Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture

Chapter 6. The Land in Between: Constructing Nature, Wilderness, and Agriculture

The Land in Between The convergence of text and practice in Baldeo’s Holi festivities demonstrates how Holi rituals balance and adjudicate tensions arising from the paired issues of fertility and sexuality on the one hand and aggression and protection on the other. The story of Balaram’s return to Braj is the central narrative of the festival, and Balaram’s role as an agriculturalist is reiterated in every ritual. His behavior illustrates human responses to agricultural and gender tensions and provides an opportunity to rethink existing responses to the earth’s—and women’s— agency. The Holi festival, like most springtime fertility festivals, celebrates prosperity and renewal and as such can be considered comic because it restores social and agricultural bonds. Balaram, as a satiric figure, mocks social convention, but ultimately his behavior stabilizes and reaffirms the existing social structures that produced the destabilizing tensions. To make a broader claim, Balaram mocks the gentility and restraint of the pastoral, yet his actions related to fertility and protection enable the pastoral, and this dynamic parallels the relationship between agriculture and wilderness constructs in contemporary environmental thought. In this chapter, I demonstrate the parallel between the pastoral paradigm of Vaishnava devotion and the neglect of agriculture in Western environmental thought. This discussion provides a foundation from which to explore the role of agriculture in the context of religion, nature, and society so that we can understand the persistence of certain stories. To lay this foundation, I present Balaram’s subordination in the Braj pastoral realm as a way to consider the neglect of agriculture withChapter 6 Constructing Nature, Wilderness, and Agriculture 162 Growing Stories from India in environmental discourse and how we might develop an agricultural discourse that leads to more sustainable practices. While impending destruction of a wilderness landscape arouses fury and indignation in large numbers of environmentalists, the environmental degradation of pastoral landscapes resulting from largescale agriculture rarely registers such an emotional response. Many environmentalists oppose disruption of the caribou migrations across the arctic tundra and mountaintop removal for mining operations, yet few rally to protest the fate of hog lot sows and fertilizer-laden rivers. The divide between animal rights and environmental groups reflects this disjuncture. The case of hog lot sows is particularly interesting because it lies at the divide between animal rights activists and environmental groups. Although environmentalists have primarily focused on ecosystems or natural processes, animal rights activists stress the emotional bonds and parallels between humans and animals.1 Although some animal rights movements have indeed focused on the plight of farm animals, most have concentrated on animals that are either considered cute, such as cats and dogs, or closer to humans, such as chimps. The gap in emotional investment in pristine wilderness as opposed to used or human-altered land is enormous and reflects cultural and social attitudes that influence human participation in the biotic community . The environmental focus on wilderness lands is particularly strong in North America, where vast tracts of land and national parks are a source of national pride. For the French, however, writes anthropologist and chef Amy Trubek, agrarian landscapes hold the pride of place in the French mythic imagination, and the French have rallied to preserve small farms and agrarian lifeways more than untouched landscapes .2 Similarly, agrarian thinkers in the United States have emphasized in-between land; for example, hedgerows and margins are considered “wild” but not wilderness. These lands and these discussions, however, have remained on the margins of mainstream environmental thought.3 The story of Balaram and the Yamuna River—and their relationship to Krishna—provides a context to rethink idioms that have dominated contemporary environmental discourse in the United States. As we have seen, an analysis of Balaram’s Holi narrative reveals those qualities that shaped his relationship to the Yamuna River, and this relationship , in part, determines Balaram’s role in the pastoral realm. The Land in Between 163 Recognizing how Balaram disturbs the pastoral scenario in the Braj context prompts reflection on similar tensions in Western environmental thought. These systems of thought have similarities: in both cases an idealized nature masks elements of class and urbanity, and human intervention into the land and the need for productivity are the disjunctive forces that disrupt romantic fantasies of the earth with “realities ” such as hunger and danger. Similarly, Raymond Williams notes, nostalgic longing for an idyllic country landscape suppresses the work, urbanity, and...