ETHNOMAD
SHARED GROUND
"Elephants, People, and Movement in Bangladesh
PART ONE:
The Paths They Remember
Written by Farhana Akter
1,400 Words Published by ETHNOMAD,
February 2026
The elephant arrives at the edge of the village just after dusk, when the heat loosens its grip and the day’s noise recedes. From behind shuttered windows, the animal is seen as an intruder, too large, too close, too unpredictable. Phones come out. Someone calls the forest department. By morning, the encounter will be logged as another case of “human–elephant conflict.”
But the elephant is not lost. It is standing on a path it remembers.
Across South Asia, elephants appear in sayings that speak of patience and inevitability. These expressions were not born of distant admiration but of long familiarity. A common Bengali proverb states, হাতি নিজের রাস্তা ছাড়ে না, “Elephants do not abandon their routes.” It is often used to describe human determination, but it also reflects careful, generational observation. Elephants return to the same waterholes during droughts. They move along corridors remembered across decades. They recognise places, seasons, and individuals.
What local people once described as stubbornness or willfulness is now described by ecologists as route fidelity and corridor dependence. The proverb is not metaphorical. It is ecological knowledge encoded in language.
For centuries, people lived close enough to notice these patterns and to adjust their lives accordingly. Settlements were sparse. Agriculture followed seasonal rhythms. Forests were extensive enough to allow elephants to move without entering human space. People harvested earlier, avoided certain routes at night, and left strips of forest untouched because they knew elephants would not change their behaviour on demand. Conflict existed, but it was limited, predictable, and often avoidable through anticipation rather than force.
Elephants were never viewed as irrational creatures. On the contrary, they were respected for a form of intelligence that mirrored human reasoning without resembling it. Another common saying, “Elephants never forget,” reflects what science has since confirmed. Elephants possess long-term memory, problem-solving ability, emotional awareness, and complex social learning. This intelligence also makes them vulnerable. Elephants are among the few non-human animals known to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder following exposure to violence and loss.
That intelligence is also why elephants occupy a central place in Hindu, Buddhist, and wider South Asian cultural traditions. They accumulate ecological and social knowledge over lifetimes and pass it on to future generations. Matriarchs guide herds along remembered routes, teaching younger elephants where water, forage, and safety can be found. These are not instincts alone. They are learned landscapes.
Two Asian elephants wade into a forest waterway, using the cool shallows to regulate body temperature and strengthen social bonds. Bathing is a daily necessity for elephants, offering relief from heat, protection for their skin, and time for tactile interaction that reinforces relationships within the herd.
This intelligence also made elephants indispensable to human societies. In pre-modern South Asia, elephants were not simply captured. They were trained, partnered with mahouts, and integrated into systems of labour, warfare, and ceremony. Mahouts learned to read subtle shifts in posture and mood. Trust was built over decades, sometimes over lifetimes. The relationship was unequal, but it was not careless. It depended on attention, patience, and a shared understanding of limits.
Long before colonial administrators mapped the subcontinent into blocks of revenue and forest reserves, elephants were embedded within state systems. Under Mauryan rulers, sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire, elephants were treated as strategic assets rather than expendable wildlife. Kautilya’s Arthashastra, written in the third century BCE, describes designated elephant forests known as hastivana, methods of capture, strict penalties for unauthorised killing, and the role of the Gajadhyaksha, the superintendent of elephants. Elephants were dangerous, costly, and irreplaceable. Their management required intact forests and skilled local knowledge.
This pattern continued across eastern India and Bengal through the medieval period. Mughal records, including Abul Fazl’s Ain i Akbari, detail how elephants were classified, named, trained, and evaluated according to temperament and strength. Bengal, with its forested eastern and northern frontiers, played a key role in elephant supply networks connecting Jharkhand, Odisha, Assam, and beyond. Records show concern not only for ownership, but for feeding, stabling, and transport.
Further east, the Ahom kingdom of Assam relied heavily on elephants for warfare and state organisation. Chronicles known as the Buranjis describe systems of capture and management tied to seasonal movement and indigenous knowledge of terrain. Elephant use depended on forest continuity, not continuous extraction. Across these regions, a consistent pattern emerges. Elephants were controlled, but never assumed to be infinitely replaceable. Conflict existed, but it did not lead to systematic extermination. Elephants were too valuable and too difficult to manage without functioning landscapes.
This coexistence was not rooted in modern conservation ethics. It was shaped by administrative need, economic value, and deep reliance on local ecological knowledge. That balance began to collapse under colonial rule.
The Permanent Settlement of 1793 transformed land in Bengal into fixed estates. Forests were measured, divided, and leased. Timber was extracted for shipbuilding and railways. Tea plantations cleared vast tracts of land. Rail lines cut through forest corridors linking Bengal with elephant habitats in Jharkhand, Odisha, and Assam.
Where pre-colonial systems adapted to elephant movement, colonial governance attempted to control and contain it. Elephants were captured, relocated, or killed to protect infrastructure and commercial interests. Landscapes once negotiated through memory and instinct were reshaped into rigid grids of fields, fences, and rails. Yet the elephants continued to move along paths they had followed for generations.
A captive Asian elephant stands with its mahout and attendants in colonial Bengal, early twentieth century. Elephants were once central to transport, forestry, and state power across the region, managed through skilled human labour and deep local knowledge. These systems of control depended on intact forests and established movement routes, both of which would be steadily dismantled under colonial land policies.
Another evident sign of change appears at the dinner table. For generations, Indigenous families relied on forests, streams, and jhum fields for daily food. Wild vegetables, spices, and herbs were gathered from surrounding hills, while fish were caught from local streams and the Sangu River. These foods provided nutrition, shaped seasonal rituals, and connected daily life to the landscape.
When I first visited Bandarban in 2016, local markets were filled with wild vegetables rarely seen in the lowlands. Over time, this variety has declined. Market stalls now carry fewer traditional foods and a more uniform supply. Residents explain that wild spices, amaranth, and stream fish have become increasingly scarce.
These changes reflect broader transformations in land use. As jhum fields give way to monoculture and forests are cleared, foods that once came directly from the hills are disappearing from everyday life. The market, once a mirror of ecological diversity, now reveals how deeply farming, food, and culture are being reshaped.
By the late nineteenth century, what we now call human–elephant conflict had fully emerged. Elephants were reframed as intruders. Their behaviour was treated as a problem to be eliminated. This was not a failure of elephants to adapt. It was a failure of humans to recognise that the land had never belonged to us alone.
Those older paths did not disappear. They persist in memory, in maps, and in the names of places. In Dhaka, it is easy to forget that the city was once threaded by routes where elephants walked. Yet traces remain. Elephant Road, now a dense commercial artery linking Science Laboratory with Shahbagh, carries a name that records a very different past. Though officially renamed Dr Kudrat e Khuda Road, most residents still use the old name.
During the Mughal period and into the early British era, Dhaka housed a major elephant depot at Pilkhana. Elephants brought from forests across Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha, and Assam were trained there before being dispatched across the region. Each day, elephants and their mahouts walked along established routes to wetlands and grazing grounds. One such route led to what is now Hatirjheel, literally “elephant lake.” The road they followed became Elephant Road, recorded in colonial maps by the early twentieth century.
Nearby place names tell the same story. Hatirpool, the elephant’s bridge, was built high enough for elephants to pass beneath. Mahouttuli, the mahouts’ quarters, marks where the people who worked with elephants once lived. These are not romantic relics. They are urban fossils of a city that once accommodated non-human movement.
A conservation team treats a deep wound on the Asian elephant's front leg in a forested area. Such injuries are increasingly linked to encounters along fragmented corridors where elephants move through farms, roads, and settlements. The wound is immediate; the cause lies in landscapes that no longer allow safe passage.
Today, elephants no longer walk through Dhaka. Their range in Bangladesh is largely confined to the forests and borderlands of Sylhet, Chittagong, and the hills adjoining Assam and Tripura. These are fragments of a once continuous network connecting eastern India and Bengal. The paths survive, but the space around them has narrowed.
For elephants, the past is carried in memory and instinct. For humans, it is written into roads, fields, and cities. Where those two histories intersect today, conflict is not inevitable, but it is predictable. What matters now is not whether elephants can adapt to a changing world, but whether human societies are willing to remember that coexistence was once an active practice, learned, negotiated, and maintained. The question this series will return to is not how to stop elephants from moving, but how people might once again learn to live with that movement.
Coming Next in Shared Ground
Part Two: Learning to Share the Path
If conflict arises when elephants are forced to move through landscapes that no longer recognise them, coexistence returns when people change how they live in those same spaces.
The next article in this series examines how communities across Asia and Africa have learned to live with elephants rather than against them. It looks beyond policy frameworks and protected area boundaries to focus on local practice: seasonal farming adjustments, shared corridors, night watch systems, beehive deterrents, and other community-led approaches that recognise elephants as responsive, learning animals rather than fixed threats.
Drawing on examples from Bangladesh and further afield, Part II explores how elephants alter their behaviour when human behaviour changes first, and what these reciprocal adaptations reveal about the possibility of coexistence in a crowded world.
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