Tracing The Close Harmony Between Hinduism And The Nature

Krishna, Dr Nanditha, Hinduism and Nature, Penguin India, 2017, 233 pp.

The relation of Hinduism to nature is always a topic which is both fascinating and needful in the present context. With the global environmental crisis and India’s own search for a developmental model that needs to usher in both economic growth and sustainability, the importance of the topic cannot be overemphasised. This makes the new work of Dr Nandita Krishna, ‘Hinduism and Nature’ (Penguin, 2017), a book to be read seriously.

After the globalisation and the liberalisation processes started in India, there have been serious studies conducted on the relation between Indic religions and environment. A sympathetic treatment of the subject came from British author Ranchor Prime, who was associated with International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). In his 1992 book Hinduism and Ecology, Prime analysed the philosophy of Hinduism with respect to environment and also studied ecological movements and their relation to Hinduism – particularly the Bhagavata tradition. Lance Nelson, Professor of Theology at the University of San Diego, edited a volume titled ‘Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India’ in 1998. It consisted of papers by various authors on how Hindu religion and ecology are intertwined in India’s developmental context. Nelson concluded as "one compelling, overarching fact”, “the still powerful reality of the mythic cosmography within the horizons of which Hindu India dwells”.

In 2011, Dr Pankaj Jain from the University of North Texas approached the subject in his book Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities (Ashgate). Here, he concentrated on the role Hindus and Jains played in the environmentalism through the study of three communities: the Swadhyaya movement, the Bishnoi community and the Bhil tribe.

The present book by Dr Nandita Krishna provides a comprehensive overview of Hinduism as a whole and its relation to nature through its Vedic philosophy, Puranic worldview and diverse local traditions. In her introduction, she points out that the Vedic and Harappan cultures ran simultaneous rejecting the conventional Western Indological model that the Vedic myth of slaying of Vritra was a reflection of Aryan hordes destroying the dams and barrages built by Harappans – an Aryan invasion scenario developed later by Marxist historiographer D D Kosambi.

The unique relation of Hinduism to nature, according to Dr Krishna, comes from the Vedic creation hymns, which despite their pluralism emphasise on the non-dual nature of the creator and the creation. The concepts of dharma and karma emerge as important guiding principles in determining the relation of Hindu community to nature not only through the overarching worldview but also through daily rituals and activities. She says that "the earth and its inhabitants are part of a highly organized cosmic order called rita and any disruption results in a breakdown of peace and the natural balance”. However, one feels that rita deserves a more detailed treatment in the context of nature and Hinduism. (In fact rita is the basis for Vedic worldview and the substratum on which the view of nature rests. There is also a strong possibility that the Tamil word for dharma, ‘aram’ itself may be etymologically related to rita through the PIE *ar from which the old Persian word aram is also derived which too means right direction.)

The author does not restrict herself to the Sanskrit literature. She also points to the ancient Tamil culture. Citing Sangham literature and also pointing out the ecological wisdom enshrined in the five eco-cultural divisions of Aynthinai in Tamil literature, she presents a pan-Indic Hindu civilisational picture. This is a very welcome step as usually the concentration is only on the Sanskrit aspect of Hindu culture alone. What is even more important is that both the Sanskrit and Tamil literary depictions show a fundamental unity of Hindu culture and hence reinforces the organic oneness of the ancient nation.

The relation between Hinduism and nature is not something that is delineated in the abstract and high philosophies of systems like Vedanta and Samkhya. The author rightly points out that "there is a very strong and intimate relationship between the biophysical ecosystem and economic institutions”. In fact, the entire book is in a way a lucid description of these relations and how they already help and can be even more actively harnessed in the conservation of nature. The introduction chapter, which forms the first 24 pages of the book, provides an insider view of how a Hindu looks at her religion and its relation to nature.

The second chapter on sacred groves and gardens is also equally interesting. The Chennai-based C P R Environmental Education Centre, of which Dr Krishna is the head, has already published books on the ecological traditions of the southern states, including a book on ‘The Sacred Groves of Tamil Nadu’ (Amirthalingam, CPREEC, 2005) and she has written another compendium on the sacred groves of India with M Amrithalingam, 2014). So here again, Dr Krishna provides the reader not only the literary and theoretical dimensions of the sacred forests and groves, but also the field reports of the sacred groves in the south Indian states as well as in the other parts of the country. There is a continuity she traces from the Vedic Aranyani to the goddess tradition in the greater Indian cultural matrix:

She points out how both secular and sacred Hindu literature are full of instructions to plant and protect trees. Thus the secular arthashastra describes different forest types: mriga vana (forests of deer), dravya vana (economic forests), hasti vana (forests of elephants), pakshi vana (bird sanctuaries) and pashu vana and vyala vana (forests of wildlife), the last reserved for tigers and wild animals. The author also quotes the sacred text Varaha Purana, which says that one who plants a pipal, a neem, a banyan, two pomegranate, two orange, five mango trees and 10 flowering plants or creepers will never go to hell.

As noted earlier, the strength of the book is that it does not stop with the high poetry and deep philosophical visions from the ancient literature but augments it with the hard data obtained through the field work. The exalted vision of forests in Indic culture throughout history is brought out as a living reality thus:

Another uniqueness of the book is its unifying vision. Many of the studies dealing with the ‘folk’ or village traditions of Hinduism fall into the fallacy of seeing them as part of a conflicting binary against the higher or Brahminical tradition. This reviewer remembers reading one ‘anthropologist’ theorising that the frequent terracotta horse figurines one finds in the villages of Tamil Nadu as memorials of captured Aryan soldiers used by Dravidians to guard their village checkposts. Here, Dr Krishna provides a more realistic picture. She places the sacred terracotta figurines, which are found abundant in the sacred groves of Tamil Nadu within the context of the sacred earth and also the regenerative power of the soil, which in turn correlates with the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

The chapter on water bodies details the river veneration, which comes from the seven rivers adoration in the Vedas. The author gives a detailed description each of the major rivers in India and their Puranic significance. The lakes and stationary water bodies starting from the Manasarovar lake are also narrated and an exhaustive list of the sacred ponds and lakes in every state is given along with the religious significance attached to them. The water veneration in Hinduism also has a very practical ecological outcome, which when neglected becomes a loss for present and future generations of Indians. She points out:

The words become significant if we remember how the same Chennai suffered from the flood caused by rain water, which it could have used constructively had the city remembered its ancient Hindu wisdom of water veneration and conservation.

The next two chapters on the plants and animals are also very informative and in a way provide in a very concentrated form what she had already elaborated in her earlier books Sacred Animals of India (2010) and Sacred Plants of India (2014). In the chapter on the abode of gods – the mountains from Himalayas, Mount Kailash and the mystical Meru to Thiruvannamalai in south India (associated with Bhagwan Ramana), almost all sacred mountains venerated in all the states of India are enumerated with the Puranic description of their sacred significance.

In the concluding chapter, the author rightfully zeroes in on the various local festivals celebrated in India which are associated with the seasonal cycles – the Pongal, Makar Sankranti, Onam etc. The regional flavours of pan-Indic festivals like Navaratri – they all celebrate the local bio-cultural diversity. (Of course one wonders why with such civilisational wisdom she could not use it to make her fellow PETA travellers understand the cultural and deeper ecological aspects of bull taming in Tamil Nadu. But that is just a tangential thought here). The unity in diversity – a very important ecological principle is also the very basis of India’s nationhood and is also the uniting principle of Hinduism as a body.

This book is a must for every student of Hinduism and Indian ecology – both lay public and professionals. The author does justice to the subject matter which is not an easy thing to do within the 233 pages of the book. To bring together the infinite variety of Hinduism and the equally infinite variety of nature and present to the reader the common principles both in the scriptures and in the living life of the Hindu nation is a Bhagirathic work to say the least, and the author has accomplished it in a lucid style without diluting the subject.