5 min readJul 5, 2026 12:26 AM IST
First published on: Jun 29, 2026 at 12:26 PM IST
Following the statement of the Rajsamand MP opposing the proposed tiger reserve in Kumbhalgarh, a reactive skirmish has broken out in the state. The MP, from the erstwhile royal family, has urged the Centre to drop the plan, stating that Kumbhalgarh “has never been a traditional tiger habitat”. The pushback is coming from erstwhile forest officers, some of them jagirdars of the former Mewar state. The tigers, one suspects, would twitch their whiskers on being informed that they had never actually been there. We Mewaris, on the other hand, can’t take this as lightly.
Mewar stretches across south-central Rajasthan, from the Aravalli hills in the northwest to the Gujarat border in the south, and from Ajmer in the north to the Hadoti plateau in the east. Udaipur is its historic heart. The Kumbhalgarh forest was a royal hunting reserve as most of India’s present-day national parks and sanctuaries once were. The right to hunt a tiger, notably, rested with the Maharana alone. Not with the other royals. Not with the aristocracy. A leopard was fair game for the nobility, a tiger was not.
A peer-reviewed paper in BT’s International Journal (2022) by Bhanu Kapil and Uma Bhati of BN University, Udaipur, has dug into the Haqikat Bahidas — the official shikar diaries of the Mewar rulers — and found that in 1838-39, Maharana Sardar Singh was receiving regular field intelligence about tigers near Udaipur. His men encountered them at Kamlod, Tikhlya, Urjankhura. The Rajputana Gazetteers of the Mewar Residency record that tigers were found in the Aravallis “from Kumbhalgarh to Kotra.”
Sherlock Holmes had warned Watson: “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. One begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” The data, in this case, is considerable. Jaswant Singh Nathawat, former wildlife warden of Kumbhalgarh and park director of Ranthambore, has described in a video how he himself came across a tiger in Kumbhalgarh-Raoli Tatgarh sanctuary in 1967. My grandfather, TH Tehsin, later vice mayor of Udaipur, encountered tigers in Mewar on several occasions. An archival register from the Raoli Forest Rest House (FRH) in the Todgarh-Raoli Wildlife Sanctuary records tigers being shot between 1953 and 1955.
The concern about the Raika pastoral community and their camels is genuine and deserves to be addressed, though it is worth noting that camels are not the tiger’s preferred quarry. The question of how a tiger reserve notification affects traditional grazing rights is one worth working through carefully with the communities involved. It has a process: Community consultation, buffer zones, co-existence provisions designed precisely because these situations are not new. We have navigated them in forests far more contested than Kumbhalgarh. It would be a pity to foreclose the conversation before it has properly begun.
There is also the question of what a tiger does to a landscape once it is back. Ecologists call it a keystone species, which is a polite way of saying its presence matters to things that have no obvious connection to tigers. Deer that know a predator is around don’t linger stripping a riverbank bare — they keep moving, nervously, which turns out to be rather good for the riverbank. The wolves of Yellowstone demonstrated this memorably. Kumbhalgarh’s wolves, leopards and hyenas lived alongside tigers for millennia. They did not find the arrangement disagreeable.
The Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary, our family’s regular summer haunt since my childhood, is already a success story. Leopards, wolves, sloth bears, hyenas, jungle cats, golden jackals, caracals, honey badgers — it is almost like someone ticking off a field guide chapter. These forests predate British documentation, and the great wall of Kumbhalgarh, second only to the Great Wall of China. Many naturalists believe the terrain, cover, and prey base make it suitable for reintroduction. The region has historically been a tiger migration corridor from Gujarat through Panarwa to Jaisamand into Madhya Pradesh. What’s missing is not the habitat. It is the tiger, and that is a human doing, not an ecological verdict.
The Aravallis of Mewar housed tigers, then lost them fairly recently, and seem, on the evidence, to be in adequate shape for a second chance.
Whether they get one is, as usual, less a question of ecology than of who is inconvenienced by the answer.
Tehsin, former honorary wildlife warden, Udaipur, is the author, most recently, of The Great Indian Safari
There is also the question of what a tiger does to a landscape once it is back. Ecologists call it a keystone species, which is a polite way of saying its presence matters to things that have no obvious connection to tigers (image used for representation only). 
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