Rashmoni found a safe haven. What about Bangladesh’s other captive elephants?

Rashmoni, now 25, was born at The Lion Circus in Khulna, where she endured years of torture and neglect to learn unnatural balancing acts, parades and circus routines for paying crowds.

Today, the elephant lives at Surma Tea Estate in Habiganj, where her mornings begin with about 50 banana plants, 30 maize plants and a bucket of husk mixed with jaggery. She eats, sleeps and bathes at will and roams freely through the tea garden.

Her relocation in December 2024 was made possible by the Forest Department, animal welfare organisation Obhoyaronno, Surma Tea Estate and India's Wildlife Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre (WRRC) in Bengaluru.

The breaking process

In Bangladesh, captive elephants exist in an ambiguous legal territory. Some are caught from the wild as calves, while others are bred in circus compounds and timber yards. 

In either case, turning a five-ton wild animal into an obedient servant requires a centuries-old subjugation technique known across South Asia as Hadani or the breaking process.

The process is brutally systematic. A young calf, usually three to six years old, is torn from its mother, its four legs bound to wooden posts. Isolated and deprived of food and water for days, it is repeatedly beaten with an ankush, a wooden staff tipped with a recurved steel hook, across its joints, head and the sensitive skin behind its ears until it stops resisting.

Among the most socially complex and empathetic mammals, elephants suffer psychological wounds that often outlast the physical scars of the crush. Deprived of their matriarch's protection, calves subjected to Hadani often develop stereotypic behaviours, such as compulsive head-swaying and shifting from side to side, which circus spectators may mistake for an "elephant dance".

For Rashmoni, the circus was all she had ever known. Her mahout, Masud, who spent years directing her in the ring, when asked about the methods used to force a juvenile elephant into obedience, he neither denied the violence, nor explicitly explained the process.

"Back then we didn't understand things the way people talk about them now," he said flatly. "To make an elephant perform circus tricks, we had to do a lot of things. If you don't force them, how else will you teach them to play? She doesn't have to do any of that here. She eats good food every single meal, and her health has turned around. I'm doing well here too."

Road to Surma

The legal and logistical push that extracted Rashmoni from the circus happened in a matter of days.  In late December 2024, Obhoyaronno, working with the Forest Department, took Rashmoni into custody from The Lion Circus. But it was uncertain where to put her for rehabilitation.

The government's primary holding facility for confiscated wildlife is the Safari Park in Gazipur, where some of the other rescued elephants were taken. But it does not have enough facilities or arrangements necessary for an elephant. 

Months earlier, when Niharkali, another circus elephant was rescued by Obhoyaronno and Forest Department, watching the circulated videos of her torture, Sadia Moyeen, one of the owners of Surma Tea Estate, contacted Rubaiya Ahmad, the founder of Obhoyaronno. 

Since Rashmoni does not eat tea leaves, while moving through tea garden, she follows the tea pluckers' path without damaging the branches.

"At first, the idea sounded strange, but it stayed with me," Rubaiya said. "When Rashmoni's rescue from Khulna became a reality, I consulted elephant rehabilitation specialists, who confirmed the model's potential. Tea estates offer space, water and food, and elephants do not eat tea leaves."

On 30 December, Rubaiya called Sadia. "I was not prepared when Rubaiya called," Sadia said. "We rushed to clear a holding space and build a secure perimeter near our bungalow." 

The transfer had begun on 31 December. Moving a five-ton animal requires steady driving at low speeds to prevent the elephant from losing its footing. Rashmoni arrived on 1 January from Habiganj to Khulna. 

"When she was brought to the tea estate, she was terrified. Her ribs were sticking out, her skin was dull and flaky, she was bloated with worms, and her feet were in bad shape from years on concrete. She was so hungry that she ate all the banana plants on her first meal here," recalled Rubaiya.

Rebuilding the diet

In the circus, Rashmoni had lived almost entirely on dry rice husk, supplemented by occasional banana stems and bread.

Initially, when the estate staff tried to give her fresh fruits and sweet corn, her gut rejected the food. To fix her diet, Obhoyaronno turned to Suparna Baksi Ganguly, one of the founders of WRRC in Bangalore, and her daughter Suranjana Ganguly.

Rashmoni is getting her daily batch of nutritious supplement balls.

"Suparna and Suranjana became our remote support," Rubaiya said. "Whenever we needed guidance on diet, stool consistency, or medication, they were available on the phone. They walked us through how to slowly rebuild her gut."

They also taught them to design a daily nutritional protocol centered on nutrient balls: two kilograms of boiled rice mashed together with wheat bran, coarse rice husk, crushed maize, raw jaggery, seasonal vegetables, and a precise amount of mineral salt.

For the first month, they conducted feedings and the deworming process over live video calls.

Today, her schedule follows a strict timetable. She wakes at dawn, typically around Fajr prayer, and feeds on fifty fresh banana trunks or maize stalks. That is followed by clean water infused with rice bran. Between eight and nine, she receives her fruit ration, including watermelon, sugarcane, pumpkin, etc.

Between ten and eleven, her handlers open the paddock, and she walks out into the tea fields.

Surma is composed of miles of low, waist-high bushes planted in clean, parallel contours beneath broad shade trees. Rashmoni moves down the narrow pluckers' paths with surprising precision, stepping around the bushes without breaking branches.

Rashmoni, though, completely ignores the tea bushes. "If she ate tea leaves, my family would never have agreed to keep her here," Sadia said.

Instead, she drops her trunk to the base of the plants, sweeping out the wild grasses, broadleaf weeds, and creepers that grow in the damp earth beneath the canopy. Her walk ends at a water body to get a bath.

Rashmoni enjoys her bath at a nearby waterbody for around an hour everyday.

The Mahout paradox

When Obhoyaronno negotiated Rashmoni's extraction from Khulna, they made a counterintuitive decision: they kept Masud on the payroll.

"We didn't have to train Rashmoni but the mahout," Rubaiya said. "In the circus, they control these animals by driving the ankush into their foreheads and behind their ears, or by waving burning rags in their faces. We had to teach him how he should behave with Rashmoni"

Cutting ties with the abuser may seem obvious, but Hadani calves lose their natural social structure and develop intense, dysfunctional dependence on the person controlling their daily lives, resembling severe trauma bonding.

"Despite years of abuse, Rashmoni remained deeply attached to Masud," Rubaiya explained. "Circus conditioning creates intense dependence on handlers, and abruptly severing that bond can cause psychological distress. At Surma, she became agitated if Masud left for 10 minutes and refused to move without him."

To ensure compliance, the estate installed closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras over the night shelter and paddock, feeding live video directly to Rubaiya's phone in Dhaka and Sadia's office.

Those who are still suffering

Rashmoni's stay at Surma is an isolated arrangement. For the vast majority of captive elephants in Bangladesh, official oversight barely exists.

Md Amir Hosain Chowdhury, the Chief Conservator of Forests, explains, "The elephants we have rescued so far were taken from licensed owners who violated the rules under the Deer and Elephant Rearing Rules 2017," Chowdhury said. 

"So far we have rescued five or six elephants. Four are at Gazipur Safari Park, and one is at Surma Tea Estate. The elephants in Gazipur were once kept in chains, but they are not chained anymore. A dedicated area has been allocated for them where they can walk and roam around."

Asked about the official figure of 96 privately owned elephants, he said the last count was conducted in 2015. A new census began this year and is expected to take about a year. He added that the registered elephants were not newly acquired but passed down through generations, with many families keeping them as a hobby.

When asked how the Forest Department learns about abuse and how they monitor working elephants across the country, he said, "We took action after seeing videos of abuse of these five or six elephants on Facebook," he said. 

"In licensed areas, our offices oversee and verify the elephants. But when mahouts take them far away, monitoring becomes difficult, sometimes leading to extortion. We plan to install microchips to track the elephants' movements and have informed owners accordingly."

He also noted that Rashmoni's stay on the tea plantation is legally temporary.

"The elephant at Surma Tea Estate is in temporary custody, and we can bring her back anytime. Rashmoni is reportedly doing well there. We plan to build an orphanage for rescued elephants, possibly near Chittagong, where we could relocate elephants from the safari park and tea garden."

To the public, the word "rescue" implies an eventual return to the jungle. But wildlife biologists point out that for an animal raised within human infrastructure, release into the wild is frequently fatal.

That danger became evident in January 2026. A video showed seven-year-old Birbahadur being beaten during Hadani training in Moulvibazar's Kulaura. Following public outrage, the Forest Department seized him and his 42-year-old mother, Sundarmala, and released them into Kalapahar reserve forest.

Without rehabilitation, Sundarmala wandered onto a railway track in Sylhet's Shibbari area ten days later. Struck by a train, she died two days later. Months afterwards, videos showed Birbahadur recaptured by handlers and back on the streets, being used for extortion.

The High Court suspended the issuing and renewal of licences to adopt wild elephants in 2024. On 17 June 2026, Supreme Court lawyer Jyotirmoy Barua served a legal notice demanding measures to prevent abuse and rehabilitate captive elephants. Yet proper rehabilitation measures remain absent.