In this article a method called, hybrid damping has been proposed to check the high amplitude non-linear vibration within a desired limit using smart magnetostrictive composite materials. For this, a flexible manipulator of large length has been modeled using a finite element method (FEM) which compared the efficiency, computation time, and damping performance corresponding to different actuations. Hybrid damping is an interactive combination of active and passive damping. An active damping scheme is employed to control the induced strains in the passive damping coating. Smart magnetostrictive material, Terfenol-D, is used to achieve active damping in the link. Fabrication of Terfenol-D based composite actuator which is used in the experiment is also discussed. Such materials can be used as an intelligent distributed layer over the link to introduce distributed control of vibration. For passive damping, a layer of strain dependent nanocomposite damping material poly-ethylene poly-ethylene glycol (PPEPEG) is used. Mathematical modeling of hybrid damping is done following a FEM and integrated with the manipulator. Simulations are first done to demonstrate the effectiveness of vibration attenuation. Experiments are conducted to validate the simulation results. It is observed that the hybrid damping scheme is able to damp vibration in the manipulator efficiently.