The delectable aroma of freshly squeezed sugarcanes fills the air as one enters the campus of the Agriculture Research Station (ARS) in Thiruvalla these days.
Inside, the action unfolds around a massive bowl of sugarcane juice. It’s a labour of love that requires relentless effort — from cleaning and crushing the sugarcane to stirring the juice for hours until it transforms into a thick, golden-brown delight. Its soft, irregular granules have a distinctive taste and a spoonful is like sucking on sweet toffee.
As the Onam season kicks in, the famed Central Travancore Jaggery (CTJ), a GI-tagged product known for its exceptionally sweet taste and embedded sugar crystals, is striving for a return to its old glory. Sold as a premium product, the jaggery is manufactured organically and contains no preservatives in it.
“Locally called pathiyan sharkara, it’s a semi-solid with its sweetness stemming from its high levels of reducing sugars and low ash content,” explains Jinsa Naseem, assistant professor (entomology) at the ARS here. She attributes these unique characteristics to the distinctive properties of riverine alluvium soils along the banks of the central Travancore region.
“The regular sedimentation of fresh silt from inundation during both the south-west monsoon and north-east monsoon enriches the riverine alluvium soils with rich organic matter in these regions. Moreover, the soils in these areas have a slightly acidic pH and low electrical conductivity,” adds Ms. Naseem.
According to Jayakumar G., Assistant Professor of Agronomy at the ARS, the pathiyan sharkara is highly favoured for the preparation of Ayurvedic medicines due to its inherent sweetness and organic qualities. “CTJ is the legacy of a centuries old agricultural tradition involving sugar canes, which used to be cultivated in a vast area that extended up to the southern tip of the upper Kuttanad region — Pandalam. The recurring floods and the organic farming methods followed in the region, in turn, helped raise the crop’s quality in terms of sweetness,” he notes.
The tradition of jaggery making in central Travancore began to decline after independence with the establishment of two sugar mills in the region: the Mannam Sugar Mill in Pandalam and the Pampa Sugar Factory in Pulikeezhu. These mills turned sugar cane farmers into mere suppliers of raw materials, leading to the gradual disappearance of the age-old practice. But the abrupt closure of these factories later in the late 1980s later disrupted the farming tradition too and the sugarcane farms are now confined to only a few pockets of Upper Kuttanad.
With the taste tradition threatening to fade out eventually, the ARS — an institution affiliated with Kerala Agricultural University, has taken it upon itself to manufacture and market the product.
