhma Jani, 62, from the neighbouring Mutluguda village, who has been preparing mandia pej for three decades. The preparation of mandia pej is simple, she explains. First, water is added to finger millet flour and mixed well to form a paste. This mixture is traditionally left in an earthen pot overnight—although today, aluminium pots are also used—allowing it to ferment and develop a slightly sour taste by the next morning. Thereafter, the fermented finger millet paste is stirred into a pot of freshly cooked rice, and mixed well. Once cooled, the mandia pej is ready to be enjoyed.
Crops including finger millet, little millet, foxtail millet and black and green gram are traditionally cultivated by communities such as the Paroja. These are harvested along with the wild edibles—mushrooms and varieties of tubers, roots, and greens—they gather. The diversity in their crops and in what they receive from the forests is essential to sustaining their way of life. “Our identity is deeply rooted in our food,” said Maina Gollari, 45, from Mutluguda village in Chitrakonda block, who belongs to the Paroja community. Multiple festivals celebrate the process of farming and harvesting, with the animals crucial to the growing of food.
Since there are no standing crops during April, communities would have to rely on alternate foods—wild edibles, fruits, and berries, as well as hunting wild animals.
Pusa Puni Parab, for instance, is celebrated across Malkangiri on the full moon day every January, marking the onset of the harvest season. “It is a time to celebrate our crops and express gratitude to our cows and bullocks, which symbolise fertility, sustenance, and prosperity,” says Maina. Cows are worshipped and offered khichdi, made with rice, kolatha (horsegram), ranjh semi (hyacinth bean), buta semi (kidney bean), kumuda (pumpkin), and dried fish. Often, wild tubers such as pit konda (Chinese yam), targei konda (Indian yam), and langal konda (Greater yam) are also used to make the khichdi.
Kathi Nacho, a traditional stick dance that begins at dusk on the day of the festival and continues throughout the night, is performed by the farmers of the communities. Traditional food preparations are offered to the older farmers, or Mul Budhia, who then offer the same to Hundi Nisani Devta, a stone idol associated with the festival. Through these practices, the Mul Budhia keep farming and cultural traditions alive.
Meanwhile, 71-year-old Domai Sanbasia, who also resides in Mutluguda, shares how older generations, especially the women, hold a wealth of knowledge about forgotten foods. She recalls learning from her mother various traditional recipes made from millets and wild tubers when she was around eight years old. “My grandmother used to make about 16 different recipes from bamboo shoots, but I only know how to prepare six basic ones. She is no more now, and there is no way for me to learn the rest of her recipes,” she shares.
An Alienation from Traditional Ways
Twenty-five-year-old Arjun Kirsani belongs to the Bonda tribe, which is classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group. He lives in Dantipada, a hilltop village in Bondaghati, located at a height of 3,000 feet, nestled in the remote forested hills of Khairput block in Malkangiri. The Bonda people are believed to have belonged to the first wave of human migration out of Africa, dating back nearly 60,000 years.
Since childhood, sindhi kida (sago worms, edible insects found around the roots of the palm tree) has been one of Arjun’s favourite delicacies. “I ate a lot of them when I was around eight or nine years old. Along with boys in my village, I would roast sindhi kida over a fire—sometimes we even ate them raw. They taste juicy, somewhat like cheese,” he shares.
“My grandmother used to make about 16 different recipes from bamboo shoots, but I only know how to prepare six basic ones.
Sindhi kida is often eaten during the summer festival of Gotna Khaoni Parab in June. It marks the beginning of ploughing activities for the new cropping season. Farmers bring their bullocks and wooden ploughs to the fields early in the morning, while women uphold the festival’s tradition by identifying a sacred spot to cook gutki sag. It is a dish made with sindhi konda (palm roots), sindhi kida, pit konda (a wild tuber), sukhila macho (dried fish), ranjh semi (broad beans), sukhila kukuda manso (dry chicken), chaula chuna (rice flour), and a variety of spices, including the local charmali, a wild aromatic green, the seeds of which are used to make traditional dishes more fragrant.
While pursuing his graduation from a private institute in Bhubaneswar, Arjun was away from Dantipada and his tribe for five years, feeling deeply alienated from his traditional food. “In urban areas, our food is often seen as ‘poor man’s food.’ We feel ashamed to bring our home-cooked meals to the city,” he says. When his city friends learned about the food he ate at home, they mocked him. “They said, ‘Oh, you eat kida! How can someone eat insects?’ It hurt me,” admits Arjun, highlighting the stigma surrounding indigenous food practices.
Without Parabs, Traditional Food Knowledge will Deplete Faster
Non-governmental organisations working in the tribal areas of Malkangiri often express concern that the traditional wisdom and shared knowledge of food diversity within these communities is at risk. Shifts in agricultural practices, changing dietary habits, and increasing migration of younger generations, all contribute to this decline. Soumya Ranjan Mohanty, a Project Officer at Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN) in Malkangiri, is actively involved in landrace mapping initiatives and the documentation of forgotten and traditional food cultures of tribal communities. “The shift to high-yield crop varieties, a cereal-based diet, and rising migration patterns are distancing tribal youth from their culinary heritage,” he explains. “Many diverse indigenous food resources remain underutilised, further threatening our traditional food systems.”
For the tribal communities that eat these foods and continue to celebrate these festivals, passed down orally and through practices followed during festivals, these rituals go beyond worship. Forty-two-year-old Sajani Khilo from Purlubhandha village shares, “We live in harmony with nature. We care for our land, soil, and animals.” These practices—surrounding farming, harvesting, festivals, and woven into daily diets— sustain the close and enduring relationship between people and their environment.
But as younger community members move away, and changing farming practices and diets further obscure these foods, this everyday sustenance is at risk. “The younger generation knows very little about these traditional foods,” says 56-year-old Lalita Hantal from Jodiguda village. “Over the years, the variety in our food has reduced significantly. With fewer crops being grown, our meals have become less diverse. Today, rice and potatoes have become our main staples.” If these parabs were to disappear, so would the traditional foodways and traditionally grown crops that maintain diversity and local food systems, endangering land, health, and tribal communities’ cultures.
Abhijit Mohanty is Bhubaneswar-based independent journalist who reports on culture, sustainable food, women’s leadership, and climate change with a special focus on tribal and other marginalised communities of India.
