A goat goes missing sometimes in Jawai, and nobody really gets angry about it. That tells you most of what you need to know about this stretch of Rajasthan, home to one of the highest densities of wild leopards in India, and somehow, almost no conflict between them and the people living alongside them. The leopards den in caves that also shelter old shrines, cross paths daily with herders moving cattle and have done so for generations treating each other less like a threat and more like neighbors who happen to cross path. It’s a rare kind of coexistence and that pulled MESHAH here for its debut campaign.
The Jawai region sits in the ancient belt of the granite hills that form the Aravalli range, nestled somewhere between Jodhpur and Udaipur. Geologists call the rock here Erinpura Granite, among the oldest exposed rocks on the Indian subcontinent. Jawai doesn’t fit neatly into any category. It is neither wilderness nor settlement, somewhere in between where the rocks and the wildlife and the people have been figuring each other out for a very long time. It’s a land where an ancient granite formation, human-wildlife interaction, culture, and history evolved together over millions of years.
The MESHAH team shot its first campaign here at SUJÁN JAWAI, a conservation- focused camp, tucked among the villages and boulder formations, ten tented suites sit in palettes of grey and beige set low against the granite so the surrounding landscape stays the point. The camp is intentionally understated, designed not to compete with its surroundings but to dissolve into them. It follows a simple philosophy of employing local people, protect wildlife, and leaving the lightest possible footprint. Part of every stay goes back into the villages themselves and the camp doesn’t dress that up much that how people and wildlife share this land is the whole point of their conservation work. The guides are Rabari, walking guests through a place they’ve known their entire lives, past nearly 300 temples and shrines, some of them centuries old, where a leopard isn’t just a wildlife, it’s something closer to family. Some of that work is quiet and practical, trackers who monitor leopards day to day, patrols that keep the area safe for them but most of it looks like people living the way they always have, with little more support from a silent hero behind them.
Life in Jawai is measured less by the clock than by the changing light. The Rabari community marches to the beat of its own drum. They were not always people of one place. Before Jawai, they moved constantly, following their herds across Rajasthan and parts of Gujarat, chasing water and the seasons. Over time, they changed. Villages emerged. Roots grew and wandering became a settled, pastoral life. Jawai became home. It’s not very hard to understand why they stayed. The land offered everything they needed, water, shelter, grazing and asked for nothing in return. The only unwritten rule was that the hills belonged to everyone, a silent pact between people and wildcats. Coexistence here is not the absence of predators, but the presence of mutual respect. The men leave their villages at first light, leading goats, sheep and cattle out into the hills, walking for hours across terrain until their white garments merge with the pale granite and gold lit grasslands, becoming indistinguishable from the landscape itself.
While the men disappear into the hills, the Rabari women keep a different rhythm. They stay back, tending households, preparing meals, caring for children, milking cattle and practicing a craft passed down through generations as family heirlooms. In Jawai, clothing functions almost like a language. Women sway through the area wearing richly embroidered garments adorned with mirrors and shells, expressing their creativity, aesthetics and identity. Rabari girls learn the art of embroidery at a very young age, gradually creating textiles that become treasured possessions for their wedding. Their textile is more than adornment, it is a biography of the community. Every Rabari woman carries fragments of her life in the clothes she wears, colourful skirts (ghaghra), embroidered blouses (kapadun) and a veil draped over head and shoulders (odhni or ludi). The mirrors stitched into her odhni catch the sun with every movement, dazzling the eyes of any onlooker, while the intricate geometric motifs, embroidered with hours of labour and an instinctive understanding of colour, make the clothing come to life. The beauty is that no two pieces are entirely alike. Their colours, crimson, scarlet, dark blue and black too, are deeply attached to the landscape of Jawai, giving contrast to the golden scrublands and becoming the landscape’s brightest expression.
Silver announces her before she even speaks. Bangles stack from wrist to elbow, large nose rings, chunky silver chokers, earring heavy enough to leave a mark, none of it is subtle and none of it is meant to be. Even her anklets come in two languages. Some are solid, heavy kada, thick bands of silver worn close against the ankle bone, others are payal, strung with tiny bells called ghungroo, a small sound trailing her across the rocks. Married women carry a marker of their own ivory bangles from shoulders to elbow, a quiet announcement of their marital status, visible even from a distance. And on the neck and forearms of some women, fine dotted tattoos called trajva, geometric clusters, scorpions, snakes, the sun and moon worked into the skin crafted by mixing lamp soot with tannin drawn from tree bark. They mark marital status, spiritual identity, even a woman’s own life story. A ward, against the evil eye, worn the way charms are worn elsewhere, except this one can never be lost or taken off. Even the youngest wear protection of some kind, silver placed on infants almost from birth, the belief the same, only the form differs. Underneath it all sits something practical too, silver as a woman’s own wealth, carried on the body, safe in the one place that travels wherever she does.
The Rabari men carry their own language too, wrapped and draped rather than woven with embroidery. Almost everywhere, white rules, a loose cotton kedia tied at the chest, a dhoti beneath it, sometimes a waistcoat layered over, the whole ensemble kept plain against the colour worn so freely by the women beside them. The kedia is made to grow with its wearer, its ties adjustable at the chest and sleeves, so one stitched for a young man can still be worn years later, as he ages and his body changes. The turban is the one place that breaks the rule of colour restraint. Worn daily to shield the head from the hot desert wind, practical before it was ever decorative. Wrapping style and colour change across the state and even within the Jawai’s own villages, age seems to decide as much as tradition does. Younger men wear red and scarlet, vivid and unmissable. Elders wear white, immaculate against greying beards, a colour read locally as purity, wisdom and peace, the turban itself easing into the same quiet the man has grown into. It is the red that stands out most in the hills, against the grey of the granite and the plain white worn below it, that red is impossible to miss.
Jawai never really belonged to one kingdom. For centuries, it bordered the regions of Mewar and Marwar, an area claimed by both, held fully by neither. Maybe that’s why coexistence came naturally here, a place built on overlap, not any boundary. On the MESHAH team’s last morning in the region, after everything had already been packed into the vehicles, they went back out one more time, not to shoot anything, just to see the place once more before leaving. The light was still coming up slow and gold, the way it does most mornings here, somewhere between dark and dawn, like gold emerging from coal. Birds were loud and somewhere below the ridge, a goat bell kept ringing, faint and out of sight. That’s when they found her, on a granite ledge much like the ones that shelter leopards all across these hills, a leopard cub, nine months old, tumbling down the slope with clumsy confidence, only something the young can pull off. She reached for a low branch, lost her grip and climbed up anyway, a little unsteady, a little proud of herself. For a few minutes she just sat there watching them through her amber eyes. No fear around, nothing guarded, just a cub being young and free, on land that shaped and sheltered leopards like her for years longer than anyone could count, on land that never chose a side. They left Jawai in the same gold and dark light, except this time it didn’t feel like they’d witnessed something rare. It felt like something that simply belonged.
Written for Meshah Journal by Noopur Shalini
