Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, The Tree and the Forest in Indian Culture: Making Meaning of the Multiple Narratives
Résumé
Journées d’étude « L’arbre qui cache la forêt », 19-20 novembre 2021
Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, The Tree and the Forest in Indian Culture: Making Meaning of the Multiple Narratives
This communication aims to make meaning of the multiple narratives which center on the forest as a material as well as imaginative territory in India. Indian civilization has revered the tree as part of the living that protects the living. In The Bhagavat Gita, Lord Krishna says "Among the trees, I am Ashvatha," making it godly. The very same ficus religiosa is associated with Buddha as he attained enlightenment in Gaya under its
boughs. In the many temples of India, mango and palm leaf decorations, coconut and banana fruit offerings, mediate between the temporal and the spiritual.
As for the forest, it has served as a space for meditation and place of birth of the philosophical treatises of the Upanishads. In the two major epics, The Mahabharata and The Ramayana, the forest features as a symbolic place of creation and recreation, a territory of exile and survival, a ground for training and transformation. The forest narrative took an exotic turn in British India, thanks to Kipling's The Jungle Book, followed by the jungle narratives of the hunter-cum-naturalist Jim Corbett. In postcolonial India, the Chipco movement of the 1970s to protect trees from being cut down in the Garhwal Himalayas showed the close link between women and ecology. In Arundhati Roy's essay "Walking with the Comrades", 2011, the forest of Dandakaranya in Central India becomes the theatre of war between the national government and Maoist
resistance, between modernization and tribal ways of life. Last, the government's efforts to amend the Indian Forest Act 1927 tell the story of the tension between conservation and commodification in the anthropocene.