Queen Of The Elephants

(Paperback)

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Description

In the tiny aristocratic figure of Parbati Barua, known as "queen of the elephants", Mark Shand finds his ultimate guru. He had already learned about the ways of elephants after riding his beloved Tara across India, a journey which he described in "Travels on My Elephant", for which he won the 1992 Travel Writer of the Year Award. But he is no match for the daughter of India's greatest expert on the Asian elephant, the late Prince of Gauripur, who taught her everything. She lassoed her first wild elephant before she was 20. Once he has earned her trust, Shand rides with Parbati the elephants' ancient migratory route through the tea gardens of West Bengal and along the rarely visited Himalayan corridor to her ancestral home in Assam. They were accompanied by Aditya Patankar, whose photographs in this book accompany Shand's account of his quest for a solution to the problem of conserving the Asian elephant.

Author Bio

Mark Shand received the Travel Writer of the Year Award for his number one bestseller Travels on My Elephant. His previous book, Skullduggery, with photographs by Don McCullin, is the story of his search for the head-hunting tribes of Indonesia. He wrote the script and narrated the 'Discovery' feature-length television film 'Queen of the Elephants'.