Eco-Resistance & the Khejarli Massacre
The Tree, the Axe, and the Sentence That Changed a Forest
Khejarli, Amrita Devi, and the Language of Ecological Resistance
Imagine a desert.
Not the desert of cinema, where golden dunes stretch endlessly beneath a dramatic sunset.
Imagine a harsher desert.
A landscape where water is precious, shade is precious, fodder is precious, and a tree is not merely a tree.
A tree can mean food.
A tree can mean shelter.
A tree can mean livestock.
A tree can mean soil.
A tree can mean survival. &
Now imagine that, one morning, men arrive carrying axes.
They have not come to wage a war.
They have not come to conquer a kingdom.
They have come to cut trees. &
The people of the village are told to stand aside.
What happens next is one of the most extraordinary stories in the environmental history of South Asia.
It happened in Khejarli, near Jodhpur, in 1730.
And at the centre of the story was a woman named Amrita Devi Bishnoi.
But today I do not want to tell this story merely as a story about trees.
I want to tell it as a story about language.
Because when we teach ecolinguistics, we ask a deceptively simple question:
What happens when the words we use to describe nature begin to determine how we treat nature?
That question takes us directly to Khejarli.
Let us go back to 1730
It is September.
The Thar is dry.
The village of Khejarli is quiet.
The Khejri trees stand across the landscape, adapted to one of the harshest environments on the Indian subcontinent.
The Khejri, Prosopis cineraria, is not an ornamental luxury.
For communities living in the arid region, it has enormous ecological and practical importance. Its leaves provide fodder. Its pods can be used as food. Its roots contribute to soil fertility through nitrogen fixation. Its shade matters. Its presence matters.
For the Bishnoi community, the relationship goes even deeper.
Their environmental ethic is associated with the teachings of Guru Jambheshwar, whose twenty-nine principles gave the community its name and included strong commitments to the protection of living beings and trees.
And then, suddenly, the sound of horses.
Men arrive.
Axes arrive.
The silence of the village is broken.
They are representatives of the ruler of Marwar.
The royal administration needs wood for construction activity, including the firing of lime kilns.
And the Khejri trees are standing there.
From the perspective of the men carrying the axes, the calculation is straightforward.
Wood.
Fuel.
Kilns.
Construction.
The tree becomes material.
The forest becomes supply.
The landscape becomes inventory.
And here, before a single tree is cut, something much deeper has already happened.
The tree has been renamed.
It is no longer primarily a living being.
It has become wood.
And that is where our ecolinguistic story begins.
The most dangerous thing may happen before the axe falls
In my advanced ecolinguistics classes, I often ask students to pay attention to nouns.
We usually think of nouns as innocent.
Tree.
Forest.
Resource.
Timber.
Fuel.
Land.
Development.
But nouns are not always innocent.
Consider the difference between saying:
“This is a tree.”
and saying:
“This is timber.”
The physical object has not changed.
But the possibilities surrounding it have changed dramatically.
If I call it a tree, I may notice shade, habitat, roots, birds, soil, fruit, memory and ecological relationships.
If I call it timber, I begin to notice quantity, price, transport, construction and fuel.
The object remains.
The story around the object changes.
This is one of the great insights of ecolinguistics.
Language does not merely report our relationship with the natural world.
Language can help organize that relationship.
Arran Stibbe calls attention to the cultural narratives, metaphors, identities, evaluations and assumptions that shape the way societies imagine the world and act within it.
He calls these “stories we live by.”
And Khejarli gives us a remarkable historical example.
Because two stories were about to collide.
Two stories, one tree
On one side stood an administrative story.
The story of construction.
The story of fuel.
The story of royal authority.
The story of material necessity.
The tree was useful because it could be converted into something else.
On the other side stood the Bishnoi story.
The tree was not simply something that could become fuel.
It was part of a living moral and ecological order.
The difference was not merely botanical.
It was linguistic.
It was cultural.
It was ethical.
And eventually, it became physical.
Because someone had to decide what the word “tree” meant in practice.
Was it an object standing in the way of construction?
Or was it a living member of a community of beings?
That question was about to be answered by a woman standing in front of an axe.
Then Amrita Devi stepped forward
Her name was Amrita Devi.
According to the traditional account, when she saw the royal men preparing to cut the Khejri trees, she confronted them.
She did not have an army.
She did not have political office.
She did not have weapons.
She had something else.
Her body.
And her words.
She embraced a tree.
Then came the sentence that has survived across generations:
“Sar sāntey rūkh rahe to bhī sasto jān.”
The commonly reported meaning is:
“Even if my head is severed to save a tree, it is a small price to pay.”
Stop for a moment.
Listen to that sentence.
Because linguistically, it is extraordinary.
It reverses an entire hierarchy of value.
Ordinarily, we construct language around the assumption that human life comes first.
A person protects the self.
A state protects its citizens.
An individual protects the body.
But Amrita Devi’s sentence introduces another moral equation.
One human life can be offered for one tree.
The tree is no longer beneath the human.
The tree has entered the sphere of moral consideration.
And suddenly, the sentence is not merely describing a belief.
It is performing an action.
When a sentence becomes an act
This is where speech-act theory becomes fascinating.
Some utterances simply describe.
Others do something.
When someone says, “I apologize,” the utterance itself performs an apology.
When someone says, “I promise,” the utterance can create a commitment.
And sometimes, under extraordinary circumstances, a sentence can reorganize the moral meaning of an event.
Amrita Devi’s words did precisely that within the traditional account.
She did not say:
“I hope you will reconsider.”
She did not say:
“Please do not cut the tree.”
She made a declaration of moral equivalence.
Her life stood between the axe and the tree.
Her body became an argument.
Her sentence became a commitment.
And then the axe fell.
Amrita Devi was killed.
But the story did not end there.
It multiplied.
Three daughters
Her three daughters, traditionally named Asu, Ratni and Bhagu Bai, followed their mother.
They too embraced the trees.
They too were killed.
And the news travelled.
From one household to another.
From one settlement to another.
People gathered.
The story was no longer about one woman.
It had become a collective moral decision.
The Bishnoi community organized resistance around the principle that trees would be protected even at the cost of human lives.
According to historical and cultural accounts, 363 Bishnois from dozens of villages were killed before the royal authorities halted the tree felling.
Think about that number.
Three hundred and sixty-three.
We can say it quickly.
But numbers have a strange capacity to hide human beings.
What does that mean?
It means mothers.
Fathers.
Daughters.
Sons.
Neighbours.
Farmers.
Elders.
Young people.
People whose names have largely disappeared from the historical record.
And yet their collective act remains.
This is where I want my students to pause.
Because data can preserve a number while memory preserves a meaning.
Three hundred and sixty-three is a statistic.
But 363 people dying to protect trees is a story.
And stories travel differently.
The king eventually heard
The news reached Maharaja Abhay Singh.
The cutting stopped.
Accounts describe the ruler as apologizing to the Bishnoi community and issuing a decree prohibiting the felling of trees and hunting in Bishnoi areas. Sources also describe the decree as being recorded on a copper plate. and suddenly something remarkable had happened.
The direction of power had changed.
At the beginning, the state had defined the situation:
We need wood.
Then Amrita Devi introduced another definition:
This is a living tree.
The community transformed that definition into collective action.
And eventually the state responded.
This is why Khejarli deserves to be remembered not merely as a tragedy.
It is also a story about how meaning can become resistance.
Now let us return to the classroom
When I teach ecolinguistics, I sometimes tell my students:
Do not begin with the forest. Begin with the sentence.
Look at a sentence such as:
“The forest contains valuable timber resources.”
Now change it:
“The forest supports a complex community of plants, animals and people.”
The physical forest has not changed.
But the linguistic world has changed.
The first sentence foregrounds extraction.
The second foregrounds relationship.
Now consider another pair:
“Trees were cut for development.”
And:
“Workers cut living trees to supply material for construction.”
Again, something important has changed.
In the first sentence, agency becomes blurry.
Trees were cut.
Who cut them?
The grammar does not tell us.
The second sentence restores the human agent.
Workers cut living trees.
This is why grammar matters.
Ecolinguistics is not simply about putting the word environment into an English lesson.
It asks us to examine how linguistic choices foreground some realities and background others.
Who acts?
Who is acted upon?
Who is visible?
Who disappears?
What is described as alive?
What is described as a resource?
What is described as waste?
What is described as development?
And what is described as destruction?
The passive voice can hide an axe
Consider this sentence:
“The trees were removed.”
It sounds almost administrative.
Clean.
Neutral.
Efficient.
But trees do not simply disappear.
Someone removes them.
Someone authorizes the removal.
Someone benefits from it.
Someone bears the ecological cost.
Compare:
“The trees were removed.”
with:
“The royal workers cut the trees for fuel.”
The second sentence restores agency.
And agency matters.
Because language can make responsibility visible.
Or invisible.
That is one reason ecolinguistic analysis matters far beyond academic exercises.
The politics hidden inside a word
Now consider another word:
resource.
We use it constantly.
Human resources.
Natural resources.
Water resources.
Forest resources.
Mineral resources.
The word is useful.
But it also carries a particular worldview.
A resource is something available for use.
And once something has been linguistically categorized primarily as a resource, extraction can begin to appear normal.
The tree becomes timber.
The river becomes a water resource.
The mountain becomes a mineral reserve.
The land becomes real estate.
The animal becomes livestock.
The forest becomes inventory.
The language becomes efficient.
And perhaps that is precisely the danger.
Because the more efficiently we reduce living systems to economic categories, the easier it can become to forget that they are living systems.
Khejarli teaches us something deeper
But let me be careful here.
The lesson is not that every use of the word resource is wrong.
Human beings inevitably depend upon the material world.
We need food.
We need shelter.
We need energy.
We need agriculture.
We need construction.
The question is not:
Can nature be useful to humans?
Of course it can.
The deeper question is:
Is usefulness the only story we tell about nature?
That is a very different question.
Because once usefulness becomes the only value, everything that cannot be priced becomes easier to ignore.
Shade has no invoice.
Biodiversity has no receipt.
A bird’s habitat does not arrive with a market price.
A future generation cannot send us a bill for the forest we destroy today.
And yet these things matter.
The extraordinary wisdom of the Khejri
The Khejri tree itself offers a lesson.
In an arid environment, ecological relationships are not abstract.
They are visible.
Immediate.
Material.
The tree supports animals.
Animals support people.
Vegetation protects soil.
Soil supports agriculture.
Agriculture supports communities.
The system is relational.
Break one relationship and another begins to weaken.
This is precisely why the Bishnoi worldview is so important to ecological thought.
It did not need the vocabulary of modern sustainability science to recognize interdependence.
It had another vocabulary.
Dharma.
Duty.
Restraint.
Care.
Reverence.
Community.
Protection.
And perhaps this is one of the great intellectual mistakes of modernity:
We sometimes assume that knowledge becomes valid only after it acquires a modern scientific vocabulary.
But communities can possess sophisticated ecological knowledge without calling it ecology.
They can practice conservation without using the word conservation.
They can understand sustainability without publishing a sustainability report.
Before “environmentalism,” there was belonging
This is why I hesitate when people casually describe the Bishnoi as simply “the first environmentalists.”
The phrase is useful, but it can also be misleading.
Why?
Because it can impose a modern category upon a much older worldview.
The Bishnoi were not necessarily waking up one morning and saying:
“Today we are going to launch an environmental movement.”
They were living according to an ethical order.
Protecting trees and animals was part of how they understood a good life.
That distinction matters.
Modern environmentalism often begins with a problem:
Something is going wrong with the environment.
The Bishnoi story begins somewhere deeper:
We belong to this living world, and therefore we have obligations toward it.
That is not merely environmentalism.
It is a philosophy of relationship.
And that brings us back to language
Language tells us what kind of beings we think we are.
Are we owners?
Consumers?
Managers?
Controllers?
Or participants?
That single distinction can transform environmental ethics.
If human beings are owners of nature, then nature becomes property.
If human beings are managers of nature, then nature becomes an administrative problem.
But if human beings are participants in an ecological community, then the question changes.
We begin asking:
What do we owe the world that sustains us?
That is a very different question from:
What can we extract from it?
From Khejarli to Chipko
More than two centuries later, another generation in India would once again place human bodies between trees and axes.
The Chipko movement of the twentieth century became internationally associated with tree-hugging and community resistance to forest exploitation.
Historical accounts of Khejarli frequently identify it as an important precursor or inspiration for later Indian environmental movements, although the precise historical relationships between movements should be described carefully rather than reduced to a simple line of direct causation.
What matters is that the image survived.
A human body.
A tree.
An axe.
And a refusal.
The image became a kind of ecological grammar.
Do not separate the tree from the person who depends upon it.
What can ecolinguistics learn from Khejarli?
Perhaps five things.
First:
Language frames ecological reality.
We never encounter the world through description-free perception. We categorize.
Second:
Grammar distributes agency.
A passive sentence can make destruction appear almost ownerless.
Third:
Metaphor shapes moral imagination.
If nature is a machine, we repair it.
If nature is a warehouse, we empty it.
If nature is a community, we negotiate our place within it.
Fourth:
Stories outlive events.
The people who died at Khejarli are no longer physically present.
But the story remains.
And because the story remains, the ethical possibility remains.
Fifth:
Ecological resistance can begin with a sentence.
Sometimes a sentence changes nothing.
Sometimes a sentence changes a person.
And occasionally, a sentence becomes the moral centre of a movement.
A thought experiment for my students
I often ask my students to imagine that they are standing in Khejarli in 1730.
There is a tree before them.
Now describe it in five ways.
First:
A tree.
Second:
Timber.
Third:
A natural resource.
Fourth:
A habitat.
Fifth:
A living member of an ecological community.
Which description is correct?
My answer is:
All of them may identify something real.
But they do not reveal the same reality.
Each foregrounds something.
Each backgrounds something.
Each opens certain possibilities for action.
And this is where critical ecolinguistics becomes intellectually powerful.
The question is not simply:
“Is this sentence grammatically correct?”
The question becomes:
“What kind of world does this sentence make easier to imagine?”
That is a much larger question.
And perhaps this is the real lesson of Amrita Devi
We often imagine courage as physical strength.
But Amrita Devi’s courage began linguistically.
She named a value.
She articulated a principle.
She turned that principle into an action.
And then others entered the story.
Her daughters.
Her community.
Hundreds of people.
The sentence travelled.
The memory travelled.
The meaning travelled.
And eventually the state itself changed its action.
This is why I do not want my students to remember Khejarli simply as a historical date.
I want them to remember it as a question.
Whenever we describe the natural world, ask:
What are we making visible?
What are we making invisible?
When we call a forest a resource, what disappears?
When we call a river an asset, what disappears?
When we call land vacant, who disappears?
When we call a species expendable, what disappears?
And when we call development inevitable, what alternatives disappear?
These are linguistic questions.
But they are also ethical questions.
The final image
So let us return, one last time, to Khejarli.
The desert is quiet.
The Khejri tree is standing.
The axe is raised.
And between the two stands a woman.
Amrita Devi.
She has no army.
No institution.
No technology.
No environmental ministry.
No international treaty.
Only a tree.
Only her body.
And a sentence.
“Sar sāntey rūkh rahe to bhī sasto jān.”
Even if a life is given to save a tree, it is a small price to pay.
We should not romanticize death.
We should not turn sacrifice into a requirement for environmental responsibility.
The lesson is not that people must die for trees.
The deeper lesson is that a society has to decide what it refuses to treat as disposable.
That is where ecology becomes ethics.
That is where ethics becomes language.
And that is where language becomes action.
The axe does not always begin with metal.
Sometimes it begins with a word.
A forest becomes a resource.
A river becomes an asset.
A mountain becomes a reserve.
A living landscape becomes vacant land.
And once the language has narrowed the world, the destruction can begin to feel ordinary.
Perhaps, then, the first act of ecological resistance is not always to plant a tree.
Perhaps it is to change the sentence in which the tree appears.
Because before a forest disappears from the earth, it can disappear from our imagination.
And perhaps that is the deepest lesson Khejarli leaves us:
Save the tree, certainly.
But also save the story that teaches us why the tree matters.
Because the future of the earth may depend not only on what humanity does with its hands.
It may depend on what humanity learns to say.
And ultimately,
on what those words teach us to see.
Thank you.
The Trees That Cost a Life
Khejarli, the Bishnois, and the Language of Ecological Belonging
There are moments in history when a human being stands before a tree and the hierarchy of the world becomes suddenly uncertain. The tree is no longer timber. The forest is no longer inventory. The landscape is no longer vacant space awaiting human purpose, and the human being is no longer simply the sovereign who decides what may live and what may be cut down.
In 1730, in the arid country around Jodhpur, such a moment occurred. At Khejarli, a Bishnoi woman named Amrita Devi is remembered as having placed her body between an axe and a Khejri tree. She was killed. Her three daughters, Asu, Ratni and Bhagu Bai, are traditionally said to have followed her example. Others then came forward. By the end of the episode, 363 Bishnois had been killed while resisting the felling of trees. The ruler of Marwar, Maharaja Abhay Singh, subsequently ordered the operation stopped and is traditionally associated with protections for trees and animals in Bishnoi settlements. The event has entered Indian environmental memory as the Khejarli sacrifice or Khejarli massacre.
But history becomes intellectually interesting precisely when we refuse to leave it in the past. Khejarli was not merely an eighteenth-century dispute over trees. It was a confrontation between two ways of understanding the world.
One could look at a tree and see fuel. Another could look at the same tree and see life. One could understand land as something available for extraction. Another could understand it as a relationship into which human beings are born.
One could ask: What can this landscape provide?
The other could ask: What does this landscape require from us?
Between those two questions lies much of the environmental crisis of the modern age, and between them lies the neglected power of language. Because before human beings cut down a forest, they often change the way they speak about it.
The Forest Before the Forest Was Called a “Resource”
Modern environmentalism sometimes tells its own history as though ecological consciousness began with Rachel Carson, Earth Day, conservation biology, climate science or the rise of environmental law.
Those developments matter enormously. But the moral problem is far older.
Long before humanity possessed the scientific vocabulary of ecosystems, biodiversity, atmospheric chemistry and ecological services, communities had to negotiate the elementary conditions of survival.
How much wood could be taken?
How many animals could be hunted?
How much water could be diverted?
How much grassland could be grazed?
How much could be consumed before tomorrow became poorer than today?
Every society eventually encounters this question.
Some answer it through markets.
Some through law.
Some through technology.
Some through religion.
Some through custom.
Some through fear of scarcity.
And some through an ethical relationship with the living world.
The Bishnoi tradition emerged in fifteenth-century Rajasthan through the teachings associated with Guru Jambheshwar, or Jambhoji. Its twenty-nine principles became the basis of a distinctive religious and cultural tradition in which protection of living beings and trees assumed an important place.
This is crucial to understanding Khejarli.
The prohibition against harming trees was not invented in the moment of confrontation.
The confrontation occurred because a pre-existing worldview already existed.
The axe arrived at a community that had already decided what a tree meant.
That is the deeper story.
Environmental resistance does not begin when the axe falls.
It begins much earlier, when a community decides what the tree is.
The Khejri Was Never Merely Wood
The Khejri, Prosopis cineraria, is deeply associated with the ecology and culture of Rajasthan’s arid regions.
In a desert environment, a tree capable of surviving extreme conditions can become far more than an object of forestry.
It can provide shade.
Fodder.
Nutrients.
Habitat.
Microclimatic relief.
Support for agriculture and pastoral life, and, over generations, cultural meaning. Therefore, the Khejri demonstrates a basic ecological principle: the value of an organism cannot always be reduced to the commodity it can become.
A forester may calculate timber.
A farmer may calculate soil benefits.
A pastoralist may calculate fodder.
An ecologist may calculate ecosystem functions.
A religious community may calculate moral obligation.
None of these perspectives is simply the tree itself.
Each is a way of attending to the tree.
And attention is never innocent.
What we attend to becomes salient.
What becomes salient becomes measurable.
What becomes measurable can become economically valuable.
What becomes economically valuable can become politically negotiable.
And what becomes politically negotiable can eventually become expendable.
This is why the apparently simple noun “resource” deserves intellectual suspicion.
Not because the word is always wrong.
But because it answers a question before we have asked the more fundamental one:
Resource for whom?
The Ecology Hidden Inside a Word
Imagine three sentences.
The forest contains timber.
The forest provides resources.
The forest sustains a living community.
All three may describe aspects of reality.
But they do not invite the same action.
The first foregrounds material.
The second foregrounds utility.
The third foregrounds relationship.
This is where ecolinguistics becomes much more than environmental vocabulary.
Ecolinguistics asks us to examine how language constructs relationships between humans, other organisms and the ecosystems in which they exist.
Arran Stibbe’s influential formulation of ecolinguistics as the study of the “stories we live by” is particularly useful here.
A story, in this sense, need not be a literal narrative.
It can be an assumption embedded in a noun.
A metaphor.
A grammatical pattern.
A recurring institutional phrase.
A cultural frame.
A taken-for-granted idea about what counts as normal.
The story may be: Nature exists to serve human beings.
Or: Human beings are participants within a larger living system.
The first story encourages extraction.
The second encourages reciprocity.
The tree remains physically identical.
The human relationship to the tree changes.
And sometimes changing that relationship is the difference between preservation and destruction.
Khejarli as a Collision of Stories
Seen through ecolinguistics, Khejarli can be interpreted as a collision between competing ecological narratives.
The royal project operated within an institutional logic in which natural material could be mobilized for a construction purpose.
Trees could become fuel.
Fuel could become heat.
Heat could become lime mortar.
Mortar could become architecture.
Architecture could become royal power.
Within that chain, the tree is an input.
The Bishnoi worldview operated within another chain.
Tree.
Animal.
Soil.
Water.
Human.
Community.
Obligation.
Survival.
The first chain is linear.
The second is relational.
The first asks how matter can be converted.
The second asks how life is interconnected.
The first is compatible with extraction.
The second places limits upon it.
This does not mean that one historical actor possessed perfect ecological wisdom and another possessed pure greed. History is rarely that simple.
It means something more interesting:
different institutions can organize attention differently.
And whoever controls attention can profoundly influence what becomes permissible.
The Sentence That Became a Stand
At the centre of the Khejarli tradition stands a sentence attributed to Amrita Devi: Sar santey rookh rahe to bhi sasto jaan.
It is commonly translated approximately as: If a tree is saved even at the cost of one’s head, it is worth the sacrifice.
The precise wording and transliteration vary in published accounts, and the quotation should therefore be treated as part of the remembered Khejarli tradition rather than as a modern stenographic transcript of an eighteenth-century utterance.
But the philosophical force of the sentence is unmistakable.
It overturns an assumed hierarchy.
The conventional anthropocentric order says: human life first, nature second.
The Khejarli maxim introduces a more radical proposition: there are circumstances in which the protection of non-human life constitutes a moral obligation powerful enough to justify extraordinary human sacrifice.
The sentence therefore does something remarkable.
It transforms a tree from an object into an object of obligation.
That is a linguistic revolution.
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When an Utterance Becomes an Action
J. L. Austin taught us that language does not merely describe the world.
Sometimes language acts.
“I promise.”
“I declare.”
“I apologize.”
“I sentence you.”
These utterances perform actions.
The Khejarli maxim can be understood in this broader philosophical tradition.
Amrita Devi’s words did not merely communicate an opinion about trees.
They articulated a principle of conduct.
Her body then enacted the principle.
Her daughters followed.
Others followed them.
Language became commitment.
Commitment became embodied resistance.
Resistance became collective memory.
Memory became cultural inheritance.
This sequence deserves attention:
word → value → action → community → memory → tradition
That is one of the deepest relationships between language and ecology.
Words can become social institutions.
Institutions can become habits.
Habits can become cultures.
Cultures can preserve ecosystems.
The history of a forest may therefore contain a linguistic history that is invisible if we look only at timber, acreage and administrative records.
The Body Became Language
There is an even more profound dimension.
At Khejarli, the body itself became a linguistic sign.
Amrita Devi’s body between axe and tree communicated something that no petition could communicate with greater immediacy: This tree is not merely an object available for your use.
The body became grammar.
Her daughters became repetition.
The community became amplification.
The dead became punctuation.
The sacrifice became a sentence written not on paper but into collective memory.
This may be the most powerful ecolinguistic reading of Khejarli.
When the official vocabulary said:
tree = timber,
the body replied:
tree = life.
When administrative power said:
forest = resource,
the community replied:
forest = relationship.
When the axe said:
this can be taken,
the human body replied:
this must be protected.
The confrontation was therefore material and semantic at the same time.
It was a struggle over trees.
But it was also a struggle over meaning.
The Politics of Naming
Environmental destruction frequently begins with apparently harmless acts of naming.
A forest becomes: vacant land.
A wetland becomes: undeveloped land.
A river becomes: a water resource.
A species becomes: a pest.
A community becomes: an obstacle to development.
A landscape becomes: a project site.
Nothing has physically changed.
But the conceptual landscape has.
Once a forest is linguistically converted into “unused land,” clearing it can appear like development rather than destruction.
Once a river is reduced to “water supply,” its ecological life becomes secondary.
Once a wetland is described as “underutilized,” its biodiversity becomes invisible.
This is why environmental discourse requires more than vocabulary lists.
It requires critical attention to framing.
The most consequential ecological sentence may not be: “Destroy the forest.”
It may be: “The forest is an underutilized resource.”
The second sentence can prepare the conceptual conditions under which the first becomes acceptable.
The Grammar of Responsibility
Consider two sentences: The forest was cleared.
and: The company cleared the forest.
The physical event may be identical.
The grammar is not.
The first sentence foregrounds the outcome.
The second foregrounds an agent.
Now consider: Forest clearance was undertaken to facilitate development.
Agency becomes even more distant.
The action has been converted into a noun.
The people disappear.
The forest disappears.
The violence of the process becomes bureaucratic abstraction.
This is one reason ecolinguistic analysis must pay attention to transitivity, agency, passive constructions and nominalization.
Grammar does not determine morality.
But grammar can influence what readers notice.
And what readers fail to notice may become easier to ignore.
The Modern Axe Has Many Names
The eighteenth-century axe was visible.
Our contemporary axes are often conceptual.
They may arrive under the names:
development
modernization
infrastructure
investment
efficiency
growth
urbanization
resource utilization
None of these words is inherently destructive.
That distinction matters.
A serious ecological argument cannot simply declare development immoral.
Human beings need homes.
Food.
Energy.
Transport.
Industry.
Employment.
Healthcare.
Education.
Technology.
The question is not whether humans should use nature.
We cannot avoid doing so.
The deeper question is: What forms of use preserve the conditions that make continued human and non-human flourishing possible?
That is the question Khejarli places before us.
Not:
humanity or nature?
But:
what kind of human flourishing is compatible with a living planet?
The Ethics of Enough
The Bishnoi tradition also confronts a powerful modern assumption:
more is better.
More production.
More consumption.
More extraction.
More construction.
More speed.
More convenience.
More accumulation.
But ecosystems operate differently.
They have limits.
Thresholds.
Cycles.
Recovery times.
Carrying capacities.
Feedback mechanisms.
Modern civilization has become extraordinarily capable of increasing extraction while becoming psychologically uncomfortable with the word enough.
Yet ecological civilization may ultimately depend upon recovering precisely that word.
Enough.
Enough timber.
Enough water.
Enough land conversion.
Enough extraction.
Enough waste.
Enough consumption.
Enough technological acceleration without ecological accounting.
The wisdom of restraint is not necessarily anti-development.
It is a recognition that every system has boundaries.
Ecological Knowledge Does Not Always Look Like Science
One of the great intellectual errors of modernity is to assume that knowledge becomes legitimate only when expressed in modern scientific terminology.
The Bishnois did not possess contemporary ecosystem modelling.
They did not have satellite imagery.
They did not calculate carbon budgets.
They did not speak in the vocabulary of biodiversity indices.
But absence of scientific terminology does not imply absence of ecological knowledge.
A community can know that trees matter without knowing the molecular mechanisms through which they matter.
It can know that animals must be protected without possessing population models.
It can know that vegetation sustains life without measuring every nutrient cycle.
Scientific explanation and cultural ecological knowledge are not identical.
Neither should simply be romanticized.
The productive intellectual task is to ask how different knowledge systems perceive, preserve and transmit relationships with the living world.
The 363: When a Number Becomes a Memory
There is another danger in environmental history.
We turn people into statistics.
363.
The number is unforgettable.
But a number can also become a wall between the living and the dead.
Three hundred and sixty-three human beings were not an environmental statistic.
They were individuals.
Parents.
Children.
Neighbours.
Farmers.
Pastoralists.
Women.
Men.
Families.
People with voices.
People with ordinary mornings and unfinished futures.
The number matters because the people mattered.
This distinction is equally important today.
Climate discourse is filled with numbers:
parts per million,
degrees Celsius,
hectares,
tonnes,
species,
litres,
megawatts.
Numbers are indispensable.
But numbers alone cannot create moral understanding.
Science tells us how much.
Narrative helps us understand what that amount means.
And language allows the two to meet.
From Data to Wisdom
We now possess ecological information beyond anything available to eighteenth-century societies.
We have satellites looking down upon the planet.
Sensors monitoring atmospheric chemistry.
Climate models projecting possible futures.
Genomic technologies revealing biological relationships.
Artificial intelligence processing enormous datasets.
Remote sensing tracking changes in forests, glaciers and coastlines.
And yet knowledge has not automatically produced restraint.
This is one of modernity’s great paradoxes:
we may understand ecological systems better than any previous civilization while remaining capable of behaving as though those systems were infinitely replaceable.
Perhaps the missing element is not information.
Perhaps it is meaning.
We do not merely need to know that ecosystems matter.
We need cultural narratives in which that knowledge becomes morally consequential.
The Bishnoi tradition offers one historical example of such a narrative.
It transformed ecological restraint from an external regulation into an internal obligation.
From Knowing to Belonging
A student can memorize: Forests absorb carbon.
That is knowledge.
A student can explain: Trees support biodiversity.
That is knowledge.
A student can define: Ecosystem services.
That is knowledge.
But ecological education requires something deeper.
The student must eventually encounter the question: What is my relationship to the system I have just described?
This is the transition from knowledge to belonging.
The statement: “Trees are important”
is informational.
The statement: “My life is entangled with the lives of trees”
is relational.
The second changes the position of the speaker.
The human being is no longer outside the ecosystem observing it.
The human being is inside it.
This may be one of the deepest educational possibilities of ecolinguistics.
The Tree and the Human
Khejarli also opens an ancient philosophical question:
What does it mean to be human?
We often define humanity through consciousness, reason, language, technology or moral agency.
But perhaps there is another measure.
Not merely how much we can control.
But how much we can choose not to destroy.
Not merely how efficiently we can extract.
But how deliberately we can restrain ourselves.
Not merely how far our power extends.
But whether our ethics can extend beyond the boundaries of our immediate interests.
A civilization capable of voluntarily limiting its power may be more mature than one that simply possesses enormous power.
The Khejarli story therefore contains an ethics of restraint long before modern sustainability discourse gave that restraint a technical vocabulary.
The Body, the Tree and the Question of Value
Why would someone place a human body between an axe and a tree?
Because value is never purely mathematical.
Economics can assign a price to timber.
But price and value are not identical.
A thing may be inexpensive and irreplaceable.
A thing may be expensive and ecologically trivial.
A thing may have no market price and enormous significance.
A tree can have commercial value as wood.
It can have ecological value as habitat.
Cultural value as heritage.
Spiritual value as sacred life.
Social value as part of a community’s identity.
Future value as something inherited by generations not yet born.
The market can calculate one dimension.
It cannot automatically calculate all of them.
That is why environmental ethics exists.
It asks questions that price alone cannot answer.
Khejarli and the Anthropocene
The modern concept of the Anthropocene, whatever its precise geological status and scholarly interpretation, captures an unmistakable reality: human activity has become a planetary force.
We alter landscapes.
Move species.
Transform rivers.
Change atmospheric chemistry.
Modify nutrient cycles.
Reshape coastlines.
Alter climate systems.
Human power has become enormous.
Khejarli offers a different conception of power.
Perhaps the greatness of a civilization should not be measured only by how much it can control.
Perhaps it should also be measured by how much it can protect despite possessing the power to destroy it.
The ability to refrain is a form of power.
Restraint is not weakness.
Sometimes restraint is the highest expression of strength.
From Khejarli to Chipko
More than two centuries after Khejarli, the Chipko movement brought tree protection into the global environmental imagination.
The visual resemblance is striking.
People embraced trees.
Human bodies became barriers.
The tree became the centre of a moral struggle.
The historical relationship between Khejarli and later Indian environmental movements is important, but chronology should be respected. Khejarli belongs to 1730; Chipko emerged in the twentieth century.
The deeper connection is not simply that people hugged trees.
It is that both reveal a remarkable political technology:
embodied ecological resistance.
When institutional language says: “This tree can be cut,”
the human body answers: “You must first pass through me.”
The body becomes argument.
Presence becomes protest.
Physical vulnerability becomes moral communication.
A Feminist Dimension Without Anachronism
Amrita Devi’s central role also invites reflection on gender and ecology.
Modern ecofeminist scholarship examines relationships among the domination of nature, gender, labour, social hierarchy and environmental vulnerability.
Khejarli can certainly be studied through such questions.
But historical interpretation requires caution.
We should not simply place a twenty-first-century theoretical label on an eighteenth-century community and declare the past solved.
The more productive approach is to ask:
How did gender shape access to ecological resources?
How were women positioned within systems of household survival?
How did religious authority interact with women’s agency?
How did ecological degradation affect everyday labour?
And why did a woman’s body become the first site of resistance in the remembered narrative?
These questions open rather than close interpretation.
That is what scholarship should do.
The Ecological Memory of a People
A forest can disappear physically.
But ecological knowledge can survive culturally.
It can survive in:
songs,
proverbs,
rituals,
taboos,
religious teachings,
place names,
stories,
memorials,
family histories,
annual commemorations.
This is ecological memory.
And memory can itself become a conservation mechanism.
A community that remembers why a tree must not be harmed possesses something more powerful than information.
It possesses inherited obligation.
The lesson is especially relevant to modern education.
We increasingly teach environmental issues as units:
Climate Change.
Biodiversity.
Pollution.
Sustainability.
Conservation.
But an ecological culture cannot be created merely by adding environmental vocabulary to a syllabus.
Students need stories that connect abstract concepts to human meaning.
Khejarli is one such story.
What the Industrial World Has Hidden
Modern civilization has performed a remarkable psychological trick.
It has separated consumption from ecology.
Milk arrives in packets.
Water in bottles.
Wood as furniture.
Paper as pages.
Electricity through switches.
Food on shelves.
Technology inside boxes.
The ecological origin of the object disappears.
The consumer encounters the product.
The ecosystem remains invisible.
This separation may be one of the defining psychological conditions of industrial modernity.
We consume the consequences without seeing the origins.
Khejarli reverses the process.
There is no invisible supply chain.
No anonymous warehouse.
No distant landscape.
No abstract commodity.
There is simply a tree.
A human being.
An axe.
And a choice.
The Language of Development
This is why contemporary environmental discourse requires intellectual humility.
Development is not the enemy.
Modernization is not the enemy.
Technology is not the enemy.
Economic growth is not automatically the enemy.
The problem begins when one story becomes so dominant that every other value becomes invisible.
A development project may produce roads, jobs, electricity and connectivity.
It may also alter habitats, displace communities or impose ecological costs.
The responsible question is therefore not: Is development good or bad?
It is: What kind of development, for whom, at what cost, according to which values, and over what time horizon?
That question is more difficult.
It is also more intellectually honest.
What Khejarli Says to a University
A university can teach environmental science without producing ecological consciousness.
It can teach climate statistics without changing the student’s relationship to the world.
It can teach sustainability terminology without examining the assumptions hidden inside the word sustainable.
Ecolinguistics offers another route.
Students can be taught to ask:
Who is represented as an agent?
Who disappears?
Who benefits?
Who bears the cost?
What metaphor governs the text?
What noun defines nature?
What verbs describe extraction?
What passive constructions conceal responsibility?
What assumptions are presented as common sense?
What stories are being reproduced?
And perhaps the most important question: What kind of world becomes imaginable through this language?
That is where language education becomes ecological education.
A Small Experiment in Rewriting Reality
Give students this sentence:
The forest is an underutilized economic resource.
Now ask them to rewrite it.
Economic discourse
The forest contains commercially valuable biomass.
Ecological discourse
The forest supports interconnected biological communities and ecological processes.
Legal discourse
The forest constitutes a protected ecological area subject to conservation obligations.
Community discourse
The forest sustains livelihoods and forms part of the community’s relationship with place.
Relational discourse
The forest is a living system upon which human and non-human lives depend.
Poetic discourse
The forest is the memory of the earth standing upright.
Which sentence is true?
The intellectually honest answer is:
each illuminates something, and each conceals something.
That is the lesson.
Language is not simply a mirror.
It is a lens.
And different lenses make different worlds visible.
English Is Not the Villain
A mature ecolinguistic analysis should avoid the temptation to blame English.
English is capable of highly extractive discourse.
It is equally capable of profound ecological discourse.
The problem is not the language.
The problem is the discourse.
English can say:
“The forest is a resource.”
It can also say:
“The forest is a living community.”
It can describe a river as:
“a water supply”
or:
“a complex ecological system.”
Language provides possibilities.
Institutions privilege some.
Cultures normalize some.
Economies reward some.
Education can expose the choices.
That is why linguistic awareness matters.
Urdu, Saraiki, Rajasthani: Toward Comparative Ecolinguistics
For South Asian ecolinguistics, an especially fertile research question concerns the languages through which ecological relationships are culturally expressed.
Do Urdu, Saraiki, Rajasthani and other regional languages contain vocabulary and discourse patterns that foreground relational relationships with land, animals, seasons, rivers and agriculture?
Certainly they contain rich ecological lexicons.
But lexical richness should not be confused with ecological behaviour.
No language is inherently ecological.
No language is inherently destructive.
Every language can express reverence and exploitation.
The deeper question is: Under what cultural, social and institutional conditions do particular linguistic resources become ecologically salient?
This question moves ecolinguistics beyond romantic claims about “nature-loving languages.”
It turns the subject into a serious comparative research program.
The Arithmetic of Civilization
The Khejarli story ultimately confronts us with a peculiar arithmetic.
What is the value of a tree?
What is the value of a forest?
What is the value of a river?
What is the value of soil?
What is the value of a species that may never again exist once lost?
Modern economics is extraordinarily sophisticated at calculating prices.
But civilization requires another arithmetic:
the arithmetic of irreversibility.
Some losses can be repaired.
Some cannot.
A building can be reconstructed.
A machine can be replaced.
Capital can be accumulated again.
But an extinct species cannot be repurchased.
An ancient ecosystem cannot simply be reordered from a catalogue.
A destroyed relationship between people and place cannot always be restored by planting seedlings.
The future contains values that the present cannot fully price.
That is why ecological responsibility requires imagination.
The Dead Should Not Be Asked to Die Again
There is a final ethical danger in stories of environmental martyrdom.
We can romanticize sacrifice.
We can turn suffering into legend.
We can admire courage while forgetting to ask why ordinary people had to become martyrs in the first place.
That would betray the deeper lesson.
The goal of environmental ethics cannot be to produce more heroes who die protecting trees.
The goal must be to create societies in which such sacrifice is no longer necessary.
The mature inheritance of Khejarli is therefore not: Someone must die for the forest.
It is: Build institutions in which people can protect the forest without having to die.
That means law.
Science.
Community participation.
Responsible economics.
Environmental education.
Indigenous knowledge.
Transparent governance.
Long-term thinking.
And, above all, a culture capable of recognizing ecological limits before crisis forces recognition upon it.
Change the Story Before the Axe Falls
This may finally be the deepest lesson of Khejarli.
Environmental destruction does not always begin with an axe.
Sometimes it begins with a noun.
Resource.
Sometimes with a metaphor.
Nature is a machine.
Sometimes with a grammatical construction.
The forest was cleared.
Sometimes with an institutional phrase.
Underutilized land.
Sometimes with a cultural assumption.
Growth requires extraction.
By the time the physical act occurs, the conceptual work may already have been completed.
The tree has already been transformed from life into material.
The forest has already been transformed from community into inventory.
The river has already been transformed from ecosystem into supply.
The land has already been transformed from place into asset.
The axe is merely the final physical expression of an earlier linguistic decision.
This is why ecolinguistics matters.
It asks us to examine the stories before they become actions.
The Tree That Still Speaks
Nearly three centuries have passed since Khejarli.
The political world that produced the conflict has disappeared.
The royal administration belongs to another age.
The palace project belongs to history.
The people who stood beneath the trees are gone.
Yet the story remains.
And the Khejri remains.
And the sentence remains.
Sar santey rookh rahe to bhi sasto jaan.
Its deepest meaning is not that a human life is worthless.
It is that human life itself depends upon relationships that human beings cannot destroy indefinitely without destroying themselves.
That is the paradox.
The tree and the human are not opponents.
The tree is one of the conditions of the human.
The river is one of the conditions of the human.
The soil is one of the conditions of the human.
The atmosphere is one of the conditions of the human.
The biosphere is not scenery surrounding civilization.
It is the condition that makes civilization possible.
The Last Lesson of Khejarli
Perhaps, then, the deepest question is not:
How can we save the environment?
The environment is not a distant object waiting for human rescue.
The more fundamental question is:
How can humanity learn to understand itself as part of what it is trying to save?
That requires a transformation of language.
We must learn to see beyond resource to relationship.
Beyond consumption to consequence.
Beyond development to interdependence.
Beyond ownership to stewardship.
Beyond utility to value.
Beyond knowledge to responsibility.
Beyond human supremacy to ecological belonging.
Khejarli does not give us a ready-made environmental policy for the twenty-first century.
It gives us something more elemental.
A question.
A tree stands before a human being.
The human being possesses an axe.
What happens next depends partly on what the human being believes the tree is.
If the tree is merely wood, the axe is easy to lift.
If the tree is a commodity, the transaction can be calculated.
If the tree is property, permission becomes the central question.
If the tree is habitat, ecological impact must be considered.
If the tree is sacred, obligation enters the picture.
If the tree is kin, the moral relationship changes again.
The physical tree has not changed.
The story has.
And stories are not harmless.
They organize attention.
Attention organizes value.
Value organizes action.
Action organizes institutions.
Institutions organize civilization.
That is why the history of environmental destruction is also, in part, a history of language.
And perhaps the history of environmental salvation will be the same.
Before we change the world, we may have to change the stories by which we understand our place within it.
The Bishnois of Khejarli understood one part of that truth nearly three centuries ago.
They did not possess our satellites, climate models or ecological databases.
They possessed something different:
a moral vocabulary of belonging.
They knew that a tree could be more than wood.
They knew that restraint could be a form of wisdom.
They knew that the living world could impose obligations upon the human being.
And when the axe arrived, they made that knowledge visible.
Today, we face no shortage of information.
What we may lack is the courage to allow information to change the stories by which we live.
We do not need another Khejarli.
We need a civilization that learns its lesson before another Khejarli becomes necessary.
Because the final question is not whether humanity can save the trees.
It is whether humanity can learn that saving the conditions of life is, ultimately, another name for saving ourselves.
And perhaps that is the sentence Khejarli has been trying to teach us for nearly three hundred years:
The tree is not standing outside us, waiting for our mercy. We are standing inside the world that the tree helps make possible.
For Ecolinguistics Students
The Khejarli case serves as a rich research initiative around framing, transitivity, agency, metaphor, nominalization, appraisal, speech acts, cultural discourse, ecological identity and “stories we live by.” Ecolinguistics explicitly examines how language participates in relationships among humans, other life forms and the environment.
Students are encouraged to investigate:
- Framing: tree vs timber vs resource vs living being.
- Transitivity: Who performs the action in “trees were cut” versus “officials ordered the trees to be cut”?
- Agency: How does passive voice distribute or conceal responsibility?
- Nominalization: What happens when “destroying forests” becomes “forest clearance”?
- Metaphor: Is nature represented as machine, bank, warehouse, family or community?
- Speech acts: How does Amrita Devi’s reported utterance function as a commitment rather than merely a proposition?
- Narrative: How has the Khejarli story been transmitted through oral tradition, education, memorialization and environmental discourse?
- Comparative ecolinguistics: How are human–nature relationships expressed in English, Urdu, Saraiki, Hindi and Rajasthani discourse?
- Critical discourse analysis: How do contemporary development documents represent land, forests and communities?
- Ethics: What linguistic choices encourage an anthropocentric worldview, and which ones make ecological interdependence more visible?
Discussion
Metaphor Analysis: How do administrative terms like “clearance,” “harvesting,” or “fuel procurement” sanitize ecological destruction, and how did Amrita Devi’s speech act disrupt this linguistic sanitization?
Ecocentric vs. Anthropocentric Grammar: In what ways do South Asian regional languages (like Saraiki, Urdu, and Rajasthani dialects) encode a more relational or biocentric perspective toward flora compared to standard bureaucratic English? &
If changing the name of a tree can change the way we perceive it, and changing the way we perceive it can change how we treat it, how much of environmental destruction begins not with an axe, but with a word?
That, methinks, is where ecolinguistics becomes more than the study of language and the environment. It becomes the study of the stories through which human beings decide what kind of world they are willing to inhabit.
Keep questioning, keep digging deeper, and never stop looking beneath the surface of what you think you know…Riaz Laghari
References
Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. Routledge.
Alexander, R., & Stibbe, A. (2014). From the analysis of ecological discourse to the ecological analysis of discourse. Language Sciences, 41, 104–110.
Rajasthan Forest Department. Annual Report 2019–20, documentation of Amrita Devi and the 363 Bishnoi martyrs.
Rajasthan Foundation. Jaano Apno Rajasthan, cultural documentation of Khejarli and its relationship to later environmental movements.
Sahapedia. Bishnois of Western Rajasthan: A Culture of Nature Conservation.
Rajasthan Higher Education Department materials on Jambhani ecological philosophy and Bishnoi conservation traditions.
Bishnoi community model: an Indian Ecological Feminist approach to environment protection
Watch: Amrita Devi And The Khejarli Massacre | Feminism in India
About the Author
Riaz Laghari (Riaz Hussain) is an experienced lecturer, linguistics researcher and writer. His academic interests span formal and theoretical linguistics, syntax, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, English language teaching, academic writing, and the relationship between language, thought and learning. He has written extensively on language, education, society, culture and contemporary issues, while continuing to pursue interdisciplinary learning and research. His work brings academic ideas into conversation with wider questions of human learning, intellectual life and society.
“Learn to live, live to learn.” — Riaz Laghari
