Tranquillity rains down
in sacred forests. Shades of green and brown present an enchanting harmony. The
earthy smell of the forest floor fills the air. Cicadas chirp. Delicious fruits
beckon. There is extraordinary biodiversity—not just tall trees, some of which
are rare, but also mushrooms growing on their trunks, earthworms crawling in
the leaf litter, and a variety of insects living in every single nook of
forest. Shonil Bhagwat, who has been researching them for the last 20 years,
attests to these experiences.
“Sacred forests are
pretty special places. Each is different, but you can always feel this mystique
in each forest,” he says.
Bhagwat grew up in
Pune and studied in Marathi medium public schools. Fascinated with the natural
world, he studied ecology in college. He would go bird watching and developed
an interest in identifying everyday urban trees. The interest spurred him to
work in tropical forests where he came across much richer biodiversity and
could challenge himself identifying rare trees. The Indian
countryside—particularly the Western Ghats—is replete with forests that are
protected for cultural, spiritual and religious reasons. What is today
Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary in northern Maharashtra has some of the
loftiest evergreen forests protected as sacred long before the sanctuary was
notified. This spurred his interest in sacredness, nature that is protected as
sacred and the people who protect it.
The sacred forests in
Kodagu district of Karnataka enthralled him. The most striking thing for him
about it is a sharp drop in temperature, the cooler air under the canopy of
tall trees on a scorching day.
An environmental geographer with the Open
University, UK, and associate researcher at the Oxford Long-term ecology lab
Bhagwat feels the sensory experience and heightened awareness that you feel in
sacred forests is akin to a religious experience.
“You start to feel in
awe of the natural world.”
Religion and
spirituality are not as esoteric as they’re made out to be. Explaining the
innate dimension of religion, the March 1984 editorial in Prabuddha Bharata,
says, “‘Religion is not a matter of personal sentiment which has nothing to do
with the objective realities of society,’ says Christopher Dawson (Inquiries
into Religion and Culture),’ but on the contrary, the heart of social life
and the root of every living culture.” Religion is not a special or unnatural
attitude or the isolated activity of a few individuals. It is mankind’s total
response to “Reality”. An individual is religious only in so far as he shares
in this universal response.
“The finally decisive
factor as to the quality of culture is not the environment,” points out Von
Ogdon Vogt (Cult and Culture), “but the total attitude and spirit of the
men who compose society. It is this total attitude and spirit which is the
religion of the tribe or nation.”
As such, according to
Bhagwat, in most Indian languages some forests are regarded as “god’s forests”. As a physical structure,
most often there are small shrines—sometimes even a collection of simple
standing stones with floral offerings—surrounded by tall trees. Over time these
deities were named after mainstream Hindu gods and goddesses.
Bhagwat thinks, as a
spiritual practice, these forests originated long before mainstream Hinduism
came along. They were rooted in the animistic traditions of nature worship—a
reason why standing stones or trees were important. As a cultural practice,
these sacred groves must have been meeting places for the communities who
protected them serving the functions of, for example, conflict resolution
between community members, spaces for performing pagan rituals around hunting,
gathering and later farming.
The idea of “sacredness”, he says, was imposed on these
forests by Western scholars much later.
Religious and cultural
traditions play an all-encompassing role in protecting these forests. Although
they were on different continents in early times, they are now mostly found in
Africa and Asia and the Middle East. There are Kaya forests in Kenya, and in
Uganda, in Benin, in Gambia, and the church forests in Ethiopia. In addition,
we have Shinto shrine forests and Zen gardens in Japan. Sikhs, in tune with
their religious culture, planted innumerable trees in Punjab.
When Bhagwat did his
doctoral work on sacred forests in Kodagu in the early 2000s, the ups and down
in coffee prices had a great impact on how people protect forests and trees. In
early 2000s Kodagu was just coming off a global slump in coffee prices. In this
period planters supplemented their income by either cutting down and selling
valuable timber trees from their plantations or by expanding their plantations
into neighbouring sacred forests (encroachment) or both. But in the 2000s as
coffee prices started to go up again, he started his research with
collaborators in Kodagu who were well-connected with the local communities.
“Looking back, I
arrived at the right time in the right place because communities were receptive
to conservation issues and the cultural importance of sacred forests. Today,
Kodagu is one of the best examples of sacred forest conservation,” he says.
In his doctoral
research, Bhagawat was primarily interested in biodiversity within sacred
forests. He adopted the “landscape-scale approach”—one where sacred forests are
not only studied on their own, but in relation to other parts of the landscape
(coffee plantations and protected areas).
Until the 2000s people
had written about these forests as if they were unique “islands” of biodiversity. But Bhagwat found
that part of the reason for the uniqueness of these forests was also their
surroundings. The reason why these forests are rich in biodiversity is because
they are “buffered” by other tree-covered landscapes (coffee plantations) that
help the biodiversity.
For example, without
coffee plantations, sacred forests would not support populations of rare and
endemic birds who also use the wider tree-covered landscapes for foraging,
nesting and roosting.
“So, this
landscape-scale framing was important in getting a handle on the importance of
these forests for biodiversity conservation,” he says.
That led to further
questions: Why are they rich in biodiversity? Have they always been that way?
Have people promoted or cultivated certain species in sacred forests? How have
these forests changed over time? How did the environmental change over long
time scales have an impact on biodiversity in sacred forests?
Bhagwat started
digging deeper into their long-term ecology, into the sediments in the sacred
forests.
“Long-term ecology
offers some pretty extraordinary tools to look back in time—a sort of
ecological time machine. The sediments are deposited in layer after layer over
decades, centuries and sometime millennia. So, if you can go deep enough in those
sediments you can get to the time period in the distant history and
pre-history,” he says.
That’s what he had
done for some of his post-doctoral work.
“This deeper
perspective from only a handful of locations—as opposed to “landscape-scale” analysis—can lend some
interesting insights into the past. Long-term ecology can provide an insight
into history, archaeology, and anthropology of past societies who started
protecting sacred forests.”
Doing long-term
ecology work is not easy. Bhagwat explains it: First and foremost, it is
important to develop relationships of trust with local collaborators and local
communities who are participating in the research. Building trust and
relationships takes time.
Some sacred forests
are quite remote and it can take several hours to simply get there. Then there
is unpredictability of weather, but work needs to be done come rain or
sunshine. Third, it can also be challenging to get equipment to some of these
remote places. The equipment for long-term ecological work can be quite heavy
and needs to be carried on top of a four-wheel drive vehicle and on foot where
these vehicles can’t reach.
“So, as the saying
goes, ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ or in this case do the fieldwork,”
he says.
His long-term ecological
research showed that there were particular environmental, cultural and social
triggers to the tradition of forest protection. Past societies responded to
these triggers and found a way out of what could have been a catastrophe and
possibly even the demise of those societies.
Long-term ecology
showed that in Kodagu some sacred forests might have “emerged” only around 400 years ago—contrary
to the popular perception that sacred forests have always been there.
“So, what happened 400
years ago?” he says and explains that the
“Little Ice Age” arrived. In Europe, this was a period of extreme cold
with lakes and rivers freezing up in winter. In the tropics, the effects of the
Little Ice Age were not as dramatic, but still resulted in an overall reduction
in water supply because there was less rain. For societies dependent on
agriculture, water shortages are serious as they lead to significant crop loss
and much reduced food supply.
Societies, he
continues, must have recognised the importance of forests around this time and
their role in protecting natural springs that would feed the streams and rivers
and supply water to farms and fields. So, protection of forests provided
crucial “ecosystem services” (as we call them today).
But how do you get
people to recognise the importance of forests and their ecosystem services?
This is where god comes in. In predominantly religious societies, god is
important and if something is declared as god’s property, people would easily
recognise its importance. This is how “god’s forest” must have come about,
Bhagwat says.
Explaining the
evolution of his thinking, he says when he started the research he had thought
of sacred forests as remnants of natural forest that were protected from
expanding agricultural frontiers, but the long-term ecological perspective has
showed that in some cases these forests might have emerged as a result of the
social fence that protected them. So, the assemblages of species you can find
in sacred forests is not an “impoverished” version of biodiversity found in
protected areas, but they are “enriched” by societies actively protecting
sacred forests for cultural, spiritual and religious reasons.
“This certainly makes
my engagement with sacred forests more forward-looking (as opposed to viewing
them as vestiges of historical religions).The factors that led to the emergence
of sacred forests make me more hopeful that with the right attitude to natural
resources and social mechanisms to protect them, we can reverse the destruction
of the natural world today and in the future,” he says.
I really felt the power of people’s devotion to the fierce village deities who inhabit these forest shrines in a sacred grove dedicated to Sri Ayyannar, the horse-riding guardian deity found throughout Tamil Nadu
The emergence of sacred
forests can take different trails. When Eliza Kent, professor and chair of
religious studies at Skidmore College, US, began her study of the sacred
groves of Tamil Nadu many books and articles had been written about how Hindu
theology could—or could not—provide philosophical resources to support an
environmental ethos. But little had been done to show whether and
how Hindus in India actually were motivated by their
religion to engage in conservation, environmental restoration or anti-pollution
efforts. The sacred groves tradition in Tamil Nadu impressed her as a
widespread example of grass roots environmental action. But what surprised
her most in the course of her ethnographic fieldwork in Tamil Nadu was that the
village residents who had preserved these patches of forest for
centuries in spite of the enormous need for fodder, fuel wood, and
farmland did so without any obvious ecological sensibility at all. That is,
villagers didn’t really care about the ecological
benefits of species diversity or the fact that their sacred groves had helped
in the conservation of trees and lianas that are found nowhere else, in some
cases. What they cared about were the gods for whom these sacred groves were
temples: lovely, cool, and mysterious temples.
“I really felt the
power of people’s devotion to the fierce village deities who
inhabit these forest shrines in a sacred grove dedicated to Sri Ayyannar, the horse-riding
guardian deity found throughout Tamil Nadu,” she says.
Upon entering the
forest, accompanied by one of the village residents, she was immediately struck
by how cool and shady it was—a welcome relief from the pounding heat of the
day. A mongoose scurried away from the banks of a small pond in the forest, and
butterflies filled the air. As they advanced towards the central shrine the
forest canopy grew thicker filtering the light through a canopy of dark green.
Her companions and she grew quiet as they approached the verdant
sanctum sanctorum along a narrow path through the trees, flanked on one side by
a dozen brightly-painted votive terra-cotta horses. No elaborate structure
sheltered Ayyannar and his two wives from the rain and sun; rather, a
simple brick and mortar arch framed the three stones that
represented the deities.
“But I couldn’t help
but feel that the whole forest was this Lord’s palace, and I was humbled
and grateful before Him,” she says.
Based on her field
work in Tamil Nadu, Kent published in 2013 a book titled: Sacred Groves and
Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India.
In it, she writes, the
deities who reign over forest shrines in Tamil Nadu are typically lineage
deities traditionally associated with the protection of boundaries such as the
horse-riding village protector, Ayyanar, and fierce versions of mother
goddesses, or ammans, who reside on the outskirts of the
village. As befits their use of violence to protect the social order, these
deities are, with the exception of Ayyanar, non-vegetarian deities, whose
worship involves pali, the sacrifice of animals, mostly fowl and
goats. Even Ayyanar inevitably has a guardian deity such as
Veerabhadra or Muniyandi, who receives animal sacrifices in the close proximity
of the shrine.
While these forest
dwelling deities typically direct their violence against ghosts, demons, or
disease, shielding their devotees from harm, they can also inflict harm when
offended or neglected. When people suspect a supernatural cause for trouble
in their lives, one standard method for uncovering it is a possession ritual,
in which a medium, a kōṭāṅki or cāmiyāṭi, enters a trance-state
enabling a god to speak and act through his or her body. The possessing
deity can then tell whether he or she, another deity, or a disturbed ghost sent
the affliction, and what needs to be done. Often, the remedy to having
offended or neglected the deity is sacrifice. The offering of a chicken or goat
is meant to make up for the moral lapse that led to the god’s displeasure,
whether a forgotten vow, a taboo unknowingly violated, or regular worship that
has gone undone.
Similarly, gratitude
for boons or services obtained (such as the driving out of ghosts) is often
expressed through sacrifice. Forest shrines occupy an important place in
this system as the homes and temples of these deities. Forests are their
special domain. Residing in forests suits these gods’ irritable nature by
putting them out of earshot of the ural and ulakkai (the
mortar and pestle) and away from the ordinary domestic life its sound
evokes.
Mostly neglected
during the year, sacred groves typically see the most activity during the
annual festival (tiruviḻā),
when lineage deities speak through their cāmiyāṭi vehicles recounting the narrative of how they
arrived, thereby connecting communities to themselves and to the mythologised
pasts in which the community’s identity is anchored. Together, the different
beliefs and practices described here—the taboos on the use of forest produce,
tales of divine punishment for transgression, possession rituals to ascertain
the will of the divine, and sacrifices to restore harmony between humans and
deities, whose connectedness to a mythologised past cements a community’s group
identity—make up the ideological system that curbs human use of the natural
resources of the groves.
Explaining what is
sacred about sacred groves, Kent says, Tamils see the groves as “sacred”
because they belong to gods, as their property and proper domain. The groves
she visited were seen as very special places that belong typically to one of
the fierce protector deities whose job it is to patrol and secure the
boundaries of the village.
As such, the koyil-kadu,
she continues, is not a place one goes to casually. Very often people taking
her there walked gingerly, careful not to trample undergrowth or break limbs.
They didn’t hesitate to show her the central shrine or votive statues (in the
absence even of a stone representing the deity) but then they wanted to leave,
so as not to inadvertently provoke the sami’s displeasure. And yet,
during festival times, people came into deeply intimate, familiar, and
emotionally intense contact with the deity—reaching out to the god for support,
embodied temporarily in the sami-adi (or god-dancer, shaman), for all
kinds of things: healing, fertility, protection against enemies, finding lost
objects or lost people. So the gods are connected to the people who revere and
worship them in profound ways.
At another level, that
connection has to do, she says, with a community’s history.
“Very often the
mythology of the gods tells you something about the pasts of the people—how
they migrated from place to place until they received a signal from their deity
that this was the right place to be. The rituals performed at the annual
festival, when people do go to the grove in large numbers, often re-enact and
re-connect people to that history, reminding them of who they are and where
they came from.”
Despite the anchoring
frame of reference the sacred forests provide to people and communities caring
for them, threats exist.
Kent says the main
force driving their devastation is the integration of villages into global
networks, which lead villagers with more cosmopolitan sensibilities to see
these forest shrines as “backwards”, “rustic” or “primitive.”
“Often, an ambitious
resident gets the idea to ‘improve’ the God’s residence by building a pukka
temple in concrete, which requires cutting down all or most of the trees that
sheltered the deity,” she says.
Sometimes, she
continues, this course of action can be delayed when others insist that a
seance be conducted to see whether that is actually what the deity wants, and
sometimes a kotanki or sami-adi reveals in trance that the god
does not want a pukka temple.
“But when people in
neighbouring villages destroy their sacred groves to create concrete temples
for their village deities, it starts a trend that is hard to stop.”
In a few instances,
the Forest Department’s somewhat ham-handed efforts to partner with local
communities led to a clearing of sacred groves.
She says she found in
Tiruvannamalai district—and J. J. Roy Burman also found the same thing in
Maharashtra—forest department enthusiasm for a joint forest management scheme
at the site of a sacred grove led the residents to fear they would lose
control over the property. Rather than see the sparsely forested open
space they used once a year during the tiruvila become a eucalyptus
grove that they couldn’t use at all, they cleared the site of all trees and
leased out the land to farmers to support the deity’s ritual needs.
Bhagwat too echoes the
processes that are damaging sacred groves. He says, “The most damaging is the
process of ‘Sanskritisation’—where animistic deities in sacred forests are
replaced by mainstream Hindu gods and goddesses, simple stone structures are
replaced by elaborate concrete temples, and trees are cut down to make space
for built construction.”
He calls it a form
of “encroachment from
within”—replacement of the natural features of sacred forests by artificial
constructions.
Added to that is there
is “encroachment from outside’”where farmland or plantations are eating into
sacred forests.
He is hopeful because
“there are many counter-examples where the ‘social fence’ is working, where
communities are coming together to protect their sacred forests, and where
people are proud of their cultural, spiritual and religious heritage. These are
the places where biodiversity in sacred forests continues to thrive.”
Also, Bhagwat
observes, the land ownership of sacred forests is complex. Some are owned and
managed by state forest departments. Some are owned by the state forest
departments but managed by local communities. Some are owned by communities
(commons) and also managed by them. Others are owned privately (by families)
and managed by family members.
“So,
the designation of sacred forests in Kodagu (as well as in other parts of
India) is a very complex matter and it depends on the local histories of land
ownership.”
In literature on sacred
forests, the word “stewardship” often
comes up. However, Bhagwat says, stewardship is a very Western idea and it has
its roots in Abrahamic religions which are founded on the assumption that
humans are superior to other beings and are made in the image of God. Because
of this special status of humans, it is their responsibility to protect the
natural world.
On the other hand, in
many Eastern philosophies, humans are seen as part of the natural order. So the
elements of nature deriving from animistic traditions feature prominently in
many Hindu traditions and rituals. There is continuity between animistic
traditions and mainstream Hindu traditions. This is also the case in many other
places where sacred forests are protected.
His continuing
research shows these traditions around the world and their similarities with
the traditions we have in India.
“Even in Europe and
North America, where you would think Abrahamic traditions are prevalent, there
is recognition of pagan traditions (Europe) and indigenous traditions (North
America).”
Their worldviews also
don’t easily subscribe to the idea of “stewardship”. Instead, humans are
considered part of the natural order and that influences their approach to the
natural world. Despite the prevalence of Abrahamic traditions in the Western
world, many people are cognizant of pagan and indigenous traditions and some
are even influenced by them, including traditions such as the protection of sacred
forests, Bhagwat adds.
Sacred forests are
unique in that they are protected by people. They are places, as Bhagwat puts
it, where “biodiversity can be protected in places where you would least expect
to find it. These forests very often are on land that could otherwise be
‘developed’ by planting coffee or by opening it up for commercial projects. But
this hasn’t happened because the ‘social fence’ in many cases has worked very
well to protect these forests from destruction.”
That has helped in protecting
some unique assemblages of species in these forests because these forests have
been under community protection for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years.
“My research has
highlighted the importance of these forests for biodiversity conservation in
ways that work with local communities and not against them.”
In India, he
continues, some communities resent our wildlife sanctuaries and national parks
because they have forced them out of their settlements and villages, but sacred
forest protection is a tradition that has emerged at the grassroots and has
been upheld by many communities themselves.
Religion—our response
to Reality—is a powerful force in conservation.”
So if you want to communicate to people that we need to take action on climate change (or conservation), religions are important partners and should not be overlooked. There is of course a role for the political process and international agreements, but to get the message down to ordinary citizens, the message needs to be communicated through concepts they best understand. Indians, endowed as they are mostly with mythical way of thinking, can relate to forest gods best.
is a freelance journalist based in Andhra Pradesh.
