From Assam to UP, how the script for Operation Catch played out
Kamaal Sheikh, who is in his late fifties, may resemble any other employee while he handles wild animals at Lucknow’s Nawab Wajid Ali Shah Zoological Garden.
But many may not know that this short-statured man belongs to a rare tribe of elephant catchers and is perhaps the only one of his kind in Uttar Pradesh.
He was brought to the state by the government to implement the state’s last elephant catching operation in 1977, which was the last year when such an exercise was a legal affair.
Sheikh, who hails from Gauripur town in Assam’s Dhubri district, said India was among those few countries, where the art of capturing or domesticating elephants was about 3000 years old.
“We are among the few carrying the legacy forward. Unfortunately, nothing is being done on the government’s part to revive this dying art. Barring me, all others who were brought to UP in 1977 elephant catching operation, are dead,” says Sheikh.
In 1977, the UP forest department began a hunt for trained elephant catchers. Once captured, the elephants were to be exchanged for animals to be brought from foreign zoos for the zoological gardens in Lucknow and Kanpur.
Mahendra Singh, the then wildlife warden posted in Lucknow, who was assigned the task of capturing the elephants, said ‘Operation ‘Catch’ was still fresh in his memory.
“I remember we were told we needed to catch around 30 elephants for an animal exchange programme. It was then that we began searching for the tribe adept in elephant-catching,”
Singh recalled.
On failing to locate any such tribe or community in UP, the hunt took the officers to the court of the royal family of Gauripur, Assam, that is known for having a large herd of domesticated elephants. Some foresters, who were part of the operation said, the ‘raja’ agreed to the plea of UP forest department but demanded Rs 3 lakh for transporting the elephants and the trained elephant catchers from his court all the way to UP.
Since the department didn’t have that much of a budget, a deal was struck wherein the ‘raja’ would send only two trained elephant catchers and two others to assist them.
“Kamaal Sheikh, who was just 15 then, was among the two elephant catchers whom we brought to UP,” said Singh.
Soon afterwards, a hunt for the ‘right’ location for Operation ‘Catch’ began.
“We shortlisted Chilla, a part of Rajaji National Park in Haridwar district of Uttarakhand, which then was a part of UP. And
We are among the few carrying the legacy forward. Unfortunately, nothing is being done on the government’s part to revive this dying art
KAMAAL SHEIKH,
elephant catcher
Kamaal Sheikh said catching an elephant was no child’s play. It’s an art that is on the verge of extinction. In Assam and other states of North East, where the elephant population is in abundance, prior to 1977, elephant catching for domestication was a tradition. Elephant catchers are also known as phundis in Assam. “Capturing elephants was my ancestral profession,” said Sheikh. How it is done? The elephant catcher said a trained ‘phundi’ (catcher) used to chase a herd on an elephant, with one end of a thick rope tied to the jumbo’s stomach and the other end of the rope used to lasso the elephant, especially the calves.
“Once lassoed, the catcher tries to reduce the length of the rope gradually as he continues to chase the elephant. The entire process is not easy as many times, the mother elephant turns violent,” he added. He said the art was over 3,000 years old and many kings had promoted the tradition of domesticating elephants for their military.