The sacred forest

At a Glance

• Central figures: Bada Deo, the great god of the Gond people; Nanga Baiga, the first priest; and the Pen - the clan deities who dwell among the roots of the sacred trees.
• Setting: The forested hills of central India - Chhattisgarh and eastern Madhya Pradesh - in the Gond homeland, where sal, mahua, and teak forests once covered the land without break.
• The turn: The first humans began cutting trees without asking, and the Pen withdrew from the groves, taking the rain and the animals with them.
• The outcome: Nanga Baiga walked barefoot into the oldest part of the forest and bargained with Bada Deo to establish the dev ban - the sacred grove - where no axe could fall, no leaf be taken, and the spirits would remain.
• The legacy: The dev ban tradition among the Gond, a forest set apart for the clan deities, still maintained in parts of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh wherever the groves have not been cleared for mining or timber.

The mahua tree split down the center and bled sap into the dirt. The man who had struck it stood back and watched the white fluid pool at his feet. He had needed wood for a post - nothing more than that - but the tree cracked open as if it had been waiting to break, and the smell that came off the wound was sharp and wrong, like something burning that should not burn.

That night, the rain stopped. It had been falling every evening for weeks, soft steady rain that filled the streams and kept the paddy alive. It stopped between one breath and the next. The frogs went quiet. The man lay awake in his hut listening to the silence, and by morning his youngest child had a fever.

The Withdrawal of the Pen

It was not only his family. In the village below the ridge, three cattle went lame on the same day. A spring that had run since anyone’s grandmother could remember slowed to a trickle and then to a dark stain on the rocks. The bhumka - the priest who spoke to the clan spirits - placed rice and turmeric at the foot of the village’s shrine tree and waited. No answer came.

The bhumka told the headman what he already suspected. The Pen had gone. The clan deities who lived in the roots and the canopy and the water that ran between the trees had pulled themselves inward and away. The forest was still standing but it was empty of what made it a forest. Birds sat in the branches and did not sing. The deer did not come to the salt lick. The mahua flowers, which should have been falling in thick sweet clusters for the women to gather, stayed shut on the branch.

Other villages reported the same thing. Up and down the hills, wherever the Gond people lived, the spirits were withdrawing. The connection between the land and the people who lived on it was thinning like thread pulled too tight.

Nanga Baiga Goes Barefoot

Nanga Baiga was old even then. He had been the first bhumka, the one Bada Deo had appointed to stand between the human world and the spirit world. He lived at the edge of the deepest forest, where the sal trees grew so close together that their roots surfaced and wove across the ground like ropes.

He heard what was happening and he did not wait. He took off his sandals - Nanga Baiga always went barefoot when he meant to speak to the earth - and walked into the forest. Not the edges of it, where the villages cleared land for planting. Into the old part. The part where the canopy closed overhead and the light came through green and broken. Where the trees had never been cut because no one had needed to cut them, and where the Pen had always been thickest.

He walked for three days. He ate nothing. He drank from the streams when they still had water in them. On the third day he came to a place where a single sal tree stood wider than the span of four men’s arms, and at its base there was a flat stone with turmeric stains so old they had gone brown and black. This was the seat of Bada Deo.

The Bargain at the Sal Tree

Nanga Baiga sat down on the bare earth and spoke.

You made us from the forest. You gave us the trees to use - the mahua for drink, the sal for building, the teak for fire. We used them. Now the Pen are gone and the rain has stopped and the children are sick. What did we do wrong?

Bada Deo’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere - from the bark, from the soil, from the air between the leaves.

You took without asking. You cut without marking what was mine. The whole forest was open to you and you treated all of it the same. The Pen need a place that is theirs alone. A place where the axe does not come. A place where the leaf stays on the branch and the root stays in the ground and the water runs clean because nothing disturbs it. You have no such place. So the Pen left.

Nanga Baiga understood. He asked what had to be done.

Mark the groves, Bada Deo said. Every village, one grove. The oldest trees, the ones nearest the spring. Set a stone at the edge. Put turmeric on it. No one cuts there. No one grazes cattle there. No one takes even fallen wood. That is the Pen’s house. They will come back to it and the rain will follow them.

The Marking of the Dev Ban

Nanga Baiga walked back the way he had come, barefoot, three days without eating. He went to the first village he reached and told the headman. They found the oldest cluster of sal trees above the village spring. Nanga Baiga set a stone at the boundary and smeared it with turmeric and oil. He spoke the names of the clan Pen aloud, one by one, and invited them to return.

By evening the frogs were singing again. By the next morning the spring ran full.

He went to the next village. And the next. At each one, the same - the oldest trees, the boundary stone, the turmeric, the names spoken aloud. The groves were not large. Some were no bigger than the space between two fields. But they were absolute. No one entered them with an axe. No one entered them with cattle. The bhumka went in once a year, at the time of the first rains, to renew the turmeric and speak the names.

What Remains

The dev ban groves stood for generations. In them the old trees grew undisturbed and the water table held and the medicinal plants that the forest produced continued to seed themselves. The Pen stayed. The connection between the Gond people and their land ran through those groves like a root system under the surface.

Some of the groves are still there. In parts of Chhattisgarh, in the hills of eastern Madhya Pradesh, you can find them - clusters of old-growth sal surrounded by cleared land, with a turmeric-stained stone at the edge. They are smaller now. Mining leases have taken some. Timber companies have taken others. Roads have cut through a few. Where the grove goes, the spring often follows it, drying up within a few years.

The bhumka still walks into the ones that remain, barefoot, once a year, and speaks the names. The Pen have not been told they can leave.