In the mountain villages of Himachal Pradesh, there is a collective of twelve to twenty women — the number shifts with the seasons and the harvests — who make ghee the way it has always been made in the mountains. Not as a commercial operation. As a continuation of something their mothers and grandmothers did, in the same vessels, with the same patience.
The cows are indigenous mountain breeds — A2 animals whose milk has never been standardised, normalised, or industrialised. They graze on mountain pastures at altitude, eating grasses and herbs that have no equivalent in the plains. Their milk is seasonal, variable, and alive in a way that commercial dairy is not.
The bilona method begins with curd. The curd is set, then churned by hand — a wooden churner, turned by rope, by hand, by the same rhythm that has defined this work for generations. The butter that rises is separated by hand. It is then clarified slowly over a low flame until the water has left, the milk solids have browned and settled, and what remains is pure, golden, extraordinarily fragrant ghee.
This process cannot be rushed. It cannot be scaled without destroying what it is. One kilogram of this ghee requires 25 to 30 litres of milk. The women who make it understand this. The price reflects this. What you receive is not a commodity — it is the concentrated labour of mountain women and mountain cows.