In 1730, in the remote village of Khejarli in western Rajasthan, 363 Bishnoi men, women, and children sacrificed their lives trying to protect hundreds of Khejri trees that the king’s men had come to cut down to fuel the cement lime kilns for the king’s palace. The ancient creed has translated into modern activism.
The Bishnoi fiercely protect the endangered wildlife that lives around them and every year a few of them lose their lives to poachers.
More recently, the Bishnoi have led a movement against a nuclear power plant in Haryana. The site is a critical natural habitat for blackbucks and the Bishnoi have been demanding an adequate conservation plan for wildlife. They intend to carry on as environmental vigilantes, a role they have played for more than five centuries. https://thediplomat.com/2019/08/the-bishnoi-indias-first-environmentalists/
A Himalayan woman who practiced Gandhian principles invited me to participate. She took me to her village to partake and record a unique non-violent demonstration of tree hugging to protect them from being felled down. It was an all female operation that day and their intervention was to drive home a point that they could stop the loggers by their peaceful persistence. This is how I came upon the Chipko movement of the Himalayas that took place in the early 90’s.
Chipko literally means to embrace or to hug. I previously had an idea of the spiritual protection of forests and animals by villagers in northern India as I had been in areas where the first Chipko movement had taken place in a village called Khejarli in 1730 AD in the Jodhpur district of Rajasthan. In this instance, the villagers of the Bishnoi community led by Amrita Devi had sacrificed their lives while protecting green khejri trees considered sacred by the community by hugging them.
Today, Chipko is seen as an ecofeminism movement. Although many of its supporters were men, women were not only its backbone, but also its mainstay, because they were the ones most affected by the rampant deforestation, which led to a lack of firewood and fodder as well as water for drinking and irrigation. Women’s participation in the Chipko agitation was a very novel aspect of the movement. The forest contractors of the region also doubled up as suppliers of alcohol to men of the area who spent their entire day gambling, playing cards and drinking while women toiled in the fields and forests irrigating and gathering wood. Women held sustained agitations against the habit of alcoholism and broadened the agenda of the movement to cover other social issues. The movement achieved a victory when the government issued a ban on felling of trees in the Himalayan regions for fifteen years until the green cover was fully restored. One of the prominent Chipko leaders, Gandhian Sunderlal Bahuguna, took a 5,000-kilometer trans-Himalaya foot march in spreading the Chipko message to a far greater area. Gradually, women set up cooperatives to guard local forests, and also organized fodder production conducive to local environments.” – Pamela Singh
Chipko movement came into existence in 1973 to protect trees from cutting down. It was a non-violent movement initiated by the women in Uttar Pradesh’s Chamoli district (now is a part of Uttarakhand, India) for the conservation of forests to maintain ecological balance in the environment. After some time, the movement spilled onto the other Northern states of India.
Objectives of chipko movement
The slogan of the chipko movement was “ecology is a permanent economy,” as coined by Sunderlal Bahuguna. He said to embrace the trees and save them from being felled down because they are the property of our hills. Save them from being looted.
One of the main objectives of the movement was to protect trees and forest area because it was the primary source of livelihood for the tribal people of this region. They were highly dependent on the forest resources for their survival.
“The Keeper of the Sacred Forest” “If I should fall… the earth shall die…” Tāne-Mahuta, god and guardian of the sacred forests and its inhabitants, uttered these terrifying words before plunging his feet deep into the earth of Te Ika-A-Māui (the North Island of New Zealand) and spreading his sacred roots throughout the entire land. […]
UNIVERSE 