Of Gods, Trees and Boundaries: Divine Conservation in Rajasthan

ANN GRODZINS GOLD Cornell University, Ithaca, New York USA and BHOJU RAM GUJAR Government Middle School, Village: Tilisma, District: Bhilwara, Rajasthan INDIA PREFACE The original inspiration for this paper was essentially a visual one. In June of 1980 I toured the deities' places (devasthzn) of Ajmer, Bhilwara, and Bundi districts in Rajasthan, North India, to collect stories about their origins and miracles, and to learn the reasons that pilgrims visited them.1 It was the end of a long hot season. The monsoon was just about to break, and most of the land we traveled through had a parched and barren look. But a number of shrines were virtual oases. Within these deities' bounded territories greenery was at times quite dense, and there were pleasant shady spots and clear running water. My fellow travelers-three young men from GhatiyBlT, the village where I had settled for anthropological field work in the fall of 1979-took this as a matter of course. Places of the gods were by definition places of natural beauty which, to meet pilgrims' needs, should include pleasant spots for bathing and picnicking.2 A few casual inquiries clarified some of the causality behind notice- able differences between deities' domains with their lush flora and the desiccated, stubby shrubbery prevailing in the surrounding country- side. The gods, I learned, objected to having their trees cut, and often even forbade the removal of dead wood from their land. Some were benevolent enough to allow their pilgrims this dead wood's use for cooking; a few required devotees to haul fuel from outside the shrine's boundaries. The gods were known, moreover, to shelter small animals and to delight in the presence of many birds, who would feed on pil- grims' grain offerings. As for water, because prayer should be preceded by cleansing, it was rare that a shrine would be established where no