In Uplagarh: butter that will melt in your mouth

“Electrical machines will kill these traditional techniques.” Rayali Bai’s voice rises above the splish-splash of the butter moving in the pot of curd as she works the netara – a thick cotton rope with handles at both ends – to churn it. In the background on the hillock behind, birds are chirping.

The time is around 5:30 a.m. at Uplagarh village in Sirohi district of Rajasthan, near the border with Gujarat. The region is hilly and the concrete streets in the village go up and down, which makes riding a motorcycle – the favoured mode of transport here – tricky. Low-roofed houses, some pucca and some kuccha, line the streets. Like Rayali Bai’s pucca house, most have two rooms, a kitchen and a verandah. Her house though is not in the main village, but up a hillock or magra, and the last leg can be covered only on foot.

Most villagers, like Rayali Bai belong to the Garasia community, listed as Scheduled Tribe in the state. In her forties now, she has never gone to school. Her case is not unusual – only 10 per cent of all women and 27 per cent of men in Uplagarh are literate (Census 2011).

Rayali Bai’s day starts with milking her cows. Of the four desi (native) cows the family owns, only two are milking at this time. The cows are milked twice a day, and each gives 1 to 1.5 litres at a time. The milk is used entirely for the family’s own consumption.

After milking the cows, she sets them to pasture and gets down to making butter, and cooking for the family. Her husband, Sava Ram, lends a hand sometimes. Besides the household chores, Rayali Bai tends to the family’s three bighas (roughly 1.4 acres) of land on which they practise terrace farming for self-consumption.

The last thing she does before going to bed is to set the curd for making butter.

“Butter or ghee made using electric machines does not taste as good as this,” she says, alternately pulling the right and then the left handle of the rope as she speaks. Rayali Bai collects the curd over two-three days to make the butter. “It saves me time and labour,” she says.

Before she starts, she cleans the space where she will make the butter, then lays out a cotton bag, and sets up a degcha (a large pot) on it. There is a metal pole planted in the ground at the spot. Unlike the other equipment, the pole is not movable.

Rayali Bai empties the curd she has collected over three days into the big pot. Then she brings the raavi – a long bamboo pole at whose base rests the churn, supported by three prongs. Two ropes link the poles. The base of the raavi pole goes into the pot, while the other pole is rotated to churn the curd.

On the morning that PARI is visiting, Rayali Bai takes five minutes to set up the equipment. Then she wraps the rope around the pole and sets to work, standing, pulling in a rhythmic movement. In about 30 minutes the butter rises and separates from the chhach (buttermilk).

The time taken depends on the amount of curd, she explains, “for three days’ curd, which is about 5-6 kilos, it takes half an hour.” Once the butter separates, Rayali Bai washes her hands and scoops it out. Dollops of the butter will be added to the vegetable curries and chapatis she makes, and some will be kept aside to make ghee.

Neither Rayali Bai nor any of the other villagers sell their farm or dairy produce. Milk sells for Rs. 35 a litre in the market in these parts, and desi ghee for Rs. 1,000 a kg – more than three times the price 10 years ago when it sold at Rs. 300 a kilo. People are willing to pay more for homemade ghee. However, there is no system in place through which the villagers can sell, so the only time they do is when a request comes through word of mouth.

Most villagers hold about two to three bighas, and keep a few cows, goats and chicken – Rajasthan has the second highest livestock population, after Uttar Pradesh, at 56.8 million. Some villagers also work for daily wages at Abu Road town, 13 km away.

Rayali Bai’s husband, Sava Ram, studied till Class 9 and is a field worker with an NGO JanChetana for two-and-a-half decades; he earns Rs. 12,000 a month. He leaves home around 10 a.m. and is back by 6 or 7 in the evening.

The couple’s oldest son Sunilal is a farmer. He is married and lives in a nearby village. Sava Ram wants to ensure the two younger children, Kamla and Roshanlal, go to college and eventually get government jobs. “I’ll be happiest to see them in college and in good government positions once they complete their degree,” Sava Ram says.

The school at Uplagarh is till the secondary level, so Kamla, 17, and Roshanlal, 16, enrolled at the Government Senior Secondary School at Or, a nearby village also in Sirohi district. They live in hostels. It’s May and the two are home for the summer vacations, and their mother is fussing over them. Among the treats she plans to serve them is sweet halwa, cooked in homemade ghee.

Rayali Bai learnt to make butter watching her mother and grandmother, and her children have learnt watching her. The khambaa-raavi-badnaas-netara are a source of pride in the home because these are a sign that the family owns milch cows. But with electric churns ubiquitous now, it might not be long before these traditional tools are seen only in rural museums.