Guest Editor's Introduction

Abstract

This special issue takes a new approach to the study of religion and nature in Indian Hinduism by drawing on recent ethnography to examine the meanings that priests, pilgrims and ordinary devotees attribute to forests and trees today. Attentive to the rapidly changing social and ecological environment of contemporary India, these studies investigate how people relate to forests and trees that are in various ways set apart, whether as a natural park, a verdant temple, or a deity’s embodied form. In these articles, trees and forests emerge not as peaceful retreats from the hurly-burly profane world, but rather as zones of contestation between competing definitions of ritual authority, progress, and authenticity. Hindus also appear here less as purely religious people, whose cosmologies predispose them to approach trees with reverence and restraint, and more as multi-dimensional people who are as enmeshed as the rest of us in worlds increasingly penetrated by mass media, mass transportation and mass consumption.

Mountain, Water, Rock, God: Understanding Kedarnath in the Twenty-First Century

“…This cautionary note has been sounded before by scholars who have written about Hinduism and ecology (Tomalin 2004;Haberman 2013, 195). It is not yet clear to me whether the Kedarnath situation can be held up as an example of how naturefocused religious sentiments create ecological resilience, a function that several scholars have argued is provided in South Asian contexts by sacred groves (Kent 2013;Gadgil and Guha 1995, 185). Rather, constructions and experiences at Kedarnath of place and god render transparent the complex intertwining of forces that are ubiquitous and forces whose persistent patterns as a whole exceed the sum of their parts-an example of what Philip Fountain and Levi McLaughlin (2016, 2) termed, in the context of a guest editor's introduction to a special issue of Asian Ethnology on religion, disaster relief, and reconstruction, "religion in situ. "…”

“…3. For other recent examples of this trend toward holistic, multidisciplinary approaches to the study of ecology and religion, see Kent (2010); Veldman, Szasz, and Haluza-DeLay (2012); Frisk (2015); Snodgrass and Tiedje (2008); Drew (2017).…”

Climate Change: Insights from Hinduism

“…The Bishnoi of Rajasthan are only one of many communities which have over the centuries shown exemplary stewardship of natural resources and practiced holistic science: their villages are oases in the desert where trees abound and deer roam around with abandon (Fisher 1997;Lal 2005). Much has been written on "sacred groves" in India from antiquity and, more generally, on the widespread reverence for trees celebrated in Hindu texts and practices: according to two scholars who have long worked on this matter, colonial "forest management"-and what else should one expect of "management," the keyword in the deadening of all that is true, beautiful, and good-destroyed the network of groves that colonial officials themselves admitted covered the subcontinent (Apffel- Marglin and Parajuli 2000: 291;Kent 2010). Reams and reams have similarly been written on the personification of rivers as goddesses in India, 1 the prolific tendency toward recycling present in everyday life, and the extremely expansive notion of the sacred-critically, a conception of the sacred productive of judicious ecological tenets-in Hinduism which encompasses the cow, the tulsi (basil) plant and neem (Indian lilac) tree, and the tens of thousands of places where the gods dropped ambrosia, or where Rama and Sita stopped to bathe during their long sojourn in the forest, or where the god Vishnu performed his lila (cosmic play).…”

Clarifying the spiritual values of forests and their role in sustainable forest management

“…JSRNC 4.2. See especially the introductory article, 'Forests of Belonging: The Contested Meaning of Trees and Forests in Indian Hinduism'(Kent 2010).Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture…”