At a Distance: Leopards of Jawai

Siddhant Rastogi, BSC economic History year 2

Image: Siddhant Rastogi

Photographed is Jivda (जिवदा), a female leopard, and two of her three cubs amid Jawai’s granite hills. Located in western Rajasthan, Jawai is a rugged, semi-arid landscape home to scrub forest, and sparse human settlement. Often introduced as ‘the land of leopards’, the region is renowned for India’s densest free-ranging leopard populations, alongside striped hyenas, sloth bears, crocodiles, and several hundred species of resident and migratory birds. 

The maintenance of the region’s unique ecology is best attributed to human-leopard coexistence practices of local village communities, which venerate leopards as sacred, leading to rare conflicts despite the presence of livestock. Nevertheless, growing tourism, habitat fragmentation, and encroachment threaten this delicate balance. As Jawai becomes more visible to the world, the practices that once sustained its ecology quietly risk becoming the first casualties of that attention.