Antlers & Antelopes of India — Part 3
In the Kanha meadows of Madhya Pradesh, at dusk, you might see them before you realise what you’re looking at. A herd of large, golden-coated deer standing in tall grass, their antlers catching the last light — branched not in the spare, elegant geometry of the sambar or the chital, but extravagantly, tier upon tier, up to fourteen tines on a mature stag. The barasingha, India’s swamp deer, is one of the subcontinent’s most striking animals. It is also, very nearly, one that no longer exists.
Twelve horns and a name
Barasingha translates from Hindi as “twelve-horned” — a reference to the deer’s most defining feature. No other deer in India regularly carries more than three tines; the barasingha stacks them up like a candelabra, with some individuals recorded at twenty tines or more. Mature males weigh up to 180 kg, making them among India’s largest deer. Their coat shifts from golden-brown in summer to a deeper chestnut during the breeding season, when large mixed herds gather and stags clash noisily for dominance.
Three subspecies exist across the Indian subcontinent: the western wetland subspecies of the Gangetic plains (found in Dudhwa and Nepal), the eastern subspecies (R. d. ranjitsinhi) found in Assam’s Kaziranga and Manas National Parks, and the hard-ground subspecies — Rucervus duvaucelii branderi — of central India. It is this last one, the hard-ground barasingha, that came within a single census count of vanishing.
Down to sixty-six
In 1938, there were an estimated 3,000 hard-ground barasingha in India. By 1967, just 66 remained — the entire surviving population of this subspecies, all of them in one place: the Kanha meadows. The causes were familiar — wetland drainage for agriculture, hunting for antlers and meat, and disease transmitted by domestic cattle grazing in the park. The barasingha’s unusual antlers made movement through dense forest difficult, confining the population to open grassland, which also happened to be the habitat most vulnerable to encroachment.
What followed is one of the more remarkable chapters in Indian conservation. Kanha’s management, recognising the crisis, began a sustained, decades-long effort to give the barasingha room to recover. Around 35 villages were relocated from the park’s core zones over time, and the degraded land they left behind was converted into grassland. Boma enclosures — predator-free fenced areas within the meadows — were created to allow the deer to breed without pressure. Artificial swamps were dug to reduce competition with other grazing species. Cattle were removed. The grasslands were actively managed, with weeds cleared and water bodies restored.
The recovery
It was slow, then steady, then remarkable. By 1988 the Kanha population stood at around 500. By 2020, it had passed 800 — and some estimates now put the free-ranging population above 1,000. In 2017, Kanha gave the deer its own mascot: Bhoorsingh the Barasingha, “the golden-antlered one,” now the face of the reserve’s conservation messaging.
To reduce the risk of a single catastrophic event wiping out the only surviving population of this subspecies, translocation efforts began in earnest. Between 2015 and 2021, 58 individuals were moved to Satpura Tiger Reserve, where the grasslands of the Bori and Churna ranges offered suitable habitat. That population has now crossed 100, with further releases planned. Efforts to establish a third population at Bandhavgarh are ongoing.
What the barasingha asks of a forest
The barasingha is a specialist, and that specialisation is both its beauty and its vulnerability. It needs open grassland with water — it is an accomplished swimmer, will dip its head beneath the surface to graze on aquatic plants, and is rarely found far from a wetland or a river. It is not the forest’s shadow, as the sambar is, or its acrobat, as the chital is. It is the meadow itself, made animal.
That dependency makes it a precise indicator of grassland health. Where the barasingha thrives, the open habitats of central India’s tiger reserves are intact. Where it disappears, something fundamental in that ecosystem has broken down.
The IUCN lists the species as Vulnerable. The hard-ground subspecies remains geographically restricted to a handful of sites, all of them in Madhya Pradesh. The recovery at Kanha is real, significant, and hard-won. It is also not finished.
Next in the series: Part 4 — The Blackbuck: India’s fastest animal and the people who protected it with their lives.