Kanha National Park

Kanha Tiger Reserve, spread across about 940 sq km of the Mandla and Balaghat districts in the Maikal hills of Madhya Pradesh, is the largest national park in the state and one of India's finest and best-managed wildlife reserves. Its landscape of tall sal and bamboo forest opening onto wide grassy meadows (maidans), threaded by the Banjar and Halon rivers, is so evocative that it is widely credited as a key inspiration for Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book — the world of Mowgli, Bagheera, and Sher Khan. Kanha is, above all, a Project Tiger reserve, and a dawn jeep safari through the misty sal forest in search of the Bengal tiger is its headline experience; the reserve also shelters leopard, dhole (Indian wild dog), gaur, sloth bear, jackal, and abundant chital, sambar, and blackbuck. But Kanha's greatest conservation triumph is the hard-ground barasingha — the swamp deer that is the state animal of Madhya Pradesh, whose population in Kanha had collapsed to barely 66 animals by 1970 before an intensive recovery programme brought it back from the edge of extinction; Kanha is the only place on Earth where this subspecies survives in the wild. Safaris run in the Kisli, Mukki, Kanha, and Sarhi zones, with permits issued through the official MP Forest portal. The park is open roughly October to June and closed in the monsoon. The Bamni Dadar plateau (the park's celebrated "sunset point") and the well-curated interpretation museum at the Khatia gate round out a Kanha visit. For vegetarian travellers, the forest lodges and resorts around the gates serve generous vegetarian buffets — North Indian and Bundeli veg, dal, paneer dishes, fresh rotis, and jungle-themed thalis — and the village dhabas on the approach roads serve aloo-paratha, poha, and chai. The best months are February to June for sightings (animals concentrate at waterholes) and October-November for green post-monsoon forest.