A series of brutal droughts raked western India in the late 15th century. Rain became a memory. Crops shriveled. Waterholes puckered dry. Starving villagers hunted wildlife to the edge of extinction. And the region’s scarce trees were scythed down and sold as timber in distant cities. Out of this skeletal landscape walked a holy man named Guru Jambheshwar. For more than half a century Jambheshwar wandered, preaching a new brand of Hindu faith: Bishnoism.
Born of ecological calamity, his 29 principles invited followers to show “compassion to all living beings” and forbade “cutting green trees.” Bishnoi believers dug ponds solely for the use of birds and gazelles. Pregnant Bishnoi women suckled orphaned antelopes. Trees were protected. In this way a major religion stepped back onto the trail of animism. The Bishnoi became Hinduism’s Druids—its environmental brigade.
“We save nature, and nature saves us,” said Nishant Bishnoi, 27, one of perhaps half a million of the sect’s members in India. “That’s our teaching.”
I met Bishnoi after walking nearly 200 miles through one of least natural landscapes in India, the machine-farmed heartland of the Punjab.
Sudhir Kukna, left, and 103-year-old Sri Ram Punia reminisce about less crowded times in the Abohar region.
Paul Salopek
India’s northwest grain basket is as synthetic as any rural tableau in Iowa. Leveled by laser-guided combines. Irrigated via a vast circuitry of wells, pipelines, and canals. Steeped in chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Amid the grid of tractor furrows, Bishnois from 13 villages had banded together to form the Abohar Wildlife Sanctuary. The 73 square miles of private scrubland and wheat fields sheltered the country’s largest remaining population of Antilope cervicapra, wild blackbuck, a near-threatened species of antelope with long spiraling horns. About 3,300 of the elegant animals, sacred to the Bishnoi, roamed the farm lanes or lolled in the shade of fruit trees. So did undisturbed herds of blue nilgai, at 600 pounds Asia’s largest antelope.
A tame blackbuck at a nature preserve in Rajasthan.
Paul Salopek
The scenes of human-wildlife amity seemed edenic. But the preserve, created in the 1970s, was fraying under pressures common throughout agrarian India.
“People from all around are dumping their cows here,” complained Mahinder Kumar Manju, 40, a Bishnoi farmer. “They come at night in trucks and unload their old animals. They know we will treat them well.”
Cow dumping is a particularly Indian problem.
Domestic cows are holy to all Hindus. After reaching the end of their useful milk-producing lives, India’s estimated 300 million bovines are supposed to be cared for—fed and housed in cowsheds until natural death. But this onerous task is often shirked by owners who simply release their aged cattle, preferably far way. Farmers say dumped cow populations have risen as a Hindu nationalist movement has ramped up a cattle protection campaign and cracked down, sometimes violently, on cow trading for export or domestic consumption by non-Hindu minorities. There are cow-dumping conflicts all over India.
The Bishnoi preserve, seen as an animal-friendly pastureland, is a magnet for such disputes.
Dumped cows compete for grass with local antelope. Bishnoi farmers have begun fencing their wheat crops to protect them from loose herds of abandoned domestic animals. The new barbed wire fences trap and sometimes maim the blackbucks. And a booming feral dog population, gorged on cow carrion, hunts young antelope.
“There used to be open land everywhere here,” said Sudhir Kukna, 32, a non-Bishnoi landowner in the Abohar reserve. “Now it looks like the rest of the Punjab.”
Nishant Bishnoi shows a photo of a blackbuck wounded by new razor wire fences. “This used to be an open area for wild animals," he says. "No more.”
Paul Salopek
India’s Bishnoi community famously cemented its green dharma almost three centuries ago. In 1730 the sect’s members, led by a woman named Amrita Devi, interposed themselves between a grove of sacred khejri trees and an army of axmen sent to harvest timber for the king of Jodhpur. Refusing to budge, the Bishnois literally died tree-hugging. The soldiers cut through their bodies. The remorseful king later banned all logging.
Early this year the Bishnoi once again took on Indian royalty: Bollywood.
In April, Salman Khan, the biggest male box office star in India, was finally convicted, after 20 years of appeals, of poaching endangered blackbuck antelope on Bishnoi lands. Alerted by gunshots, Bishnoi farmers had chased the fleeing megastar’s car on motorbikes. This time, though, the king didn’t repent. Khan spent one night jail before being sprung again by his lawyers.
“We will keep fighting him in court,” said Nishant Bishnoi, the young farmer in the struggling Abohar reserve. On his mobile phone, he displayed photos of blackbucks killed by running into barbed wire fences. “It’s about the message. It’s for the environment.”
I camped a few miles from Nishant Bishnoi’s house, in semi-desert scrub that was being mined for sand. It was among the last patches of native antelope habitat left in the Abohar Wildlife Sanctuary. It was a nook of white thorns and ochre dunes that could be walked across in three minutes. It covered less than an acre.
