Book Extract | My Head for a Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi

My Head for a Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi, the World’s First Eco-Warriors Profile Books, London, 2025. Hb. Pp. 272. Rs. 699

Martin Goodman's My Head for a Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi, the World’s First Eco-Warriors Profile Books, London, 2025. Hb. Pp. 272. Rs. 699.

Foreword by Peter Wohlleben/ Preface by Ram Niwas Bishnoi Budhnagar. Photographs by Franck Vogel.

How much can one love a tree? Rajasthan, in northern India, is home to the Bishnoi, a community renowned for the extreme lengths they go to in order to protect nature: Bishnoi men and women have died to defend trees from loggers and wildlife from poachers.

The Bishnoi have one of the greatest stories never told. A desert people from Rajasthan, their religion — uniquely — is built around the protection of nature and animals. Jambhoji, their spiritual leader, set out the rules in the sixteenth century, and they have been followed ever since, most famously by a woman who led 363 villagers in giving their lives (‘My head for a tree’) to protect their forest.

In modern times, the Bishnoi have evolved into eco-warriors. Their Tiger Force protects trees from loggers and animals from poachers, going unarmed against armed men, and fearing no power, not even India’s top movie star, Salman Khan, when they found him hunting on their land. (This is the book extract that has been published here on Moneycontrol.)

As Peter Wohlleben asserts in his foreword, My Head For A Tree is an electrifying story — and one that offers wisdom and commitment in the face of environmental crisis and climate change.

Writer and conservationist Martin Goodman, one of few trusted outsiders, relates the history of the Bishnoi, and asks what a world facing climate change and natural disaster can learn from a 600-year-old sustainable community leading an existence in delicate balance with nature and under threat from rapacious modernity.

My Head for a Tree offers a timely reflection on indigenous, community-based activism and how we might adjust our lives to fight for the natural world.

Apparently at the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival 2025, during the discussion around the book, there was a large contingent of the Bishnois present in the audience. They were very appreciative of their support of Martin Goodman and his documentation of their century’s long effort at environmental conservation that they clapped loudly and for long. According to those who witnessed this event, it was a spontaneous burst of joy in celebration of the release of the book but at the same time tremendously moving.

Martin Goodman is the award-winning author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction, including Client Earth, an account of eco-lawyers saving the planet, In Search of the Divine Mother, and On Sacred Mountains, a spiritual biography of India. He is emeritus professor of creative writing at the University of Hull.

The following book extract is excerpted with permission from My Head for a Tree, Martin Goodman, Profile Books/Hachette India.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose

****

Bishnois versus Salman Khan

A few miles on from Khejarli, beside the highway, is a bare concrete platform raised above road level. You want the bathroom? It’s at the back. Which means pick your way through the rubbish and go where you like. This is a roadside restaurant with a roof but no walls. This highway is at the fringe of the village of Kankani and we are hosted by the restaurant’s owner Hiram Ram Bishnoi. He is also the village serpench, its elected chief official, greying hair beneath his white turban. He looks to the side as he speaks, recalling the events of 1998 when events here became world headline news. His village is where the most famous man in India came with night-vision goggles. And came up against Hiram Ram’s uncle and cousins.

This world-famous invader was the film star Salman Khan, a man regularly topping the Forbes Indian Celebrity List for fame and fortune, then in his early thirties. Filming for his latest all-star family drama began in Mumbai, but in October of that year the film’s cast and crew moved up to Jodhpur. The city has world-class hotels, and a short drive away cameras can pan across the compelling desert scenery of Rajasthan. Designed to be that year’s blockbuster, Hum Saath Saath Hain (‘We Stand United’) was set for some weeks of location shooting. Even among an all-star Bollywood cast, Salman Khan was stellar; he would appear in a record ten of the top-grossing films that year. In Western terms, think Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt.

Pump out star quality on the set all day, and at night you’re still burning. Who needs a bed? As night cloaked the desert, Salman Khan shot out on an off-road trip with a jeep and a driver. Allegedly, when he returned it was with the body of a chinkara. They’re small, these tiny gazelles, and fast, and so rare they have been given special legal protection. A story told of a night-time chinkara feast back at the actor’s hotel. If so, defending counsel would say at a future trial, bring us the knife with which you say Salman Khan fleeced the chinkara. And where is the driver? Journalists tracked him down. Yes, the driver told them, he saw Khan shoot the animal. So why didn’t he show up in court? He had been threatened, he said.

On October 2, 1998, other cast members joined Khan in his jeep. As per claims, they were after Blackbuck. Only an Indian cheetah, now extinct, ran faster and though cheetahs could leap far they couldn’t leap as high as blackbuck do. Blackbucks are endangered and officially protected, which is why the film party came out in the secrecy of night. With their bursts of speed and crazy leaps, blackbucks are a challenge to shoot. And the males with those long twin horns that corkscrew high above their heads, that’s the sort of beast a hunter mounts for display on his wall.

Twenty minutes out of Jodhpur, by the village of Kankani, the party turned off-road, headlights sweeping desert. They swerved round the trees and churned up sand. Ahead of them creatures were running fast. Bang. Bang. The animals fell. The jeep, allegedly filled with the actors, raced toward the kill, stopped, and the actors got out.

Hiram Ram looked away from his restaurant, toward his village of Kankani, and spoke of what happened then. In the nearby house his nephew’s family was yet to settle. His nephew had sold a buffalo and its new owners had just left. Up on the roof, his daughter-in-law saw the lights of a jeep bouncing through the night, its engine roaring. She let out a shout.

Her husband, Choga Ram, called to his brother Poonamchand and both men jumped on a scooter and raced to the scene. They saw a jeep, and the people beside it, and in the light from their scooter, they recognised the actor Salman Khan. Who wouldn’t?

The actors jumped into their jeep and doors slammed shut even while the wheels span and the vehicle drove away. The scooter’s lights fell on the scene the actors had left behind, one to make a Bishnoi weep: the bodies of two slain blackbucks.

The men revved up their scooter. The actors did not know about a check post on the road ahead. The jeep would turn to avoid it and come back their way. The two brothers and their father were waiting, one with a large stick. The jeep came, and the stick smashed into its side, but the jeep swerved and drove away.

Poonamchand noted down the number of their licence plate. A villager recognised the fleeing jeep as belonging to a tour operator that he knew. A crowd of Bishnois tracked the jeep back to Salman Khan’s hotel. In the morning they laid siege to the place, shouting for justice. The police and the government had to respond and start an investigation.

The crime scene was intact, the corpses of the blackbuck stretched where they landed on the blood-soaked dirt, a group of Bishnoi men standing vigil. This is what Bishnois do: protect the evidence till the authorities come. The carcasses were carried away for postmortem examination.

Who better to do the work than Rajasthan’s chief veterinary officer? Well, just about anybody. The causes of the Blackbucks’ death were two-fold, the officer declared. One blackbuck had fallen in a hole. The other had been killed by a dog.

You call in the law to resolve this illegal killing of endangered animals, and this is what happens. What else can you do?

Shine a light on the state veterinarian, for a start. Which is what the Bishnoi did. Criminal proceedings were set in motion against the veterinarian and were only dropped when he died. Meantime, a new postmortem identified bullet wounds. The blackbuck had died from gunfire. But were these animals dug up from their graves verifiably blackbuck?

The blackbuck’s special legal protection almost aggrieves the Bishnoi. ‘Being nature lovers to the core,’ notes the journalist Gangadharan Menon, ‘they bemoan the fact that, under the Indian Wildlife Act, animals are accorded various levels of importance. But to a Bishnoi, killing a monitor lizard is as hideous a crime as killing a tiger. To them, every life has value.’

However, since the ways of the modern world are stacked up against the needs of wildlife, Bishnois will use whatever scrap of legal support is available to them. And forest officers help. Alert to the need for evidence strong enough to withstand the keen scrutiny of a court hearing, the young officer who had exhumed the blackbuck corpses called in DNA experts. DNA scraped from the carcasses was compared with blood samples from blackbucks at Hyderabad Zoo. For the first time,e the same science used to identify human remains was used to identify animals. These exhumed bodies were indeed blackbuck. And so, with the special protection given to these animals under the law, their killing was indeed a crime.

In a legal battle, take on the Indian film industry and its leading star and you don’t want to be a lone villager. You’ll be squashed. But Poonamchand, who was the Bishnois’ principal witness at the scene, had his religion to empower him. Beyond that, he had the Bishnoi community. In the wake of Khan’s blackbuck killing, the recently formed Bishnoi Tiger Force, a vigilante group, had a huge boost in membership and a powerful sense of purpose. They deputed guards to protect their witnesses. And they formed mock courts at which Poonamchand could practise giving his deposition before a magistrate.

Lalit Bora was the investigating officer working for the police. ‘We had circumstantial evidence and seizures of articles to prove that poaching was done,’ he said. But he agreed that it was the eyewitnesses and their testimony that swayed the case.

One such eyewitness was the driver of the hunting party’s jeep, Harish Dulani. In the lower court trial, he testified that it was Salman Khan who had done the shooting.

The legal process ground on. And on. And the Bishnois stayed the course, a Bishnoi lawyer assisting the state attorneys.

One decade passed. Salman Khan’s legal team is highly invested in delaying any trial.

A second decade passed. Khan’s legal team is as good as it gets. But the Bishnoi have become an implacable force. ‘Khan waged an all-out defense,’ noted The Los Angeles Times, ‘with film industry luminaries and legions of fans demanding his exoneration and lawyers stalling the proceedings so many times that the lead witness, a Bishnoi villager [Poonamchand], had to appear in court 68 times.’

In 2018, twenty years after the alleged crime, a police force of two hundred were deployed outside the courthouse to control any possible disturbance. Flanked by his own security guard, Salman Khan arrived in a black shirt and jeans and wearing dark glasses. In reading out the verdict, the chief magistrate termed the actor ‘a habitual offender’. The verdict? Five years in jail.

Firecrackers jumped and exploded across the street outside the court. Bishnois were celebrating. How did Poonamchand feel, all these decades after racing his scooter to the scene of the blackbuck slaughter? ‘Fulfilled!’

Was Rampal Bishnoi, state president of the Bishnoi Tiger Force, happy? ‘Though the sentence should have been bigger,’ he told reporters, ‘as he killed two blackbucks, we are satisfied that the court found him guilty and handed him a fitting sentence.’ Khan’s fellow actors were acquitted. Not good enough, declared Rampal Bishnoi. The Tiger Force would find ways to appeal their acquittals.

In the years between the blackbuck killings and Khan’s guilty verdict, the Tiger Force had teamed up with law enforcers. ‘Bishnois have over the years become our partners,’ said a senior police officer in Jodhpur, ‘especially the leaders and volunteers of the Bishnoi Tiger Force. They maintain information networks to bust poaching all over western Rajasthan. At times, they accompany us to remotest desert areas owing to their familiarity with the terrain.’

On these far-flung raids do the police have to keep the Bishnoi men in check? Never. In all the pursuits of poachers, the policeman can’t recall a single incident where Bishnois used a weapon or turned violent. That’s despite more than two dozen members of the Tiger Force being killed in action during these years.

‘We have registered more than 400 cases so far,’ the Tiger Force president reflected from the courtroom steps. ‘And we make sure that the witnesses in our cases stand their ground in courts. We hold mock courts to train them on how to depose before magistrates and motivate them to remain firm during the trial of the cases.’

Khan, of course, had his own brilliant legal team on the case. He spent a few days behind barsand  then was released on bail, pending his appeal.

Over lunch at the roadside restaurant men reconstruct the remains of the story.

What was the cause for Khan’s legal appeal? At that first trial in the lower court, Khan’s legal team had turned down the right to produce evidence for the defence. The driver who testified against Khan subsequently vanished for a while. When he reappeared, he had changed his story. With the case now in the Higher Court, Khan’s lawyers claimed the lower court had refused them the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. The judge declared a mistrial, and the case moved on to the Supreme Court.

Khan was banned from overseas travel. Then the Covid pandemic gave cause to delay any new court appearances. As of October 2024 there had been fifteen separate court actions in the ongoing trial.

Back in 1999, the Tiger Force’s new members were young, including the teenage Ram Niwas. When the film from Khan’s Rajasthan shoot, Hum Saath Saath Hain, was set for its glitzy Jodhpur premiere, he joined the Tiger Force in a street demonstration that kept the cinema closed for the night.

Of course, the men of the Bishnoi Tiger Force held an alternative view of Salman Khan to many Indians. An Indian journalist tells how, for the actor’s mostly male followers, ‘Khan’s bad-boy image has sustained him from the beginning of his career. The frequent reports of drunken misbehaviour in public, indiscipline at work and girlfriend abuse, along with the hit-and-run and poaching cases that finally landed him in court, have contributed greatly to fan enthusiasm.’

Twenty-two years later, Jodhpur invited Khan to start the Jodhpur Marathon. Fifty members of the Tiger Force made sure he was turned away. ‘How can someone start a marathon here when he killed blackbuck,’ Ram Niwas says, ‘the state animal of Rajasthan?’

Two other Bishnois have dominated recent Indian newspaper headlines.

One is Ravi Bishnoi, who you’ll find in the sports pages. Bishnois are not known for sporting achievements, and so the teenage Ravi had to carry rocks from barren ground and haul cement to help build his training base. With friends he sowed the land with grass, brought in special red mud for the wicket, levelled the ground, and Jodhpur’s Spartans Cricket Academy was formed. His coaches gave him a bike so he could cycle the fifteen miles to and from the ground at the beginning and end of each working day.

Better to focus on your exams, instructed his father, a school headmaster. More exciting to play cricket, said his mother, who was passionate about the sport. The boy persisted and built expertise as a spin bowler. No cricketer from Rajasthan had played for India since independence. Now they have. In December 2023 Ravi Bishnoi became ranked the world number one bowler in short-overs cricket.

‘Look!’ temple authorities told me, pointing to a photo of Ravi on stage in a temple hall. He was there to tell groups of schoolchildren about all they can achieve if they follow Bishnoi values.

These children won’t be taught about Lawrence Bishnoi. Turn to the newspaper’s front pages for stark headlines about him. ‘Every society has its renegades,’ Bishnois told me.

Lawrence Bishnoi is a bandit and a gang leader from the Punjab. His ‘Bishnoi Gang’ began in a trade that is the dark side of several Bishnoi communities: opium smuggling. They expanded into extortion and killings. Currently confined to a Delhi prison cell, Lawrence Bishnoi still wields influence over his gang members.

Are blackbucks the incarnation of Guru Jambhoji? Every Bishnoi I asked thought this was a crazy notion, all creatures being equally sacred, but multiple printed sources and also Lawrence Bishnoi hold this equivalence of guru and antelope to be indeed true. In 2022, from his prison cell, he announced that unless Salman Khan and his father attend the Bishnois’ main temple and offer a public apology for slaying the blackbuck, he would have them both killed.

Salman Khan normally meets crowds of his fans for the festival of Eid, which closes the Muslim fasting period of Ramadan. That year he locked himself away. Fifteen security cameras swept around his apartment building and ten special forces officers were assigned to his protection. In the summer Mumbai police authorised Khan to carry a personal firearm, and the actor went on to add armour and bulletproof glass to his Toyota Landcruiser. Feeling the need of still more security, in 2023 he imported a bulletproof armoured Nissan Patrol from Dubai.

In April 2024, at 5am on a Sunday morning, he was asleep inside his Mumbai apartment. Two young men on a motorbike fired shots into his front door, and then raced off firing shots into the air. Both were later apprehended. One soon died under police interrogation, allegedly by suicide.

Worried for Salman Khan’s life, his ex-girlfriend pleaded with the Bishnois to forgive him.

‘If he himself comes to the temple and seeks forgiveness,’ said Devendra Budiya, president of the All India Bishnoi Society, ‘our community could think about forgiving him, because one of our twenty-nine rules is forgiveness. Salman should further take an oath that he will never make such a mistake again and will work to protect wildlife and the environment.’

Was Ram Niwas secretly pleased at these death threats to Salman Khan? The suggestion shocks him. ‘We are non-violent people. What is the difference between us and Salman Khan if we kill him? We want the process of the law to take place. When he came up to Jodhpur for the trial we could have caused trouble, but we didn’t.’

Across the highway from the restaurant, deeper into the village, workers are finishing a large stone platform. This is at the site where Khan allegedly shot the blackbuck. On top of the platform will stand a life-sized blackbuck statue, its horns composed of actual blackbuck horns taken from animals found dead in the forest. The young Bishnois of Kankani raised funds to pay for the 800 kg statue. On the surrounding land, they are planting a thousand trees and hope to build a blackbuck rescue centre. The killing happened before they were born.

‘We want to send a message to people,’ said Prem Saran, one of the project’s young organisers, ‘to protect flora and fauna like our community does, so that a repeat of the 1998 incident does not happen. The site where the memorial is being made is the same as where the blackbucks were buried. These animals are like our family and we can sacrifice our lives to protect them.’