As prices of Udupi mallige plummet, a small Christian community pins its hopes on Ganesh Chaturthi

As prices of the Udupi mallige plummet, a Christian community of Shankarpura village pins its hopes on Ganesh Chaturthi

It has been a long and tiring day for Naveen, 30, who has just finished loading the last of his flower parcels for the day — the famous Udupi mallige (jasmine) — on a Bengaluru-bound bus. “This season has not been particularly profitable as we have had poor rains and it has been unusually hot,” says Naveen, from Brahmavara taluk in Karnataka’s Udupi district. This is perfect weather for this variety of jasmine. But it also means a larger-than-usual supply of flowers, and a dip in their rates.

The flowers usually fetch around ₹2,000 per atte (a bunch of over 3,000 buds) during this time. But the Udupi Mallige app, developed in 2019, will tell you that the average rate since the last week of August has been hovering around just ₹550-₹600.

The sentiment is echoed by another flower seller, Vishak of Udupi, although he is hopeful that the rates may spike closer to the upcoming Ganesh Chaturthi festival. “It has been quite a dull time for flower dealers. We have had the odd good day in the recent past, but we hope that the high demand during the current wedding season and the upcoming festival will bring the rate up to ₹2,000,” he says.

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The Udupi mallige is widely grown in the village of Shankarpura in Udupi. As I enter the bylanes, I notice that most houses have large gardens. Just as I pause to admire the plants outside one of the houses, an affable-looking Wilson Martis invites me in.

The subtle fragrance of this delicate flower is unmissable in his living room as his 80-year-old mother strings the delicate buds into a garland locally known as a chendu. I watch in awe as she deftly moves her frail fingers, artistically tying the milky white buds with fibre extracted from the stem of the banana plant, specifically of the elaichi and yelakki variety. Martis says that each chendu has about 800 buds and stringing them together is an onerous task, just like the picking of the buds, which he does at dawn.

The history of the cultivation of the Udupi mallige in Shankarpura, home to a large Christian community, is interesting. This crop, accorded a GI tag, has been cultivated here since the mid-1930s. “The origin of jasmine cultivation here can be traced to Fr. Basil Salvadore Peris, who was appointed as the parish priest in 1934, says 76-year-old John P. Mendonca, a resident. “The region, largely hilly with laterite soil unsuitable for paddy cultivation, was ridden with poverty. Fr. Peris had the intuition that jasmine, which was grown at that time in Bhatkal in Uttara Kannada district, would thrive here. He arranged for saplings to be brought to Shankarpura. My grandfather, along with a couple of his close friends, travelled on foot to Bhatkal, almost 100 km away. Each of them came back with 20-25 saplings which they distributed among the community.”