Written for the Good Food Movement as part of my monthly column ‘The Plate and the Planet’. Published in June 2025. Header image credit: Kaushani Mufti for the Good Food Movement.

Across India, it is not uncommon to find people relying on nature and its signs to determine the course of their own actions, from farmers predicting monsoon showers by observing the movement of ants, to herders navigating pasture routes based on the flowering patterns of local trees. Practices, skills, and insights that emerge from a community’s long-standing relationship with its environment, often passed down through generations, are referred to as traditional knowledge. The term is often used interchangeably with ‘Indigenous knowledge’, particularly in contexts where settler communities form the majority of the population, such as in the US or parts of Latin America. In these settings, Indigenous communities are typically recognised as the primary custodians of place-based knowledge systems.

However, in the Indian context, the distinction is less clear-cut. Much of what is termed traditional knowledge is held not only by constitutionally recognised Indigenous communities (Adivasis), but also by a wide range of rural and agrarian communities who have co-evolved with their local environments over centuries. Therefore, for the purpose of this column, I use the term ‘traditional knowledge’ as an inclusive umbrella that encompasses the diverse, place-based knowledge systems developed and sustained by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities over generations.