Forest

In North East India, forestland in general and shifting cultivation in particular remain the primary resources and means of livelihood for many Scheduled Tribe people. However, the practice of shifting cultivation is not so prominent and is declining owing to the steady shift, transformation,and withdrawal from the labour-intensive shifting cultivation to non-agricultural livelihoods, resulting in an improvement of forest conservation and cover.

Sacred groves are widely recognised for their religious, cultural, and ecological value. They are an intrinsic part of traditional and indigenous practices of forest governance. However, the contemporary sacred forest system is not an autonomous world. Its sociopolitical landscape is not confined only to the village either. Based on extensive fieldwork in Jharkhand, this paper argues that sacred groves have evolved to be dynamic spaces of multilevel institutional interactions and contestations. Their conservation is contingent on the intersectional dynamics of indigenous, state, and institutional processes. Classical approaches of sacrality of the nature and forms of forest worship need to be combined with the concerns of the local environment, democracy, gender, caste, conservation, and culture.