Last week, on a plant walk through Delhi’s Sanjay Van, I came across a tree I had probably seen many times without ever really noticing. The botanist leading the walk stopped and asked if anyone could identify it. There were a few guesses, but hardly anyone could point to the tree with certainty. Then came a clue: think Rajasthani; think staple food; think chatpata. Someone in the group finally said it: khejri.
There it was, growing in front of us, a familiar name attached to an apparently unfamiliar tree. Native to the Aravalli region and deeply woven into the ecology and food culture of Rajasthan, khejri is also where one half of ker sangri comes from. The dish is often described simply as a Rajasthani speciality, but its story begins much earlier — with a landscape where food had to adapt to heat, scarce rainfall and long periods when fresh vegetables were difficult to come by.
Ker sangri is, in that sense, more than a dish. Its two principal ingredients, ker and sangri, come from plants that have long been part of life in the Thar Desert. Their collection, processing and preservation evolved around the realities of desert living. For communities there, these plants were sources of food as well as income. Today, however, the future of ker sangri is caught between two very different developments: growing recognition of its traditional value, including sangri’s Geographical Indication (GI) status, and the environmental and economic pressures affecting the plants and the people who depend on them.
A food Shaped By The Desert
Sangri comes from the khejri tree (Prosopis cineraria), a species found across much of Rajasthan and well adapted to hot, dry conditions. Its roots can reach deep into the soil for water, allowing the tree to survive where many other plants struggle. The tender green pods are harvested before they ripen and are eventually dried for storage. The ripe fruit is also eaten, with its pulp known as khokha.
Ker, meanwhile, comes from the thorny shrub Capparis decidua. Its small, unripe berries are typically collected in March and April and used in pickles, curries and other preparations. Both plants belong to a landscape in which seasonality and scarcity have historically shaped what people eat. When fresh vegetables were not readily available, foods such as dried ker, sangri and kumtia offered something that could be gathered when available, processed and stored for later.
But turning these desert plants into food has never been a simple matter of picking and cooking. Sangri pods are collected by hand, often requiring people to climb khejri trees or use ladders while negotiating their thorns. Once harvested, the pods are boiled for around 30 to 45 minutes before being spread out to dry in the sun. Ker requires repeated boiling in salt water to reduce its bitterness before it can be dried and stored.
That labour matters to the story of ker sangri. These were not simply ingredients that happened to grow in the desert; they became part of a system of gathering, processing and preserving food according to what the landscape allowed. During droughts and periods of famine, such foods could become particularly important when other sources of food were scarce.
From Household Food To A GI-recognised Product
Much of the knowledge around ker sangri has travelled through households and communities, passed down through the everyday practice of collecting, preparing and cooking these ingredients. But there is an economic dimension to this knowledge too. In parts of Rajasthan, collecting ker has provided women with an additional source of income, while self-help groups are now experimenting with ways to turn the ingredient into higher-value products, including ker powder, digestive products, chutneys and even chocolates.
The idea is not only to create new products, but also to change who benefits from the trade. By processing ker themselves, women’s groups hope to reduce dependence on intermediaries and retain a greater share of the value generated from collection and processing.
The recognition of sangri through a GI tag adds another layer to this evolution. A GI links a product to a particular geographical origin and establishes criteria around its regional identity. For traditional foods, that recognition can help draw attention to the relationship between a product, the landscape in which it originates and the knowledge that has developed around it.
But a GI tag, important as it may be, cannot by itself safeguard the landscape that produces the ingredient. And this is where the story of ker sangri becomes less about culinary revival and more about what happens when the environment that sustained a food begins to change.
Why Ker Is Becoming Harder To Find
For ker, one of the biggest challenges is the changing nature of its habitat. The shrub grows in a variety of places — forest land, pastures, farm boundaries and uncultivated patches. These are precisely the kinds of spaces that come under pressure as agriculture expands and land use changes. Traditional field boundaries where ker once grew are increasingly being replaced by fencing, reducing the space available for the wild shrubs.
Irrigation has introduced another complication. In parts of the Thar, canals and tube wells have made more intensive agriculture possible, but the increased availability of water is not necessarily beneficial for every plant. Ker is adapted to arid conditions, and increased soil moisture can cause its roots to rot. Farmers may also remove bushes from agricultural land because they take up space or provide shelter for animals such as wild boar.
Infrastructure development adds another pressure. Ker bushes growing along roads can be removed when roads are widened or construction takes place. What looks like a small change at the level of a single shrub can become significant when repeated across a landscape where the plant already has a limited habitat.
Then there is the weather itself. Ker is a plant adapted to heat, and local knowledge suggests that intense heat can encourage fruiting. But that does not mean it is insulated from changes in weather patterns. Shifts in rainfall, storms and changes in the timing of winter can affect flowering and fruit production. One farmer, for instance, reported that rain during the flowering season had resulted in fewer flowers. These changes are difficult to separate from the larger transformation of the desert landscape. A plant that evolved to survive scarcity may still struggle when the pattern of that scarcity changes.
The future of ker sangri, then, depends on more than keeping a recipe alive. It rests on the khejri tree and the ker shrub, on the people who know how to collect and process them, and on the pastures, fields and uncultivated spaces where these plants continue to grow. The GI tag may bring sangri greater recognition, but recognition is only one part of preservation. For a food tradition shaped by the desert, protecting the dish ultimately means protecting the ecological and economic systems that made it possible in the first place.
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