In the ancient
hills of Jawai in northwest India, locals and big cats have peacefully
coexisted for centuries like nowhere else in the world. As safarigoers
arrive to experience the unique environment, can the harmony last?
JUST BEFORE DAWN, on
the whitewashed steps leading up to the Shiva temple on Perwa Hill, we
find four leopards. A mother and three cubs, they loll about, rubbing
against each other like oversize domestic cats. The guide is shining a
powerful flashlight, and when it catches their eyes, the glint is a
startling yellow-green. Languorously stretching, occasionally changing
position, they seem unconcerned by the humans watching them from a jeep
at the foot of the hill. As the sun nears the horizon, the sky turns
pale and the contours of the hill appear, an ancient granite dome
whorled and pocked by erosion, full of caves and fissures. Dawn breaks,
bathing the rock in a peachy glow, and the cats slink out of sight.
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.
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.
In parts of Africa
where leopards’ prey is more scarce, their territories can be huge, on
the order of several hundred square miles for an adult male. Females
will have territories within that of a dominant male, staying close to
places where they can raise their young. If a cub is female, a mother
will cede territory to her. If it’s male, it will usually be pushed out,
forced to roam more widely. In Jawai, where territories consist of a
network of hills connected by corridors of farmland, leopards needn’t
travel far for food and do not feel threatened by the humans around
them. It is generally in places where humans have made attempts to kill
or expel leopards, such as in Uttarakhand, that attacks are more common.
Over a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs at the camp, Bannister
explains his own theory, that the big cats that become “man eaters” are
old or weak, too slow to catch other game or too toothless to fight. In
Jawai, strong young males are always coming into conflict with their
elders, who may well be taken care of before they become a problem.
Though leopards can live for 20 years here, Bannister has never sighted
one older than 10.
When he’s not out
driving or chatting to the guests, Bannister holes up in a little office
next to the camp’s kitchen garden and updates the database he keeps of
every leopard sighting, creating entries not unlike Facebook profiles
for individual cats. In 2014, he sighted one female leopard — he named
her Naina — 75 times. In a month when he tracked her with particular
attention, he discovered that she had killed at least three goats, three
dogs, two buffalo calves and a young cow, all from a single village.
For a poor community, this is a significant economic loss. Yet across
Jawai, the leopards seem to be viewed as a blessing. People stand on
their roofs to watch them. They take pleasure in their presence.
SPRING IN JAWAI is a
time to watch flights of waterbirds land on the lake and eat raw
chickpeas out of the pod. The vivid green wheat fields look enhanced,
postproduced, as if Shah Rukh Khan might suddenly burst out and sing a
sentimental movie song. It is the time of Holi, the festival celebrated
across India in a riotous carnival of water jets and colored dye, a time
in which differences are resolved by water fights and the senses of
hardworking people are pleasantly deranged by opium and the cannabis
preparation bhang. On the night of Holika Dahan, the eve of the
festival, villagers light bonfires to reenact the destruction of the
evil demoness. Climb a hill and you can see them all across the
district, beacons in the darkness.
On top of Nag Bawasi,
rowdy Sena boys chant and sing, their fire (made of truck tires) sending
flames up into the sky. Down in the village, others compete to pull a
20-foot pole out of the flames, carrying it around like a giant torch.
Sparks fly, and I have to duck out of the way of the Bacchanalian
procession. Tonight, with all the smoke and noise, there are no leopards
in sight, but the religious significance that attaches to the hill and
to the other high places in Jawai is part of the reason that they form a
sanctuary for the cats. People do not like to kill living things near a
temple, and locals do not have reason to climb these hills, except to
worship.
The next morning I
watch Bannister chase village children around with a mineral water
bottle full of dubious colored liquid. The kids give as good as they
get, drenching him and squealing with laughter. Someone sprays my shirt
pink, someone else dumps blue and green powder on my head and a raffish
village elder offers me a shot of syrupy lime-green moonshine, which,
lightweight that I am, I really can’t face so early in the day. Others
have no such qualms. Around me there are bloodshot eyes, woozy grins. A
musical ensemble consisting of a couple of large double-headed dhol drums and a tal pan sets up a clattering rhythm, and men dance the gair,
clacking long sticks together as they circle a shrine. Through this
chaos, Bannister genially shepherds a small group of tourists, including
an elderly English couple celebrating their golden wedding anniversary.
He is a man performing a balancing act, fiercely committed to the
leopards yet aware that the very presence of tourists is a sign that
faster times are coming to this place, in the form of Internet access
and cellphones and members of a younger generation who know what things
cost and are not sentimental about the old ways.
One of the guides at
the camp is Varun Kutty, a dapper young man who grew up far from here in
the Himalayan foothills of Himachal Pradesh. He has made it his
business to understand the local culture, much as Bannister has made it
his business to get to know the wildlife. On the evening of Holi, after I
send my paint-spattered clothes to the camp laundry, he arranges for me
to visit a manor house in Falna, to meet Thakur Abhimanyu Singh, the
village’s leader. Here, the thakurs are the apex of the human system,
just as the leopards are the apex of the wild one. Though Jawai is by no
means a timeless place, it is overwhelmingly Hindu and the caste system
retains real power. Modern forms of authority like the Indian Forest
Service operate here, and modern politics too, but in practice, feudal
lords like the thakur are the ones who settle disputes and receive
fealty, much as their forefathers did hundreds of years ago.
We arrive as a huge
gair dance is circling through the courtyard. The thakur, a friendly,
mustachioed man with the placid good manners of one accustomed to being
obeyed, sits cross-legged on a platform near the main gate, heavy rings
on his fingers and a pair of mobile phones on the sheet in front of him.
Stick-carrying men file in and greet him before heading into the dance.
Women congregate in a corner, forming a densely packed crowd. In
between namastes, the thakur points out various local worthies who are
part of the line — a bank manager, a railway official. Some dancers have
immense panache, clacking sticks with the man in front and the man
behind in swoops and stylized sword-fighting moves. Others lollop along
like drunks doing the conga at a wedding. In front of us, a line of old
men are watching the proceedings. They are, to my eye, almost
identically dressed, in clean white cotton. Most have mustaches and all
wear pagaris, turbans of various colors and designs that allow the
thakur to name the caste of each one: “This man in pink is an ironsmith,
this man is a farmer. This pink is for a mali, a gardener, the red
spots are Meghwal, the ones with the dark red are Rabari, the ones with
many colors, those are Rajput men….”
It is something to be a
Rajput man. The thakur is a Rajput. The princely dynasties in Jodhpur
and Udaipur are Rajputs. The cardinal Rajput virtue is bravery, not
forgiveness or humility. Ordinary Rajputs are arable farmers. As
Bannister puts it, “If leopards ate wheat or mustard, you can bet they
wouldn’t last long.” The herders whose livestock are threatened are
Rabari, not Rajput. The Rabari are semi-settled nomads, with a different
view of the world. Women conduct business affairs (and hold a lot of
the family wealth in the portable form of jewelry) while the men roam
with the animals. Whether it is pressure from their land-owning Rajput
neighbors or some aspect of their culture (perhaps stemming from their
veneration of Mata Devi, the mother goddess) that leads them to accept
the leopards, they are the ones who are called on to exercise
forbearance. Fatalism has its limits. They raise high barriers of thorns
round their animal pens at night.
How long can Jawai’s
fragile entente between humans and leopards persist? For the moment, the
tourist footprint is very light. Jawai camp is small, exclusive and
maintains good relations with the community. But more cars and jeeps are
arriving, bringing people to look at the wondrous cats. Bannister
believes that, unless some kind of regulation is put in place, the
leopards could migrate east into the high Aravalli Mountains. Creating a
national park and displacing the farmers and herders would destroy the
lifeworld of Jawai’s people and remove the leopards’ main source of
food. Such a park would have to be stocked with wild game to make up for
the vanished livestock.
On my last day at
Jawai, I visit a temple not far from Sena village, on a hill called Dev
Giri. On the way up, at its base, are monuments to two jeeva samadhis,
yogis who had themselves buried alive, leaving behind their material
bodies and the cycle of death and rebirth. On the peak is a temple to a
dark goddess, Kalka Devi, a vengeful aspect of the Mother Goddess who is
worshiped here in a natural cave that reaches way back into the hill.
Outside, rotting scraps of clothing hang on a tree, votive offerings
from the parents of sick children. Inside, a flight of steps leads up to
a stone bearing a relief image of the goddess alongside her vehicle, a
black dog. High on the rock above her head, black bees swarm over a huge
lobelike hive. I walk up toward her. She has staring eyes. She carries a
severed head and is garlanded in skulls. After a few paces, I look
down. Beside my bare feet are a set of oily paw prints, the tracks of
the leopard who walked here before me.
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