12-year-itch: If you're lucky, this is your one chance to get rare kurinji honey

Some food items like bread we buy daily. Others weekly, monthly and some households still get yearly supplies of grains and pulses.

But soon I hope to replenish stocks of kurinji honey from 12 years back. I still have two bottles from 2006. Honey is a natural preservative so it hasn’t gone bad. It is thick and black like molasses, and tastes like it too, not quite as harsh, but with that same combination of darkly sweet and bitter.

It comes from bees that feed on the flowers of the kurinji, Strobilanthes kunthianus, which has the odd behaviour of only flowering every 12 years. When it does, as is happening now, the blue-purple blooms cover the Nilgiris and might be one reason they are called the blue mountains. Kurinji is famous in Tamil literature, with one of the classical styles of poetry named after it.


Plants which bloom at such widely space intervals are called plietesials and it is quite rare behaviour. There is a similar variety of Strobilanthes in the Western ghats called karvy and it blooms in eight-year cycles. A letter in The Times of India in 1904 points out how a recent trip by the Governor, Lord Lamington, to Mahabaleshwar coincided with one of the blooms: “Bees are very busy manufacturing honey from the plant in flower.”

But botanists first described the pattern with kurinji and its flowering cycles have been tracked back to 1838. The tribes in the Niligiris have, of course, long been familiar with the behaviour. In Honey Trails in the Blue Mountains, a book published by the Keystone Foundation, which is also the source of my bottles of 2006 honey, it is mentioned that Todas “used these cycles to calculate a man’s age and wisdom”. People remember how many cycles of kurinji they had lived through.

Keystone works with ecology and livelihoods in the Nilgiris and the book is a fascinating glimpse of a whole biosystem seen through the different bee species, the plants they feed on and the tribes of the hills that collect their honey and have made it a part of their mythology and rituals. Embedded in these myths is considerable biological knowledge that showed how to harvest honey sustainably, minimising destruction of the bees.

Many of these tribes now lead marginal existences, and the kurinji is in retreat too. In the past, their springy stems were harvested to thatch roofs and another letter in ToI complained of tomato farmers buying them in bulk to support their vines. But it is unchecked development that has reduced the kurinji flowers this year — and who knows how much will survive to bloom in 2030?

The honey will also be less, though ironically demand is high, because of wild claims being made of its health benefits. I have no idea if these are true but am happy to value whatever kurinji honey I can get, for its unique taste and the way it connects me with the cycles of life in the Nilgiris.