1998, from an article about capturing wild elephants in Mysore, India.
About once every five years, the maharadja of Mysore used to round up wild elephants from his jungles, in order to have them tamed and used for ceremonies or logging work. This took several months and involved thousands of hunters and several hundred tame elephants. It climaxed when the wild elephants were driven, one by one, into a wooden stockade (called kheddah), where some of their tamed and trained fellow creatures helped to immobilize and rope them. For the maharadja, this was a kind of celebration, to which he invited his friends of the international jet set. Not being part of this, I couldn’t obtain an invitation, but had to smuggle myself in and spend the nights in the jungle with the native hunters. Nevertheless I got a story that is still of some interest, inasmuch as this event turned out to be the last of its kind: in the following years, the maharadja was dispossessed of his kingdom, most of his forests were destroyed and the wild elephants deprived of their habitat.
1953, near Mysore, India, Khedda (capturing wild elephants) (c)