Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities

Sustenance and Sustainability

Pankaj Jain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317151593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

In Indic religious traditions, a number of rituals and myths exist in which the environment is revered. Despite this nature worship in India, its natural resources are under heavy pressure with its growing economy and exploding population. This has led several scholars to raise questions about the role religious communities can play in environmentalism. Does nature worship inspire Hindus to act in an environmentally conscious way? This book explores the above questions with three communities, the Swadhyaya movement, the Bishnoi, and the Bhil communities. Presenting the texts of Bishnois, their environmental history, and their contemporary activism; investigating the Swadhyaya movement from an ecological perspective; and exploring the Bhil communities and their Sacred Groves, this book applies a non-Western hermeneutical model to interpret the religious traditions of Indic communities. With a foreword by Roger S Gottlieb.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Dharma is ethics and ethics dharma.

Ninian Smart1 (1993)

This is a book about the lives of villagers in the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat in India. Having lived in India in my adolescence, I had sometimes wondered about the relationship of Indian villagers with their natural resources. My interest in this study was sparked in spring 2005 when I took a course on religion and environmental ethics with Professors Frederick Smith and Scott Schnell at the University of Iowa. This began my interest in exploring the diverse ways different communities interact with their environment. Out of thousands of different castes, groups, and sects present in the Indian villages, I have picked three communities spread across the villages of Rajasthan and Gujarat that have not only worshipped nature but also tried to protect and conserve it based on their beliefs and practices.

In Indic traditions, we see a number of rituals and myths in which mountains, rivers, trees, animals, and birds are revered. Despite this nature worship in India, its natural resources are under heavy pressure with its growing economy and exploding population. This has led several scholars to raise questions about the role religious communities can play in environmentalism. Does nature worship inspire Hindus to act in an environmentally conscious way? Is there any relationship between their reverence for bio-divinity2 and their care for biodiversity? Since the 1990s, India has been embracing capitalism, consumerism, and urban development at a rapid pace. At this turning point, will it join the other developed countries as a major contributor to global warming?

In this book, I have tried to explore some of these questions with three communities, the Swadhyaya movement, the Bishnoi community, and the Bhil tribe. While the first one, the Swadhyaya movement, arose in the mid-twentieth century in Gujarat as a “New Religious Movement,”3 the origin of the latter two dates back to medieval times in Rajasthan as two distinct “tribes” or “castes.” None of these groups arose as a reaction to “global warming” or “saving biodiversity.” Such a reaction has always been the motivation for environmentalists to launch their campaigns in these times of “Inconvenient Truth” and yet some examples of ecological activism set by these three communities seem more effective than many governmental initiatives. The Swadhyayis (followers and practitioners of the Swadhyaya movement) have built their tree-temples and water-harvesting sites in Gujarat and other states with a high success rate. Bishnois have been active protectors of their natural resources. Similarly, Bhils have protected their sacred groves even when people destroyed the surrounding forests in Southern Rajasthan (Haynes 1998).

I present each of my case studies in separate chapters beginning with the Swadhyaya movement, followed by the Bishnoi community, and then the Bhils. Following David Haberman and Lance Nelson, I argue that “anyone wishing to understand the relation between religion and ecology in India, or to think or act ecologically in an authentically Hindu context, must come to grips with the mythic and sacred dimensions within which Hindus function – and the ecological implications thereof” (Haberman 2006: 2). Thus, before I initiate my discussion on the environmental practices of these communities, I explore the complex religious world of each, exploring their history, theology, and rituals that I encountered while reading their texts and talking with their followers, priests, and other volunteers during my visits to various temples and pilgrimage sites in their villages. I also question some of the categories such as “religion” and “New Religious Movement” as applied to these communities throughout my descriptions.

After Robert Redfield and M.N. Srinivas, Milton Singer (1972) explored the dichotomy of “great” and “little” traditions of India differentiating the “Brahmanical Hinduism” from “Local Hinduism.” Following Singer, I apply this dichotomy of great and little traditions to modern and traditional “Hinduisms.”4 Modern “Hinduism” includes the movements such as ISKCON, Ramakrishna Mission, Transcendental Meditation, and Art of Living among others.5 On the other hand, traditional rural “Hindu Dharma”6 includes the rural communities such as Swadhyayis, Bishnois, and Bhils, that are largely present in villages and small towns of India. While my research with rural communities had little, if any, evidence of their ecological practices being influenced by modern scientific researches about global warming, the modern organizations, on the other hand, seem to be largely responding in their own ways to “save the planet,” joining the global awareness movement. In this way, I present Indian communities in two different models: “great” and “little.” The former is modern, English-speaking, urban-based, and fully conscious about environmentalism in its list of social causes and the latter is traditional, vernacular, rural-based, and only somewhat conscious about environmentalism.

These two kinds of environmentalisms then raise a bigger fundamental question. What is the difference between the two? In my chapters about each community, I show that there is no category of “environmentalism” in the “way of life” of traditional Indians living in the villages. Instead of using the categories of “environmental ethics” and “religion” to interpret their “way of life,” I suggest that “dharma” presents a better alternative. Here I have tried to build on the seminal work of two scholars, Ariel Glucklich (1994) and Austin Creel (1977). Glucklich saw dharma as a phenomenon that helps Indians transcend the boundary of subject and object. I suggest that this holistic attitude of Indians based on dharma can be used for wider environmental awareness as has been done to some extent in the Swadhyaya movement. Creel, on the other hand, tried to connect the Western notions of ethics with the Indic notions of dharma. He observed that while several modern Indian thinkers have written about dharma, they are yet to develop a comprehensive ethical framework based on dharma. He suggested that this could be done by wide-ranging reinterpretations of dharma in line with modern developments. Following his suggestions, I try to correlate the discourses of the founders of the communities of Bishnois and Swadhyaya with ethics, especially as it relates to natural resources. I show that both these gurus succeeded in mobilizing and ethicizing their communities based on their dharmic teachings. In this way, building on Creel and Glucklich, I argue that dharma could be developed as an alternative sociological and anthropological category to study Indic traditions. Following Weightman and Pandey (1978), I argue that the concept of dharma can be successfully applied as an overarching term for the sustainability of the ecology, environmental ethics, and the religious lives of Indian villagers. The distinct categories of “religion,” “ethics,” and “ecology” work well for the “modern” urban Indians. However, for millions of rural Indians, “dharma” unites and synthesizes their way of life with environmental ethics, as also noted by Ninian Smart in his quotation above. Thus, I have tried to follow the project of McKim Marriott (1990) who used the term ethnosociology, the alternative disciplines of social science, instead of juxtaposing the Western categories on the non-Western societies.

Thus, my study of different examples of environmentalisms in the Indian villages raises several questions. Is it possible to transcend this dichotomy of tradition and modernity? Can we modernize and rationalize the traditional communities or can we “traditionalize” the modern communities? Which approach is better for the future? I present my conclusions in light of these questions. My hypothesis is that for the Indian traditional communities, environmentalism is ingrained in their daily “way of life” and their religious ethos that they often describe in vernacular languages using the term dharma that has multiple meanings including ethics, virtue, religion, sustenance, order, and law (Edgerton 1942). Based on this overarching presence of “dharma,” I suggest that Dharmic Ecology of these communities offers a unique avenue for approaching environmental restoration today. Before I get to my three case studies in next three chapters, first, I review the existing scholarly literature about Indic Traditions and Environmental Ethics.

1 Cited by Bilimoria et al. (2007)

2 I borrow this term from Emma Tomalin (2009). I review her observations later.

3 “New Religious Movement” is a sociological term used to describe newer movements within established religious traditions. I describe and question this category later.

4 This dichotomy has also been redeployed by ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel to capture the influence of mass-mediated popular culture in contemporary South Asia. See his Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (1993).

5 Following Axel Michaels, I am categorizing these groups under the category “modern” based on the fact that they were all founded in India but successfully spread in Western countries based either on their English literature often written by their founding gurus or their Western-style professional management including PR campaigns and websites (Michaels and Harshav 2004: 22).

6 I differentiate “Hinduism” as a “Religion” from “Hindu Dharma” later based on the distinction between urban Indians’ modernized and organized religious communities from the rural Indians’ traditional “way of life.” This distinction is also based on the use of languages in these two categories. The urban religious organizations largely use English while the rural “dharmic” communities continue to use their vernacular languages.

Chapter 2
Theoretical Propositions for Indic Traditions and Ecology

Environmentalism is comparable to a child that only recently learned to walk. Ecospiritualities of different kinds seem to be the invisible backbone of the growth of this child.

Bergmann (2006)

Lynn White is widely considered the pioneering scholar who criticized Western religions for the current ecological problems in the world (1967). The summary of his argument is as follows. Humans have tampered with nature unlike any other species, e.g., the Romans cut the forests to build their ships and the British built the Aswan Dam. Similarly, deforestation and erosion resulted from mining for potash, sulfur, iron ore and charcoal. Population explosion, sewage deposits, and garbage deposits are other major problems that continue to impact global ecology catastrophically. According to White, descendents of Northern European peasants turned out to be the biggest exploiters of nature with their scientific and technological progress in modern times. The transformation of humans from being part of nature to exploiter also coincided with another major shift in the human psyche in Europe. This was also the period when Christianity was “destroying” pagan animism there. According to White’s interpretation of the Bible, God made humans in his image and they are supposed to dominate nature for their proper ends. By transferring all the divinity from nature to a superhuman God in heaven, “Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects” (1967: 1205). Let me now analyze some of White’s conclusions.

Christianity located the divinity in the God as a trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Bible does say that God made humans in his image but to interpret it to mean that God meant humans to dominate nature is an over-simplification of the Bible’s story of Genesis. My point is that the Bible might have rendered the nature as profane but it did not exhort humans to exploit it for their selfish greed. White goes to the extreme of attacking the Bible in his agenda of searching for the roots of the current ecological crisis and misinterprets the story of Genesis. White falls in the category of those Orientalists who in their romantic image of Eastern religions saw only mistakes in the Western religions. J.J. Clarke (1997), George A. James (1999) and others have noted the two extremes. On the one hand, they seek all the solutions in Eastern religions and see only problems in Western religions. On the other hand, some regard non-Western traditions to be too irrational and superstitious and portray Western traditions to be more “scientific.”

Overall, White tries to build a good case against the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and its aftermath, leading to the current ecological crisis. As I noted above, he leaves some holes in his thesis. I agree with White’s conclusion that there is a need to search for fine examples within each religious tradition such as Saint Francis of Assisi in Europe and Zen Buddhism in Japan. Unfortunately, both the Western religious community and the scientific community seem to have ignored such examples at least until the late twentieth century.1 For instance, the Jewish text Kabbalah employs the image of a cosmic chain in which every being is interlinked. All the elements of existence – from the most hidden to the most visible – are intimately bound to one another. All things trace their roots back to the inner recesses of the source of all being, Ein-Sof. Similarly, according to the Midrash’s interpretation of the Bible, the first act Israel performs after entering the holy land is planting trees in their attempt to “walk after” God. God created the Garden of Eden so that men in his image can plant trees (Holtz 1984: 201–326). These are the examples that can build bridges among environmentalists and religious communities and go against the dominant interpretation of Genesis as presented by White.

I agree with White that each tradition is uniquely linked to its environment and it is best to try to look into native tradition for the ways each tradition or lineage absorbs the environment around it. Building on White’s (and other scholars’) recommendations, I now look into the case of Indic traditions and their potential environmental ethics. Scholars of environmental ethics and Indic traditions have differentiated two models of environmental awareness for India: “devotional model” and “renouncer model.” These two models are based on a long-standing “snake-mongoose conflict” of India between the householders and ascetics that I have described elsewhere (Jain 2006). Householders perform devotional and ritualistic activities whereas ascetics perform austere practices.

Scholars such as Anne Feldhaus, David Haberman, and Vasudha Narayanan put the devotional model forward. Feldhaus notes that the Indologists have ignored the importance of worldly values in Indic traditions in general and the role of rivers for these values in particular (1995). She notes that rivers have been associated with the householder values such as wealth, beauty, long life, good health, food, love, and the birth of the children, rather than the ascetic values. Narayanan also distinguishes the ascetic model from the devotional model (1997). Narayanan argues that the ascetic model was largely limited to intellectual elites and their philosophical discussions. According to Narayanan, the Indic philosophical texts were never popular choices for oral and public religious performances. Hence, the world-denying attributes of Vedanta, as suggested by Nelson (1998) and described ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical Propositions for Indic Traditions and Ecology
• 3 The Swadhyaya Movement
• 4 The Bishnoi Community
• 5 Sacred Groves of Bhils
• 6 Modern Organizations Adapting to Ecology
• 7 Dharma as Religious and Environmental Ethos
• 8 Conclusions
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index