Catching Up With a Kerala Harvest Festival Where Agriculture Blends With the Arts and Learning
A harvest where the land teaches, art listens, and community learns together. In Zahira Rahman’s account of Arangottukara’s Koythulsavam, farming meets theatre, craft, and care—quietly and collaboratively. This is education rooted in the soil, sustained by women, and open to all who arrive with attention.
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is not education at all – Aristotle”
It was the 20th anniversary of Koythulsavam, or the harvest festival at Arangottukara, in Thrissur, Kerala. 20 years of engaging with the earth and its creatures, and being consistent about it, is not a mean task. I had planned and dreamed of attending this event when I was doing my Ph.D. in Theatre in Education. When I arrived after 20 years of waiting, one winter afternoon, the Earth was resplendent and ready for harvesting.
I arrived at Arangottukara to a message that announced bio- farming workshop, the directions were not exact and a stranger could be led away to a wrong spot but I was immediately a directed to the courtyard of a modest home where a few people had gathered to listen to a talk on bio farming, the knowledge dissemination and the discussion that followed demonstrated the tone of knowledge transfer that defined Kalapatashala. We had lunch under a canopy of trees, everyone pitching in seamlessly and providing one another space and respite without the other demanding it. This arrangement of social relations does not happen through disciplinary means; it evolves through interactions in freer and open spaces.
I encountered the young and the old, the middling and the extraordinary, the happy and the despondent, the fortunate and the deprived, all striding and marching in purposeful exercises: theatre training, classes on farming techniques, craft workshops, art exhibitions, dance classes; spreading knowledge among whoever cares to cross this open land, organically and poetically. There was space for the watchers and the musers, too.
First, it was the ancestral land that was being farmed, then eventually it transformed the whole village and its people, inspiring everyone who came to watch. A committed group of villagers held together by the sheer persistence and will of Sreeja Arangottukara and her close friends (turned family) has found meaning in ploughing the earth and watching the stars both literally and metaphorically. The theater space and activities that the Kalapatashala has embraced is collaborative and dialogic by default. The plans and the structure of these harvest festivals have evolved organically with no hierarchy or inflexible rules.
The beginnings of the Harvest Festival, which now attracts people worldwide was spontaneous and born as a spur-of-the-moment thought when this group of women turned fallow lands into lush green rice fields ,the first harvest was abundant, and it lifted their spirits. They cooked payassam over a fire in the fields after harvest and burst into songs in a moment of solidarity.
When they went to invite the panchayat president to inaugurate the harvest, the panchayat officials were excited. It was 2006, the year of the golden jubilee celebrations of the birth of the Kerala state. The Panchayat had funds to organise such events, so they were eager to turn this into a bigger event involving the whole village.
The history of Arangottukara is rife with tales of revolution of women collectives breaking free of their cloistered existence, of theater activities emancipating and empowering women. The Kuriyedath Thatri trial was born out of a rebellion that rocked the male-dominated society. The birth house of this intrepid woman is a stone’s throw away from the fields where this harvest festival is staged. The Weavers Collective which inspired the play Thozhil Kendrathilekk in the 1940s, resonates with the work of Kalapatashala, established in 2005. It is Arangottukara and its neighbourhood that witnessed cataclysmic changes that rocked the patriarchal system, with writers and social reformers like V.T.Bhattathirippad revolutionizing a conformist society. Arangottukara and its villagers were already well known for upsetting the inflexible establishment. Theater groups and artistes like M. Narayanan of the Arangottukara Nataka sangam had been resolutely fighting injustice and this had become a part of their community living .
When Sreeja KV and M Narayanan, both alumni of the Government Sanskrit College, Pattambi, began their journey together, they combined their passion for agriculture and theatre. Arangottukara Nataka Sangam, which was once a powerful theater group, had slowly scaled down its performances with its actors and directors moving in different directions. By 2000, Sreeja and her friends had formed a Kudumbasree unit. These self-help neighbourhood groups, which were becoming popular in Kerala, were seen as a means of women’s empowerment. They farmed, sold their produce, and tried their hand at making value-added products with the harvested rice. There is still a weekly bazaar, which financially and socially empowers women.
This merger of diverse people, integrating culture and agriculture, sowed the seeds of Kalapatasala in the year 2005. The Kala Patashala Trust that has emerged since then does work on organisational logic; however, the workings of Kala Patasala are organic and instinctual like Sreeja’s own logic: she works in a Sales tax office, a very rigid by- the- book space; however, her inner life is defined by a spontaneity that springs from her inner core. Once a tree-climbing, speed pedaling young girl, she has kept her free spirit alive in her 59 years of journey. She is fiercely self-effacing and reiterates that Kala Patasala is a cooperative and collaborative project.
It has retained its fluid character, reforming and refining itself from within. What began as collaborative bio farming in an attempt to test the efficacy of social bonding has grown into a merger of culture and agriculture. The women labour collectives who contribute hugely to this venture get themselves absorbed into this world of productive living as players and benefactors
The language of the theatre, dialogic and collaborative, had entered the space over the years, and the camaraderie was visible and present. Members of the Workers Union office of all political orientations voluntarily taking up the responsibility of ensuring law and order, dissuading those inclined to disrupt the harmony, local women contributing a day’s wage to fund the festival, the young students, NSS volunteers from colleges around Government College Patambi and Ayurveda College, Kootanad being the heart and soul of the events, altruism seemed the practice.
This year’s festival found a congregation of environmentalists, young entrepreneurs, artists, farmers, labourers, academicians, intellectuals, theater people, film actors, dancers, skilled craftsman scientists, and students coming together, a crowd so diverse that it was difficult to give it a name. However, they had all gathered in the spirit of unity, and there was a beauty in this diversity. The festival’s tagline says diversity, resistance, and survival- lessons in living beautifully and productively, sharing resources and knowledge. Independent, self-reliant women thronged the fields. The whole discourse was that of supporting and soliciting.
The children’s theatre and the plays staged did not just impress but engendered a hope that even with all the machines and screens expediting robotic living, there’s yet a thinking generation pushing ahead, and the threat of drugged youth self-destructing themselves into zombies could be a bit fanciful.
Education as an organic process is ensured in the coming together of theater and farming, and if we are seeking a poetic understanding of the logic of this harvest festival, it’s the blending of the earth and the sky: the roots and the firmness of the earth and the freedom and limitless space of the sky. They had named it Vallam 2026, meaning a coconut frond basket for storing seeds in. A hope for a fecund future.
