On Ramdhan Mahavar, organic farming, and the quiet pride of going door to door
I first met Ramdhan Mahavar at a farmers’ sammelan organised by Sambhaav—a gathering where older organic farmers meet new ones so that knowledge can move between them in a language everyone in the room actually speaks. When I asked Ramdhan to sit with me on a khat, he quietly pulled a chair instead. When pressed, he explained that the meeting was being held at an upper-caste person’s house. Sitting on the same khat, he felt, might offend others. “Sir, I am from SC,” he said, almost as an aside—not as complaint, just as fact, worn smooth from being carried a long time.
Ramdhan belongs to the Koli community, a group that once held deep knowledge of forests and traditional water systems and were their protectors. That knowledge was erased over generations, and the community was pushed to the margins. Yet when Ramdhan was called to speak at the sammelan, the shy man could not stop talking. He spoke about the quality of his vegetables, about the poison that pesticide-grown food carries quietly into homes, and about the happiness he feels knowing that what he sells people is genuinely good. He did not perform any of this. It came out the way things do when someone has held them a long time and finally finds the right room to say them in.
Ramdhan started organic farming 2 years ago. What sets him apart is not just how he farms, but how he sells. He does not take his vegetables to the mandi. Every other day, he harvests and goes door to door on his cycle, selling directly to households that wait for him. He sells at market price—not more. The point is not a premium but something closer to a refusal: he does not want his vegetables tipped into a pile alongside pesticide-grown produce, losing what makes them different before they even reach anyone. The care taken on the farm, he feels, should carry all the way to the door.
The cycle has its own history. It was given to his daughter under a government scheme when she was in Class 12. She was married five years ago, but the cycle stayed. Today it goes everywhere Ramdhan goes—through village lanes, past fields, between the lives of the households that have come to expect him. It carries more than vegetables.
His farm in Ghevar announces itself without drama. An iron mesh gate with no lock—just a length of cloth tied around it. Among all the farms we visited, Ramdhan’s was the most diverse, the most alive with the logic of nothing being wasted. Take the amla. Some fruit drops early, pecked at or simply loosened by the weight of ripening. Ramdhan collects it. The damaged pieces are dried in the sun and ground into powder for sale; the intact fruit goes to market whole. The tree, in this way, yields twice—once in its best fruit, and once in what it cannot help losing. The tomatoes work the same way. Peacocks visit the farm and peck at the ripening crop, leaving the fruit damaged and unsellable. Ramdhan sets these aside for seed-saving—the damage has already opened the fruit, and the seeds inside are sound. Next season’s plants come from this year’s peacock visits. What modern language calls closed-loop farming exists here not as a framework absorbed from a manual, but as instinct: the kind that develops when you cannot afford to see anything as disposable, and then discover that nothing actually is.
Sambhaav has been part of how this farm has grown. The exposure visits they organise—trips to nearby organic farms where farmers learn from peers who speak the same language, in a register that feels like conversation rather than instruction—have shaped how Ramdhan thinks. He has been on two such visits and brought back heirloom seeds from each one, which he is now nourishing carefully. He keeps asking for more. This year, Sambhaav gave him the Sona Moti wheat variety; he showed us the stalks with visible excitement. Kunj Bihari says the relationship runs both ways—Sambhaav gives support, exposure, seeds, and connection, and it learns in return. Ramdhan, without knowing, teaches.
All is not at ease though. Wild animals—rabbits and wild boar—are a constant threat, and Ramdhan, like many other farmers in the area, has responded by sleeping at the farm. He showed us the small shelter where he spends those nights. Over time, he has learned to read the dark by sound: the particular rustle of a rabbit moving through a row of plants, the heavier rhythm of a boar. The hard nights are not the coldest ones. They are the nights when a wedding is happening somewhere nearby and the loud music fills the air, drowning out the sounds he has learned to trust. Animals have eaten through crops on those nights before he knew they were there. He speaks about this without bitterness—the way farmers learn to hold loss, as part of the shape of the work.
At the sammelan, at one point, a conversation had drifted toward caste — someone speaking about Koli sub-castes in the way people sometimes do when they assume the room agrees with them. Ramdhan had said little then. But later, at the farm, when he showed us his night shelter, he picked up a Gita Press publication, Kalyan, and held it out. He mentioned that he reads it regularly. That he is a practicing Hindu. This stayed with me. The book, the timing, the need to say it at all — as if the conversation at the sammelan was still running somewhere in the background. The constant burden to justify himself.
And yet, when Ramdhan forgot all of that—when he was talking about the amla powder, the peacock-pecked tomatoes, the households whose doors open when they hear his cycle on the lane—he was entirely himself. A man who grows food with seriousness and sells it with care. A man who now stands in sammelans of all castes and classes, and speaks, and people listen. Between the hesitation and the standing, there is a cycle. It moves through villages every other day, quietly carrying dignity, knowledge, and a different kind of freedom.