India Travel Guide

Bandhavgarh National Park
With Kanha becoming ever more popular, Madhya Pradesh's second national park, BANDHAVGARH, tucked away in the hilly northeast of the state, is receiving increasing attention from tourists. The draw is that it has the highest relative density of tigers of any of India's reserves, shelters a collection of fascinating ruins, and offers the chance of trekking through the jungle on elephant-back. It's a long haul to Bandhavgarh from either Jabalpur (195km) or Khajuraho (237km), but worth it - not only to track tigers and deer but also, as all the accommodation is close to the park gates, to watch the array of birdlife without even entering the park.

Bandhavgarh may be one of India's newer national parks, but it claims a long history. Legend dates the construction of its hilltop fort to the time of the epic Ramayana, when monkey architects built Rama a place to rest on his return from his battle with the demon king of Lanka. Excavations of caves tunnelled into the rock below the fort have revealed inscriptions scratched into the sandstone in the first century BC, from which time Bandhavgarh served as a base for a string of dynasties, among them the Chandellas, responsible for the temples at Khajuraho. They ruled from here until the Bhagels took over in the twelfth century, staking a claim to the region that is still held by their direct descendant, the Maharaja of Rewa. The dynasty shifted to Rewa in 1617, allowing Bandhavgarh to be slowly consumed by forest and by the bamboo and grasslands that provided prime hunting ground for the Rewa kings. The present maharaja ended his hunting days in 1968 when he donated the area to the state as parkland. In 1986, two more chunks of forest were added to the original core zone, giving the park a total area of 448 square kilometres.