The city that kept the elephants' names but lost the elephants themselves

Elephant Road. Hatirpool. Hatirjheel.

Dhaka is full of reminders of an animal that once belonged to the city. Today, the names remain, but the elephants are gone.

There is something strange about walking down Elephant Road today.

The streets are crowded with buses, rickshaws, shops and thousands of hurried people. Neon signs compete for attention, while traffic barely moves.

And yet, hidden in the name of the road is a memory of a very different Dhaka.

Elephants once walked here.

They came from Pilkhana, where Dhaka's royal elephant stables once stood, towards the waters of Hatirjheel. Hatirpool, too, carries the memory of those animals. Pilkhana could accommodate hundreds of elephants, which were used for transport, labour, warfare, and ceremonial purposes.

Then the city grew.

The elephants disappeared. The names stayed.

Perhaps that is the saddest part of Dhaka's relationship with elephants: the city remembers them better than it preserved the world they needed to survive.

Pilkhana in 1904.

Once, they were part of Dhaka

It is difficult to imagine now, but elephants were once woven into the life of Bengal.

They carried kings and soldiers. They hauled timber. They appeared in processions and ceremonies. Dhaka became an important centre for keeping and training them.

For centuries, they were not exotic creatures seen from behind a fence. They were part of everyday life.

But that relationship changed.

Wild elephants were captured in large numbers, while forests were gradually cleared for settlements, agriculture and roads. As machines replaced animals, elephants lost much of their usefulness to people.

And as Dhaka expanded, there was simply less and less room for them.

The city that once accommodated elephants became a city where even people struggle to find space.

The elephants moved farther away

The elephants did not disappear from Dhaka overnight.

They were pushed towards the remaining forests, mainly in the southeast, the Chattogram Hill Tracts and Cox's Bazar, while some migrated across the northern border from India.

Their once-continuous habitat became fragmented into smaller forests, connected by increasingly fragile corridors.

The last detailed national survey estimated 268 resident wild elephants in Bangladesh, along with 93 migratory elephants.

For a country where elephants once roamed across vast areas, the number is painfully small.

And even those remaining elephants are increasingly being forced into the paths of people.

Roads cross their routes. Railways cut through forests. Villages expand into their habitat. When an elephant enters a crop field, we call it a conflict. But the elephant does not know where the forest ends and the village begins. It only knows the path its herd has followed for generations.

When the road became a railway

Perhaps nothing captures the tragedy better than an elephant trying to cross a railway.

In 2025, an elephant repeatedly rammed a moving train in Chunati Wildlife Sanctuary. The railway had been built through important elephant habitat, while a section of around 600 metres remained unfenced in an area frequently crossed by elephants.

The image is almost symbolic.

A train represents a Bangladesh moving forward — faster roads, better connectivity, new infrastructure.

The elephant represents a Bangladesh that existed long before any of it.

And somewhere between the two, the forest has disappeared.

Dhaka's elephant memory

In 2023, a young elephant was killed by a train near Uttara in Dhaka.

For a city accustomed to traffic deaths, construction accidents and the constant violence of urban life, it was an extraordinary sight.

An elephant, an animal that once belonged to the landscape of this city, lying beside a railway line. It felt almost impossible. But perhaps it should not have.

By then, Dhaka had already lost its elephants long ago. What remained was only the memory.

Elephant Road, Hatirpool and Hatirjheel — three names that quietly tell the story of a city that changed so completely that the animals behind those names became almost unimaginable.

Elephants did not vanish from Bangladesh in one dramatic moment.

A forest became a settlement. A hill became a road. A corridor became a railway. A herd became smaller. A calf was killed. And slowly, a generation grew up without seeing what earlier generations considered ordinary.

That is how extinction often looks. Not like an ending. Like forgetting.

Perhaps one day, Dhaka's children will hear the words Elephant Road and never wonder why it is called that. They will know Hatirjheel as a lake, Hatirpool as a neighbourhood and Elephant Road as a shopping destination.

The names will survive. The elephants may not. That is what makes the old names of Dhaka so haunting. We kept the names of the elephants after we lost the elephants themselves.

Somewhere beyond this city, in the remaining forests, elephants are still walking the paths their ancestors knew.

For now, they are still here. But the question is no longer whether Bangladesh once had elephants.

We know it did.

The question is whether, years from now, Elephant Road will be the only place left where Dhaka remembers that it once did.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.