One of the tallest makhna (tuskless) camp elephants, Major Gulab Singh earned his title in honor of his bravery during patrols in the insurgency era. Most evenings, he would return to the Doigurung anti-poaching camp, nudging its pillars and steps with his trunk in anticipation of his meal. His mahout would prepare haathi daana, a mix of grains wrapped in leaves from the torani plant, which was a staple for all elephants here. Legend has it that if you handed him a bottle of alcohol, he would drink it without hesitation. He was later "surrendered," as one mahout recalls, to Pakke Tiger Reserve after having killed four mahouts while serving in the army
These mahouts, armed not with weapons but with bonds of trust with their elephants, would cross rivers during the monsoons and live lives of quiet resilience. For over 15 years, Gulab Singh and other elephants, along with their mahouts, served the rainforests of Pakke—dragging wood to be stored for the monsoons and ensuring that 200 frontline staff were provisioned with rations when motorable roads failed. They also escorted staff who had fallen ill out of the forest for treatment.
A mahout's life also brings to mind a study by Michelle Anagnostou and colleagues, who published a paper titled International Scoping Review of Rangers' Precarious Employment, where they reviewed the working conditions of frontline anti-poaching staff across 84 countries. The study found that 70-76% of forest staff in Africa and Asia saw their families fewer than 10 days a month. A mahout’s life is similar—they see their families even less than that because of their camp elephants.
During a visit to the Doigurung anti-poaching camp in the heart of the forest, we recall an amusing but sincere plea for leave from Gulab Singh’s mahout. When meeting the field director, the mahout said, "Even Gulab Singh has gone into musth (an annual roving strategy, typically used to meet females) and come out of it; shouldn’t I be allowed to go home?" With a rare smile, the then-strict field director, Tana Tapi, granted the mahout a leave of absence.
So many stories and incidents from the last decade of our work brought us back to Pakke in March 2024. This time, it was for something that many of us felt should have been done over a decade ago—being and learning with the mahouts themselves. They shared these stories with us during a larger workshop, led by clinical psychologists (Diptarup, Kanishk, Sucheta, Yukta & Ershad), focused on deep listening and storytelling. Their experiences and conversations, which we started in 2016, have been invaluable in guiding us through different methodologies. Like Professor Margaret Kovach's main thesis, which reminds us that "stories thrive where there is respect," this was more than just a song for us. It was about nurturing micro-spaces of care and comfort, fostering relationships, reciprocity, and responsibility, with the hope that it could become a gift for Pakke.
It was a challenging workshop, as it not only brought together mahouts from different ranges but also required the elephants to come along. Our days and workshop breaks were punctuated by tracking camp elephants in the morning and feeding, bathing, and providing veterinary care for them throughout the day as we interacted and learned from the mahouts.
The "Elephant Song" was born in that moment when, for the first time, all the mahouts and their assistants (jugalis) in the forest department sang together in chorus, led by Deben Das Deka, fondly known as Deben Ata. He traveled from Boko, 250 km away, to Khari camp, 13 kilometers deep inside the forest, to share his 80 years of elephant-mahout wisdom, woven from a tradition of folk songs from Goalpara in Assam. His presence energized the mahouts, filling them with a life force so potent that even without Gulab Singh, the group gathered and began humming a tune.
For many, it was their first time composing a song. The mahout team of Bikash, Brajen, Gopal, Jully, Kaka, Lakhiram, Pali, Pema, Debaru, Rasham, Shangkhang, and Sonu found themselves shaping the flow of the song, as the six elephants—Raja, Joymala, Bahadur, Khaisingh, Bijaya, and Tamuk—fed on wild grass in the Khari grasslands. “I imagine me and my elephant walking out of the forest, standing atop a small hill, looking out over the landscape and up at the blue skies. How beautiful that moment would be,” Pema shared while shyly recording his part for the song.
During our night in Pakke, Riaz strummed his acoustic guitar while Arghadeep sang along, building on Deben Ata’s voice and melody with a female chorus of Nandini, Shradha, and Pooja. Together with the mahouts, we spontaneously crafted lyrics. Inside the singing circle in Pakke, Salil moved like a conjurer, with his SM58 mic that tried to capture every voice, every line. It was a fleeting moment, one we couldn’t let slip.
The dusk forest orchestra began, with the rainforest canopy in Pakke Tiger Reserve turning tangerine under the fading sunlight. Haathi Bondhu had interruptions. As the sun completed its slow descent toward the western horizon and the moon glistened over the Khari River, the mahouts and their ranger, Kime Rambia, hurried out with torches to ensure that wild elephants weren’t attacking the camp elephants. This was also a constant threat to Major Gulab Singh, one that even gave him his tailless appearance after a wild elephant bit part of it off.
The six elephants were safe, and we were back at Canopy Collective in Tezpur, seated around an heirloom table, reflecting on our journey. As we pieced together the forest of sounds recorded—from the early morning birds to the "duk duk" in the mahouts' chests when they went searching for their elephants—we heard the "brrr..." heave the elephants made, which they interpreted in elephant language as "mera aadmi aa gaya" (my person has come). As we spread our laptops, Zoom recorders, and musical gear across the table, fine-tuning this journey the very day we returned from Pakke, the recordings were raw—voices slightly out of pitch, forest sounds loud, and rhythms uneven.
After months of working remotely and meeting at studios in Guwahati and Goa, we felt the song finally came together. When Pooja and Shradha sent us the music video, with a tribute to the mahouts, the journey felt complete. We hope that the release of Haathi Bondhu, which the mahouts heard at a rainforest stream in Pakke before its release and gave us feedback on, strengthens the bonds between all of us.
Despite this, Major Gulab Singh passed away in 2022 after a fight with a wild elephant. His mahout, one of the oldest in Pakke, left us with bittersweet memories—from his request for leave to his remark that he could, and probably never would, do anything else. "Upay bhi nahi hai" (there’s no other way), he said before eventually leaving his job. The stories of taking care of oneself and the stories of taking care of elephants could fill a thick book—of mahouts, elephants that have moved on, and those that endure—and we have only just touched upon them, much like life at Pakke Tiger Reserve unfolds in different ways.
Photographs by: Ashok Tallang, Arjun Rai and Sharat Hazarika from Green Hub
*Salil and Nandini thank the many co-contributors and co-dreamers who made the elephant song happen.
