IWN Report — Monday, 28 September 2026

As wildlife lovers and conservationists across India take to social media to express anguish over five young elephant calves being trucked out of  Assam and sent thousands of kilometers away to Tamil Nadu’s temples — where they are likely to live out their lives as solitary, ceremonial animals — the transfers have quietly gone through.

The last four of five young elephants reached their destinations late last week, despite the outcry and pending legal challenges. The Gauhati High Court has asked Assam to account for, in a detailed affidavit on the animals’ welfare, before it hears the case again on 15 October.

The journey — of Durga, a five-year-old female; eight-year-old Hiralal and six-year-old Shiva, both males; Rupsing, a male recorded as 13; and Bijuli, a five-year-old female — and the questions it has reopened, show  why Tamil Nadu’s temples continue to turn to Assam for elephants, and how a practice rooted in royal courts and forest economies has persisted long after those worlds have faded.

The Rules

Moves like this are governed by the Captive Elephant (Transfer or Transport) Rules, 2024, which let a state’s Chief Wildlife Warden approve a transfer if “the owner is no longer in a position to maintain the elephant” or if “the elephant will have a better upkeep than in the present circumstances.” For a move between states, the receiving state inspects the new home and sends its recommendation back to the donor state. All five calves were privately owned, and Tamil Nadu’s Chief Wildlife Warden, Rakesh Kumar Dogra, has said a no-objection certificate was in place for Durga’s transfer, DT Next reported.

Assam-based conservationist Rohit Choudhury asked the Gauhati High Court to halt the transfers, as part of his pending challenge to the provisos in Sections 40(2A) and 40(2B) of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972. On 18 September a bench of Chief Justice Ashutosh Kumar and Justice Arun Dev Choudhury refused, saying it found “no reason, as on date, to pass any restraint order, unless it is clearly shown that necessary clearances have not been obtained,” after Assam’s Additional Advocate General said every clearance was in place, LiveLaw reported. A similar petition by the Seva Trust in the Madras High Court is awaiting judgment, according to the legal news site Sekar Reporter.

Open Questions

The calves were described in the Madras High Court as donations to the temples, but some Tamil Nadu reports have referred to Rupsing as purchased, Northeast Now found, and no donation deed or sale agreement for any of the five has been made public. Rupsing’s own forms give two different ages, 13 years and two months in one and 15 years and one month in an earlier one.

Elephants can be privately held only if their captivity traces back lawfully, and Alok Hisarwala, founder of the Centre for Research on Animal Rights, has argued in Scroll that the question of who Durga’s mother is, and whether that mother’s captivity was lawfully established, is a legal one. The animal-welfare group People For Cattle in India, which has campaigned against the transfers, has pointed to holes in the calves’ ears as possible signs of wild capture. IWN has not been able to verify that claim.

Royal Inheritance

Much of the temple tradition traces back to royal courts, where, as the historian Thomas Trautmann has shown, Indian rulers kept war elephants for roughly 3,000 years and, because raising one from birth cost too much, caught wild adults and trained them one by one, which gave them a reason to protect elephant forests. “For over two millennia,” the ecologist Raman Sukumar has written, “the history of the Asian elephant is essentially a history of its use to further the imperial ambitions of Asian kings and European powers.”

In Kerala, the Cochin State Manual recorded about 12 elephants belonging to temple boards in the 1890s, according to Sahapedia, and local tradition holds that the Guruvayur temple, then in the Zamorin’s kingdom of Calicut, once had to borrow elephants from a temple under the King of Cochin. Guruvayur’s most famous tusker, Kesavan, was offered to the temple on 4 January 1922 by the Valiya Raja of the Nilambur royal family.

In 1954, a few years after the princely states were absorbed into India, Guruvayur received an elephant named Padmanabhan from Cherukunnath Namboodiri, a devotee giving thanks for the birth of a child, The News Minute recorded. The 2022 amendment to Section 43 of the Wild Life (Protection) Act now allows captive elephants to be transferred for “religious or any other purpose”, the first time the Act has made an exception on religious grounds for a Schedule I animal, Down To Earth noted.

Assam’s Supply

Before elephants were moved to Schedule I in 1977, which made their capture illegal, the lasso method known as mela shikar took an estimated 300 to 400 wild elephants a year in Assam alone. The state’s working elephants then lost much of their logging work after the Supreme Court banned tree felling in 1996, and nearly 1,000 domestic elephants have been taken out of Assam since that ban, Deccan Herald reported in 2022.

In December 2022, Assam’s then forest minister, Chandra Mohan Patowary, told the state Assembly that 97 domestic elephants had been sent to other states since 2006, 57 of them to Bihar, according to the same report. One of them, a female named Joymala, went to a Tamil Nadu temple on a short lease more than a decade ago, and when Assam went to court for her return, Tamil Nadu told the Madras High Court in 2022 that it had no intention of sending her back.

Royal Remnants

As the courts weigh the paperwork and the temples take possession of their new arrivals, the question that lingers is whether rules shaped by vanished kingdoms can meet the expectations of a country that now sees elephants less as symbols of power and more as sentient beings with lives of their own.

Sources: LiveLaw · Captive Elephant (Transfer or Transport) Rules, 2024 · Northeast Now · The Hindu (via Hindu Press International) · DT Next · Scroll · Sekar Reporter · IIAS review of Trautmann, Elephants and Kings · Raman Sukumar, Seminar · Sahapedia · The News Minute · Down To Earth · Deccan Herald