Trees and the sacred grove (hundi) play a primordial role in the perseverance and persistence of shamanic ecocosmologies of the Desya (local Adivasi people) of Koraput region in Odisha/ India.
Mahima Dharma in Koraput is known as Alekh dharma or as “Alekhs.” Alekh-s wear gerua-colored clothes; worship the God Mahima Alekh and the earth goddess Basmati or Basudha. Alekhs use a symbolic code in their dress. The color of their clothes (gerua) is the same as the color of the red anthills, local manifestations of the earth goddess. A symbolic identification with the goddess makes Alekh-s as holy as the earth. Alekh specialists become ecstatic Alekh gurumai and, as such, capable of divine communication when they during ritual festivities might climb on trees while in trance. As oracles, as husbands, or wives of the earth goddess or other male and female Hindu deities, Alekh gurumai become virtuoso singers of the Divine.
The new ascetic tradition in indigenous contexts of Koraput has a twofold profile. On the one hand, it consists of Alekhs, the common converts representing a new systematized abstinent and vegetarian conduct of life. On the other hand, it is characterized by the Alekh gurumai, the
ecstatic mediating shamans and virtuoso singers of the Divine demonstrating the continuity of the non-systematized value of religious ecstasy within an eco-cosmological worldview. Alekh gurumai represent ritual specialists, shamans, and mediators perpetuating the traditional value of ecstasy and shamanic negotiation amidst this eco-cosmological world.
This eco-cosmology relies on the meditating voices of the shamans and their capacity to connect with the other world represented in the spiritual connectedness with the sacred sphere of the sacred grove with its sacred trees.
