The life and death of Ramu/Laden, the elephant friend
Before the crack of dawn on India’s Republic Day, when smoke from small woodfires from the tea estate labour colonies mixed with a heavy dew clung to the ground, was my dear friend Ramu’s body discovered under an electrical cable. He had been electrocuted by a sagging wire, visible burn marks and an immediate death, tell-tale signs of what had transpired - 11000 volts stopping his heart.
Ramu was a large male tusker roaming from the broad-leafed forests of Sonai Rupai at the foothills of the Himalaya through the densely populated human areas of Rangapara and its tea estates, to the river islands of the raging Brahmaputra. I have spent countless days and nights following him as he made his way through these areas, understanding how he behaves, and how people interact with him. He was a folk legend in these parts, with several stories of him swirling around - where he came from, what he did, and where he roamed. His most striking trait was certainly his ‘Buddha-like’ behaviour of being unperturbed by humans, literally walking through villages in broad daylight with a trail of hundreds of people following him, laughing, shouting, jumping — almost like the pied piper. He also stood out because of his sheer majesty; his unusually large stature and incredibly long tusks were an anomaly for this region as historically, the tusked males were hunted out, leaving a small population. He was a full head taller than the other elephants that he hung out with. Despite living intertwined with the tens of thousands of people in this region, or maybe because of it — and his departure from normal elephant behaviour of avoiding humans — there was a deep fascination and respect for this entity. He traversed this landscape with a thorough knowledge, appearing and disappearing like a phantom.
He was like the smoke from these small woodfires, everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Ramu’s biography
I had begun writing a biography of my dear friend, Ramu/Laden the elephant many months ago. Of him navigating both human and non-human worlds with such grace and ease. Of his elephant friends like Tara and human friends like Ajay. Of his journey learning through conflicts with people.
I had thought that I would go back to this land and write about the Hollywood-esque that Ramu lives, filled with deep passionate relationships, uprisings, dilemmas, violence, and the many systems and individuals tugging at his corners.
I now write this remembrance eight thousand kilometres away in the stark English winter, though am immediately transported back to Nahorani Grant No 2, in Ajay’s backyard, Ramu’s favourite spot. I smell the thick heavy smell of elephant in the still humid air, the distant clanking of tea machines and see a nonchalant Ramu amidst the Lantana and bamboo bushes.
Two names
First, the elephant in the room: why does he have two names, Ramu/Laden?
In the early 2000s, driven by the sheer frustration of consistently losing crops to elephants — there was a spate of lethal poisonings of elephants in the region. On one of these carcasses, somebody had scrawled ‘dhan-chor Laden’, translating to ‘paddy thief Laden’. Probably owing to the then-recent media coverage of Osama bin Laden, the individual saw the similarity between the terrorist and these elephants. Both attacking innocent civilians for no fault of theirs and causing these innocents to live in constant fear. There were many Ladens after - essentially any large solitary bull, irrespective of his behavioural traits got this moniker. Our Laden, with his large build, symmetrical gleaming tusks, and propensity for human areas fit this image perfectly. When he first arrived in the landscape, his behaviours fit perfectly too — David, a conservationist escaped by the skin of his teeth during a human-elephant conflict reduction drive, with Laden charging at the forest department (FD) team that was on foot. A few months later, when the driver of an FD jeep was unable to move out of the way in time, Laden squished the rear hood in.
However, in a few years of residing in the landscape, he seemed to have understood the lay of the land and calmed down to a large degree. He became habituated to the chaos of these human areas, and probably realised that people were all bark and no bite. He would walk unperturbed through hundreds of people, including when he was in musth, a period typically associated with heightened aggression in elephants. On one instance, while still in musth, with fluid dripping from his face, a young boy of about 15 picked up a bamboo stick and snuck up behind this four-thousand kilo wild elephant and smacked his bottom! Laden ignored the idiocy of this kid, and only shook his leg and moved ahead.
Spurred by their lived experiences with Laden, several people in the landscape felt that this strong negative name was not representative of, or fair to him. The FD started calling him Lachit, after the legendary historical warrior of Assam — and the residents of the vast area christened him ‘Ramu’, a more affable name. I sometimes felt that he showed an amount of restraint that I do not think I would have had I been in his place. He had a kink in his tail and was pockmarked with little lumps - evidence of his run-ins with humans. He was shot at with buckshot, birdshot, catapults, country-made rifles, flaming arrows, and even stabbed with spears. But he seemed to only emerge wiser — recognising that these non-lethal costs were associated with the benefits of living amidst humans.
Human friends
It is impossible to speak about Ramu without mentioning Ajay, his human friend. Their bond seemed out of a movie, too surreal for reality. Ajay lived at the edge of his village, and was also the de facto leader of managing human-elephant conflicts in the region - taking the initiative to deter elephants from entering the village boundary and keeping the community updated on elephants’ movements. All of this of his own accord and no external support from any NGO or the FD, until recently. When Ramu was in the scrubland, away from the village, Ajay would go around and keep an eye — stopping kids from getting too close for comfort, and if Ramu moved towards the village, hollering at him or bursting an occasional firecracker to remind him to stay away. At hearing Ajay’s booming ‘rooohhhhh’, he would pause and look up. Then wait. And then move off at a tangent, almost making it seem like he understood but didn’t want Ajay to feel too presumptuous about making an elephant move at command. Other people did not have this impact, and most frustratingly for them, neither did the forest department.
I have often seen Ajay and Ramu sharing the greater part of an afternoon, each doing their own things after acknowledging each other. After a village festival, especially ones like Durga Puja where banana stalks are used as decorations, Ajay would ask a pick-up truck-owner friend of his for a favour, and pay for the fuel himself — and go around the village collecting these stalks. He would then deposit it far away from the village, in fallow land for his friend. Ramu would inevitably come by. On one occasion, he took four days to — leading to Ajay being a little alarmed. Although Ajay’s stoic demeanour never let this show, tight-lipped as always, he would just let a sentence or two slip, “I am a little concerned, this has not happened before..”. I now knew Ajay well enough to know that this was reflective of him being extremely worried. When a friend asked him why he undertook these efforts, he just shrugged his shoulders and said it must be done.
Before I left the landscape, Ajay and I made a quick visit to a neighbour’s pond — Ramu had started hanging out there in the sweltering May afternoons. We sat across him, with the pond serving as a barrier between us - the closest we had ever been to Ramu. He approached the edge of the water, splashed himself and went across the other side, gently munching on small bits of grass that had grown with the pre-monsoon showers.
When a new DFO, a senior FD officer was posted to this region, he saw Ramu on a field visit. He turned to the main man in charge, his junior, Rabha da (who also shared a close relationship with Ramu), and said, “keep an eye on him, he has such large tusks — it could be a poaching target”. Rabha da laughed a little and turned his head and said, “oh don’t worry, Ramu will look after himself, but of course, we will too”. Dibakar, also on the FD team would express his surprise and irritation, “whenever we don’t want to see him, like when we have other work - all we will see is him — and when we do need to trace him, he disappears for tens of days! I just don’t understand!”
Elephant friends
Ramu had strong interactions not only with humans but also with his species. He was spotted with virtually all the other elephants in the landscape. With large female-led herds, probably in search of mates, with young males, and other older males too. Once, when Nitin, my supervisor, and I were tracking elephants as part of the radio-collaring project we stumbled upon four large male elephants, including Ramu, looking out in four directions, their backs to each other, the large tea bushes at their feet looking like miniature toys. It is known that older male elephants teach younger males important skills, such as how to navigate human areas and show the much-needed restraint, thus keeping them ‘in check’.
The most telling of his relationship with other elephants was when we had successfully sedated a female elephant to place a radio-collar on — she was immobile, had her trunk to the ground and was ‘snoring’ — all pointing to an effective tranquillisation. Seeing this, our team began approaching her. But when we were about 100m away, Ramu appeared out of the blue! He moved straight towards the sedated female, and pushed and prodded her awake — vigorously pushing her away from us, to the safety of a nearby woodland. Our loud hollering and bursting firecrackers did not perturb him, and they both disappeared into the woodland - not to be seen. We documented this helping behaviour in a scientific journal, sharing these altruistic insights from Ramu’s life with ecologists across the globe.
In another instance, a large ‘elephant drive’ was organised by the FD to direct a herd of about 80 elephants away from crop fields on the river islands of the Brahmaputra river to the protected forest. All the cogs were in place, tens of FD staff armed with torches, crackers, and mobile phones - they just had to wait for the elephants to emerge from the tall grasslands at dusk as they always do. They would then cross the sliver of a tributary after which the team would holler and direct the elephants away. However, dusk fell, the nightjars called, and then the stars shone - with no sign of the elephants other than an occasional branch breaking in the grasslands – evidence that they were there. And then in the faded moonlight, we see a silhouette of just one large elephant. Ramu. The other 80 elephants had moved across further downstream, through a more challenging part of the river - giving the FD the slip! And Ramu served as a diversion, successfully distracting all of us. He was at the receiving end of many expletives that evening, but of course, he nonchalantly continued on his way.
He had the ability to be seemingly everywhere. When heading out to tranquilize elephants we moved into a bamboo thicket and stumbled upon a clearing. In the middle of which was the humungous Ramu, nonchalantly picking up grass in his trunk and swishing it and swirling it around. None of us had expected him to be there — leading to us all drawing our breaths in at the same time. We subsequently managed to collar a female elephant, Tara. Many months later, when tracking her we followed the beeping signals to a forested hula, a deep furrow in the Addabarie Tea Estate where natural vegetation grew. Moving around to get a better fix, we stumbled on a clearing. Here, at the edge was Ramu – hot in the pursuit of a female elephant. We watched them court each other from a distance, as did the other elephants, including Tara. This was one of the many times he attached himself to Tara’s herd.
He was also the most captured elephant on our camera traps - under the jackfruit tree that he would vigorously shake near Rangapara, at Sayaram’s fields in Dowangbari, and even in the heart of the dense forests of Sonai Rupai. However, he was undoubtedly the most popular in tea estates with a strong fan base. Once, the local vet, Abhilasha and I made our way to Kolony Tea Estate and found a set of womenfolk sitting on the bund, taking a long break from plucking tea. They were looking at Ramu, who had recently made his way to his prized mud pit, and was laying on his side and taking a long nap through the day – an old habit of his. They excitedly showed us photos of Ramu, who was considered part of the landscape, just like the trees, the birds, the people, and the sun.
Human-elephant conflicts
Ramu was not always non-destructive though — he occasionally broke into storehouses looking for rice, salt, or alcohol, especially freshly-brewed lau-pani. He would sniff his way around a house, and then proceed to break the nearest window, or in its absence, the wall and help himself. This invited the wrath of people, who gave him a jab with whatever they could find. However, unlike most of the other elephants in the landscape, even in such chaotic situations with so much panic and people running in all directions, he had not harmed any human in the recent past. This is probably why there was so much empathy for him, “he is doing this only because he also has nothing to eat, look at our stomachs —we go to such lengths for such a tiny stomach, but imagine him — there are no forests left either. At least he never harms humans”. While these may not necessarily be scientifically accurate, this trait of his is probably why he was tolerated in the landscape despite being recognisable and causing damage, an otherwise recipe for retaliatory killings.
In the Dhulapadung tea colony, he broke into the mud-and-stick wall of a small illicit brewery, while the grandmother was in the other room. He entered, and saw a toddler asleep on a plastic sheet and gently ducked back out, withdrawing his head — all while the grandmother watched muted. I reached the spot a while later to see the child once again asleep in the corner, with a huge elephant footprint larger than him right next to him, engraved in the mud floor.
Ramu also had his eccentricities. One summer afternoon, in a span of 24 hours, he decided to uproot 14 large subabool trees in tea estate. He was not in musth, nor were there any discernible signs of him acting differently. These were gigantic trees, several decades old, at least ten feet in circumference and four storeys tall – not a mean task! Why did he do this? No one could tell. All that was known was that he nibbled on the roots of a couple of these trees and moved along. We collected samples to see their nutritional composition but eventually did not get to it. The only people upset with this were the tea estate managers as shade trees boost the productivity of tea. The local residents though, were elated! The plantation labour laws mandate the management to provide a certain amount of firewood to the residents, however, they are notorious for skimping on this and always give a smaller fraction, forcing the labourers to scavenge for small branches or buy more with their meagre wages. The powerless workers have no remedy. Now that Ramu had uprooted so many trees, they were sure to get a larger amount of firewood – the management had no excuse. Plus, the management needed to hire some more people to cut these large trees into blocks, leading to some temporary employment for these people who are relegated to the margins. Ramu and the residents seemed to be happy with this event, while an exasperated tea estate manager was left scratching his head as to why this happened.
Builder of narratives
Ramu was the probably single largest driver of creating a narrative, a culture of human-elephant coexistence in Sonitpur — of providing a clue to how a shared space could be. His calmness and ‘never harming anyone’ behaviour led to several created histories for him. One of the most widely believed ones was that he was a captive elephant in Lakhimpur, a hundred kilometres away. The owner, a rich man had hired a mahout to handle Laden, who was an irresponsible alcoholic, forgetting to even feed him and beating him with no provocation. On one particularly abusive instance, Laden crushed the mahout to his death. Following this, the owner took charge — and a few months later met the same fate. Laden took this opportunity to escape, and meandering through the foothills of the Himalaya eventually reached the tea estates of Sonitpur and made this his home. Laden also had piercings in his ear, a sign of being a captive (though a more plausible explanation is the shotgun pellets that he was riddled with causing this). Of course, this is an implausible story, but it shows how stories evolve to explain anomalous behaviours. Similar traits of being accustomed to humans have been well documented in elephants in south India. He was a flagship individual for the landscape.
Ramu’s death
Over time, it became apparent to me that Ramu was not only another elephant, another data point to me, but an individual with a distinct personality. I felt a shared understanding with each passing interaction, at times, especially when he would be gorging himself on the bamboo in the heart of the tea estates, I would prop myself against a tea bush a distance away, taking cover from the sun beating down and make my notes. He would glance towards me at the start, half-raising his trunk and then get back to chewing. However, when a new person was around, he would either slowly walk away into the brush, or walk towards us — making us aware of his displeasure. However, I feel that his personality sometimes makes us attribute a lot more meaning than is warranted.
To me, his loss is deeply personal. Though I never explicitly acknowledged it until now, I had probably considered his presence a permanent feature of the landscape – I had heard of him many months before I saw him, and kept hearing about him many months after I left the landscape to study. The confidence, tact, and intelligence with which he navigated these complex, chaotic human areas and thousands of people and hundreds of elephants had somehow been internalized in my mind, that Ramu knows this place. This is his home. Nothing can befall him. Even when he disappeared for weeks, he had always returned. The men at Gorumara would ask each other, “where is Ramu these days? Is he back yet?” [emphasis mine]. Seeing him slain by a negligent wire is heartrending, for I cannot imagine the elephantscape of Sonitpur without this Buddha-like entity.
Words are difficult to describe our shared space because no words were ever exchanged.
Ramu's death is a stark call to us not just to be chroniclers of loss - recording the disappearance of these individuals, of species, of spaces. The power company, APDCL, whose lines caused this avoidable death had previously been directed to increase the height of these high-tension cables, but they were said to have been dragging their feet for several months. Ramu’s death underscores an often-encountered problem in conservation efforts; here was a well-defined problem with a well-defined solution, supported by the local residents, and required a relatively small monetary investment. Yet, the decisive factor missing was the political will to act. Identifying these critical bottlenecks and how to stoke change is key to creating meaningful conservation impacts.
Ramu leaves behind not only a strong legacy, one that is going to endure several decades but also was instrumental in creating a community of humans whose friendships he facilitated. On his tragic passing, I got tens of messages from people I hadn’t spoken with in years, all deeply moved by this collective loss of our friend’s passing. Ajay, of course, was the most shaken — he attended the post-mortem but went home midway through. He said he didn’t feel like talking to anyone, only answering my phone because I was so far away and would be feeling low too. Dibakar who has been interacting with Ramu since the day he entered the landscape to his death yesterday has not slept since Ramu’s loss. Ramu was considered the ‘guardian’ of the Sonitpur by the tens of thousands of people who knew him and who miss this ‘peaceful, almost human’ elephant. His death is heavy on our hearts, and on all those whose lives he touched.
Some of the many people who shared space and time with Ramu (in no particular order): KK Sharma, Hiten Kumar Baishya, Kaushik Baruah, David Smith, Samshul Ali, Parikshit Kakati, Borbora da, Teron, Tarun Menon, Kartik Chandramouli, Rangjalu Basumatary, Siddharth Agarwal, Priyanka Das, Nayantara Siruguri, Rohit Nandakumar, Samir Singh, Biblop Saikia, Promod Saikia, Epil Kongari, Tejaswini Nagesh, Ajit Bhengra, Aarushi Agarwal, Abhinav Agarwal, Joymala, Abishek Nippani, Rose, Isuf Khan, Ananta Das, Johann, Dibakar Basumatary, Dulen Lekharu, Ajay Sharma, Nibir Choudhary, Saurav Borkakati, Raj Ballav Sharma, Jacintha, Elizabeth, Indira, Chandan Nath, Manmuni, Ganesh, Kartik, Manisha Kumari, Peter, Michael, Vedika Agarwal, Anupam Sarmah, Raju Saikia, Poorva Goel, Bibhuti Mazumeder, Nitin Sekar, Lucky Neog, Matthew Kerketta, Sangeeta Kumari, Nripen Kalita, Piraisoodan B., Biren Rabha, Pradip Bora, and countless others.
Arjun Kamdar,
28 January, 2025
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