The millet revival and associated new policies are encumbered by a fundamental and complex problem our research projects deal with: the disconnection of crops and culture. In Odisha, while millets are now celebrated as a “salvage crop” for the future, the original cultivators of millets (the Adivasis) are considered as “backward” by the state and the coastal urban middle-class population in general. This discrimination has a very long history (Kingwell-Benham and Fuller 2012, Thapar 1971) and while millets have increased in status, diets and cultivation techniques of the highlanders, their Indigenous religions and cultures continue to be denigrated and actively curtailed. Some of the key aspects in this multifaceted process are school education that devalues local lifestyles as Berger (2014; see also Gupta and Padel 2018, see image above) has shown and the industrialization of agriculture combined with top-down and market-oriented agricultural development schemes (Saxena 2020). Commercially successful crops are introduced and monocultures of rice, maize and cotton promoted. During our preparatory fieldwork in 2019, for example, Peter and René participated in a workshop (organized by the government of Odisha and a non-profit agricultural organization) for local farmers where the cultivation of an invasive spineless cactus (Opuntia) was encouraged, as far as we could see mainly to the benefit of the cosmetic industry. Among many members of agricultural departments the view that Adivasi cultivators are ignorant, and their cultures irrelevant, still prevails. One of the organizers told Peter after the workshop: “You know, they are Adivasis, they do what we tell them.”

Another associated problem resulting from the disconnection of crops and culture is that conflicting “food-worldviews” (MacRae 2016) go unnoticed. The state and agro-scientists think about millets in terms of “food security” or “staple security”, while a contrasting bottom-up perspective endorsed by local communities is often described as “food sovereignty”, i.e. the right of a people to decide on their own culturally favored ways of cultivation and consumption. Commercial farmers think about millets in terms of “food profit”. These different stakeholders virtually seem to live in separate worlds.

In our project we research the dynamic relatedness of crops and culture in the context of recently introduced policies. We strive toward a holistic understanding of millets that relates the natural properties and affordances of crops, previously studied by René (Cappers 2019), to their socio-cultural embeddedness Peter and Roland investigated (Berger 2003, 2015, 2018, 2023; Hardenberg 2018, 2021a, 2021; Berger & Hardenberg 2018). We study the interplay between various material (crops, soils, technologies) and non-material factors (such as food-worldviews, religious conversion, valuation of millets), and shifts in relationships of gender, status and power. Moreover, while we focus on contemporary dynamics in Odisha, we will contextualize them in relation to past shifts of crop selection in India. In societal terms, we want to understand and problematize the process of curtailing Indigenous cultures and livelihoods and to spell out the conflictual relationships between different food-worldviews and we hope to contribute to transforming the situation of mutual incomprehension of the different stakeholders into one of dialogue.