Watch out first documentary on ethnomycology in India, a film that offers a powerful reflection on cultural loss, and a call to protect both fungal biodiversity and the ancestral knowledge entwined with it.
June 30, 2025
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FFungi Staff
FFungi Volunteer
On our first day, we entered the Oja’s house - dim, smoky, and alive with ancestral presence. He lit the hearth and stirred bitchi, a fermented rice wine made using wanti - the traditional Garo starter culture, rich with wild yeasts. The ladle moved through it slowly, an offering poured to the unseen. Here, fungi are healers, fermenters, preservers of lineage. Passed down through hands and seasons, wanti embodies both memory and microbiome - a living archive through which the Garo commune with spirits, and where our own journey into fungal kinship quietly began.
Fungi Foundation’s work in India begins right here. Grounded in the recognition that ethnomycology is not a relic of the past but a living, breathing inheritance under threat. In a country where fungi have long played essential yet often unacknowledged roles in medicine, ritual, food systems, and ecological balance, this work carries a larger responsibility. It is a call to preserve and honour these mycological traditions—not only for their cultural significance, but for the vital insights they offer in rethinking our relationship with the more-than-human world.
These ideas, practices and understanding became central to our project of shooting The Mushroom Keepers, a film that explores the deep relationships between fungi and the Khasi and Garo tribes of Meghalaya. Directed by Naveed Mulki and produced by the Fungi Foundation, this short documentary is an attempt to listen – to the forest, the soil, the elders, the rains that didn't come.
This is ethnomycology: the study of human-fungal relationships. But for us, it's more than study - it is a collaboration. We aim not to extract knowledge, but to join hands in protecting it. And that begins with honouring oral traditions and the elders who hold them.
In Meghalaya, we witnessed first hand how ethnomycology can serve as a powerful tool for fungal conservation. When Kong Queency taught us that certain mushrooms should never be harvested before the first thunderstorm, or when she explained how the particular scents of rain-soaked earth signals which species will emerge where, she was sharing knowledge that predates modern mycology by millennia. This wisdom – passed down through generations of careful observation – offers insights that contemporary science is only beginning to understand.
India, we realized, stands at a unique crossroads. Unlike many Western cultures where mycological traditions that were nearly lost must now be revived, communities across India maintain living relationships with fungi. From the Himalayas to the Western Ghats, each region harbors its own fungal storytellers. Yet these knowledge systems face unprecedented threats from climate change, deforestation, and the inevitable passage of time.
We envision creating a nationwide archive of traditional mycological knowledge, working respectfully with communities to ensure their wisdom remains in their control while contributing to global conservation efforts. Every conversation with elders like Nikre and Kong Queency reveals new layers of understanding about these remarkable organisms that connect entire ecosystems through underground networks.
As we continue this vital work across India, we invite you to witness these profound relationships for yourself. The Mushroom Keepers offers a window into worlds where fungi are revered as teachers, healers, and sacred beings – perspectives our planet desperately needs as we prepare for an uncertain future.
Join us in preserving these invaluable traditions.
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