Stitched Into the Landscape — Part 2
In the Thar Desert of western Rajasthan, blackbuck graze at the edge of villages the way cattle do elsewhere. They do not run. They have learned, over five centuries, that they do not need to.
The community they live beside is the Bishnoi — a Hindu Vaishnava panth founded in 1485 by Guru Jambheshwar, popularly known as Jambhoji, in Marwar. He gave his followers 29 principles, eight of which concern the protection of living things. One of them, jeev daya palani — be compassionate towards all living beings — has functioned for centuries as the legal and moral framework for an entire ecosystem.
Before his death, Jambheshwar declared that the blackbuck was his own manifestation. To hunt one was not a wildlife crime. It was sacrilege.
The first martyrs
The Bishnoi did not simply believe in protection. They died for it. In September 1730, the Maharaja of Jodhpur’s soldiers arrived in the village of Khejarli to fell the sacred Khejri trees for palace construction. A woman named Amrita Devi wrapped her arms around one and refused to move. The soldiers killed her. Then her three daughters. Then 363 Bishnois from 83 villages, one by one, each hugging a tree as the axes came.
When news reached the Maharaja, he halted the felling and issued a royal decree — engraved on copper — prohibiting the cutting of trees or hunting of animals in or near Bishnoi villages. That decree has never been rescinded. Khejarli is now the site of an annual Bishnoi ceremony, and September 11 is India’s National Forest Martyrs Day.
The Chipko movement of the 1970s, in which Himalayan villagers famously hugged trees to prevent logging, drew directly on the Khejarli example. The Bishnois got there 240 years earlier.
Thread and thorn
The dhurrie — the flat-woven cotton rug of Rajasthan — is where this theology finds its most intimate material expression. Bishnoi women have long incorporated the animals of their landscape into their weaving: blackbuck with their spiralling horns, chinkara gazelles, peacocks, camels, the desert fox. The motifs are not decorative choices. They are a record of what the community has chosen to protect and what has, in return, chosen to stay.
Dhurrie weaving is a flat-woven craft with a long heritage across Rajasthan’s villages. Around Salawas village near Jodhpur — in the heart of Bishnoi country — the craft has been woven by families across generations, with animal and geometric motifs drawn from the desert environment. A blackbuck in a Bishnoi dhurrie is not the same as a blackbuck in a Mughal miniature, painted for the pleasure of a court that hunted them for sport. The animal in the rug is a neighbour, protected by doctrine and daily practice.
Bishnoi women are also known for breastfeeding orphaned blackbuck fawns — the mothers lost to poachers or predators. It is the kind of detail that stops you. Not a conservation programme. Not an intervention. A woman feeding a fawn the way she would a child, because the doctrine says all living things are family, and she believes it.
What the numbers say
The blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) carries Schedule I protection under the Wildlife Protection Act — the highest category, equivalent to the tiger. Across India, its range has contracted to roughly 4.6% of its historical extent. In Rajasthan, the recorded population fell from around 27,800 in 2016 to approximately 19,100 in 2024, according to the Rajasthan Forest Department.
The one exception in an otherwise declining picture is Nagaur district — which has the highest blackbuck population in the state and is the heartland of Bishnoi settlement. The correlation is not subtle.
The Bishnoi community works actively alongside the forest department, tipping off poachers, running animal rescue centres, and — when necessary — pursuing legal cases themselves. The Salman Khan blackbuck poaching case, in which the community pursued a 20-year legal battle after the actor allegedly killed two blackbuck during a 1998 film shoot near Jodhpur, ending in a conviction in 2018, is the most visible example of that vigilance. It is not the only one.
Pressure and persistence
The Bishnoi community numbers around 600,000 followers across northern and central India, concentrated in western Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab. They face the same pressures as every rural Indian community: economic migration, land encroachment, the attrition of tradition in younger generations.
The religious doctrine that has sustained blackbuck conservation for five centuries is described by researchers as a “value-based natural-resource-management strategy” — language that turns something lived and visceral into something that sounds like a policy paper. The Bishnois themselves would put it differently. Jambheshwar’s blackbuck walks at the edge of their villages. They are not going to let anyone touch it.
The dhurrie on a Bishnoi floor carries that animal’s likeness in cotton thread. It is a small thing. It is also, quietly, a covenant.
Next in this series: Part 3 — The Warli of Maharashtra and the leopard deity whose shrines have made the forests around Mumbai safer for wild cats.
Sources: Environment & Society Portal — Bishnoi & Religious Environmentalism · Sahapedia — Khejarli Massacre · ScienceDirect — Blackbuck population review, Rajasthan 2025 · Down to Earth — Bishnoi principles & wildlife · Mongabay India — Bishnoi conservation beyond religion · MAP Academy — Dhurrie weaving · MDPI Religions — Bishnoi ecology & faith study, 2025