“From Nature, to Nature”: Articulating the Discourse of Environmental Sustainability in a Chhau Dance Community (West Bengal), India

Within socio-ecological shocks of the Anthropocene, “ecological wisdom” promulgated through indigenous knowledge systems and practices is being much discussed upon and appreciated as a strong alternative to forge couple environmental resilience and community wellbeing. So we could reorient economy-ecology interconnections by recognizing unrecognized cultural traditions and its related livelihoods, that refurbishes nature. While studying the ecocosmological foundation of this Chhau dance form which is embedded in the local economy and culture, we deal with three basic questions: (1) How best are nature’s services accrued by the folk (dancing) communities? (2) How the reliance on Ecosystem Services shape a conservationist community ethos, contributing to ecological sustainability? (3) How do nature and culture corroborate with each other through these folk forms of expressions? Based on a multi-layered empirical analysis the paper tries to deal with these questions using the Chhau dance as the case study and specifically focusing on the Chhau mask makers of Purulia (West Bengal). Though Chhau is a folk cultural dance form, yet it ensures livelihoods of dancers and mask makers, which in turn infiltrate a sense of ecological preservation among the Chhau community. However, one can find strong traces of an intertwined interrelationship between ecology and economy in traditional Chhau dance and can contextualize the conservationist ethos of the community (through restorative practices) within the narrative of South Asian ‘environmentalism of the poor’.