Suján, Rajasthan, India

Suján is India’s great conservation success story, the result of 20 years of passion for the country’s pristine wilderness, married with peerless hospitality.

Tigers at the atmospheric ruins of Ranthambore.

The hills of Jawai, in western Rajasthan, are around 850 million years old. They emerge from the plain in peaks and undulations of igneous rock, striated deep grey and rosy beige, eroded and shaped by countless millennia of winds and monsoons. Tall euphorbia clings tenaciously to their sides, bristling tentacles of vivid lime-green capped with scarlet blossoms. Cactus and mesquite cast pools and trickles of shade. When the sun rises – a perfect orange disc in the muddled light of dawn – it casts a delicate pink net over masses of slumbering stone.

Jawai’s flats are dotted with villages, set in a patchwork of castor, wheat and mustard fields. Nomadic Rabari tribesmen, tall and ascetic in white djotis and vermilion turbans, drive their goats and sheep along dirt roads and through sparse bush. Hindi devotionals carry faintly on the air from temples built into the sides of rocks, along with the persistent tak-tak-tak pulse of generators and the lowing of buffalo and, in the dark-blue evenings, the acrid scent of woodsmoke.

Family tented suite, Suján Jawai.

But Jawai has another resident population, one that’s been here for centuries: leopard. The cave networks and crevasses in the rocks are an ideal habitat for the cats; they populate the entire area surrounding Jawai Bandh, the dam built in 1946 to contain the Jawai river – now a lake, and home to dozens of bird species and the large freshwater crocodiles called muggers.

The coexistence of man and big cats elsewhere in India – population 1.3 billion – has at times been a fraught one; but here, the last time a human was killed by a leopard was more than 150 years ago. I learned this at Jawai Leopard Camp, which was opened by the Indian travel company Suján in December 2013. I was its inaugural guest, visiting on assignment for the Financial Times; and I wondered aloud then about the viability of pursuing wildlife conservation in the midst of what looked, bar those extraordinary rock formations, more or less like any other stretch of agrarian Rajasthan.

Suján’s founder Jaisal Singh.

But that was the point, said Jaisal Singh, Suján’s 41-year-old founder – to put this unique-in-the-world symbiosis between charismatic megafauna and equally charismatic human culture at the centre of the story. Staging wildlife experiences the way they happen in the Maasai Mara or the Pantanal in Brazil would be disingenuous, not to mention impossible. Somehow, people and predators have sorted out how to share this tract of western Rajasthan; this, he said, is what we want Jawai’s guests to see.

Wilderness is in Singh’s bones – and in his pedigree. He spent parts of his childhood in Ranthambore, the one-time Mughal stronghold that in the late 17th century became the private hunting grounds of the Maharajas of Jaipur; its extraordinary clifftop fort was once home to 45,000 people. His mother and father, Malvika and Tejbir Singh, are eminent Indian journalists and conservationists who have documented Ranthambore’s tiger population for almost 50 years; together with Malvika’s brother, Valmik Thapar (who is still considered one of the preeminent tiger experts in the world), they helped map the 1335sq km that became Ranthambore National Park, established by Indira Gandhi in 1979.

Yusuf Ansari, Anjali Singh and Jaisal Singh.

In 2000, at the age of 21, Singh – in an effort, he once joked, to evade university – went to his mother with a business plan: why not build an exclusive tented camp, adjacent to the family farm (which abuts Ranthambore), and write the playbook for super high-end safaris in India? She gave him the land, and six months later Sher Bagh – the first Suján property – opened to the public.

In the 20 years since, Jaisal and his wife, Anjali Singh, have created a small portfolio of destinations that curate, with thoughtfulness and sophistication, the stories of Rajasthan. The region’s landscapes, textures, and history – from medieval princes to Mughal emperors and the pomp and pageantry of 19th- and 20th-century Rajputana – are shared through artisanship, design, cuisine, and up-close but uncontrived experiences of both wilderness and culture. Singh describes his wish for Suján to purvey “transformative experiences; of our natural and cultural heritage – not just through celebrating our many cuisines, tracking and observing wildlife, exploring a historic fortress, or riding horses through the rural countryside, but very importantly, also through human interaction.”

The pool at Sher Bagh.

Jaisal Singh’s experience spans the breadth of modern travel, from bar-setting service standards to pioneering re-wilding efforts. He is a vice president and executive board member of Relais & Chateaux (of which elite alliance Suján’s properties are all members); he is also a member of the Rajasthan state wildlife board’s key decision-making standing committee. His paternal ancestors helped map New Delhi, alongside Sir Edwin Lutyens; he plays polo with princes and knows his Vougeot from his Vosne-Romanée. But he can also track apex predators with the skill of a seasoned guide.

This wide-ranging remit – as I learned on a return trip to Jawai last February, when I also spent several days at Sher Bagh – colours the whole Suján experience. It takes a more urbane form at the Singhs’ Suján RajMahal Palace – one of the Jaipur royal family’s pleasure redoubts, which Suján took over management of in 2015 and almost instantly parlayed into one of Rajasthan’s most exclusive stays. And it leans toward design and rural heritage at The Serai, opened outside Jaisalmer in 2008 – a high-style fever dream of India under canvas in the sands of the Thar Desert, where the suites have walled gardens and rosy local-stone floors, and at night hundreds of candles fill alcoves and line paths, and nomadic Manganiyar musical troupes perform their haunting ballads under the stars.

Bush dinner with Jaisal and Anjali Singh.

Staff at Suján Sher Bagh.

Conservation, though, is a – the – core Suján value. The idea for a wilderness camp in the Jawai area was in the back of Singh’s mind for years, but it was only in spring 2013 that he, Anjali and long-time family friend Yusuf Ansari – an author, historian and amateur naturalist, who joined Suján full-time in 2006 as vice president and director of experiences – acted on his instinct. By early December, the 10 contemporary-cool tents – big, airy, monochrome, hung with large-scale black and white photographs of animals and landscape, and dressed in hits of bold red recalling the Rabaris’ turbans – were ready for guests.

At Jawai, Suján’s founding tenets – of protecting the land and wildlife, the local culture, and the local communities – are adapted for an ecosystem where people and animals share top billing. As a guest this is experienced in myriad ways, from Suján-built schools (13 at last count, which have educated almost 5700 children to date), to the Rabari tribesmen who greet you in camp or by the side of the road (and who occasionally help out with a bit of impromptu leopard tracking), to Jawai’s mobile medical primary care service, which you might spot in one of the five villages surrounding the reserve (it operates six days a week).

Children at one of the schools built by Suján.

Engaging the community has also helped the Singhs in their re-wilding effort – a significantly more difficult undertaking here than in many other countries. India has strict and complex land ceiling laws, making individual ownership of agricultural land beyond what’s stipulated by statutory regulations challenging. Suján’s strategy – the slow but steady buying or leasing of small but critically contiguous pieces of grazing and farmland – has resulted in Jawai’s original 30 acres proliferating several times over, in full compliance with those regulations.

Slow work, but it pays off; land that was farmed two years ago is now indistinguishable from the bush surrounding it, creating wildlife corridors that let animals range, feed and reproduce unmolested. The dream is to eventually connect all the way to Kumbhalgarh National Park, some 25 miles to the east.

Community engagement is part of Suján’s philosophy.

In the bush, Jawai’s head of field, Vedant Thite, trains up local villagers to become trackers, arming them with comms and GPS systems and long-range binoculars; they call in sightings throughout the day and evening, and contribute significantly to the research that has allowed Thite’s team to identify and gather data on 55 leopards in the area. Leopards are shy, solitary animals, and nocturnal hunters. They repair to the cool safety of caves at first light, and descend when the day’s heat begins to fade. I’ve had a handful of thrillingly close sightings at Jawai, including a rather spectacular porcupine takedown. But other times, the hills, and the cat’s natural reticence, meant we trailed from a few dozen yards away as it made its way down, pausing to loll, groom, or simply watch the horizon before reaching the plain, where, if we were lucky, we’d shadow it more closely for a bit.

Royal tented suite, Suján Jawai.

The Relais & Chateaux standards were admirably upheld in the bush. In the mornings, there were patisserie and omelettes with pots of rich milky masala chai at bivouacs that appeared as if by magic, far from camp; in the evenings, G&Ts by the lake, with a laden table and paraffin lanterns glowing in the rosy post-sunset dusk as, under a violet sky, we noshed on samosas and sipped champagne.

Jaipur is an ideal halfway point between leopards and tigers, though Suján’s RajMahal Palace would be an entirely worthwhile add-on to any India itinerary. It was originally built in 1729, and parts of it are still used by the royal family (the pin-up handsome maharaja, 22-year-old Padmanabh Singh – Pacho to his polo mates – likes to train in the gym). Not a single colour in the spectrum was neglected in the redesign, which is a maximalist’s dream (a full 46 bespoke wall coverings were produced for the 13 rooms and suites, the restaurant, and various sitting rooms and lounges). Butlers in white livery and ice-pink turbans patrol the wide lawns and poolside terrace, where guests sip and sup under striped pink pavilions. And there is the added fillip of the Singhs’ social reach, which affords guests supreme access to cultural sites and pursuits, both private and public, across the Pink City.

Suján RajMahal Palace

To my mind, though, if there is a soul of Suján, it’s Sher Bagh. The camp turns 20 this October, which may account for the unmistakable best-in-class air of ultra-competence among the staff here. But then, I had the Sher Bagh A-Team at my disposal: besides Ansari –a peerless guide, who as a rule donates his fee to Suján’s conservation fund – I was with Salim Ali, one of the most respected and longest-serving trackers in Ranthambore. We arrived from Jaipur at lunchtime; at 2:30 we were in a jeep, headed for the park’s main entrance, a 10-minute drive from camp. Not an hour later, we were a few long strides away from a large female, known as T84 (an unofficially as Arrowhead, for the markings on her brow), and her two adult cubs, our jeep trundling slowly backwards in reverse as they strolled languidly towards us on the road. Three tigers, walking in tandem as if hitting their marks: the cameras whirred and clicked, clicked and whirred.

We were close to Jogi Mahal, the ruin of a pleasure palace on one of Ranthambore’s lakes; as a child, Jaisal Singh camped under the shade of its enormous banyan tree. These days, though, Jogi Mahal is in easily-accessed Zone 3 of the park; so within about 15 minutes we were one in a scrum of jeeps and canters, the larger people-carrier style trucks often used by government officials and day trippers. This isn’t as unusual as one would wish. Ranthambore isn’t the Serengeti; with India comes the human factor, and its critical mass around tigers can feel pretty massed indeed.

the living/dining tent at Suján Jawai.

Which brings us to the Suján USP that really counts here: form. That Sher Bagh is a gorgeous camp – evoking the 1920s glamour of the Raj, its 12 tents hand-stitched in Jodhpur and their interiors filled with hand-made, campaign-style furniture – is undeniable. That the food, the ambience, the spa treatments, library, fireside cocktails and entertainment are all unfailingly top-notch, also true; Singh himself will sometimes cook his signature jungli maas for guests, and Sher Bagh’s bartenders could hold their own in Mayfair.

But if you’re a big cat appassionato, and you’re here to see tigers, your reason for choosing Sher Bagh is simple: Team Suján has more collective experience, skill and expertise with these predators, and this park, than anyone else operating here. Ranthambhore’s tiger reserve is divided into 10 zones and most of the safari vehicles are each allocated a zone to mitigate crowding. But Sher Bagh’s guides have long since mastered the arts of advance booking and zone-change requests. And they know every last path, hill, gorge, wood and lake, of primary Zones 1 through 5, and buffer zones 6 through 10 as well (because Singh’s parents and uncle, it bears mentioning again, mapped the entire place). So while our sighting of T84 and her progeny was a bit of a crowded one, just as often – thanks to the skill of the team – we were entirely alone with whatever tiger we found, for as much as half an hour, before anyone else showed.

In a way, it’s a minor miracle that tigers are spotted with any frequency at all here. Only about a third of Ranthambore is accessible to vehicles; the rest is protected wilderness territory, and the cats move in and out of it at will. Add to this the fact that tigers are incredibly adept at the art of invisibility: senior, seasoned guides will relay stories of scanning hills, valleys or forest for ages, looking futilely for a cat they’d spotted some ways off, only to lower their binoculars and find it materialised in the grass three metres away, watching its watcher intently. Bengal tigers are huge – as much as 30 per cent again as a large African lion; the paw of a big male can be the size of a human face. But they are as elusive as leopard when they want to be.

Anjali Singh at Ranthambore National Park.

To track and observe tigers in their habitat is to understand their almost mythic place in the Indian consciousness. The jungle’s own eyes and ears play a thrilling role; monkeys, sambar deer, even peacocks will set off their call-and-response alarms as a tiger enters their territory, sounding them louder and more urgently as the predator approaches, and setting the hairs on the back of your neck up. When a tiger roars – a sound very different from, and not nearly as common as, a lion’s roar – it hits your chest with a whump and can carry for miles.

There are currently around 65 tigers to be found in Ranthambore, and the good guides are on a first-name basis, so to speak, with many of them. There is Sultana, an aggressive female who likes to charge (not long ago she landed a hard, snarling thump with her front paws on the hood of a jeep carrying a high-ranking foreign diplomat; rumour had it he was so unnerved he left Ranthambore that same day). There is the Star Male, named for his unusual face markings, a handsome but retiring type who we found lounging quietly in a shady gully late one afternoon, after not having shown himself to Ansari or Salim Ali for months. There was legendary Machhli, head of a female line that is famously long on charisma; much loved (and much photographed), she was given a state funeral when she died in 2016.

And then there is the place that is Ranthambore itself, its fort temples crumbling, its forests full of tumbledown, overgrown cenotaphs and pleasure pavilions, interspersed with banyan trees as large as palaces; a half-ruin, half-wilderness so redolent of lost history you’d be happy to explore it, tigers or no. History, culture, man and the wild have intersected, and been interdependent, here as in few other places. Spend a hazy, burnished afternoon in its far reaches, and you understand entirely the Singhs’ lifelong, multigenerational love for it.

This year marks Suján’s 20th anniversary in business. There were to have been festivities in the offing all through the late summer and fall, and plans had begun to take shape for a fifth camp not far from Jawai, one that would feature a pioneering exploration of the human-animal connection.

Relais & Chateaux cuisine.

Sumptuous tent accommodation at Suján Sher Bagh.

All now on hold. As I write, it’s six weeks to the day since I left Ranthambore, and almost the entire world is sheltering in place. The camps and Palace have been closed for two weeks. The Singhs, quarantined in Delhi, remain positive, heartened by those guests who have postponed rather than cancelled their bookings, and finding ways to keep supporting the communities that rely on Suján for healthcare, education and livelihoods. None of us know when travel will resume, and the thread of these stories will be picked back up. But when it is, the Singhs – its most capable, thoughtful storytellers – will be waiting.