An elderly priest descending to Perwa village from a temple devoted to Lord Shiva on Perwa Hill where he lives, one of the many holy slopes in the region that is also home to leopards. Credit Richard Mosse
If you are coming to visit one of Raxa Collective’s properties in south India, and want a recommendation for a visit to another part of India, this may be on our to do list (we need to go check it out first, and will let you know):
Life Among the Leopards
Up at the top, an elderly priest begins to move around the sanctuary, a bearded figure wrapped in a shawl against the morning cold. I watch through binoculars as he begins the long, slow descent of the steps, perhaps two hundred of them, steadying himself with a stick. According to local legend, as a young man the priest committed a murder and sought sanctuary here, whereupon he was filled with the wild glory of God. Seeing his devotion, his pursuers relented, and he has spent his life in this remote place, serving Lord Shiva. On an outcrop directly above the steps, about halfway down the steep hillside, the oldest of the cubs has reappeared and is watching the frail old man pass below. Almost full-grown, it is a formidable creature, with muscular forelegs and a powerful jaw. It looks poised to pounce. Yet as the priest picks his way down, it makes no move, and he reaches the bottom safely, puttering off to run his morning errands in the village.
Jawai, in the Pali district of Western Rajasthan, is a remarkable place. In a country that has been changed almost beyond recognition by two decades of explosive economic growth, electrification here is patchy, the crops of mustard and wheat painstakingly harvested by hand. In 1946, Maharajah Umaid Singh of Jodhpur broke ground on a dam on the river Jawai, the most significant incursion of modernity into the landscape. The land around the dam is known informally by the river’s name.
The rich river-bottom soil, which for millennia has supported clans of Rajput farmers, is broken by dramatic solitary hills, stark uninhabited granite peaks, almost all of which are marked by a shrine or temple. Some, like the one at Perwa Hill, are lived in by the priests who tend them. Many are passed down from father to son. Through this country wander semi-nomadic herders of the Rabari tribe following ancient routes that take them south into Gujarat and east into Madhya Pradesh. And in the hills live dozens of leopards, predators who by day watch the humans go about their business, and by night come down to hunt, stalking the streets of their villages and killing their livestock.
The area around Jawai Lake, for millennia the home of Rajput farmers. Richard Mosse
Around the world, from the savannas of Kenya to Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, when big cats pose a threat to poor communities, the same sad story prevails: Cats kill valuable animals. Occasionally they kill people, often children, who are small enough to be carried away. And then people kill the cats. In the first three months of this year, leopard attacks across India left at least nine dead and 38 wounded. Yet in Jawai no one has been taken by a leopard for over 150 years. In 2013, a young naturalist called Adam Bannister came to Jawai to work for Anjali and Jaisal Singh, a New Delhi-based couple who wanted to set up a high-end safari operation. Bannister, a sandy-haired South African who had worked with leopards in South Africa and jaguars in Brazil, walked and drove around the region, talking to local people to find out the patterns of leopard movement. He quickly realized that Jawai was unique. Perhaps nowhere else in the world do humans and big cats live in such proximity with so little friction.
The result of Bannister’s research and the Singhs’ experience (their company, Sujan, runs successful tiger and elephant safaris elsewhere in India and in Kenya) is a luxurious tented camp designed to have a low environmental impact. Its 11 tents, located in a field bought from a local farmer, can house 22 people at full capacity, and staff are recruited, as much as possible, from the community. The permanent structures — a garage for jeeps, staff accommodation and offices — are hidden behind a high bamboo fence, giving guests like me the illusion that they are living a little closer to nature than is in fact the case. Every day, just before dawn and again at dusk, Bannister and his team treat the tourists — often serial safarigoers, equipped with expensive long lenses and wardrobes of khaki clothing — to a bouncy and sometimes hair-raising jeep ride through the countryside, past antelope, porcupine, crocodiles and all manner of bird-life, to look for leopards.
I first visited the camp last October, looking for a place to unwind after a family wedding in Delhi. On that visit, Bannister took me to watch a mother and her cubs prowl about outside a cave partway up a hill called Nag Bawasi, which lies right on the outskirts of the nearby Sena (“Army”) village, founded, according to tradition, by demobbed Rajput soldiers. The mother, Bannister explained, had earlier that day killed a goat on the Sena cricket pitch and dragged the carcass up the hill to eat. By the time we came upon them in Bannister’s jeep, the leopard family was satiated, relaxed. As dawn broke, the sounds of the village waking up brought home how startlingly close they were to human habitation. Barking dogs, a transistor radio, the coughing of a generator. Though the elevation creates a natural boundary between the two worlds — the cats above and the humans below — there was no illusion that we were in an uninhabited place, some game reserve or national park. The morning light revealed sleepy men and women walking along paths, each one carrying a container of water, a can or a steel lota, on their way to defecate among the scrub and the drifts of plastic waste.
Read the whole story here.
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