Venkitachalam told me that his organization has seven members, but he refused to let me talk to any of the others. “Their names are very secret,” he said. Some are deeply involved in temple activities, and they act as his spies on the ground, eavesdropping on the conversations of temple presidents, taking notes and photographs whenever an elephant is harmed or gets out of control. His sources include mahouts, temple priests who ride in elephant processions, local commuters and his own students. On big festival days, he stands under a banana plant in his garden while neighbors and strangers stop by to tell him what they’ve seen.

The day after a festival, Venkitachalam calls his sources to confirm any tips that seem to point to a violation. Then he writes up his complaint in longhand and passes it to one of his secret partners, who types it in an e-mail to the relevant authority. He avoids using computers himself, and he says he has never watched television, though he’s been on TV hundreds of times to denounce the abuse of elephants. Such devices, he says, might sap his creativity — and besides, 10 minutes spent watching television are 10 minutes he could be using writing complaints.

Among men who deal in the selling and trading of elephants, the mere mention of Venkitachalam’s name never fails to set off a rant. They say that he’s unreasonable and prone to exaggeration or that he must be taking money from some outside sources. His devotion protects him from the most obvious charge that would be leveled against any Muslim or Christian who took on the elephant business: that it’s an attack on religion. Instead, his critics write him off because of his lack of status. “There is always a tendency for people to suppress him,” P. S. Easa, a local elephant expert, told me. “If you look at him, with his dhoti. . . .” He waved dismissively at his shirt and pants and laughed. “He’s a simple man.”

For much of the last decade, the face of elephant ownership in Kerala has been K. B. Ganesh Kumar, a popular local movie actor, politician and president of a group called the Kerala Elephant Owners Federation. As an actor, Kumar made his name playing villains and rowdies. As a politician, he has represented his home district in Kerala’s Legislative Assembly for more than a decade. And as an elephant owner, he led the opposition to an appraisal of Indian elephants put out in 2010 by the central government, known as the Gajah report. Among its recommendations: All captive elephants should become government property; their use at public functions should be discontinued and their commercial employment phased out. To Venkitachalam, the document was like an elephant Magna Carta. From then on, his organization’s primary demand has been its implementation. For the elephant owners of Kerala, it was an outrage. Under Kumar’s leadership, they organized protests against the Gajah report and lobbied government officials to shelve it.

Then in 2011, less than a year after the report came out, Kumar received a remarkable appointment: he became the state’s forest minister, thereby making him the official most responsible for the enforcement of elephant-welfare law in Kerala, even as he continued to lead the Elephant Owners Federation. Venkitachalam, naturally, complained about this apparent conflict of interest. Kumar kept his elephant but was forced to resign from the federation. A bitter rivalry was born.

A week after I met Venkitachalam, I took a train to Kerala’s capital to meet Kumar in his ministerial office. His assistant had told me that I might have to wait: the minister’s schedule was hard to foretell. His aides waited with me, none of them busy, it seemed, with anything but drinking coffee. Four hours later, the minister finally swept into the room, and the aides leapt to their feet. Kumar has dark, curly hair, a macho mustache and a weakness for loud shirts; he was wearing a shiny purple number covered with paisleys. I was surprised at how soft-spoken he was. A half-dozen of his staff members sat opposite us, laughing whenever their boss cracked a joke.