Send message to Authors

Paper long abstract

In the Rajasthani folk traditions of India, nature functions not merely as a backdrop for sacred narratives but also as an active agent in the processes of deification. This Paper examines how local folk deities - including Pabuji, Gogaji, Tejaji, and regional bhomiyas - have emerged through intimate entanglements between natural landscapes and narrative practices, challenging the Western nature-culture binaries through indigenous cosmological frameworks. Drawing on spatial ethnographic fieldwork and oral narrative analysis, the Paper investigates how specific natural sites - such as sacred groves, khejdi trees, serpent habitats, crossroads, and water sources - become repositories of supernatural agency through storytelling practices. Paper further explores three interconnected dimensions: first, how natural features actively participate in deification; second, how these stories encode ecological knowledge and environmental ethics within community memory; and third, how contemporary transformations - including highway shrines like that of Om Banna (Bullet Baba) - demonstrate the adaptive capacity of folk narratives to incorporate technological landscapes into sacred geographies. The authors will examine how storytelling-events shape both landscape-perception and environmental relationships, to resist anthropocentric frameworks by positioning nature as inherently numinous: neither purely "natural" nor "supernatural" but existing within relational cosmologies. The attempt is to contribute to understanding indigenous ontologies by revealing how Rajasthani folk traditions conceptualize nature-nurture relationships through deification practices, while addressing the themes of human-nonhuman entanglements, archives as living ecosystems, and narrative commons, as repositories of relational knowledge-systems that fundamentally reconceptualize agency, sacred geography, and environmental relationality.