 So the subject for my talk this evening emerges from research that I conducted among Basmati farmers, Indian rice retailers, agricultural scientists and government regulators in and around the Dune Valley in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. In India and Pakistan, as I'm sure many of you know, Basmati is historically associated with long-grained aromatic rice grown in the sub-Himalayan regions of the Indo-Gangetic plain. My own interest in Basmati came about as part of my larger study of the development of commercial organic agriculture in Uttarakhand, which will be the focus of the book. In recent years the state government of Uttarakhand has vigorously promoted certified organic agriculture and large Indian rice retailers have formed contract arrangements with groups of Indian farmers in the Dune Valley to produce organic Basmati for exports to countries in the Middle East, in Europe and North America as well as for sale in India. And so this is a photo where you can see representatives from the rice retailer that procures Basmati inspecting an organic field and what they're looking for here is actually not whether they're not assessing whether or not it is organic that takes place through a different mode of organic inspections and certification but they're looking for signs of disease and nutrient deficiency in the Basmati crop which would effectively yield as well as the quality of the harvested grain. So contract farming of organic Basmati for export is something that's relatively new in the Dune Valley but their Dune Basmati has a long-standing reputation for being among the finest produced. Its distinctive qualities in particular its aroma and its taste are attributed to the particular climate soils and water of the Dune Valley. Despite its fame the production of Basmati in the Dune Valley dwindled in the wake of India's Green Revolution. And so in many ways the advent of organic agriculture had led to a renaissance and a revival of the cultivation of a grain for which the valley has long been famous. But paradoxically as the cultivation of Basmati experiences this sort of renaissance it's become increasingly difficult to find older cultivars of Basmati in the shops and markets of their Dune itself. When I visited their Dune in 2016 after having conducted over 20 months of fieldwork there between 2005 and 2008 I discovered that many of those small shops that I had seen there during that time had virtually disappeared. It was only after slipping off the busy thoroughfares near their Dune's railway station where many of these vendors had been located that I came across a few shops with sun bleached fading signboards on which the words best quality basmati rice and their Dune's delicious Basmati rice were still just barely visible. Among these establishments Ron Kumar's store which is pictured in the center of the photo here has stood near their Dune's railway station for over 60 years. A family business spanning three generations in 2016 it was squeezed between a pharmacy on one side and a mobile phone and money transfer vendor on another. One of the few merchants who still sources local Basmati cultivars directly from farmers in the vicinity of the the capital city Ron Kumar told me that these older cultivars are disappearing as the expansion of the city in the wake of Uttarakhand's formation in the year 2000 consumed prime agricultural land. Earlier he told me in an account that I heard on a number of occasions Basmati rice grown in their Dune was short grained but it had a good smell shifting to speak of the long-grained commercial varieties and to even more recent hybrid varieties developed to meet growing domestic and world demand for Basmati. Ron Kumar lamented that now the Basmati grain is long and fine but it lacks aroma a loss that he attributed not only to the characteristics of these commercial varieties but also to the changing climatic and ecological conditions of the Dune Valley. The area's once famous short grained Basmati then was quite literally disappearing from the valley on shop signs and in the fields. One month before I visited Ron Kumar shop in February 2016 Basmati was awarded a geographical education by India's Intellectual Property Appalach board. This designation came after a long and contested process and it conferred of state recognition of and legal protection for Basmati rice grown in India's sub-land region so in places like the Dune Valley. Geographical indications are a fairly recent form of Intellectual Property established under the WTO although they draw kind of on more established forms of protection like the appellation although they are distinct from it. GIs are founded on the rationale that to quote the definition offered by the WTO a product's quality reputation or other characteristics can be determined by where it comes from. In this respect geographical indications are thought to be capable of supporting and protecting products whose distinctiveness is closely connected to their places of production. So from a certain standpoint one might think of geographical indications as perhaps offering a legal means to prevent the appropriation of regionally or culturally distinctive products or even kind of thinking with the theme of this series to decolonize them. The question I'd like to explore today is how can we make sense of the disappearance of older Basmati cultivars and land races from the Dune Valley at the very moment when the place-based character of Basmati is lauded and legally recognized by the Indian state in the form of a geographical indication and when the Dune Valley itself has become an important site for the production of certified organic Basmati. In this respect the fading signboard of Ramkumar's storefront I think offers a cue for thinking about changes in the political, economic and cultural milieu in which Basmati circulates. To connect the research that I'll talk about tonight with the theme of the seminar series, Decolonizing National Resource Governance, these changes in Basmati's circulation have to do with what might be thought of as interrelated processes of its colonization, decolonization and I'll argue its recolonization. Central to these processes I suggest is the definition and the delimitation of what Basmati is, what it can and cannot be. And so my talk tonight springs in a sense from this sense of puzzlement and a question that emerged during the course of my field work which seems obvious but became less and less obvious to me as I as I progressed with my research and that is what is Basmati. So I frame my own approach and inquiry around this question around two questions in the title of my talk. What's in a name and what's in a brain? So one observation that I start with is that for much of its history Basmati has harbored an extantiveness that belies the smallness and seeming simplicity of grains of rice. Contemporary contract farming of organic Basmati in the Dune Valley builds on a much deeper history of its of producing, consuming and commoditizing Basmati in the subcontinent. An 18th century poem by the famed Punjabi poet Wari Shah is known as the first written record of Basmati and the grains finds mention along with other fine rice in an account of the wedding of the poem's heroine. From records such as this it's apparent that like other aromatic rice Basmati's elite associations and its connotations of luxury are well established having been consumed by and cultivated for royalty and nobility in Pakistan and northern India and sometimes under the direct supervision of these authorities. While Basmati was clearly prized and highly valued there's little record though about whether and how the grain may have circulated as a commodity prior to British colonial rule. Opportunities for such circulation certainly existed in mobile India rice was exported to Central Asia from the Punjab although it's not typically noted as a significant export for the Empire. The mobile period also saw the elaboration of a land revenue system first on the basis of in-kind payments and later through cash payments so in-kind payments of grain and then subsequently cash payments. The collection of revenue and particularly in the form of cash relied importantly on an extensive and well-established system of rural markets and cash propping of cotton oil seeds sugarcane and indigo. Despite the commoditization then of certain crops in pre-colonial British India Basmati appears to have remained outside emerging systems of land revenue collection and circulated instead in a regionally delimited realm of exchange that was more restricted to royalty nobility and religious authority. By the late 19th century however Basmati grown in the Dune Valley was recognized as a superior grain in British colonial records. At Kinsen's Gazeteer documents three main varieties of Basmati grown in the Dune noting that the kiari furnishes rice of the best quality the seeds are stoned in nurseries in April-May and the young plants are transferred in the following two months to well-irrigated fields where they are carefully weeded. The principal varieties are the Ramjavain and Basmati and these grow best in the warm valleys and along the great rivers where there's much moisture. But although recognized to be of fine quality Basmati from the region didn't appear to participate substantially in centuries old circuits of trans-Himalayan trade in the region nor was it a significant agricultural commodity during the period of British imperial rule. In northern India generally then Basmati doesn't appear to have been a significant cash or revenue-paying crop or to circulated or to have circulated widely in a commodity form. Instead it appears more as a prestige crop that participated in a different order of exchange and tribute and was produced, traded and consumed mainly at a local or regional level. It's more limited circulation corresponded historically with a more open and perhaps a looser definition of Basmati, one in which its value was determined not only by its aromatic or physical qualities but also by its participation in noble or religious spheres of exchange. Today however Basmati is a mass commodity but these elite associations are re-inscribed through brand names like trophy, royal or Taj Mahal in the relatively new but burgeoning market, domestic market for branded rice in India. Despite its renown in India over several centuries the mass commoditization and global circulation of Basmati is a relatively recent phenomenon. As the anthropologist Denny Vidal has noted it dates really only to the 1980s. Indeed Basmati exports have grown exponentially for over the past four decades. For example from April to December 1981 India exported about 165,000 tons of Basmati while in a 12 month period in 2018 to 2019 India exported over four million metric tons of Basmati to more than 150 countries and the value of these sales was nearly five billion US dollars which accounts for over 20% of the value of all food and agricultural products within the purview of India's agricultural and processed food products export development authority which is the agency responsible for regulating many of India's food exports so it accounts for a significant proportion of the value of India's food exports. The recent mass commoditization of Basmati for export is directly connected with post-green revolution initiatives in plant breeding. Following the green revolution breeding efforts that had sought to enhance crop yields primarily were expanded to improve the quality of characteristics of rice varieties and in particular Basmati which commanded a premium in domestic and export markets. The kinds of quality standards that became important in these plant breeding initiatives included among other things Basmati's physical characteristics such as the length, breadth, shape and color of the grain, its behavior upon cooking including its absorption of water, its volume expansion and kernel elongation, its nutritional qualities such as its protein content and its milling qualities. From the 1980s through to the present day the the development of Basmati varieties has accelerated tremendously and so this table is difficult to read but it shows a list of 29 government notified varieties of Basmati and one of the things that's interesting I think about this list although you may not be able to read it is that in a 40-year period from 1969 to 2009 there were 14 varieties of Basmati that received notification whereas in the period from 2010 to 2016 there were 15 varieties that received notification so one can see just within the last decade the tremendous acceleration and proliferation of breeding the plant breeding and the notification of Basmati varieties and many of these more recently notified varieties are hybrids such as Pusa Basmati 1121. The rapid growth of the domestic market for branded Basmati or for branded rice in India more generally has also driven the diversification and the proliferation of commercially marketed Basmati varieties. Like the expansion of Basmati exports the emergence of domestic demand for branded rice is relatively recent so for example the food Indian food retail company which procures organic Basmati from farmers in the Dune Valley was only incorporated in 1989 when it established its own flagship brand of Basmati and across India in 2007 sales of branded rice again for one third of the total volume and one half of the total value of the domestic market for Basmati. More recent figures later than 2007 I found difficult to come by but I think one can still sort of see the ongoing kind of strength and growth of this market for branded rice by the increasing number of private food companies that are sort of seeking a slice of this this market. A method growing demand for Basmati within both domestic and export markets both private corporations and national governments have sought to establish exclusive proprietary claims to Basmati. So many of you I'm sure are familiar with the 1997 award of a patent to the US company Rice Tech for Basmati lines that were developed using Indian and Pakistani germplasm and the subsequent public and legal contestation that it provoked. So although much of the patent was subsequently revoked it spurred the government of India and the government of Pakistan to take steps to prevent its future appropriation and here I think it's worth remembering or worth recalling that Vandana Shiva is described by a piracy and more generally the move to award intellectual property over seeds and plant varieties as a form of colonization as the colonization of the seed. So in this context geographical indications may be seen and were certainly seen by these governments as a possible way of preventing such colonization. But these efforts to avert the colonization of Basmati have only intensified the efforts to define what it is in ways that I will argue amount to a certain kind of recolonization. So the rapid growth in exports and the global circulation of Basmati has also at times been accompanied by allegations of adulteration and the widespread use of admixtures or blending of different rice varieties in exported rice that is labeled Basmati. In response international food standards authorities and those in exporting and importing countries have developed precise definitions about what is and isn't Basmati through both binding and voluntary regulatory frameworks. The emergence of Basmati as a global commodity is thus associated with progressive moves to specify and to delimit what it is marking a break with a past in which Basmati's meanings and its qualities were rather more open. These recent regulatory efforts quite literally reshape what kinds of rice may be considered Basmati. To set parameters for export quality Basmati, for example, in 2003 the government of India developed standards that included the minimum precooked grain length, the minimum length bread ratio and the minimum elongation ratio after cooking. These parameters were intended as thresholds that would ensure Basmati's continued reputation in export markets as a famously slender, long-brained, non-sticky aromatic rice. Importing countries have also adopted similar standards. In the UK, which is the eighth largest importer of Basmati, a voluntary code of practice offers the following definition, quote, Basmati is the customary name for certain varieties of rice that are grown in exclusively in specific areas of the Indo-Gangetic plains, which currently includes the Punjab on both sides of the Indian and Pakistani border, Jamal, Haryana, Uttaranshal or Uttarakhand and Western Uttar Pradesh in India. Crucially, this definition of Basmati goes on to limit it to certain varieties as well. So the UK standards note that these varieties must be notified either by the government of India or the government of Pakistan. They must have at least one parent, which is a historic land race variety, and they must meet specific quality criteria for Basmati. So in a sense, the UK standards limit what can be called Basmati in India to the 29 varieties that were on the list I showed earlier. And furthermore, historic land race varieties or traditional varieties are also varieties that are indicated on that list. So the kind of bounds of tradition at land race are also kind of contained within that list. They don't exceed them. These regulations ensure that in UK markets the term Basmati can only be applied to a narrow range then of notified rice varieties that display specific characteristics and are grown in particular geographic regions. The advent of geographic indication, however, creates other kinds of compulsions to define what Basmati is. These efforts have also entailed the mobilization of scientific expertise to effectively nationalize Basmati as Indian in a manner that departs from and remains at odds with understandings of farmers in Utterkan to cultivate the problem. During the course of my fieldwork, local lore about the origins of Therodun Basmati was recounted to me by a somewhat surprising range of Dune Valley farmers and staff of regional NGOs working to conserve seed biodiversity. These accounts cast the grain for which Therodun is famous as an exotic cultivar introduced to the Dune Valley by an exiled Afghan Amir, Dost Mohan Mubkan, after his capture by the British following the Anglo-Afghan War in 1839. A local Therodun historian provides the only documented record of this account in English, reporting that the exiled Amir brought with him seeds from Kunar Valley in northeastern Afghanistan, which took well to the climate and soils of the Dune Valley. In the agrarian history, an imagination of Dune Valley residents and cultivators, therefore, their Dune Basmati, very kind of locally specific cultivars, are caught up with and owe their existence to a wider regional political and imperial history of the 19th century, one that connects the Dune Valley in significant and perhaps unexpected ways with the central Asian terrain of the great game. The agrarian cosmopolitanism displayed by farmers as they noted the origin of Dune Valley Basmati in Afghanistan stands in contrast to those held by some of the region's renowned rice scientists who contend that Basmati originates in the Indians of continent, not in Central Asia, and with some claiming its origins in the Dune Valley itself. This is evident in peer reviewed published accounts, and it was emphasized to me on several occasions as I met with rice breeders and scientists at GBPanth Agricultural University in Uttarakhand. GS Kush, an eminent rice breeder and rice breeder and rice geneticists based at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, identifies the Himalayan foothills of present day Uttarakhand, Bihar, and the Nepali Terai as the center of diversity for the group of aromatic rice to which Basmati belongs. And this is an image from his paper here. So from this region he contends, quote, aromatic rice's spread northwestward to Punjab, in India and Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, northeastward to Bangladesh and Myanmar, and the Indian states of Arissa, Bengal, Assam, and Manipur. The westward distribution occurred to other states of India, such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Pujarat. So it's kind of precisely the opposite direction of the accounts given by residents and farmers in the Dune Valley. While the origins of Basmati generally, and there are doing Basmati specifically, remain unclear to me. I wasn't able to kind of authoritatively establish the origins of Basmati. I think it's nonetheless worth reflecting on the stark differences between a cosmopolitan local lore that acknowledges the historical movement of plant germplasm across present-day national borders and their entanglement with geopolitics and imperial history. And what is, by contrast, a more provincial theory offered by internationally renowned rice breeders. Here it's significant that many of the rice scientists and breeders were consulted by the government of India during its efforts to establish grounds for making the claim to a geographical indication for Basmati. And the success of this application hinged on the ability to demonstrate origin, and particularly locating the origins of Basmati within Northern India through documented published accounts. So sort of documentary, peer reviewed evidence of the Indian origins of Basmati was critical in securing the GI. If scientific accounts thus nationalize Basmati's origins as Indian, they also shift to how Basmati's key qualities are known and defined. As I conducted research in the Dune Valley in 2007 and 2008, residents of Assantur, a village that had acquired a particular fame for Basmati, gave me small bags of what they called Mota Basmati, which was different from the one that they were growing commercially as part of the organic program. And here you can see the difference between Mota Basmati on the right and the commercially grown organic variety. So Mota Basmati was bred and cultivated through farmer selection. It wasn't one of the government notified varieties developed by a public or private sector breeding program. It wasn't sanctioned for official commercial sale. Villagers grew this cultivar for their own consumption and often spoke of how it's a Roma was superior to that of any of the commercially available varieties. Mota Basmati shared many of the characteristics of government notified commercial varieties, especially its elongation upon cooking and its distinctive fragrance. But in Hindi, Mota means fat or thick. And as the word suggests, and as the photo shows, prior to cooking, the grain was short and bold or thick, not long and slender, as is more typical of commercially available grains. Despite its appearance, residents of Asanpur spoke of the wondrous aroma of Mota Basmati, recalling childhood memories of how it's scent would wash through the village when it was cooked. While they're doing Basmati then is often described as if it were a single variety of rice, experienced cultivators discerned differing and different qualities across Basmati produced in different locales within the Dune Valley. Though named for a physical property of the grain, it's that kernel, Mota Basmati's qualities were clearly also understood to exceed these parameters. Rather than being fixed in the grain, they were understood to be part of a more complex ecological interplay, not just in abstract terms of climate, soil and water, but of the wind specific direction at certain times of day, the quality of sunlight, the properties of water and the courses along which water flowed. So for example, farmers would distinguish between the properties of water drawn from different rivers via irrigation canals or down from springs and streams in nearby forested hills. Yet the differences I started to perceive between the notified varieties of Basmati cultivated for organic markets and Asanpur's Mota Basmati only made me question and really kind of brought forth this question of what is Basmati. In the summer of 2008, I brought this puzzle along with a few grains of Mota Basmati to a rice geneticist at GB Pond Agricultural University. Our conversation was initially wide ranging and he acknowledged that the term Basmati is, as he put it, a confusion. He elaborated, if you go to the rural area, you will find the Basmati of every village. Every village has its own Basmati. And so this seemed to me to be the perfect moment to ask him about Mota Basmati. Taking out a small sample of the grains that I've carried with me, I was curious to see, but also thoroughly unprepared for his reaction. Because he was a rice geneticist, I somehow thought that he would maybe acknowledge the variability of Basmati. But his initial reaction was dismissive. He inspected the small, thick grains before him, looked up at me and said, but madam, this is not technically Basmati. He went on to explain his reasoning. The grain is very coarse. There is a lot of mixture of other grains. And then more than 75% of the grains, they are short and they are bold. Pressing on this assessment, I told him that despite the appearance of the grain, it elongated significantly when it was cooked. Furman, his evaluation, he replied that many such local cultivars elongate substantially, even he said too much, and that this does not make them Basmati. Nonetheless, he asked his lab assistant to cook the grains I brought with me. And his skepticism was tempered a bit when we observed that the grain as he put it, behaved like Basmati. So after cooking, it resembled Basmati, lengthening and becoming fine and flaky. Despite the way in which cooking transformed the grain, however, he maintained that this could not be true Basmati on account of the length and the breadth of the uncooked grain. Rice, he noted, is the only grain that's consumed predominantly in an unprocessed state, that is, without substantial milling or grinding. So unlike wheat and maize, which are other widely consumed grains in northern India. That's he explained that the size and shape of the uncooked grain, and not just the cooked grain itself, have become an integral to characterizing Basmati's physical qualities. In projecting Asankur's Motha Basmati as Basmati for want of the right kind of qualities, this rice geneticists no doubt likely had in mind India's export quality standards, which I mentioned earlier. These standards stipulate not only the length breadth, length breadth ratio and elongation ratio, but also percentage parameters for foreign matter, other rice varieties, other grains and so on. What's crucial here is that these export quality standards now also delimit the scope of India's geographical indication for Basmati. Basmati that's eligible for protection through geographical indication, then, must first be a government notified variety, and second must conform to these export quality standards. The rise of Basmati as a globally traded grain has had two major and paradoxical effects. First, it has shifted the locus of quality from sensory aromatic properties to the physical characteristics of the grain, and to a geography that defines spatially, rather than through socio-ecological relations. Under the contract farming arrangements that underlie the production of organic Basmati, farmers must now not only plant certain government notified varieties, but through their labours must ensure that the grains they cultivate are not discoloured, black, green and striped, broken and so on. And this final slide shows one of the problems that may occur. So this is a disease called brown spot, which as you can see actually leaves a brown spot on the rice and blemishes the milled grain. And so this creates a problem for farmers, because it means that their rice then doesn't conform to these export quality standards, if a certain proportion of it is blemished in this way. So a second, I guess, effect of the rise of Basmati as a globally traded grain, and something that's resulted from processes of standardization that structure geographical indication is that local cultivars like Motha Basmati have been expelled from recent regulatory definitions of the very category of Basmati. Ironically, as India's geographical indication is promoted to protect Basmati's distinctiveness, the most particular and distinctive kinds of Basmati grown in the Dune Valley are no longer considered Basmati at all. Increasingly, Basmati is defined then through the interlocking of regulatory relations that become ingrained in agricultural practices as farmers who wish to participate in contract farming arrangements are obliged to grow particular varieties of rice and to ensure that their crop conforms to export quality standards. To be sure of previous efforts to colonize Basmati, so to speak, have been loudly contested as in the rice tech patent dispute. But today, what could be seen as Basmati's recolonization, this time by the Indian states and private sector food companies is arguably more subtle and surreptitious. It occurs as Dune Valley farmers replace Motha Basmati with government notified varieties, and meet even more invisibly, adapt their labors to regulatory standards so as to coax from their fields the slender, fine and unblemished grains that we may consume. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much. It's really fascinating. Yeah, study really shows us how we can see the world in the grain of the rice in some ways. I'm really very interested in this and not at all knowledgeable about it. But it's a subject which it can relate to everyone's life. And it's something that yeah, it's a real example of how the political economy of food can be told through, you know, one one single commodity. So I, as I just mentioned, I'm not at all an expert in this area. My questions are mostly for more information and for learning for myself, learning more about it, because one of the really interesting aspects of your presentation was the liquid sort of class status and how both sort of domestic consumption has historically been, you know, marker of class status. And yeah, and then how it gets sort of shifted from from that to nationalist discourses. And so my first sort of question was what accounts for you said that there was and this was just an attempt to draw out that class link more explicitly. It's there throughout the people. You said that it was not a commodity for very long, historically, right? And that's precisely because it was a prestige prop. And it was it's restriction, it's restricted circulation added to in a sense it's prestige, right? And then later, what we see more recently is a growing demand. You said there's been a growing demand, if you like, for this promote domestic and export markets. So what does that growing demand then tell us about the class, if you like implications of this crop, what what what the changing structure of class domestically and internationally? Yeah, because that's that's one shift that you say that now this much greater the second point that again, it's more for my own understanding that on the one hand, we see this move towards standardization that is through this GI process. Is that is that correct? Yeah, that GI thing is a key. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the GI is building on other processes of standardization, show export quality. Exactly. And so my sense of that story was that there is a sort of reduction in what is acceptably basmati, right? So what's that's that's that's doing that. But on the other hand, and there was also that very interesting table, which shows there's a proliferation of the varieties, recognized varieties of lots, right? So that's gone alongside a notification of many, many more varieties. So why would one assume that that standardization is necessarily reducing the feed rather than, you know, expanding also creating sort of spaces for expansion? So I mean, I stopped there, I'm sure there are more questions from the audience. But I think that that's it's a really terrific subject anyone that look forward to reading more about. Should I answer? Oh, as you as you prefer, would you take more questions? Yeah. Is that okay for you? Yeah. I was just wondering under what circumstances to serve as the rice geneticists interact with local farmers, if they ever do, because that would sort of maybe like, are they ever sort of dealing with these farmers as sort of experts or is it always sort of teaching? And I was wondering if there were any efforts to include local varieties onto the notified list? Yeah, great questions. Should I take those? There's sort of four questions there. Thank you for them. So I think in terms of I guess one thing I should say is that in a way, because I came at this through really looking at organic agriculture, the interest in Basmati and geographical indications, and branded rice in India that these are kind of interest that develop during the course of my research, but sort of as one branch that I haven't, that I've not had thus far a chance to explore as much as I like to. But it's something that I hope to do more with in the future. But in terms, so on that note, I haven't looked specifically at the questions of class and consumption of Basmati and what what the growing demand for Basmati or for branded Basmati in India tells us about class. I guess I think there's maybe two things that are the one thing about in terms of class and this demand for Basmati. So one is I suppose the growth of a middle class in India and the fact that certainly Basmati is becoming a grain that more people can afford to purchase at some, you know, to some degree. What's also interesting is is the branding itself of Basmati. So I had the opportunity to interview some of the kind of marketing executives who were working in the company that is procuring organic Basmati. And I ended up spending an afternoon looking at advertisements for branded Basmati that they were selling. And they were very there's a very kind of conscious way in which different brands, trophy, royal Taj Mahal are kind of targeted to different second parts of the population, right on a class basis. So there's a way in which I think there may be a kind of independent demand for Basmati, but that demand is also being kind of cultivated. And class itself is also sort of being produced or reproduced partly through the marketing strategies of these food companies. One might argue. Again, it's something that I need to explore more, but that's kind of one possible thought. I think maybe the second point about class or another, what could also be interesting to explore is is the way in which consumption of certain foods is a way of producing or expressing class status and distinction. So Pierre Bourdieu is famously written about this and many other people have looked at how food and food consumption practices are a way of marking class or other differences and distinctions. And one could perhaps kind of take a similar approach to thinking about the growing demand for Basmati. So yeah, I mean, I think it could be in terms of food studies, it could be an interesting way of thinking about the production and reproduction of class. In in India and the participation of this kind of growing sector of private food retail in that. I think in relation to, yeah, the point about the, you know, what, whether this is truly a narrowing of the field, given that we've seen such a kind of proliferation of new varieties of Basmati. I mean, I think yeah, that's definitely I completely agree with that. I don't I. Yeah, I think, you know, what I shouldn't suggest that this is just a kind of narrowing and a reduction of what Basmati is. But what seems significant is who who is behind the whose varieties are recognized, right? What are the kind of conditions under which cultivars varieties become eligible for recognition. And I guess what's important about that list is it's all varieties that are developed in informal plant breeding programs. So and so far, to the best of my knowledge, this is these plant breeding initiatives, unlike what one hears with respect to plant breeding, sort of in a wider sense, in India, but these initiatives have been mainly public sector initiatives. So the private sector hasn't stepped in a big way to develop newer varieties of Basmati. But I mean, I think another, there's certainly links between an increasingly close links between public sector breeding and private retail. So it could be interesting to kind of get at how that shapes the development of these new varieties. But I guess the key thing here is that the maybe it seems to be more the kind of ways in which local cultivars are kind of expelled from are excluded from the category of Basmati. So Basmati becomes that which is contained within a list that this government notified list of varieties that which, you know, observes particular kind of physical characteristics and so on. And maybe that kind of addresses the last question that answered or that you asked about the inclusion of local cultivator cultivars on the notified list of notified five varieties. Again, to the best of my knowledge that hasn't happened. And I think we would be able to speak to this more more as well. But one of the reasons is that often these local cultivars may not be kind of stable. In the same way that varieties bred in a formal, you know, under formal plant breeding kind of conditions are. So there's certain reasons why why the local cultivars haven't been included on the list. But what's sort of curious is that in a sense, initially, I think the geographical indication for Basmati in India was seen as a possible means for protecting, you know, traditional varieties, local cultivars, biodiversity, and so on, certainly in response to the patent. And that's kind of one sort of discourse that's existed around GIS more broadly. But I think from what I I can see what the Basmati experience so far of the Basmati geographical indication tells us is that it's working quite differently, right? And so that rather than it's including and being inclusive of varieties and cultivars produced under diverse conditions. In a sense, it's perhaps narrowing the conditions under which Basmati can be considered Basmati. And then the direct question your question about the rice geneticists. So I mean, I think because this state agricultural university is located in, in Uttarakhand, you know, certainly, these weren't scientists who were, you know, working all the time in a lab, and they conducted research in, in and around the Dune Valley. I still think, though, that that itself doesn't, it doesn't necessarily transform the research process itself. It didn't mean that there was, you know, was the plant breeding efforts were participatory in any sense. So I think in some ways, the, the and what was interesting is in a way, the views of these rice geneticists seem to fall far more in line with the kind of policies of the government of India, right, rather than with the kind of diversity that might be observable in the field. I don't know if that answers. Yeah. Were there more other questions? Yeah. So one is one is about the history that we're trying to trace the origins of Basmati. It's funny if you traced it back to work on this, then to see if there were varieties there, which have similar indicators, which perhaps establishes that the origins lie somewhere there. The other question I had is about, well, the paper looks at the exclusion as a process of recolonisation. The question I have is, would the story be different if you've told it from the contract farming and what the contract farming process actually does? Did you dig deeper into that contract farming, the contracts? Yeah. What is happening to the farmers with that process? Is that even part of the reason? Yeah. No, thank you for those, for those questions. On the origins of Basmati in Afghanistan, it's something that I would, I find really fascinating how this account has emerged. And I haven't been able, though, to trace it back to the Kunar Valley in Afghanistan. I've tried to find kind of records or other ways of getting at what kinds of rice are cultivated in this region. But it's, I think, without going to Afghanistan and kind of working in that region, it may be difficult to kind of establish those connections. But I think it's something that could be, it's offering a very different kind of account of Basmati's origins, and I think precisely because it's one that's so enmeshed in a particular kind of geopolitical history that understands this region, which is today very fractured and divided in a way that is kind of really, really quite connected. You know, I think it could either it's something that I think would be would be interesting to do. So maybe this will be this is so this isn't my book, I have to say. But maybe it could develop into something in the future. And in terms of the contract farming, this was actually something I did look at more in the context of the the production of certified organic Basmati. And so in term, I guess your question was about exclusion. This was put the same story. And it could be a reconstruction. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, I mean, the farmers in the Dune Valley had a very kind of ambivalence experience with contract farming. In fact, in the years that I conducted my research, which was principally 2007 to 2008, many farmers in a certain part of the Dune, well, actually, many farmers who had grouped together these farmers federations to sell their Basmati to to this rice retail company actually renamed on the contract. So so they at the moment after Basmati is harvested, there were there was a series of dates when farmers are supposed to come to a particular procurement point at the block headquarters or the Mandi and representative from the company was there. And the rice samples of the rice were inspected. It was weighed there was you know, this was kind of a moment of transaction. But so I was there for this procurement in 2007. And many of the farmers didn't turn up. And so what I was told at the time, or some of the reasons that were given at the time, well, one from the company's point of view, they said, Oh, well, they're just, you know, diverting it to their family or saying that, you know, they need it for weddings. And so they sell they're selling less to us. So there was a certain amount of this rentalment on the part of the company. But in fact, you know, farmers had particular reasons for not honoring contract. One was that the contract price of Basmati, they said wasn't competitive with at the time, what was a fairly strong market price for Basmati. And in particular, that the extra cost of labor that they labor costs that they encourage, because they couldn't apply sort of herbicides, weed, control weeds, and so on, they had to hire manual labor, that these costs weren't adequately compensated and the price they were receiving. Some there were four farmers federations. So these were kind of unit like units of group certification and contract farming that included at the time around 400 farmers in each Federation. So in one of the federations, the farmers said they hadn't received their payment from the previous year on time. So they're not actually paid in cash at the moment of procurement. The payment goes to the president of the Farmers Federation. And then it's up to the president to distribute it to the members of the Federation. So in one instance, there were there were serious problems with the kind of management of this process and farmers had said they were never paid for Basmati that they sold the previous year. So obviously, why would they honor the contract? So there was I guess I wouldn't necessarily see it then as a kind of process of that process of colonization. And because I think in a certain sense, these farmers showed a certain, you know, a fair degree of agency in how the terms in which they engaged with the contract. A number of them also because it was so hard to find Basmati in the city of their doing. And because there's sort of concerns and fears among residents city urban residents if they're doing about Basmati that they buy being adulterated, or being fake, they would sometimes drive out to these farms to just buy directly from farmers themselves. And so I think you know, there was also in some ways an emergence of a more kind of local demand and supply of Basmati. And I think in general, yeah, the farmers were either able to find ways to resist or abandon the contract. And for some, some also really welcomed the chance to participate in it. You know, welcomed the links to private private rice retailer. And you know, and really spoke very positively of it. Yeah, how do you think things would have gone without the GI? And do you have kind of a better situation like whether you'd keep a GI with completely overhauling like the un-time criteria? Yeah, and how much do you think what has happened would have happened anyway, just because of things like wider branding, and the whole agricultural commercial industry as a big thing outside of the field? Yeah. No, I mean, I think those are, yeah, good points. In some ways, I think, I mean, in some ways, and you know, I put this out there as a thought. So other people may have different ideas or perspectives on this. But I think that in some ways, it is the kind of, yeah, what I call the mass commoditization in Basmati that's kind of propelled these efforts to standardize it and to stabilize it, even independently of the geographical indication. So in some ways, the fact that, you know, in the UK, there were concerns about the blending of different kinds of rice that was then labeled Basmati, and that these kinds of concerns that emerge through and in supply chains, whether or not there is an additional GI involved will will exist and will kind of create create pressures, and arguably a need for standardizing and stabilizing particular legal or regulatory meanings of, you know, what is Basmati or what isn't Basmati. So I know those are arguably necessary for certain kinds of trade. I guess I have a friend and a colleague who works in Madagascar. And she's looked at the export in very small quantities of Madagascar red rice, which is an airline rice. So I think, you know, one can look at different kinds of commodities, right? And in some commodities, like in this instance of red rice in Madagascar, that kind of variability that you find, it's kind of non standard quality, the fact that there's, you know, variation in color of the grain size, that it's not, it's not, or maybe not yet being subject to these processes of standardization, but it exists and part of its value derives from the fact that it is this kind of niche heirloom, heirloom rice. So yeah, I guess it, you know, very much, I think is linked maybe to the particular form of the form and circuits through which the commodity circulates. But I guess when it comes to the geographical indication, so yeah, I think some of this would have gone on anyway, but I suppose what's maybe more problematic for me or raises concerns for me is that is that these local cultivars like Basmati are now not seen as Basmati. And they're not protected. They're not, they can't be, because they're not bus, they're not seen or recognized as Basmati. They're not eligible for the same kinds of protection. And yet, plant breeding programs may use the germ plasm of these cultivars to develop varieties that are then listed as a notified variety. And that's the case with one of the with one of the cultivars that is a government notified variety. So the type three variety, which was actually well, it was the longer grain that I showed that you saw the two photos, type three Basmati is actually developed from they're doing cultivar, but it's type three Basmati. And so I think, you know, this is, I think this is where the concerns about, you know, the way in which local germ plasm land races are still a kind of source and material for plant breeding programs to use without kind of recognition becomes becomes something more of a concern if one is concerned about, you know, their appropriation in the first place. Is that yeah? Any other questions? No. So I don't know if it remains for me to panic. I don't want to speak for a really stimulating paper. And we look forward to reading more, more forward. Thank you. Thank you very much. Just great. More interesting questions of my own. I thought they're not subject. I thought the whole of you to this. So I'm interested as to why did they demand after the revolution go down?