Jawai

About Jawai

Three hours west of Udaipur the Aravallis stop being hills and become bare granite domes sitting straight out of flat scrub country. That is Jawai: a dam, a scatter of Rabari shepherd villages, and roughly fifty leopards living on the rocks directly above them. There is no national park boundary here and no fence. For a century the Rabari have treated the leopards as belonging to the temples in the caves, the leopards have kept to the granite, and neither has killed the other. It is one of the few places in India where big cats and people share a landscape rather than a schedule — which is why the point of coming is understanding the place, not collecting a sighting.