Meeting Chinna Thambi: A Journalist's Privileged Glimpse Inside an Elephant Camp

The best part of being a journalist is the access it grants to places most people can never dream of visiting. The Varagaliyar elephant camp, tucked inside Tamil Nadu's Anamalai Tiger Reserve (ATR), is one such place — closed to the public, it opens only to those with official permission.

That permission came one evening, an hour before dusk, when the then Field Director of ATR allowed a visit to the camp. The journey itself was unforgettable. A sturdy Forest Department jeep trundled along narrow trails that barely existed, through mud roads so untouched that the vehicle seemed to clear foliage bending into its path, much as elephants move through forests.

The destination was Chinna Thambi, the wild elephant tranquillised, captured, and tamed to become a camp elephant in 2019. Before his capture, he had been a crop raider in the Thadagam valley on the outskirts of Coimbatore, entering human habitation with the innocence and curiosity of a young bull. He was 25 when he was caught, and over time had grown used to the villages on the forest's fringes.

Approaching the camp, enthusiasm gave way to trepidation. The gigantic wooden enclosure — a kraal made of wooden beams — stood ahead, and from a distance his tail was visible. In that moment, the urge was to run away, to avoid seeing him that way. But the Field Director glanced back, and there was no choice but to continue.

Chinna Thambi's mahout offered him large balls of ragi from outside the enclosure. Stepping closer for a better look, it was the first time a wild elephant had been seen from such close quarters. When he put out his trunk for food, the instinct was to jerk back. The mahout joked that all he wanted was food, adding that he was almost broken — it was just a matter of a few days.

Such access is a privilege like none other, allowing a story to be approached with all five senses. Yet not every experience is one to look back on with fondness. The same camp visits that offered close observation of abandoned elephant calves at Theppakadu in Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, or of mahouts mixing cooked ragi, rice, horse gram, and salt into mammoth balls at mealtime, also carried a quieter discomfort — the knowledge that this closeness comes at a cost.