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| Sunday, 09 April 2006 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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About kiri
and kekiri
by S. Pathiravitana That catchy political slogan Kolombata kiri, gamata kekiri prodded quite a few of us into thinking that this was what was wrong with our social instability. Give the kiri to the gama and throw the kekiri onto the plates of the city folk so that it will teach them to understand how the villager suffers! But those who have lived among the peasants know that they have a rather poor opinion of milk. They have been cautioned by their vedamahattayas about relying on milk to improve their health because of its tendency to increase phlegm. Now this is not a simple village superstition. I see that more sophisticated people in the West are now being cautioned by social activists like Heather Mills McCartney, the wife of the Beatle, Sir Paul McCartney, that dairy products can cause cancer. She is a member of the Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation. Social activism Her social activism includes her fight against land mines and the use of animal fur. She will be joined by some academics at a public discussion soon on the subject of milk and cancer. Among the academics is a nutritionist, Prof Colin T. Campbell, who has studied the effect of diet on Chinese health. The study of the Chinese diet may be relevant to this issue because the Chinese, like the Sri Lankan peasants, are sceptical about drinking milk. The Chinese seem to prefer drinking a vegetarian milk like soya. According to Heather Mills, milk is no longer what it used to be a century ago. I can well understand that. There was no mad cow disease then. But to come back to the political slogan I started with, I don't think it could have come from the mouth of a Sinhala peasant. They are rather proud of what they grow and have a kind of intimacy with the things they plant that they are very unlikely to deride them. In any case no way would they have derided kekiri. It ranks pretty high in their estimate, unlike the city birds who look down on things like pathola, vatakolu and vattakka. Apart from its culinary importance, kekiri also has great medicinal value. Take, for instance, what Dr Seela Fernando has to say about kekiri in her Herbal Food and Medicines in Sri Lanka (Navrang publication in collaboration with Lake House). Kekiri (Cucumis melos) is a cooling diuretic. "It is nutritious and quite edible. As a medicine it is used to relieve painful and frequent passing of urine and retention of urine. There are many decoctions prepared with kekiri seed. One of them is kekiri seed, sahindalunu, cardamoms and tippili taken in equal quantities and powdered finely. It is to be taken in fermented toddy in the morning. The dosage is two tablespoonfuls of the powder in a glass of toddy or fermented rice water (halpana watura)." Another Ayurvedic physician, H.M.A. Tissera, refers in his book Suva Thuru Vesess to a variety of kekiri known as seeni kekiri; it is also known as pittu kekiri or piti kekiri and is larger than the common variety. It also cools the body and helps to expel stones in the bladder. When the fruit is opened you can scoop up the mellow portion of the fruit and consume it. The sprinkling of a little kitul hakuru over it, it is said, converts it into an unusually pleasant drink. Such is the esteem with which kekiri is held in the village. This political slogan quite obviously has been coined by a left inclined young man who derives his intellectual strength from the books of the founder of Marxism. The founder, who had a dim view of the village himself because the peasants were reluctant to join his revolutionary enthusiasms, dismissed the Arcadian simplicity of the life of the villager as the "idiocy of rural life." Hence the urbanisation of the village has been the aim of most of those who enter politics on the mistaken view that that is what the villager wants. Mahatma Gandhi who had the right vision for the largely rural India bemoaned what the imperialists had done to their former colonies. "We have to make a choice," he said, "between India of the villages that are as ancient as her and India of the cities, which are a creation of foreign domination. Today the cities dominate and drain the villages so that they are crumbling into ruin. My Khadi mentality tells me that cities must subserve villages when that domination goes. Exploiting of villages is itself organised violence. If we want swaraj to be built on non-violence we will have to give the villages their proper place." The proper place for the village in this country is the same as what Gandhi envisioned for rural India. But, sad to say, the ruin that has overtaken our villages is far greater (being a small country) than what India has suffered. The destruction of the village under the British occupation is not something that happened as a direct onslaught on it. Probably the British were not aware of the damage they were doing, as they realised later when they abolished the gam sabha system first and then realising their mistake brought it back in 1871. As Andrew Carnegie, the self-educated American multi-millionaire remarked when he visited Ceylon around that time; "I am amused at the ignorance of the average Englishman or American upon Eastern affairs. He is always amused when I tell him that so far as representative institutions are concerned, there is not a village in India which is not further advanced in the department of politics than any rural constituency in Britain...the English is really the most backward. The experiment in Ceylon in restoring the native system has been an unequivocal success, even beyond the expectations of the warmest advocates; and in addition to the advantages flowing from the native courts, it is found that the village committees are beginning to repair and restore the ancient tanks and other ancient works, which, under the curse of the centralised and foreign authority, had been allowed to fall into disuse." Open economy But even this restoration did not save the village from the disasters it faced. What finally ruined the village was the introduction of the open economy by the British almost immediately after they occupied the island. Until then the villager in Ceylon led a contented life with few wants and needs. He had very little desires. What the open economy did was to break up this life of simple wants and needs and tempt the minds of the people by placing before them many more things than were necessary for contended living. Instead of following the Buddha's advice not to multiply one's desires there was now a stampede to buy from the open market some utterly useless gew gaws. Anagarika Dharmapala who saw this encroachment as a direct threat to the simple Buddhist way of life warned the people in his weekly letters published in the Sinhala Baudhaya not to fall into this trap. Simple Buddhist way He lashed with his tongue the English-educated leadership of the country for wasting the resources of the land on buying wedding presents of imported goods like cruet-stands, butter dishes, cake baskets, biscuit boxes, jam pots and sugar bowls. Such wedding presents, he reported, were thought important enough by the then newspapers to be listed in the reporting of weddings as a regular feature of who gave what. This, of course, did not help to endear him to that class which ridiculed his call for national regeneration and succeeded in hounding him out of the country. These are the values that the country has inherited from the penultimate period of our colonialism. This thinking prevails everywhere and has continued into our post colonial period and has now percolated to our villages where the wives and daughters of our farmers, whose help is so important for the reconstruction of the villages today for the gama neguma project, have gone in search of consumer doo-dads believing that life will be happier with them. It might be relevant here to give a picture of the contended life we led as depicted by a man who spent nearly twenty years of his life, officially as a prisoner, but free to go anywhere, live anywhere within the Kandyan kingdom, before the baneful influences from the West crept over our land. Here is how Robert Knox saw the heart of the Kandyan kingdom: Thus plentifully has Nature stored this Island that they neither need nor have many manual operations, except making tools to till the ground to sow Cotton for Clothing and for rice; for they reach not for more than food and raiment and drink the water of the brookes. Thus with these naturall helpes they live with little labour; having less riches and Care than we in England, but are healthful, Chefull and Carelesse and so live with their wives and children tell worned out with old age. Thus they eate to live (not for wantonnesse) and live to eate, for they use not sports for recreations when grown up, but their Chief diversion is to sett and talk with their friends and neighbours. 'This kind of life have I had many years experience of having but little and wanting less - I mean such things as are absolutely necessary for mans subsistence - and so could very well have continued myself to have continued...' |
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