When I first met the Kharai camel herders in Kachchh, I was struck by how quietly everything moved the wind, the camels, the people. One elder looked out at the mangroves and said, “We don’t keep camels. They keep us.”
That stayed with me.
The Kharai camel isn’t just an animal. It’s a story written in salt and tide. These are the only camels in the world that swim. For generations, they’ve adapted to a fragile rhythm walking miles through dry lands, swimming across creeks, grazing on mangroves, returning home with the tide.
But that rhythm is breaking.
Salt pans now creep into their grazing lands. Industrial expansion has eaten away entire mangrove patches. What’s left is a thinning line between survival and disappearance.
Calves are being born into confusion. The old routes are gone. The sea they knew is no longer swimmable. The forest they grazed is now fenced, fragmented, or gone.
And still, the herders wait they wait for rains, for some return of the past, for someone to listen.
Their way of life isn’t in a museum. It’s alive, fragile, and fading.
This isn’t just about camels. It’s about a people whose lives are tied to the land and sea in ways policy rarely understands. It’s about a culture slowly silenced not by time, but by deliberate neglect.
Let’s not wait until the last camel dies to realise what we’ve lost.