Mahali Kizhangu Curd Pickles

Part 1 of a two-part series on Mahali Kizhangu [Decalepis hamiltonii] and Nannari [Hemidesmus indicus], and the unforgivably large ecological costs of confusing the two.

Maahaali kizhangu [மாகாளி கிழங்கு], magali/ mahaani/ maavaali, perum-nannari [பெரும்நன்னாரி], katuvalli kizhangu, “meesai kaai” [moustache fruit owing to the shape of its fruits], swallow root, Decalepis hamiltonii is a uniquely flavored root endemic to the deciduous forests and hilly-to-montane regions of South India, apparently preferring compact, not-rich soils and the company of rocks and boulders. Its principle traditional use has been as a medicament, and the mode of delivery usually a pickle.

I have not grown up with mahali, but the pickling of this kizhangu with curd (and zero oil) is such a Palakkad-Tamil Brahmin thing and my family traces origins to Palakkad via multiple marriages so the place and its practices are all akin. When I announced to my father some years ago that I was off to the Mylapore temple markets to find this very seasonal and special root, he seemed happy but not surprised. Pickling mahali kizhangu is what we do, whether we’ve ever done it before or not.

Before I could get to the pickling, however, I found myself, as the Dutch say, “in de pekel zitten”: in a pickle myself. Mahali root is critically endangered thanks to destructive commercial overharvesting and is on the IUCN’s Red List–an alarming fact which stands quite in the face of mahali kizhangu‘s relatively easy local availability. Push cart vendors have for decades brought this around old neighborhoods during post-monsoon winters, presumably sourced from the foraging Irula or other hill-dwelling communities, for urban housewives to pick up and pickle. Its rarity always made it relatively expensive, and these days that’s all the more so. There’s usually one vendor or one stall in local markets which will carry the roots, usually with other “exotics” like green peppercorns, kelakkai [Carrisa carandas] and kadarangai [wild lemon] for pickling. One can’t say it’s widely available, but it’s certainly around.

The root is prized for its medicinal properties, most especially as a hemoglobin-booster, blood purifier, and general vitalizer, but equally to treat poor appetite and digestive issues, skin diseases (it has a role in wound-healing), bronchial conditions, glycemic or blood sugar control. Families can be divided, however, by the flavor. Intoxicating, say some. Moote poochi naatham, say others: the odor of bedbugs. More for us! shrug the some. Worse than paan masala, insist even others. And so it goes.

Mahali kizhangu belongs in a repertoire of “forest foods” upon which forest-dwelling communities–tribals, if one wants to call them that–have historically relied, though it’s not belly-filling source of sustenance, more of a supplement or, as I say, a medicament.

Old roots, new exploitation

From here the story becomes a familiar one. The Irulas and Kanis (in Tamil Nadu) and the Chenchu and Yanadi (in Andhra Pradesh) and other forest-dwelling communities foraged in season, always leaving behind enough root for the plants to regenerate, and never taking more than their own physical carrying capacity. Commercial medicinal plant collectors among the Malayalis (in Kerala) and presumably their counterparts in deciduous forests of Chittoor, Anantapur, Kadapa and Nellore districts in Andhra Pradesh (where “Rayalaseema Sharbat” is famous), are invariably less careful or committed. The contrast is between community custodians of forest resources used for sustenance and the commercial exploitation of forest resources by outsiders, and we all know in this who does the greater and more lasting damage.

There is a tendency to think of the forests-before-commerce as veritable gardens of Eden, rich in resources, cared for by people who lived in perfect step with their natural environments. No doubt, subsistence foraging, whaling, hunting, farming have likely had neither sensibility nor scale to “exploit” and decimate the way that commercial undertakings historically have, in all imperial contexts and from imperial times forwards. At the same time, very few are willing to ask what subsistence really ever entailed beyond deep knowledge of and attunement with local ecologies–what hardships, what trade-offs, what yearnings for what unavailable opportunities, and–uncomfortably–what routes to better livelihoods the prospects of commerce might have opened up, alongside the inevitable threats. There was always something of a market for mahali, and the only instance of a self-sufficient community wanting to protect and safeguard a prized local resource at all costs from any outsiders is Wakanda with its mythic vibranium. Mahali kizhangu‘s placement of its most special and sought-after qualities in its roots, ironically hidden from view and difficult to discover, are tragically its Achilles’ heel.

The commercial over-exploitation of wild Decalepis hamiltonii is noted as fact in just about any academic paper written on the subject. Reasons, however, are never given: as with tribal “subsistence,” “commercial exploitation” seems self-evident and doesn’t seem to warrant much explanation. But the roots of over-exploitation are critically important, if you’ll forgive the unfortunate pun. For what are these mahali roots being rapaciously harvested? Pickles wouldn’t begin to explain it, nor would the uses in traditional Indian medicine systems. The root’s unusual flavor somewhere between vanilla and root beer is, however, a clue to what more. Mahali contains an isomer of vanillin, 2-hydroxy-4-methoxybenzaldehyde or HMB/2H4MB, making it attractive to the flavoring industry as an artificial vanilla or vanilla essence substitute or more. Its unique flavor also makes it wildly popular in a body-cooling summer sharbat–although not a soul would understand “mahali sharbat,” were you to mention that name, they’d know only nannari sharbat or Rayalaseema nannari sharbat. That’s the second clue to its over-exploitation, for although nannari is an entirely different plant [Hemidesmus indicus, Indian sarsaparilla, naruneendi, sugandhi, sariva, anantamoola or the endless root] it also contains the vanillin isomer 2-hydroxy-4-methoxy benzaldehyde or HMB/2H4MB, and therefore is often confused with or used interchangeably with mahali kizhangu. There are also some studies which seem note that both mahali and nannari are used interchangeably in modern Ayurveda: a 1978 article by Nayar et al notes that in the “Government Central Pharmacy, Bangalore and in some of the leading Ayurvedic pharmacies in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the roots of this taxon which is considered as ‘Sariva Bheda’ (in Ayurveda) is used in place of the roots of Hemidesmus indicus (Sariva) in Ayurvedic preparations like Amritamalaka taila, Drakshadi churna, Shatavari rasayana and Yeshtimadhu taila.”

And here is the rub: nannari is far more known and far more popular than mahali kizhangu, but nannari has always been far less available in bulk than mahali [Nayar et al 1978]. So the mis-identification, confusion, and substitution is just one-way: mahali is mistaken for and used as a substitute for nannari, not the other way around. All this carries Ayurvedic imprimatur, though I am yet to find a published study that offers more than anecdotal evidence for the interchangeability of these two roots.

Mahali-Nannari-Maha-Mix-Up

The internet then becomes an echo chamber; photographs of what is clearly mahali kizhangu are routinely presented as nannari, even in this paper by Shifali Thakur et al / Int. J. Res. Ayurveda Pharm. 12 (3), 2021. YouTube videos demonstrating the successful farming and cultivation of “nannari” or the foraging of “nannari” are not showing nannari at all, but mahali mis-identified as nannari. Some articles, such as this one by Raju and Ramana (2011), treat “nannari” as though it were just the name that happens to be given to a drink made (and they document just how) from D. Hamiltonii.

Rare are the videos that make correct identifications: for example this which recognizes that this root is maredu gadda (mahali in Telugu) and not nannari, and offers a good glimpse here of the kind of environs in which Mahali kizhangu grows, and what it takes to forage for it. Revathi Babu tells of a saying in Kumbakkonam: Naatula valanja Nannari, Malaila valanja Mahali; if it grows in the country it’s nannari, if it grows in the hills it’s mahali–a saying which both recognizes the closeness, but equally the differences.

I suppose the good news in any of this is that mahali kizhangu is being cultivated, but cultivation as we know will favor some types over others, will cease with demand, and may not return anything to the wild. Meanwhile, the over-exploitation of wild mahali has placed not just mahali, but at least three of the twining vines and erect shrubs of the family Decalepis at risk of extinction:

• D. hamiltonii,
• D. arayalpathra [Amrithapala, Janakia arayalpatra; found in the rocky hill slopes on the Agasthiyar hills (Kerala) and within the Kalakkadu Mandanthurai tiger reserve in Tamil Nadu],
• D. salicifolia [“mara-nannari,” from the Anamalai Hills (Kerala and Tamil Nadu), Nelliampathy (Kerala) and Marayoor (Kerala) forests],
• D. nervosa [restricted to one of the highest sections of the Western Ghats, the Nilgiris], and
• D. khasiana [geographically isolated from the other four species in peninsular India; first documented in the Khasia hills of Meghalaya; since also found in Bangladesh, Laos, Myanmar, and China [Source]

Of these, all but D. Nervosa have a vanillin-like fragrance and are utilized medicinally–and the first three used interchangeably, in spite of the roots of D. aryalpathra and D. salicifolia being moniliform to D. Hamiltonii’s straight tubers. So, along with D. Hamiltonii, D. aryalpathra and D. salicifolia are listed as endangered, too, although not on the IUCN’s lists yet.

Images by the otherwise very reliable Dinesh Valke below are labelled Anantamool/H. Indicus, but it’s unclear if they are nannari or in fact a Decalepis variety:

Andhra Pradesh’s State Biodiversity board reported in 2013 that demand for Decalepis had risen dramatically, and, with it, prices–and that mahali roots were being smuggled out of India to “Australia, South Africa and other countries” where (perhaps) the demand for natural sources of artificial vanilla flavor (yeah, the irony) might be greater. Indeed, I have heard of the roots being “spotted” at ethnic grocers in the United States, though it’s not at all clear to me what local consumers in these various countries would be doing with this root in the first place.

Certainly not pickling, or the use as a medicinal decoction, which are the only traditional culinary uses for the mahali kizhangu roots that I know. The rest is madness and craze, with up to 2,500 bottles of “nannari” concentrate being sold per day in some summers, at least as this one sharbat-making shop called Ondippili in Madurai tells it. I’m all for traditional, local, natural–and a cynic perhaps, but scale of this sort invariably means compromises of an existential sort. Too much sugar, too little care.

What is to be done about any of this? This carelessness of mis-identification, or is it a ruse? that brazenly allows for or even condones the over-exploitation of mahali by calling it “nannari” all along, so that mentally I never made the connection between my use of nannari in a syrup for Jil-jil-Jigarthanda and the devastation of the species. None of us would, and there is literally no information out there except a newspaper report or two and all the academic papers which few will read bemoaning critically endangered status to jolt us out of nannari-love-stupor and into an awareness of the truth.

So what is the role of the conscious consumer in all this?

Here are some ideas.

• Know, first and foremost, that what you are consuming as nannari is very likely and most probably mahali kizhangu and that the summer craze for nannari sharbat has contributed to the over-exploitation of wild Decalepis species to the point of near-extinction.
• Know also that what medicinal benefits you are deriving from “nannari sharbat” are probably not those that you would get from actual nannari-based sharbat, but something from the mahali root. Is the sharbat form the best way to derive mahali’s benefits? Or is the better delivery method indeed the urugai?
• If you see mahali kizhangu in the markets, don’t just buy it on the logic that it’s already harvested so you may as well. Instead, ask–ask the vendor from where this root is being procured. From where does it come? Is it being farmed or foraged? Press a conversation on vendors about over-harvesting of wild roots, insist that you will buy only what is farmed and cultivated, raise a fuss, talk about the loss of these resources to forest-dwelling communities. It may seem like a futile effort and a waste of time, you may get lies and more mis-information or just patient nods and acquiescences, but this, too, is sowing a seed.
• Buy very little, make it last long. Mahali kizhangu in pickled form will last you years if you preserve it right and use it sparingly–as a supplement and a medicament.
• Skip commercially produced nannari sharbat entirely. It’s chock-full of sugar anyway; whatever medicinal properties it has are probably cancelled by just that. Plus God knows there are multiple thirst-quenching, body cooling sharbats available. Panakam. Bael/Bilvam. Jal-jeera. Rose milk with badam pisin. Buttermilk. Have any of them. Skip the nannari because it’s not nannari at all and is costing us a precious, endemic species.
• And if you do live in a place where mahali grows wild–find the seeds. [Watch this video and this one to see what they look like.] They are not available online, as far as I can tell. Plant them or send them to anyone else who will plant them and care for them enough to return them to wildernesses. According to farmers such as these and Vedavathy 2004 it should be possible to grow them with some care even if seed viability is short and “[n]atural seed germination is very low in this species, that is, 6% because of hard seed coat, less seed dormancy period and due to self-incompatibility” [Reddy and Murthy 2013].
• You could also propagate vegetatively, from a plant cutting.
• If you have a farm of your own and have read this far, no excuses. Grow mahali kizhangu. By all accounts it’s hardy, loves compact and relatively dry soil, grows amongst rocks and boulders, in all those impossible uncultivable areas, and acts as a “drill bit,” as one person I met once told me, boring into the hard earth, creating passages for water and aiding in groundwater restoration or filling aquifers, even or especially in places where all this seems impossible. Get your JCBs and heavy earthmovers to make you rain-water catchment areas, for sure. But also plant mahali kizhangu.

Finally, the curd pickles

Now to climb out of this inescapable pickle vat and actually get to the pickling of the real mahali kizhangu. I follow a recipe that is, as it turns out, derived from the classic one by Meenakshi Ammal in her early book Samaitthu Paar/ Cook and See. Unfortunately, even in this book Mahali is translated as “Sarsaparilla” which it patently is not. Again, it’s Nannari that’s known commonly as Indian sarsaparilla–and it’s that name that transfers back to Mahali, perpetuating the confusion. But that error is not Meenakshi Ammal’s, it’s to be laid on the desk of her English translators.

It’s worth noting that mahali kizhangu pickles have a notably long shelf-life. Refrigerated, they can last almost indefinitely. The reason? The same volatile principles that give the root its distinctive flavors have “bacteriostatic and toxic properties and hence the root can be stored unaffected for long periods” [Nayar et al 1978]. For these very reasons, interestingly, dried mahali bits stored with grains and pulses can keep them free of weevil infestations.

With thanks to Chandra Venkatesan, conversations with whom gave shape to this post, and to Nina Sengupta of Edible Weed Walk and the Audible Weed Walk podcasts for guiding me to the ecological and practical truth of things.

Sources

Ezhilan Arivudai Nambi, Prabhakaran Tenkasi Raghu. 2022. “Current forest use in the light of new rurality.”
Trees, Forests and People 8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tfp.2022.100242

Ionta, Gretchen M. 2009. “Phylogeny Reconstruction of Periplocoideae (Apocynaceae) Based on Morphological and Molecular Characters and a Taxonomic Revision of Decalepis,” PhD Thesis, University of Florida.

Nayar, R.C., Shetty, J.K.P., Mary, Z. et al. 1978. “Pharmacognostical studies on the root ofDecalepis hamiltonii Wt. and Arn., and comparison with Hemidesmus indicus (L.) R. Br.” Proc. Indian Acad. Sci. 87, 37–48 https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03046869

Rodrigues, V., Kumar, A., Gokul, S. et al. Decalepis salicifolia (Bedd. ex Hook. f.) Venter: A steno-endemic and critically endangered medicinal and aromatic plant from Western Ghats, India. J Biosci 46, 44 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12038-021-00162-6

M, Chandrasekhara & Sri Rama Murthy, K. 2013. “A Review on Decalepis hamiltonii Wight & Arn.” Journal of medicinal plant research. 7: 3014-3029. 10.5897/JMPR2013.5099.

Sharma, Shiwali and Anwar Shahzad. 2014. “An Overview on Decalepis: A Genus of Woody Medicinal Climbers.” Journal of Plant Science and Research 1/1.

Solomon Raju, A J and K Venkata Ramana. 2011. “Traditional preparation of a health drink
Nannari Sharbat from the root extract of Decalepis hamiltonii Wight & Arn.” Indian Journal of Natural Products and Resources 2(1), pp. 121-124

Vedavathy, S. 2004. “Decalepis hamiltonii Wight & Arn. — An endangered source of indigenous health drink.” Natural Product Radiance Vol 3(1).