In a semi-lunar landscape of parched scrub near Jaisalmer, a brushwood fence rings six mud and dung thatched cottages in an area smaller than a tennis court which an extended family of twenty eight Bishnoi farmers call home, standing shyly on the spotless mud floor that shines with constant sweeping.
Rajasthan’s last three monsoons have been poor enough to threaten the very life of these nature worshippers whose ecological, vegetarian, pacifist and non-pollution credentials make Greenpeace look like a vandals, who bring out a little wooden stool as you try to get your head around a lifestyle that for hundreds of years was deemed backward, but now seems the only way forward.
For here is a sect of eco-warriors that may kill no animal nor even fell a tree, (unlike other Hindus, their dead are buried as to cremate would involve the use of wood). This family are millet farmers – when it rains. When it doesn’t, they survive selling milk and cream from their cows and wait and wait for the rains to save them.
Beyond their scrub fence, black buck graze on the fruit of the Khejri tree – these are animals that would provide nutrition to the Bishnois’ meagre grain diet and trees that would provide fuel and heat, but both remain sacred and untouched to these, the greenest humans on Earth.
They nod politely as you leave and after a half hour of rutted desert, the guide mentions in passing, “ Did you notice that Bishnoi in the last hut on the right who waved as we left? In his forties? He’s got an an M.A. in English at Jaipur University.”
You stop the Jeep so he can run that past again, which he does.
“So what will he do for a career?”
He shugs and looks puzzled. “Nothing,” he says.
“Then why do it – is it like some sort of intellectual exercise?”
The guide nods slowly. “Yes, you could say that, just an intellectual exercise. He calls it his hobby.”
So the Bishnoi with the M.A. sits in his mud hut with the rest of his family, waiting for the rains so he can sow his millet. And waits, and waits…..

India’s Thar Desert isn’t Peter O’Toole desert, too scrubby for that, but still desolate enough for a bend in the road to be viewed as a major feature. You can pass a hundred miles of nothing and then something. Like this – a perfect circle of a dozen sheep, their bowed heads facing inwards and touching as they doze, matched by another circle a quarter mile ahead. No one knows why. Maybe they’ve learnt how to shade their heads from the heat which can top 48 degrees; maybe they’re just attention seekers, and who could blame them?