Honey, It's me again!

A few weeks ago I revisited Keystone Foundation in Kotagiri.

Keystone foundation is an organization that works with the indigenous tribal communities in the Nilgiris, in Tamil Nadu.

During my last visit, (read more about it here), I was most taken by their work with the honey hunting Kurumba tribe, and the beautiful documentary on their harvesting practices. Since then, we always have some of Keystone’s Last Forest wild honey stocked at home.

Ever since, I have also been fascinated by stories around honey. My ears perk up when I hear about honey hunters and I’m perpetually on the look out for wild honey. I’ve stopped and curiously conversed with the now-rare honey sellers around Bangalore city -- they load up a huge hive that they’ve collected, onto their tiny moped bikes and roam the city, filtering the amber liquid on the spot for potential buyers.

In this photo is M. Rajini, the first honey peddler I met. He traveled from Selam, Tamil Nadu with these hives collected from the hills in the forests of Yercaud. He filters the honey in front of you, into large empty soft-drink bottles, selling it at rupees 200 per liter.

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Shortly after I had visited keystone for the first time, I had had a discussion about the Kurumba honey hunters with an old teacher and friend, Chitra. She had told me about similar honey-hunting tribes in Nepal. With my recent visit to Keystone still fresh in my mind, today, I coincidentally came across a great article on Homegrown about one of these honey-hunting tribes in Nepal. They collect a kind of hallucinogenic wild honey in the Himalayas. And their practices are so incredibly similar to those Kurumbas in the Nilgiris!

It reminded me of a beautifully intriguing conjecture of Chitra’s --

“I keep wondering if there is any anthropological connection between the honey-hunting tribes in places that seem so geographically distant as the tribes in Nepal and the tribes in the Nilgiris... I used to (and still do) imagine that when forest cover was far denser than it is now, there might have existed a more-or-less unbroken thread of different honey-hunting tribes all the way from the Himalayas, past the Vindhyas and down to the Nilgiris. And maybe, just maybe, there was some kind of transfer of information from tribes that lived in adjoining forests....”