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Updated: May 15, 2025
The space was divided into patches, containing paddy or dry rice, grain, Indian corn, coracan, with sweet potatoes, cassava, onions, yams, chillies, as also cotton-plants. I was surprised to find that the cultivators had only a temporary occupation of the ground. It is called chena cultivation. Pumpkins, sugar-cane, hemp, yams, as well as grains and vegetables, are grown.
Close to the edge of this the cultivated land of the village extended, and people were stationed in watch-houses erected up among the branches of the trees, shrieking and yelling, and beating drums, and making every conceivable noise to drive back into the jungle the elephants who were accustomed to take their morning repast off their fields of coracan, and maize or millet.
Thus a single watcher is able to keep them off the rice and coracan lands; and in some places, where these intervene between their haunts and the tanks where they are accustomed to drink, passages are made, lined by bamboo fences, and they pass up and down them without attempting to break into the fields, though full of their favourite food.
Their instinct tells them exactly when the products of the ground in which they most delight are ripe, and they regularly make their appearance in that part of the country where they are to be found. Now, curiously enough, as soon as the rice and coracan are removed and the fences are broken, the elephants walk into the fields and regularly glean them.
Although the fences around these chenas are little more than lines of reeds loosely fastened together, they are sufficient, with the presence of a single watcher, to prevent the entrance of the elephants, who wait patiently till the rice and coracan have been removed, and the watcher withdrawn; and, then finding gaps in the fence, they may be seen gleaning among the leavings and the stubble; and they take their departure when these are exhausted, apparently in the direction of some other chena, which they have ascertained to be about to be cut.
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