Every year, around July 15, a heavy mechanical giant will wake up in Mandya taluk, outside Bengaluru. The “sugar crushing” process, heralded by the puja and announced in the newspapers, will begin. The state-owned Mysore Sugar Company, known as Mysugar (or Mysugaru in common parlance), will officially start crushing sugarcane for the season. This begins with pomp and celebration. The MLA or Minister will ceremonially light the factory’s huge kettles, creating a mass of fire. Columns of smoke will rise into the sky. Then the sugar crushing season begins. Lines of trucks, tractors and bullock carts piled high with green cane will line the roads, patiently waiting their turn so their cane crop can be crushed into sweet sugar. Thus, over half a million tons of sugarcane will be crushed, boiled, crystallized and transformed into a food that the Kannadigas call pila and the North Indians call jod.
I initially thought the choice of date was related to an auspicious day in the lunar calendar. But it’s really about some colonial engineer trying to outmaneuver, if not control, the southwest monsoon, using the Krishna Raja Sagar Dam as a tool. If you look at the old administrative glossaries of the Mysore state, or even the most recent government documents on sugar mills, you will see that while the start-up of a mill is a traditional ceremony that involves lighting lamps, breaking coconuts and other ritual pujas to invoke the gods, the actual date of start-up is tied to meteorology, irrigation cycles and crop chemistry. The mid-July launch is a dance with the southwest monsoon and the historic plumbing of the Cauvery Basin.
I drove through Mandya last month and admired the long, elegant green stalks of sugarcane. I did not realize at the time that sugarcane is a tough-tempered crop. It takes at least 12 months to mature, and requires intense sunlight and plenty of water. In Mandya district, there is a close handshake between sugarcane farmers and the state irrigation department. The cropping cycle is decided when the irrigation department opens the gates of the Krishna Raja Sagara (KRS) dam, which in turn is dictated by the arrival of the southwest monsoon so that the reservoir can be replenished. This was usually in June and July. As a result, farmers plant their sugarcane crops during this period so that the thirsty sugarcane can drink. Since the crop takes exactly a year to reach its peak, cane planted during the monsoon the previous year remains tall, mature, and full of sugar (or sucrose to be precise), twelve months later, the following July.
This brings us to the precise timing of the crush: the sugar buildup. Millworkers cannot simply crush cane whenever they want; They are hostage to Brix levels and sugar recovery rates. I knew about Brix levels because wine and fruit growers constantly talk about it. But sugar recovery rates relate to the percentage of commercial white sugar extracted from a specific weight of harvested sugarcane, i.e. the amount of pure sugar that can be extracted from the raw sugarcane crop. For example, if a mill operates at a sugar recovery rate of 10%, this means that for every 100kg of raw sugarcane crushed by its machines, it successfully crystallizes 10kg of refined white sugar. The remaining 90 kg of plant weight is converted into bagasse (crushed fibrous remains used as fuel) which I buy as slabs for my Navaratri prasadam, and molasses (a dark, sticky syrup used to distill ethanol).
During the first months, sugarcane uses its energy to grow leaves and stems. Only in the final stage of its life cycle, with heavy rains and changing weather, does the plant stop growing vertically and begin frantically converting glucose into storable sucrose. If a factory fires its boilers too early, the sugarcane is watery and low in sugar, resulting in poor financial returns. If they wait too long, the cane over-ripens, becomes fibrous, and the sucrose breaks down. Mid-July represents the agricultural sweet spot as early-planted crops reach peak absolute sugar density.
There’s also a very practical, earthly reason for this mid-summer deadline. Sugar milling is a large-scale and logistically punishing enterprise. Thousands of tons of heavy sugarcane are harvested by hand, quickly loaded onto tractors and bullock carts, and transported across dirt tracks from the fields to the factory gates every day. If mills delayed the crushing process until the absolute peak of the waning monsoon or late winter rains, the fertile, clay-heavy soil of the Mandya Basin would turn into a thick, impassable swamp. The tractors will sink into the mud, paralyzing the supply chain. By launching in mid-July, plants can process the first and most massive wave of harvest just as the initial monsoon rains settle in, taking advantage of ideal road conditions before fields are completely flooded.
Sugarcane is part of Kannada culture. For us sitting in Bengaluru, the July 15 date is another announcement, but it is actually the culmination of a year-long agricultural effort. The motivating actors this time are the KRS engineers, the rain clouds over the Deccan and the specific way this beautiful crop, Saccharum officinarum, which we call Kabbu in Kannada, ripens.
(Shobha Narayan is an award-winning author based in Bengaluru. She is also a freelance contributor who writes about art, food, fashion and travel for a number of publications.)
