Our Story

 

Tribal Sangha is the story of a people, and their traditional tribal craft of steam distillation. A community of people, who once lived with their tribal ancestors on their ancestral lands, deep within the forests of the mountains in the Western Ghats.

 

As the exchange of forest produce by the tribal people — forest honey, embroidered wares, beaded necklaces, herbs and incense gums, but above all, lemongrass oil for its pure, steam-distilled essence, drawn from the age-old traditional iron still — with the common folk grew more frequent through a weekly market, organized by the forest department in town, a few among them, in search of better prospects for themselves and their families, chose to venture beyond the sacred tribal lands, and settled on the outskirts of the bustling hill towns and cosmopolitan valleys below.

New homes were found in marriage, new names were taken in belief, and slowly, the town's way of life became their own. A few generations followed, and with them, the stories of the sacred and the rituals of the tribal lands grew into a distant memory — fading from one person's dream into another person's way of life.

 

But a few among them, even as they carried their newly adopted customs and modern occupations, chose to also carry forward the rare and closely guarded tribal craft of their ancestors: the art of distilling essential oils by the time-honored method, kept alive in mud-thatched distillation sheds up in the forest hills, where each season they harvest lemongrass leaves and fire the tall mud ovens that hold the 250kg iron stills.

Even today, the lemongrass oil drawn from these stills — born of ancient tribal wisdom and the same forest-grown lemongrass — is unlike anything one could ever come close to experiencing elsewhere. This traditional craft has now become the very thread of their identity, in these mountain hills of the Western Ghats — and it is because of them the ancient tribal wisdom in such traditional process survives, and is still practiced in the old way, rather than be allowed to perish, or be hoisted up behind the glass in a fancy British museum.

 

Today, a community such as this in the mountain hills of the Western Ghats, and others like them across the Himalayas, carry forward the same art of their age-old distillation method, amidst the very forests and valleys where it was first born.