Folk Religion and Environmental Sustainability: Study on the Sacred Knoll of Borgidanga and the Thirteen Manasa Sisters, India

Abstract

Sustainable management seems urgent on this globalized earth. People present themselves as modern technicians and scientists rather than creators of civilization, readily discarding the folk sciences and folk cultures that are their pillars. Sacred groves form the folk science, culture and technique for reducing all the rigidity, roughness and crises of the environment. They act as a natural ‘antibiotic’ to treat the environment. Oral traditions are the cellar of folk belief. Every society has some common beliefs that are not necessarily planted in the open scientific arena but are widely accepted as folk truth by the social communities. These beliefs are the hidden nano-culture of the physical and cultural environment. From the dawn of every civilization, people maintained their folk truth through oral transmission, and at the time of globalization, folk beliefs constructed the cultural value and system in every community, which primarily reflect the customs, traditions, and ethnicity of a group. Social and local identities are being fossilized within the casket of folk belief, and in recent multicultural, mixed-cultural phases of the globe, the maintenance of folk belief has a vital synoptic view. The researchers would like to stress the importance of folk belief in the recent environment through two case studies: one is on the Boga festival, and the worship of the sacred tamarind tree in Koma village, and another is on the folk culture of Nalhati Hillock near Nalhati in the Birbhum district of West Bengal.