832 S. Mokashi and S. A.W. Diemont


will not be followed. But the grove will stay. Ceremonies will continue. The temple structure can grow bigger. I feel people won’t cut trees. I feel if more protection is provided it will remain the same. If trees are planted—fruit bearing, medicinal varieties and local native spe- cies—the sacred forest will become denser’ (D18; age 23; Education: graduate degree).


Young men also seemed more accepting than older men of a change that would allow women access to sacred forests. For example, one young man from village C said, ‘I mean both men and women are equal so even if ladies go there in the temple it should not be a problem. That rule should have been changed’ (C11; Age 25; Education: Diploma in Education). The women in a family from Village D told about an activity that speaks about their sustainable man- agement attitude: ‘Our family has been collecting medicinal plants from the sacred forests for the last 3 years. While ex- tracting we keep one bulb for future regeneration.’ With the help of local NGOs, many villages in the Bhimashankar region have been working towards securing tenure rights to forests under the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006. The Community Forest Resource rights is a pioneering provision that gives local communities (i.e. the Gram Sabha, which is a village assembly consisting of both men and women adult members) the right to protect, manage and conserve forest areas.Additionally, Kalpavriksh, an environmental NGO, has been working with women’s self-help groups in the region, reviving biocultural diversity through uncultivated and wild food festivals (which SM at- tended), and have also developed a women’s local honey en- terprise, buying local honey and processing and packaging it for sale.


Discussion


Women’s access to sacred forests Religion plays an important role in implementing social boundaries with respect to a particular natural resource, by prohibiting the access of either men or women to that resource (Cox et al., 2014). This role is evident in the Bhimashankar region, where traditional rules curtail wo- men’s access to and control of these sacred forests. Researchers in the Indian sub-continent have noted the gender-specific restrictions imposed on women regarding entry and involvement in the management of sacred forests. Menstruating and pregnant women are not allowed to enter the sacred forest because they are considered to have a pol- luting effect. In southern India, pollution (Tittu) is one of the main elements in Tamil religiosity (Kent, 2010). This pollution is conceived as some invisible substance which emanates during death and menstruation. If this rule is transgressed, it angers the deity, and the woman or the com- munity face consequences. Similar observations have been made in sacred forests in the state of Kerala, where polluting


activities are supposed to anger the snake gods (Notermans et al., 2016), and in the state of Madhya Pradesh (Kala, 2011), and in sacred forests in Maharashtra (Singh, 2006). In the sacred forests that we observed in the Bhimashankar region, women were allowed to enter both the temples and the sacred forests that were dedicated to female deities. In the devithans in Sikkim, India, where the deity in these sacred forests is a goddess (devi translates to goddess), Acharya & Ormsby (2017) posited that, in the case of devithans that act as source of water, women may have been allowed to enter because of the need to draw water, thus resulting in a deviation from imposing a sanc- tion on the entry of women. In forest-dependent communities women play an im-


portant role in the extraction of forest products, and in some regions they are the primary harvesters of products such as fuelwood, fodder and leaf litter for daily needs (Agarwal, 2009). Singh (2006) noted that some of her inter- viewees suggested women are restricted from entering the sacred forests because they are mostly responsible for fuel- wood collection and hence the restriction may be a way of protecting the sacred forest. But she challenges this assump- tion because men also collect fuelwood, and wood for house construction and for use in agricultural fields, yet are not barred from sacred forests. Patriarchy is dominant in Indian society and men’s con-


trol of activities associated with sacred forests shows this power imbalance. Taboos are both religious and traditional, with women kept away from sacred forests through this sys- tem of taboos. Thus women’s status in the household and community, societal norms and religion dictate their rela- tion with the sacred forests. The younger generation is in- creasingly questioning this gender inequity and advocating for equality in access to sacred forests and temples. During the time of our interviews, severalwomen’s groups were try- ing to enter temples in India from which they had until then been traditionally barred (Prasanna, 2016; Bijukumar, 2019). This budding movement could have affected some of the perspectives of the younger generation interviewed.


Women and forest conservation


We conclude that women have little say in the management of the sacred forests we studied. However, although the sacred forest tradition has survived without women’s in- volvement,we found that some of the sacred forests had dis- appeared or were declining. We suggest that this problem could be addressed by increased participation of women in the decision-making processes for sacred forests. It has been well established that women’s participation


has a positive impact in community forestry (Agarwal, 2009, 2010; Leisher et al., 2016). Agarwal (2009,p. 2796) noted that ‘women’s greater participation in the governance structure of an institution protecting a common pool


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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