A weird 7-second video of a bright pink elephant standing on the steps of some old abandoned temple in Jaipur has absolutely exploded on social media lately. The crazy part? The elephant in the clip, a female Asian elephant named Chanchal, actually died a few months ago.
The short video features a model named Yashasvi, also covered from head to toe in the same intense pink powder, smiling and posing on the back of the elephant while the trunk swings around her in a gentle motion. This video was actually taken back in November 2025 by a Russian photographer named Julia Buruleva, but it was only until the end of March 2026 that it really began to circulate. When it began to circulate, people went nuts accusing all those in the video of outright animal cruelty.
A tweet from X.
In the video posted by NEXTA on X, Chanchal just stands there calmly in front of these weathered stone ruins, under bright sunlight. Yashasvi reaches out to touch the trunk, the camera has that slight shaky handheld feel, and there’s no sound. That’s literally it seven seconds, millions of views.
Buruleva, who’s based in Barcelona and works as a conceptual artist, set the whole thing up as part of a six-week project celebrating Jaipur’s famous pink vibe. They used organic gulal the same natural powder people throw around during Holi. Both the model and the elephant got covered in it. The owners and handlers from Hathi Gaon (Jaipur’s Elephant Village) put the color on in about ten minutes, and it was washed off right after. According to her, it was completely non-toxic and fit with local traditions. Chanchal was already retired from tourist rides because of her age.
Then, on February 26, 2026 about three months later Chanchal died. She was somewhere between 65 and 70 years old. Her owner, Shadik Khan, and the president of the Hathi Gaon committee, Ballu Khan, both said it was just old age, nothing to do with the photoshoot. They insisted the paint had zero connection to it.
But the timing sucked. When the video actually went viral, the gap between the video shoot and the death of the elephant created a ton of outrage from a lot of people. The animal rights groups and the thousands of commenters who posted about the video said it was exploitative because the elephant was basically just a prop for likes on Instagram. A lot of the outrage was coming from outside India, especially Americans because they tend to get really worked up about things like this.
It’s kicked off a much bigger argument about captive elephants in India whether they should be used for tourism, festivals, or art projects at all. PETA India called the situation for captive elephants a “state of emergency,” pointing to the constant stress they live with.
On the flip side, the proponents of the shoot claim that the use of gulal on elephants has been the norm in Indian culture. Buruleva herself defended the shoot by saying that the intention was to celebrate the local culture and not damage it in any way. She even went ahead to create a petition against the overhyped media reports.
So far, no charges have been filed. The Rajasthan Forest Department is still checking whether everything followed wildlife laws.
