Shared Ground:
'Elephants, People, and Movement in Bangladesh'
Asian elephant, Bangladesh.
For centuries, elephants moved across this landscape along known routes shaped by rivers, forests, and seasonal human use. Those movements once governed where people built, farmed, and waited. Today, only a small population remains, confined to broken corridors where safe passage is rare. This elephant stands as a reminder that coexistence in Bangladesh was not accidental, but learned, practiced, and lost.
Shared Ground: Elephants, People, and Movement in Bangladesh begins from a simple but often misunderstood truth: elephants did not decline because people forgot how to live with them. For centuries, elephants moved through Bengal along routes shaped by rivers, forest edges, ridgelines, and seasonal human use. These movements were known, named, and anticipated. They influenced where people built, what they planted, and when they waited. Coexistence was deliberate, grounded in restraint, shared knowledge, and an acceptance that movement was part of life.
The decline began when movement itself became dangerous. Colonial land fixation, railways, roads, and rigid forest boundaries broke old routes and turned shared passage into risk. Rivers were controlled rather than followed, forests fragmented, and settlements hardened. Elephants lost safe passage, and people lost the flexibility that once allowed them to adapt around large, mobile animals. What is now described as “human–elephant conflict” is better understood as the collapse of a shared landscape system.
Today, fewer than a few hundred elephants remain in Bangladesh, most confined to fragmented forest patches along borders and hill tracts. Their movement is constrained, unpredictable, and often lethal. Yet the routes they once followed have not vanished entirely. They persist in place names, in remembered paths, in avoided lands, and in the stories of those who lived alongside elephants before corridors were fenced, settled, or erased.
This project is ethnographic at its core. We begin not with satellite maps or conflict statistics, but with people. Elders, forest-edge communities, farmers, and former forest workers carry detailed knowledge of where elephants moved, when they arrived, and how people responded. This knowledge rarely appears in conservation plans, yet it governed coexistence for generations. Recording it is urgent. Once human memory fades, the possibility of rebuilding shared space diminishes sharply.
At the same time, the project takes elephant movement seriously as a form of learned behaviour. Elephants are not simply reacting to habitat in the abstract. They follow routes remembered by matriarchs and reinforced over generations, abandoning them only when danger becomes unavoidable. By placing human memory and elephant memory in the same frame, the project asks different questions: which routes are forgotten, which are erased, and which might still be reactivated if safety and predictability return.
What makes this work different is that it does not treat corridors as technical fixes or lines to be imposed on a map. Corridors are understood as social spaces as much as ecological ones. Where they function, it is because people act as watchers, warners, guides, and stewards. Where they fail, it is rarely due to indifference but because systems have removed people’s ability to manage risk collectively. This project documents those practices carefully, showing that coexistence was a form of governance, not tolerance.
Shared Ground is deliberately slow. This is not a pilot project designed for quick results or simplified solutions. It is a long-term ethnographic commitment to understanding how shared landscapes once worked, how they fractured, and what fragments remain. By returning to the same places over time and following both people and elephants across seasons, the work builds depth rather than snapshots. That depth is essential for thinking seriously about climate adaptation, land use, and survival in a crowded landscape.
Ultimately, this project is about more than elephants. It is about how societies remember how to share space, and what happens when that memory is lost. By documenting movement, restraint, and adaptation as lived practices rather than abstract principles, Shared Ground offers a grounded way of thinking about conservation, climate, and coexistence in Bangladesh today. It is an invitation to follow a long story as it unfolds, rooted in place, memory, and the hard work of staying human in a changing world.
Stories, Images, and How Elephants Are Understood Today
Elephants do not only move through forests and corridors. They also move through public imagination. In Bangladesh today, many people may never encounter an elephant directly. For those growing up in cities like Dhaka, elephants often exist at a distance, encountered through headlines, social media clips, films, books, or school lessons. In refugee camps and border regions, elephants may be known through warning notices, NGO messaging, or fragments of stories carried across borders from Myanmar. These indirect encounters shape how elephants are understood and spoken about, as threats, victims, symbols of loss, or creatures out of place.
As part of Shared Ground, we examine how elephants are portrayed across media, education, and public discourse, and how these portrayals differ from older memories of shared landscapes where elephants were a known seasonal presence. We look at how people who have never lived alongside elephants come to imagine them, what emotions these stories produce, and how language influences everyday conversations about conservation and belonging. By tracing how elephants fade first from imagination and only later from the land, the project shows that conservation is shaped not only by forests and corridors, but by the stories societies tell about who and what belongs within them.
