‘My Head For A Tree’: A moving account of the Bishnoi community’s reverence for all forms of life

The word makes up the world. Woven into stories, it runs the globe and stalls it too. In this, imagination is its ally. It fuels the mind of the inhabitants of the planet (I don’t want to use the word “humans” because nobody knows whether a butterfly or a blue whale can or can’t imagine.) Stories are our fodder. Even when these stories are in the packaging of “non-fiction”, the style of writing is more engaging when it is told in a storytelling format and not bogged down by copious data, tables, pie charts and notes. In his book, My Head For A Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi, the World’s First Eco-Warriors, Martin Goodman clubs many such stories of real people to bring their reality, both in the now and the then, to the foreground. Bishnois, the cover page reads, are the world’s first eco-warriors.

The Bishnois: then and now

Let me first introduce Bishnois quickly. They are the people indigenous to Rajasthan who have given up their lives to save trees as well as wildlife. They follow 29 rules (Bees: twenty, Noi: nine in Rajasthani dialect), hence Bishnoi – all of them pertaining to non-violence and simple life. In a documented incident from...

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