12th February 2014 (Day 4) (Vrindavan #6)
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On the way back from Kusum Sarovar to Vrindavan, we stopped off at a village where they produce sugar. Here is a young boy sitting in front of the sugar factory.
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There were also a couple of young buffalo tied up nearby.
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But I digress….
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This is the operation as seen from the street. Usually I post the images in chronological order but here they are in an order to show the sequence of a process. Actually in this one we are returning to the bus and I am taking a last shot looking back.
The edge of a pile of cut sugar cane stalks is at the bottom left corner. The machine grinding the stalks is at mid-left. The furnace is towards the centre and there are a series of large shallow ceramic bowls on the ground to the right of that, not visible in this image. These are for heating and cooling the sugar cane juice.
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Here we have a friendly operator feeding the machine that grinds the sugar cane stalks. A hidden petrol or diesel engine drives the machine through the big wheel and belt at the right.
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This is the other side of the machine where the mulched sugar cane emerges. I presume they later use this to feed the furnace.
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The juice from the cane comes out a chute at the front of the machine, into a collecting bowl and then flows further down a channel. You can see that better in this view.
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The juice flows into a heated bowl. The heat comes from the furnace that we saw earlier. The chimney is behind the person at the back of the crowd with the horizontal striped shirt (you may be able to just see the top of it).
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The juice flows down a series of large ceramic bowls that are heated from below by the furnace.
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Image by Julie Manley.
This is the final cooling bowl. I took one of this but it wasn’t in focus, I think I had accidentally put the camera in macro mode. My partner Jools, standing beside me, took this one.
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Some nice patterns on the surface….
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Stirring the final mix.
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Image by Julie Manley.
Eventually, it goes into moulds and ends up as cakes of sugar, as above.
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Murray Foote 
OMG! we in the western world are so removed from the source of our food. This is indeed an eye-opener on small industry for the basic foods of life.
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India has always been well-populated and fertile with agricultural surpluses removed by taxation, hence edifices such as the Taj Mahal. I suspect there’s never been a time when the ordinary people on the land were prosperous. So they have to make do with what little they have. It’s essentially a functioning society but there are certainly many poor.
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