Changing Paradigm of the Sacred

The Sacred Mountain thatJivya Soma Mashe, and otherWarlis in the vicinity rever andcontemplate,Image Courtesy: Vikas Harish

Not far from the highway, as one comes in towards the coastal town of Dahanu, an impressive mountain, a thumb like structure, looms ahead. Even to the uninitiated there is an eerie presentiment of its sacredness. A natural element renders to the collective veneration of a ‘tribal’ community. Deities are created from the elements that surround, a synergistic relation to their abode. This is the abode of the Warli’s, Warla literally signifying a piece of land. In these cultures, where communities have lived in the exterior margin of large city populations, the identification with nature is paramount

RURAL CREATION AND VENERATION

This rural image is evocative of the context in which sacred and profane edifice thrive in the tribal cultures of India, and thereafter the migration of this context within the urban

At the onset it is important to assign that the word ‘tribal’ or ‘tribe’ pertains to the context laid in the Constitution of India. It may not thus carry any additional connotation ascribed through the exterior cultures for these endogamous communities. Tribals here are indeed also communities that thus identify themselves through the passage of time. These are communities who remained in exclusion of the complex system of societal divisions, the castes, historically being identified as jati, outside of the caste, nishachar, people of the night or adivasi, the premier inhabitants. Adivasi is a designation that they themselves identify with besides their proper tribal names.< P>

Another parameter that must be elucidated is the context of rural in terms of the ethnic and the post-ethnic. The ‘ethnic’ would pertain to an acceptance of the diversity and the appropriation of a ‘tribal’ identity. Tribal in implication not only with the anthropological definition of pertaining to a homogenous community, but essentially thereof pertaining to similarity of thoughts, social structures, inhabitation amongst a variety of other concomitants. It is then the ‘post’ that asserts in the contemporary times, as while the ‘ethnic’ often synonymous with ‘rural’ or at other times with ‘tribal’ accepted a homogenous identity, the ‘post’ questions its hardiness.