![How the Bishnoi made environmental safety central to their identification [Book Review]](https://foreignshoresnrinews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/363_Bishnoi_Sacrifice_Memorial-768x512.jpg)
- The guide, My Head for a Tree, paperwork the previous and current standing of environmental activism by the Bishnoi neighborhood in Rajasthan.
- Utilizing narrative nonfiction, it combines retelling of historic occasions, conversations with modern Bishnoi activists, and the writer’s onground observations of their methods within the Thar desert.
- The guide reveals how the Bishnoi use non-violent mass sit-ins, litigation, and media protection to pursue environmental justice.
In Might this 12 months, Radheshyam Bishnoi, a wildlife conservationist in Rajasthan, was on his method to cease a poaching incident when he died in a tragic automobile accident. He belonged to the Bishnoi neighborhood within the Thar desert, a folks whose beliefs have environmental safety at their core. Launched earlier this 12 months, a brand new guide My Head for a Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi, the World’s First Eco-Warriors by Martin Goodman, weaves collectively historic accounts and modern encounters to disclose how the Bishnoi’s historical knowledge gives important classes for the present planetary disaster.
Goodman, a British author and professor, initially needed to inform the story of people that dedicate their lives to defending their surrounding pure habitat. On a visit to Jaipur, he was launched to the Bishnoi. He got down to discover who the Bishnoi are, what motivates them to surrender their lives for the pure world round them, and the teachings the remainder of the world can be taught from them.
My Head for a Tree might be categorised among the many rising style of “World South environmental knowledge”, which encompasses quite a few information experiences and movies in recent times that look to the area for options. Nonetheless, it succeeds in establishing that the Bishnois’ conventional ecological information is not only a factor of the previous. The guide reveals how their information fuels their modern activism, which is an evolving apply, one that might allow them to outlive the local weather disaster.
Over 270 pages, Goodman presents his forays into the Bishnoi neighborhood in Rajasthan, spending time with a number of members of the neighborhood: the younger and aged, girls, males, discipline guides, forestry officers, activists, clergymen, politicians, and attorneys. The story unfolds over a number of rural areas starting from folks’s houses to mass neighborhood gatherings.
On the outset, Goodman briefly mentions his positionality as an outsider whereas coming into the world of the Bishnoi. He doesn’t replicate on his privilege, and as an alternative, explains over the course of a few chapters, preface and acknowledgements how he was launched to the Bishnoi by Harsh Vardhan, a buddy of the Bishnoi and Vijay Lakshmi Bishnoi, a politician. He explains he was invited by neighborhood members, had a information and that’s how he began visiting villages. Within the early chapters, he attends a big neighborhood gathering the place he’s invited to take a seat on the podium and the native chief publicly tells him to do an excellent job of writing the guide. That is how, he says, the neighborhood accepted of him writing the guide and it was “commissioned”.
Conventional knowledge meets fashionable activism
The foremost themes of the guide are the historical past of the Bishnoi, their non secular beliefs, and the Bishnoi method to environmental activism. Though Bishnoism is named a sect inside Hinduism, Goodman argues that it has all of the {qualifications} of a definite faith, together with a set of 29 guidelines, a few of which expressly forbid chopping inexperienced bushes and killing animals.
The guide’s timeline stretches from the start of Jambhoji, the founding father of Bishnoism in 1451 through the late medieval period to current day India. Utilizing a non-linear narrative, it covers tales from Jambhoji and his successor Vilhoji’s time, acts of particular person and collective sacrifice to forestall logging and poaching, and the instruments Bishnoi use to defend their surroundings. The writing type pulls the reader right into a scene with dwell motion, zooming out to share the bigger context and details, usually adopted by an anecdote. This retains the reader hooked whereas the 18 chapters stay quick and crisp.
An extended line of environmental martyrs
The guide reveals how historic occasions formed the Bishnois’ environmental ethics. Many suppose that the Chipko Motion launched the thought of treehugging. However the guide means that the motion might need been impressed by the unique treehuggers – 363 Bishnois who sacrificed their lives to guard bushes within the Khejarli bloodbath of 1730, which began when Amrita Devi, a lady from Khejarli village, clung to a Khejri tree and opposed males from the then Maharaja’s military, who needed to chop bushes to assist the development of a brand new palace in Jodhpur.
The Bishnoi name these martyrs sakasis, with the primary recorded ones courting again to 1604 when two girls died defending bushes. They’re adopted by an extended line of sakasi, a few of whom are featured within the guide. Their tales are advised utilizing easy prose, recreating scenes of how defending bushes and animals led to their deaths, making them come alive on the web page.
One of many chapters options Radheshyam Bishnoi, who guides Goodman within the seek for the nice Indian bustard. As the 2 traverse the desert, the writer recounts how Radheshyam threatened to leap from a pylon to demand officers set up reflectors on energy traces connecting wind generators to shield the bustards from electrocution attributable to collision. The officers agreed.
When a wildlife scientist calls the Bishnoi “species-centric”, Goodman discovers this evaluation is inaccurate. Other than caring for bustards, Radheshyam’s community of volunteers additionally cleared animal carcasses from accidents on practice tracks that appeal to vultures, to make sure the endangered birds don’t get run over by trains whereas feeding on carrion.
The volunteers working to defend bushes and animals
The guide does an excellent job of decentering public figures which have introduced Bishnoi to the limelight by giving them very restricted area, be it Salman Khan who’s accused of illegally searching blackbucks within the Thar or gangster Lawrence Bishnoi, who threatened to kill the actor. As an alternative, it focuses on the tales of seemingly strange neighborhood members who’ve devoted their lives to preserving the wildlife of the area.
Goodman dedicates a couple of chapters to Bishnoi girls’s environmental activism, profiling Pooja, who runs an animal rescue centre in Sribalaji and Devangini, who cares for stray canines regardless of her neighbours’ disapproval in Jodhpur. By way of conversations about training, marriage and caste, Goodman depicts gender and social dynamics locally, although he avoids direct commentary on the topic.
The Bishnoi Tiger Pressure and its leaders and members seem a number of instances within the guide. The power is a volunteer-run organisation that has run a number of campaigns, from advocating for extra extreme punishments for violating wildlife legal guidelines to together with a chapter on Amrita Devi within the faculty curriculum. On the time of writing the guide, they have been campaigning for longer jail sentences for tree chopping and had introduced the development of a freeway round Jodhpur to a halt to cease the rampant removing of bushes.
The Bishnoi resistance is powerful as a result of the neighborhood congregates in massive numbers at websites the place environmental violations have occurred, explains Ram Niwas Bishnoi Budhnagar, a pacesetter of the Bishnoi Tiger Pressure. Not solely do they protest non-violently at websites the place infrastructure initiatives are underway however in addition they discuss to the development staff to realize their empathy for his or her wrestle.
The guide has a conversational, non-academic tone. The storytelling is usually seamless besides a couple of abrupt though necessary detours like a chapter on the Chipko motion, whose connection to Bishnoi environmentalism may have been established extra clearly.
Utilizing authorized methods and media advocacy
The Bishnoi learnt to make use of the media and litigation for advocacy as early because the Seventies by partnering with Harsh Vardhan, a former journalist who turned a wildlife conservationist. In December 1978, an Arab prince visited the Thar to hunt bustards. As quickly because the Bishnois learnt this, with Harsh’s assist, they organised a protest exterior the governor’s home in Jaipur, which made entrance web page headlines within the native paper. Harsh additionally petitioned the Rajasthan Excessive Courtroom to cease the Arab searching social gathering from progressing. Because of this, on January 1, 1979, the courtroom ordered a right away two-week ban and the searching social gathering was over.
Many Bishnoi have taken up authorized research and likewise shaped a bunch of lawyer activists. Goodman contextualises this by explaining the standing of environmental litigation, its suppression and hasty environmental clearances in India. He mentions how Adivasi communities in Hasdeo Arand in Chhattisgarh have handled deforestation and suppression by Adani Group and the state. In a second that reveals solidarity, Ram Niwas says the Bishnoi attorneys will assist Hasdeo residents if wanted.
My Head for a Tree makes for an general good, informative learn, with out being preachy. It leaves one feeling that the Bishnoi and their surroundings will put up an excellent battle within the instances to come back.
Learn extra: Bishnois organise and educate themselves to take surroundings conservation past faith
Banner picture: Ladies of the Bishnoi neighborhood have been related to surroundings safety since way back to 1604, when two girls gave their lives to guard bushes. Picture by Harsh Vardhan.
