Nearly three centuries ago, in a small village in Rajasthan called Khejarli, Amrita Devi Bishnoi wrapped her arms around the trunk of a Khejri tree to protect it in her embrace.
Sir sante rok rahe, toh bhi sasto jaan
If a single tree can be saved at the cost of a human head, it is worth it.
And with that, along with 368 others, she offered her life for the Khejri. This tender act forged roots for tree-hugging movements around the world: Chipko, to embrace. Encircling their trunks, pressing our hearts to theirs, our life for theirs. Returning to Rajasthan, we sit in the shade of a 400-year old Khejri in the Thar desert, to speak with the people who continue to protect this land by encircling it to mark it as sacred.
Village folk in the Thar draw rings around the periphery of forests in the desert, orans, with kesar (saffron) and doodh (milk) to mark them as sacred. This ties them to the oran in unspoken promise: no one hacks a single branch from the native trees, or tills a square inch of oran land. The orans reciprocate. They replenish by providing abundant water, pasture, sustenance and shelter. These orans are a spring of abundance in the desert, passed down generations as parampara, legacy.
Despite being the heart of the desert, Jaisalmer is home to more than 100 orans which belong to the commons, and have been protected by the commons for nearly 700 years. As desert communities become increasingly vulnerable to the climate crisis, we spoke to women from Samwata village on the edge of Degrai Oran, one of the largest in the region, to understand how the land shelters them from luu, heatwaves, and akal, famine.
They form part of Oran Bachao, a group of people across caste, creed and religion, who have come together to protect the orans. Orans are still seen through the eyes of the coloniser: classified in India’s official revenue records as ‘wastelands’. And naming them as such makes it easier to dispossess locals for the creation of solar and wind farms, destroying delicate ecosystems that make the land naturally resilient to the changing climate. Degrai was one such case. There are many more.
Along with the I Love Foundation, Jaisalmer Fort Palace Museum, and the women of Samwata village, we created a beautiful monument to transform the narrative of the Thar, and directly amplify the communities’ demands for their homes and their land to be seen as abundant, and sacred.
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The age of a khejri is determined by the depth of the hollow in her trunk, the lives she has lived and all that she has seen. Today, she sees the land under her roots be razed to build solar plants. 50,000 cattle, 5,000 camels, and 6,000 people across 12 villages and 36 communities risk losing access to what has sustained them for seven centuries. Under her shelter, we sit and learn the significance of this land from these women. Each woman circles the Khejri, drawing a ring with a matka of milk, in a parikrama.
When she completes the parikrama, she asks herself:
Mujhe iss zameen se kya milta hai?
What do I receive from this land?
Paani, har subah. Water, every morning.
Saans. Breath.
Ber, sangri, khejri milti hai, taakat milti hai. Ber, sangri, khejri, from which we derive our strength.
Bakri, gai, bhains ko charne laati hoon. I bring my cattle here to graze.
Ghoomne ke liye jaga milti hai. A space to roam around.
Hum jeete hai, toh iss dharti ke liye. We live for this land.
Zinda rehte hai, toh iss zameen ki vaja se. We are alive thanks to this land.
Then, drawing a ring around herself, she asks herself:
Main iss dharti ko kya deti hoon?
What do I give to this land?
Pyaar, hassi, muskurahat. Love, laughter, my smile.
Seva. Service.
Doodh, daane, meri awaaz. Milk, grains, my voice.
Main iss zameen ko apna namashkaar deti hoon. I offer my devotion to this land.
Main kuch nahi deti, yehi sab deti hai. I give nothing. She gives us everything.
Humaari kya aukat ki hum dharti ma ko kuch bhi de? Who are we to offer anything to this land, our mother?
We hear stories of Degrai Mata, the goddess in whose name the oran is protected. Chunnaris are offered to her as gifts, to thank her for protecting them. The ladies of Samwata all wore colourful ghunghats, veils that cover their face as a mark of ownership. Through the course of our workshop, they slowly opened up, sharing stories and songs of the land with us. They told us how the oran has changed in their lifetime, how the arrival of ‘companies’ has meant they cannot rest there or walk freely anymore. We asked how they would like to be seen in the mural. Slowly, they assembled, backs rested against the khejri, face up to the sun, ghunghat lifted.
We gathered these stories and dreams together in the form a mural painted on the 800-year-old walls of the Sonar Killa, the Golden Fort of Jaisalmer which once sat at an important crossroads on the Silk Road. Every morning, its towering sandstone walls rise from the distant dunes, and set into them as night falls. Its largest building, the granary named Annapurna Bhandar after the Goddess of Abundance, becomes our mural’s home.
Legend goes that during an argument between Shiva and Parvati over a game of dice, Shiva exclaimed flippantly: everything is maya, an illusion. The water we drink, the food we eat is all maya. Parvati was livid: calling food and grain an illusion was akin to calling her labour, her existence an illusion. To teach him a lesson, she disappeared. In her absence, time stood still. Seasons refused to change. The land became infertile and severe drought and famine followed. People prayed for her to return and restore the order of nature. Witnessing their suffering, Parvati assumed a form known as Annapurna, and opened a kitchen to distribute food to anyone who came to her. Shiva, carrying a begging bowl, approached her doorstep, and his wife, in all her celestial splendour, served him with her own hands.
Like Annapurna, the invisible labour of women in the stories we hear, especially around climate justice, is a tale as old as time. Even in the Oran Bachao movement, we struggled to hear the voices of women from the region. Even though women are often the carriers of climate wisdom, those who bear the heaviest brunt of their changing landscapes, in walking further to collect water, in eating less to feed the bellies of their children and in fighting patriarchal systems that do not allow them to make decisions within their homes.
Along with their land, the women of Samwata belong to tribes and castes who have been categorised as ‘criminal’ by the coloniser. Their origins forcibly erased and made invisible. And so, they construct their own histories and identities into being. The Meghwals, denied access to drinking water due to their caste, affirm themselves as the descendants of clouds. The Lohars could bring life to their imagination by moulding precious metals with their hands. The Meenas draw their lineage from Vishnu’s matsya (fish) avatar, who is said to protect them from a great deluge. And the Rabaris consider themselves the protectors of the camel, which in turn protects them. By painting these colonized, criminalised and ‘outcast’ tribes in a Fort dominated and historically occupied by the Brahmin and Rajput castes – the mural stands as a radical vision to the stewards of this land, in a site where their ancestors may never have been able to set foot.
We shoot colour through the pulsing veins of our mural by crushing elements found in the desert: cinnabar becomes red, indigo blue, peori and sindoor for red and orange, all bound together by our gum arabic. Soil from the fields we sat in became the brown of the land. When they joined us to paint, the ladies of Samwata showed us how to create mandana, as taught to them by their mothers, and their grandmothers before them. Here everyone has access to beauty – palaces may be adorned with mirrors and gold but village homes painted with earth, lime, white clay and dung are no less beautiful. Mandana paintings not only cool down houses in the pulsing heat of the desert but are also ritual practice to protect home and hearth. Following their lead, we used the backs of our palms to apply a base coat of gobar, cow dung on to the wall.
When we began to paint, the walls devoured anything we put on them. A cloud would dissipate in seconds, the sun behind it would vanish in minutes. We have come to Jaisalmer during the most testing time of their year: the anticipation for rain makes the air heavy, and we quickly realise that even the walls are thirsty. We have learned from Chattar Singh ji, the keeper of infinite wisdom on desert ecologies, that no auspicious task on this land can begin without the blessing of the sugan chidiya, the auspicious bird. He tells us: if you listen carefully, she can tell you where to find water, whom to marry, where to live. Naturally, hers is the first image the wall accepts. We take it as a sign to proceed.
What began as one wall, slowly turned into two, three, and four: an oran which envelops you as you enter. Everyone we met in Jaisalmer spoke of the orans and its creatures as if their own kin. In this land, every being, every entity, human or not – is alive. Every seed has a kul, a lineage, and every cloud a name despite seeing fewer than 40 days of rain a year. The godawan is the ‘oran ki beti’, the daughter of the forest, with larger-than-life monuments erected in her honour. And the wisdom of the sugan chidiya is like an old aunt who has lived countless lives, and seen the world many times over.
Perhaps this reverence for the natural world, this knowing and naming of every detail of her being, her mood swings and her bounty, and loving her and committing to her through it all has been the key to survival for these communities for hundreds of years, countless famines and droughts. Sumer Singh ji who leads the Oran Bachao movement tells us:
‘Oran sab hi ka hai, bas yeh dekhna hai ki kaun aage aayega’,
the oran belongs to us all, it’s just a matter of who steps forward to protect it.
He wants to protect the orans for their children, especially as worsening heatwaves and drought make life in the desert even more unpredictable.
For centuries, the khejri has protected this land and her people, through akal. Her leaves, luk, provide for grazing, her fruit, sangri, for sustenance, and her bark mixed with flour during famine, for survival. As if emerging from deep within her chest, the khejri in the centre of our mural affirms:
Main iss dharti ki chaya hoon.
I am the shelter of this land.
You need only sit in her shade on a hot summer afternoon, to know this to be true in your bones.
