Our Mothers Make Panjiri: A Case Study in How Narrative Change Travels Through People, Not Platforms

Narrative change is often treated as a problem of messaging. But belief systems do not move through messages alone; they move through relationships, institutions, and transmission infrastructure. Using the commercialization of the postpartum tradition of panjiri as a case study, this piece examines what happens when a belief system survives but the system that carried it disappears.

Photo credit: Whisk Affair Blog

You can buy panjiri on Amazon now.

The listings describe it, for the most part, correctly: organic ghee, whole wheat flour, gond, warming spices, dry fruits. Ayurvedic. Traditional. For new mothers. The ingredients are accurate. The packaging is clean. The price is reasonable for what it claims to be.

What the packet cannot carry is the knowledge of what those ingredients are actually for, or the understanding that the making of panjiri was never separable from its medicine. The product preserved the nouns and lost the grammar entirely.

What Panjiri Actually Is

For generations across North India, panjiri has traveled through households as oral postpartum care. There's no fixed recipe, and women have traditionally prepared this with wheat flour roasted slowly in ghee, dense with gond and dry fruits of the region. Warming in Punjab; cooling as dhaniya panjiri elsewhere; something different again in Karwar. This variation is the record of oral transmission. Knowledge calibrated to local ecology and climate, passed from mothers to daughters as part of a wider South Asian system of postpartum food medicine (Sharma et al., 2024).

The pharmacopoeia embedded in panjiri is specific and doumented. Gond, an edible tree resin, soothes joints loosened by labor. Methi's (fenugreek) bitter leaves balance hormones with oestrogenic properties and strengthen digestive processes, for lactation. Kamarkas, the resin of the Palash tree (Butea monosperma), whose name translates literally as tighten the waist is used as a muscle tonic for low back pain, pelvic and uterine muscle toning, and carrying anti-depressent and anti-inflammatory properties (Khush, 2018). Ajwain seeds steeped in warm water to restart digestion. Each ingredient has a season, a preparation, a part of the body it is working on (Mishra, 2025; Tea for Turmeric, 2025).

These are not folk comforts. They are a healthcare logic embedded in a system of community care refined across generations of apprenticeship. A systematic review of medicinal plants used during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum care in India documented 228 plant species used in maternal care across the subcontinent, nothing that this knowledge was orally transmitted, calibrated to local ecology, and that its erosion represented a direct risk to maternal health outcomes (IJRMS, 2023). Panjiri became hyperlocal precisely because it was never written down. Writing standardizes. Oral traditions diversify. The recipe grew more precise across generations for exactly that reason: each maker calibrating to her own region's plants, her own climate's demands, even particular bodies.

How Oral Systems Transmit Belief

Here is what the wellness industry missed when it put panjiri in a packet: oral transmission is not a delivery mechanism for ingredients. It is a delivery mechanism for belief.

When a Punjabi mother makes a Punjabi panjiri for her Punjabi daughter after birth, she is transmitting a framework for what the postpartum body needs. The food arrives inside a relationship, and this relationship is precisely what makes the food medicine.

Research on intergenerational knowledge transfer in oral tradition-based communities confirms what practitioners of these traditions have always understood: oral knowledge transmission is not merely the passing of information but the construction of identity, social bonds, and cultural continuity through relationships of mutuality and reciprocity (Zhang, 2025; PMC, 2022). The transmission is inherently contextual. It requires the presence of the knowledge holder, the specific body of the recipient, and the ecological conditions that make the knowledge legible. Remove any of these and the knowledge does not transfer; it arrives as content without context.

A meta-ethnography of Southeast and East Asian immigrant mothers' postpartum cultural practices found that while mothers recognized the value of postpartum traditions, the lack of social support in immigration contexts deterred them from observing these practices. The information is available, but what made the information so meaningful is the relational infrastructure built in. This doesn't survive a migration.

Oral health traditions operate as what we might now call values-based narrative infrastructure. They do not target demographics. They transmit through relationships defined by shared values and lived experience: the mother who learned this from her mother, the neighbor who adjusts it for your specific complaint, the dai who reads your body as someone else might read a face. The knowledge stays precise because the transmission is interpersonal. A study of traditional medicinal knowledge learning processes found that these systems are "place-based and related to history, language, and social relations" -- and that urbanization, migration, and biodiversity loss are the primary forces disrupting their continuity (PMC, 2022).

The Narrative Intervention Misfires

The global Ayurvedic products market was valued at approximately USD 15.2B in 2024 and projected to reach USD $109.8B by 2032, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 28% (Cognitive Market Research, 2024). Postpartum Ayurvedic products, including commercialized versions of panjiri, are a significant and rapidly expanding segment of this market, driven by diaspora demand, wellness industry growth, and increasing consumer preference for "traditional" health solutions (Grand View Research, 2025).

The wellness industry's arrival into this space was, in narrative change terms, a reframe; an attempt to introduce new content into an existing cultural ecosystem. It succeeds at reach. It fails at transmission.

Academic research on the commodification of Ayurveda documents this failure precisely. A peer-reviewed study of Ayurveda's commercialization in Europe found that as Ayurvedic medicines travel beyond India, they undergo "discursive detachment from ontological tenets." Their identity is rearticullated as.a "malleable experience" that isolates the product from the customary relational elements that constituted its original function (PMC, 2023). The result is a product that can be consumed privately, without context, without anyone explaining what the body is moving through or how long recovery is supposed to take. The study argues that this process "fosters the misinterpretation of the ancient healing system" while positioning it as "an elite commodity" in Western markets, one that retains the aesthetic of tradition while severing its epistemological roots.

The Amazon panjiri packet reached audiences the oral tradition never could: diaspora daughters whose mothers were across an ocean, urban women whose connection to traditional dais had been severed, consumers who recognized the aesthetic of Ayurvedic wellness without understanding its diagnostic logic. What this adoption had not achieved is the belief transfer that would have made distribution matter.

Because belief, in this ecosystem, is not carried by ingredients. It's carried by the person who brings them.

The Double Extinction

The oral system was already under pressure before the wellness industry arrived.

According to the Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT), Bangalore -- India's national Center of Excellence for medicinal plants and traditional knowledge -- approximately 90% of medicinal plants used by India's herbal industry are collected from the wild, with over 70% of those collections involving destructive harvesting of roots, bark, and whole plants (FRLHT). FRLHT estimates that approximately one million traditional, village-based carriers of herbal medicine systems remain in India, including traditional birth attendants, bonesetters, and herbal healers. But this number is declining as both the ecosystems and the apprenticeship systems that sustained them erode (FRLHT, 2016).

In the Satpura jungle of Madhya Pradesh, where the Baiga and Gond peoples have gathered medicinal plants for longer than any written record, the forests themselves are disappearing. Deforestation, agricultural monoculture, and erratic monsoons are destroying the plant communities the dai pharmacopoia depends on. A 2020 Mongabay investigation documented how sacred groves in Madhya Pradesh (the primary conservation mechanism for rare medicinal species) are being cleared for mining, with Adivasi communities having no formal recourse under the inconsistently implemented Forest Rights Act (Mongabay India, 2020). Traditional healers in Uttarakhand have reported that medicinal species they rely on now flower and fruit earlier than before due to shifting monsoon patterns, affecting traditional harvest times, while some species have migrated to higher elevations and will require longer and more difficult journeys to collect (Mongabay India, 2020).

The Baiga, officially recognized as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, have tradtionally practiced a form of forest stewardship so intimate that they historically refused to plow the earth with metal tools. They understand the soil as a living body. Deforestation and displacement from mining and development projects have severed many Baiga families from their ancestral lands where their pharmalogical knowledge was rooted (Ayurvance, 2025). As younger generations are drawn into wage labor and urban migration, oral knowledge transmission -- the apprenticeship system through which a dai learned to press bark between her fingers to judge potency by season, or to taste a root for peak ripeness -- is fading without successors (Mongabay India, 2020).

The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act of 2006 was designed to recognize Adivasi land rights and prevent displacement. In practice, implementation has been inconsistent. Many claims have been settled on paper while communities continue to be displaced; some states have performed better than others depending on the level of tribal activism and awareness. By 1991, Scheduled Tribes comprised 8.1% of India's population but constituted over 40% of those displaced by development projects, a disproportionality that has continued in the decades since (Pathfinders, 2024).

Displacement and ecological destruction had already begun severing the connection between women who hold this knowledge and the ecosystems that made the knowledge possible. The wellness industry has accelerated that severence by making the acceleration invisible, by offering a product that felt like a continuation.

My great grandmother was a dai near the Satpura Jungle of Madhya Pradesh. I am a birth doula in Brooklyn. Somewhere in that distance -- geographic, generational, pharmalogical -- a chain broke. What arrived in my family was not a panjiri made by someone who knew my body. It was a product for a market that recognized an aesthetic without understanding our epistemology.

What Gets Lost When the Transmission System Breaks

Conservation science has generally treated hyperlocal food knowledge as something preserved by separating it from the people who hold it. This can look like cataloguing it in a botanical archive, protecting it through geographical indication tags, storing it in seed vaults. FRLHT and similar organizations have instead pushed for in situ conservation: biodiversity maintained where co-evolution between humans and plants continues, in living practice rather than frozen record. The distinction matters enormously.

The wellness industry made the same assumption as the GI tag system: that the knowledge is in the plant. both miss what oral tradition already understood: the knowledge is in the relationship between the plant, the body, and the person who reads both.

When this transmission system breaks, what is lost is not a recipe. What is lost is a framework for understanding what a postpartum body is, what it needs, and whose job it is to know. The wellness industry replaced that framework with a different one: recovery as a consumer experience, postpartum care as a product category, the body as a surface for the application of correctly sourced ingredients.

This is a narrative shift, a genuine change in what audiences believe is true about postpartum bodies and who is responsible for caring for them. The shift happened below the level of argument. Nobody decided to stop believing in the dai's pharmacopoeia. The belief eroded because the transmission system that carried it stopped functioning. As the narrative change literature documents, paradigm shifts of this kind involve "radical shifts in existing assumptions and beliefs" that occur not through persuasion but through the gradual displacement of one narrative ecosystem by another (ORS Impact, 2024).

The Measurement Problem

This is also, precisely, a measurement problem.

The wellness industry can measure reach: how many units of panjiri were sold, how many reviews mentioned postpartum recovery, how many diaspora buyers tagged the product as "traditional." These are content distribution metrics, equivalent to reach and impression counts that dominate social impact campaign measurement, and that the narrative change field has increasingly recognized as insufficient (SSIR, 2022).

What these metrics cannot measure: whether buyers understood what the ingredients were for, whether they used them in sequences and combinations the pharmacopoeia requires, whether the products worked, and whether postpartum recovery outcomes in diaspora communities are converging with or diverging from outcomes in communities where the oral tradition remains intact.

The distrinction between content distribution and belief transmission is the gap where most narrative interventions fail. Research on how media influences social norms has found that information delivered socially, through face-to-face interactions and public transmission, is significantly more influential on attitudes and behavior than information delivered individually or privately (Harvard Gender Action Portal, 2013). The panjiri packet delivers information privately, to an individual consumer, without the social transmission mechanism that made the information actionable. The dai delivered knowledge socially, relationally, calibrated, and within a community that shared the belief system that made the knowledge meaningful.

Narrative change measurement frameworks increasingly recognize the need to move beyond reach to track shifts in knowledge, perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs. They need to assess whether interventions have helped move audiences toward action rather than simply toward awareness (SSIR, 2022). Applied to the case of panjiri, the question is not whether the product is selling but rather whether the belief system it claims to carry is actually being transmitted.

What Oral Infrastructure Teaches Campaign Strategy

There is something that those designing narrative interventions should be learning from oral tradition that most are not.

Oral health systems were not scalable in the conventional sense. They were durable. A dai's pharmacopoeia did not reach millions of people through efficient distribution. It reached thousands with sufficient precision to produce different outcomes than standardized biomedical care could offer for the same conditions. Its value was calibration, not reach.

The distribution mechanism: kinship, apprenticeship, shared cultural practice, was also the belief transmission mechanism. The medium was the relationship. The message arrived inside trust.

Contemporary narrative change practice is beginning to understand this. Research on how social norms shift through media has found that public, social transmission of narratives produces stronger attitude change than private, individual exposure. Social transmission creates "common knowledge" of a norm, enabling social coordination around the new belif (Harvard Gender Action Portal, 2013). Oral tradition solved this problem generations ago. It moved through values-based communities, calibrated to each community's specific ecology of relationships and embodied knowledge. It did not 'target audiences', it designed for them.

The question for anyone designing a narrative intervention then becomes larger than what content must be produced. What is the transmission system? Does that system carry belief or just information? A panjiri packet carries information. A mother making panjiri carries belief. Campaign strategy that cannot answer that question is distributing product, not changing narrative.

What Remains

In upstate New York, in a terroir better known for growing bone-dry Riesling than bitter gourd, my mother grows nearly 70 varieties of plants. Seeds arrive in labeled packets from a shop in Panchsheel Park in Delhi, concealed in the lining of luggage. Her friends, ranging from 40 to 90, from Punjab, from Baroda, from Mahrashtra, have assembled organically into what they call a 'garden club,' trading seeds hand-to-hand with instructions that rarely make it onto paper.

This is in situ preservation in the conservation science sense: biodiversity maintained where co-evolution between humans and plants continues. It is also, in the language of narrative change, an oral transmission system operating in exile. The knowledge is not in the seeds. It is in the conservation that accompanies them. The woman who knows when to plant, how deep, what this plant tastes like at peak ripeness, which preparation it requires for which season.

My mother is not running a cultural preservation project. She is refusing to arrive at the end of her life without the knowledge that was passed down. The seeds travel in luggage because she decided the knowledge was worth carrying across an ocean. That decision, repeated by thousands of South Asians across the diaspora, is the only reason any of this survives in a new land.

The wellness industry will keep selling panjiri. The Amazon listings will migrate into Whole Foods, keep getting more sophisticated, the visual identities and branding becoming more precise, the ingredients more responsibly sourced. None of that is really the problem.

The problem is that somewhere, a daughter gives birth far from her mother, and what arrives is a packet rather than a person. The packet, however carefully made, does not know her.