The Bishnoi community follows twenty-nine principles laid down by Guru Jambheshwar in 1485 in the Thar. Several of them are conservation rules: do not cut green trees, do not kill animals, filter water, and protect wildlife.
In 1730 at Khejarli in Rajasthan, 363 Bishnois were killed defending khejri trees from being cut for a royal building project, holding on to the trunks while they were felled. It is often cited as India's first environmental movement.
Bishnoi villages in the Abohar area of Punjab hold blackbuck and chinkara in open farmland with no fence and no forest, because the community protects them. The Abohar Wildlife Sanctuary is essentially that arrangement given a legal name.
Bishnois have prosecuted poaching cases in Indian courts with more persistence than any state agency, including cases against film actors.
It is one of several community-based conservation traditions in northern India, alongside the oran sacred groves of Rajasthan, and it predates the concept by centuries and works better than most that came after.
The khejri, Prosopis cineraria, is the tree the rule protects, and it is what makes the Thar farmable at all. It fixes nitrogen, its leaves are fodder through the dry months, its pods are eaten, and a field with khejri standing in it yields more than a field cleared of them. Protecting it was never sentiment.
Amrita Devi is the name given for the woman said to have held the first tree, and the roll of the dead is kept by the community. A fair is held at the site every year, and the Government of India's national award for community wildlife conservation is named for her.
They filter their drinking water, bury rather than burn where wood is scarce, and hold the rule about animals with a strictness that has produced both court cases and violence. The name is the number itself, bis and nau, twenty nine.