India's least-charted quadrant is where the tigers are, where the Buddha attained enlightenment, where the living root bridges of Meghalaya have been growing for five hundred years, and where the country's most extraordinary biodiversity exists largely undisturbed.
Central India's national parks contain India's highest density of wild tigers — and the jungle here, the Deccan Plateau's sal forests and bamboo thickets, is so different from the manicured wildlife reserves of Africa that first-time guests are sometimes initially puzzled. There is no open savannah, no predator visible from half a mile away. The jungle closes in around the jeep track, the light filters green through the canopy, and then a pause — a shift in the alarm calls of the langur monkeys — and a tiger materialises from the undergrowth twenty feet from the bonnet of the vehicle, and the world contracts to that single fact.
The northeast is India's most topographically dramatic region and its most ethnically complex — eight states, each with its own tribal cultures, its own languages, and its own relationship to the mainland. Meghalaya, the wettest place on earth in several of its valleys, grows living bridges from the aerial roots of rubber trees trained across rivers over generations, a feat of bioengineering that exists nowhere else. Assam's Kaziranga protects two-thirds of the world's remaining one-horned rhinos on a floodplain of extraordinary fertility beside the Brahmaputra.
Odisha, on the eastern coast, is where Hindu temple architecture reaches a height that rivals Rajasthan and surpasses it in antiquity. The temples of Bhubaneswar trace a continuous tradition from the 7th to the 13th century. Konark's Sun Temple — built as a colossal stone chariot on twenty-four carved wheels — was one of the most ambitious pieces of religious architecture ever attempted in India, and its ruins are still among the most powerful things on the subcontinent.