South Konkan · Western Coastal Strip

The small things

A mango that is a single cloneAlphonso is never grown from seed — every tree is a graft, so the whole crop is genetically one plant propagated for centuries. The name is generally traced to Afonso de Albuquerque, and grafting on this coast is credited to the Portuguese-era orchards. The fruit's geographical indication was registered in 2018, after decades in which mangoes from anywhere were boxed and sold as Hapus.
The plateau that flowers for three weeksA sada is bare rock for eight months of the year and impossible to farm. Within weeks of the first rain it carries a dense cover of ephemeral herbs — including insectivorous Drosera and Utricularia — that complete a life cycle in the thin film of soil and vanish. Botanists count these plateaus among the most distinctive habitats in the Western Ghats; revenue records still class them as wasteland.
Carvings older than any settlement hereThousands of petroglyphs are cut into those same laterite plateaus around Ratnagiri and Rajapur, some tens of metres across, most of them found in the last fifteen years by local researchers walking the sada in summer. Some depict animals — rhinoceros and hippopotamus among them — that have not lived on this coast in recorded history, which is the strongest argument for their age. They sit on India's UNESCO tentative list, and several are on land under industrial acquisition.
A fruit that pays for the poorest groundKokum grows without irrigation, fertiliser or pesticide on laterite too poor for other crops. Every part is used — rind dried into sol, drained liquor kept as agal, pulp made into syrup, seed pressed into kokum butter — and it is one of the few Konkan crops whose processing income stays with the household that grows it. It carries a geographical indication in the name of the Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri districts.
The spice that draws the borderTirphal, the dried berry of Zanthoxylum rhetsa, numbs the tongue slightly and smells of citrus and pine. It is used through the coastal belt from the Savitri to coastal Karnataka and almost not at all north of it. If a fish curry has tirphal in it, you are south of the Savitri; if it has vinegar in it, you have crossed into Goa.
Two chillies doing two jobsMalvani masala uses Bedgi chilli for deep red colour with little heat and Sankeshwari or Lavangi for heat with little colour, in a ratio each household fixes for itself. Being able to move colour and heat independently is what lets the same blend serve a mild fish hooman and a mutton sukka that will take the skin off your mouth.
A theatre with no scriptDashavatar is performed from memory and convention. The opening sequence is fixed, the main episode is chosen on the night, the verses are improvised inside a metre, and the harmonium and paddle drum cue entrances. There is no written text to consult, which means the form survives only as long as there are performers, and it collapsed to a handful of companies in the twentieth century before recovering.
A fair whose date the deity announcesThe Angnewadi jatra in Sindhudurg has no fixed calendar date. It is declared each year by kaul — the fall of a flower placed on the image of Bharadi Devi — and once declared, lakhs of people, including migrants working in Mumbai, arrange travel and leave around it.
The month the region comes homeGanesh Chaturthi empties Mumbai's Konkani neighbourhoods and fills these villages. Railways and the state transport corporation run hundreds of extra services for it, and houses shut for eleven months are opened and cleaned for ten days. It is the clearest annual measurement of a migration that has been running for a century and a half.
Khoti, and why everyone leftUnder the khoti tenure the intermediary held the revenue right and the cultivator held very little. Laterite soil, small holdings and that tenure together made subsistence marginal, so from the nineteenth century men went to Bombay for mill, dock and clerical work and sent money back. Konkan villages have been remittance economies for longer than most Indian regions have been anything.
Snakes in the sanctumAt Marleshwar, resident snakes in the cave shrine are neither removed nor treated as a hazard; they are part of what makes the place sacred. The temple's yatra is described as the deity's marriage, and the procession climbs beside a waterfall to get there.
The only man worshipped in his own fortInside Sindhudurg, Shivaji's son Rajaram raised a temple to Shivaji himself shortly after his death. There are hand and foot impressions set in lime on the walls, said to be his. A ruler being installed as a deity inside his own fortification is very close to unique in Indian practice.

Small local details of South Konkan — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)