Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

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.&nbsp;

Department of Environmental Studies

Economic and Political Weekly

Governing Sacred Groves Religion, State, and Institutions in Indigenous Jharkhand

Sacred Forests of Asia: Spiritual Ecology and the Politics of Nature Conservation

“Come Let Us All Play”: Sacred Groves, Sarna, and “Green” Politics in Jharkhand, India

Caste and race, Dalits and Black people, and the common ground between them have been analyzed in many areas, but their conjunction in the environmental fi eld has been neglected. Th is article locates Dalit ecologies by examining the close connection between caste and nature. Drawing from a plural framework of environmental justice and histories of environmental struggles among African Americans, it focuses on historical and contemporary ecological struggles of Dalits. It contemplates how their initial articulations under the rubric of civil rights developed into signifi cant struggles over issues of Dalit access, ownership, rights, and partnership regarding natural resources, where themes of environmental and social justice appeared at the forefront. Th e intersections between Dalit and Black ecologies, the rich legacies of Black Panthers and Dalit Panthers, and their overlaps in environmental struggles open for us a new historical archive, where Dalit and Black power can talk to each other in the environmental present.

Fulltext

Environment and Society: Advances in Research

Caste, Environment Justice, and Intersectionality of Dalit–Black Ecologies

Dalit folktales are an important part of Indian folkloristic categories. They have existed since long, often in a complex relationship with the dominant culture. The development of Dalit cultural, political and public spheres in the recent past has galvanized a dynamic Dalit system of organization of folktales in performances, festivals and protests, leading to a diffusion of its contents and forms, and intimate connections with everyday life of the community. The folktale has also increasingly become an expression of Dalits’ environmental risks, conflicts and rights. Its mythical characters have been transformed into symbols of ecological ancestors with immense physical, natural and spiritual skills, who have the courage to liberate the community from oppressive ecological and social systems. Drawing on the folktale of two Musahar brothers, Dina and Bhadri, widely circulated in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of India and Nepal, the article sheds light on how folk traditions work within Dalit and other marginalized groups in South Asia. It particularly focuses on how folklore has become a way for Dalits to assert their environmental rights through their own motifs, everyday memories, and ecological ancestors. Based on extensive fieldwork in the North Indian River Plains, the article highlights this new phenomenon of ecological symbolism of Dalit folklore.

South Asian History and Culture

God of Humans’:Dina-Bhadri, Dalit Folktales and Environmental Movements

India’s ‘nature writing’ has traditionally encompassed ecology, geography and sacrality, but it has often bypassed Dalit eco-literary traditions. This article discusses the eco-literary, by focusing on Dalits and their relationship to the earth. It perceives the earth as an important locus of Dalit individuation, carving them as a free, working community, prior to the bearing of burdens of caste, and thus revealing irreducible instances of rights and claims. Placing archives of Dalits and ecocriticism, novel and river, caste and commons in tandem with each other, the article reads a literary text, A River Called Titash, deeply, and delves into the layers of making of Dalit environments. Written by Adwaita Mallabarman, a poor Malo Dalit, and autobiographic in a wider sense, the novel weaves a complex narrative of nature, place, time and community at the turn of the twentieth century. It shows how Dalit environments comprise a unique set of analytic, where earth,