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My Head for a Tree: Read an exclusive excerpt from Martin Goodman’s book on the Bishnoi

ByMartin Goodman
Jan 17, 2025 07:10 PM IST

In an excerpt from the first chapter, Amrita Devi and the 363 Martyrs, Goodman recounts the legendary tale of lives sacrificed to save trees on Bishnoi land.

On Monday 11 September 1730 (although this reads like a fable the details are recorded, including the names of the people involved) the men of Khejarli were away with their herds. The monsoon rains were recent so a woman of the village, Amrita Devi, was tending the crops with her three daughters – Asu, Ratni and Bhagu. She lifted her head. She had heard men’s voices. But it was too early, surely, for the village men to be returning with their herds. She heard creaks from wooden oxcarts and the thwacks of sticks on hide, shouts to goad oxen through mud.

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Amrita rushed through the trees like a red flame. Men in the uniforms of the Maharajah’s forces were pulling axes from the backs of the carts. One man was giving orders and Amrita stood herself in front of him.

The men had marched out from Jodhpur, she learned, where the Maharajah had plans for a new palace. Its construction needed lime, and for the lime they needed fire and to fuel the fire they needed trees. The men had come to chop down the khejri forest and haul it to the city to be burned.

This could not be allowed to happen.

Pay us a bribe, the officer suggested, though he called it a tax. A tax for every tree. And then the men would march off and chop down someone else’s trees. Amrita could no more pay a bribe than she could kill an animal or eat meat or herself harm a tree. Her life worked because she was a Bishnoi who lived by a clear set of twenty-nine rules set down by her guru more than two hundred years earlier, which saw accepting bribes to be as sinful as stealing.

These rules governed her life. One was an injunction to protect all living beings. Another was not to cut trees that had the sap of life still in them. So she hugged her body close to a khejri tree, and as the men approached she spoke the words that children would learn and recite for generations to come: Sar sāntey rūkh rahe to bhī sasto jān. ‘My head for a tree; it’s a cheap price to pay.’

A man with an axe chopped off her head.

Amrita’s three daughters, Asu, Ratni and Bhagu, watched their mother’s sacrifice. They heard her last words. They saw the blade cut through her neck and her head fly free. They saw the fount of blood from her body. They were young.

Asu stepped forward to hug a tree.

As did Ratni.

As did Bhagu.

The axemen chopped off their heads.

Word of the attack went round the other Bishnoi villages. The old who didn’t roam so far were the first to arrive and as they grabbed on to trees they too were beheaded. Then the news reached the men of Khejarli, who ran home ahead of their goats and their cattle, arriving into a massacre. They too held on to trees and gave their lives. Other Bishnoi walked in from nearby villages, grasped hold of a tree, and were chopped to death.

‘You villagers,’ the officer in charge of the Jodhpur troops scoffed, ‘you’re only sending in the old and the weak.’

In response, young men came, and women and more children. Each held on to a khejri tree, chanted holy mantras and the words of their guru, and gave their life.

A couple were passing, fresh from their wedding. What good was their life with all its hopes if they walked on past this killing of a forest? The bride and groom each took hold of a tree. Each was killed.

Word spread further still and people kept on coming. One hundred people. Two hundred people. Three hundred people. They gave their heads to save the trees. Word finally crossed the thirteen miles of desert to Jodhpur and the Maharajah.

Shocked by the news, the Maharajah ordered his men to withdraw. When the killing ended, three hundred and sixty-three villagers had been martyred. The Maharajah issued an edict: it was now forbidden to chop down a living tree, and to hunt or poach any animal, throughout Bishnoi land.

The martyrs of Khejarli were all Bishnois. They have a word, sakasi, for those who sacrifice their life for others. The first recorded sakasi came from 1604, a hundred and twenty-six years before the Khejarli massacre. In the village of Ramsari, near Jodhpur, two women called Karma and Gora were beheaded in defence of trees. Then in 1643, when trees were being felled for use in celebrations of the goddess Holi, a local Bishnoi named Buchoji killed himself in protest.

Are twenty-first-century Bishnois prepared to put their lives on the line to save trees? They are.

Would I die to save a child? I’d hope so.

Do I love trees? Yes.

Would I die for one? Not yet.

But who are these people who would?

(Excerpted with permission from My Head for a Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi, the World’s First Eco-Warriors by Martin Goodman; published by Profile Books / Hachette India; 2025)

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