A sacred grove is protected by a village, not by a forest department

Old forest survives where somebody forbade cutting it

Travel through the hills of Meghalaya, the Konkan, parts of Kerala or the drier country of western Rajasthan and you will occasionally pass a patch of forest that is visibly older and denser than everything around it. The boundary is often abrupt. On one side, cultivated fields or thinned scrub; on the other, closed canopy and undergrowth.

These are sacred groves, and there are thousands of them across India under a long list of local names — kavu in Kerala, devrai or deorai in Maharashtra, law kyntang and law lyngdoh among the Khasi, orans in Rajasthan, sarna in parts of the central and eastern belt.

What they have in common is the mechanism. A deity or an ancestral spirit is understood to reside there, and removing anything from the grove is prohibited by the community that observes it. That prohibition, not a notification in a government gazette, is what kept the trees standing.

The rules are specific and they are not conservation rules

The prohibitions vary from grove to grove and it is a mistake to generalise them. In many, nothing at all may be removed — not firewood, not a fallen branch, not a leaf. In others, deadwood may be collected but living trees may not be cut. Some permit the gathering of particular medicinal plants; some allow entry only to certain people, or on certain days.

None of this was designed as an ecological programme, and the groves are not nature reserves that happen to have a religious veneer. They are religious sites whose protection has had ecological consequences, which is a different thing and worth keeping straight.

The consequence is nonetheless considerable. In heavily cultivated landscapes these patches often hold the last stands of the original forest type, which makes them useful reference points for botanists as well as significant to the people who maintain them.

Mawphlang is the one most visitors see

The sacred forest at Mawphlang, a short drive from Shillong in Meghalaya, is the best-known example that is genuinely set up for visitors. Guides from the local community take groups along a path through moss-heavy old trees, explaining which lineage holds responsibility for the grove and what the rules are.

The rule visitors hear most often there is the simplest: take nothing out. Not a stone, not a leaf. Whether one treats the accompanying warnings as literal or as a sturdy way of enforcing a boundary, the effect on the forest floor is the same, and the litter of centuries lies undisturbed in a way that is genuinely unusual.

It has become a fixture on the Shillong day-trip circuit, which brings the ordinary consequences of that. Go early if you would rather walk it quietly, and take the community guide rather than wandering in alone, because the guiding is part of how the arrangement now supports the village.

Community conservation has a legal shadow in India too

Alongside the traditional groves, Indian law does provide for protected areas managed with or by local communities — conservation reserves and community reserves were added to the wildlife legislation to cover land that did not fit the sanctuary or national park model, including land not owned by the state.

In practice the two systems overlap unevenly. Some groves have been notified under one of these categories, many have not, and a good number sit on land whose formal status is genuinely unclear. There is an active debate about whether formal notification helps a grove or undermines the local authority that has been protecting it, and it has not been settled.

Meanwhile the pressures are ordinary rather than dramatic: road widening, quarrying, changing religious practice, and young people moving away from the households that held the responsibility. Some groves are shrinking. A few have been actively revived.

How to visit one without being a problem

Ask first, and ask in the village rather than at the edge of the trees. A grove that welcomes visitors will usually have somebody who guides, and a grove that doesn’t is not a site you’re entitled to enter because you have travelled a long way to reach it.

Then keep the rules exactly as they are given, including the ones that seem arbitrary — footwear removed, no photography of a particular shrine, women or men excluded from a particular part on particular days. You may find some of these restrictions objectionable. Arguing about them at the boundary of somebody’s sacred site is not the productive place to have that argument.

And take nothing. The prohibition on removal is the single rule that appears in almost every grove in the country, it’s the reason the forest is there, and a visitor who breaks it has taken something out of a system that has held for a very long time on trust alone.