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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how sari-draping of trees and plants animates other-than-human agency, creates transformative spaces, and affords marginalized women vernacular authority. Drawing on the Oraon spring festival of Sarhul, it explores ritual ecologies that challenge nature/culture binaries.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how vernacular acts of sari-draping a sacred tree invokes other-than-human agency, activates ritual authority, and creates transformative spaces that challenge nature/culture binaries in South Asian ritual ecologies.

Based on fieldwork among marginalized Oraon communities in Ranchi and Bokaro districts in Jharkhand, the study focuses on a seasonal ritual that celebrate the sacred marriage of the earth and sun: Sarhul Festival. In Sarhul, a sari-draped tree becomes a bearer of a living tradition within sacred groves, mediating collective identity and seasonal renewal.m. I argue that this practice renders nature not as an absolute category but as an emergent, relational domain—potent, transformative, and tangible.

Drawing on theories of material and vernacular religion and the ontological turn, this study shows how sari and tree 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 vernacular.