SINCE 1960 · THREE GENERATIONS
Our Story
A forester, a doctor and a camp on the edge of Ranthambhore. More than sixty years of one family and one forest.
Nature comes first
The landscape leads. Rooms are spread out among the trees, and the land between them belongs to the birds and animals that have returned to it.
What we offer is time in a place that has been allowed to heal, and a seat at the campfire where these stories are still told.
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Khem Villas is a jungle camp, and it is also the latest chapter of a longer story. Fateh Singh Rathore spent fifty years giving Ranthambhore back to its tigers. His son Goverdhan spent the next thirty giving the villages around the park a reason to want them there. Khem Villas, named for Fateh’s wife Khem, is where the two stories meet: land on the edge of the park, rewilded by hand over nearly forty years, with a camp set quietly inside it. To stay here is to join the family’s journey.
Fateh and Khem with Goverdhan, early 1960s.
Part one
The forester
1960
Mount Abu
Fateh Singh Rathore joins the Rajasthan Forest Service in 1960 and is soon posted as a game ranger to Mount Abu, the hill station in the south of the state. His job is to manage the game for the shooting parties of the old princely families. Fateh himself likes shooting game as well. Older residents of Mount Abu still remember a young ranger in a Stetson hat on a BSA motorcycle.
Fateh with Balbadra Singhji.
1961
The royal shoot
A young ranger is hand-picked to take part in a tiger shoot organised by the royal family of Jaipur for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, who are touring India. It is the last of the old world. Within twelve years, Fateh will be working to end it.
The royal shoot, Sawai Madhopur, January 1961.
1969
Dehradun
Fateh is among the first Indian forest officers to train in wildlife management, at the forestry institute in Dehradun. His teacher there, S. R. Choudhury, turns a hunter into a conservationist, and Fateh credits him for the rest of his life.
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In Dehradun he also meets, by chance, Diana Wordsworth and her husband Colonel Sen, who are looking for land in the hills above the town. He talks them into coming to see Mount Abu instead, and they build their retirement home there; today it is Wordsworth Lodge. Diana becomes his second great influence: she dislikes his shooting, buys him his first camera and, in 1973, takes him to England to see what conservation looks like there. The two meetings change how Fateh sees wildlife for good.
Diana Wordsworth.
1971
Night drives
Fateh is posted back to Ranthambhore as its game warden. The forest is full of people and cattle by day, so the tigers move at night. Fateh drives after dark with a spotlight wired to the car battery in one hand, steering and changing gear with the other. The lakes shine with the eyes of a thousand deer. A tiger is a glimpse in the headlights, or a long night beside a tethered buffalo bait, watched from a small tower above the gorge at Singhdwar, on what is now zone 5. For anyone new, it is a hair-raising ride.
A tiger in the spotlight on a night drive, 1970s.
1973
Project Tiger
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launches Project Tiger. Nine reserves are chosen, Ranthambhore among them, and Fateh joins its first team; he will go on to run the reserve. WWF International provides the seed money, a large part of it from the sale of Tiger Fire, a painting by the British wildlife artist David Shepherd, which raised £127,000. Shepherd later comes to Ranthambhore to film In Search of Wildlife with David Shepherd, and the two become lifelong friends. His foundation will support Fateh’s school and pay for Tiger Watch’s first undercover anti-poaching work.
The Project Tiger jeep on the Bhakola stream bed, 1970s.
1975–76
Valmik
A young Valmik Thapar arrives from Delhi looking for quiet, on the advice of his sister Malvika and her husband Tejbir, who had stayed with Fateh a little earlier. He stays for months at a time. Fateh teaches him the tiger and its world; Valmik writes it down. Their books together are the first to show the life of the wild tiger in such detail. Valmik goes on to carry the tiger’s story to the world in his talks, books and films, and to argue its case at every forum in India and abroad. He called Fateh his tiger guru.
Valmik Thapar, Tejbir Singh and Fateh.
1976
Sixteen villages
Fateh leads the voluntary relocation of sixteen villages from inside the forest, the turning point in Ranthambhore’s recovery. Each family is given land, a house and a well outside the park. With the villages gone, the grass returns, and with the grass the deer, and with the deer the tigers.
Talking it through.
1976
A visit from WWF
Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, head of WWF International, comes to see the work for himself. Fateh builds him a helipad out of mud and cow dung; it is probably the last time a helicopter will land inside Ranthambhore. He then carries the Prince by camel to Jogi Mahal, the old ruin he has restored as a guest house beside Padam Talao, the park’s great lake.
Fateh takes Prince Bernhard, chairman of WWF International, to Jogi Mahal by camel.
1980
National park
With the villages gone, Ranthambhore is among the first parks to be declared a national park, with Fateh again at the helm. Night drives end, and so does the old practice of tying out bait for the tigers. As the tigers increase, so do daylight sightings: families with cubs, hunts, courtship. The great tigress of those years was named Padmini, after Fateh’s elder daughter. National Geographic’s Land of the Tiger (1984–85), one of the most popular wild-tiger films ever made, is filmed largely here. In the early 1980s, the family likes to say, if you saw a photograph of a wild tiger anywhere in the world, there was an eighty per cent chance it was taken here.
A pair at rest.
1981
The ambush
Between 1976 and 1981 the tigers double in number and the deer many times over. The recovered grasslands draw the cattle of the villages at the park’s edge, and the park and its people are at odds. Fateh is hard on poachers but always talks to people first, so on patrol he stops to talk to a group of graziers. They have gathered to kill him. He and his driver, Sayed, who covers him with his own body, are beaten with sticks and left with broken bones; Fateh has a broken leg and arm and a cracked skull. He drives them both home and spends six months in bed.
Fateh recovering, 1981.
1985–86
Jogi Mahal
Ranthambhore is now one of the most famous tiger reserves in the world, and Jogi Mahal, with no electricity, lit by lanterns and a campfire, is where its visitors stay. At night the silence breaks only for a tiger’s roar or a deer’s alarm call.
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Among Fateh’s notable guests are Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his family, who spend a week’s holiday here, Amitabh Bachchan, Mick Jagger and a young John F. Kennedy Jr.
Rajiv Gandhi and Fateh at Jogi Mahal, 1985.
1987
Sariska, and a stand
A district officer orders cattle to be driven through the Ranthambhore park. Fateh refuses and offers his resignation. The order is reversed and the officer suspended, the first time an officer so senior has been suspended. The price is his posting. He is moved to Sariska, a smaller reserve to the north, where within a year he uncovers Sansar Chand, until then unknown and one of the biggest wildlife traders in India, sending tiger and leopard skins over the border to China. The trail leads back to Ranthambhore. He is moved again, to a desk in Jaipur. He takes long leave instead, at the cost of his career and pension, and comes home to the house he had built in 1985 on the edge of the park.
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From home, Fateh runs his own undercover check on Ranthambhore and finds poaching that, left alone, will take every tiger. When his tracker Badhya Lal brings word of a fresh tiger skin on its way to Lucknow by train, Fateh goes to an old friend in the police, whose men arrest the poacher. The story fills the national papers, and a state inquiry finds the park’s count of more than forty tigers was never true. Fateh reckons fewer than sixteen are left.
Fateh in the 1980s.
1987
Ranthambhore Foundation
Valmik Thapar founds the Ranthambhore Foundation, with Fateh and a circle of old friends beside him: Malvika and Tejbir Singh, Avninder Singh, John Singh and Bharat Kapoor. The villages at the park’s edge have lost their grazing and firewood overnight; schooling is poor, industry is barred, winter nights go in chasing deer from the fields, and sometimes a tiger takes their cattle. The Foundation sets out to listen to their side and build a bridge between the people, the park and its tigers. It is Valmik’s doing, and it sets the course for everything the family builds next.
Fateh and Valmik.
Part two
The doctor
1989
Coming home
Goverdhan Singh Rathore qualifies as a doctor in Jaipur and comes straight back. He grew up at Jogi Mahal, waking to mist on Padam Talao, sleeping on the terrace in summer to the roar of tigers and the clash of sambar antlers, swimming in the Bhakola stream, walking the forest and reading the sand roads for pugmarks, and staying in the simple rest houses his father had built. He had also grown up listening to his father and Valmik at the campfire, worrying about the villages. The Foundation invites him onto its board and makes him its first field director.
Goverdhan reading at his desk.
1989
The clinic on a truck
He builds a clinic on a small truck and drives it to 33 villages a week, often across fields where there is no road. Primary care, vaccination, family planning. Child marriage is common, and with it teenage pregnancies and mothers and babies lost in childbirth. After clinic he sits with the elders and listens. What he hears shapes the next three decades.
The mobile clinic under a tree in a village, early 1990s.
1990–94
Artificial insemination
Better cattle, so they are worth keeping at home. With tractors replacing the plough ox and the park closed to grazing, the old herds made no sense. The Foundation partners with the state dairy federation, paying for milk transport, vaccination, cold storage and staff, and with a young officer, Dr Prithvi Singh Panwar, opens a new route round the park and 17 new dairy cooperatives. Farmers travel to Anand in Gujarat, home of India’s milk revolution, to see cows giving fifteen litres at a milking; with a subsidy, more than 300 cows and buffaloes come back with them. A breeding programme with the BAIF foundation of Pune still runs today, three decades on, with yields up from a litre or two a day to ten or fifteen, and private dairies now buy milk from the same villages.
Goverdhan with the cross-bred cattle. The programme still runs; photograph from the 2000s.
1994
Prakratik Society
Valmik, now the Foundation’s executive director, wants it to work on tiger policy with government, and encourages Goverdhan to found his own organisation for the community work. Prakratik Society begins with eye camps, with Delhi’s Venu Eye Institute, for old people blinded by cataracts, who had to be led even to the toilet by their grandchildren and could not make the 200 km journey to the nearest free surgery, at Nawalgarh.
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The team with the clinic bus.
1995
Usha
Goverdhan marries Usha in 1995. A city girl, she comes to a house with no telephone and electricity for eight hours on a good day. In summer they sleep on the roof on sheets soaked in water that never stay cool for long, and by seven Goverdhan has left in the medical van. She is not one to sit at home: she volunteers on the Foundation’s tree programme, then runs the hospital’s medical store. Their son Yudhveer is born in 1997, and Goverdhan’s sister Padmini, a lawyer, and his mother Khem move in.
Usha and Goverdhan.
1997
A hospital in a village
Cataracts are not the only need. Enlarged prostates, gallstones, kidney stones, hernias and heart disease go untreated: a district of a million people has no anaesthesia machine, and its hospital manages only caesareans and hysterectomies, under local anaesthetic or ether. Goverdhan’s condition for building a hospital is that a village should give the land. Sherpur, on the edge of the park, gives an acre. The hospital opens in 1997 and is soon better equipped than the district hospital: keyhole surgery, cataract implants, an intensive care unit, a neonatal unit. Patients come from across the district. It has since moved to the district town, now offers cardiac and neurosurgery, and is still the most advanced hospital in the district.
Goverdhan in the neonatal unit.
1998
Tiger Watch
Retired since 1996 and living on his farm at the edge of the park, Fateh hears that tigers are being poached. At his request, Ashutosh Mahadevia, whom Fateh looks upon as a son for his devotion to tigers and to Ranthambhore, helps him establish Tiger Watch to help the government keep track of them. In 2003 a young scientist, Dharmendra Khandal, joins them, and with a handful of local young men they start working undercover. Their 2004 report finds at least eighteen tigers missing, and with a police team they raid the poachers’ villages.
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Tiger Watch then does the harder thing: a hostel for the children of the Mogiya hunting families, and craft work for their women, so that the next generation has another living. Dharmendra leads it today, and Ashutosh, as Founder Director, continues to guide the team.
Fateh talking with the hunting community.
2000
Fateh Public School
By 2000 there is no good school anywhere near Ranthambhore for Yudhveer, and Goverdhan will not leave. He and his father have long believed that education is the great equaliser; Fateh was the first of ten children in his family to graduate. Fateh gives two acres of land on the spot. The money comes one evening on the porch from Michael Jackson, a British wildlife painter and family friend, who goes to his room and returns with a cheque for £32,000. He also gives the school its motto, Second to None.
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Fateh Public School opens in 2001. Hundreds of children from the villages have passed through it since, many on scholarships. Girls who would once have married at fifteen have become doctors.
David Shepherd with Fateh and the children at Fateh Public School.
2004
The Green Oscar
The biogas work wins the Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy, presented in London by Sir David Attenborough. The press calls it the Green Oscar, and the prize money builds more plants.
Goverdhan receiving an award from the then Prince Charles.
Part three
The camp
1988–89
The land
Even before he qualified, Goverdhan had persuaded Valmik to buy land with him on the edge of the park, and helped Malvika and Tejbir, and Fateh’s old friends Bharat and Nandini, buy beside them. He wanted a place that would feel like living inside the park, the way he remembered it as a boy. The others lived in Delhi; Goverdhan lived here, at first in Valmik’s small house of two rooms and a shared bathroom, and began planting. The land was overgrazed scrub. Native trees went in, water was held in new lakes and wetlands, and slowly the grasses came back. Wildlife began to pass through, including tigers. More land was added in 1995, and in 1997 he began building a house of his own, finished the following summer. He has been adding to the land ever since; today it is 45 acres.
The land and the village beyond, from the hill.
1999–2000
Sher Bagh
Malvika and Tejbir are looking for a project for their son Jaisal, not yet twenty and just back from England. Goverdhan suggests a small jungle camp on their land: he will build it, and he and Usha will run it. Malvika says: show me tomorrow. He draws it overnight. Without looking up, she says: do it. Sher Bagh opens in October 2000, built in the style of the old hunting-camp tents, and under Usha soon becomes the most popular camp in Ranthambhore; she runs it for six years. Soon after, Adrian Zecha of Aman arrives to build the group’s first Indian property next door, on land Goverdhan has already begun to rewild, and Goverdhan spends two years helping it disappear into the landscape; Aman-i-Khas opens in 2003. Between the two, he learns how a jungle camp should be built.
The tents at Sher Bagh.
2006
Khem Villas
By 2005, with Jaisal grown up and ready to run Sher Bagh himself, Usha wants a camp of her own. Goverdhan agrees to build it on one condition: that she runs it. Khem Villas opens in 2006, designed and built by Goverdhan, run by Usha and her team. The rule has stayed the same since: the land decides how many rooms there are, and everything around a room is built to feel like the park Goverdhan grew up inside.
The gate.
2011
Fateh
Fateh Singh Rathore dies of cancer on 1 March 2011, two weeks after receiving the WWF Lifetime Achievement Award. He is cremated on his farm at the edge of the park. Ranthambhore has more than seventy tigers today. Some have walked out on their own to repopulate neighbouring forests; others were carried to Sariska, to give back the tigers it had lost. Every organisation he started is still at work.
Fateh in his feathered hat.
Today
The third generation
Yudhveer and his wife Geetika have moved back to Ranthambhore to run Khem Villas and carry on the conservation work; his sister Diva grew up here too. The hospital, the school, Prakratik Society and Tiger Watch continue. A share of what Khem Villas earns goes back into them, and every guest who stays here helps.
The family on safari in Ranthambhore, 2026. Behind: Yudhveer, Geetika and Padmini. In front: Usha, Diva and Goverdhan.
1980s
Holidays at Jogi Mahal
Every school holiday Goverdhan comes home to the forest. With Fateh posted at Ranthambhore, Jogi Mahal is the family’s house in the park: lanterns lit at dusk, a fire in the hearth on winter nights, the lake outside the door. Each evening Fateh sets up a bonfire and a bar for whoever is staying, and the day’s sightings are told again under the stars. Those nights shaped a boy, and later a camp. The lantern light, the fires and the lakeside bar at Khem Villas are Jogi Mahal as Goverdhan remembers it.
Goverdhan and friends on safari in Ranthambhore.
1977
The park returns
Where sixteen villages once stood, the forest has grown back.
Lakarda, a year after its people moved to Kailashpuri, 1977.
1990–94
Deforestation
Trees for firewood, so the forest is left alone: saplings for fuel, fodder and timber at a nominal price, and for a farmer who plants a hundred or more on his field boundary, ten rupees for every tree still alive, paid over three years: three, three and four. After ten years the trees are his to harvest. More than two million given out.
Planting, 2000s.
1990–94
Biogas
Biogas from the dung of cattle now kept at home: masons trained by the Khadi and Village Industries Commission build more than 700 Deenbandhu plants.
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A new biogas stove in a village kitchen, 1990s.
2017
Fateh’s Retreat
In 2017 Fateh’s home on the edge of the park opens its doors as a homestay. The family still lives here and runs it, on old farmland it has reforested, and guests stay in the house where it all began.
Fateh’s Retreat, the family home on the edge of the park.
2019
Wordsworth Lodge
Diana Wordsworth leaves her Mount Abu home to Fateh in her will. In 2019 the house she and Colonel Sen built becomes Wordsworth Lodge: twenty rooms near the Dilwara temples, Mount Abu as it was.
Wordsworth Lodge, Mount Abu.