From awe to action: How I discovered harmony and found purpose in forests
Seema Lokhandwala, a 2025 Pritzker Award finalist, reflects on how a childhood encounter with an elephant grew into a lifelong commitment to protecting the fragile bonds between people and wildlife
A throbbing sound rolled through the air and, slipping under my skin, sent goosebumps across my body. Her eyes like deep emerald pools seemed to hold the forest, something timeless and immense. And I marveled at how such a colossal being could move through the Terai’s whispering grasslands with the quiet grace of drifting clouds.
That awe has never left me.
The path from that first encounter to working for elephant conservation has been long, yet unwavering. I grew up in a community where the choices for a respectable future were narrow, confined to becoming a doctor or an engineer. And so, I trained to be a computer engineer, even as another part of me kept yearning to be with elephants.
In those years, books became my refuge. I read voraciously about elephants until, one day, I came across the documentary “Echo and the Elephants of Amboseli.” For the first time, I saw someone living the life I had only dared to imagine. That window opened wide, and I stepped through. My reading deepened, and I soon learned that in my own country there were a few who had also devoted themselves to elephants. Startling, though, was a silence — very little was known of Asian elephant communication compared to their African cousins. In that silence, I heard my calling.
I began reaching out to researchers in India, and I was blessed to find mentors who encouraged me to follow my passion. I transitioned enthusiastically from my job as a software engineer to a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science. Within days of stepping into the field came my first experience of human-elephant conflict, and with that, a sobering realization of the significance of and the challenges and contested routes to coexistence.
I remember one winter morning in Assam when I visited a house raided the night before. The veranda was littered with dung and scattered hay, the kitchen torn apart and the entire year’s harvest lost. The woman of the house spoke softly, her voice steady despite the destruction around her. She recalled the trumpeting cries that had split the night, her family huddling under the bed as elephants devoured grain and feasted on salt. Yet even in her loss, she called them “Ganesh Baba”, the name of a Hindu deity, as a mark of reverence. It stunned me: how could such reverence exist alongside such loss?
And in that moment, I understood something profound. Coexistence in India is not led by ecologists and conservation scientists alone. Equally, if not more important, are efforts and cultural beliefs of the silent millions that actually live alongside the magnificent animals — people who endure with patience, who live with fear and yet speak with reverence, whose courage and care keep intact the fragile thread of coexistence. But that thread is fraying.
Expanding farms, economic pressures and the relentless pace of globalization are eroding the tolerance that have allowed people and elephants to live side by side. This realization spurred me to work towards protecting the very relationship between humans and elephants, the invisible bond that holds coexistence together.
To understand and protect that fragile bond, I knew my work could not be confined to a lab. It had to be in the villages — on porches at dusk, in courtyards at dawn, listening as people recalled their interactions with elephants. And so I spent months in and around the forests of Kaziranga-Karbi Anglong. Slowly, a pattern emerged: most encounters happen in darkness, in fields and farms that lie along the ancient routes of elephants.
These observations stirred something deep within me. I realized the skills I had picked up as an engineering student could be turned outward, reshaped into tools for conservation. And so, the Elephant Acoustics Project took shape. From the outset, it has been nurtured by community participation, as we walked the fields with farmers, listening to their wisdom and weaving their knowledge into every choice we made.
Communities guide our work as much as our research in bioacoustics — we design advanced acoustic sensors but they guide us in their placement; we program acoustic deterrents but only after consulting the communities to find out the sounds that work best. The insight we glean from the communities has become the backbone of the project.
Throughout this journey, I have upheld and nourished a quiet vow I made years ago: to work not only for the advancement of science but also for the coexistence of humans and wildlife, to help preserve that delicate balance which allows us to share the land.
