SACRED LANDSCAPES AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY: A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF FOLK RELIGION IN MALDA DISTRICT, WEST BENGAL

Abstract

Sacred landscapes are an important dimension of lived religion in which communities ascribe religious, cultural, emotional, and historical significance to particular places. Sacredness in rural settings is not only related to formally institutionalised temples or religious buildings; but also to village shrines, sacred trees, ponds, rivers, ritual grounds, ancestral places and places inscribed in local myths and oral traditions. The present article explores the relation between sacred landscapes and collective identity through a sociological study of folk religion in Malda district of West Bengal. The study conceptualises folk religion as a cultural system of everyday life as expressed in local deities, ritual practices, oral narratives, folk performances, healing traditions, sacred ecology, and community festivals.

The research adopts an ethnographically including participant observation, narrative interviews, oral histories, informal conversations, sacred-landscape mapping, and a structured survey component. Village shrines, worship of Maa Manasa, beliefs related to trees and rivers, folk healing practices, performance traditions of Gambhira, sacred practices of tribals/Santal are some of the areas that receive special attention. The analysis is informed by Durkheim’s notions of the sacred and collective effervescence, Geertz’s interpretive approach to religion, Turner’s idea of communitas, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and symbolic reproduction and Douglas’s analysis of social boundaries and purity.

The study argues that sacred landscapes are socially constructed spaces of collective memory and identity. Culturally meaningful places are created out of ordinary geographical locations through ritual repetition, storytelling and emotional attachment. Sacred landscapes provide communities with material and symbolic points of reference, through which belonging is expressed as ‘our place’, ‘our deity’, ‘our ritual’, and ‘our tradition’. At the same time, sacred spaces are not socially neutral: participation and access are shaped by gender, caste, age, class, religious affiliation, and ritual authority. Processes of modernisation, migration, environmental change, institutionalisation and digital media are changing landscapes, but this does not necessarily detract from their social significance. Rather, folk religion is being reconfigured in the conditions of changing society. The paper argues that sacred landscapes provide a useful sociological framework to comprehend the interplay of religion, collective identity, memory, ecology and social change in rural Bengal.