M.D. Sabash Chandran and Madhav Gadgil tell us in the Sacred Groves and Sacred Trees of Uttara Kannada that the concept of the sacred grove is one found in cultures around the world. Ancient Slavic people worshipped nature, and especially woodlands. The sacred groves of the Mediterranean region were many. Sacred groves were one of the formal categories of land use in the Greek and Roman landscape. The Kikuyu of Africa believe the Migumu grove to be sacred and in them no tree may be cut, or firewood gathered, or animal killed. The Indonesians consider the Banyan tree to be sacred, believing that spirits reside in the trees.
All of these cultures have varying relationships with these outdoor sanctuaries. Some preserve and some use. What is distinctive with the sacred grove in the region I am studying, the Uttara Kannada, is the fluctuating relationship between nonutilitarian and utilitarian, rest and active, and fallow and productive. They carefully plan their use of the sacred grove, so as to sustain both the livelihood of man as well as wild. The argument made by Frederique Apffel-Marglin and Pramod Parajuli is that when a society decides to separate humans daily activities from the preservation of nature, it creates a context for a livelihood of excess, since care and preservation is happening somewhere else.
Here, in the Uttara Kannada, the sacred grove is a necessary component of everyday living because it is integral to the ecosystems survival upon which the people depend for their livelihood. The origin of the grove likely followed the introduction of agriculture about 3500 years ago. Since the soils of the wet tropics are notoriously fragile, the village communities learned to set aside large amounts of forest close to their settlement as safety forests. These safety forests naturally turned into sacred places where tree cutting was taboo. The supply forest in contrast, was subject to regulated use. The ratio of the sacred grove (6% of the total land) to the supply forest (26% of the total land) and other land use, created a system that allowed for a maximum use of biological resources while maintaining an extremely low risk of resource extermination.
However, there were many developing threats to the sacred groves existence. As Hinduism absorbed the indigenous deities into its religion, it became common for temples to be build within these groves and often with the wood from the sacred trees. The idea was that the wood contained the same sacred properties whether alive or dead. Further, during British colonial rule, the government seized the forest for its possession, regardless of the sacred groves vitality to the people who cared for them.
This vitality was recognized by both the Hindu religion, and the colonial government, but extremely underestimated. The sacred grove provides the shade and moisture necessary for the spices and herbs so famous in this region. Further, sacred groves are always associated with the watershed, which is of ever increasing value today. In Hindu writings it is said that one son equals ten deep water reservoirs and one tree planted is equal to ten sons. Even in Greek and Roman sacred groves, springs were said to have been found near or within the sacred trees. The Indonesians believed that the sacred tree’s contained deities that resided there to ensure the availability of clean water.
The protection of these groves means the sustainability of the ecology and the people who care for them. If we as a society continue to view wilderness preservation with the assumption that human use of these habitats is incompatible, then precisely that will come to fruition.
Readings:
1) Saraswati, Baidyanath. “Sacred Groves and Sacred Trees of Uttara Kannada.” Life-style and Ecology. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1998. 85-136. Print.
2) Chapple, Christopher Key, and Mary Evelyn. Tucker. “”Sacred Grove” and Ecology.” Hinduism and Ecology: the Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water. Cambridge, MA: Distributed by Harvard UP for the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2000. 291-316. Print.