The history of civilization is linked with the environment and its transformation through human activities. The search for the origins and processes of changes in physical habitats—a sacred grove, a river, or a forest—is complicated, and involves probing various cultural, sociological, historical, and political factors. Eliza Kent's Sacred Groves and Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India gives a comprehensive and refreshingly in-depth account of a whole range of ancient and modern, religious and material, and community and caste factors that contribute to the making of India's much celebrated, but rarely researched, sacred groves. For the first time, in understanding the small forests or stands of trees set aside for a deity's exclusive use in a southern Indian state, we get a complex sense of forested shrines, which are constituted by religious, social, cultural, and economic relations, and the flow of influences, information, commodities, and people that often extend far beyond a community or a locality. This sincere attempt to understand the context and present reality of sacred groves by integrating regional and local forces also helps to circumvent unrealistic expectations of groves and gods, while simultaneously analyzing the impact of state, market, globalization, and liberalization. This important book demonstrates how the tendency to essentialize and romanticize sacred groves has the danger of ignoring local social inequalities, power relations, and caste, issues which are also a living reality in the realm of sacred groves.

On her difficult road to unravel the religious and cultural milieu surrounding various sacred groves in diverse regions of Tamil Nadu, Kent draws from multiple beliefs, myths, rituals, and daily practices surrounding these groves. Kent suggests that the reasons for tree protection given by villagers in the Madurai area mark their understanding of “Tamil sacred groves as places where people now living very much as settled and moderately prosperous farmers connect with vital aspects of their communal identity as former hunters and warriors” (p. 13). In the second chapter, Kent discusses the groves of Tiruvannamalai and demonstrates how community rituals and beliefs are a complex blend of non-Brahmanical local religion and devotion to Vishnu.

Tree conservation here draws from community self-assertion, newfound access to education, and political power. Each age, place, and inhabitant has added its touches to the interpretation of these forested shrines. The idea of unity between society and nature, expressed through religion, has been the kernel of most of the conceptual constructs of the villagers in the past, who also tried to picture the ecological contours of their society through diverse cultural, religious, philosophical, and aesthetic forms. According to the author, the sacred groves first and foremost are sites where gods reside and where there are temples. However, she concludes that “conservation or degradation comes about as a result of the interactions between belief and other fundamental factors. Three factors are particularly significant: community solidarity, nature of ownership, and the physical size of the groves” (pp. 115–16).

Kent sketches the renewed interest in sacred groves in the context of India's changing ecological landscape. Indian environmental scholars saw the sacred groves as an exemplary system of “traditional community resource management” (p. 2) and “tended to generalize broadly about the religious beliefs and practices surrounding them” (p. 6). Environmental discourses also represented sacred groves as a vanishing tradition that was being eroded as Indian society was becoming more industrialized, educated, materialist, and imbricated in global networks of commerce and information. The strength of this book lies in locating sacred groves through intricate details in specific local and regional situations. Kent states, “Confounding simplistic representations of the religious beliefs and rituals surrounding sacred groves, close study demonstrates that local practices regarding sacred groves are at once more imaginative and pragmatic than previously thought” (p. 8).

Without getting into a detailed analysis of the tense and major discussion that is going on throughout the continent on the path and future of religion in general, and in connection to ecology in particular, Kent touches on basic religious understandings, beliefs, and practices of people in everyday lives. Equally powerfully, Kent is interested in the degree of new and voluntary organization and development associated with the forming and restoration of sacred groves in south India. The author finds here, through two different projects, that the language and metaphors of religious environmentalists converge with ethnic chauvinist Hindu nationalists (p. 163).

Religious environmentalism arose in a situation when it was considered necessary to comprehend the profound changes in human/nature relations. Since the 1980s, the interaction between religion and environment has become more pronounced. The book makes a significant contribution in our understanding of ecological religion, not only in academic terms but also in its practical manifestation.