Ninth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

This paper clarifies the signification of the ‘constructed geography’ of India, a landscape made of pilgrimage places and religious networks that have served to create a complex mix of people of all genders, all ages, all castes, all states of India. Religious places culturally create a mental map of India. The symbolic language between nature and human beings contributes to shape this imagined landscape. I here wonder why devotees ruin these holy places? Why in this intricate interrelationship of religious myths and landscape, the religious impact is not used to develop ecological programs? As religious myths are so important, why religious leaders avoid connecting the power they get in Indian society and over political leaders, to combat rivers pollution. Symbolically, the religious vision of the world does not take into account the environmental imperatives and this is a part of the reasons why this distance exists between religious and political leaders on this topic. We understand here the paradoxical complexity between terms and symbolic: purity/pollution. How can we say that the waters of the Ganges, which give purity to the devotees, could be polluted? While in Hindu beliefs water is « the container of life, strength and eternity » (Eliade 1958), how can one let it become a container of death? This paper provides an understanding of the Hindu religion, attachment to the sacred places, and the ecological negligence Indian people show for these places they call « sacred ».