Rooted in belief, sustained by practice—a village forest that outlasts the stories told about it.
What would a forest look like if it were left untouched for nearly a century? In Tilwar, the answer stands quietly on a hill—dense, shaded, and alive in a way that is almost difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t stood inside it.
The canopy here is almost entirely dhonk. Not the stunted, shrubby dhonk one finds across the denuded hillsides of this region, mistaken so often for something not worth protecting—but dhonk that has been allowed to become what it always was: tall, sixty, seventy, even eighty feet, with a crown so thick and continuous that sunlight doesn’t fall here so much as it arrives in fragments. It filters through only in certain places, in narrow shafts, as though the forest is deciding what to let in. Here and there, an adusa grows at the margins, but the dhonk dominates so completely that this Devbani is almost a monoculture of quiet authority. Other Devbanis in this region may boast a more visible diversity of species. Tilwar’s is different. Its power is in its singularity, in the depth of shade it holds.
At the top of the hill sits the shrine of Bhomidev, a legendary warrior. No one in the village can quite piece together the full story of who he was or what he did. Memory, as it does, has worn the edges smooth. What remains is not the narrative but the presence—a felt understanding that someone is here, someone is watching, and that this place belongs to him in a way that precedes and outlasts any legal claim.
Twice a day, every day, aarti is performed at the shrine. At dawn and at dusk, the village comes to give—flowers, songs, the smell of incense carried on the morning air. And alcohol. Bhomidev, Chotelal explains, takes only alcohol as his offering. When asked why, the answer is simple and unambiguous: it is what he wants. Earlier, the offering was locally brewed—desi sharaab, made within the village itself, carrying something of the land in it. That practice has largely vanished now, partly through disuse, partly because home brewing is illegal. So people buy bottles from shops and bring them to the shrine. The gesture is the same, even if the offering is different.
Bhomidev, of course, does not drink the offerings. The bottles accumulate. And some of the young men of the village—those already inclined toward drinking—know this, and quietly take them. Everyone in the village is aware of this. It is spoken of with a certain wry knowingness rather than scandal. Someone might argue that this creates a pipeline from the sacred to the recreational, that the shrine is inadvertently fostering drinking among the young. But then one looks up at the forest—at the eighty-foot dhonk, the filtered light, the moisture held in the soil, the wells below that stay full—and the argument loses some of its footing. The Devbani stands tall, whatever contradictions nest inside its rituals.
The young come to the aarti too. Children who might otherwise have no reason to stand still in a forest learn to do so here, learn the rhythm of offering, learn that there is something in this place that asks something of them. Devbani is not only a forest. It is a place of coming together, a moment in the daily life of the village that is collective before it is anything else.
And then there are the yearly melas and akhadas—festivals held in the name of Devbani, drawing people in celebration and ritual. During these gatherings, something else happens too. Any individual might become possessed by Bhomidev. It is not predictable, not managed. The god arrives in whoever he chooses, and through them he might speak, ask for something, set a task. The story of Bhomidev may be half-forgotten, but his presence is not.
Bhomidev is woven into the rhythm of everyday life in Tilwar in ways that go beyond the twice-daily aarti. Anything that happens in the village—a sudden illness, a marriage that comes through after years of difficulty, a child born after long waiting, a crop that fails, an accident on the road—finds its way back to the Devbani. People ask themselves, and each other: was something taken? Was something neglected? Or, when good fortune arrives: did Bhomidev listen? When a prayer is answered, the response is not private. Families hold bhandaras—large community food offerings—or organise additional aartis. The good fortune is returned, circulated, shared. The Devbani does not just hold a forest. It holds the village’s account of itself, its losses and its gratitude.
The protection of this forest does not come from fences or from government orders. It comes from belief made daily into practice—and from the memory of what happens when that practice is broken.
Chotelal, a resident of Tilwar, tells his story plainly: he once took fodder from the Devbani for his goat. Just once. The goat died the next day.
He does not elaborate. He doesn’t need to. The story is not really about the goat. It is about the weight of that moment—the crossing of a boundary everyone understands without a map, the return of consequence. Whether one reads it as divine retribution or as the kind of coincidence that becomes belief when it arrives at exactly the right moment, the effect is the same. The story circulates. It has been circulating long enough to become part of how the village understands this place. Chotelal says it not to warn, exactly, but with the quiet certainty of someone who learned something and did not need to learn it twice.
This is how restraint is held in place—not by enforcement but by accumulated memory. The stories are the fences.
People graze their animals 8 to 10 kilometres away to keep them from the Devbani. Even dry wood that falls is returned, set aside for ceremonial fires. Nothing is taken. Only given.
Step just beyond the boundary of the Devbani, and the hill tells a different story. The land on the other side is bare—trees cut, invasive plants spreading across exposed soil, the hillside scraped open. The contrast is sharp enough to feel deliberate, though it isn’t. It is simply the difference between land that is held in common belief and land that is not.
There is a patch on the same hill that falls within what one might loosely call the zone of the Devbani—but it does not come under its protection. It is barren. The villagers notice this. They say it plainly: if not for the Devbani, even this land, the protected land, would look like that. The forest survives not because it is special in some inherent geological or ecological way, but because people have decided, collectively and across generations, to treat it as special. Inside, the soil holds moisture. Nearby wells stay recharged. The forest moderates something.
Tilwar’s Devbani is part of a much older pattern. Across this landscape, almost every village once had its own Devbani—a patch of land set apart, held in reverence, protected not by the state but by shared practice and belief. There was also the Rakhtanbani: land collectively left to grow wild for a few years, untouched by agreement, allowed to recover before anyone returned to it. These were not romantic gestures. They were functional, embedded in how communities understood their relationship to land—that the land needed periods of being left alone, that what you protected today fed you tomorrow.
Sambhaav’s work is rooted in exactly this: the effort to reignite these memories, to bring back into view the practices that sustained landscapes before they were simplified into resources. Devbani is one thread of that effort. It shows that the knowledge was never fully lost—it is still being practised, still alive in the daily aarti, in Chotelal’s story, in the children who come to the shrine at dusk and learn, without being formally taught, that there are things you do not take.
What may look like andhvishwas from the outside—superstition, irrational belief—is, from the inside, a working system. The offerings have changed. The brewed alcohol of an earlier generation has been replaced by shop-bought bottles that find their way into the hands of young men who were never supposed to have them. The story of Bhomidev has blurred with time. The melas go on, the possessions happen, the aarti rises at dawn and dusk. And the forest, through all of it, stands.
It has kept a forest growing on a hill in Tilwar for the better part of a century. The laws did not do that. The belief did.
Link to the Flickr album used here.