Women and sacred forests 829


TABLE 1 The number of respondents in each age group in the four villages (names anonymized). Age (years)


AB C


18–30 01 43 2 31–45 33 22 3 46–60 11 62 2 61–75 11 21 3 76–100 20 22 1 Total


7 6 16 10


breeding are common occupations, increasingly the young- er generation is working in neighbouring towns and cities, in education, service and industry. The language spoken among these communities is Marathi.


Methods


The total number of village sacred forests in the Bhimashankar region has not been fully documented, al- though Pande &Pathak (2005) estimated there are 14 sacred forests within the Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary, and Deshmukh (1999) and Burman (2003) also documented sa- cred forests in this region. Based on these studies, we esti- mated there are 30–40 sacred forests in the region, with some villages having several. Using the villages mentioned in these studies as a reference, SM conducted preliminary visits to 20 villages (Fig. 1) during 2015–2016. Kalpavriksh, an environmental NGO, facilitated contact with three peo- ple local to the region to accompany SM. Of these 20 villages we found three no longer had sacred


forests, although the temple or the deity shelter were extant, and three village sacred forests were either neglected or highly degraded, with only the major trees standing and the undergrowth cleared. We therefore considered 14 of the 20 villages for study. Based on the location of theses villages (selecting villages not close to each other), ownership of the land on which the sacred forests were located (community, private or Maharashtra Forest Department), and accessibil- ity,we selected five villages for in-depth study.We could not obtain community consent for research in one of these vil- lages, and therefore interviews were conducted in four vil- lages, which we refer to as A, B, C and D (the names have been anonymized to protect the communities from any un- intended harm). Ethnographic methods, in particular semi-structured in-


terviews, were used to gather data. Although four commu- nities were involved, the unit of analysis was the individual. We used convenience and snowball sampling to select par- ticipants for interview (Bernard, 2006; Newing et al., 2011). Additionally, targeted sampling (Bernard, 2006) was used to seek out key informants such as priests and elders. Preliminary visits, community consent meetings, and the


D Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Women Total 11


4 34 21 0 32 18 3 46 25 1 10 10 0 41 12 8


15 13 86


interviews were conducted over 18 months from mid 2015 to the beginning of 2017. Eighty-six in-depth interviews were conducted along


with group and community meetings. Table 1 details the respondents in each village by gender and age group. Being a woman allowed SM to approach women easily and, add- itionally, two of the local contacts were young women and were able to introduce SM to other women in the villages. Interviewees usually invited SM to enter their house. On many occasions interviews were conducted whilst the women were cooking, cleaning or sweeping. The interviews were recorded, and later translated and transcribed. The transcriptions were coded and analysed using ATLAS.ti 7.5 (Scientific Software Development GmbH, Berlin, Ger- many). For coding both hypothesis and provisional coding were used (Saldana, 2009). To maintain the anonymity of the respondents, each was assigned a number based on their village. Thus the first respondent or interviewee in Village A is A1, the second is A2, and so on.


Results


We initially discuss the characteristics of the sacred forests in the studied villages and then our findings regarding wo- men’s perspectives of and relationships with sacred forests and other forest areas.


Sacred forests


The sacred forests we observed in the Bhimashankar region were associated with villages or their hamlets and were lo- cally known as ban or devache ban, which means God’s for- est. The location of the sacred forests varied from mountain top to valley, and from the interior of forest accessible only by foot to beside roads, and were located in a matrix of villages, agricultural fields and other forest areas (Table 2). Area ranged from a clump of trees to 5–6 ha (Plate 1). Although small, the sacred forests were generally biodiverse, although a few were dominated by only one type of tree species, such as bamboo Bambusa bambos or fishtail palm Caryota urens. A few sacred forests had water wells or streams flowing beside them and were a source of drinking


Oryx, 2021, 55(6), 827–834 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605320001179


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