The pine seed is central to the indigenous identity of the Kinnaura inhabitants of HP’s border district.
Run a Google search for ‘pine nuts’, and the highly-priced packaged chilgoza (or neoza) seeds appear on your screen. Currently selling for Rs 4,000 to Rs 5,000 per kg, the markets put an economic value on the nuts based on scarce supply and demand driven by international cuisines and nutritional benefits. But the intricate socio-cultural histories and ecological webs in the high Himalayan landscape, which grow and nurture this wild and rare forest produce, are beyond monetisation.
In Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh, home to the endangered Pinus gerardiana forests in the western Himalaya, chilgoza is called ree in the local dialect. The pine seed has not just been a widely exchanged commodity for centuries on this Indo-Tibetan trade route, but is central to the indigenous identity of the Kinnaura inhabitants of the border district. While rituals in Buddhist Kinnaura traditions are incomplete without greetings made from garlands of neoza’s edible beads, it is the harvesting of the pine cones which hold the seeds that is nothing short of a festive gathering, spread over three to seven days, depending on the season’s fruiting. I witnessed one such collective harvesting, a slowly-disappearing practice, in September last year at Jangi village in Moorang tehsil, with the largest chilgoza forests in the upper Sutlej basin.
In this customary practice, the local deity or Shu approves the date to ‘open’ the forest for harvesting of the cones around fall every year. “We seek blessings not just for a good harvest, but also for protection from any mishaps, considering we have to climb the tall trees to get to the cones,” says Dolma Negi, as she puts on her cholu (traditional dress) for the ceremony. The puja is referred to as Ree tai khorsa (accounts for chilgoza), where the presence of an adult member from each household in the village is mandatory. Not just absentees, even latecomers to the event are fined. The village is divided into four hamlets as per the settlement pattern, and each tol (hamlet), with about 20 to 25 families, has a representative who keeps annual accounts of all socio-cultural events and rituals. It is only after the puja that one representative from each family, irrespective of the caste and gender, moves to the forest to start the collection the following morning. Groups of four persons move together for the collection.
At the end of the day, the entire harvest is brought to one place and divided equally per family. Black tea is sipped with jaggery after lunch amid generic banter and singing. Post-lunch, before the harvest of the day is sorted by size and equally distributed, the village takes stock of the quality and volume of cones. Chits of papers with names of different sections of the forests are placed on the floor, and each group sends a representative to pick a chit. It is the responsibility of the sub-group to carry out the harvest in the section they picked. Every family keeps enough nuts to meet their annual household use; the rest of the harvest is sold off.
The money collected is deposited in the kosh of the hamlet, or sometimes divided. The fund can be used for common activities, or be given as a loan to someone in need. In a way, this functions like a self-help group.
In a region where agro-pastoralism has been a way of life and private landholdings are small, income from forest produce like chilgoza has been critical. Prem Chand of Jangi laments about the decreasing harvest in recent years. “Earlier, we got nearly 1.5 to 2 quintals per family. This has gone down to 20-25 kg.” He identifies changing climate, especially the reducing snowfall, as one of the reasons, but also speaks of thousands of chilgoza trees that have been cut for the construction of hydropower projects and transmission lines in Kinnaur.
The process of harvesting chilgoza pines has also undergone a shift. As farmers are preoccupied with getting horticultural produce, mainly apple, to the markets, villagers now auction the forests to contractors, who pay migrant workers to extract the cones.
In 2022, a fire raged for nearly a week in Jangi’s chilgoza forest. “The entire village was on fire control duty,” shares Buddha Negi, a youth leader. They set up long water pipes, made fire lines and used sand and mud. The Forest Department arranged the pipes but it was the relentless effort of the villagers that brought the fire under control.
Regenerating this slow-growing conifer with a niche habitat is difficult, and the Forest Department’s attempts at chilgoza pine nurseries have met with poor sapling survival rates. When speaking of the regeneration of this pine, Prem Chand doesn’t forget to mention the bird, Ree-tod (large-spotted nutcracker), a specialised feeder of the pine seeds, responsible for their dispersal. “Ye neoza ke daane apne liye chhupa ke rakhte hain,” he adds, hinting at nature’s invaluable mechanism for propagation, and also conveying that not everything is up for sale.
This article first published on The Tribune, 17th March 2025
