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The first work on environmental history in India, This Fissured Land, mentions the phenomenon of Sacred Groves. Sacred Groves are neither peculiar to India nor to Asia. In fact, there is evidence that they existed all over the world in various communities predating what we as historians call civilisation. From the writings on environmental science and related disciplines we find that the topic of Sacred Groves is already under discussion. While environmental historians do indeed mention this concept it requires greater attention according our observation.

If we were to look at general environmental histories then we may mention India’s Environmental History (2012) in two volumes by Dr Mahesh Rangarajan and Dr K. Sivaramarkrishnan. These volumes are a collection of papers by various scholars including Romila Thapar, Thomas R. Trautmann, Sumit Guha, Richard Grove, David Ludden, David Arnold, Rich Freeman, Sajal Nag and Amita Baviskar. It is in volume two of this work that we find Rich Freeman’s paper Folk Models of the Forest Environment in Highland Malabar which deals with the topic of Sacred Groves at length.

Dr Vulli Dhanaraju’s A Textbook of Environmental History of India (2016) is a comprehensive work discussing most topics on environmental history. The scope of Dr Dhanaraju’s work is vast while the length is limited; therefore, the issue of Sacred Groves has been raised only briefly here. However, the topic finds a greater degree of importance in Dr Madhav Gadgil & Dr Ramachandra Guha’s This Fissured Land; an Ecological History of India (1992) which is considered as the pioneering work on environmental history in the country.

Another important work by Dr Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods; Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (1989) mentions the concept in passing though not directly. Apart from This Fissured Land there exists another joint work by Dr Gadgil and Dr Guha namely Ecology and Equity (1995) which mentions Sacred Groves as a part of India’s indigenous methods of forest protection.

It is in various journal articles that the topic has been mentioned and discussed in relative detail. For example, we may refer to Dr Madhav Gadgil and Dr V.D. Vartak’s joint paper Sacred Groves of India – A Plea for Continued Conservation in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society (1975) and Dr Madhav Gadgil’s solo paper Sacred Groves; An Ancient Tradition of Nature Conservation in The Scientific American (2018).

The interesting fact quite apart from the obvious one that the aforementioned research papers were focused on Sacred Groves is that none of the authors were environmental historians nor were the journals in question history journals. There are other papers which do not fit this paradigm like Mukul Sharma’s paper in the Economic and Political Weekly (2022) titled Governing Sacred Groves; Religion, State and Institutions in Indigenous Jharkhand and Debal Deb’s Sacred Groves of West Bengal; A Model of Community Forest Management? (The Overseas Development Group, University of East Anglia, 2007) These may not be works of “history” as such but it is within the realm of the social sciences.

However, we do submit that environmental historians will do well to refer to such works for their own research. Environmental history is a multidisciplinary topic and reaching out to different disciplines to glean important information from their ideas is in keeping with the nature of this sub-genre of history as well as the subject as a whole.

We may begin our main discussion with reference to the pioneering work on environmental history in India; This Fissured Land. It is a work that kickstarted research into environmental history in the universities of India. This aspect of history has become quite in vogue among PhD students and authors alike. Authors from other disciplines introduced historians to several concepts including the topic of environmental history itself. It is rather surprising to us that the concept of Sacred Groves, though referred to rather prominently in the context of the life of Lord Buddha, has not gained greater importance than is observed today.

This Fissured Land refers to the phenomenon of Sacred Groves several times as refugia or patches of forest, the sea or any place that contains natural and food resources which is placed under protection. This protection is in the form of a religious injunction against harvesting the resources wherein there may be total or partial prohibition from hunting or felling trees over there. This is not peculiar to India, as we have already mentioned, nor is it peculiar to any particular region of India. Such social institutions may be found from Gujarat to Mizoram.

There are three cultural contexts in which Sacred Groves have been mentioned in This Fissured Land – Adivasi, Buddhist and Sanatan Hindu. The authors of this work have mentioned a gamut of historical experiences and references to this phenomenon including the fact that Dietrich Brandis who is still referred to as the father of tropical forestry in India by Indian foresters mentioned Sacred Groves as an indigenous form of the preservation of forests[1].  Herr Brandis’ approval of Sacred Groves may or may not have been shared by the British Raj which ultimately implemented forest policies in India but the fact is that such groves continue to endure till this day.

The authors of This Fissured Land have referred to the fact that Gautam Siddhartha who went on to become Lord Buddha was born in a Sacred Grove dedicated to the Goddess Lumbini which is located in present day Nepal. The authors of This Fissured Land have put forward the theory that this was a way of conservation from below be it from a Sanatan Hindu or “heterodox” point of view. We do not have any quibble with this characterisation to the extent that this indeed appears to be coming from the people and is not a decree of the state. This is however, in our view a phenomenon that is related to the way in human societies have tried to cope with the problem of overexploitation of resources no matter where they were situated.

The abundance of Sacred Groves connected with Sanatan Hindu Dharmic practices and beliefs in various parts of India, including West Bengal where we have ourselves visited such places is a counter to any notion that this might be something related to Adivasi or heterodox beliefs as opposed to Sanatan Hindu ones. On the other hand, if we refer to the religious beliefs of the Adivasi people of India particularly in the Central and East-Central parts of the country then we find an even greater emphasis on Sacred Groves than elsewhere. Dr Pradip Chattopadhyay in Redefining Tribal Identity[2] has mentioned the fact that the Santhal people who mainly reside in Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha and Bihar worship nature as a part of their key belief system.

Our submission is that celebration of nature or worship of natural forces as a manifest form of the divine is a part of the indigenous belief systems in India which includes all the Dharmic religions including Sanatan Hindu Dharma, Buddhism, Jainism and Adivasi beliefs. The existence of Sacred Groves in all of the aforementioned Dharmas is proof of this contention. It also proves the fact that in these belief systems the connection with prehistoric human beings have not been entirely severed.

We may refer to a paper by Dr Madhav Gadgil and Dr V.D. Vartak published in the year 1975 in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society titled Sacred Groves of India[3]. Therefore, this paper not only predates the first environmental history book of India but also, in our humble opinion, anticipates the rise if not of environmental history, then at least the interest of the social sciences in such topics. We say this because of the accessible quality of the paper. By this we mean that it is remarkably jargon free and intelligible to the lay reader who might not have majored in science as a student[4].

If we compare this with a much later solo paper by Dr Madhav Gadgil published in The Scientific American in the year 2018 then our observations on the paper referred to in the previous paragraph holds true. In this paper, Dr Gadgil has brought out the all-India nature of the phenomenon as well as the importance it holds for the Adivasi people of India. Both of these points are equally important. We have already mentioned the fact that this is not just a pan Indian phenomenon but rather a global one. Moreover, the Adivasi people who are legally recognised to be dependent on the forest do harbour beliefs in such Sacred Groves be they in the North-East, Central India or South India.

We would like to reemphasise that all of these authors have mentioned the fact that belief in the Sacred Groves cuts across the Dharmic religions of India like Sanatan Hindu Dharma, Buddhist Dharma and Jain Dharma. This is not only an Adivasi belief; non Adivasis of India share this as well. There are several Sacred Groves which are related to the worship of Sanatan Hindu deities just as there are Gram Thans related to Adivasi beliefs. The various belief systems of the Indian Subcontinent share certain commonalities. It has been observed by scholars before us that the boundary lines between Sanatan Hindu Dharma, Buddhist Dharma, Jain Dharma and Adivasi religious beliefs are blurred. There are commonalities between these traditions which may be attributed to the fact that these are after all from the same overarching culture and civilisation.

1. Chattopadhyay, Pradip, Redefining Tribal Identity; The Changing Identity of the Santhals in South-West Bengal, Delhi, Primus Books, 1^st Edition, 2014

2. Dhanaraju, Vulli, A Textbook of Environmental History of India, New Delhi, Dominant Publishers & Distributors Ltd., Revised Edition, 2017

3. Gadgil, Madhav, Sacred Groves, The Scientific American, 319, 6, 48-57, December, 2018

4. Gadgil, Madhava & Guha, Ramachandra, The Use and Abuse of Nature incorporating This Fissured Land; an Ecological History of India & Ecology and Equity, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1^st Edition, 2000

5. Guha, Ramachandra, The Unquiet Woods; Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Ranikhet, Permanent Black, 3^rd Impression of 20^th Anniversary Edition, 2017

6. Rangarajan, Mahesh & Sivaramakrishnan, K., Eds., India’s Environmental History, 2V., Ranikhet, Permanent Black, 3^rd Impression, 2017

1. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land; An Ecological History of India, in The Use and Abuse of Nature, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000, pg. 132
2. Pradip Chattopadhyay, Redefining Tribal Identity; the Changing Identity of the Santhals of South-West Bengal, Delhi, Primus Books, 2014, pg. 40
3. The paper is accessible online via a Google search
4. Dr Gadgil and Dr Vartak jointly published other papers on related topics in other journals as well. However, those papers were published later than this one.