GROVES DEDICATED TO THE GODS

Madhav Gadgil & V. D. Vartak

The  practice of dedicating Groves to deities is common in India. While they provide a haven for birds and animals, they also preserve many species of plants, which would otherwise have become extinct.

India is a country of sacred cows, sacred monkeys and sacred banyan trees. We are nature worshippers par excellence, and extend protection to more forms of living nature than any other culture in the world. Not content with caring for individual species, we also have our sacred ponds and sacred groves, ancient nature sanctuaries where all forms of living creatures are afforded protection through the grace of any one deity.

These deities are generally of timely primitive nature: mother godesses in the form of unshaped stone lumps smeared with red paint, lying open to the sky, a Kalkai in the Konkan, a Jogmaya in the Aravallis or a Kenchamma in South Kanara. But for the believers they are amongst the fiercest of deities; breaking even dead twig in a sacred grove may result in serious illness or in violent death, Such distinct taboos have led to the preservation in these sacred groves of forest in its virgin condition, relics of the forest that. must have once covered much of India.

Sadly enough, little is now left of these great forests, but the sacred groves, often as much as twenty hectares in area, still stand hither and thither; the last refuge for many species of trees and climbers, orchids and ferns and forest-loving birds and animals. Not only are they a naturalist's paradise but they are now playing a crucial role in the conservation of our forests, soil and water.

The practice of dedicating such groves to deities was once spread throughout the Old World. Greek mythology tells us of the groves of Diana. Kalidasa, in his play Vikramorvashiyam narrates how his heroine, Urvashi, was transformed into a climber on accidently entering the grove of Kurnara, the misogynist son of Shiva and Parvati. Sacred groves exist today in Ghana and Nigeria, Syria and Turkey and perhaps in many other countries of the Old World as well. They are apparently to be found throughout India and we know of them from Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Mysore, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh and the North-Eastern State.

The phenomenon is not only widespread but must be very ancient as well. In fact, the nature of religious cults associated with the sacred groves suggests that these cults date from the hunting age before man had settled down to raise livestock or till the land. The deities generally lie open to the sky, and are known in many cases to be offended of a shelter be erected over them. They are always situated at a distance from any human settlement, all of which point to their origin in the nomadic stage of society.

The deity is generally feminine, as indication of its origin in early times, when birth was still the most miraculous of all events. The mother goddess never has a male consort, a reminder of the age when marriage in the present form was totally unknown. The red paint smearing the goddess represents of course the blood of sacrificial victims. These victims were no doubt humans in bygone time. Even today, goddess Shirkai in the Poona district is symbolically offered a human victim every year.

Originally the victim must have been sacrificed by being impaled on a hook which was hung on a rope from a rotating pole. Now the hook is still pressed against the back of the victim. But the man no longer swings by the hook. He is instead tied to the rotating pole by a dhoti. The wound made by the hook is not very serious and is rapidly healed. Shirkai has a fine grove of some four hectares in which this hook-swinging ceremony is annually performed. The original function of the groves was perhaps to provide the proper atmosphere for such primitive rites. It is possible though that at least occasionally some more practical considerations were involved in declaring a grove sacred.

The sacred grove of the "seven sisters" near Tunbad in the Kolaba district of Konkan harbors a splendid specimen of a leguminous climber, Entada phasealoides. The climber is locally known as gaidhari or succour of cattle. Its bark is used in treating cattle for snake-bite and this being the only specimen of gaidhari in this locality, people come to the grove from as far as forty kilometers for a piece of the bark.

The "seven sisters" of Tunbad are water deities like Vardani, a goddess common along the crest of the Sahyadris in Poona district. These groves always adjoin a stream fed by a perennial spring. With the cutting down of every tree and shrub outside of the grove, all other formerly perennial springs may dry up soon after the rains. Then the sacred grove really becomes the last refuge, not merely of plants and animals, but even of one of the five elements of life: aap or water.

The grove at village Gani in the Kolaba district of Konkan is a lovely forest of about fifteen hectares. Half of it was recorded as a temple forest in the revenue books. This became clue for felling as a part of a forest coupe in 1972, and trees in it were marked for cutting. Hearing of our interest in the sacred groves from some forest department officials, the villagers wrote to us for help. They had witnessed the drying up of all perennial streams except for the one in the grove in the last decade, and were afraid it too would go the way of others if the grove was destroyed.
Besides water, the villagers were also dependent on the grove for firewood and leaf litter and for shelter from the heat of mid-day. We are happy to note that the forest department readily agreed to their request.

Nature conservation ultimately depends on local cooperation and this was a heartening instance of how it may be effected through grassroots sentiments. But conservation of these holy precincts is a matter of much wider significance as well. Again and again we have come across plant species which have disappeared everywhere in the locality except in one or two sacred groves. Such species may often have a medicinal significance, the traditional knowledge of which will lapse quickly enough if these last specimens were to disappear.

It is also likely that many plant species, of no known value of present and on the way to their extinction, may acquire significance in future. This was only some ten years ago that plants were discovered to be sources of potent insecticides, None of our tropical plants have been studied from this viewpoint. Besides, the groves may support genetic variants of common trees, which may be valuable in a forest tree-breeding programme   

All of this suggests that we must get down to the business of conservation of sacred groves very seriously indeed, for religious beliefs are rapidly declining and many a grove is already gone.

Courtesy : Dr. Madhav Gadgil

Source Article Published in  Illustrated Weekly