The Forest Man

The sandbank lay flat and pale in the middle of the great river. There were no trees on it, and no shade. The sun beat down on the sand until it was too hot to touch.

A teenage boy stood on the sand, looking at the snakes. There were many of them, lying still. The floods had washed them up here, and with nowhere to hide from the heat, they had died.

The boy was Jadav Payeng. He was about sixteen years old. And what he decided that day would shape the rest of his life.

The river island

Jadav grew up in Assam, in north-east India, near the Brahmaputra, one of the mightiest rivers in Asia. He belongs to the Mising community, a people who have long lived beside the rivers of Assam and who know their floods and moods.

The Brahmaputra is wide and restless. Each year the monsoon floods carve away its banks and pile up new islands of sand, called chapori. Many of these sandbanks are bare and lifeless. Nothing grows on them, and in the dry season they bake in the sun.

The story Jadav has told is that, around 1979, after a great flood, he came upon the dead snakes on a sandbank and was deeply upset. If there had been trees, he thought, the creatures would have had shade. When he asked the elders of his village what could be done, the advice he remembers was simple: plant trees.

Bamboo first

So he did. He began with bamboo, which grows fast and can take root in poor soil. He planted the shoots in the sand of a sandbank island called Aruna Chapori, near the town of Jorhat.

It was hard work. There was no tap, no pipe and no shade. He had to carry water to the young plants. Not long afterwards, a government tree-planting project worked in the same area for a few years. Jadav worked on it as a labourer. When the project ended and the others left, he stayed.

Day after day, year after year, he kept planting and watering. As the bamboo grew, he added other trees. The trees held the soil together. Fallen leaves made the sand richer. The ground began to hold water. Slowly, the sandbank was turning into something new.

Building a forest

Jadav did not just plant trees. He tried to build a whole living place. He has described bringing ants and earthworms to the island to help enrich the soil. He let the forest grow wild.

He lived simply, keeping cows and selling milk to support his family. Every spare hour went into his trees.

Over the decades, the forest spread across hundreds of hectares. Local people began calling it the Molai forest, after Jadav's nickname, Molai. Birds arrived. Then deer, rabbits and monkeys. Then bigger animals. Herds of wild elephants began to visit each year. Rhinoceroses came, and even Bengal tigers.

Found by the world

For a long time, hardly anyone outside the area knew about the forest. Then, in 2007, a photographer and journalist named Jitu Kalita, exploring the river islands, came upon a dense woodland where he expected bare sand. He met the man who had planted it.

He began writing about Jadav, and the story spread. In 2012, Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi honoured him, and he became known as the Forest Man of India. A short documentary film called Forest Man was shown around the world. In 2015, the Government of India gave him the Padma Shri, one of the country's highest civilian honours.

Living beside wild animals is not always easy. Elephants from the forest have sometimes damaged nearby crops and homes, and there have been times when angry neighbours wanted to cut the trees down. Jadav has defended the forest, saying the animals need somewhere to live.

Still planting

Jadav Payeng is no longer a teenager. But he has said he plans to keep planting trees for the rest of his life, and he has started work on more sandbanks.

What began as a handful of bamboo shoots on a scorching strip of sand is now a forest that people travel to see. There is shade there now, and birdsong, and animals moving quietly among the trees.

Want to read more?

The short documentary Forest Man (2013) shows Jadav Payeng at work in his forest. For younger readers, Jadav and the Tree-Place by Vinayak Varma, published by Pratham Books, tells his story in pictures.