Strength in Diversity

In Nagaland’s Langnok village, Chongkhem, the filmmaker Chentei Lam Khiamniungan Naga’s grandmother, grows millets and legumes using seed varieties passed down through generations. Through her, the film attempts to document traditional agricultural knowledge in the region. Of late, Chongkhem notes, crop yields in the village have reduced. “We used to harvest more than 100 baskets of crops. We used to cook a lot of millets, but now the use of millet has been reduced to about 50 baskets,” she says. Weather patterns are becoming irregular, disrupting sowing and harvesting in ways that make traditional stress-resilient crops—millets, purple yam, tapioca, beans, and lentils—increasingly central to the community’s food security. Though not explicit, the film portrays the village’s women as the custodians, practitioners, and teachers of indigenous knowledge. Little girls are seen threshing and winnowing grains alongside their elders, learning through participation. Passing down local knowledge systems has gained a newfound significance in securing food in the face of environmental stressors such as excess rainfall. Strength in Diversity attempts to highlight this epistemic continuity in a region that was found to be underrepresented in the existing literature on women farmers and the ongoing climate crisis.