Known as “Elephant Girl” (Hasti Kanya) in Assam, 67-year-old Parbati Barua is India’s first woman mahout (elephant keeper). She was conferred the Padma Shri last year for her pioneering work in wildlife conservation and for breaking gender barriers in a field traditionally dominated by men.
Born into the Gauripur royal family in the Goalpara district of Assam, Barua and her father Prakritish Barua caught their first elephant together when Barua was 14 years old in the Kachugaon woods of Kokrajhar district.
The last of the Rajas of Gauripur was Prakritish Barua. Parbati Baruah spent a lot of time in the forests with her father and had a deep awareness of and fascination with elephants when she was a young child.
Prakritish Barua had forty elephants in his royal stables and was a quirky hunter with a mystical awareness of elephants.
With a vast entourage that included cooks, attendants, and a private teacher for his kids, Barua would take his family on long excursions into the woodlands. His family comprised of his four wives and nine children.
According to Parbati herself, she somewhat developed her interest in elephants during these excursions. Barua spent forty years reducing human-elephant conflicts and fighting against gender stereotypes in this profession.
Human-elephant confrontations have a long history in Assam, and Baruah was instrumental in developing government regulations to keep them under control. She developed into a master at taming wild elephants.
Her expertise on the behaviour of elephants made her well-known not just in Assam but also in nearby states like West Bengal and Odisha.
Barua also assisted the forest authorities in driving troublemakers back into the forests from agricultural fields. Queen of the Elephants is the title of a book written about her by British travel writer and naturalist Mark Roland Shand, published in 1996.
Later, the BBC produced a documentary that was widely praised.
Following at least 40 years of continuous service as a mahout, Parbati committed her life to animal conservation, and she is presently a part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Asian Elephant Specialist Group (IUCN).
