Europeans may entertain warm feelings towards elephants but in north-east India the species is much less popular and not without cause

Europeans may entertain warm feelings towards elephants, but in north-east India the species is much less popular, and not without cause. Increasingly, the Indian elephant is angry: shot at by poachers, its ancient migratory paths blocked by tea plantations, its home in the jungles that once greened the Himalayan foothills now reduced to small shards of forest, it finally seems to be fighting back. All the elephant wants is peace and safety.” There was no doubt on which side her loyalties lay. “If a man is killed,” she said, “millions more are there to replace him. “My work,” Parbati told friends, “is to rescue man from the elephants, and to keep the elephants safe from man.

This battle is at its fiercest in rural India where hundreds of wild elephants are killed each year – some by poachers and some by angry villagers tired of having their crops destroyed or gobbled up by these voracious herbivores – and for the past 20 years it has been growing fiercer. Then, with all of her duties done, she disappeared alone into the jungle with her elephants for a long, long time.”AND THEN, shortly afterwards, Parbati found a new purpose: a role in the battle between man and India’s 9,000 remaining wild elephants. “She took her father’s death well,” says one friend.”She returned to the family for the cremation ceremonies. Lalji was disheartened and impoverished, and his health failed Parbati nursed “the beloved little kid” until he died. Catching wild elephants in this way is perilous work, and Parbati is the only woman in the world to have mastered it. (So remarkable is she that Mark Shand, the English adventurer and pachydermophile, and Aditya Patankar, his Indian collaborator, have written her biography, which is published next week by Jonathan Cape.)Parbati and Lalji’s jungle life came to an end in 1977, when the Indian government banned the capture of elephants for commercial purposes. Riding barefoot, and steering her elephant with the firm pressure of her toes behind the elephant’s ears, Parbati would stalk a wild herd through a tangle of jungle creepers.

Then she would ease her way into the herd, separate one of the smaller calves from the others and, if all went well, have it securely tied up before the alarm was trumpeted and the calf’s mother and the bull elephant charged over. Indeed, many of the elephants seen in north India today – chained outside Hindu temples, dragging teak logs out of the jungle, chauffeuring tourists around game parks or up the steps of Rajasthani palaces – were caught by Lalji and Parbati.From her father, Parbati learnt the dangerous art of the mela shikar, the elephant round-up. Together, father and daughter went into the business of catching wild elephants, taming them and selling them off either privately or through the Sonepur fair, on the River Ganges near Patna. There was no room for princes in modern India, so Lalji retreated into the forests, seemingly as doomed to extinction as many of the species he had hunted Parbati followed. Lalji found himself broke, with little left aside from his Mahtiabag palace and a stable full of 40 hungry elephants – each animal devours nearly 250lbs of fodder a day. But after independence from Britain in 1947, the Indian state began stripping the maharajahs and princes of their land and wealth. The final blow was the abolition of the maharajahs’ privy purses in 1970, an act which cut off the Indian aristocracy’s final vestiges of privilege and power.

When the Moghuls ruled India, demanding taxes from the princes under their domain, the Baruas paid off their yearly tribute to the emperor with six war elephants. Parbati, the favourite among the children, has since claimed that “When I opened my eyes for the first time, I saw an elephant.” It was probably not the most suitable upbringing for the future wife of a banker.Although Lalji hunted many different animals in the jungles of Assam, neither he nor his princely ancestors ever killed an elephant. The elephant was sacred to the Barua family; as good Hindus, they had worshipped Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of Auspicious Beginnings, for centuries. Lalji was an eccentric and uncanny hunter who killed over 40 tigers and twice as many leopards. (There would, I imagined, be no shortage of leopard skins for his Amazonian daughter’s wardrobe.) For six, sometimes nine months a year, Lalji left his palace and camped in the Assamese jungle, taking along his large family (he had four wives), and a retinue of 70 servants that included nearly a dozen cooks, a doctor, a barber, and a tutor for his nine children. Everybody, even the mahouts (the elephant drivers who look after most of India’s 23,000-odd domesticated elephants) called him “Lalji”, which means “the beloved little kid”.