Hiristor and Mak, two rurban male Asian elephants, culturally more synurbised than their forest counterparts, traverse a production landscape – once a forest but now teeming with people and infrastructure – in southern India, trying to come to terms with their newly lived spaces and the novel experiences driving them. A complex interplay of space, knowledge, and capabilities has created a new generation of ‘outlier’ elephants, who have no option but to develop novel, potentially adaptive, behavioural strategies to live alongside humans. This rapid synanthropisation of the elephant populations of peninsular India, we suggest, requires an urgent realisation of the latent capabilities of both people and elephants to enable their peaceful, but vital, coexistence in the troubled times of the Anthropocene.
