Sacred Groves Among Communities (The Mahadeo Kolis and the Kunbis of the Western Ghats)

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About the Author J.J. ROY BORMAN (b.1955) is primarily an anthropologist having done his post-graduation from North Bengal University in Sociology and Social Anthropology. Immediately after obtaining the degree he worked on the impact of counter- insurgency among the Mizos in Mizoram as a Fellow of Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development, Chandigarh. After living there in a village for about one year he joined Help Age India as Project Adviser for East and North-East India. After almost eight years of his direct contact with social work and social engineering, he joined Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, as a member of the Faculty. Apart from teaching Anthropology, Roy Burman also carries out research mainly on the problems in rural areas. Forests, environment, mass religion have been his main areas of interest. He is the first person in India to have done Ph.D. on Sacred Groves from the sociological perspective. Few anthropologists have had the opportunity to travel in the tribal and forest areas all over the country like him. Right now it has become his passion to portray the inter-ethnic harmonious relations in the country.

Introduction The basis of the formation of civilization has been debated for a long time, particularly with respect to it's impact on nature and the sustenance of human life. This has been so considering the fact many of the development projects have seriously endangered the environment and life on the planet. S.K. Chahal confirms this very sharply as he states, "Today we are faced with an environmental crisis of massive proportions. The crisis of the environment involves not merely isolated and particular problems such as the pollution of our lakes, rivers, the smog of our cities and the devastating effect of pesticides on food chains. It involves a threat to life on this planet and quality of this life. Alternations of the environment can destroy, and are destroying in many cases, the balance of nature, which sustains that life system. The causes of this crisis are multitude; the misuse of technology to pollute, excessive proliferation if the human species, and ignorance of causal relationships in nature. The basic underlying causes of this crisis are mistaken values and attitudes" (Chahal: 1994.2).

In spite of the current crisis of the environment, there are powerful lobbies in the western countries who state that the problems have been exaggerated. Science and technology is moving such rapidly that it will be able to take care of the by using remedial technology and also that new resources will be discovered and complex matter will be created to overcome the resource crunch. They also view that population growth which is 'supposed to be a major factor of environmental crisis (S.K. Singh: 1994).

The concern for scientific outlook to social life and the cultural premises backing it up in the West is not very recent. Roots of it can, in fact, be traced to scientific revolution in Europe, two to three centuries back. The empiricist thinkers like Francis Bacon and later philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz viewed the role of mathematics as final in the human societies (Taylor & Taylor: 1989). The scientific temper to a large extent is linked to the capitalistic economic order. No wonder that a section of the scholars supporting the scientific temper are also supported by neo-liberalists. The neo-liberal thinkers who vie for free economy stress that economic life should not be trampled over. The liberalists also view that capitalism by itself has no ills and given full options to the individuals-they by themselves will have interest in preserving a good environment. It believes that the welfare state can easily provide the scope to the individual entrepreneurs by taking adequate measures to tax non- recycling industries for pollution, and enhance urban environmental quality through welfare measures.

This scientific approach and the philosophy of wanton consumerism have not gone unchallenged. Not only many of the developing countries are voicing their opposition to this, but even in the western countries a good number of people are concertedly trying to resist the destructive technology and the philosophical premises backing it up. Capra argued that orthodox science following the Cartesan-Newtonian paradigm amounted to the philosophical basis of the contemporary environmental crisis (Heywood). According to O'Ridon (Pepper: 1993) the concern was first raised in USA itself towards the early part of this century through 'Back to Nature' movement

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