Elephant expert Dhriti Kanta dies at 87

Kolkata: An expert on Indian elephants and celebrated author, Dhriti Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, breathed his last at his south Kolkata residence on Friday morning. He was 87.

“He had been suffering from age-related problems and breathed his last around 7.15am,” said his wife Shila Lahiri Choudhury.

No elephant story was complete without a stop at Lahiri Choudhury’s. He was a rare combination of literary proficiency with a deep understanding of wildlife, which often translated into unparalleled writings, in both English and Bengali.

He was born in 1931 to Dhirendra Kanta and Renuka Devi at Kalipur village in Mymensingh district of Bangladesh. After Partition, his family shifted to Kolkata. Dhriti Kanta was a student of English literature at Presidency College and completed his PhD from the University of Leeds. Later, he became a professor at Rabindra Bharati University.

Dhriti Kanta travelled extensively across the forests of Ass-am, Barak Valley, Bengal, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha, Uttaranchal, Bandipur and Periyar, gathering experience on elephants and surveying the status and distribution of elephants, man-elephant conflicts and problems of elephants in India.

His books, ‘The Great Indian Elephant Book’ and ‘A Trunk Full of Tales: Seventy Years With The Indian Elephant’, are considered guidebooks on elephants. Dhriti Kanta wrote two Bengali books, ‘Hatir Boi’ and ‘Jiboner Indradhanu’. He also researched on Kolkata’s heritage architecture. In 1977, he became a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s elephant specialist group. He also became a member of the advisory committee of Project Elephant in 2004.

Recalling his association with Dhriti Kanta, former government-registered hunter Ranjit Mukherjee said none of their ventures was complete without his advice. “I, along with my friend Chanchal Sarkar, who was also a government-recognised hunter, met Dhriti Kanta in 1972. In 1974, he gave us the movement map of a rogue elephant at Nagrakata when we had gone to north Bengal to shoot it. 

At that time, we failed to kill it and could only manage to injure it. On our return, he advised us on ways to successfully shoot a rogue elephant. We used to have several ‘adda’ sessions at his home and discussed mostly elephants and their behaviour,” recalled Mukherjee.

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