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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how sari-draping of trees and plants animates other-than-human agency, creates enchanted spaces, and affords marginalized women vernacular authority. Drawing on Santali and Hindu seasonal festivals, it explores ritual ecologies that challenge nature/culture binaries.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how vernacular acts of sari-draping on natural forms—such as trees and plants—invoke other-than-human agency, activate ritual authority, and create enchanted spaces that challenge nature/culture binaries in South Asian ritual ecologies.

Based on fieldwork among marginalized Santali and Dalit Hindu communities on the outskirts of Deoghar, Jharkhand—a significant site for both traditions—the study focuses on two annual rituals that celebrate the sacred marriage of natural elements: Santali Sarhul (Baha Parab) and Hindu Tulsi Vivah. In Sarhul, which marks the union of the sun and the earth, sari-draped trees become bearers of a living tradition within sacred groves, mediating collective identity and seasonal renewal. In Tulsi Vivah, the ritual marriage of a plant and a stone, dressed in bridal attire, enacts domestic virtue and divine reciprocity within the household. I argue that these practices render nature not as an absolute category but as an emergent, relational domain—potent, transformative, and Marvellous.

Drawing on theories of material and vernacular religion and the ontological turn, this study shows how sari, tree, and plant become co-actors in metamorphic encounters that complicate inherited epistemologies of the “natural” and the “cultural.” These acts of dressing are not symbolic but generative, producing sacred presence and opening spaces of agency for women excluded by caste, gender, and institutional sanction. By tracing these ritual ecologies, the paper contributes to broader debates on sacred ecology, material religion, and the Marvelous in folk narrative traditions.