A rat sprinting across a bare foot is treated here as good fortune, not a mishap to flinch from.

Inside the Karni Mata Temple at Deshnoke, thirty kilometres south of Bikaner in Rajasthan, something like 25,000 black rats live inside the marble halls. They spill out of wall crevices, drink milk from communal trays and sprint along guard rails, weaving between the grain, sweets and chickpeas that pilgrims bring as offerings. Wikipedia’s entry on the temple notes that eating food already nibbled by the rats is considered a high honour.

Nobody inside calls them rats.

What the Charans mean by kaba

They are kaba, and that distinction carries enormous weight for the Charan community who administer the temple. Kyle Trembley, an anthropologist who has spent extended periods at Deshnoke, argued in a 2023 paper in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space that Charans separate kaba from ordinary rats through a stack of everyday practices. These include policing the temple boundary, invoking transmigration, talking about health and hygiene, and setting rules about who may touch and eat what. Kaba are family, and rats are vermin: the same species on paper, entirely different beings in practice.

Their origin story runs through grief. Karni Mata, born in 1387 and venerated as an incarnation of the warrior goddess Durga, is said to have gone into deep meditation after the drowning of a boy named Lakshman, travelling to the realm of Yamraj to demand him back. Yamraj said no. So she declared that her people would never again pass into his kingdom, and would instead remain with her in rodent form. Charans who die become kaba, and kaba who die are reborn into Charan families.

A colony with no predators

Netting keeps birds of prey off the roof, and locals chase off stray cats and dogs. Food arrives all day, every day, carried in by thousands of worshippers and tourists.

Speaking to Discover Wildlife, Trembley described the site as functioning ecologically as a closed ecosystem, with no reason for any animal to leave. The result is one of the densest rat populations recorded in any human setting, breeding almost entirely within itself. Restricted gene flow of that kind lets rare recessive traits surface more often, which is likely why the temple has its handful of white-coated rats, believed by devotees to be Karni Mata herself and her sons.

Spotting one causes chaos. Travel writer Sophie Pearce, who saw a white kaba in 2018, told the same publication that her guide had to rescue her from the crush of people surging towards it.

Black rats are ordinarily nocturnal, jumpy, and devoted to staying out of open spaces. At Deshnoke they work the day shift, in full view, in the middle of a crowd.

Disease, and a question left unasked

Ask about illness and the temple has a confident answer ready. Trembley was told that rats spread disease while kaba cure it, and that a plague sweeping Gujarat in the early 1990s sent sufferers to Deshnoke, where they drank the same milk as the rodents and recovered.

Half of that is documented. Between August and October 1994, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that India notified the World Health Organization of 693 suspected bubonic or pneumonic plague cases and 56 deaths, with Gujarat among the affected states. The curing part has never been tested by anyone.

The absence on the other side of the ledger is more striking. No disease outbreaks have been reported in connection with the temple, though the anthropologist is upfront that serious study of these particular animals barely exists. Twenty-five thousand rodents in daily skin contact with tens of thousands of barefoot pilgrims raises an obvious epidemiological question, one the scientific literature has barely touched.

What rats get up to when nothing is chasing them

Fear does a lot of work in shaping how rats behave, and researchers have started asking what happens once that fear is switched off. In a 2019 study published in Science, Annika Reinhold and colleagues at Humboldt University of Berlin taught laboratory rats to play hide-and-seek with a human. The animals learned to swap between hiding and seeking, preferred opaque boxes to transparent ones when concealing themselves, kept quiet while hidden, and celebrated with leaps the team nicknamed freudensprung. No food was involved at any point; the reward was tickling.

That was one paper, one lab, and a handful of adolescent male rats, so it is a striking result rather than settled fact. Still, it lines up uncomfortably well with what visitors to Deshnoke describe watching all day. Kaba chase each other, rear onto their hind legs and box, and bicker briefly over a scrap of roti before losing interest, because more roti is always coming.

Centuries of accidental fieldwork

Trembley frames the temple as a case study in kinship built across a species line, and suggests it may become a more useful one as climate pressures push animals and people into closer quarters. Charans, for their part, are not conducting research. They are visiting relatives.

That leaves an odd gap. Deshnoke has quietly run one of the most stable, predator-free, food-unlimited rat colonies anywhere for centuries, and almost none of it has been measured. Somebody with permission, a bit of tact and a decent sample size could learn a great deal there. The rats, at any rate, are not going anywhere.