Evolution of Poetic Tropes: The Elephant

Harunaga Isaacson
June 8, 2020

Introductory

Elephants are a very big subject. (Apologies for that.) There is, I should
say, no animal more important, more defining, in the world of Sanskrit
culture than the elephant. The difference in attitude towards elephants
is at the basis of some of the most fundamental divides between on the
one hand the culture of South Asia and the Indianised kingdoms of
South East Asia, such as Cambodia, and on the other hand that of China
and the Sinicized (though with a touch of Indian influence, mainly
through Buddhism) countries of East Asia. A recommended book on
this topic: Thomas R. Trautmann: Elephants and King: An Environmental
History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Sanskrit words for elephant are, unsurprisingly, very many. The
Amarakośa lists fifteen general synonyms, followed by two for a bull-
elephant who leads a herd, seven for bull-elephants in rut, and two for
bull-elephants no longer in rut. Later lexicographical works add more.
Noteworthy is that one of the common names (included among the
fifteen general synonyms of the Amarakośa) is conspicuously polysemic:
nāga.
Treatises on elephants (gajaśāstra) classify elephants into a number of
types, and these classifications must have been well-known, for they are
sometimes alluded to in kāvya.

His Temples, Her Breasts

The Sanskrit word kumbha (the same word which means also ‘pot’)
refers in elephants to the two protuberances on the top of the elephant’s
head (kumbhau tu piṇḍau śirasaḥ, says Amara). Our most popular
Sanskrit-English dictionaries, Monier-Williams’ and Apte’s, call these
‘frontal globes’; I shall use the English word ‘temple’ instead. Some
translate ‘lobe’; Ingalls, in his translation of the Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, some-
times uses ‘frontal lobe’, sometimes ‘cranial lobe’, and once apparently
‘globes of his cranium’.
Our first topos is that the temples of an elephant—specifically,
though this is often left unsaid, the temples of a bull-elephant in musth,
during which the temporal glands swell—resemble the breasts of a
beautiful young woman. They are indeed one of the most common of
all upamānas for such breasts. (Another favorite upamāna for breasts is
kumbha in its other common sense.) The following verse is not all that
 evolution of poetic tropes: the elephant 2

noteworthy in itself, but it may be interesting to set it beside verses 7

and 8 of Handout 2 of this term, in the section Her Breasts under the
Cakravāka.

udbhūtaṃ kim idaṃ manobhavanṛpakrīḍāravindadvayaṃ

tatsūtiḥ katham ekatas tanuvasadromāvalīnālataḥ|
cakradvandvam api kṣamaṃ tad api kiṃ sthātuṃ mukhendoḥ
puro
lāvaṇyāmbudhimagnayauvanagajasyāvaimi kumbhadvayam|| 11 1
SaKaA 855 (stanaḥ, kasyacit).

It is common (and no doubt natural) to combine this comparison with

the image of the elephant plunging/plunged into a pool, as in this verse.

Occasionally one finds verses with the upamānopameyabhāva reversed, as

in the following.

kumbhadvayaṃ tad amaradviradasya vo ’vyād

udbhidyamānam udadher mathanāvasāne|
prodyaddvitīyakamalākucaśaṅkinībhiḥ
serṣyaṃ yad aikṣata surāsurasundarībhiḥ|| 22 2
SūMuĀ āśīḥpaddhati 108 (the final
verse of the paddhati, attributed to
Bhaṭṭendurāja, Abhinavagupta’s teacher
The Gait of the Elephant in the field of poetics).

Anyone who has seen them in motion, will have been struck by the
grace of the walk, and indeed most of the movements, of elephants. The
gait of both men and women is compared (already in Epic) with that
of elephants, to convey that it is graceful. There is perhaps something
aloof, proud or haughty about it as well.

mārayantyā janaṃ sarvaṃ nirāgasam avajñayā|

mātaṅgānāṃ gatir yādṛk tādṛg āsīd asaṃśayam|| 33 3
SūMuĀ sāmānyataḥ strīsvarūpavarṇanam
89; Subhāṣitāvalī 1456. In both an-
The editor of the Sūktimuktāvalī prints the first word as dūrayantyā; but thologies the verse is attributed to
Śakavṛddhi.
he reports three MSS as reading mārayantyā, and I suspect that these are
the only three available here.4 So dūrayantyā is probably a conjecture; 4
Five manuscripts were used in total, ac-
one can understand the editor’s thought processes, but mārayantyā is cording to the prastāvanā of the edition;
but two seem to be of abridged versions
the reading of the Subhāṣitāvalī as well, and is also found in the modern of the collection.
anthology Subhāṣitaratnabhāṇḍāgāra.

Elephant Pearls

Another very often encountered trope is that the elephant’s temples

contain pearls. On this topos, and the objects, rare but not completely
non-existent, on which it is based, see the excellent article by Sreeramula
Rajeswara Sarma ‘Gajamauktika: Poetic convention and reality’.5 Sarma 5
Bulletin d’Etudes Indiennes 9 (1991),
also briefly discusses the related though different convention in Tamil 195–202; PDF available online at
https://srsarma.in/pdf/
articles/1991_Gajamauktika.
pdf.
 evolution of poetic tropes: the elephant 3

that such pearls grow not in the temples but in the pouches from which
the elephant’s tusks emerge.
A locus classicus in Sanskrit for this topos is the following verse of
the Kumārasambhava, part of the famous opening description of the
Himālaya, in which it is combined, as often, with the trope that lions
will attack and kill bull-elephants.

padaṃ tuṣārasrutidhautaraktaṃ
yasminn adṛṣṭvāpi hatadvipānām|
vidanti mārgaṃ nakharandhramuktair
muktāphalaiḥ kesariṇāṃ kirātāḥ|| 46 6
Kālidāsa, Kumārasambhava 1.6.

Since the elephant’s temples must be cut or torn open before the
pearls believed to be within can be seen, the topos is usually combined
either with that of the elephant-slaying lions, as we have just seen, or
with that of the king who slays his enemies’s war-elephants. For in-
stance, from Kṣemendra’s description of Daśaratha near the beginning
of his Rāmāyaṇamañjarī :

yudhi pītam arātīnāṃ yat khaḍgenāniśaṃ yaśaḥ|

tad vāntaṃ lagnabhinnebhakumbhamuktāphalacchalaiḥ|| 57 7
Rāmāyaṇamañjarī 1.41.

The pearls, and the elephant, are often an upamāna for something
else. The following verse is attributed to Abhinanda (the author of the
Rāmacarita?) in the Saduktikarṇāmṛta.

mṛgendrasyeva candrasya mayūkhair nakharair iva|

pāṭitadhvāntamātaṅgamuktābhā bhānti tārakāḥ|| 68 8
SuRaKo 948, SaKaA 401.