Saving India's Mighty Tuskers

A measure of the conservation and welfare efforts underway to save this endangered animal

- Sanskrita Bharadwaj, Naorem Anuja

About six years ago, while filmmaker Kartiki Gonsalves was moving homes from Bengaluru to the hills of Ooty, she drove past a baby elephant walking along the side of the road. A local man kept pace at his side.

Growing up in the mountainous Nilgiris, spotting tuskers wasn’t rare for Gonsalves. “You see lots of wild animals—elephants, leopards, bears—but I’d never come across such a young calf before. I also wanted to know what this little calf, who should have been with his mother in the wild was doing with a man,” she says.

Seeing her lean out of the window with delighted curiosity, the man beckoned her over to join them. “That’s how I first met Bomman and three-month-old Raghu,” says Gonsalves, referring to the protagonists of her 2022 film Elephant Whisperers that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film at the 95th Academy Awards. “We spent some beautiful moments together which carried on for almost a year and a half before I began making the documentary.” The experience was an enlightening

one for the 36-year-old director. “I grew up in a place which always has elephants but I never realized how endangered they were. Meeting Raghu led me to delve deeper into the complexities of elephant-human dynamics,” Gonsalves explained. She also got a peek into the lives of Bomman and Bellie, who belong to the forest dwelling community of the indigenous Kattunayakar tribe.