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Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence Rethinking Human-Elephant Relations in South Asia
Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence Rethinking Human-Elephant Relations in South Asia
Title Pages
(p.i) Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence (p.ii)
(p.iv)
Published in India by
Oxford University Press
YMCA Library Building, 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India
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Title Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-946722-8
ISBN-10: 0-19-946722-6
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Dedication
Dedication
(p.v) To Professor Charles Santiapillai (1944–2014), wildlife advocate, teacher,
and mentor (p.vi)
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Acknowledgements
(p.ix) Acknowledgements
Piers Locke, Jane Buckingham
Piers Locke would also like to thank the Rachel Carson Center for Environment
and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. The award of a writing
fellowship in such a stimulating and supportive (p.x) scholarly environment
proved crucial for completing writing and editorial work on this book. Special
thanks go to members of the Multispecies Reading Group, whose feedback was
so useful—Ursula Münster, Celia Lowe, Thom van Dooren, Emily O’Gorman,
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Acknowledgements
Harriet Ritvo, Etienne Benson, Jean Langford, Peter Cox, Susanne Schmitt, Veit
Braun, and Amir Zellinger. The editors are also grateful to the two anonymous
reviewers who generously provided their time and expertise in reading and
responding to the draft manuscript. We are also grateful to Dr Joanna Cobley,
whose sterling efforts at proofing and formatting the manuscript for submission
have been invaluable. Finally, the editors would like to thank the contributors,
whose sustained commitment made this project such a pleasure to work on.
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Illustrations
(p.xi) Illustrations
2.1 Diffusion of the War Elephant 53
2.2 Mughal War Elephants 62
4.1 Akbar’s Adventures with the Elephant Hawa’i 100
4.2 Trained Elephants Execute the Followers of Khan Zaman 105
5.1 The Camp at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. 120
8.1 Mohan Pushes the Log 181
8.2, 8.3 The Owner Walks beside the Animal while the Latter Is Dragging
the Log 182
8.4 Ropes and Equipment for Dragging Logs 192
8.5 Once the Truck Is Fully Loaded, Aipang Removes the Ramps 197
8.6 Reaching the Village, Aipang Helps the Truck 198 (p.xii)
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Tables
(p.xiii) Tables
13.1 Summary of the Status of Livelihoods of the Nilgiris’ Human
Communities of Interest in Human–Elephant Conflict 305
13.2 Summary of Ethnic Community Perceptions of Elephants and Causal
Explanations of Human–Elephant Conflict 322 (p.xiv)
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0001
This raises the question of how best to inhabit a world shaped and shared with
elephants. Here, context and perspective are vitally important. Let us consider
the first aspect of this dilemma of coexistence. The problem of living well with
elephants in the modern world may benefit from broader consideration of the
significance of human agency for the habitability of the planet. The terra-
forming capability of contemporary human civilization, and the impacts of its
technologies on the biogeochemical processes that support life on earth are now
acknowledged as so profoundly transformative that a new geological epoch has
been proposed: the Anthropocene.3 Associated with this new term is a narrative
by now familiar, one which is emphatic that the environmental costs of industrial
development facilitated by fossil-fuel technologies are producing an ecological
crisis of planetary proportions. We are facing daunting challenges of climate
change, resource depletion, ecosystem degradation, and biodiversity loss that
we can no longer ignore, and which impact upon elephants in complex ways.4
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
shared with others, I have proposed a new approach to the study of human–
elephant relations. Conceived as both shared discursive space and integrated
research programme, ethnoelephantology suggests we can combine
methodological perspectives from the humanities, the social sciences, and the
natural sciences to investigate the social, historical, and ecological intersections
of humans and elephants.11 I argue that we must attend seriously to elephants
as subjective agents, and that we must consider how the lives and landscapes of
humans and elephants have historically co-evolved in dynamic relation. The
‘ethno-’ prefix is intended to suggest we avoid studying elephants in isolation
from the human histories and contexts that impact upon them and, instead,
focus on the constitutive relations between the two species across a spectrum of
material and semiotic considerations.
The chapters in this book address these themes in a variety of ways, drawing on
a variety of expertise focused on a variety of issues and case studies. It is
organized around three sections, which emerge out of thematic concern rather
than disciplinary affiliation, a strategy to be avoided if we not only wish to
embrace multiple forms of expertise and understanding, but also to foster the
conditions for their integration. The first section, ‘Humans and Elephants
through Time’, is concerned with the temporal dimension of this interspecies
relationship, exploring forms of knowledge and practice through which humans
and elephants encounter and affect each other. The second section, ‘Living with
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
A second theme emerging from the chapters comprising this section concerns
interspecies transport and labour. This is first explored with regard to the role of
elephants and mahouts facilitating projects of war, to which the discussions of
Trautmann and Olivelle on the state sponsorship of captive elephant
management allude. Later, in Buckingham’s chapter dealing with the Mughal
emperor Akbar and his elephants, this theme is explored with regard to the
demonstration (p.8) of ceremonial prestige and masculine power. In Baker’s
chapter by contrast, elephants are not used in spaces of battle or ridden in
display, but to access remote environments for colonial projects surveying
botanical resources and geological conditions.
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
A third significant theme, which resonates throughout the chapters of this book,
is that of companionable relations: of humans and elephants as cohabitants,
bound together as proximate bodies, interacting subjects, and fellow world-
makers who shape the conditions and possibilities of each other’s lives, even if
consent is not mutual and the relational dynamics not symmetrical. This is
evident in the development of the war elephant as a technology of interspecies
synergy that was exported beyond India to Persia, the Mediterranean, and
Southeast Asia, as discussed in the chapters by Trautmann and Olivelle. As we
discover, this was a dangerous form of custodial labour around which elaborate
forms of skilled practice and organizational structures developed in order to
capture, maintain, and deploy elephants in a situation of kinaesthetic union with
their human riders. However, companionship is more obviously evident in the
intimate relations of particular people with particular elephants, as Buckingham
and Baker demonstrate with case studies from the eras of Mughal and British
imperial rule. Finally, a less direct form of companionship is evident in the
apparatus for managing elephant living space, which depended on fostering and
sustaining conditions for the reproduction of free-roaming elephant populations,
exemplified by Trautmann’s discussion of the eight forests of ancient India
reserved as elephant habitat. While framing this in terms of companionship, with
its connotations of intimate social intercourse, may seem counter-intuitive, this
usage is consonant with Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species.18 Her
articulation of this concept has been widely applied in multispecies writing
because it embraces the panoply of mutually constituting entanglements
between humans and other species, irrespective of physiological and
behavioural difference. Anthropologist Anna Tsing, for instance, even writes of
mushrooms as companion species, arguing that it is a humanist folly to ignore
the interspecies interdependencies through which lives are made possible.19
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species, and captive individuals, the role of the past in configuring the
predicaments of the present is made acutely evident, allowing Sukumar to
conclude with reflections on the afflicted decline of the elephant and the
challenge of finding ways for humans and elephants to live well together in the
crowded spaces of South Asia.
As part of a broader project exploring the relations between elephants and kings
for the environmental history of Asia,20 Thomas Trautmann’s chapter provides
an account of the war elephant and the dissemination of this technology among
ancient civilizations of the Eurasian and African landmasses. He traces the
earlier westward diffusion through the Persian and Hellenistic kingdoms, and
the later eastward diffusion through the Indianizing kingdoms of Southeast Asia.
He persuasively argues that the war elephant, and hence also the mahout, first
emerged through the conjunction of kingship and forest people in the elephant-
rich forests of India about 3,000 years ago. In so doing, he acknowledges the
challenge of writing a deep history of mahouts, who have left only limited traces
in the historical record and have been rarely mentioned not because they were
insignificant, but because they were indispensable. Trautmann is to be
congratulated in this endeavour because he attempts to connect the history of
mahouts with the ethnography of mahouts, a considerable challenge since the
purposes and conditions in which captive elephants and their handlers are
deployed has changed so much since (p.10) the demise of the war elephant, the
final use of which he traces to an invasion of Cambodia by the King of Siam in
1833.
Trautmann shows that the relationship between elephant and mahout was so
integral that the knowledge and expertise of the latter travelled with the
cultivated habits of the former, so that when war elephants were acquired, so
were their mahouts, the interspecies intimacy between them essential to the
efficacy of this animate technology. Mahouts appear as brave specialists
managing dangerous animals highly prized in war, and Trautmann suggests
prestige surely accompanied their occupation, evident in the etymology of the
term mahout, deriving from the Sanskrit mahamatra, meaning a person of great
measure.
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Shanmugasundaram Wijeyamohan make clear for Sri Lanka, we see how closely
intertwined are the histories of elephants and the civilizations that developed
around them, an appreciation of which has profound implications for the
dilemmas of conflict and coexistence with which this book is principally
concerned.
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(p.13) The elephant culture that Akbar helped perpetuate was certainly not
lost on the British, who were impressed by the imperial majesty and practical
utility of elephants. However, rarely if ever have histories of human–elephant
relations considered the role of the latter for the scientific endeavours of the
former. Julian Baker attempts just this, exploring the role of elephants in
scientific fieldwork in colonial India. In so doing, he effectively asks us to
consider what would happen if we write histories of scientific discovery that not
only incorporate elephants as facilitating devices, but which also recognize them
as contributing participants. Through comparison with the example of the ship
and the telescope, he demonstrates that like the former, elephants enabled
transport across difficult space, and that like the latter they augmented
perception. Elephants helped fieldworkers travel, inhabit, and engage with wild
environments. In addition, Baker shows how a retinue on elephant-back not only
helped traverse terrain but also navigate social space. Since the elephant’s
association with political power commanded respect, it lent authority in
situations of encounter with local people in remote places. However, the
elephant in fieldwork is more than just a vehicle of access, an instrument of
observation, and an expedient symbol of authority, as Baker demonstrates
through a discussion of the fieldwork of the botanist Joseph Hooker and the
geologist Valentine Ball.
Amy Fletcher is also concerned with elephants and scientific practice, albeit in a
radically different context. While her chapter does (p.14) not concern
elephants in South Asia, it is pertinent to our concern with multispecies
coexistence and the moral and practical dilemmas that human agency presents
for elephant life. Indeed, it is significant for its consideration not only of
contemporary problems but also of future possibilities. By contrasting the
imminent demise of the extant Sumatran elephant with the possible resurrection
of the extinct woolly mammoth, Fletcher raises key questions about conservation
priorities, the biotechnology of de-extinction, and the role of Pleistocene
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with Khamti mahouts and their elephants. Demonstrating similar concerns with
the subjective agency of elephants and their interspecies intimacy with humans,
he argues for an approach to understand labour as collaborative conduct
involving mutual understanding between species. Meanwhile, Niclas Klixbull
deploys the contrasting cases of intimacy and conflict in the interspecies
encounters of mahouts and farmers to explore relations with captive and free-
roaming elephants that differentially articulate with Buddhist Sinhalese culture,
and which produce different attitudes, different knowledges, and different
concerns.
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
for mutually constituting human and non-human identities, which cannot simply
be reduced to a dynamic of human domination.
Niclas Klixbull considers how to assess the cultural, historical, and practical
aspects of relations with elephants in Sri Lanka. His analysis involves both an
exploration of the significance of elephants in Buddhist symbolism and Sinhalese
society, and ethnographic interpretation of two forms of human–elephant
relation—companionship in captive elephant management, and wildlife conflict
in farming communities. In so doing, he provides contrasting examples of living
with captive elephants and sharing space with free-roaming elephants, the
former conducive to positive symbolic associations, the latter in tension with
them. Klixbull introduces us to the mahouts Jayasena and Chandana, and their
elephants Lakshmi and Rani, revealing to us the ways in which Sinhalese
Buddhist culture informs their interspecies interactions, as well as the mahouts’
self-understandings of how they manage effective relations with their elephants.
This includes the importance of talking to your elephant, reserving an intimate
and familial form of address to express affection, developing a trusting
familiarity, and being attentive to their changing emotional states, to which one
becomes attuned in the course of sustained, intimate companionship.
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As with Trautmann’s and Olivelle’s discussion of the Indian elephant forests, the
historical sketch of Santiapillai and Wijeyamohan reveals that so too in ancient
Sri Lanka, kings were concerned with protecting the environments that provided
crucial elephant habitat. Here too we see a connection between the conservation
of free-roaming elephant populations and the supply of elephants for captive
use. The authors discuss the renown of Sri Lankan elephants in the ancient
world, as attested by a variety of classical sources, including Onesicritus and
Megasthenes, who mention the export of elephants to India, and report claims of
their superior quality. Similarly, they cite claims about the appreciation for the
quality of Sri Lankan elephant ivory, reminding us of the significance of Sri
Lanka for an ancient international network that valued elephants and their
products.
We learn how the periods of Portuguese, Dutch, and then British colonialism
affected the fortunes of the elephant. The Portuguese were principally attracted
to Sri Lanka by its cinnamon and its elephants, introducing a new technique of
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capture by which large numbers of elephants were forced into enclosures. The
elephant business continued under the Dutch and the British, although it is with
the latter in the nineteenth century that elephant populations declined as a
result of deforestation for the establishment of coffee and then tea plantations,
and due to an initially indiscriminate slaughter of elephants by hunters.
However, realizing that the elephant population was diminishing, and concerned
with continuing their sport, hunters responded by campaigning to establish
reserves. As with other histories of protected areas, it was these hunting
reserves that would become the national parks that are now key sites for
elephant conservation and wildlife tourism.
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Exploring the impacts that free-roaming elephants make on human lives and the
traces they leave on territories variously claimed for humans and for elephants,
Münster alerts us to commonalities in different ways of knowing and
encountering elephants. She considers the knowledge, experience, and claims
not only of forest officials, veterinarians, and wildlife biologists, but also of local
farmers, forest labourers, and handlers of captive elephants. In the context of
colonial and post-colonial projects of resource extraction, economic
development, and wildlife conservation, their testimony enables her to describe
the emergence of a crisis of interspecies conflict, in which humans and
elephants endeavour to survive together in a crowded and fragmented landscape
of agricultural and forest land. In so doing, Münster explains not only how
elephants are understood as intelligent beings navigating a world shaped by
friction between (p.23) human livelihoods and wildlife management, but also
the disturbed socializations that result from the pressures this situation puts on
both humans and elephants.
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
Tarsh Thekaekara and Thomas F. Thornton also concern themselves with the
problem of human–elephant conflict in a socially diverse and ecologically
fragmented landscape with multiple livelihoods and complex relational
dynamics. They highlight the inadequacies of conservation strategies based on
keeping humans and elephants in separate spaces, and argue that effective
approaches for managing human–elephant coexistence require a better
integration of social science expertise with conservation biology.22 Drawing on
the first author’s experience as an activist and researcher with the Shola Trust,
they outline the different histories, interests, and attitudes of human social
groups encountering elephants in a changing landscape. Primarily comprising a
patchwork of forested areas, tea and coffee plantations, agricultural land, and
human settlements, they describe the problem of increasing mortalities caused
by elephants in the Nilgiris in the context of human expansion, population
movement, and socio- economic development.
These results enable the authors to conclude that not all landscape inhabitants
accord elephants the same ontological status; that explanations for conflict vary
according to cultural and ecological circumstances; that communities with
longer histories of interactions with elephants tend to be better accommodated
to them; and also that (p.24) different groups vary in their tolerance of
elephants. Since elephants cannot be contained within protected areas, the
authors argue that conservation policy must accept the necessity of formulating
strategies for interspecies space sharing, must consider community
participation, and must be attentive to the diversity of interactional histories and
cultural models for human–elephant relations.
It is hoped that the contributions to this volume not only help further our
understanding of the range and complexity of intersections between humans and
elephants in South Asia, that they not only provide critically nuanced
perspectives on the dynamics of conflict and coexistence, but that taken
together they can also be seen as striving towards a mode of analysis less
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
What then might characterize such a space? What might be required for such a
programme? And how far does this collection take us towards these goals?
Clearly, meaningful discussion among researchers from multiple disciplines
requires a common vocabulary and a common framework of assumptions to help
prevent participants talking at cross-purposes. Too often, however, it seems that
projects proclaiming interdisciplinarity underestimate the challenges of
productive dialogue across institutionalized boundaries within and between the
arts and the sciences, tending to consider different frameworks of knowledge
and knowing, but not the social conditions by which they are instilled (p.25) as
forms of practice. Here sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is
particularly useful, because when applied to academics, it reminds us that the
challenge of interdisciplinarity does not merely concern the commensurability of
forms of knowledge and types of research, but also the conditioned attitudes,
dispositions, and motivating concerns that practitioners acquire through training
in particular disciplines, even as they are encouraged to operate beyond them.24
I leave it to the reader to decide how well the contributions to this volume reveal
a common agenda, develop complementary arguments, and indicate the
possibility of an integrated approach to understanding human–elephant
relations, not only attentive to forms of expertise most closely associated with
understanding either humans or elephants, but also for treating the interspecies
relationship itself as the unit of analysis. While it should be evident that we are
attempting to rethink human–elephant relations by bringing multiple forms of
disciplinary expertise into conversation with each other, and by applying
common perspectives and concepts, I think it is important that we also
acknowledge the limits a single researcher faces in doing justice to the poles of
a relationship that has been investigated in institutionally and intellectually
differentiated ways by different kinds of scientists and scholars for so long. The
challenge, then, is not only conceptual, but also methodological, organizational,
and even psychological. Perhaps rethinking human–elephant relations and
appropriating concepts and approaches from other disciplines are insufficient.
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
Notes:
(1.) See N. Bhaskaran, Govindarajan Kannan, Uthrapathy Anbarasan, Anisha
Thapa, and Raman Sukumar, ‘A Landscape-Level Assessment of Asian Elephant
Habitat, Its Population and Elephant–Human conflict in the Anamalai Hill
Ranges of Southern Western Ghats, India’, Mammalian Biology 78, 6 (2013):
470–81; L. Chartier, A. Zimmermann, and R. Ladle, ‘Habitat Loss and Human–
Elephant Conflict in Assam, India: Does a Critical Threshold Exist?’ Oryx 45, 4
(2011): 528–33; S. Gubbi, ‘Patterns and Correlates of Human–Elephant Conflict
around a South Indian Reserve’, Biological Conservation 148, 1 (2012): 88–95; P.
Leimgruber, J.B. Gagnon, C.M. Wemmer, D.S. Kelly, M.A. Songer, and E.R. Sellig,
‘Fragmentation of Asia’s Remaining Wildlands: Implications of Asian Elephant
Conservation’, Animal Conservation 6, 4 (2003): 347–59; and R. Sukumar, The
Asian Elephant: Ecology and Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
(2.) For extensive surveys of India’s captive elephants, their mahouts, and their
owners, see the work of Surendra Varma and colleagues supported by the Asian
Nature Conservation Foundation (ANCF) and Compassion Unlimited Plus Action
(CUPA). In 2008: Captive Elephants in Zoos: An Investigation into the Welfare
and Management of Captive Elephants in Zoos of India; Captive Elephants in
Tamil Nadu: An Investigation into the Status, Management and Welfare
Significance; Captive Elephants in Circuses: A Scientific Investigation of the
Population Status, Management and Welfare Significance; Database for Captive
Elephants and Their Mahouts in Karnataka: Protocol and Significance; Captive
Elephants in Karnataka: An Investigation into Population Status, Management
and Welfare Significance. In 2009: Captive Elephants in Bihar: An Investigation
into the Population Status, Management and Welfare Significance. In 2010:
Elephants in Sonepur Mela: Observations Population Status, Trade and Welfare
of Captive Elephants Displayed at Sonepur Mela, Bihar, India.
(3.) See W. Steffen, P. Crutzen, and J. McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans
Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’ Ambio 36, 8 (2007): 614−21.
(4.) Consider for instance, the idea of breaching planetary boundaries: Johan
Rockström, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Asa Persson, F. Stuart III Chapin, Eric
Lambin, Timothy M. Lenton, Marten Scheffer, Carl Folke, Hans J. Schellnhuber,
Björn Nykvist, Cynthia A. De Wit, Terry Hughes, Sander van der Leeuw, Henning
Rodhe, Sverker Sörlin, Peter K. Snyder, Robert Costanza, Uno Svedin, Malin
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
(5.) See Richard W. Byrne, Philip J. Barnard, Iain Davidson, Vincent M. Janik,
William C. McGrew, Ádam Miklósi, and Polly Wiessner, ‘Understanding Culture
across Species’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, 8 (2004): 341–6.
(7.) On the idea of human exceptionalism, see Donna Haraway, When Species
Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). On ecological
decontextualization in humanist forms of social theory, see B. Latour, ‘To
Modernize or Ecologize? That’s the Question’, in Remaking Reality: Nature at
the Millennium, edited by N. Castree and B. Willems-Braun (London and New
York: Routledge, 1998), 221−42.
(8.) See Noel Castree, William M. Adams, John Barry, Daniel Brockington, Bram
Büscher, Esteve Corbera, David Demeritt, Rosaleen Duffy, Ulrike Felt, Katja
Neves, Peter Newell, Luigi Pellizzoni, Kate Rigby, Paul Robbins, Libby Robin,
Deborah Bird Rose, Andrew Ross, David Schlosberg, Sverker Sörlin, Paige West,
Mark Whitehead, and Brian Wynne, ‘Changing the Intellectual Climate’, Nature
Climate Change 4 (2014): 763−8; and Gisli Palsson, Bronislaw Szerszynski,
Sverker Sörlin, John Marks, Bernard Avril, Carole Crumley, Heidi Hackmann,
Poul Holm, John Ingram, Alan Kirman, Mercedes P. Buedía, and Rifka
Weehuizen, ‘Reconceptualizing the “Anthropos” in the Anthropocene: Integrating
the Social Sciences and Humanities in Global Environmental Change Research’,
Environmental Science and Policy 28 (2013): 3–13.
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
(10.) See Dominique Lestel and Hollis Taylor, ‘Shared Life: An Introduction’,
Social Science Information 52, 2 (2013): 183.
(18.) See Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); and Haraway,
When Species Meet.
(21.) Here, we might also consider the ‘phenomenological biology’ of Jakob von
Uexkull, particularly the concept of umwelt, suggesting the perceptual worlds
species construct and inhabit according to their sensory apparatus and bodily
capacities. See his classic essay, ‘A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and
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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations
(24.) See Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998);
and Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990).
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
Raman Sukumar
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0002
Keywords: Elephant hunting, Harappan civilization, Vedic people, Alexander of Macedon, Mauryan
empire, Ganesha, Mughals, timber elephants, ivory poaching, elephant conservation
The relationship between Asian elephants and people is arguably the most
contrasting and complex interaction between any animal and human through
history. The elephant is a creature that has been tamed yet never really
domesticated, that has carried our heaviest burdens, yet has also been a huge
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
burden to farmers whose crops it has ravaged. It has been a participant in Asia’s
fiercest battles for over two millennia, yet it has also played the role of an
ambassador of peace. Elevated to the status of a supreme god, the elephant has
also been kept in chains and brutally slaughtered for its ivory. It is then not an
easy task to fully comprehend the legacy of Elephas maximus, one of the planet’s
most intelligent and charismatic denizens.
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
Homo sapiens evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago and successfully
emigrated to Asia about 70,000 years ago. We have no knowledge of the
interaction between H. sapiens and E. maximus prior to the dawn of agriculture
and civilization at about 10,000 years ago but can only speculate that the nature
of this relationship was (p.33) not very different from that in earlier periods.
Rock art in central India from the earliest phase of the Mesolithic (4,500 to
10,000 years ago) features tuskless elephants but no association with people
with the exception of a single image from Kharvai; on the other hand, an
elephant hunt has been clearly depicted from the Neolithic/Chalcolithic period.7
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
migrated to from central Asia. The Vedas, a collection of hymns and sacrificial
rituals; associated commentaries such as the Upanishads; the two great epics
(the Ramayana and the Mahabharata); and other ancient texts provide insights
into this cultural change as the Aryans advanced eastward into the Indo-
Gangetic basin, clearing and burning the forest, raising settlements, and
bringing the land under the plough.16 Although the earlier Vedas show
familiarity with elephants, there are no explicit references to the use of captive
elephants or indeed their use in war; the Artharvaveda (first half of the first
millennium BCE) provides the first clear reference to captivity in a hymn that
praises the attributes of the royal elephant.17 It seems inconceivable that the
Vedic people did not use the elephant in their expansion into the subcontinent—
the elephant would have been indispensable in clearing the forest and raising
settlements, as well as in its occasional use to intimidate an enemy. Putting all
evidences together, we can conclude that the earliest use of the elephant as an
instrument of war can be dated to the very early first millennium BCE, though it
would take several hundred years more for the animal to be deployed at a larger
scale on the battlefield.18
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
(p.36) Indeed, the so-called Pashupati seal from the Harappan civilization,
depicting a horned figure surrounded by four creatures including the elephant,
seems to convey religious symbolism that is not clearly understood.24 For
unambiguous evidence of the emergence of the sacred elephant, we thus need to
turn to early Buddhist India. The sacredness of the elephant is implicit in the
birth legend of the Buddha.25 Queen Maya has a dream in which a white
elephant holding a lotus in its trunk descends from heaven and enters her
womb; nine months later she gives birth to Siddhartha Gautama who goes on to
become the Buddha. Although this legend is difficult to date precisely, its visual
depiction in a railing at Bharut, dated to the second century BCE, certainly
suggests that the oral tradition is much older. King Ashoka’s rock edict (mid-
third century BCE) at Kalsi, along with the figure of a tusked elephant in musth,
with the words gajatame (the supreme elephant) inscribed in Brahmi script
between its legs, is an unmistakable reference to the sacred white elephant. A
few years after his bloody war against Kalinga in about 260 BCE, Ashoka
embraced Buddhism and its doctrine of ahimsa or non-violence towards all
creatures. His edicts are testimony to a number of measures that he took to
preserve all forms of life for their intrinsic worth.26 It is of course entirely
possible that the elephant had already been considered sacred among adherents
of Buddhism before Ashoka’s time. The mention of hastidasana (auspicious
elephant), hastimangala (elephant festival), hatthimaha (an elephant figure that
was worshipped), and hatthivatikas (a group of people who worshipped the
elephant) in early Buddhist literature point to the animal’s sacred status.
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
The mythology of Ganesha also elaborated greatly from the Gupta period
onwards in sources such as the Puranas, while the deity’s popularity soon spread
across the ocean to Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia, and
overland to Tibet, China, and Japan. Ganesha and the elephant are also
commonly depicted in temples of medieval Hindu India, testifying not just to the
importance of the deity, but also to the continued use of the animal in the armies
of kings. The Pallavas, the Chalukyas, the Cholas, the Rashtrakutas, the
Chandellas, the Hoysalas, and the rulers of Kalinga and Vijayanagara raised
magnificent temples and monuments featuring the elephant. The elephant
continued to be an integral part of the armies of the Hindu rulers for many
centuries.32 Knowledge of the elephant and its management was recorded in
several ancient texts including the Sangam poems of the Tamils, Sanskrit texts
such as the Matangalila, and Assamese texts like the Hastividyarnava.33
The arrival of the Mughals in India during the sixteenth century changed the
character of the Islamic engagement with the elephant. The Mughals began not
only to build up stocks of war elephants through capture and tribute from other
rulers, but also began to learn the art of capturing from the wild and training for
use in their army. As discussed further by Jane Buckingham in this volume, the
elephant culture under the Mughals reached its pinnacle under the emperor
Akbar, whose personal engagement with the animal is legendary.37 A reading of
the Akbarnama and the Ā’īn-i Akbarī would make it abundantly clear that the
elephant establishment under the Mughals at the peak of their power was as
large and sophisticated as that under the Mauryans. The Mughals borrowed
heavily from the Hindu traditions but also added their innovations to the system
of management. Akbar revelled in controlling and riding the fiercest elephants,
in particular those bulls in musth, and maintained 101 elephants for his
exclusive use. Elephants were named and recognized for their individual
personalities, each with distinct morphological and behavioural characteristics,
suggesting that their Mughal masters had a deep knowledge of the animals,
even if it was strongly anthropomorphic and reflected instrumental concerns.
The elephant was the preferred royal mount in hunting creatures such as lions,
tigers, and wild pigs (a practice also enjoyed by the rulers of Nepal until the mid-
twentieth century38). Elephant was pitted against elephant in royal sport. Free-
roaming elephants were captured but never directly killed during the Mughal
‘elephant hunts’. Elephants were certainly deployed on a large scale in
practically every war the Mughals fought, although being a dangerous animal
over which humans might lose control made its efficacy on the battlefield
questionable. The invention of gunpowder and the increasing use of firearms
began to render the elephant ineffective in direct battle as it became an easier
target. The Portuguese effectively used firearms (p.39) against elephant-based
armies in Ceylon in the sixteenth century. By late Mughal times, the role of the
elephant in the army was reduced to that of a baggage carrier.
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
The colonial view of the elephant changed further with the growth of British
power during the eighteenth century.42 The British were quick to appreciate the
importance of the elephant in the cultural, economic, and political spheres of the
subcontinent. They first began to acquire elephants for use in the military, albeit
as a carrier or haulier of men, baggage, and equipment during the late
eighteenth century. When initial attempts by the East India Company to capture
elephants became too expensive, the British turned to local markets for their
supply, though some British officers themselves benefitted from the capture and
sale of the animals.43 During the nineteenth century, the exploitation of the rich
tropical forests of India and Burma for timber provided the next impetus for the
use of (p.40) elephants to haul the logs out of the forests, a harvest that
contributed substantially to the imperial expansion. With the creation of the
Indian Forest Service in 1864, the responsibility for the capture, training, and
management of ‘timber elephants’ to carry out scientific and sustainable forestry
passed on to an institution that has persisted until the present times and is
responsible for the protection and conservation of the species. Elephant-
catching operations commenced in several parts of southern and northeast
India; of these the Dacca (present-day Dhaka) elephant-catching establishment
in Bengal was the most important. Between 1868 and 1950 a minimum of 22,000
elephants were captured or destroyed in control measures from the forests of
the northeast according to available figures.44 In comparison, the off take from
the southern forests was modest. The emerging European veterinary science
during this period also benefitted the Asian timber elephant.45 Realizing the
substantial losses from mortality and injury during capture and subsequent
training, the British introduced scientific elephant husbandry, a blend of Eastern
traditions and Western natural sciences that has also largely continued into
modern times.46
With about 70 per cent of the global population of the Asian elephant, South Asia
holds better hope for the long-term survival of the species, especially in parts of
India and Sri Lanka (while Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Nepal have much fewer
numbers whose viability depends on the habitat status in neighbouring countries
with a shared elephant range). Across India, a number of elephant reserves have
been set up for the conservation of the species in larger landscapes. North-
eastern India with its sizeable elephant population has, however, witnessed
habitat loss due to clearing of forest on a large scale in (p.42) recent decades,
while mining and industrialization have impacted the elephant’s habitat in east-
central India. The northern Indian range of the elephant along the Himalayan
foothills is also rather tenuous as a result of fragmentation. Southern India holds
the largest concentration of elephants of any region in relatively stable habitats.
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
Sri Lanka, surprisingly, still holds a sizeable population that is not only
genetically diverse but also constitutes a single range across the island. Since
the 1970s, ivory poaching, a scourge usually associated with the African
elephant, has also begun selectively impacting male Asian elephants again,
although it has declined over the past decade.55 The systematic capture of
elephants has been banned in India (and other countries as well) since the
enactment of legislation in 1972 to protect wildlife, but India still holds about
3,500 elephants in captivity, while the global captive population may exceed
16,000 animals.56 A major management challenge in South Asia has been
human–elephant conflicts that also shape the attitudes of local people and
society at large toward the conservation of the species, an issue variously
explored in this volume in the chapters by Paul Keil, by Ursula Münster, and by
Tarsh Thekaekara and Thomas Thornton. Indeed, the future of the human–
elephant relationship in South Asia is likely to be determined by how
successfully these conflicts are resolved, including such pragmatic means as the
selective capture of elephants for training and use, a proposition that is certainly
not without controversy. Perhaps, then, we need to better appreciate the
dynamic relations between captive and free-roaming elephants and their
involvements with human endeavours if we are to ensure their future prospects.
Notes:
(1.) Thomas R. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2015).
(3.) Raman Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants (Mumbai: The Marg
Foundation, 2011).
(6.) Miki Ben-Dor, Avi Gopher, Israel Hershkovitz, and Ran Barkai, ‘Man the Fat
Hunter: The Demise of Homo erectus and the Emergence of a New Hominin
Lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant’, PLoS ONE 6, 12 (2011):
e28689.
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
(7.) R.R.R. Brooks and V. S. Wakankar, Stone Age Painting in India (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1976).
(8.) Jonathan M. Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
(10.) Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization; Sukumar, The Story
of Asia’s Elephants.
(12.) C.M.A. Baker and C. Manwell, ‘Man and Elephant: The “Dare Theory” of
Domestication and Origin of Breeds’, Zeitschriftfür Tierzüchtung und
Zuchtüngsbiologie 100 (1983): 55–75.
(16.) Lahiri-Choudhury, ‘Indian Myths and History’; Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s
Elephants.
(17.) H. Beveridge, trans., The Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl (Calcutta: Asiatic Society
of Bengal, 1897–1939), Book 3, Hymn 22.
(22.) T.R. Trautmann, ‘Elephants and the Mauryas’, in India: History and Thought
—Essays in Honour of A.L. Basham, edited by S.N. Mukherjee(Calcutta:
Page 11 of 14
The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
Subarnarekha, 1982), 254–81; L.N. Rangarajan (ed. and trans.), Kautilya: The
Arthashastra (New Delhi: Penguin, 1992).
(24.) A.K. Narain, ‘Ganeša: A Protohistory of the Idea and the Icon’, in Ganesh:
Studies of an Asian God, edited by Robert L. Brown (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1991), 19–48.
(27.) See Alice Getty, Ganeša: A Monograph on the Elephant-Faced God (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1936); the papers in Brown, Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God;
and P. Pal (ed.), Ganesh: The Benevolent (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1995).
(30.) Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures (New York:
Random House, 1977).
(31.) Edward C. Sachau, trans., Alberuni’s India (London: Trübner and Co., 1888;
reprint, New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2002).
(32.) J. Sarkar, Military History of India (New Delhi: Orient Longmans, 1960).
(35.) Simon Digby, War Horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate: A Study of
Military Supplies (Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971).
(37.) H. Beveridge, The Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl, 3 vols (Calcutta: Asiatic Society
of Bengal, 1897–1939); Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants.
(38.) P. Locke, ‘The Tharu, TheTarai, and the History of the Nepali Hattisar’,
European Bulletin of Himalyan Research 38 (2011): 59–80.
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
(39.) C.W. Nicholas, ‘The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity. (i) The Sinhalese Period’,
The Ceylon Forester 1 (1954): 52–8.
(40.) C.R. de Silva, ‘Peddling Trade, Elephants and Gems: Some Aspects of Sri
Lanka’s Trading Connections in the Indian Ocean in the 16th and Early 17th
Centuries’, in Asian Panorama Essays in Asian History, Past and Present, edited
by K.M. de Silva, S. Kiribamune, and C.R. de Silva (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing
House, 1990), 287–302.
(41.) Jayantha Jayewardene, The Elephant in Sri Lanka (Colombo: The Wildlife
Heritage Trust of Sri Lanka, 1994).
(48.) F.W.F. Fletcher, Sport on The Nilgiris and in Wyanaad (London: Macmillan,
1911).
(49.) Robert Olivier, ‘Distribution and Status of the Asian Elephant’, Oryx 14, 4
(1978), 379−424.
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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages
(52.) See Charles Santiapillai and Peter Jackson, and IUCN/SSC Asian Elephant
Specialist Group (comp.), The Asian Elephant: An Action Plan for Its
Conservation (Gland, Switzerland: IUCN, The World Conservation Union, 1990);
and C. Santiapillai and R. Sukumar (eds), The Asian Elephant: Status and
Conservation Action Plan. Final Report to USFWS (IUCN/SSC Asian Elephant
Specialist Group, 2004) for reviews of the status and conservation problems of
the elephant.
(53.) R. Lair, Gone Astray: The Care and Management of the Asian Elephant in
Captivity (Bangkok: Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations
(FAO) Regional Office for Asia and The Pacific, 1997).
(55.) Sukumar, The Asian Elephant; V. Menon, R. Sukumar and A. Kumar, A God
in Distress: Threats of Poaching and the Ivory Trade to the Asian Elephant in
India (New Delhi: Asian Elephant Conservation Centre, Bangalore, and Wildlife
Protection Society of India, 1997); Vivek Menon, Tusker: The Story of the Asian
Elephant (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2002).
(56.) See S.S. Bist, ‘An Overview of Elephant Conservation in India’, The Indian
Forester 128, 2 (2002): 121–36; and I. Baker and M. Kashio (eds), Giants on Our
Hands: Proceedings of an International Workshop on the Domesticated Asian
Elephant (Bangkok, Thailand: Food and Agriculture Organization, 2002) for
details.
Page 14 of 14
Towards a Deep History of Mahouts
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0003
Keywords: war elephant, mahout, kingship, elephant forests, captive elephant management,
Arthaśāstra
This chapter comes out of research on elephants and Indian kingship, focusing
upon the war elephant.1 I use the institution of the war elephant as a means of
uncovering the environmental history of kingship, that is, of bringing the forest
into the history of kingdoms. In the ancient period of India’s history, the war
elephant dominates and conditions all other uses of elephants. Here I will focus
upon mahouts because they were crucial to the deployment of war elephants
and the spread of the use of them from one kingdom to another. The chapter is a
homage to Piers Locke, whose ethnology of mahouts in Nepal was the starting
point for the conference leading to the present book. I will sketch a history of
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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts
mahouts over the centuries, and then connect it to the ethnologies of mahouts of
Locke in Nepal,2 Surendra Varma and associates in India,3 Nicolas Lainé among
the Khamti of Assam,4 Ingrid Suter in Laos,5 and Nikki Savvides6 and Pittaya in
Thailand,7 making thereby the beginnings, at least, of a deep history of mahouts.
The chronological and spatial span of the topic is enormous. The war elephant
was invented in the late Vedic period, perhaps as early as 1000 BCE; the last use
of a war elephant on the battlefield that I have been able to find is an invasion of
Cambodia by the king of Siam in 1833, which means that the whole history of
the war elephant stretches (p.48) across the better part of 3,000 years.8 The
use of the war elephant was taken up by kingdoms throughout India and Sri
Lanka and spread beyond, spanning a region that extends, at its widest, from
Spain to Java (though not to China). In this large space-time frame there was a
mahout for every war elephant. There were more than a hundred generations of
mahouts in those 3,000 years, learning the trade by apprenticeship and
transmitting their knowledge, orally and by example, from the deep past to the
present. Mahouts of the present day, therefore, are the recent twigs of
branching lineages of teachers and pupils extending far back into the past. We
know this, even though the mahouts left no written record of their own and are
only rarely mentioned in the record written by the literati.
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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts
the course of battle, the elephant ceases to function as a war elephant and may
become a danger to its own troops. Because of this, the existence of the mahout
can be inferred wherever war elephants appear in texts, whether they are
mentioned or not. This is a significant matter of method, as the mahout is often
unmentioned, not because he is unimportant but, on the contrary, because he is
indispensable.
War elephants have many roles, during the march, in camp and in battle, but the
defining ones are battering fortifications under siege, and attacking enemy
troops in open battle. In the first, the elephant has only the mahout to direct
him. In the second there may also be one or two warriors riding on the back.
They ride bareback, as do cavalrymen of early ages; the howdah does not come
in till the Middle Ages. Hence elephant-riding is a skill, which warriors must
acquire through training. It is distinct from the elephant-driving skills of the
mahout on the one hand, and the use of weapons, on the other. But in any case,
the elephant, with a mahout to direct it but with or without riders, is itself a
weapon to instil terror (bhīma) and break up the ranks of the enemy.
To the unity of war elephant and mahout I need to add a third element, the
mahout’s tool, the aṅkuśa, an iron two-pointed hook. Often the aṅkuśa is
translated as a goad, but it is rather, principally, a restraint for a war elephant
who has been chosen for his abundant aggression and needs to be restrained in
some situations, so that his aggression is directed in a way that advances the
cause. This desirable abundance of aggressiveness is expressed in poetry by the
idea that the superlative war elephant on the battlefield is in musth. A near
impossibility becomes a convention, such that in any battle scene the elephant
described is in musth. Even more, by a nice bit of hyperbole, the elephants of
king Rāma’s fine city are described as being always in musth (nitya-matta).9 In
sculpture and painting the mahout with aṅkuśa is always shown as a sign that
the elephant he is driving is a war elephant.
The English word mahout answers to the Hindi mahāvat, which derives from the
Sanskrit mahāmātra.10 This is a transparent word, meaning a person of great
(mahā) measure (mātra). It designates an official of high rank, the king’s
minister or counsellor. It is surprising (p.50) to find the elephant driver
together with the high official in the meanings of mahāmātra. Mayrhofer
remarks that there seems to be no unity between the two meanings.11 Various
other words for elephant-keeper in Prakrit (meṇṭha, miṇṭha) and Pali (hatthi-
meṇḍa) led him to suggest the possible influence of a ‘non-Aryan word for
elephant driver’. Even if this is so, however, the elephant-driver did come to be
called mahāmātra, a word transparently indicative of high importance, and this
is the word for elephant-driver in common use in both epics, the Mahābhārata
and the Rāmāyaṇa, and in the law book of Manu. Other texts, notably the
Arthaśāstra, have the word hastipaka, but mahout and its forebears have
dominated, as in the Mughal period Ā’īn-i Akbarī. Though the mahout was a
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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts
lowly employee of the king, and virtually tied to the elephant in his keeping, as
we shall see, it appears that his high value as an asset to the king, as a military
asset above all, was recognized in this word.
As the use of war elephants became the universal norm in ancient India, the
supply of wild elephants for capture and taming was a problem every kingdom
had to solve as best it could. The Arthaśāstra has three different things to say
about the problem of supply. In the first place, the king is advised to maintain an
elephant forest of his own, under an overseer. Forest people are to guard the
forest, and put to death anyone killing an elephant, but rewarding anyone
bringing in the tusks of an elephant that has died naturally. Forest wardens,
assisted by mahouts (hastipaka), chainers, border guards, forest people, and
attendants, are to keep a census of elephants in writing, noting ‘those moving in
herds, those roaming alone, and those driven from a herd, the leaders of herds,
as well as those that are vicious (vyāla) or in musth, young ones, and those
released from captivity’. They should capture elephants that have excellent
marks and demeanour in the judgment of elephant trainers (anīkastha).12
Elephants are to be captured at age twenty, which is a sign that it is war
elephants that are wanted, while youngsters, those with small or no tusks, the
sick, and pregnant or suckling females are not to be caught.13 But elsewhere it
says a youngster (vikki) may be captured for entertainment.14
In the second place, the Arthaśāstra chapter on the elephant forest ends with a
verse giving the relative quality of elephants of eight regional elephant forests,
the best being from the eastern (p.51) region (Kaliṅga and Aṅgara), middling
from east and central (Prācya, Cedikarūṣa, Daśārṇa, and Aparānta) and the
worst from west and northwest (Surāṣṭra and Pañcanada).15 The list of the eight
regional elephant forests became a standard list, much repeated in later texts, to
which were added names of physical features forming the boundaries of these
forests.
In the third place, the Arthaśāstra, whose geographical horizon for the most part
is confined to north India, undertakes a comparison of the strategic values of the
northern (Himalayan) and the southern (the Dakṣiṇāpatha) trade routes, and
finds that elephants among other things are more plentiful on the southern
route, though horses are not.16 This introduces trade into the problem of supply,
and it also introduces for us the fundamental military problem of the Indian
kingdoms: that horses and elephants were in complementary distribution, the
great horse pastures being in the grasslands of the Indus Valley, and elephants
in the forests of the Ganga, the Brahmaputra, the great central Indian forest,
and the Western Ghats of south India where the largest wild population of Asian
elephants is to be found today.
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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts
All the evidence goes to show that within north India there was a definite
environmental advantage for eastern kings: access to more and better wild
elephants, and skilled mahouts, who were likely to be forest people at origin.
This was an advantage enjoyed by the kingdom of Magadha as it grew into a
great empire under the Mauryas. The Indians of the Vedas moved essentially
from a land of horses, and a form of warfare based upon the horse-drawn
chariot, into an elephant habitat that grew richer the further east they moved,
and that increasingly engaged with mahouts coming mostly from the forest
people who lived in the same forests from which the elephants came. (p.52)
Were there mahouts before kingship? I do not believe there were. The evidence
of the early literate civilizations goes to show that kings have always been
attracted to elephants as signs of their pre-eminence, and made use of them
through spectacular royal hunts (Assyria, Egypt), sacrifices (Egypt), capture-
and-display (Assyria, India), tribute-taking (Egypt, Assyria), clearing the forest of
animals dangerous to farmers (China), and use of ivory as a luxury material (all
the early civilizations) leading up to the invention of the war elephant in India.18
But there is no evidence of a deep history of live capture and use among forest
people before kingship arose.19 Hunting or scavenging of elephants for food and
the carving and trading of elephant ivory by forest peoples, have long histories,
long preceding the invention of kingship itself. But kings did not learn how to
make war elephants from forest people. The war elephant is a product of the
conjuncture of kingship and forest people in the elephant-rich forests of India,
and the mahout himself is the very embodiment of that conjuncture.
Moreover, the mahout is the embodiment of the practical knowledge that made
possible the diffusion of the war elephant as an institution from one kingdom to
another.
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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts
Greek and Chinese sources that this was so. The trade of merchants played only
a small part in this circulation of war elephants, at least at first, and royal
interest always strongly guided trade when it arose.
War elephants and their mahouts played an important role in this history. One
great advantage which Magadha enjoyed during its two-century rise to
dominance, relative to its rivals who lay westward of it, was access to an
abundance of wild elephants of superior quality, and perhaps also to an
abundance of mahouts. This was offset by a comparative disadvantage in respect
of horses; but the success of (p.54) Magadha over the long haul suggests that
its elephant–and-mahout advantage outweighed its horse disadvantage.
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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts
2,000 horses, 2,000 chariots, 3,000 or 4,000 elephants, and 200,000 foot
soldiers—very much the largest of any king of India.20 The army of Porus had a
larger cavalry, in absolute numbers and proportionally, but the Nanda force, with
its larger number of chariots, had a large number of horses, too, and many more
elephants, if we may rely on these numbers.
More telling is the report on the successors to the Nandas, by Megasthenes, who
was sent, a decade or so after Alexander, as ambassador to the new Mauryan
king of Magadha, Chandragupta, who had overthrown the Nandas. Megasthenes
was deeply interested in the military structures of the Mauryan empire, and
reported upon such things as the manner of catching and taming elephants.
Megasthenes tells us that the overall Mauryan military policy was to separate
the farmers from the military and separate the warriors from landownership,
creating a large standing army that was sufficiently well paid to maintain
personal servants and to be utterly idle in peacetime. In addition, the emperor
monopolized the ownership of elephants, horses, and arms, such that after battle
the animals were returned to the royal stables, and the arms to the royal
armoury. By implication, all mahouts were in the service of the state. This policy
of monopolizing and thus centralizing the sinews of war in the hands of the
emperor, as described by Megasthenes, contributed greatly to the success of
Mauryan expansion.21
Mauryan power extended to south India, and their kings had diplomatic relations
with the ‘three crowned kings’ of the Tamil country, Cola, Cera, and Pāṇḍya, so
called in the anthologies of classical Tamil poetry (the Sangam Literature). In
this poetry, the fourfold army is abundantly present, and the war elephant
figures both in battle scenes and in poems in praise of royal gifts, in which the
elephant is the highest kind of gift.22 Similarly, in the great chronicle of Sri
Lanka, (p.55) the Mahāvaṃsa, the war elephant and the fourfold army figure
again and again.23 The spread of the institution of the war elephant to all
corners of the Indian subcontinent and to Sri Lanka was connected with the
military expansion of the Mauryan empire, its diplomatic contacts with kingdoms
beyond its borders, and associated movements of its war elephants and mahouts.
Ultimately, these mahouts must have trained up local people to continue the
tradition in local lineages, using local languages.
The institution of the war elephant spread throughout South Asia, then, and to
Southeast Asia, all of them regions of wild elephants to this day; and westward
to Persia, the Hellenistic kingdoms, North Africa, Greece and Rome, regions
which did not have wild Asian elephants. It did not spread to China, which had
wild elephants but did not adopt the institution of the war elephant. In China,
kingship had a very different relation to the forest.
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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts
Diffusion Westward
Let us trace this expansion of the institution of the war elephant beyond India,
beginning with the westward diffusion. It starts with the Achemenid kings of
Persia, who had some imported Indian elephants, certainly with Indian mahouts.
Alexander of Macedon encountered Indians with elephants in the army of Darius
III, whom he defeated at Gaugamela. As he proceeded eastward into India,
Alexander was highly receptive to gifts of elephants and actively pursued them
as spoils of war. This is nicely illustrated by an episode recorded in Arrian. While
marching to the Indus, Alexander determined that Indians of the country had
fled for refuge to a nearby king, releasing their elephants to fend for themselves,
near the river. He ordered local people to show him the way to the elephants.
‘Many Indians are hunters of elephants, and Alexander took pains to have them
among his attendants, and at this time had their help in elephant hunts.’ Most of
the elephants were captured, permitted riders to mount them, and were added
to the army.24 Thus Alexander not only collected elephants but also took on
Indian elephant hunters, as well as mahouts, acquiring thereby the knowledge
and skill necessary to capture, train, and deploy war elephants, or at least to
find practical means to counter them in battle. (p.56)
Alexander had perhaps 200 elephants when he died in Babylon, in 323 BCE. His
successors divided them among themselves and used them against one another
in the wars that followed. One of the successful contenders was Seleucus, who
had been an infantry commander in the battle against Porus; he acquired 500
elephants from Chandragupta Maurya, for which he ceded four eastern satrapies
of Alexander’s empire, including much of southern Afghanistan. Those elephants
secured his military success, and made him king of Syria, which is to say the
eastern portions of Alexander’s empire. He and a cavalry commander of
Alexander’s, Ptolemy, son of Lagos, had been allies in the early days of the wars
of succession. But once Ptolemy became the ruler of Egypt and southern Syria,
with help from elephants of Alexander that fell to his possession, he and
Seleucus, and their successors as Hellenistic rulers of Egypt and Syria, became
neighbours and therefore enemies by position. The successors of Seleucus
obtained further consignments of Indian elephants, probably from the Mauryans
themselves. The first two Ptolemies, especially Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who
were cut off from the land route to India by their Seleucid rivals, and whose
Asian elephants and Indian mahouts were a ‘wasting asset’ as Burstein has said,
poured enormous effort and treasure into capturing and training African
elephants of Numidia (Sudan) and the western coast of the Red Sea, and
training up local lads to be mahouts, doubtless with the help of the Indian
mahouts in their employ.25 Ptolemy II sent a certain Dionysius to India. Casson
suggests he could well have had the assignment of recruiting Indian elephant
hunters and trainers, since the Ptolemies could not bring back the elephants
themselves by sea.26 He thinks it is clear that Ptolemy II got enough Indian
elephant-men to get his programme underway. Besides leading hunting parties
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and training newly captured elephants, these Indians were doubtless given the
task of teaching these skills to people of his country.
It was a development of the Hellenistic period (after Alexander, that is) that the
mahout came regularly to be called, simply, ‘the Indian’ (Indos). Thus in
Hellenistic battle descriptions, one might read that the elephant had two or
three archers in addition to ‘the Indian’. In the dictionary of Hesychius, the word
‘Indos’ was defined as ‘those who lead elephants from Aithiopia’, that is, the
place where the Ptolemies captured and trained wild elephants.27 It is clear that
(p.57) Indos here has a technical military meaning, which stems from an ethnic
designation but in this meaning may apply to people who are not from India for,
as we have seen, Indian mahouts were training up locals to become mahouts. It
is evident that those 500 Mauryan elephants of Seleucus had not driven
themselves, but came with Indian mahouts on their necks, who stayed on as
valuable, if wasting, military assets to the Seleucids, just as Indian mahouts had
accompanied Alexander’s 200 elephants to Babylon, and been divided up as
spoils by the quarrelling successors. The mahouts brought with them some
technical terms from Indian languages, including words for aṅkuśa, which
entered Greek as attested in the dictionary of Hesychius.28
Further diffusion of the war elephant in the West involved Carthage in what is
now Tunisia, capturing and training up elephants at the foot of the Atlas
mountains for use in its titanic wars against Rome, and, to a degree, Rome itself,
and various Greek and Macedonians rulers in addition to the Sassanian rulers of
Iran as well as some others. A striking testimony of the importance of mahouts
in the Carthaginian army comes from Appian, who says of Hannibal that he
attacked the sleeping Roman soldiers of Fulvius in their camp. He ordered his
‘Indians’ to mount their elephants and break into the camp, causing disorder,
while others ran about; calling out in Latin that Fulvius had ordered them to
retreat to a nearby hill. The stratagem would have led the Romans into an
ambush, had it succeeded (it did not).29 Because ‘Indian’ has the specialized
meaning of elephant driver, we cannot know if these elephant-drivers were
Indians or not; possibly they were North African mahouts who learned the trade
from Indian mahouts. In this stratagem, the war elephants and mahouts alone,
without warriors riding on them, were the attack force.
Diffusion Eastward
Southeast Asian kingdoms took up elephant warfare under conditions quite
different from those of the Hellenistic kingdoms. On the one hand they had wild
Asian elephants of their own, on the other hand kingdoms emerged later, in
about the first century ce, and when they did, they drew upon the Indian model
of kingship.
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Quaritch Wales was the first to show that Indian models of warfare were a part
of the practices that Indianizing kingdoms of Southeast (p.58) Asia adopted.30
The spectacular bas-reliefs of Angkor (twelfth century), analysed by Jacq-
Hergoualc’h, show war elephants with noble and royal warriors in howdahs,
driven by mahouts with aṅkuśas.31 While the armies of the gods and demons
depicted in scenes from the Mahābhārata or the Purāṇas are full, fourfold
armies of Indian type, the Khmer armies depicted are mostly armies of foot
soldiers and war elephants, with but few horses and no chariots. Moreover, the
weaponry of such human armies is quite eclectic, including the traditional
Khmer battle-axe and the Chinese double crossbow.
We do not know how the war elephant with mahout and aṅkuśa was instituted in
Southeast Asia, but we may suppose that diplomatic relations with Indian
kingdoms were involved. There is no question here of Indian mahouts as the
mahouts are shown in Khmer or Cham dress and hairstyle. But to suppose that it
was a spontaneous indigenous formation, a coincidental second invention of the
war elephant, in the context of Indianizing kingdoms, is simply too improbable to
believe. However it came about, the knowledge of the Indian mahout was
transmitted to the Khmer, Cham, and other mahouts of Southeast Asian
kingdoms. There is no trace of war elephants in Southeast Asia before the rise of
kingship on the Indian pattern.
Southeast Asia plus Yunnan mark the eastern limit of the war elephant. Kings of
China had direct experience of the war elephant in their wars against Southeast
Asian kings, and in the diplomatic missions of Southeast Asian kings bringing
trained elephants as gifts, but chose not to make war elephants part of their
warfare. Indeed, as Wen Huanran has shown,32 wild elephants were distributed
through much of China to the latitude of Beijing as recently as 7000 BCE, but
have retreated south and west by stages before the spread of Chinese
agriculture and Chinese kingship, till there remain, today, less than 300 in
Yunnan, on the border of Myanmar. Chinese kingship has been concerned to
clear the forests of wild animals dangerous to farmers, to use ivory, and
occasionally to display live elephants brought from afar as diplomatic gifts, but
not to preserve wild elephants in order to capture and train them for warfare.33
The larger context of this difference between India and China is the much
greater use of animal power in India, with greater commitment of land to
pasture (and grazing in forests) and the growing of fodder crops for animals,
whereas in China, reliance on animal power is (p.59) relatively little, human
power (aided by wheelbarrow, carrying-pole, or backpack) is used more, and
there is little pasture and forest. Pasture lands of China are largely confined to
the second economy, beyond the Wall.
We see these two ecologies come together when we examine the interactions
between Indianizing kingdoms of Southeast Asia and the Chinese empire as it
concerns elephants. We have a valuable resource for doing so, in the Ming Shi-
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The Ming forces had to often confront war elephants on the battlefield in
Yunnan, in the hands of ‘bandits’ who were yi, non-Han people. In this context,
they are the approximate equivalent of the Indian ‘forest people’ category.
However, we should not take the minimizing talk of bandits at face value, as
many of these bandit (p.60) armies numbered in the tens or hundreds of
thousands. The insurgent forces of Yunnan in the Ming period are kingdoms, like
their neighbours, the elephant-using Indianizing kingdoms of contemporary
Southeast Asia.
In one engagement of this war, a Ming force of 30,000 cavalry confronted the
Bai-yi army of 10,000 men and 30 elephants in the vanguard, their chieftains
riding upon elephants.38 After defeating this force, the Chinese imposed
surrender terms of paying for the costs of the war, and a tribute of 500
elephants, 30,000 buffalo, and 300 elephant attendants.39 The upshot was the
setting up of state farms for elephants under the Trained-Elephant Guard,
sending home all the Bai-yi elephant handlers, and the sending to the capital of
the captured elephants under elephant handlers from Champa. But this elephant
establishment was later closed down and the mahouts sent home.40
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This is the closest the Chinese came to taking up the training of elephants for
their own use in this Ming period source, and it is significant that they had to
rely upon mahouts of the yi people of Yunnan and of Champa for these purposes.
About the same time, the kingdom of Cambodia sent an embassy offering a
tribute of twenty-eight elephants, thirty-four elephant handlers, and forty-five
slaves; and the kingdom of Annam a tribute of four elephants and three
elephant-handlers.41
To be sure, at the end of the era of the war elephant, other uses of elephants
continued. Elephants always had functions in warfare apart from battlefield
combat and the battering of fortifications under siege. In addition, there were
uses outside of the military ones. It will be helpful to follow such threads as may
remain, connecting past with present.
Using elephants for royal hunts was an ancient practice in India with important
diplomatic applications. The practice was taken up by the Sassanian kings of
Persia, who imported their hunting elephants from India, as may be seen in the
bas-relief of a royal hunt at Taq-i Bustan, showing twenty-two elephants with
mahouts and their assistants, probably Indian. In India, it was royal practice to
protect wild elephants, and elephant hunts involved capturing elephants and
training them to be (among other things) mounts from which to conduct hunts of
other large mammals. This pattern was continued by the Mughals, and under
British rule in India.42
Chitwan mahouts still live more or less full time with the elephants of the stable.
But the old practice of apprenticeship, by which young sons or nephews would
act as unpaid labour for their elders and get food and board but no wage, is
giving way since the introduction of (p.63) village schools, which keep the
young sons and nephews at home, far from the elephant stables. The training of
mahouts is shifting towards a mix of introductory training sessions by the
superior staff, followed by on-the-job training of young men of hiring age. At
nearby hotels, which offer elephant rides to its guests, the working conditions of
mahouts has shifted even further away from the old pattern, in that mahouts are
hired from India as wage labourers rather than hiring from Tharu families that
have a tradition of going into the service.
Other associated uses of elephants that continue from the past include
processions, that is, the use of the elephant as a conveyance or vāhana of the
king indicative of his supreme rank. This function was applied to the gods, or in
Sri Lanka the Tooth Relic of the Buddha, so that temples, even today, keep
elephants for festival processions in which the god of the temple is treated as a
king, much as Indra, king of the gods, exchanged his Vedic chariot for the
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elephant Airāvata after the invention of the war elephant in the late Vedic
period. Ethnographic work on temple elephants and their keepers such as that
of Seneviratne has considerable potential for a deep historical view of
mahouts.46
Finally, elephants were long used for extracting timber from forests and hauling
heavy materials to the building sites of temples and palaces. This brings us to
the timber elephant of recent times, which came to be the dominant form of
elephant-use in the nineteenth century, after the demise of the war elephant.
On the one hand, the timber elephant of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
drew upon long-established practices and the knowledge of mahouts and was
not a new invention. But, on the other hand, its rise to dominance had to do with
conditions that were altogether new and profoundly reshaped practice.
Technologies using fossil fuels, beginning with railways and steamships,
produced a steep drop in the cost of transportation that ultimately displaced the
use of animals for transport-power, including horses, above all, and also mules,
donkeys, draft oxen and camels, and, eventually, elephants. The transportation
revolution created vast new markets for tropical hardwoods. Railways in Asia
needed enormous amounts of timber for railway sleepers or ties, and
locomotives burnt wood until coal mines were developed. Steamships needed
teak from South or Southeast Asia for their decks. Those very steamships,
thanks to the cheap fossil fuel that powered (p.64) them, articulated a
worldwide demand for tropical hardwoods from the monsoon forests of South
and Southeast Asia. Nowadays, these hardwoods go into the making of fine
furniture for export.
Elephants had long been used for extracting timber from forests for local
demand, but the great rise in international demand was a quantitative change so
massive as to create a qualitative change in elephant culture, at the very
moment that the war elephant came to the end of its history. These changes
coincided with the retreat of kingship before the advance of European empires,
encompassing most of South and Southeast Asia. The new entities deploying
timber elephants were mostly not kings but colonial forestry departments and
their national successors, or large private corporations such as the Bombay
Burmah Trading Company, and numerous small-scale local operators. Trade and
ownership of elephants was cast free of the interests of kings, so that there
arose a vigorous trade in elephants, who had then become the property of
individuals as well as of the state or its licensees. Large establishments of timber
elephants gave large numbers of mahouts’ employment, but under new
conditions.
This period is coming to an end, and has already ended in most countries
(Myanmar being the notable exception)—a victim of its own success in depleting
the forests, to the degree that governments have been moved to put limits on
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Let me draw out a few of the most salient differences that arise in moving from a
war elephant to a timber elephant mode of production. To do so, we can make
use of two classic works that came out of the Burmese timber industry: Evans’
treatise on the diseases of elephants,50 U. Toke Gale’s Burmese Timber
Elephant,51 and also the studies of Khyne U. Mar on the studbook of timber
elephants.52 To begin with, the demographic profile of captive elephants in
timber operations is different. Under the regime of the war elephant, there was
a preference for the twenty-year-old male tusker—the most difficult to capture,
train, and manage. But in the timber industry, (p.65) combative tendencies
were at a discount and while large tuskers were valuable for some of the most
demanding tasks, male elephants that were difficult to control were generally let
free immediately during large-scale captures. As a result, the demographic
profile shifted proportionately towards more females and youngsters, and indeed
the average age during capture was five or six years.53 Moreover, timber
elephants were let free to forage for themselves in the forest at night, and to
socialize with their wild brethren. A tamed female would get pregnant in this
way and after delivery would go to work with a suckling baby trotting by her
side. The rate of replacement by this means, however, was never sufficient to
maintain the captive population, and capture of wild elephants continued.
Under these circumstances, mahouts become paid employees of the state or the
corporation, not a status publically announced by clothing signifying a position
of honour in the service of the king. The oversight of feeding and remedies for
illness, collocations of herbs and spices purchased from the bazaar, by mahouts
gave way before a developing veterinary medicine emanating from current
European practice, which also displaced the Ayurvedic medicine formerly
administered by a physician (cikitsaka), with which the mahout’s home remedies
were probably similar.54 There grew a vigorous free trade in elephants in which
forest people participated fully, especially Shans, who captured young elephants
to ride on and to sell, their chiefs collecting them in numbers as an article both
of prestige and profit, emulating kings in a colony in which the Burmese
kingship had been extinguished by the British. Rustling of elephants at night
when they were foraging freely to sell them across the Thai border, and if
possible to steal them again and sell them back to their original owners was
rife;55 Khyne U. Mar, who had access to records of 9,600 timber elephants of
Myanmar captured or born after 1875, notes that some 600 had escaped to the
forest, been sold, or stolen by insurgents.56 In this ‘wild west’ situation, forest
people had the skills, opportunity, and means to participate, on a small scale, in
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The vectors of change, however, are many, and create a great deal of variation
across this field. The first of these have to do with the political and economic
conditions under which elephants are used: the condition and nature of kingship
at any particular time and place; the distribution and health of elephant forests;
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I have already given the example of the mahout’s turban as a way in which
ethnography can inform the reading of ancient visual representations. Let me
give another, having to do with language. Locke says that elephants imported
from Myanmar to Chitwan in Nepal,59 having learned commands in one
language, had to learn them again in a new one. Aelian says,
Ptolemy the Second, also called Philadelphus, was presented with a young
elephant, and it was brought up where the Greek language was used, and
understood those who spoke it. Up to the time of this particular animal it
was believed that elephants only understood the language spoken by the
Indians.60 (p.68)
This is a way of saying that it was thought only Indians could be trainers, until
the times of Ptolemy II who took to capturing and training African elephants.
The first elephant to understand Greek commands signifies the emergence of
Greek-speaking elephant-men. It is from such small details that the deep history
of mahouts can be divined.
A deep history of mahouts would also have to take on one final issue, and that is
the relation of the lineages of mahouts to elephant trainers belonging to circuses
and zoos around the world. I can give only a brief account of what needs to be
done.
The capture and display of elephants goes back to the beginnings of kingship, in
ancient Egypt, Assyria, and probably the Indus Civilization as well. The
‘zoological garden’ is the later issue of the royal or aristocratic menagerie, and
of the movement of wild captives in king-to-king circuits of diplomacy and gift-
giving, such as the elephant given to Charlemagne from the caliph Harun al-
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Rashid in the ninth century, and a handful of other such spectacular gifts. The
circus, on the other hand, has a more discontinuous history. It is the modern
revival of the animal display of the ancient Romans in the Circus Maximus,
which included elephants. For modern zoos and circuses, the flow of captive
elephants to places far away from their habitat was made possible by the
transportation revolution, occasioning a huge rise in numbers from the second
half of the nineteenth century. Before then the number of elephants in Europe or
America was very small indeed.
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Notes:
(1.) Surendra Varma gave freely of his vast knowledge of captive elephants and
their mahouts; Rob Burling gave valuable comments on the chapter; John
Whitmore on matters Southeast Asian; the incomparable Rebecca Grapevine
gave research assistance; Piers Locke shared his PhD thesis; Ingrid Suter and
Nikki Savvides gave information on mahouts in Laos and Thailand. A fellowship
from the Mellon Foundation and the College of LSA, University of Michigan,
supported the research, which also resulted in a book, Thomas R. Trautmann,
Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2015).
(3.) Surendra Varma, Suparna Ganguly, S.R. Sujata, and Sandeep K. Jain,
Wandering Elephants of Punjab: An Investigation of the Population Status,
Management and Welfare Significance, Elephants in Captivity: CUPA/ANCF—
Technical Report No. 2 (Bangalore: Compassion Unlimited Plus Action (CUPA)
and Asian Nature Conservation Foundation [ANCF], 2008); Surendra Varma,
Anur Reddy, S.R. Sujata, Suparna Ganguly, and Rajendra Hasbhavi, Captive
Elephants of Karnataka: An Investigation into Population Status, Management
and Welfare Significance, Elephants in Captivity: CUPA/ANCF—Technical Report
No. 3 (Bangalore: CUPA and ANCF, 2008); Surendra Varma, S.R. Sujata, N.
Kalaivanan, T. Rajamanickam, M.C. Sathyanarayana, R. Thirumurugan, S.
Thagaraj Panneerslevam, N.S. Manoharan, V. Shankaralingam, D. Boominathan,
and N. Mohanraj, Captive Elephants of Tamil Nadu: An Investigation into the
Status, Management and Welfare Significance, Elephants in Captivity: CUPA/
ANCF Technical—Report No. 5 (Bangalore: CUPA and ANCF, 2008); Surendra
Varma, George Verghese, David Abraham, S.R. Sujata, and Rajendra Hasbhavi,
Captive Elephants of Andaman Islands: An Investigation into the Population
Status, Management and Welfare Significance, Elephants in captivity: CUPA/
ANCF—Technical Report No. 11 (Bangalore: CUPA and ANCF, 2009).
(4.) Nicolas Lainé, ‘Pratiques vocales et dressage animal. Les mélodies huchées
des Khamtis à leurs elephants’, in Chant pensé, chant vécu, temps chanté:
Formes, usages et représentations des pratiques vocales, edited by N. Bénard
and C. Poulet (Rosières-en-Haye: Éditions Camion Blanc, forthcoming).
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(5.) Ingrid Suter, ‘Changes in Elephant Ownership and Employment in the Lao
PDR: Implications for the Elephant-Based Logging and Tourism
Industries’ (unpublished, 2013).
(6.) Nikki Savvides, ‘At the Brink of Extinction: The Captive Elephant Population
and the Dying Culture of the Mahout in Surin Province, Thailand’ (unpublished,
nd.).
(9.) Rām, The Vālmīki-Rāmāyaṇa: Critical Edition, edited by G.H. Bhatt and U.P.
Shah (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1960–75), 1.6.23.
(12.) Patrick Olivelle, trans., King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India:
Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 102; R.P.
Kangle, trans., The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1969,
2nd ed.), 2.2.6–14.
(19.) I use ‘forest people’ (rather than tribals or some other such term) as it
corresponds to the terms used in the texts, notably aṭavi and vana-cāra. Forest
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(20.) T. Trautmann, ‘Elephants and the Mauryans’, in India: History and Thought.
Essays in Honour of A. L. Basham, edited by S.N. Mukherjee (Calcutta:
Subarnarekha, 1982), 254–81; reprinted in Trautmann, The Clash of
Chronologies: Ancient India in the Modern World (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2009),
229–54; and in India’s Environmental History, edited by Mahesh Rangarajan and
K. Sivaramakrishnan (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2012), 152–81.
(22.) K. Kailasapathy, Tamil Heroic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); A.K.
Ramanujan, trans., Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the
Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil, translated from the Oriental classics (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985); M.L. Thangappa and A.R.
Venkatachalapathy, Love Stands Alone: Selections from Tamil Sangam Poetry
(New Delhi, India: Penguin Books India: Viking, 2010).
(25.) Stanley M. Burstein, ‘Elephants for Ptolemy II: Ptolemaic Policy in Nubia in
the Third Century BC’, in Ptolemy II Philadelphus and His World, edited by Paul
McKechnie and Philippe Guillaume (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008), 135–47.
(29.) Appian, Appian’s Roman History, translated by Horace White and Edgar
Iliff Robson (The Loeb Classical Library, London; Cambridge, Mass.: W.
Heinemann; Harvard University Press, 1972), 7.7.41, 2–5.
(30.) George Coedès is the inventor of the phrase états hindouisés, which in
English became Indianized states. I prefer to call them Indianizing kingdoms,
that is, states whose kings adopted and adapted the Indian model of kingship.
See also H.G. Quaritch Wales, Ancient South-East Asian Warfare (London: B.
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Quaritch, 1952); and Rongsheng Wen (ed.), Zhongguo li shi shi qi zhi wu yu dong
wu bian qian yan jiu (Chongqing: Chongqing chu ban she: Xin hua shu dian jing
xiao, 1995).
(34.) Geoff Wade, ‘Introduction’, Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu (2005), http://
www.epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/, accessed 20 January 2013.
(35.) Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu, Ming Shi-lu, 24 September 1386.
(41.) Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu, 15 October 1388; 10 January 1389.
(42.) Ā’īn-i-Akbarī (on hunting), Abūal-Faz̤l ibn Mubārak, The Ā’īn-i Akbarī: A
Gazetteer and Administrative Manual of Akbar’s Empire and Part History of
India (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1993), 2.27.
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(47.) Suter, ‘Changes in Elephant Ownership and Employment in the Lao PDR’;
Sarinda Singh, Natural Potency and Political Power: Forests and State Authority
in Contemporary Laos (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012).
(49.) Richard Lair, Gone Astray: The Care and Management of the Asian
Elephant in Domesticity (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific,
1997); Locke, ‘History, Practice, Identity’; Varma, Ganguly, Sujata, and Jain,
Wandering Elephants of Punjab; Varma, Reddy, Sujata, Ganguly, and Hasbhavi,
Captive Elephants of Karnataka; Varma et al., Captive Elephants of Tamil Nadu;
Varma et al., Captive Elephants of Andaman Islands.
(52.) Khyne U. Mar, ‘The Studbook of Timber Elephants of Myanmar with Special
Reference to Survivorship Analysis’, in Giants on Our Hands: Proceedings of the
International Workshop on the Domesticated Asian Elephants, edited by Iljas
Bker and Masakazu Kashio (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the
Pacific, 2002); Khyne U. Mar, ‘The Demography and Life History Strategies of
Timber Elephants in Myanmar’ (PhD thesis, University College, London, 2007).
(54.) Evans, Elephants and Their Diseases; Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant.
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(61.) Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of
the American Circus (Animals, History, Culture) (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2013), 36.
(62.) Ros Clubb and Georgia Mason, A Review of the Welfare of Zoo Elephants in
Europe: A Report Commissioned by the RSPCA (University of Oxford, Animal
Behaviour Research Group, Department of Zoology, Oxford: Royal Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 2002), 90–3, 97.
(63.) Clubb and Mason, A Review of the Welfare of Zoo Elephants in Europe.
(64.) Prajna Chowta, Elephant Code Book (Bangalore: Asian Nature Conservation
Foundation, 2010).
(65.) Suter, ‘Changes in Elephant Ownership and Employment in the Lao PDR’.
Page 24 of 24
Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0004
Human interaction with elephants began at a very early date in the Indian
subcontinent. We know that Alexander encountered elephant regiments
deployed by his Indian adversaries; but they were a regular part of the fourfold
army several centuries before the Mauryas.1 The domestication of elephants may
have taken place a lot earlier, possibly already during the Indus Valley
Civilization,2 and the elephant was trained for warfare already by the beginning
of the first millennium BCE.3 As we seek ways to study this interaction in
modern and contemporary times and to ameliorate its adverse effects on the
Page 1 of 16
Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
One question that text scholars have to answer before using the Arthaśāstra
material for historical purposes is whether one can believe what it says; is it
historically accurate? Propaganda, wishful thinking, and ideological
pronouncements were prevalent in speech and text then as now. One check on
the accuracy of Kauṭilya’s descriptions, however, is his detailed account of how
to construct a fort. This, incidentally, is the most ancient text on Indian
architecture we have. Professor Dieter Schlingloff has devoted several studies to
a close comparison between the available archaeological data and Kauṭilya’s
account and has shown that Kauṭilya’s description fits closely with the
archaeological record, including such details as the distance between moats and
between towers.7 The Arthaśāstra, for the most part, is hard-nosed and only
infrequently gets into idle speculation; it is one ancient Indian text that can
serve as a source for historical reconstruction. The information provided for
horses and elephants, with attention to detail and terms clearly derived from
oral traditions, confirms this.
Its main topics are statecraft, governance, and law, and its material on elephants
is presented within this framework. For example, it has little information on how
elephants were used within the civilian economy.8 But what it has to say about
elephants is precious, because it provides the most ancient technical description
of the elephant/human interaction available for South Asia; it also incorporates
expert oral traditions among mahouts and elephant-handlers. For an indication
of the centrality of elephants in the Arthaśāstra, consider the fact that the term
hastin for elephant occurs 138 times, while other terms, such as dvipa and nāga
occur a total of twenty times. Compare this to the law book of Manu, a work of
comparable length, where the elephant is mentioned just nine times.
My chapter has three sections. The first section will deal with the management
of wild elephants; the second with the management of domesticated elephants,
with a brief transitional note on the conversion of the wild to the domestic; and
the third with the work of elephants. (p.77)
Unlike cattle, camels, and horses, elephants were generally not bred in captivity
by ancient Indians. The reasons are unclear, but it must have something to do
also with the length of time needed—around twenty years according to the
Arthaśāstra—for an elephant to be able to engage in commercial or military
activities. Maintaining elephants for so long, given their need for a lot of food
and fodder, would have been economically unfeasible. For the same reason, the
Arthaśāstra forbids the capture of young elephants and pregnant females.9
The wardens of the elephant forests were required to take periodic census of the
elephant population. It involved both the actual counting of elephants and an
estimate based on factors such as dung deposits and footprints. Note that these
census takers moved about on or with female elephants, probably because they
did not cause aggressive or defensive behaviour among the elephants herds,
Page 3 of 16
Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
First, the hunt took place in the summer before the rainy season, that is, mid-
May to mid-July. A possible reason is that during the dry (p.79) season elephant
herds tend to congregate at lakes and rivers, as it still happens in Minneriya
Preserve in Sri Lanka, where hundreds of elephants from different herds come
to the Minneriya Lake for what has been called ‘the gathering’. The elephants
targeted for capture are twenty years old and, in the judgment of experts, have
proper marks of excellence. The very young, as well as pregnant and suckling
females, are exempt from capture. The Sanskrit terms used for the capture of
elephants are bandhana, literally binding, and grahaṇa or capture.
In the first passage we have three interesting words most likely deriving from
the vocabulary of elephant trainers that are probably here Sanskritized: vikka,
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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
moḍha, and makkaṇa. The meanings of the last two are doubtful, and the
translation depends on the interpretations of later commentators. The term
vikka, on the other hand, certainly refers to a very young cub, because at KAŚ
2.31.16 Kauṭilya permits the capture of infant cubs for entertainment: ‘In order
to play with, one may capture a cub, feeding it milk and green
fodder’ (kṣīrayāvasiko vikkaḥ krīḍārthaṃ grāhyaḥ). It is unclear for whom such
cubs were intended, but one may guess that it was for the palace and its women
and children. We will see later that elephants may have been used for other
kinds of entertainment as well, such as theatrical or circus performances.
That the elephant hunt may have been a ceremonial event attended by
dignitaries and kings is indicated by a comment that a neighbouring lord may be
invited to such an event and then placed under arrest.18 Likewise, a pretext for
taking forces to the border of a kingdom was to engage in an elephant hunt,
when the real reason was to attack the neighbouring ruler.19
The management of state elephants was under the control of the Superintendent
of Elephants (hastyadhyakṣa). He was responsible for all aspects of the
management as spelled out in the very opening of the chapter dedicated to him:
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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
That many of the attendants enumerated in the above list were officials of some
standing is demonstrated by the fact that they are mentioned in the salary list of
the Arthaśāstra (5.3). Fines and penalties were imposed on elephant workers for
neglecting or mistreating elephants, showing that the management regimen
included a deep concern for the welfare of the elephants:
These are the occasions for imposing a penalty: keeping the stall unclean,
not giving green fodder, making an elephant sleep on bare ground, striking
it on an improper area, letting someone else ride on (p.81) it, making it
travel at an improper time or on unsuitable ground, taking it to water at a
place that is not a ford, and letting it go into a thicket of trees. He should
deduct this from their rations and wages.24
Elephants normally lived in stables with separate stalls for each, and the
Superintendent was responsible for their construction, maintenance, and
staffing. Kauṭilya gives a somewhat abbreviated description of a stable and the
stalls for individual elephants in these instructions to the Superintendent:
Some dimensions given in this passage are problematic. The height, width, and
length of a stable is said to be twice the height of an elephant. There are several
problems with this: is this the height of an average elephant? or the maximum
height of an elephant? or of the actual elephant living in it? Further, the length
of the stable cannot be just twice the height. This would at most accommodate
two stalls. There is probably a mistake here, because in the parallel description
of stables for horses (KAŚ 2.30.4) the length is, quite reasonably, said to
correspond to the number of horses. It is likely that the author intended the
specifications of a horse stable in the preceding chapter, mutatis mutandis, to
apply also to elephant stables. And the description of a horse stable is
instructive, and it gives us a broader picture of a stable and the area
surrounding it.
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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
The other animals located in the vicinity may have had a variety of uses,
including spotting snakes and intruders. Within the fort, which is the capital
with the king’s residence, elephant stables were located in the east-southeast
sector.28 It is unclear whether all the state elephants were located within the
fort, although my guess is that only those required for ceremonial purposes and
for the defence of the fort were located there. It would have been much less
expensive to house most of the elephants in the countryside where fodder and
land were more easily available.
The food and rations for elephants depend on their age, size, and the kind of
work they are engaged in, and Kauṭilya goes into great detail about the diet and
rations of elephants:
Per aratni (48 cm), the ration is one droṇa (5 litres or 9.6 kg) of rice
kernels, half an āḍhaka (0.62 litre) of oil, three prasthas (0.92 litre) of
ghee, ten palas (378 gm) of salt, 50 (1.8 kg) palas of meat,32 one āḍhaka
(1.25 litres) of juice or twice that amount of curd to moisten the lumps, one
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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
āḍhaka (1.25 litres) of liquor or double that amount of milk along (p.83)
with ten palas (378 gm) of sugar as a stimulating drink, one prastha (0.31
litre) of oil for anointing the limbs, one-eighth of that for the head and for
the lamp, two and a quarter loads of green fodder, two and a half loads of
dry grass, and an unlimited amount of leaves.33
If these rations constitute the food consumed by an elephant each day, as seems
likely, one can see the heavy expense involved in maintaining a sizable number
for work and war. The enormous amount of fodder eaten by an elephant is
attested in recent studies, one cited by Trautmann estimating 600−800 pounds
of green fodder daily.34
Finally, there appears to have been a custom of cutting the tusks of elephants.
The practice is recorded also in the Bṛhat Saṃhitā of Varāhamihira (fifth century
CE), and the Arthaśāstra specifies that a tusk should be cut leaving a section
from the mouth whose length is twice the circumference at the root of the
tusk.35 The purpose of this trimming of tusks, besides providing ivory, is left
unstated.
Before concluding this part of the chapter, let me briefly touch on some
significant information provided by the Arthaśāstra regarding elephant culture in
the society at large. First, there appears to have been a commercial trade in
elephants.36 Even though Kauṭilya recommends the establishment of elephant
preserves, given the distribution of elephants in India,37 this may not have been
possible for all kings. Further, even kings with such forests may have looked to
the open market to purchase additional and better elephants. A couple of verses
provide an estimate of the regions from which the best elephants come.
Among elephants, those born in Kaliṅga and Aṅgara are the best; those
born in the east, Cedi, and Karūṣa, and those from the Daśārṇas and
Aparāntas are considered middling. Those from Surāṣṭra and Pañcanada
are said to be the worst. The courage, speed, and energy of all are
increased with training.38
The identity of many of these names is not altogether clear. Kaliṅga is Orissa
(present-day Odisha); Aṅgara is possibly southern Madhya Pradesh. Cedi is
Bundelkhand of Madhya Pradesh. Karūṣa may be south of Cedi, and Daśārṇas
may be southeast of Cedi. Aparānta is the Konkan area of Maharashtra, and
Surāṣṭra is south-western Gujarat. Pañcanada is possibly an area between Sindh
and Uttar Pradesh. Note that all these regions are broadly within the northern
parts of India, (p.84) the region where this text was composed, and this
corresponds to an evaluation of the northern trade route (uttarapatha) which is
said at one point to provide horses, elephants, and ivory.39 There is also a
reference to elephant traders in the context of additional taxes imposed by the
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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
Work of Elephants
My final topic is the work of elephants. Once again, the information provided by
the Arthaśāstra pertains principally to the state use of elephants.
There are two major tasks for state elephants: serving in wars and allowing
humans, especially the king and other officials, to ride them. The first is easy to
understand and evaluate. Kauṭilya is explicit: ‘A king’s victory is led by
elephants, for elephants, with their enormous bodies and lethal onslaughts, can
crush an enemy’s troops, battle-arrays, forts, and military camps.’45
One of the four divisions of an ancient Indian army consisted of elephants. The
elephant brigades were deployed in different parts (p.85) of the army
depending on the specific military formation being employed. However, the use
of elephants was limited to seasons that were not excessively hot and to the
rainy season, and to regions with plenty of water:
During a time when excessive heat has abated, he should march with
regiments consisting mostly of elephants; for, elephants sweat internally
and thus become leprous, and when they cannot immerse in water and
drink water, they have internal secretions and thus become blind.
Therefore, one should march with regiments consisting mostly of elephants
only in a region with abundant water and during the rainy season. When
conditions are opposite, he should march into a region with little rain or
muddy areas with regiments consisting mostly of donkeys, camels, and
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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
horses. In the rainy season, he should march into a region that is mostly
desert with all four divisions of the army.46
Kauṭilya also provides details about the tasks assigned to the elephant brigades:
These are the tasks of the elephant corps: marching at the vanguard;
making new roads, camping places, and fords; repelling attacks; crossing
and descending into water; holding the ground, marching forward, and
descending; entering rugged and crowded places; setting and putting out
fires; scoring a victory with a single army unit; reuniting a broken
formation; breaking an unbroken formation; providing protection in a
calamity; charging forward; causing fear; terrorizing; demonstrating
grandeur; gathering; dispatching;47 shattering parapets, doors, and
turrets; and taking the treasury safely in and out.48
Even though this involves not the work but the use of elephants, dead ones for
that matter, there is some information about the use of elephant parts. Among
the items listed as forest produce are skins, bones, bile, tendons, eyes, teeth,
horns, hooves, and tails of many animals, including the elephant.54 Elephant
tusks were used for hilts of swords.55 Although we have evidence for the trade in
ivory—for example, it was taxed at one-tenth or one-fifteenth56—and there was
heavy punishment for stealing vessels made of ivory,57 it is quite surprising that
in the chapter devoted to precious items taken into the treasury discussed
above, we have pearls, gems, diamonds, coral, sandalwood, aloe, and even
incense, skins, and cloth, but not ivory. However, neither are gold and silver
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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra
discussed in that chapter, indicating that there is much in the Arthaśāstra that
we do not fully comprehend.
The question has been asked whether the elephant lore of ancient India
recorded in various texts—from the scientific and scholastic to the mythical and
poetic—has any connection to the real knowledge and management of elephants
by mostly illiterate trainers and mahouts. Representing the view that most, if not
all, ancient elephant lore is simply rubbish—a view expressed in its most
extreme form—is an article of Melin Peris, who claims that old works on
elephants in India and Sri Lanka are ‘a lot of baloney!’58 Basing his arguments
on secondary sources without reference to primary texts or even to the
significant translation and study of a major medieval Sanskrit treatise on
elephants, the Mataṅga-Vilāsa by Franklin Edgerton,59 Peris concludes: ‘To this
range of pseudo-sciences may belong whole corpus of elephant mantrams, the
wanted nila sastra [sic] and perhaps a good deal of the so-called ali vedakama,
including its pharmacology, which are still held in dumb admiration by a
credulous public from a failure on the part of researchers to test them out for
what they are worth.’60 (p.87) The material on elephants from Kauṭilya’s
Arthaśāstra presented earlierbelies this overly negative evaluation of ancient
Indian elephant lore. Edgerton over eighty years ago asked the same question as
Peris: ‘The question might be raised, to what extent does this ancient elephant-
science represent actual experience with elephants, rather than theoretical or
fanciful speculation?’61 But he came to a very different and, in my view, more
accurate conclusion. Acknowledging that texts do betray signs of scholastic hair-
splitting and theorizing, he yet concludes: ‘But in general it seems to me hardly
doubtful that we are dealing with genuine, ancient, and persistent tradition of
elephant-lore, which grew up in and around the elephant stables of Indian
potentates.’ After noting the technical terms for various bodily parts and the
specific names given to an elephant in each of the first ten years of life, names
that have no clear etymologies in Sanskrit, Edgerton remarks that: ‘They smack
of the jargon of stables.’62 It is this on-the-ground knowledge of domesticated
elephants and of their management, often ‘the jargon of stables’, that is for the
most part presented in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra.
Notes:
(1.) Thomas R. Trautmann, ‘Elephants and the Mauryas’, in The Clash of
Chronologies: Ancient India in the Modern World (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2009),
229–54.
(4.) Patrick Olivelle, King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya’s
Arthaśāstra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
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(8.) The issue of private ownership of elephants has been dealt with by
Trautmann in The Clash of Chronologies. He concludes that under the Mauryas,
private ownership of elephants was prohibited. How far this practice was
emulated by other rulers is difficult to estimate. Although Kauṭilya does not
address this issue directly, several of his comments indicate recognition of the
private ownership of elephants. For example, as I note later, elephants were
used by entertainers as part of their performances, and ‘elephant roads’ are
present in the countryside. Kauṭilya also gives the amount of taxes to be
assessed on dealers in elephants.
(11.) Note that officials who, when tested, lacked integrity were placed in mines,
and in produce and elephant forests (KAŚ 1.10.15). On elephant forest, see also
KAŚ 7.11.15; 7.15.22; 8.4.44–5.
(14.) nāgavanapālā
hastipakapādapāśikasaimikavanacarakapārikarmikasakhāhastimūtrapurīṣacchannagandhā
bhallātakīśākhāpracchannāḥ pañcabhiḥ saptabhir vā hastibandhakībhiḥ saha
carantaḥ śayyāsthānapadyāleṇḍakūlaghātoddeśena hastikulaparyagraṃ vidyuḥ |
yūthacaram ekacaraṃ niryūthaṃ yūthapatiṃ hastinaṃ vyālaṃ mattaṃ potaṃ
bandhamuktaṃ ca nibandhena vidhyuḥ || (KAŚ 2.2.10–11).
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(21.)
cikitsakānīkasthārohakādhoraṇahastipakaupacārikavidhāpācakayāvasikapādapāśikakuṭīrakṣakau
aupasthāyikavargaḥ (KAŚ 2.32.16).
(22.) Patrick Olivelle, ‘The Medical Profession in Ancient India: Its Social,
Religious, and Legal Status’, eJournal of Indian Medicine (forthcoming).
(25.) The meaning of this expression is unclear, although it must refer to some
architectural feature of the building. See my comment on this passage in
Olivelle, King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India.
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(30.) Kauṭilya describes different kinds of vicious (vyāla) elephants: ‘The vicious
elephant has just one type of activity. Its preparatory regimen consists of
keeping it under restraint and guarding it individually. It is one that is
apprehensive, obstinate, erratic, and in rut; one whose rut is diagnosed; and one
the cause of whose inebriation is diagnosed. A vicious elephant that is lost to all
activities may be simple, firmly resolved, erratic, and vitiated by all the
defects’ (KAŚ 2.32.8–10).
(31.) The five kinds appear to be five different stages of training development of
a captured elephant. We see similar stages of development in the war-elephant
(KAŚ 2.32.4) and riding-elephants (KAŚ 2.32.6). In these cases, however, some
elephants may never go beyond a particular stage. Becoming accustomed to
water probably means that the untrained elephant is being taken to a river to
get him used to getting in and out of the water. Becoming accustomed to pits
probably means that the elephant is trained here to go into and come out of
hollows and craters. It appears that elephants have a natural fear of holes and
pits, and training would be directed at overcoming this natural fear. damyaḥ
pañcavidhaḥ skandhagataḥ stambhagato vārigato ‘vapātagato yūthagataś ceti ||
(KAŚ 2.32.2).
(32.) Scholars have speculated that ‘meat’ (māṃsa) here may refer to the fleshy
parts of fruits. But Piers Locke (personal communication) points out that he has
heard of elephants in Nepal being fed animal meat.
(36.) For further details on this trade, see Trautmann’s chapter in this volume.
The control of this trade may have been an important source of power for kings
along the trade routes. Although it is possible that the elephant trade was
controlled by kings, Kauṭilya’s statement given later about taxes on elephant
traders (KAŚ 5.2.17) indicates that at least some portion of that trade was in
private hands.
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(41.) See Patrick Olivelle, ‘Showbiz in Ancient India: Data from the Arthaśāstra’,
in ‘Festschrift Prof B.D. Chattopadyaya’, edited by Osmund Bopearachchi and
Suchandra Ghosh (Delhi: Manohar, forthcoming).
(47.) Commentators and translators take the two terms grahaṇa, mokṣaṇa to
mean capturing and releasing, that is, taking enemy soldiers as prisoner or
releasing them. It is, however, unclear why this task should be singled out in the
midst of activities aimed at one’s own army. The term mokṣayitvā at KAŚ 10.5.2
provides a clue to a possible meaning. There the term refers to the release or
dispatching of the army from its confines within the army camp into the field to
assume battle formations. I think that a similar meaning may be present here in
the sense of dispatching army units to various areas of the battle formation. If
that is the case, then grahaṇa may mean the opposite, that is, the gathering of
dispersed troops into a single location.
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(53.) See J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian
(London: Trübner, 1877), 72.
(62.) Piers Locke also discusses Edgerton’s Matanga Lila in his short essay
‘Captive Elephant Management, the Tharu and the Nepali State’, IIAS
Newsletter 49 (2008): 14–15.
Page 16 of 16
Symbolism and Power*
Jane Buckingham
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0005
Keywords: Akbar, Akbarnama, mahouts, Ā’īn-i Akbarī, war elephants, captive elephant management,
mahout, mast, nonhuman agency
Page 1 of 20
Symbolism and Power*
Written during Akbar’s reign, the Akbarnama and Ā’īn-i Akbarī are key sources
for the relationship between the elephant and the Mughal elites during the
Akbari period. Commissioned to write these biographical and administrative
accounts of the Mughal empire, Abul Fazl, Akbar’s chief minister and close
confidant, included chapters in both sources dedicated to the elephant,
particularly in relationship with Akbar. Following Timurid traditions of record
keeping and historical biography,8 the Akbarnama provides a richly illustrated
historical narrative of the Akbari period and its antecedents. The Akbarnama
includes among its many illustrations, multiple images of the elephant as a
weapon of war and emblem of both military and (p.94) political power. Lavish
Page 2 of 20
Symbolism and Power*
double page illustrations and detailed descriptions of the courage and action of
elephants in battle in the Akbarnama showed Akbar drawing on the historical
relationship between elephant and royalty to legitimize his claim to absolute
power over warring factions of the Mughal forces as much as over the local
Indian princes.9 Commissioned by Akbar, the text reflects his interests and
awareness of story and image as vehicles for the construction of his identity as
emperor.10 Painters of the Mughal court were committed to the accurate
representation of elements of nature and culture, their images functioning as
visual narratives, representing in dynamic multidimensional form the details of
events described in the accompanying text.11 Within the hyperbole of Persian
court style, Abul Fazl draws on Akbar’s interactions with elite elephants in
constructing an image of the emperor as courageous, wise, and the Sufic
‘perfect man’, carrying the mark of divinity.12 Volume three of the Akbarnama,
the Ā’īn-i Akbarī or ‘mode of governing’, based on the extensive Mughal records
and daily reporting on every aspect of the empire’s administration, is a detailed
account of the resources and administration of the domestic, military, and
revenue aspects of the empire. Here Akbar’s greatness is reflected in the quality
and scale of his empire rather than his deeds. However, the discussion of the
imperial elephant stables and their management demonstrates Akbar’s practical
knowledge and engagement with the animals as an aspect of his imperial
authority.
This chapter brings a new insight into the success of Akbar’s empire by focusing
on the significance of Akbar’s relationship with elephants as an aspect of his
broader military and political strategy for India’s subjugation. Akbar’s private
relationship with elephants was central to the creation of his public self as
emperor and as ‘perfect man’, the embodiment of imperial masculinity.17 The
elephant was part of Akbar’s strategy of integrating and subordinating Indian
traditions of Rajput authority into the emerging Mughal state, a process begun
less formally during the Delhi Sultanate.18 As both Trautmann and Olivelle
discuss in their chapters, elephants were closely associated with kingship in
ancient India and have an ancient historical tradition of imperial and military
Page 3 of 20
Symbolism and Power*
relationships with emperors and kings. The male mast war elephant conferred
his attributes of prowess, virility, and barely controlled violence upon the kings,
gods, and warriors of ancient and pre-Mughal India.19 Akbar’s embracing of the
elephant as the embodiment of imperial power signalled a movement towards
Indian symbols of imperial authority and away from the horse-based Turko-
Mongol warrior cultures of central Asia, which had been the foundation of
Babur’s claim to Timur’s Indian empire and the establishment of the Mughal
empire as successor to the Delhi Sultanates.
Page 4 of 20
Symbolism and Power*
of incorporating Indian symbols of power into the Akbari state and integrating
both elites and non-elites into the structures of empire.
Of the Mughal emperors, Akbar had a particular fascination with elephants, and
as Abul Fazl noted, when Akbar left Kabul and came to India ‘he gave [them]
special attention’.29 In writing the story of Akbar’s life, Abul Fazl attributes great
virtues, massive physical strength, ferocity, and courage to the elephant, which
by association became part of the emperor’s identity. In the Ā’īn-i Akbarī’s
opening description of Akbar’s imperial elephant stables, Abul Fazl describes the
elephant as a ‘wonderful animal … in bulk and strength like a mountain; and in
courage and ferocity like a lion’. The elephant worked in relationship with the
emperor on both symbolic and military levels, adding ‘materially to the pomp of
a king and to the success of a conqueror’.30 As O’Hanlon argues, Abul Fazl
represents Akbar in his Akbarnama as the embodiment of masculine perfection,
the ideal ruler of the state, the household, and in full control of his own body.31
Qualities attributed to the elephant such as strength, ferocity, wisdom, and
foresight32 were those to be found in the ‘perfect man’, and for Abul Fazl,
Akbar’s relationship with elephants was confirmation of his complete authority
as emperor over his subjects and his connection with the divine.33 Abul Fazl
used the elephant’s own history to enhance Akbar’s reputation. He describes
Akbar leaping onto an elephant whose own driver had lost control, and how the
emperor was able ‘to control it with severity, and to engage it in fight’ though ‘it
was impossible to approach this animal without God’s protection, much less, to
ride it’. Similarly, Akbar rode the elephant Lakhna ‘at the height of its ferocity,
evil nature and man killing and made it engage with an elephant like itself, so
the proudest were surprised’.34 Even before the age of fourteen, Akbar’s
‘[r]iding upon mast, men-killing, driver-throwing elephants, the sight of whom
melted the gall-bladder of the iron-livered ones of this art’ were demonstrations
of Akbar’s power and connection with God. Akbar’s skill and athleticism in
Page 5 of 20
Symbolism and Power*
While Akbar’s exploits on wild and mast elephants are better known in histories
of the Mughal empire,36 the story of Akbar’s systematic acquisition and creative
interest in the skill of elephant riding, management, and training is less well
known. Abul Fazl makes a clear distinction between Akbar’s relationship with
elephants before his father’s death and as the imperial successor. Akbar became
ruler in 1555 at the age of fourteen with Bhairam Khan acting as regent. While
Akbar was a child, before he rode ‘grand elephants’, he learnt the skill of riding
on Dilsankar and first rode alone on Fanjbidar, both elephants gifts from his
father, the emperor Humayun.37 Even in learning to ride, Akbar’s relationship
with elephants was deeply connected with his gradual assumption of imperial
power. Showing his skill and status as a Mughal prince in India, Akbar, no more
than thirteen years of age, rode out on Fanjbidar to meet his father at Sihrind.38
On his father’s death, Akbar began supporting the legitimacy of his reign by
demonstrating his own imperial qualities through dominating elephants.
Historians have attributed Akbar’s apparently reckless riding of mast elephants
to the need for distraction from depression and possible epilepsy.39 However,
Akbar’s relationship with elephants and skill in riding difficult and dangerous
animals is deliberately and carefully acquired. This reflects not only his
commitment to excellence in every area of animal management, hunting, and
war craft appropriate to his imperial status, but also a personal interest in
testing his skill at subjugating elephants, one of the most powerful symbols of
Indian royal power. The first mast elephant he rode was Damudar, an elephant
known for his steadiness even in mast and given by Akbar to Bhairam Khan.
Seeing the elephant tied to a tree and taking balls of rice from his attendant’s
hands, Akbar took the opportunity of climbing on—less a demonstration of his
mastery over the mast elephant than an assumption of his authority over
Bhairam Khan and his possessions, despite his minority position in relation to his
regent.
Page 6 of 20
Symbolism and Power*
authority to command the elephant even as he could command his body and
empire.
That Akbar was consciously manipulating his ability to relate and manage
elephants in the service of his public image is clear from the different accounts
of his riding the mast elephant Hawa’i, reported and illustrated in the
Akbarnama, and recalled by Jahangir in his memoirs. The incident is illustrated
in the Akbarnama, its importance demonstrated by the double-page illumination
showing Akbar forcing Hawa’i to engage in battle with Ran Bagha outside Agra
fort and then chasing him across the River Jumna, the bridge of boats collapsing
behind them (see Figure 4.1).
The Akbarnama records Akbar’s ride on Hawa’i as occurring while Akbar was
growing in stature as the ‘perfect man’ and perfect emperor, ‘at once a spectator
of the system of divine decrees, and an administrator of the world according to
the best laws’.45 Akbar’s apparently reckless riding of Hawa’i, ‘a mighty animal
and reckoned among the special elephants’, shows Akbar taking on the mantle of
imperial power by understanding and subduing the most powerful symbol of (p.
100) Indian kingship. Abul Fazl implies that in controlling Hawa’i, Akbar was
not only controlling India, but also the vices of the world: ‘In choler,
passionateness, fierceness and wickedness [Hawa’i] was a match for the
world.’46 Akbar also used Hawa’i and other elephants not only to assert his
authority, but also as a means of testing his own purity of purpose. He explained
to Abul Fazl that mounting dangerous mast elephants was for him a type of trial
Page 7 of 20
Symbolism and Power*
by ordeal, offering the chance for God to intervene and judge his conduct: ‘If I
have knowingly taken a step which is displeasing to God or have knowingly
made an aspiration not according to His Pleasure, may that elephant finish us.’
Through (p.101) repeated submission to the elephant’s own capacity for
violence, Akbar endorsed his imperial authority and demonstrated his status as a
‘perfect man’ striving for unity with God. Furthermore, in the Ā’īn-i Akbarī, Abul
Fazl argues that it is because of the help of elephants, working in cooperation
with Akbar and divine support for his claim to imperial authority, that Akbar was
able to crush rebellion and bring submission to ‘[w]icked low, men [who] see in
an elephant a means of lawlessness’.47 Rather than evidence of emotional
instability, riding mast elephants can then be seen as consistent with the
symbolic and historical relationship between God, ruler, and elephant in forging
an empire in India.
From the most honoured lips of my father I heard as follows: ‘In early
youth I had taken two or three cups (of wine), and had mounted a full-
blooded (mast) elephant. Though I was in my senses, and the elephant in
very good training, and was under my control, I pretended that I was out of
my senses, and that the animal was refractory and vicious, and that I was
making him charge the people. After that, I sent for another elephant, and
made the two fight. They fought, and in doing so went to the head of the
bridge that had been made over the Jumna. It happened that the other
elephant ran away, and as there was no escape, he went towards the
bridge. The elephant I was on pursued him, and although I had him under
control, he would have halted at the slightest signal. I thought that If I held
him back from the bridge the people would regard those ways (of mine) as
a sham, and would believe that neither was I beside myself, nor was the
elephant violent and headstrong. Such pretences on the part of kings are
disapproved of, and so after imploring (p.102) the aid of God-Glory is to
Him—I did not restrain my elephant. Both of them went upon the bridge,
and as it was made of boats, whenever an elephant put his forefeet on the
edge of a boat, half of it sank, and the other half stood up. At each step
there came the thought that the lashings might give way. People on seeing
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Symbolism and Power*
this were overwhelmed in the sea of perplexity and alarm. As the care and
guardianship of the Great and Glorious God is ever and in all places the
protection of this suppliant, both elephants crossed the bridge in safety’.48
That Akbar was cognizant and careful in his own approach to elephant riding
and handling to demonstrate his masculine and imperial power is evident in the
way he managed his own elephant stables. He preferred careful and safe
management in capture and training over techniques dangerous to both
elephant and rider and was in favour of the development of specific safety
devices to be used when riding elephants. Jahangir’s memoir demonstrates an
emperor deploying the elephant in service of his empire with care and precision.
During his rule, Akbar developed a range of modifications and new techniques
and equipment for the riding, training, and capture of elephants. The traditional
Indian use of the dharna, a heavy chain for tethering the elephant was adapted
from the former attachment to the forefoot to attachment to a hind foot. Akbar
ordered that the practice of chaining by the fore foot be discontinued because it
‘was injurious to the chest of the elephant’.49 The welfare of the rider was also of
concern. Akbar adapted the traditional andhiyari, that is, darkness, which was a
piece of canvas or cloth that could be released to cover the elephant’s eyes when
it was ‘unruly’. The temporary blindness had ‘been the saving of many’. Akbar
however renamed the cloth ujyali, that is, light, and resolved one of the major
problems with the device. ‘As it often gives way, especially when the elephant is
very wild, His Majesty had three heavy bells attached to the ends of the canvas,
to keep it better down. This completed the arrangement.’50
The symbolic and military value of the elephant to Akbar was based in a deep
interest in elephants and their management. The Ā’īn-i Akbarī is rich in elephant
lore, detailing the classical Indian typology of elephants, cosmological
understanding of the elephant, and literature on elephant type, behaviour,
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Symbolism and Power*
treatment, and management.52 As with other aspects of his rule, Akbar sought to
integrate this Indian tradition into the structures and symbols of the Mughal
empire. He reclassified elephants according to his own priorities and the relative
value he gave to their various qualities, in particular heat and strength, speed
and courage, the kinds of values articulated in Abul Fazl’s opening description of
the elephant’s importance to the ruler.53 Akbar made a seven-fold classification
of the imperial elephants, those hunted or bred for the imperial stables, with
each class further subdivided into the large, medium-sized, and small, or
younger elephants. Details of feeding and management, including the allocation
of servants for the elephants, were based on this classification, with the best and
richest food and largest numbers of servants being allocated to the elephants of
the first three classes. Those attending the elephants were given a status
according to the classification of the elephant.54
The ranking of elephants was consistent with Akbar’s priorities, the first and
most highly prized being the mast (full blood) kind, comprising young male
elephants that embodied the power and strength and virility of mast. The heat of
the elephant was highly prized and referred specifically to the heat of a male
elephant in rut. Akbar’s elephant breeding programme was intended to produce
such male elephants whose masculinity and virility could by association match
and enhance the symbolic masculine authority of the emperor. Abul Fazl notes
this as a particular quality of Akbar’s own elephant (p.104) in war: ‘The noise
of battle makes some superior elephants just as fierce as in the rutting season;
even a sudden start may have such an effect. Thus His Majesty’s elephant
Gajmukta: he gets brisk as soon as he hears the sound of the drum and gets the
above mentioned discharge.’55 The second class of elephants, Shergir, ‘tiger-
seizing’, which were younger and less consistent than full mast elephants still
demonstrated ‘signs of perception’ and like the best mast elephants ‘exhibit an
uninterrupted alacrity’, a term also used to describe mast condition. The third
class, Sada (plain), indicated elephants of great quality but of not quite the same
class as the first and second. The fourth to seventh classes comprised elephants
younger and smaller than the three top ranks.56 Similarly in the maintenance of
elephants for Akbar’s entertainment, when two elephants kept in readiness for
combat fought at the palace, if the elephants were Khalsa, that is, for the
emperor’s private use, the bhois, who ride behind the mahawat on the elephant’s
rump, received 250 dams, but if other elephants were involved, they received
200 dams.57 The linkage of payment and merit to rank in the elephant stables
shows Akbar’s incorporation of the elephant as both symbolic and practical
expressions of imperial power into the mansab-based hierarchical culture of his
empire.
many animals within the ranking system, some military and some primarily for
hunting and sporting purposes. Horses, camels, hunting cheetahs, deer, and
elephant were, like humans, expected to demonstrate the qualities of courage,
loyalty, and submission required of their mansab level. Like humans, animals
that did not comply with the behaviour expected of them could be punished by
demotion, though there is no reference to an elephant being actually executed in
the Akbarnama. Punishment of elephants was a reflection of the Mughal
understanding that the elephant had moral insight, not only into his or her own
behaviour but also into that of others. Elephants were incorporated into the
expression of imperial authority as instruments of justice. Trained to act as
executioners, the elephant was the expression of Nizamat, the emperor’s control
over the life and death of his subjects and his enemies (see Figure 4.2).58 (p.
105)
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Symbolism and Power*
structures of the Mughal administration. In the Ā’īn-i Akbarī, Abul Fazl notes
that ‘[w]henever His Majesty mounts an elephant, a month’s wages are given as
a donation to the bhois’.63 Even if Akbar took the place of the mahawat who sits
on the elephant’s neck and guides it, he acknowledged the value of the bhoi
who, able to act as mat when needed, rode on the elephant’s rump in battle and
helped direct its speed.64 The administrator of the stables, clerks, report writers,
and those required to keep watch on the feeding and care of each elephant also
benefited from Akbar’s largess and were motivated to work towards ensuring
that the animals were well cared for. As Abul Fazl explained: ‘[W]hen Akbar has
ridden ten elephants, the following donations are bestowed, viz., the near
servant who has weekly to report on the elephants, receives a present; the
former, 100R; the Daha, I, 31R; the Naqib, 15R; the mushrif (writer) 7.5R.’ These
donations were in addition to ‘the regal rewards given to them at times when
they display a particular zeal or attentiveness, or go beyond the reach of
speech’.65 The value and status of the elephant and Akbar’s personal investment
in their correct management meant that non-elite specialists also became
incorporated into Mughal systems of punishment. Like the penalties
recommended to the Mauryan emperors for mistreatment of elephants in
Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra and discussed by Olivelle in this volume, the punishments
meted out by Akbar for misuse or ill treatment of elephants were severe. In
Akbar’s elephant stables, ‘[if] a driver mixes drugs with the food of an elephant
to make the animal hot, and it dies in consequence thereof, he is (p.107) liable
to capital punishment, or to have a hand cut off, or to be sold as a slave’.66 If the
elephant affected was a Khasa elephant, that is, one selected for Akbar’s
exclusive use,67 the bhois were also punished, losing ‘three months’ pay and
[being] further suspended for one year’.68 Deriving their status from that of the
elite elephants, those involved in the care and management of the Khasa
elephants were consistently more richly rewarded while also being liable to
‘such punishment as His Majesty may please to direct’.69
Elephants also played a role in the networks of gifting and patronage that
defined and maintained the hierarchy of masculine and imperial authority, with
Akbar in control of the empire, the court, and himself.70 Elephants were not only
important items of free gifting, as the elephants Humayun gave to his son, they
were also items of obligatory gifting, indicators of the subordinate status of the
giver in the context of an empire expanding its tributary reach. Akbar’s
integration of Rajput, Turkic, Mongol, and Afghan zamindari, princely and
scholarly elites into the mansabdari system, which created a patrimonial
hierarchy of loyalty and status, is well documented.71 Less well known is the
provision and maintenance of elephants as a requirement of many levels of
mansab (rank). Mansabdars of noble to lower levels, from 7,000 to 500, were
required to maintain elephants at the disposal of the emperor, with one riding
elephant and five baggage elephants to be provided for every 100,000 dam paid
in accordance with their zat (personal) ranking within the mansab system.72
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These elephants were for the sole use of the emperor and were partially
supported by the state, which provided their fodder. As Rajput nobility and
others of established Indian ruling and zamindari families were integrated into
the network of loyalty and patronage tying them to the empire, the requirement
that they provide but not use elephants was both a material and symbolic
indication of Akbar’s control over Indian royal tradition. The mansab system
linked court and army, incorporating elite Indian families into the royal
household through conquest and marriage, providing Akbar with access to
military resources without the logistical challenges of paying and maintaining a
standing army.73
Elephants were also part of the material and symbolic processes of forced giving
by capture, which supported the expansion of the Mughal empire. The Akbari
empire was intensely militarized with provision and training of cavalry and
elephant forces embedded (p.108) within the mansabdari system. It was also
highly mobile, the court and household travelling with each successive Mughal
emperor to wage war, consolidate control, and suppress rebellions. Elephants
played a critical role in transporting the harem and other nobility, carrying
baggage for the mobile court and demonstrating the emperor’s status. They
were also an important part of booty captured on campaign. Hawa’i, for
example, was one of 1,500 elephants reportedly captured in the defeat of
Hemu.74 The processes of hunting and capturing elephants from the wild forest
areas of the empire also served the functions of military surveillance, integration
of marginal populations, and suppression of rebellions.
In this sense, the capture of elephants was an opportunity for the further
subordination of India and the capture of land and property yet to come under
Akbar’s authority. For instance, the series of elephant hunts conducted during
the monsoon of 1564 in the forests of the Malwa and surrounding regions were
undertaken as part of a strategy to subdue the rebellious Abdullah Khan Uzbeg.
As Abul Fazl noted, rather than direct confrontation, Akbar was ‘determined to
use elephant-hunting as a pretext and to make an expedition to Malwa’,75 taking
with him armed cavalry, infantry, and war elephants to capture ‘wild elephants’
in Khan Uzbeg’s territory.76 As had been the case for the kings of ancient India,
the elephant hunt also provided opportunities to connect with forest tribes,
otherwise beyond the reach of administrative and taxation systems,77 and to
exert authority over forest regions ‘in which there never had been a trace of
men’s footsteps’.78 When hunting elephants for capture and training, Akbar
relied on local networks, which included non-elite elephant specialists to assist
in locating the herds. Hunting elephants in the forests near the fort of Sipri,
Akbar ultimately relied on the local tribesmen, the Bhils, who ‘at the end of the
day … came to the camp’ and were able to ‘give an indication of where the herd
was’.79 The hunt provided an opportunity to subdue governmental rebellion and
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also to bring the ‘savage denizens of the wild’ into contact with the imperial
court and its military and intelligence apparatus.80
The elephant hunt was also a means of bringing the court to outlying regions
and establishing and maintaining hierarchies of masculine relationship with the
emperor.81 Abul Fazl notes that the Bhil who had informed the camp of the
herd’s location was ‘a servant’ (p.109) of Rajah Jagman of Dhandhere. To
Akbar’s great pleasure, the rajah had made the herd available to the camp ‘and
he had also arranged that, if by chance the camp should be in the
neighbourhood, information should be given that Jagman had out of loyalty left
huntsmen for the purpose of the sport’.82 Through facilitating the hunt, the rajah
demonstrated his respect for Akbar and acceptance of his authority, despite
other forces of rebellion in the region. Capturing elephants differed from the
tiger and deer hunts which aimed to kill the prey,83 but still provided mansabs
an opportunity for nobility to gain favour with the emperor by demonstrating
skill, courage and, as in the rajah’s case, loyalty.84 Abul Fazl connected the hunt
with the bureaucratic consolidation of the empire under Akbar, noting that while
on the elephant hunt in Malwa, on the second day ‘he abode in his camp and
engaged in administration which is the real kind of hunting’.85 Akbar, the
masculine emperor and ‘divine athlete’, was equally capable as a hunter of
elephants as of men. Strategies of persistence and courage demonstrated in the
elephant hunt were then just as effective in the camp as in the forest.
state, but also into the role of the human–elephant relationship in the gendered
representation of Akbar as perfect man and Mughal emperor. The Akbari state is
not only a military and political complex but is also forged in cultural
partnership with India’s elephants.
Notes:
(*) Sincere thanks to my sister, Anne, and her husband, John, for support and in
preparing earlier versions of this chapter.
(1.) Douglas E. Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1989), 55–6.
(2.) William Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organisation and
Administration (New Delhi: Eurasia Publishing House, 1962), 175–8.
(3.) Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghals, 175; Lisa Balabanlilar, ‘The Begims
of the Mystic Feast: Turco-Mongol Tradition in the Mughal Harem’, The Journal
of Asian Studies 69, 1 (2010): 132–6.
(4.) ‘Heroic Death of Rani Durgavati’, painting by Kesav and Jagannath (from the
Akbarnama), c. 1586–87 Museum no. IS.2:35–1896, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.
(5.) Malahat–i-maqal of Rao Dalpat Singh, fol. 54 b cited in Irvine, The Army of
the Indian Moghuls, 177.
(6.) Malahat–i-maqal of Rao Dalpat Singh, fol. 54 b cited in Irvine, The Army of
the Indian Moghuls, 177.
(7.) Abul Fazl Allami, Ain i Akbari, translated by H. Blochmann (Delhi: Aadiesh
Book Depot, 1965) [Hereafter Ā’īn-i Akbarī], 124.
(8.) John E. Woods, ‘The Rise of Timurid Historiography’, The Journal of Near
Eastern Studies 6, 2 (1987): 81–108; Asim Roy, ‘Indo-Persian Historical Thoughts
and Writings: India 1350–1750’, in The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Vol.
3: 1400–1800, edited by José Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and
Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 148–72. See also, Stephen
Dale, ‘Steppe Humanism: The Autobiographical Writings of Zahir al-Din
Muhammad Babur, 1483–1530’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 22,
1 (1990): 37–58.
(9.) For example, the Akbarnama’s double page miniature, ‘The War Elephants
Citranand and Udiya Collide in Battle’ (c. 1586–89, Museum no. IS.2: 115–1896,
Page 15 of 20
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Victoria and Albert Museum) illustrates the 1567 Mughal campaign against the
rebels Khan Zaman and Bahadur Khan.
(11.) Som Prakash Verma, ‘Painting under Akbar as Narrative Art’, in Akbar and
His India, edited by Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997),
159–60.
(12.) Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body: History, Gender and
Imperial Service under Akbar’, Modern Asian Studies 41, 5 (2007): 890; Milo
Cleveland Beach, The New Cambridge History of India, Mughal and Rajput
Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 62–7.
(13.) M. Athar Ali, The Apparatus of Empire (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1985); S.P. Blake, ‘The Patrinomial-Bureaucratic Empire of the Mughals’, Journal
of Asian Studies 39, 1 (1979): 77–94; John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Streusand, The Formation of
the Mughal Empire, 51–65, 108–52.
(14.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 631; Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire, 132.
(15.) Satish Chandra, Mughal Religious Policies, the Rajputs and the Deccan
(New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1993); Sri Ram Sharma, The Religious
Policy of the Mughal Emperors (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1988).
(16.) R.A. Alavi, ‘New Light on Mughal Cavalry’, Medieval India, a Miscellany 2
(1972); S.M. Jaffar, The Mughal Empire from Babar to Aurangzeb (Delhi: EssEss
Publications, 1936), 158–9; Jos J.L. Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers
and Highroads to Empire, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 2002), 99–132.
(17.) The notion of ‘perfect man’ used here draws on Streusand, The Formation
of the Mughal Empire, 131–2; and O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body’,
889–923.
(18.) Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 238–45, 278–95.
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Symbolism and Power*
(22.) K.S. Lal, ‘The Mughal Harem’, Journal of Indian History 53, 3 (1975): 415–
30; Ellison Banks Findly, Nur Jahan, Empress of Mughal India (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), chapter 5. For a discussion of historical exoticization of
the Mughal harem, see Ruby Lal, ‘Historicizing the Harem: The Challenge of a
Princess’s Memoir’, Feminist Studies 30, 3 (2004): 592.
(23.) Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); Lisa Balabanillar, ‘The Begums of the Mystic
Feast: Turco-Mongol Influences in the Mughal Harem’, The Journal of Asian
Studies 69, 1 (2010): 123–47.
(27.) Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Akbar’s Personality Traits and World Outlook: A Critical
Reappraisal’, Social Scientist 20, 9/10 (1992): 20–3.
(32.) See, for example, the behaviour of elephants in the campaign against the
rebels Khan Zaman and Bahadur Khan, Akbarnama, Vol. II, LXII: 428–9.
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Symbolism and Power*
(36.) Alam Khan, ‘Akbar’s Personality traits’ 82–3; Vincent Smith, Akbar the
Great Mogul 1542–1605 (Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1962), 38–9, 246–7; Sukumar,
Chapter 1, this volume.
(39.) Alam Khan, ‘Akbar’s Personality Traits’, 82–3; Smith, Akbar the Great
Mogul, 38–9, 246–7.
Page 18 of 20
Symbolism and Power*
(58.) Andrew de la Garza, ‘Mughals at War: Babur, Akbar and the Indian Military
Revolution, 1500–1605’, (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2010), 221–5;
Akbarnama, Vol. II, LVIII, 398; LXII.
(62.) For insight into the culture and status of South Asian mahouts, see Niclas
Klixbull, Chapter 9, this volume.
(71.) W.H. Moreland, ‘Rank (Mansab) in the Mogul State Service’, Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society 68, 4 (1936): 641–65; Shireen Moosvi, ‘The Evolution of the
Mansab System under Akbar until 1596–7’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
of Great Britain & Ireland (New Series) 113, 2 (1981): 173–85.
(72.) Andrea Hintze, The Mughal Empire and Its Decline: An Interpretation of
the Sources of Social Power (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 58–60; Irvine, The Army
of the Indian Moghals, 178.
(73.) Satish Chandra, Mughal Religious Policies, the Rajputs and the Deccan
(New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1993); S. Inayat and A. Zaidi, ‘Akbar and
the Rajput Principalities: Integration into Empire’, in Akbar and His India, edited
Page 19 of 20
Symbolism and Power*
by Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15–24; Balabanillar,
‘The Begums of the Mystic Feast’, 126–8.
(77.) On Mughal intelligence, see Z. Siddiqi, ‘The Intelligence Services under the
Mughals’, in Medieval India, a Miscellany, vol. II (Aligarth Muslim University,
Dept of History, Centre of Advanced Study; New York: Asia Publishing House,
1972), 53–60; and for role of tribal groups in pre-modern Indian states, see Aloka
Parasher-Sen, ‘Of Tribes, Hunters and Barbarians: Forest Dwellers in the
Mauryan Period’, Studies in History 14, 2 (1998): 174–91.
(83.) By Akbar’s succession the Mughal court followed specific rules of hunting,
see Akbarnama, Vol. II, LIV: 342; LVIII: 394. The techniques of hunting,
capturing, and taming elephants can be found throughout Akbarnama but are
discussed in detail in chapter LIV.
(84.) Garza, ‘Mughals at War: Babur, Akbar and the Indian Military Revolution,
1500–1605’, 217.
Page 20 of 20
Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork
Julian Baker
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0006
Keywords: British India, Valentine Ball, Joseph Hooker, colonial science, captive elephants, non-human
agency
Our elephant was an excellent one, when he did not take obstinate fits, and
so docile as to pick up pieces of stone when desired, and with a jerk of the
trunk throw them over his head for the rider to catch, thus saving the
trouble of dismounting to geologise!
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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork
That morning, 31 January 1848, the botanist Joseph Hooker toured the western
edge of the Damooda (Damodar) Valley coal seam, two days’ travel north of
Calcutta (present-day Kolkata). From January to April, Hooker hired elephants
from time to time—depending on the terrain—mainly for cargo but also for
scientific observation. This passage reveals his esteem for an able and
cooperative animal. The cognition and dexterity he described is impressive: at a
verbal command, the elephant identified and dislodged a specific stone and
lobbed it backwards into the hands of its mahout (driver). On elephant, Hooker
collected specimens from the riverbed and lower canopy of densely vegetated
tracts. He also inspected foliage along the packed-flat pathway the elephant left
behind. The words ‘excellent’ and ‘docile’ (p.116) suggest that the elephant
was obedient and useful, but also that this elephant possessed an amiable and
dutiful disposition. Equally, the words ‘obstinate’ and ‘fits’ suggest that the
elephant acted according to its own, sometimes intractable, volition. Helping
and hindering, hired elephants contributed their own agency and individuality to
Hooker’s scientific journey.
Though less common, colonial naturalists hired elephants for fieldwork; their
physical size and dexterity combined with complex social and individual
characteristics meant that elephants played multiple roles on the road. In what
follows, I will show how, for the botanist Joseph Hooker and the geologist
Valentine Ball, elephants served as instruments and participants in scientific
travel, observation, and collection. First, I use Sorrenson’s three denunciations
to structure a discussion of how elephants enabled physical and social access to
rural and forest regions—and thus can be considered a kind of terrain-specific
instrument. Second, I examine how elephants contributed their individuality and
agency, permitting and hindering camp travel, and can therefore be considered
to have participated in such fieldwork. (p.118)
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choking forest paths and riverbanks. From November to May, the dry season
shrivelled rivers and baked the plains to a dusty brick-hard. With the advent of
the Indian railways, circa 1867, locomotive transport began stitching cities and
districts together. But even then, railroads only serviced large, populous cities.
Asian elephants, however, are physiologically evolved to long-distance travel in
the forests of India. As vehicles, they went where boat, carriage, and pony could
not effectively reach. Travellers used them for cargo, comfort, and physical
safety, but also to achieve appropriate social status and for official audiences
with local nobility.
Freight came first. The Irishman Valentine Ball served the Geological Survey of
India from 1864 to 1878. Each year for four to ten months, Ball left his Calcutta
office and trekked several hundred (p.119) kilometres across Bengal,
Jharkhand, Orissa (present-day Odisha), and Assam. By this era, railroads linked
Calcutta to cities along the Ganges. Few travellers opted to employ relatively
expensive and onerous elephants. But where Ball went, elephants were
indispensable. They transported instruments, provisions, tents, and specimens—
and occasionally his person. He typically travelled with two elephants, at most
four. This image of his camp (Figure 5.1) shows the extent of his retinue and
equipment. For himself, Ball brought a ‘double-roofed hill-tent … with lateral
verandas’, a bath tent, cooking equipment, a frame bed, a working table and an
eating table, a book-case, two chairs, a gun rack, clothes, and specimen cases.13
To this were added beds, tents, and provisions for eight to twenty servants.
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The elephants’ short-sleep schedule (two to three hours per night, usually taken
around midnight) and sensory perception provided Ball with an incidental
advantage: camp alarm system. This was a practical service in unpoliced
territory with valuable provisions and instruments. While wearied porters,
servants, and guides slept, elephants remained alert.17 One night in Orissa,
thieves crept into one of the tents. Ball was ‘awakened by a great uproar, the
elephants trumpeting (p.120) (p.121) in concert with the shouts of the
men’.18 The only lost item was the doctor’s hookah.
For a traveller, the elephant’s chief value lay in its ability to traverse challenging
terrain. The botanist Joseph Hooker toured eastern India and the Sikkim
Himalaya from 1848 to 1850. Before his mountain excursions, from January to
April of 1848, Hooker travelled west, as far as Benares along the Grand Trunk
Road, back east along the Ganges, and then north into Sikkim. As for Ball,
Hooker’s hired elephants carried his tents, instruments, and specimen cases,
and he occasionally observed from the howdah, en route or on excursions from
camp. Both Ball and Hooker conducted research in the forests of Jharkhand and
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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork
Bengal, including the Tarai, a band of seasonal swamp forests skirting the outer
Himalayan foothills known for its swamps, wildlife, malaria, and 12–18-foot-high
‘elephant grass’. Here, the howdah’s elevated seat permitted Hooker to survey
his surroundings while on the move and stay safely above the sandy banks,
which were ‘everywhere covered with the marks of tigers’ feet’.19 ‘The only safe
way of botanizing,’ Hooker continued, ‘is by pushing through the jungle on
elephants.’ The word ‘pushing’ is apt. Colonial hunters had long relied on the
strength and size of elephants to force their way through the Tarai’s tall grass
and thorny underbrush.20 Hooker wrote, though, that this made for ‘an
uncomfortable method, from the quantity of ants and insects which drop from
the foliage above and from the risk of disturbing pendulous bees’ and ants’
nests’.
The howdah’s perch did not separate Hooker from soil or flora. Rather, the
elephant’s trunk functioned as a prosthesis—a combined winch, net, and hook—
which enabled Hooker to collect while riding. During his explorations up the
Damooda and Soane valleys, his elephant handed or tossed up stones, and on
forested hillsides it plucked epiphytes from the branches above.21 The elephant
also broke trail. In the Rajmahal forests of Jharkhand, tangled vines and
underbrush made it difficult to leave local footpaths, ‘except for a yard or two up
a rocky ravine’.22 Here, the ‘elephant’s path [was] an excellent specimen of
engineering’, wrote Hooker, ‘for it winds judiciously’, and followed the flattest
possible gradients.23 These circuitous, trampled alleyways permitted a second
inspection on foot and combined with local footpaths (which ran perpendicular
to the hill-slope) to ‘double the available means for botanizing’. Where
necessary, his elephants also ‘stripp[ed] away the (p.122) branches of the trees
with their trunks’, clearing the desired path.24 Hooker noted a further advantage
in his diary: ‘I got many plants on the route, the elephant getting several
inaccessible species for me.’25
Hooker did not publish the line above about the elephant ‘getting several
inaccessible species’.29 The admission comes from a letter to his father.30 Such
an oversight segues to Sorrenson’s second denunciation that animal transport
would leave no traces on the scientific knowledge collected.31 His notion of
traces necessitates, first, a reflection on what we consider as contributing to the
topographical and botanical knowledge gathered by naturalists and, second,
attention to the retrospective effacement of local human and animal agencies.
Neither Hooker’s Himalayan Journals (1854) or Flora Indica (1855) nor Ball’s
Jungle Life in India (1880) or The Diamonds, (p.123) Coal and Gold of India
(1885) stated which specimens were originally observed from a howdah. Yet
each naturalist used elephants, and their roaming research resulted in maps and
specimen collections.32 Acknowledged or not, these graphic and material pools
of knowledge contain the contributions of elephants as vehicles of entry and
traverse, and as instruments of observation and collection.
later drew up. But, rather than their lack of agency or utility, it was disciplinary
norms and rhetorical artifice which effaced elephants’ traces from the
knowledge later published.35
Neither Ball nor Hooker journeyed in splendour. But both carried sufficient
caparison to transform their workaday animal vehicles into diplomatic
carriage.40 During their travels, each naturalist attended durbars (courtly
audience), met local nobility, and entered districts with and without official
permission. Hooker had come to India by way of government grants, his father’s
connections, and Company permission. Hubris and chauvinism fuelled at least
part of an imperial, ‘right to roam’ conceit, which eventually saw him jailed in
Sikkim for trespassing on the Tibetan border.41 Ball was an ‘old India hand’, he
spoke Hindustani and Bengali and mostly sympathized with ‘indigenous’
customs. Nonetheless he operated according to the British Government rather
than local regulations, going where the Geological Survey of India required him
to go. Yet on a day-to-day, district-to-district basis, beyond the reach of the East
India Company’s authority or the English (p.125) language, Hooker or Ball’s
credibility would have emanated not (only) from colonial authorization but also
from their retinue—and elephants constituted a mainstay of this socio-symbolic
Page 8 of 20
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assemblage. Elephants did contribute authority to the data Hooker and Ball
collected, but indirectly, diplomatically, and on Indian terms.
Page 9 of 20
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Considering that adult Asian elephants spend twelve of every twenty-four hours
walking—on home ranges of up to 250 square kilometres—Ball had marched his
elephants towards breakdown.49 They were likely suffering some combination of
fatigue, dehydration, and trauma,50 as well as possible footpad and back
abrasion.51
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Beginning his sixth year, he purchased Anarkelli and Peari from the East India
Railway Company. The former was ‘a sedate old maid, and the latter a skittish,
well-shaped, good-tempered young thing of about thirty-five years of age’.60
Peari was his favourite. Over five seasons, Ball reminisced that ‘both these
elephants have travelled some thousands of miles with me, and, except that
Peari occasionally suffers from fits, they have proved an excellent investment,
and have done their work well’.61 (p.128) These descriptions betray both
anthropomorphism—‘old maid’—and objectification—‘investment’. Yet in the
language Ball used both Anarkelli and Peari appear as sentient individuals and
team members. I believe the latter quote is instructive. Ball wrote that he
travelled with rather than on or by Peari, suggesting inclusion and a semblance
of sentient equivalence. He wrote that Peari ‘suffered from’ fits, as if she was
afflicted by a personality disorder. And he wrote that both elephants ‘did their
work well’, indicating gainful contribution, assigned responsibilities,
performance expectations, and distinct capabilities. Anarkelli and Peari were
non-human employees.
While being familiar and useful members of the camp team, hired elephants
often caused mischief, which stymied fieldwork.62 Mowlah and Bhari were wont
to escape when grazing unwatched. Following one such getaway, Bhari ‘broke
her chains during the night and made off, and was not captured until mid-day,
when it was too late to march’.63 This old female ‘was incorrigible; she would
frequently spend the greater part of the night trying to break her chain’ and was
known to ‘show an extraordinary degree of cunning, and would hide herself
behind a tree or bush, and remain quite still when she saw [the mahout] coming
to look for her’.64 Pachyderm peek-a-boo may seem farcical. But, as Ball wrote,
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Mowlah rebelled from day one. Ball had acquired him from the Superintendent
of the Indian Survey during his first year.69 Alongside Anarkelli and Peari,
Mowlah provided years of service. ‘But the acquisition was not an unmixed good,
for Mowlah, … was a very unmanageable animal.’70 His first assigned mahout
immediately requested Mowlah’s dismissal ‘on the ground that the elephant
would not obey him, and that he was afraid of it’. Ball refused; the mahout quit.
Ball then ‘handed over the beast to the assistant or mate, who, at the prospect of
becoming Mahout, rose to the occasion and undertook the sole charge till a
second man could be obtained’. ‘Almost immediately’, however, ‘there was a
severe trial of his skill and pluck’.71 Mowlah trunk-swatted his new master and
fled. The mahout and chauprassies subdued Mowlah several hours later at
spear-point, ‘cowed [him] with a severe thrashing’, chained him to a tree, and
‘gave [him] further chastisement, after which he acknowledged [the mahout’s]
mastership’. Twelve years later, Ball reluctantly rehired Mowlah for a season in
Orissa. This time Mowlah went musth—a periodic hormonal surge when male
elephants behave erratically and aggressively. He ‘began to give trouble, and to
show a particular dislike for the mate mahout, whom he several times knocked
over’.72 The next morning Mowlah ‘flung’ the assistant and broke loose.73
Mahouts and servants again arrested him by martial tactics. The ‘moral of it all’,
Ball wrote, ‘is beware how you take charge of strange elephants’.74
After his time in India, Valentine Ball returned to Ireland and became Professor
of Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Dublin. The knowledge of central
and eastern India he acquired during his travels was such that engineers sought
Ball’s advice for the best railroad route between Calcutta and Bombay. Joseph
Hooker returned to England and, following in his father’s footsteps, became
Director of the Royal (p.130) Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he spent much of
the remainder of his professional career classifying the immense collection of
specimens he had gathered. Neither mentioned elephants in print again.
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But, before and after Ball’s and Hooker’s journeys, colonialists had relied on
elephants for war, construction, logging, and diplomacy in India, as well as in
Burma, Siam (Thailand), Indochina, and the Melanesian archipelago. In
narratives across the nineteenth century, colonial travellers mentioned the
elephants they saw and rode. Colonial fieldwork is a necessarily circumscribed
topic. Yet elephants appear—albeit peripherally—in the journeys of botanist
William Griffiths and in John Keay’s account of the Great Trigonometrical Survey
of India.75 While colonialists and contemporary scholars have rarely portrayed
elephants as instruments or participants, this exclusion seems to say as much
about anthropocentric and humanist interpretations as about the actual roles
and contributions of elephants. Ball and his mahouts controlled the baggage
elephants. Yet Anarkelli, Mowlah, Peari, and Bhari also acted. Like any hired
assistants, they possessed their own upbringing, education, personality, and
temperament. Rather than animate outsiders to human affairs, or familiar
animals, it seems right to understand these elephants as ‘strange persons’, or
‘other-than-human persons’.76 That is, we should understand elephants as
historical actors possessing consciousness, influence, and individuality.
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Notes:
(1.) Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals (London: John Murray, 1854), 10.
(4.) Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of
the American Circus (Animals, History, Culture) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2013).
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(6.) J. Poole and P. Granli, ‘Mind and Movement: Meeting the Interests of
Elephants’, in An Elephant in the Room: The Science and Well-Being of
Elephants in Captivity, edited by Debra L. Forthman, Lisa F. Kane, David
Hancocks, and Paul F. Waldau (North Grafton, MA: Center for Animals and
Public Policy, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, Tufts University, 2008),
2–21; Lynette Hart and Piers Locke, ‘Nepali and Indian Mahouts and Their
Unique Relationships with Elephants’, in Encyclopedia of Human–Animal
Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals, edited by
Marc Bekoff (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2007), 510–15; Piers Locke, ‘The
Ethnography of Captive Elephant Management in Nepal: A Synopsis’, Gajah 34
(2011): 32–40; Piers Locke, ‘Explorations in Ethnoelephantology: Social,
Historical, and Ecological Intersections between Asian Elephants and Humans’,
Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4, 1 (2013): 79–97; and Locke,
Chapter 7, this edition.
(8.) Noel Castree, Catherine Nash, Neil Badmington, Bruce Braun, Jonathan
Murdoch, and Sarah Watmore, ‘Mapping Posthumanism: An Exchange’
Environment and Planning A: International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 36, 8 (2004): 1341–63.
(11.) John Keay, The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and
Everest Was Named (London: HarperCollins, 2000).
(12.) John Law, ‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation
and the Portuguese Route to India’, Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of
Knowledge 32 (1986): 234–63.
(13.) Valentine Ball, Jungle Life in India: Or, The Journeys and Journals of an
Indian Geologist (London: De la Rue, 1880), 8.
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(17.) See also Robert Butler, Narrative of The Life and Travels of Sergeant B-
(London: Knight and Lacey, 1823); James Forsyth, The Highlands of Central
India: Notes on Their Forests and Wild Tribes, Natural History, and Sports
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1889); George P. Sanderson, Thirteen Years among
the Wild Beasts of India (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1879).
(20.) John Pester, War and Sport in India, 1802–1806: An Officer’s Diary (London:
Heath, Cranton and Ouseley, c. 1900), 108; Forsyth, The Highlands of Central
India, 318–20.
(21.) Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 10; Joseph Dalton Hooker, Hyacinth Symonds
Hooker, and Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker
(London: J. Murray, 1918), 240.
(24.) J.D. Hooker, S.H. Hooker, and Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton
Hooker, 240.
(25.) J.D. Hooker, S.H. Hooker, and Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton
Hooker, 240
(27.) Poole and Granli, ‘Mind and Movement: Meeting the Interests of
Elephants’, 5.
(28.) Thomas Williamson, The East India Vade-Mecum; Or, Complete Guide to
Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military, or Naval Service of the Hon. East
India Company (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810), 430–65; Sanderson,
Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India, 52–88; Forsyth, The Highlands of
Central India, 288–300.
(29.) J.D. Hooker, S.H. Hooker, and Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton
Hooker, 240.
(30.) J.D. Hooker, S.H. Hooker, and Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton
Hooker, 240.
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(32.) Hooker, Himalayan Journals; J.D. Hooker, S.H. Hooker, and Huxley, Life and
Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker; Ball, Jungle Life in India.
(33.) Jennifer R. Wolch and Jody Emel (eds), Animal Geographies: Place, Politics,
and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands (London: Verso, 1998); Chris
Philo and Chris Wilbert (eds), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies
of Human–Animal Relations (London: Routledge, 2000).
(34.) Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E.C. Spary (eds), Cultures of
Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
(37.) George P. Sanderson, Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India, 83.
(38.) Captain Thomas Williamson, The East India Vade-Mecum; Or, Complete
Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military, or Naval Service of the Hon.
East India Company (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810), 395–7.
(39.) John Henry Grose, A Voyage to the East Indies (London: S. Hooper, 1772),
248.
(49.) Poole and Granli, ‘Mind and Movement: Meeting the Interests of
Elephants’, 3–5.
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(50.) G.A. Bradshaw, Allan N. Schore, Janine L. Brown, Joyce H. Poole, and
Cynthia J. Moss, ‘Elephant Breakdown’, Nature 433 (February 2005): 807.
(51.) Williamson, The East India Vade-Mecum; Sanderson, Thirteen Years among
the Wild Beasts of India.
(52.) Bradshaw, Schore, Brown, Poole, and Moss, ‘Elephant Breakdown’, 807;
Hart and Locke, ‘Nepali and Indian Mahouts and Their Unique Relationships
with Elephants’; Richard C. Lair, Gone Astray: The Care and Management of the
Asian Elephant in Domesticity (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asian and the
Pacific [RAP], 1997); Locke, ‘The Ethnography of Captive Elephant Management
in Nepal’; Poole and Granli, ‘Mind and Movement: Meeting the Interests of
Elephants’; Nance, Entertaining Elephants.
(53.) Hart and Locke, ‘Nepali and Indian Mahouts and Their Unique
Relationships with Elephants’; Locke, ‘The Ethnography of Captive Elephant
Management in Nepal’.
(55.) Samuel White Baker, The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon (London: Longman,
Brown, Green and Longmans, 1854); Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India;
Sanderson, Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India.
(59.) J.D. Hooker, S.H. Hooker, and Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton
Hooker, 239.
(62.) See also Forsyth, The Highlands of Central India, 319–20; Francis Rowdon
Hastings, The Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings, 1858 (London:
Saunders and Otley, 1858), 314–15; Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 46.
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(66.) Bradshaw, Schore, Brown, Poole, and Moss, ‘Elephant Breakdown’; Richard
W. Byrne, Lucy A. Bates, and Cynthia J. Moss, ‘Elephant Cognition in Primate
Perspective’, Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews 4 (2009): 65–79;
Poole and Granli, ‘Mind and Movement: Meeting the Interests of Elephants’.
(68.) Sanderson, Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India, 62.
(76.) Sarah Whatmore and Lorraine Thorne, ‘Elephants on the Move: Spatial
Formations of Wildlife Exchange’, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 18, 2 (2000): 185–203; Nurit Bird-David and Danny Naveh, ‘Relational
Epistemology, Immediacy, and Conservation: Or, What Do the Nayaka Try to
Conserve?’ Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 2, 1 (2008): 60.
(77.) Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 26.
(78.) See Philo and Wilbert, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places; Wolch and Emel,
Animal Geographies; Nance, Entertaining Elephants.
Page 19 of 20
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Page 20 of 20
The Hall of Extinct Monsters
Amy L. Fletcher
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0007
Page 1 of 17
The Hall of Extinct Monsters
and palm oil industries—disappeared between 2007 and 2009. The IUCN
estimates that within a twenty-five-year period starting in the mid-1980s,
Indonesia lost approximately 69 per cent of potential elephant habitat due
primarily to industrial demand for converted land.1 The Sumatran elephant, one
of three recognized subspecies of the Asian elephant, joins the Sumatran
orangutan, Sumatran rhino, and the Sumatran tiger on the list of species that
are highly unlikely to survive in the wild without significant and sustained
conservation interventions from the Indonesian Government and other
environmental stakeholders. We are witnessing the decimation (p.138) of a
subspecies whose Asian elephant ancestors can be traced to Kenyan fossils that
are at least five million years old. Should the Sumatran elephant population
continue to decline, the only IUCN categories left beyond ‘critically endangered’
are ‘extinct in the wild’ and ‘extinct’. One may or may not agree with Josh
Donlan, Founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies, when he
argues that ‘our elephant experiences should be wild, rather than tented ones
brought to us by Barnum and Bailey’,2 but right now the Ringling Brothers and
Barnum and Bailey Centre for Elephant Conservation, a member organization of
the International Elephant Foundation (IEF), is a necessary though fragile
bulwark between the Sumatran elephant and extinction.
As the Sumatran elephant recedes from view, the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus
primigenius) has newly come into focus in both science and culture, a paradox
that is the fulcrum for the following analysis. Despite having been extinct for
12,000 years (not counting a small remnant population on Wrangel Island in
Siberia that endured until approximately 2000 BCE, before mysteriously dying
out), the woolly mammoth has taken centre stage in recent conservation debates
about de-extinction. This renegade and controversial approach to conservation
seeks to bring back extinct species via the tools of ancient DNA
(deoxyribonucleic acid) analysis, reproductive cloning, genome editing, and
other advanced biotechnologies. It is often discussed in the context of rewilding,
another bold idea that envisions the restoration of large-scale conservation
corridors to prehistorical stages of untouched wilderness, lush with large
megafauna and thriving indigenous ecosystems.3 In the last decade, de-
extinction has moved from the fringes of science to the mainstream, due to the
confluence of rapid advances in biotechnology, the financial support of well-
placed organizations such as the Revive and Restore Project (affiliated with the
Long Now Foundation), and intense media and public interest in charismatic
species such as the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger. The idea of de-
extinction irritates and even angers many environmental stakeholders, who fear
the diversion of limited conservation funds to speculative technological projects
and the ongoing technologization of nature. It is also reinvigorating debates
about how best to stem and even reverse the global biodiversity crisis. The
woolly mammoth, that ‘archetype of everything icy and (p.139) Palaeolithic’,4
is one of the prominent species often (controversially) purported to be a good
Page 2 of 17
The Hall of Extinct Monsters
It also provides an accessible way to think about the profound changes being
wrought by advanced biotechnologies in this postmodern society. In the late
nineteenth century, displays of mammoth remains and taxidermy specimens
helped a newly modern audience to ‘visualize and come to terms with’ Darwinian
ideas about extinction and the ‘notion of a deep past long before the emergence
of man, populated by a host of extraordinary creatures’.8 The charismatic
mammoth bridged the worlds of science and entertainment at the start of the
twentieth (p.140) century, a role it continues to play today in public
communication of such difficult concepts as artificial wombs, pluripotent stem
cells, and ancient DNA. The MIT Technology Review notes that ‘by reviving lost
species, a new company could put a warm and fuzzy face on advanced
reproductive engineering’9—an observation that deserves more than casual
consideration. If the tangible downstream financial pay-off of bringing back a
woolly mammoth actually resides in the implications of the associated
biotechnologies for human health and industrial agriculture, then it is important
to consider the consequences of deploying extinct species as a way of bringing
public support and funding into the biotechnological sector. The notion of a
technological politics of hope has received significant attention in the realm of
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The Hall of Extinct Monsters
Pleistocene Dreams
Woolly mammoths exist in multiple liminal realms between fact and fantasy,
between science and science fiction, and between the prehistoric (p.141) past
and the present. Unlike dinosaurs, with whom we can only co-exist in our (often
computer-generated) imaginations, we can project our pre-historical selves into
the woolly mammoth’s landscape if we try hard enough. Early humans depicted
the creatures in ancient cave paintings found in France and Spain, and a
woman’s image carved into a piece of 26,000-year-old mammoth ivory is the first
known portrait of a human being.13 This temporal juxtaposition of the woolly
mammoth and man may help to explain our enduring fascination for them. As
Matthew Chrulew argues, ‘This extinct beast, whose demise coincides with our
own ascent, is today a privileged figure in stories of environmental
transgression, guilt and redemption.’14
The mythic woolly mammoth first floats back into view in Europe in the
eighteenth century. In the early 1700s, the Irish collector Hans Sloane studiously
collected what turned out to be the fossilized teeth and tusks of Siberian woolly
mammoths, while later in the century American President Thomas Jefferson
(1743–1826) became obsessed with the notion that a mammoth might still exist
in the remote United States—a desire that in part prompted him to send Lewis
and Clark on their famed expedition.15 The Western science of palaeontology
was essentially founded on the study of mammoths—a study that can be traced
back to the late eighteenth century when Georges Cuvier realized that the fossil
remains he had identified could not possibly belong to an extant elephant
species.16 By the late nineteenth century, the mammoth was a recognized
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modern icon. Indeed, when the popular McClure’s Magazine ran a short story in
October 1899 about a modern adventurer who hunts down and kills the last
surviving mammoth in the Alaskan wilderness, some readers were so outraged
that the editor had to publish a retraction.17
In addition to its shaggy charisma, the woolly mammoth is the main character in
a classic mystery and adventure story that we continue to tell, as we still do not
know conclusively what explains the final die-off of the species. Was it primarily
the fault of rapid climate change, a disease outbreak, the innovative new spear
tip technology that Clovis hunters brought to North America, or some deadly
interaction among these three variables? It is not coincidental that, in the early
twenty-first century, the woolly mammoth has re-emerged to take up once again
the weight of our cultural anxieties. Despite the gap between then and now, we
are a society obsessed with the exact (p.142) same apocalyptic scenarios:
anthropogenic climate change, newly infectious pandemics, and human-induced
extinctions. Imminently adaptable, in cultural if not environmental terms, the
woolly mammoth is both the ‘Titan of the Ice Age’, as a recent I-Max
documentary puts it, and also the sentinel of a potential twenty-first century
environmental dystopia in which ongoing human pressure, without a
concomitant technological breakthrough, causes the megafauna to die out,
leaving future nature to ‘cockroaches, pigeons and rats’.18
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The Hall of Extinct Monsters
the object of this book is to describe some of the larger and more
monstrous forms of the past … to endeavour, by means of pen and pencil,
to bring them back to life. The ordinary public cannot learn much by
merely gazing at skeletons set up in museums. One longs to cover their
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The Hall of Extinct Monsters
nakedness with flesh and skin, and to see them as they were when they
walked this earth.22
The ancient urge to represent the woolly mammoth in cave drawings has thus
evolved into the desire to recreate the mammoth through techno-science. When
Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell, stepped
onto the world stage in 1997 and took us into a new age of somatic cell nuclear
transfer (SCNT), the corporeal reality of a cloned mammal (which many
scientists had previously declared impossible) also reinvigorated the idea that
modern science will eventually find a way to bring back extinct species. Amongst
a small coterie of charismatic extinct megafauna, including the Tasmanian tiger,
the dire wolf, and the sabre-toothed tiger, the woolly mammoth’s appeal is both
perennial and international. Mammoth excavation and potential reproductive
projects today involve scientists from the United States, Japan, South Korea, (p.
145) Russia, and Denmark. As early as 1996, Japanese scientists Kazufumi Goto
and Shoji Okutsu had stated that they hoped to find the well-preserved sperm of
a frozen mammoth and then use it to inject the eggs of a surrogate Asian
elephant, thus producing an elephant–mammoth hybrid. The scientists believed
they could eventually produce a mammoth genetic facsimile via continued
selective breeding over several decades. By 1999, the discovery of a well-
preserved specimen named Jarkov (in honour of the Dolgan reindeer herder who
found its tusks in 1997 and led researchers to the carcass) generated global
media speculation about eventual cloning and headlines such as ‘Can Cloning
Restore Pitter Patter of Mammoth Feet?’ (The Palm Beach Post), ‘Goodbye Dolly,
Hello Hairy, Prehistoric Mammoth Clone’ (The Sunday Herald), ‘Scientists Hope
to Clone Pachyderm’ (The Washington Times), and ‘Bringing Back the
Beast’ (The Moscow Times). The discovery of the 20,000-year-old Jarkov
specimen, which was extraordinarily well preserved, dovetailed with a new
interest in the emerging field of ancient DNA analysis.25 French polar explorer
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The Hall of Extinct Monsters
Bernard Buigues and his research team extracted the remains in a twenty-three-
ton block of ice, flying it by helicopter to an ice cave in the town of Taimyr,
Siberia, for analysis. Even the austere New York Times paid attention to the idea
of cloning the woolly mammoth, though it included in its commentary the views
of ethicist Gregory Pence, who emphasized that ‘you need live nuclei and live
eggs, plus a host mammoth mother to gestate the foetus. Because none of these
are available, “Jurassic Park” to the contrary, it won’t succeed’.26 The Discovery
Channel, further confounding the line between science and spectacle in this
case, made two dramatic documentaries about the Jarkov expedition: Raising the
Mammoth (2000) and Land of the Mammoth (2000). In the interests of visual
impact, the filmmakers purportedly asked the scientists to re-attach the
mammoth’s tusks to the ice-bound specimen in order to enhance a scene
depicting the dramatic air-lift of the behemoth from the tundra to its new cave
home.
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Yet in 2009, National Geographic ran an article on the woolly mammoth genome
(and some related palaeogenomic projects) titled ‘Recipe for a Resurrection’,
which included an image that detailed three potential methods of bringing back
a woolly mammoth: in vitro fertilization of a female Asian elephant with frozen
sperm, cloning from a frozen cell, or cloning from the sequenced mammoth (p.
147) genome. Though the magazine acknowledged the ‘huge hurdles’ that
remained, the overall impact of the article was to foreground the genetic
similarities between mammoths and elephants (which theoretically provide a
pathway to reproductive cloning) and to intimate that ongoing technological
progress would eventually break through these barriers.36 Similarly, Nature
returned to Dolly the sheep in responding to the mammoth genome news, noting
that ‘the fact that just 15 years ago cloning mammals was confidently ruled out
by man as being impractical should give people pause before saying’ cloning an
extinct species was impossible.37 By 2008, the mainstream consensus that
resurrecting an extinct mammal was an idea firmly lodged in science fiction
started to dissolve under the weight of rapid biotechnological progress and an
influx of well-financed new stakeholders into the de-extinction debate. As Jean
Baudrillard observed, science fiction ‘is no longer an elsewhere, it is an
everywhere: in the circulation of models here and now, in the very axiomatic
nature of our simulated environment’.38 To put this in more prosaic terms, when
the evolutionary biologist Hendrik Poinar admitted in a 2013 TED talk that ten
years ago he would have scoffed at the idea of reviving an extinct species, but
was ‘standing here today to tell you that … the revival of an extinct species is
actually within reach [using] the well preserved remains of woolly mammoths in
the permafrost’,39 the debate about mammoth cloning took on a new,
anticipatory dimension, moving decisively as a discourse from the realm of if to
when. The public and the mass media cannot be faulted for beginning to dream
that biotechnology could stop and even reverse the extinction crisis. Indeed in
2014, the discovery of a 40,000-year-old mammoth carcass freeze-dried in
permafrost on Maya Lyakhovsky Island, Russia, prompted Radik Khayrullin, Vice
President of the Russian Association of Mammoth Anthropologists, to declare
unequivocally that ‘the data we are about to receive will give us a high chance to
clone the mammoth’.40 Professor George Church, who is conducting research on
woolly mammoth restoration in the context of a larger interest in advanced
genetic engineering, trumped Dr Khayrullin when, in an October 2014
discussion at Harvard University, he rejected cloning in favour of genome
editing, noting that ‘we’re assuming that the Asian elephant is basically right, a
mutant [mammoth] that has (p.148) a problem living at minus 50°C’.41 As the
following section demonstrates, the basic idea behind genome editing—the
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The serious new debate about de-extinction indicates that we’ve crossed a
crucial threshold in our expectations of technoscience. De-extinction is a
powerful idea that implies (to the dismay of its critics) that we may soon turn
extinction—once ineluctable—into an engineering challenge, which is part of the
reason that so many journalists and scientists draw analogies between bringing
Page 10 of 17
The Hall of Extinct Monsters
back an extinct species from deep time in this century and the Apollo moon
landing in 1969. Indeed, we have arguably transgressed extinction already in the
case of a very recently extinct species. In 2003, a team of European researchers
conducted two experiments to clone the bucardo, using DNA from skin samples
taken earlier from the last animal, which died in 1999. One live birth of a
bucardo resulted from the implantation of fifty-seven embryos (of an original 439
produced in the laboratory) into surrogate domestic goats. The one kid brought
successfully to term lived only seven minutes before dying of lung defects. The
abstract to the scientific article eventually published simply states that ‘to our
knowledge, this is the first animal born from an extinct subspecies’,47 belying
the intense media interest in the announcement. The Telegraph, like many other
newspapers around the world, reported that the breakthrough ‘raised hopes that
it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting
them from frozen tissue’.48 The scientists involved in the project urged that the
somatic cells and tissues of all endangered species be preserved with deliberate
haste, as this action might prove to be the only way to avoid the disappearance
of critically endangered species in the twenty-first century.
From a critical perspective, the researchers’ access to very recent skin samples
means that the bucardo achievement represents only incremental progress from
the era of Dolly the sheep, while the short life and painful death of the one
resurrected Ibex angered many (p.150) scientists and environmental activists.
Nevertheless, as I argue in Mendel’s Ark: Biotechnology and the Future of
Extinction, the bucardo experiment undermines the previously firm distinction
between extant and extinct that is crucial to how modern societies have
conceptualized their moral responsibility to endangered animals.49 The African
Wildlife Foundation, for example, urges us to support efforts to save African
elephants and rhinos since ‘once these animals are gone … they’re gone
forever’. Yet as Nikolas Rose argues, an ‘event is a matter of associations,
linking up a number of disparate little changes such that a threshold is crossed
[and] that which was previously exceptional, remarkable, becomes routinely
thinkable, perhaps even expected’.50 The resurrected bucardo may have only
lived a few minutes, but the fact that it existed at all takes us into a new era of
environmental expectations.
science, show business, and big hairy pachyderms. The same happy combination
propels a new and highly successful travelling exhibition titled ‘Mammoths and
Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age’, replete with an I-Max, 3D documentary
(which, I should note, I happily paid to watch at the San Diego Museum of
Natural History in 2013). The palaeoimagery toolbox may one day encompass a
resurrected woolly mammoth, but even if it doesn’t, the creature will continue to
stomp through both computer-generated landscapes and our dreams.
Page 12 of 17
The Hall of Extinct Monsters
The elephant is thus a conduit both to mammoths and to us and may yet be
brought on board the Ark of future nature. Yet, even if concern (p.152) for the
Sumatran elephant and hope for the woolly mammoth prove synergistic in both
scientific and political terms, this chapter concludes that in this new era of de-
extinction we always need to remember that the worlds we hope to find are
usually more alluring than the ones we are in; in other words, we must mind the
gap between our dreams and our actions. The idea of bringing back the woolly
mammoth will inevitably continue to exert its strange magic, but hopefully as we
dream of bringing the woolly mammoth back from the dead, we can also
prioritize bringing the Sumatran elephant back from the brink.
Notes:
(1.) A. Gopala, O. Hadian, Sunarto, A. Sitompul, A. Williams, P. Leimgruber, S.E.
Chambliss, and D. Gunaryadi, ‘Elephas maximus ssp. Sumatranus’, The IUCN
Red List of Threatened Species (2011), http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/
199856/0, accessed 23 May 2016.
(2.) Josh Donlan, ‘How a Plan to Return Big Beasts to North America Raised
Hackles and Hope’, Grist, 8 November 2005, http://grist.org/article/donlan/,
accessed 24 May 2016.
(3.) Michael Soulé and Reed Noss, ‘Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary
Goals for Continental Conservation’, Wild Earth 8 (1998): 19–28; Sergei Zimov,
‘Pleistocene Park: Return of the Mammoth’s Ecosystem’, Science 308 (2006):
796–8.
(8.) Vincent Campbell, ‘The Extinct Animal Show: The Paleoimagery Tradition
and Computer Generated Imagery in Factual Television Programs’, Public
Understanding of Science 18, 2 (2009): 206.
Page 13 of 17
The Hall of Extinct Monsters
(11.) Nik Brown, Alison Kraft, and Paul Martin, ‘The Promissory Pasts of Blood
Stem Cells’, BioSocieties 1, 3 (2006): 330.
(13.) Charlotte Higgins, ‘Ice Age Art at the British Museum Was Crafted by
“Professional” Artists’, The Guardian, 24 January 2013, http://
www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jan/24/ice-age-art-british-museum.
(15.) The Lewis and Clark expedition (1804–6) spanned 8,000 miles and explored
the uncharted United States interior from the Missouri River to the Pacific
Northwest.
(16.) Rev. H.N. Hutchinson, Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the
Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), https://
archive.org/details/extinctmonsters00hutciala, accessed 24 May 2016.
(17.) Nancy L. Bessie, ‘The Great Mammoth Hoax’, Alaska Journal 10, 4 (1980):
10–16.
(18.) Marilyn Geewax Cox, ‘Resurrecting Species May Come in Handy’, Deseret
News, 10 October 1999, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/722081/
Resurrecting-species-may-come-in-handy.html?pg=all, accessed 24 May 2016.
(19.) Marianne Sommer, ‘The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution
between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth-Century
America’, Configurations 15, 3 (2007): 299–329.
(21.) John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange
Quest to Cheat Death (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011), 1.
(25.) Amy Lynn Fletcher, Mendel’s Ark: Biotechnology and the Future of
Extinction (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Publications, 2014), chapters
5 and 6.
(26.) ‘Frozen Woolly Mammoth Inspires Cloning Project’, The New York Times, 5
October 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/05/science/frozen-woolly-
mammoth-inspires-cloning-project.html, accessed 24 May 2016.
(27.) Alex D. Greenwood, Christian Capelli, Göran Possnert, and Svante Pääbo,
‘Nuclear DNA Sequences from Late Pleistocene Megafauna’, Molecular Biology
and Evolution 16, 11 (1999): 1466–73.
(29.) Oliver Haddrath and Allan J. Baker, ‘Complete Mitochondrial DNA Genome
Sequences of Extinct Birds: Ratite Phylogenetics and the Vicariance
Biogeography Hypothesis’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London,
Biological Sciences 268, 1470 (2001): 939–45.
(30.) A. Cooper, ‘The Year of the Mammoth’, PLoS Biology 4, 3 (2006), http://
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040078, accessed
24 May 2016.
(31.) J. Krause, P.H. Dear, J.L. Pollack, M. Slatkin, H. Spriggs, I. Barnes, A.M.
Lister, I. Ebersberger, S. Pääbo, and M. Hofreiter, ‘Multiplex Amplification of the
Mammoth Mitochondrial Genome and the Evolution of Elephantidae’, Nature
439, 7077 (2006): 724–7.
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The Hall of Extinct Monsters
archive.cosmosmagazine.com/news/mammoth-genome-cracked-key-cloning/,
accessed 24 May 2016.
(35.) Ian Sample, ‘Hair from Frozen Carcasses Used to Reconstruct Woolly
Mammoth’s Genome’, The Guardian, 19 November 2008, http://
www.theguardian.com/science/2008/nov/19/woolly-mammoth-genome, accessed
24 May 2016.
(36.) Tom Mueller, ‘Recipe for a Resurrection’, National Geographic, May 2009,
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/05/cloned-species/mueller-text,
accessed 24 May 2016.
(37.) Henry Nicholls, ‘Darwin 200: Let’s Make a Mammoth’, Nature 456 (Nov
2008): 310–14, http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081119/full/456310a.html,
accessed 24 May 2016.
(40.) Gabrielle Jonas, ‘Woolly Mammoth DNA to Be Cloned, Then Joined with
Elephant DNA to Create New Creature’, International Science Times, 13 March
2014, http://www.isciencetimes.com/articles/6946/20140313/woolly-mammoth-
dna-cloning-elephant-clone.htm, accessed 24 May 2016.
(41.) Alvin Powell, ‘Behold the Mammoth (Maybe)’, Harvard Gazette, 16 October
2014, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/10/behold-the-mammoth-
maybe/, accessed 24 May 2016.
(42.) ‘DNA’s Code: Key to All Life’, Life International Magazine 35 (1963): 39.
(43.) Alicia Hills and Albert Rosenfeld, ‘Nearer Now! Control of Aging and
Heredity’, Life International Magazine 35 (1963): 45.
(44.) Richard Alleyne, ‘Do We Really Need to Bring Back the Mammoth?’, The
Telegraph, 1 December 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-
news/3540349/Do-we-really-need-to-bring-back-the-mammoth.html, accessed 24
May 2016.
(45.) Pasqualino Loi, Teruhiko Wakayama, Joseph Saragusty, Josef Fulka Jr, and
Grazyna Ptak, ‘Biological Time Machines: A Realistic Approach for Cloning an
Extinct Mammal’, Endangered Species Research 14 (2011): 231.
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The Hall of Extinct Monsters
(48.) Richard Gray and Robert Dobson, ‘Extinct Ibex is Resurrected by Cloning’,
The Telegraph, 31 January 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/
science-news/4409958/Extinct-ibex-is-resurrected-by-cloning.html, accessed 24
May 2016.
(50.) Nikolas Rose, ‘The Politics of Life Itself’, Theory, Culture and Society 18, 6
(2001): 1–30.
(52.) Richard Stone, ‘Bringing Back the Beast’, The Moscow Times, 3 July 1999,
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/bringing-back-the-beast/
275286.html, accessed 24 May 2016.
(53.) Nathaniel Rich, ‘The Mammoth Cometh’, The New York Times, 27 February
2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/magazine/the-mammoth-
cometh.html?_r=0, accessed 24 May 2016.
Page 17 of 17
Animals, Persons, Gods
Piers Locke
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0008
Page 1 of 18
Animals, Persons, Gods
For several millennia, across South and Southeast Asia, humans have captured,
tamed, and driven elephants. Although procured from the wild, humans have
also facilitated their proliferation through the reservation of forests, the
construction of reservoirs, and edicts that made elephants the sacred property
of kings.3 Captive elephants have served us generically as technology of war, as
economic commodity, as symbols of political power, and as animal labour, but
also individually as intimate companions. Unlike dogs, cats, and most livestock,
these are not domesticates in the sense of species that have been behaviourally
and morphologically modified through humanly controlled sexual selection, but
rather individuals that although ‘tamed’ have not irrevocably relinquished their
autonomy as ‘wild’ animals. In other words, if we talk of the domestication of
elephants, then we must appreciate that it is of a kind involving social
appropriation rather than biological intervention.4 However, these
appropriations are not without biological consequence, as we see with the
altered frequency of tusked males in free-roaming elephant populations that
have been subjected to sustained histories of selective capture.5 The relations
between free-roaming and captive elephant populations in environments shaped
directly or indirectly by human activity cannot be ignored.
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Animals, Persons, Gods
Nepal’s lowland Tarai region, once forested and teeming with free-roaming
elephants, was highly prized by its rulers, for whom captured elephants were a
valuable resource. Previously used as an instrument of war, and variously
appearing in Hindu traditions as sacred beings, elephants were both royal
property and symbols of state power. Captured elephants were gifted to the
Mughal and then the British rulers of India in annual tribute, and exported to
generate income for the state. The risk-laden enterprise of capture required an
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Animals, Persons, Gods
organized structure of state support and local expertise. Local overseers could
be generously rewarded, receiving land grants with rights and responsibilities to
collect tax from tenant farmers they recruited as pioneer agriculturalists, further
stimulating a land tenure system that configured local class structures and
relations with the state.11 In the nineteenth century, reports suggest that two to
three hundred elephants were being caught annually for export to India,
exhausting the free-roaming population by the end of the century.12
Representing both material and symbolic capital, elephants were always valued
individually as well as generically. The specific characteristics of captured
elephants, (p.163) determined by physical, behavioural, and culturally
mediated criteria of evaluation, were important for defining their export value,
their suitability for royal pageantry, and their use in hunting and conservation,
as well as in configuring the relational dynamics between specific elephants and
their human care providers. Captured elephants were named, and their care
involved understanding their particular temperaments and dispositions through
the intimate relations their mahouts developed with them. Through the status of
the elephant as sacred commodity and practical instrument, then, an institution
of skilled custodial labour emerged that entwined the destinies of humans and
elephants. Recruited through links of kinship and community, successive
generations of Tharu became elephant-men, usually living apart from their
families and sharing their everyday lives with elephants upon whom they rode in
kinaesthetic union. For both humans and elephants, these were working lives
that involved risk and reliance, violence and affection, and conflict and
cooperation. Intimate but ambivalent interspecies relations of trust and
domination were then integral to the operation of this government institution,
the sarkari hattisar.
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Animals, Persons, Gods
cutter; and phanet, or driver. Supervising the care teams is the raut, and above
him is the subba, responsible for the discipline of humans and elephants, for the
provision of human and elephant food and materials, and for implementing the
directives of the park authorities. As the ruling institution, the Department of
National Parks and Wildlife Conservation directs the life and labour of humans
and elephants as part of a regime of (p.165) protected area management,
informed and supported by a globalized apparatus of biodiversity
conservation.19
Captive elephants have been denied the relational dynamics and patterns of
association they would normally enjoy in the wild, and this is surely relevant to
the ambivalence in their relations with humans. Life in the multispecies
institution of the sarkari hattisar presents mahouts with the dilemma of
balancing trust and domination, compassion and cruelty, and cooperation and
conflict. The contradictions inherent in this ambivalent relationship must
somehow be resolved. Nepali mahouts manage this by drawing on their
occupational culture and their practical experience, which suggests to them that
elephants can be simultaneously and differentially understood as animals, as
persons, and as gods.
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Animals, Persons, Gods
humans make tools, that not only humans transmit socially acquired knowledge
and skill, and that, subject to some crucial qualifications, not only humans have
language.21 The critique of human exceptionalism has helped dislodge a dualist
metaphysic of man and the world rooted in Greek philosophy and the cosmology
of the Abrahamic religions. Elsewhere however, alternative philosophies and
worldviews have allowed for understandings of a permeable divide between
humans, animals, and even gods. In the broader context of Nepal’s
predominantly Hindu and Buddhist culture, the sarkari hattisar is one such place
where these kinds of alternative understandings are possible.
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Animals, Persons, Gods
For an elephant to permit you to ride and attend to him or her, trust,
understanding, and an appreciation of each other’s dispositions is vital. In the
relationship Sitasma and I developed, this was evident in the greeting with
which we began our days together, an olfactory probing in which she would coil
her trunk around me in a tactile ritual of communicative intimacy. Not only did it
involve me submitting myself to her, enjoying her warm breath and gentle
embrace, but it also involved her recognizing me as ‘her human’ through my
smell. It is significant that I was as much ‘her human’ as she was ‘my elephant’,
and this mutuality was acknowledged by all the handlers in discussing their
working life. Proprietorial associations went both ways.27
In the relations of apprenticeship, the elephant also represents a tutor, and the
mutuality of companionship becomes especially evident in the practical
experience of enskilment as a competent handler. As my mentor, Sitasma would,
for example, wiggle her head to inform me that I was misapplying my toes in
transmitting driving instructions. Similarly, on occasion she would demonstrate
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Animals, Persons, Gods
that her insistence on turning left when I was trying to turn right was not
disobedience on her part, but rather her revealing to me her preferred grazing
foods, which it was my responsibility to learn and which include medicinal plants
that indicate digestive ill health. She not only educated me about her needs and
preferences though, she also helped me appreciate how elephants inhabit the
world through different bodily capacities, sensorial engagements, and relational
practices. I learned how Sitasma demonstrated care for others, whether it be
her two-year-old son Kha Prasad who always accompanied us, or whether (p.
169) it was a human like me. Gaining insight into another mode of being with
which I could identify further consolidated my sense of companionable
connection.
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Animals, Persons, Gods
The spatial relations of the hattisar could be highly significant in this regard,
with the effect that the parameters of personhood contract to exclude elephants.
The stable is arranged like a set of nested circles, with the elephants on the
perimeter, protecting the humans at the centre from the jungle surrounding the
stable. In the evenings, in informal contexts free of handling duties (dipti), away
from immediate proximity to their elephants, handlers would typically relax, talk
about themselves, and even indulge in irreverent joking. The hattisar is what the
sociologist Erving Goffman would describe as a total institution,31 because
mahouts eat, sleep, work, and play in the stable, because it provides its own
social world with its own rules and objectives, thoroughly structuring the lives of
mahouts (and elephants), conditioning their outlook and dispositions in what the
sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would describe as their habitus.32 Even if not
directly attending to their elephants, mahouts who are present in the hattisar
must make (p.171) themselves available should they be required. This
demanding and sometimes dangerous job leaves mahouts with little time free of
obligation. The rare (and only ever provisional) opportunities to engage in
informal, exclusively human, forms of social intercourse allowed mahouts to
define themselves outside of the context of the elephant to whom they were tied.
These were times when handlers would talk within the modal register of
domination, discussing the challenges of control in relation to a disobedient
elephant during musth (a periodic hormonal surge that makes males aggressive)
or during the ritual initiation of a juvenile’s driving training. And so another
metaphoric turn of the kaleidoscope yields another configuration, one in which
the elephant’s animality assumes primacy.
the elephant’s flank with the first two fingers of their right hand, the same
gesture as when one anoints oneself with tika powder as prasad, the consecrated
leftovers from puja, a devotional act of worship. Ram Ekval explained to me that
this was the mahout way of acknowledging your elephant’s divinity and
requesting the goodwill and protection of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god,
while riding his incarnation. This may be seen to serve the purpose of
counterbalancing the modal register of domination, which life in the separate
interior can encourage, with the modal register of veneration, which the risky
uncertainties of life in the exterior requires. As another phanet, Satya Narayan,
explained: ‘We ride you as a servant, but we know you are a god.’ The
kaleidoscope has turned again, an altered configuration of place, activity, and
attitude shifting the relational stance towards veneration.
The underlying cosmological ideas about nature, authority, and the logic of caste
play a crucial role in the understanding of the ontological state of divinity and
relational mode of veneration. During my ethnographic research, I found the
forest to be emblematic of nature in the sense of a wild domain not ostensibly
transformed by human activity.34 In Chitwan, the forest is the domain of the
Tharu forest goddess, Ban Devi, who controls dangerous animals like tigers that
frequent it. While the hattisar represents domestic space subject to human
sovereignty, the forest represents a wild space subject to divine sovereignty. An
incident from 1998, before I began my field research, illustrates the dangers of
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Animals, Persons, Gods
the wild domain beyond the hattisar. A tiger leaped onto the head of a mahout,
who was out with his elephant cutting grass. The mahout did not survive. In
local understanding, it was Ban Devi that was ultimately responsible, since this
incident occurred in her domain. Usually, the potential anger of the goddess can
be appeased by conducting sacrificial rituals in which she is presented with gifts
that are pleasing to her ferocious nature. These include animals, alcohol, money,
and feminine items of beautification. Similarly, the (p.173) goodwill of Ganesha
must be petitioned with gifts appropriate to the characteristics of his nature,
especially during the ritual period of elephant training, in which a juvenile is
separated from its mother and paired with a human companion who temporarily
adopts ascetic vows of ritual purity (sanyas). With a renowned appetite
celebrated in myth, it is sweets that must be given to the vegetarian Ganesha,
whose divine substance incarnates itself in the sacred elephants that the
handlers apologetically drive and upon whom they rely for their safety in the
forested landscape of the park.
The conception of nature evident in these practices and their supporting beliefs
is not so much the one of the nature/culture dualism of Western thought that
categorically separates, but is instead one that distinguishes the wild from the
socialized along a continuum.35 Following anthropologist Philippe Descola, I
term the handlers’ conception of nature sociocentric in that domains
distinguished by Western thought as nature and society are here understood as
subject to the same organizing logic, modelled on human understandings of
political order. This is evident in the tenurial sovereignty of Bikram Baba, the
local area god, which is clearly modelled on the hierarchical authority of the
king as the lord of the land.36 Perhaps more significant though is the organizing
logic of caste in terms of shared substance, presented as typical of Hindu and
South Asian thought in McKim Marriott’s ethnosociology.37
To explain further, we inhabit a world in which all life shares substance that
varies according to the ratio of its component qualities, the three humoural
gunas of satva, rajas, and tamas. These gunas, in turn, can be transmuted as a
result of the effect of action or karma, which determines rebirth in the cycle of
life or samsara. It follows from this that in such a world the ontological
separation of animality, humanity, and divinity is ultimately permeable. In
previous existences we may have dwelt as animals, but with the potential for
godhood within us all, in a future existence we might be able to realize our
intrinsically divine nature and ascend the hierarchy of being, evident in the
ubiquitous Hindi and Nepali greeting of namaste meaning: ‘I salute that bit of
god that dwells within you.’38
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Animals, Persons, Gods
We have seen how the ontological states of animality, personhood, and divinity
correlate with the relational modes of domination, companionship, and
veneration. The modality of domination is evident in didactic commentary and in
demotic discourse, the modality of companionship in the mutuality of embodied
practice, and the modality of veneration in elephant training as rite of passage
and in everyday ritual acts just before humans enter the dangerous exterior.
Crucially though, these paired ontological states and relational modalities are
not exclusive. Rather, they are differentially emphasized in contextually
contingent ways, each informing the other like the refractive play of light on the
glass beads that produces the beautiful forms of the kaleidoscope. Indeed, we
may see the production of beautiful form (kalos and eidos) as metaphorically
significant, since through these plural and overlapping states and relations
Page 13 of 18
Animals, Persons, Gods
handlers attend not only to the moral complexity of managing working lives
shared with captive elephants, but also to the achievement of a remarkable form
of interspecies communion. For the mahouts this communion is necessary and
remarkable precisely because their elephants have the power to sever their
relations of captivity. Mahouts regularly confirmed the idea that this is a
relationship that demands respect for elephants through combinations of loving
affection, reverential awe, and coercive discipline.
Notes:
(1.) Indeed, as Joseph Alter points out, citing Donna Haraway, the origins of the
domestication of the dog probably lie not in a human realization of the possibility
and practicality of domesticating wolves, but rather in a process of archaic wolf
and human populations adapting to each other. See Joseph Alter, ‘The Once and
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Animals, Persons, Gods
(2.) Piers Locke, ‘The Anomalous Elephant: Terminological Dilemmas and the
Incalcitrant Domestication Debate’, Gajah 41, 2 (2014): 12–19.
(3.) See the chapters by Trautmann, and Santiapillai and Wijeyamohan in this
volume.
(5.) Fred Kurt, Gunther Hartl, and Ralph Tiedemann, ‘Tuskless Bulls in Asian
Elephant Elephas maximus: History and Population Genetics of a Man-Made
Phenomenon’. Acta Theriologica, supplement 3 (1995): 125–43.
(8.) Ursula Münster, in this collection, has also explored the ambivalent relations
of violence and intimacy between humans and elephants that work together in
south India.
(9.) This phrase is taken from Thom van Dooren’s discussion of a whooping
crane captive breeding programme. See Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and
Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 92.
(10.) In accordance with popular usage, I use the word ‘mahout’ as a generic
term for the professionals who provide custodial labour for elephants, even
though in Nepali captive elephant management mahut has the more
circumscribed meaning of the most junior ranked member of an elephant-care
team.
(11.) Piers Locke, ‘The Tharu, the Tarai, and the History of the Nepali Hattisar’,
European Bulletin of Himalyan Research 38 (2011): 59–80.
(12.) Arjun Guneratne, Many Tongues, One People: The Making of Tharu Identity
in Nepal (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 30.
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(16.) See Dominique Lestel and Hollis Taylor, ‘Shared Life: An Introduction’
Social Science Information 52, 2 (2013): 183–6.
(17.) Noel Castree, Catherine Nash, Neil Badmington, Bruce Braun, Jonathan
Murdoch, and Sarah Watmore, ‘Mapping Posthumanism: An Exchange’,
Environment and Planning A: International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 36, 8 (2004): 1341–63; Haraway, When Species Meet; and Bruno
Latour, ‘To Modernize or to Ecologize? That’s the Question’, in Remaking
Reality: Nature at the Millenium, edited by Bruce Braun and Noel Castree
(London: Routledge, 1998), 221–42.
(19.) Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in
India 1945–1997 (Hyderabad: Sangam Books Ltd, 2003).
(22.) Science and technology studies scholar Annemarie Mol has also used the
metaphor of the kaleidoscope to think about the juxtaposition of multiple
figurations. See A. Mol, ‘Mind Your Plate! The Ontonorms of Dutch Dieting’,
Social Studies of Science 43, 3 (2013): 379–96.
(23.) Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Jean Lave,
‘Situated Learning in Communities of Practice’, in Perspectives on Socially
Shared Cognition, edited by Laureen B. Resnick, John M. Levine, and Stephanie
D. Teasley (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1991), 63–82.
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(27.) Piers Locke, ‘“Elephants are People Too”: Affective Apprenticeship and
Fieldwork With Nonhuman Informants’, forthcoming in HAU Journal of
Ethnographic Theory.
(28.) Use of the ankus or elephant hook is not sanctioned in Nepali captive
elephant management.
(29.) For example, Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss on the social and intellectual
capabilities of African elephants, ‘Elephant Sociality and Complexity: The
Scientific Evidence’, in Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence,
edited by Chris Wemmer and Caterine A. Christen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008), 69–98.
(31.) Erving Goffman, Asylums; Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients
and Other Inmates (London: Penguin, 1961).
(32.) Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, translated by R. Nice (Oxford: Polity
Press, 1990); and Nick Crossley, ‘The Phenomenological Habitus and Its
Construction’, Theory and Society 30, 1 (2001): 81–120.
(34.) See Roy Ellen, ‘The Cognitive Geometry of Nature: A Contextual Approach’,
in Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Philippe Descola
and Gísli Pálsson (London: Routledge, 1996), 103–23. Furthermore, contrary to
literature promoting Chitwan as pristine wilderness, it is important to
understand Chitwan as an anthropogenic space in which human activity has
Page 17 of 18
Animals, Persons, Gods
played a major role in shaping the landscape and, therefore, also in shaping
habitat for biodiverse life. See Piers Locke, ‘The Tharu, The Tarai, and the
History of the Nepali Hattisar’.
(36.) Richard Burghart, ‘Hierarchical Models of The Hindu Social System’, Man
(n.s.) 13 (1978): 519–26.
(38.) Lawrence Babb, The Divine Hierarchy: Popular Hinduism in Central India
(New York: University of Columbia Press, 1975), 52.
(41.) For a discussion of elephant lore in the Matanga Lila, see Franklin
Edgerton, The Elephant Lore of the Hindus: The Elephant-Sport (Matanga-Lila)
of Nilakantha (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1931); and for an analysis of elephant
knowledge in the Arthaśāstra, see the chapter by Olivelle in this volume.
(42.) Piers Locke, ‘Captive Elephant Management, the Tharu and the Nepali
State’, IIAS Newsletter 49 (2008): 14–15.
(43.) George P. Sanderson, Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India: Their
Haunts and Habits from Personal Observation; with an Account of the Modes of
Capturing and Taming Elephants (London: Allen & Co., 1878).
(44.) M. Marriott, ‘Varna and Jāti’, in The Hindu World, edited by Sushi Mittal
and Gene Thursby (New York: Routledge, 2004), 357–82.
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DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0009
Keywords: captive elephant management, northeast India, logging, mahout, non-human agency,
interspecies labour, logging, collaboration, Khamti, Arunachal Pradesh
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with elephants and their human partners, the Tai-Khamtis, who conduct labour
for logging in Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India.
It is 8 a.m. and we are leaving the forest camp. We follow a forest formed by the
movements of elephants dragging logs. We reach a place where cut logs are
ready for removal. Three big logs from a mekai,1 about 1.5 metres each, are
spread over a cleared area. Before starting work, the owner points to Chao
Nakalang, the mahout, indicating a log that must be dragged by Mohan, the
elephant. The mahout then asks Mohan to lay down by telling him, ‘Boit,
boit’ (Get down, get down) and sits on the elephant, taking his place on Mohan’s
back. From there, with his feet placed on top of the elephant’s head, he gives
commands to Mohan. At first, he asks him to pull the log next to the pathway
(Figure 8.1). However, a cut tree, not yet prepared (p.181) for removal, hinders
the passage, and the elephant is unable to overcome this obstacle. After some
vain attempts, Chao Nakalang gets down from the elephant.
Mohan stops while men check the chains around the log. Chao Nakalang and the
owner together ask Mohan to move forward, repeating ‘Agaat, Agaat’ several
times. But he refuses. Aware of the load attached to him and the slope of the
trail, he looks at the owner as if to (p.182) tell him that he will not venture onto
the trail with such a load behind him. The owner then goes in front to Mohan to
see the slope, and then comes back to him, a little edgy, shouting at him twice,
‘Agaat, Agaat!’ Still Mohan does not move. A moment of doubt settles. The men
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are insisting; Chao Nakalang even grabs a stick with which he threatens the
animal, but to no avail.
Then, the owner calls the elephant by his name. He repeats twice: ‘Agaat Mohan,
Mohan!’ After a few moments, he finally steps forward; we follow his steps.
Proceeding down the small hill, Mohan does not seem as nonchalant and assured
as on other occasions when I saw him dragging logs, albeit over easier terrain.
Indeed, there are numerous bushes and branches presenting obstacles, and
Mohan’s legs sink into the mud on the gently sloping terrain. Mohan hesitates.
Again the owner urges him forward, walking beside him continuously repeating
the commands: ‘Agaat! Agaat! Hoy hoy’ (see Figures 8.2 and 8.3).
We finally reach the main track, back on wide, flat ground. From here Mohan
continues his journey alone. No longer concerned, the human collaborators let
him proceed to the point of collection. Here I see four logs from the same tree
that Mohan brought on previous days.
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The Tai-Khamtis have been living and working with elephants since their
migration to northeast India in the mid-eighteenth century. Elephants have not
only been witness to the changes occurring in human society, but by
contributing to the attainment of specific tasks they have also directly
collaborated and actively participated in Khamti social life. These kinds of
human–elephant relationship are constituted through an intimate and highly
integrated partnership with a ‘deep history’ that extends back millennia.2
Many scholars, like French sociologist Jocelyne Porcher, have remarked that the
role, labour, and significance of animals in human society and history have often
been overlooked.4 Historically, the humanities and social sciences have tended to
consider animals merely as instruments to serve human purposes, neglecting
their subjectivity and ignoring the relational contexts that reveal interspecies
bonds for which their disciplinary perspectives have been epistemologically ill
equipped. However, more recently, the problematic oppositions of nature and
culture, human and animal, which obstruct analysis of relations across species
boundaries, have been challenged by anthropological thinkers including Bruno
Latour, Tim Ingold, and Philippe Descola.5 They have helped theorize an
anthropology of human–non-human relations, considering the variability,
modalities, and forms of engagement that connect humans to other life forms in
shared biophysical environments. These endeavours have helped us relinquish
the limitations of an overly anthropocentric point of view.
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integral components of human worlds, but as interacting forms of life whose own
ways of being warrant consideration. Advancing this agenda, several
researchers have begun developing concepts and methods with which to
examine humans and animals collectively in terms of interspecies relations in
hybrid communities,7 or forms of association,8 or contact zones of natural–
cultural encounter,9 or the reciprocating influences of human–animal
cohabitation.10
This chapter asks then how we might think of the human–elephant working unit
in terms of intersubjective engagement, aiming to show how an interspecies
community emerges from a common world made intelligible through combined
action. This involves consideration of the cognitive capacities and corporeal
capabilities of humans and elephants, their reciprocal influences, and the
representations that arise from specific contexts in which cooperation is
manifest. In proposing an integrated approach for rethinking the working
relationship of humans and captive elephants, this chapter responds to Piers
Locke’s proposal for ethnoelephantology as an interdisciplinary framework for
studying human–elephant relations.12
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make labour a living activity. From the verb ‘to work’, we shift here to its
substantive ‘working’; that is, from the activity of work to the working subject.
Returning to the animals’ labour, Porcher states some implications for working
activity involving human and non-human animals. At work, the relationships
between humans and other animals are expressed through exchange on the
basis of giving-receiving-rendering.18 The involvement of animals at work costs
them: they use their strength and follow the rules and constraints of each
activity. This way, in exchange for their participation in human work, animals
earn their living in the human world. As reward, a ‘good life’ should be rendered
to them; this good life can be heard as a promise. It can be considered as a sort
of ‘value added’ to the life of the animal in relation to its existence outside the
circle of human activities.19 Humans should at first withdraw some constraints
of life in the wild and meet animals’ essential needs. Thus, the ‘good life’ can, for
example, be measured by the nutritional rewards given to animals and by the
caring relationship in which humans should be engaged when working with non-
human animals.20 (p.187)
In addition, due to their presence in the human world of labour, animals do not
only have natural needs, they also have needs arising from their working
activities. The good life offered to animals should also cover these specific
needs. In the case of human–elephant partnership, some practices are essential
precisely because by co-opting elephants into a system of labour serving human
interests, humans are depriving them of the opportunity to fulfil their needs in
ways that would be normal if only associating with conspecifics. During
fieldwork, several Khamti informants insisted on the necessity to provide such
‘good life’ to elephants as a reward for their participation in timber operations
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and their involvement in human social life more generally. In this view,
nutritional rewards appear essential because working elephants are deprived of
time that would otherwise be used for grazing, to which they must dedicate a
high proportion of each day since their digestive system is so inefficient. Locke’s
chapter also remarks upon this in the care practices of government elephant
stables in Nepal. According to Tai-Khamtis, another reward for elephants
appears at the time of bathing, an opportunity to create empathic bonds and
reciprocal trust.
For any individual, the benefit of labour depends on the recognition of what they
have accomplished. However, material remuneration may not be the most
important sign of recognition. Beyond the purely economic, we should also
consider symbolic recognition of the utility of the work and the status that
accrues to the worker. Again, Porcher adds a specific recognition for animals
engaged in human activities: the recognition of the interspecies bond. Animals’
work leads towards a need for recognition by the quality of its relationship with
humans. Indeed, besides the rationale of productivity, work also carries a
relational target: the construction of social bonds.21 This way, working with an
animal falls within the sensible world, which includes the attention and gestures
of humans with respect to animals. The preposition implies accompaniment and
complementarity. As for the verb ‘to become’, which Donna Haraway has pointed
out as necessarily implying a ‘becoming with’, the same applies for the verb ‘to
work’: by working with an animal, one is transformed and vice-versa.22 At work,
both Tai-Khamtis and elephants are engaged in corporeal intimacy, sharing time
and space together on a daily basis, which consolidates their relational bond. (p.
188)
However, several studies have shown that interspecies communication can take
unexpected forms, especially when both species are engaged in a common task.
For example, with fighting beetles in Thailand, it is by vibration created using a
small pen skilfully rubbed on the log of wood in the fighting arena that owners
are able to transmit information to their beetle, encouraging them to attack or to
defend.24 Elsewhere, Siberian herders encourage their herds to move in desired
ways by mobilizing their ethological knowledge of reindeer habits and
dispositions.25 These two examples may refer to what Haudricourt has described
as positive indirect actions on nature.26 These examples emphasize the ways in
which representations as well as human knowledge influence animal behaviour.
Thus, to be effective, interspecies communication requires humans to consider
the differing sensory capabilities of non-humans in order to appreciate how they
might make sense of their world.
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then can we say that each engages the subjectivity of the other? It is thus
assumed that in addition to the implementation of skills and cognitive abilities of
each protagonist, the achievement of common tasks is only possible through
meaningful, negotiated engagement. Can we claim that mahouts and elephants
are working together in these interspecies terms? Among the Tai-Khamtis, (p.
190) in what kind of relationship do elephants have to labour? Is it synonymous
with exploitation? Or is it better understood as collaborative work? Can it be
asserted that humans and elephants constitute labour collectives?
Among the Khamti, when elephants are employed to drag logs, they first have to
be harnessed and equipped with different accessories. This equipment allows
animals to make the best use of their traction force and prevent injuries while
working. At first, the mahout places a saddle pad made of jute on the back of the
animal. On this pad, which prevents friction between the skin and other
equipment, he places a rectangular cushion pierced at its centre, the gaddi. The
gaddi follows the spine of the animal and creates a flat surface, on which the
mahout puts the ghedra (rectangular pads, about 15 inches thick, with identical
dimensions to those of gaddi). Depending on the size of the elephant, three or
four ghedra are then placed in order to constitute a saddle for the mahout.
However, the mahout does not always sit on the animal during dragging
operations. When appropriate, he positions himself on the ghedra in an elevated
way. He is thus not straddling the neck of the animal, but is literally sitting over
it. This position may seem comfortable: the saddle is wide and composed of (p.
191) several cushions stuffed with straw. However, it is only by extending his
feet that a man can reach the ears or the head of the animal to transmit
commands. Thus, we will see that the mahout must stand up and sometimes
remain in equilibrium when the animal lowers his head to roll logs.
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A lap belt, composed of a double layer of strings, is wrapped around the animal’s
belly. This is the sai pan. It consists of two loops at the ends, which join the
ghedra at its centre, tied with a small rope, the sai kat. This rope helps in
maintaining the saddle formed by the ghedra. From the node formed on the
saddle, the mahout then surrounds the animal’s chest with another double rope
that constitutes the harness, the sai pan kho. In order not to harm the animal
when it drags logs, straw paddings are affixed between the skin and the
harnesses. This harness is attached to either side of the saddle of the animal
with new thin strings. Once the saddle and harness are attached, the mahout
subjoins chains, the sai lik. On each side of the animal, chains are attached to
the sai pan, at the gaddi height, and they extend from the rear of the animal.
Two small wooden pieces are inserted at the centre of each node of the entwined
ropes so that the saddle remains in equilibrium when the animal pulls logs.
When logs are ready to be dragged or pulled, two new channels are rolled and
hung by hooks. When the mahout sits on the saddle, he transmits gesture
commands with his feet using the lakap—a kind of stirrup in which he places his
feet behind the elephant’s neck. The lakap is used for the mahout’s safety. His
feet, being placed inside the callipers, are not likely to slip when the elephant
falls forward (see Figure 8.4).
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ankles; the slope could cause the load to hurt the elephant. When Mohan
reached the track and found flat, wide ground, dragging the log appeared
relatively easy in proportion to his size. Consequently, at this point in the
conduct of the task, less human attention was required.
Mohan’s conduct warrants further examination though. From the very moment
when the log was attached to his chain, Mohan’s mahout no longer sat on him.
Mohan walked alone on the path traced by activity between the tree-cutting
place and the gathering point. Mohan’s human accomplices were content to
walk beside him, only communicating by voice. They ensured Mohan was led in
certain manoeuvres, such as slopes or turns on the route. Walking alone, without
the mahout on his back, may grant some autonomy to the elephant. As noted,
Mohan took the liberty to grab branches to feed. He also took the time to grab
other branches to rub his skin. Furthermore, we learned that Mohan always had
some bamboo branches that he continually chewed, a situation reminiscent of
J.H. Williams’ (p.193) comments in his famous memoir ‘Elephant Bill’ about
bamboo as chewing gum for elephants. Williams also notes that elephants were
most likely to comply with orders when given by the mahout standing next to
them.30
At about 8 a.m., the driver, his assistant, and I leave the village. Upon reaching
the entry of the forest, we find Aipang and Chao Mein waiting for us. Together
we visit the gathering place. There, a dozen previously stored logs are waiting to
be loaded. Chao Mein and Aipang begin manoeuvring. Sitting on Aipang, the
mahout invites him to push each log: the animal leans forward and, with his
head, pushes one. He gently manoeuvres amid scattered logs to push forward
with his head so that one log joins another. The language used towards the
animal is rude. (I recognize some familiar Assamese insults, often heard during
heated discussions between men.) Meticulously, one after another, Aipang
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pushes the logs together with his foot, wedging his trunk between the foot and
the log.
While rubbing and constantly tapping the ears of the animal, Chao Mein shouts,
not instructions, but new profanity. The elephant redoubles his force, and with
his head, mightily pushes the logs, which roll and huddle against each other. The
manoeuvre concludes with the onomatopoeia of ‘hoy hoy’, indicating that the
animal has properly accomplished what the mahout expects of him. Strokes
behind the ears continue. The elephant still has to bring a final log, which is (p.
194) located in the centre of the space. Once all of the logs are together, the
mahout allows his elephant to take rest.
During this time, the driver parks the truck. The driver’s assistant then indicates
to Chao Mein the place where he will position the truck for loading. This
requires Chao Mein and Aipang to move three obstructing logs. Using his front
leg, Aipang heels the end of a log to remove it from others and then he pushes it.
He does the same with the other logs, which remain aligned. Once the truck is
parked for loading, Aipang is asked to affix two thin logs, the mai,31 obliquely
from the trailer to the ground. These logs serve as a ramp on which the logs will
be hoisted up to the trailer. The animal cleverly catches the first one by the end
of his leg and grabs it with his trunk, wrapping it around the log to strengthen
his control. With his head up, he moves the log toward the back of the trailer.
Chao Mein shouts ‘biri, biri’ (leave it, leave it). The animal lays down the mai on
the trailer. Then, men properly position and align them at the end of the trailer.
Meanwhile, Aipang has already gone to grab the second mai and deposit it in the
same way as the previous one.
Aipang is going to take the first log next to him. Using his front leg, he detaches
it from the others and starts the operation. Aipang catches new branches, which
he uses to hit his body in order to keep insects away. Throughout the loading,
this operation will then be guided by the mahout. Aipang is now ready to load
the first log; he lifts his leg above the first one and pushes it at the bottom of the
ramps. He makes it roll on the two ramps, first with his leg and then with his
head. To indicate to him to continue the effort, Chao Mein presses emphatically
behind the ears of Aipang. As he moves a log onto the ramps, the driver and his
assistant are each positioned on one of the adjacent logs. Then, the log is rolled
onto the block.
At the end of each movement made by Aipang, each human places a shim to
prevent the log from rolling backwards. At first, it is with his feet that the
elephant hoists the log. As soon as the log reaches his head height, he pushes
with his forehead. Chao Mein presses consistently behind the elephant’s ears: it
is not yet time to take a break. As the elephant pushes, the mahout swats his
body again to deflect insects. It takes only five new body movements for the log
to reach the top of the ramp. A last impulse with the head makes the log (p.
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While the driver and his assistant adjust and set the log on the trailer with a
chain, Aipang and Chao Mein immediately return to the pile to load a second
log. As always, with his foot Aipang detaches and pushes a log towards the mai.
Then, once each man is positioned against each ramp, the same operation starts
again. The driver and his assistant are located outside the two ramps—Aipang
and Chao Mein at the centre thereof. They are there to ease the elephant, but
also to align the log properly during manoeuvres. While Aipang is pushing with
his trunk, the two men, one on each side, are dragging a small shim to hold the
log, the gutka. The second log comes falling onto the trailer and, rolling a bit on
it, it touches the first one, which serves as a brake. Chao Mein taps gently on the
head of Aipang, who is going back to seek a third log.
The operation is carried out even faster when all are together and moving
forward according to the elephant’s rhythm. Once synchronized, the elephant
lays his head on it to push and tighten the logs. After the first four logs have
been placed, the elephant removes both mai against the trailer, as the truck has
to manoeuvre to allow the loading of four new logs located on the side. Among
the remaining logs, the last one has to be selected according to its shape and
size so that it perfectly fits with the others on the trailer.
At this point, the men and the elephant are getting tired. The intensity of work
lowers. Once the tenth and final log has been loaded, the elephant offers us a
balancing act. As the last log is not perfectly placed on the trailer, the mahout
asks Aipang to stand up against the trailer and to push the log with his head, as
he did with the others. But the log at the top of the stack exceeds his height.
Chao (p.196) Mein then continuously repeats ‘upper, upper’ to the elephant,
urging him to put one foot and then the other directly on the trailer and stand
up. Relying on his feet, he then reaches the log with his head and pushes it to
the extremity of the trailer. Aipang pushes in a strong way, a bit too much, since
the log falls to the ground on the other side of the truck. Considering the
vehement shouts of men and the injunctions heard so far, especially from the
mahout, I am surprised to see no signs of discontent with the animal. The men
look at each other, and only a few smiles brighten their faces marked by fatigue.
I notice that nothing is said to punish Aipang or to discourage him for failing to
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complete the assigned task. Finally, this log will remain there, and some space
will be made in order to load a new one.
In the situation described, it is clear that Aipang knows his job and can perform
the required tasks well. However, even though he can respond to commands, he
does not necessarily wait until his mahout, Chao Mein, asks him to perform
certain tasks. Often Aipang seems to decide for himself, taking appropriate
initiative, including repositioning the logs on the trailer in the most efficient
manner possible. At the beginning of the session, there is a moment of
misunderstanding on the part of the elephant with regard to what the men
expect from him. He seems to know that he must focus on the logs, but he does
not understand how to arrange them in relation to the position of the truck (and
as an insufficiently knowledgeable human observer, I did not know how this
would be done).
What then are the ways in which Aipang executes these tasks? To first push,
gather, and then hoist the logs, the elephant uses his feet. With his trunk and
forehead he aligns logs. While logs are hoisted on the shins, coordination does
not only occur between the mahout and the elephant, but also among the entire
team including the driver and his assistant. Moreover, when Aipang hoists logs
along the two ramps, they advance all together at the same time according to
the elephant’s effort. Throughout operations, the men assist the elephant. This
participation is compulsory for the effective achievement of tasks. They orient
and guide him; they supervise him, as a foreman might do for a worker. Each
one has a well-defined duty for the achievement of the work task. For example,
the role of the driver and his assistant, in addition to operating the truck, is to
assist the elephant when he hoists the logs onto the (p.197) ramps. Using a
small triangular piece of wood between the log and the ramp, they support the
logs and thus prevent it from slipping and rolling back.
Once the truck is fully loaded, the workday is not yet over either for the men or
the elephant (see Figure 8.5). The truck must leave the forest, join a road, and
reach the factory. Although in this case the distance between the forest and the
road does not exceed ten kilometres, driving on the track with such a load can
be complicated. The truck has to traverse delicate passages, and in times of rain
(as was the case on this day of observation), the vehicle can easily get stuck.
Serving a function akin to tow trucks, elephants are called in to help trucks
through these difficult passages. That day, Aipang had to give such assistance on
three occasions. To do so, the elephant is always behind the truck, pushing it
forward with his strength. On this occasion, Aipang put his head against the
cargo of logs, behind the truck, and his mahout, tapping the back of Aipang’s
ears with his feet, encouraged him on, as the driver manoeuvred the machine to
release the rear wheels of the truck (see Figure 8.6).
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Throughout the loading situation described, it seemed that Chao Mein was
rough with Aipang. In addition to providing ongoing small tweaks with his feet
behind the ears, he often shouted at him and threatened him with a bamboo
stick he held in his hand. I had the opportunity to question Chao Mein on his
attitude and his relationship with the elephant during loading, showing him
some video that I recorded. From his point of view, on that day, but not only on
that day, Aipang did not want to work with timber. He therefore had to be
encouraged to get the logs, to drag them, and to gather them, before finally
loading them. He admitted to me that Aipang, like many other elephants, did not
like working in logging operations. He told me that being very familiar with this
animal, he knew the elephant had a tendency of not wanting to perform difficult
tasks, such as loading several tonnes of wood onto the back of a truck.
Aipang had a great reputation in catching forest elephants, but for thirty years,
he had been engaged only in timberwork. The vivid injunctions reveal a mode of
relation and communication necessary for this particular elephant, more
emphatic on this occasion than others. What the mahout Chao Mein said
indicates the long-term character of relations between mahouts and elephants,
and the understanding that develops through the trajectories of their mutually
bound lives. Chao Mein’s interpretation of his attitude towards Aipang suggests
a long acquaintance with him. The degree to which Chao Mein exerted his
authority was a response to the indifference and lack of motivation Aipang felt
on this day.
U. Toke Gale tells how he was able to observe elephants developing strategies to
feign work in the forest camps of Myanmar: ‘Many full-grown (p.200)
elephants are known to shirk work. They would press their forehead against a
heavy log, tense their muscles, open wide mouths, and even groan aloud to give
the impression of maximum effort when in fact they are just pretending to push
the log over.’32 When Aipang was deemed to have failed a task though, such as
aligning a log on the truck that then dropped, no reprimand was given, neither
by the mahout nor the driver nor his assistant. At that time of the day, everybody
was very tired, and hence the men were sympathetic to their non-human
companion. The variable volition of elephants at work is significant. They may
choose not to work, and sometimes, even when resorting to coercion, their
cooperation cannot be guaranteed. A reprimanded elephant understands that
humans are frustrated, but this may not succeed in soliciting their consent.
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Khamtis not only share their lives with these animals, they, above all, share a
condition of living.36
Notes:
(1.) Shorea assamica.
(4.) Jocelyne Porcher, Vivre avec les animaux. Une utopie pour le XXIÈME siècle
(Paris: La Découverte, 2011).
(5.) Bruno Latour, Politique de la nature. Comment faire rentrer les sciences en
politique (Paris: La Découverte, 1999); Tim Ingold, The Perception of the
Environment: Essays in Livehood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000);
and Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).
(6.) Jakob von Uexkull, ‘A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A
Picture Book of Invisible Worlds’, Semiotica 89, 4 (1992): 319–91, originally
published in 1934 in Instinctive Behavior, edited and translated by Claire H.
Schiller (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1957).
(7.) Dominique Lestel, L’Animalité. Essai sur le statut de l’humain (Paris: Hatier,
1996).
(10.) F. Brunois, ‘Pour une approche interactive des savoirs locaux: l’ethno-
éthologie’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes 120–1 (2005): 31–40.
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(17.) Deontic activity includes the bonds shared by individuals in order to work
together. See Dejours, Travail vivant; Christophe Dejours, La panne: Repenser le
travail et changer la vie (Paris: Bayard, 2012), 101.
(20.) Jocelyne Porcher and Tiphaine Schmitt, ‘Dairy Cows, Workers of the
Shadow’, Society and Animals 20, 1 (2012): 39–60.
(27.) For a case of indigenous people and elephants in British colonial forestry,
see Ursula Münster, ‘Working for the Forest: The Ambivalent Intimacies of
Human–Elephant Collaboration in South Indian Wildlife Conservation’, Ethnos
81, 3 (2016): 425–47.
(28.) For a more detailed historical role of timber operation in Khamtis’ society
in post-independence India, see Nicolas Lainé, ‘Effects of the 1996 Timber Ban
in Northeast India: The Case of the Khamtis of Lohit District, Arunachal
Pradesh’, in Nature, Environment and Society: Conservation, Governance and
Transformation in India, edited by Nicolas Lainé and T. B. Subba (New Delhi:
Orient Blackswan, 2012), 73–93.
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(33.) Like other animals, in recent years, elephants have prompted a growing
number of publications about them, revealing their intelligence and cognitive
abilities. Several research groups currently specialize in the study of different
species living in Africa or Asia. Thus, the results of work conducted by teams of
scientists, sometimes engaged in research in the long term, regularly bring to
light new pachyderm skills. All this research granted intentionalities and various
forms of intelligence to elephants through the recognition of a certain self-
consciousness by the mirror test (Joshua M. Plotnik, Frans B.M. de Waal, and
Diana Reiss, ‘Self-Recognition in an Asian Elephant’, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 103, 45 [2006]: 17053–7), the capacity of mutual
assistance from conspecifics (J.M. Plotnik, Richard Lair, Wirot
Suphachoksahakum, and F. de Waal, ‘Elephants Know When They Need a
Helping Trunk in a Cooperative Task’, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 108, 12 [2011]: 5116–21), empathy among congeners (Lucy A. Bates,
Katito N. Sayialel, Norah W. Njiraini, Cynthia J. Moss, Joyce H. Poole, and
Richard W. Byrne, ‘Elephants Classify Human Ethnic Groups by Odor and
garment Color’, Current Biology 17, 22 (2007): 1–5), or the ability to reproduce
sounds and human speech (Angela S. Stoeger, Daniel Mietchen, Sukhun Oh,
Shermin de Silva, Christian T. Herbert, Soowhan Kwon, and W. Tecumseh Fitch,
‘An Asian Elephant Imitates Human Speech’, Current Biology 22, 22 [2012]:
2144–8). For a more general overview of elephant cognition research results, see
Moti Nissani, ‘Elephant Cognition: A Review of Recent Experiments’, Gajah 28
(2008): 44–52.
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DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0010
help us sense that animals have their own lives, their own karma, tests,
purposes, and aspirations. And, as often brief and painful, as their lives
may be, they are also graced with purity and a clarity, which we can only
humbly respect, and perhaps even occasionally envy. The Jatakas validate
our deepest feelings and keep alive for us today knowledge of the wisdom
inherent in all life forms. To lose respect for all other species, and the
fundamental wisdom they too embody is, after all, to weaken the first and
most fundamental of the precepts—not to kill but to cherish all life.3
The Sasa Jataka tells the story of a hare that sacrifices itself to be eaten in order
to feed passing beggars. In the Mahakapi Jataka, a monkey king sacrifices his
own life so his followers may cross a river safely, and in the Matakabhatta
Jataka, a goat is overjoyed by its slaughter because it will finally free itself from
a life of misery (p.207) and suffering.4 Self-sacrifice and heroism are expressed
through the acts of animals as mediators of moral goodness, even as they tend to
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Not all animals demonstrate positive moral values; some illustrate the
consequences of imprudent behaviour. One animal that is notably represented in
particularly benevolent terms is the elephant. While the Buddha took many
animal forms in the Jataka tales, the elephant may be seen as the most
significant. In the Chaddanta Jataka, he was born as a pure white, six-tusked
elephant king that lived in a golden cave with two queens. Being hunted for his
tusks, he was shot with a poisoned arrow, and when the hunter failed to cut off
his tusks, he himself took the hunter’s saw and cut them off for him. The
Alinacitta Jataka tells the tale of a young white, noble elephant who saved a
kingdom of men from invasion and subsequently handed it over to the right
ruler.5 The elephant is portrayed as both loving and selfless in the Jatakas, but
this very positive representation is not only confined to these tales. Its
importance in Buddhism goes far beyond anthropomorphic texts about
benevolence. The elephant is also the living symbol of the life of the Enlightened
Buddha. This is evident in the story of Queen Maya’s dream of a six-tusked white
elephant that foretold her pregnancy with the Buddha. ‘She dreams that a white
elephant with six tusks has entered her body. On the same night, the bodisattva
descends as a white elephant with six tusks and enters her womb on the right
side.’6
child may help cure it.8 Both the Sinhalese farmers and mahouts I spent time
with in Sri Lanka had pictures as well as plastic and ceramic depictions of the
elephant hanging over doors and on walls of their homes. Several of the mahouts
also wore jewellery such as pendants, bracelets, and necklaces portraying
elephants, some in more abstract forms than others. Bracelets and rings
comprising the tail-hair of their individual elephants were especially popular
among mahouts as lucky charms and as ways of binding themselves to the
substance of their particular elephant. None of the mahouts, however, wore
ornaments made from hair of elephants other than their own, and it was
understood that all incorporated hair should be found rather than removed, as
the latter would be disrespectful to the elephant. The spiritual intimacy the
Sinhalese mahouts felt with their elephants was evident not only from these
ornaments, but also through ritual gestures of respect and affection (similar to
those reported by Locke for Nepali mahouts, Chapter 7). Most of the mahouts I
studied among performed small daily rituals that included hand gestures and
caressing their elephant’s legs, trunk, or stomach. After hanging his goad on a
tree, Jayasena, an experienced mahout with whom I commenced my
apprenticeship, would fold his palms, and for a short moment, raise them
towards his instrument. This gesture was also repeated when he commenced the
washing of his elephant. Before he sprayed the first handful of water on her, he
folded his palms and touched his forehead with his fingertips. Chandana, also a
close informant, would kiss each leg of his female elephant, Rani, after every
workday, while (p.209) the younger mahout Village made heart-shaped
gestures on the belly and forehead of his young female elephant Pooja when
feeding her at the stables in the evenings. These symbolic practices suggest an
attitude of reverence that has surely been important in Sri Lankan traditions of
captive elephant management.
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The majority of the mahouts I encountered in Sri Lanka, while either partially or
fully non-literate, possessed considerable knowledge about elephants, acquired
through a tradition of oral instruction and practical apprenticeship. Their
knowledge about elephants typically exceeded that of elephant owners, whether
that knowledge concerned male behaviour during the period of hormonal
excitement known as musth, dietary habits, or the position of the more than
ninety nila (nerve) points which they learn in the course of everyday practice
rather than from literary sources. Similarly, it is through interactive, lived
experience that mahouts become familiar with the individual dispositions of their
elephants. As Locke argues when talking about mahouts in Nepal: ‘One learns to
be with one’s elephant through a routine in which time spent together in the
jungle, cutting grass, bathing, or grazing, is central, and which entails acquired
proficiency in interactive bodily comportment.’12 While working with a four-
tonne animal requires a certain amount of strict discipline in (p.210) order to
maintain safety and control, it is the shared intimacies and intertwined
biographies of the human–elephant relation that seem crucial to effective
partnership. It is therefore extremely important for mahouts not only to attend
to the well-being of their elephants, but also to encourage mutual understanding
and to nurture an empathic bond between them.
The talk to the elephant is best for her … she is calming and she is better
and closer to me. The Lakshmi get not angry when talking like that to her
but more happy. She can smell … and listen I am near to her and then she
doesn’t do the nasty things. Like when she has made a mess in her stable
or is misbehaving in the river while being washed: ‘How much I told you,
you don’t do this all the time. Why you have to behave bad and do nasty
things?’ I tell her … she knowing that I am not happy when I say that [sic].
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palm branches every now and then. According to Jayasena, what mattered most
was not my choice of words, but my use of tone. Calm and soothing intonations
(p.211) were crucial as elephants can distinguish between pleasure and
displeasure. While elephants understand specific command words, in this
situation it was not inappropriate for me to talk to Lakshmi in my mother
tongue, Danish, a language with which she was most likely unfamiliar.
While this verbalized mode of address is not dissimilar to that between pet
owners and their companion animals in contemporary Western society, there is
more at stake in a working relationship with an elephant.13 The mahout Jayasena
claimed that his elephant both respects and fears him, although he argued that
fear is not the foundation for an effective relationship between human and
elephant, noting he could not have stayed with the same elephant for almost
thirty years if she was constantly afraid of him: ‘Mahout like me must love the
elephant … Like loving people … Much respect and also little afraid, but
important is friendship and love…. Like my sister she is [sic].’ While Lakshmi is
sometimes addressed by reference to the physical character of tush-bearing
(etinna), she is just as often addressed with the affectionate nanghi, meaning
younger sister, since Jayasena is a year older than her. This effectively situates
Jayasena and Lakshmi in an intra-familial hierarchy that implies the elder’s
responsibility towards the care and well-being of the younger. Significantly, use
of these terms of address tended to correlate with different modes of activity.
Where ‘etinna’ would be used in relation to working situations requiring
obedience, ‘nanghi’ would be used in leisure situations involving affection, when
bathing, gently admonishing, or when taking her to her stable. Only rarely would
I hear him refer to her by her given name. This not only reveals different modes
of address according to situational engagement, but the use of familial names
also suggests the personification of the animal. As with the Nepali mahouts
among whom Locke apprenticed, both Jayasena as well as the young mahout
Village claimed that elephants are able to feel and express human-like emotions
of anger, fear, love, hatred, and jealousy. And because these emotional states all
play vital factors in the daily lives of elephants, the mahouts claim they should
respond in similar ways to similar emotions, even if they breach the species
barrier.
exclusively for humans, who unlike animals are thought to possess souls,
Buddhist cosmology posits a cycle of rebirth that applies to all forms of life.
If you can live all life with the elephant she is happy and will love you …
It’s a good thing to the elephant because she is … then she is … feel love.
Someday I can see the change in her [Lakshmi] mind then she is having a
bad day and feel angry and not always listen when I talking … Important to
know all the many minds elephant have. Danger, very danger if ignoring
that … [sic]14
Loyalty towards one’s elephant is also crucial, and attending to another elephant
can solicit jealousy. Mahouts told me that working with or helping with another
elephant can make an elephant extremely jealous, which may turn to
disobedience, aggressive behaviour, and ‘much broken heart elephant [sic]’.19
When getting acquainted with (p.213) Lakshmi, I was instructed to constantly
talk to her while at her side, and I was told that interacting with other elephants
in her presence was not only inappropriate, but would also negatively affect the
trust the elephant had established towards me. According to Jayasena, it would
make the elephant like me less due to the possibility of her feeling jealous. The
mahouts knew that emotional ties went both ways, from human to elephant, and
from elephant to human. This corresponds with Locke’s experience in Nepal
with the elephant Sitasma Kali, for whom he was as much her human, as she
was his elephant (Chapter 7). I observed such interspecies intimacy between the
male Kandula and his mahout Sunil, both of whom had been working together
for twenty-two years. Kandula’s affection towards Sunil was especially apparent
when Kandula was taken to his stable at night. After feeding and administering
treatment for his damaged back with Ayurvedic medicine, as Sunil walked away,
Kandula would reach out for him with his trunk, making small squeaking sounds
while glancing after him. This behaviour was not an exception, but a regular
occurrence. Ruwan Galpola, a guide and elephant treatment expert, described
their relationship in the following way:
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Very much friends and comrades. Almost never have I seen like this a
mahout and his elephant that are good friends. Like this, Kandula is almost
like the dog when Sunil leaving in the night. Looking and looking for him
and where are you go, Sunil? Like Jayasena and Chandana this is very
special relationship also for the elephant. He feels it also and when the
Sunil is not with him he is missing [sic].
We may interpret the ways in which mahouts view their elephants as persons in
terms of cultural convention and practical experience. We might look to
Buddhist belief, which suggests that mahouts are interacting with their
ancestors or relatives—reincarnated people in animal form—and with
anthropomorphized animals, as seen in the Jataka tales. We might also look to
their daily engagement with and practical knowledge of elephants, in which
elephants are understood to possess sentient, emotional lives on the basis of
interpreted interaction and observation. While a tradition of cultural and
religious belief undoubtedly plays an important role in the mahouts’
understanding of life—human or not—I suggest that practical experience is most
significant for their understanding of elephant personhood. Although Midgley
argues that animal trainers only metaphorically attribute (p.214)
conventionally unique human qualities to their animal companions to manage
them effectively, I argue that we should not discount as mere artifice an attitude
that credits the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of elephants as similar to those
of humans. In a condition of shared life, we witness a form of intersubjective
engagement between species that begs the question as to whether reserving
personhood for humans is itself mere artifice, the result of a particular cultural
and intellectual tradition.20
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among the Sinhalese mahouts we encounter a Buddhist world view that not only
anthropomorphizes non-human animals in its folklore, but also posits a
cosmological order with permeable boundaries between human and non-human
life in the context of beliefs in rebirth. Perhaps then the notion of
anthropomorphism is ultimately only intelligible from a world view that retains
an ontological separation between cultural humans and natural animals?
the out there. Concerned with the primacy (p.216) of movement and the logic
of inversion that Paul Keil also draws on in this volume, Ingold suggests that
In this figuration, Ingold sees the world and all its inhabitants as part of a large
meshwork of trails that interconnects like a web.
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Human–Elephant Conflicts
The relatively small size of Sri Lanka, its growing human population, and the
territorial displacements of inter-ethnic war have increasingly forced humans to
venture beyond established agricultural zones into jungle frontiers, or to reclaim
abandoned territory that displaced elephants had made their own. The island
that had a population of only 2.7 million people in 1871 is now inhabited by more
than twenty million people, of whom 75 per cent are directly dependent on
agriculture for survival.30 This human expansion leaves less room for the free-
roaming elephant population in Sri Lanka, which comprises 10 per cent of the
global Asian elephant population, and which exists at the highest density in
Asia.31 As farmers venture further into uncultivated areas in order to grow crops
and ensure their survival, many encounter elephant pathways—established
routes by which the elephants move in search of food and water.32 In the habit of
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following known routes, elephants are increasingly likely to cross cultivated land
inhabited by farming communities when a change in land use occurs.
Since these encounters can prove lethal, the Sri Lankan Department of Wildlife
Conservation (DWC) regularly provides farmers with powerful firecrackers to
fend off elephants. Although this elephant scare-method may save a farmer’s
harvest and perhaps also the lives of crop-raiding elephants by preventing direct
violent conflict, some researchers have suggested that excessive explosions may
impair elephants’ hearing, making them unresponsive to this method of
deterrence.33 Alternatively, they may simply be learning not to fear firecrackers.
Nonetheless, a dilemma arises, since ensuring the survival of the free-roaming
elephant is a national duty when one considers its legal protection, its iconic
status for conservation and national identity, and its fiscal value for generating
tourism revenues. However, the (p.219) intense and lethal conflicts between
humans and elephants are also producing negative attitudes towards
elephants.34
The density of human population and the fragmented elephant habitat leave
some to argue that Sri Lanka no longer possesses wilderness, and hence it no
longer possesses the space to effectively segregate humans from elephants
which conventional conservation has been predicated on. Jamie Lorimer remarks
on the interwoven evolutionary history of humans and elephants on an island in
which living space reserved for elephants gives way to zones of problematic
cohabitation.35 Wilderness is of course as much cultural construct as it is
material reality, one that can be very misleading in the case of biodiverse yet
anthropogenic landscapes. Indeed, it may be fair to say that in Sri Lanka only
shared space exists, where most (but not all) elephant populations inhabit
fragmented territories, with 70 per cent of the population ranging in human
cultivated areas instead of designated protected areas. As Lorimer argues:
‘Elephants and their landscapes—like the vast majority of animals and ecologies
in the anthropocene—are not natural in the singular modern sense of this term.
They are hybrid, dynamic, uncertain and fraught with politico-ethical
responsibilities.’36
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houses to look for and warn off elephants making incursions into their cropland.
Located beyond village boundaries, farmers trekked to their fields in groups for
fear of encountering elephants. As Millawana, an elder from Weragala, (p.220)
explained: ‘Every day, about four or five o’clock, we all go together through the
jungle to the tree houses because it’s more safe when together. In the daytime,
many elephants not come. They come after four o’clock. Most come at night
[sic].’ Stories of elephants attacking people, tree houses, and even houses with
stored rice were numerous, although most often these incidents involved solitary
male elephants, considered to have acquired rogue habits. Although elephants
do not usually feast on onions, preferring other crops like rice, manioc, and
banana, they can easily trample an onion field, costing the farmer thousands of
rupees in lost income. Nimal, a younger farmer previously attacked by a rogue
elephant, told me that he had lost two thirds of the total income from an onion
harvest as a result of a small group in his field. Another farmer, Piyadasa,
explained how he lost forty kilograms of onions in one day from the incursions of
a single elephant. Charles Santiapillai and his colleagues report nearly half of
Sri Lanka’s farming families suffering annual losses of over 20,000 rupees due to
wildlife pests such as elephants. They also note that only 6 per cent of farmers
received compensation from the Sri Lankan government for losses due to
elephant depredations, leaving many families trapped in debt.37 Situations like
these are by no means confined to Sri Lankan farming communities, as can be
seen for instance in the Wayanad district of Kerala, in south India, where
farmers are forced to take large bank loans and where wildlife crop raiding
represents a major threat to human livelihoods.38
Like most Sinhalese people, the farmers in and around Habarana have grown up
with the elephant as an animal with sacred associations and are undoubtedly
aware of its national significance. Sri Lankan elephant experts like Charles
Santiapillai have argued that this spiritual connection should not be discounted
in accounting for the continued existence of the elephant.39 According to
Mahinda, a retired soldier turned farmer, it is crucial to begin every rice and
onion season with religious ceremonies in order to protect the crops:
Before we start, we say to god look after us and our land and then hang
coconut then after harvest say thanks to god and give presents, milk, rice,
betel, everything…. We do this to protect from animals, mostly elephants
because elephants destroy the cultivation therefore (p.221) we ask for
help of god Ganesh because elephants come from all sides and we can’t
escape. Every day, every week sometimes comes and destroys [sic].
While the interviewed farmers were all Buddhist, they asked the Hindu elephant-
god Ganesha to protect their crops. The salience of Ganesha in communities in
proximity to free-roaming elephants does not seem coincidental. When Mahinda
had a successful harvest without substantial economic losses, thanks were given
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to Ganesha by offering various edible gifts as well as prayers from the village
elder, Millawana.
However, the continuous threat this large animal presents for these small
communities has given impetus to farmers to develop new forms of wildlife
knowledge. As with the mahouts, they have acquired new understandings about
elephants, relatively independent of its cultural significance, deriving from
observation, encounter, and even experiment. As farmers have experienced most
raids at night, they have developed a variety of elephant-scaring methods. Other
than firecrackers issued by the Sri Lankan government, shining flashlights,
clapping, yelling, and making small fires are also common tactics deployed to
keep elephants away. Millawana explained how one particular method is very
effective when trying to scare off free-roaming elephants, it involves two hand-
sized pieces of metal. By clicking and rubbing them together, it is possible to
mimic the sound of a reloading shotgun. According to Millawana, elephants
understand what this sign suggests, a potentially deadly weapon. Of the farmers
I met, none admitted to using lethal methods against elephants, which are
illegal. As Weerasekara explained: ‘If we shoot, we go to jail.’ Millawana pointed
out that this form of mimicry could only be effective if elephants had
experienced the use of lethal firearms. This method, then, not only represents
creative improvization, but also reflects the local farmers’ appreciation of
elephants as social beings who can learn and remember.
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Elephants have played significant roles in shaping human life in Sri Lanka, as a
cultural symbol, as a working animal, and as an environmental cohabitant. The
working elephant population is much reduced compared to the past, as
Santiapillai and Wijeyamohan demonstrate in this volume, with its primary
functions restricted to tourism and temples (a context not explored in this
chapter). Although only roughly 120 elephants remain in captivity, the tradition
of intimate companionship between a mahout and his elephant continues. I have
argued that many years of corporeal experience and social interaction with
particular elephants has produced understandings more complex than
dismissive claims of the anthropomorphic extension of human characteristics to
animals can adequately explain. For mahouts, the personhood of their elephants
is constituted in and through the relationship they develop with their non-human
companion. The farmers of Weragala have also acquired new understandings of
free-roaming elephants as distinct individuals through their lived experience of
encounter. My preconceptions of (p.223) elephants were not ostensibly
influenced by a particular religious background or cultural heritage, as were my
human research participants’. Nonetheless, I did arrive in Sri Lanka with
preconceptions about this largest of the land mammals, but their significance
faded as new understandings emerged through the intensity of my interactions
with elephants and my proximity with humans familiar with living with
elephants, free-roaming or captive. While the elephant may never represent for
me a national symbol, a religious deity, or a key constituent of my identity, my
experience of being-in-the-world with elephants has given me access to
knowledge that, at least partially, resembles that of the mahouts and farmers,
whose attitudes and opinions of elephants became meaningful for me as a
participant observing ethnographer.
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Notes:
(1.) D. Wisumperuma, ‘Religious Use of Elephants in Ancient Sri Lanka’, Gajah
37 (2012): 16.
(2.) H.T. Francis and E.J. Thomas, Jataka Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1916), 3; P. Waldau, ‘Religion and Other Animals: Ancient
Themes, Contemporary Challenges’, Animals and Society 8, 3 (2000): 230.
(6.) Har Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass Publications, 1999), 295.
(8.) Teresa Cannon and Peter Davis, Aliya, Stories of the Elephant of Sri Lanka
(Melbourne: Airavata Press, 1995), 17.
(10.) Cannon and Davis, Aliya, Stories of the Elephant of Sri Lanka, 109.
(11.) Fred Kurt and Marion E. Garaï, The Sri Lankan Elephant in Captivity (Sri
Lanka Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2007), 63–5; Lynette Hart and Sundar, ‘Family
Traditions for Mahouts of Asian Elephants’, Anthrozöos 13, 1 (2000): 34–6;
Cannon and Davis, Aliya, Stories of the Elephant of Sri Lanka, 109.
(14.) Jayasena.
(15.) Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, Georgia: University
of Georgia Press, 1984).
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(16.) Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep:
The Emotional Lives of Animals (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., Vintage, 1996), 21.
(17.) For example, see Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss, ‘Elephant Sociality and
Complexity: The Scientific Evidence’, in Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality
of Coexistence, edited by Chris Wemmer and Caterine A. Christen (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 69–98.
(19.) Jayasena.
(20.) See Piers Locke, ‘“Elephants are People Too”: Affective Apprenticeship and
Fieldwork With Nonhuman Informants’, forthcoming in HAU Journal of
Ethnographic Theory.
(22.) See, for example, Gary Varner, ‘Personhood, Memory, and Elephant
Management’, in Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence, edited
by Chris Wemmer and Caterine A. Christen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2008), 41–68.
(23.) C. Painter and C. Lorentz, Phenomenology and the Question of the Non-
human Animal, at the Limits of Experience (The Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 4.
(24.) See Dominique Lestel and Hollis Taylor, ‘Shared Life: An Introduction’,
Social Science Information 52, 2 (2013): 183–6.
(25.) Rane Willerslev, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among
the Siberian Yukaghirs (California: University of California Press, 2007), 20–1.
(27.) Samantha Hurn, Humans and Other Animals: Cross Cultural Perspectives
on Human–Animal Interactions (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 44–7; Willerslev,
Soul Hunters, 19.
(29.) See Charles Santiapillai and S. Wijeyamohan, Chapter 10, this volume.
Page 17 of 18
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DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0011
problem, with different people looking at the species from different angles with
vested interests. While the elephant is loved by the urban elite to whom it
represents a majestic and charismatic species worthy of protection, it is loathed
by many of the rural poor who are disadvantaged and struggling to survive while
sharing their land with it.
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Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka
tuskers, that could batter walls and break through barriers, and numerous
working elephants composed of both sexes that were used in religious
ceremonies and were also employed in a variety of tasks such as hauling timber
and large rocks.
The ancient Greeks and Romans referred to Sri Lanka as Taprobane. According
to Onesicritus, the great historical writer who accompanied Alexander the Great
on his campaigns in Asia, elephants of Taprobane were bigger and more warlike
than those of India.7 The Greek geographer Eratosthenes (third century BCE)
mentions elephants as one of the products of Taprobane, while Dionysius who
lived in the first century CE describes Taprobane as ‘the mother of elephants’.8
According to the great Greek traveller and geographer Megasthenes (350–290
BCE), elephants were routinely exported in boats from Taprobane to India
despite the fact that Indians had already captured and tamed elephants. The
preference was largely due to ‘the greater intelligence, tractability, and
reliability’ of the elephants from Taprobane. In the epic battle at Raphia in 217
BCE,9 the 73 African forest elephants used by Ptolemy were no match against
the 102 Indian elephants of Antiochus.10 It was following this victory that the
demand for Asian elephants in warfare increased. In the first century BCE,
according to Nicholas, the Roman emperor Augustus received as gifts elephants,
‘probably the highly esteemed elephants of Ceylon’.11 According to the sixth-
century Byzantine geographer Cosmas Indicopleustes (‘Indicopleustes’ means
Indian voyager), elephants intended to be used as war-elephants were obtained
chiefly from Ceylon.
To the Persians and Arabs, Sri Lanka was known as Serendib. The one item that
brought the Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Arabs to Sri Lanka was ivory, the
principal article of trade then. There was a huge demand for elephant ivory from
Rome. Ivory was so much a part of everyday life in ancient Rome. Nero used
ivory extensively in every part of his palace, while Seneca is reputed to have
owned 500 tables with ivory legs.12 According to the Mahawamsa, King
Jethatissa II who reigned early in the fourth century was skilled in ivory carving
and taught the craft to many (p.232) of his subjects.13 Much of the ivory came
to India from Africa. Sri Lanka had much fewer tuskers than India. Nevertheless,
ivory carvers from China preferred the tusks from Sri Lanka given ‘the density of
the texture and delicacy of tint’.14
There were several exchanges of trained elephants between the royal families of
Sri Lanka and Burma. In addition, according to Cosmas, given the reputation of
the Sri Lankan elephant in warfare, they were specially bred in the island and
exported.
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came in search of cinnamon, found many war-elephants for sale with the king of
Ceylon. As Nicholas points out, the use of war-elephants in Ceylon predated the
arrival of the Portuguese by nineteen centuries.15 Next to cinnamon, elephants
were the major attraction, which impelled the Portuguese to establish
themselves in the island. The Portuguese established a fort at Colombo in 1518
and, given their interests in commerce, obtained from the king of Kotte a
promise of an annual tribute of cinnamon, precious stones, and elephants. In
1587–8, King Rajasinha I was reputed to have assembled ‘a force of 2,200
elephants, 150 pieces of artillery, and 50,000 fighting men’ to fight the
Portuguese.16 But against the firepower of the Portuguese, elephants proved to
be not an asset but a liability.
Page 4 of 12
Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka
meant ‘elephant quay’.19 In the Vanni region of Ceylon, the only tax paid to the
Portuguese was in elephants.
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Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka
Page 6 of 12
Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka
The elephant being the largest terrestrial herbivore requires relatively large
areas to forage, and hence inhabits a diversity of environments. Assuming that it
takes four square kilometres to support an elephant without upsetting the
natural relationship between the animal and its habitat, for the estimated
population of 6,000 elephants to be sustainable, it would require the exclusive
use of about 24,000 km² or roughly 37 per cent of the total land area. The
government of Sri Lanka has set aside about 13 per cent of the land as
‘protected areas’ (PAs) for conservation of wildlife. Nevertheless, 96 per cent of
them are not large enough to accommodate the entire annual home range of
elephants. Protected areas are not islands, and hence elephants frequently
range outside even the largest reserve. This explains why almost 70 per cent of
the elephant’s range in Sri Lanka lies outside the system of protected areas, and
thereby the animal comes into conflict with man in agricultural areas. The
maximum number of elephants any protected area and its surrounding region
can support would therefore depend on the people’s tolerance of the species. In
other words, unless the people are able to derive some tangible benefit from the
presence of elephants in their neighbourhood, they are unlikely to tolerate the
animals on their land. If people are to co-exist with free-roaming elephants, then
the damage caused by elephants must be properly and promptly compensated.28
In a recent assessment of the human–elephant conflict in Sri Lanka, it was found
that 65 per cent of the people said that they could not co-exist with elephants.29
Although elephants and people favour the same habitats, they do not always mix
well. It is a truism that except at the lowest density, elephants and humans are
fundamentally incompatible.30 This incompatibility increases rapidly as both
elephant and human densities increase. Given the human population at more
than 21 million, (p.237) the present human–elephant ratio of 3,500:1 is
comparable to that seen in West Africa.31 At the current rate of growth, the
human population in Sri Lanka is projected to double in 75 years. If the elephant
population grows at an annual rate of 1.5 per cent, it will double itself in 47
years. As Sukumar argues, when the fertility is kept constant, the population
growth rate is determined primarily by female mortality schedules. In Sri Lanka,
the female mortality in human–elephant conflict is very low.32
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Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka
Bad news travels fast in Sri Lanka, and the elephant deaths are given wide
publicity in the media. Every time an elephant is found dead, the hapless DWC is
blamed for its inability to save it. It appears that elephant mortality may be
slightly exaggerated in Sri Lanka. According to Nicholas, in 1951, on an
average, one elephant was killed per week in defence of crops.33 Back then the
law permitted the killing of any elephant that trespassed or attempted to
trespass upon cultivated lands. From the available records, between 1950 and
1970, a total of 1,163 elephants were lost in the wild in Sri Lanka. This
translates into an annual mortality of about 58 elephants. However, of the 1,163
animals only 639 were actually killed by farmers in defence of their crops, and
hence the annual loss from the human–elephant conflict would have been about
32 elephants. It must be remembered that during that period Sri Lanka had a
much more extensive forest cover (perhaps 50 per cent of the land area) than it
does today. More recent data from the DWC shows that in the 18-year period
from 1990 to 2007, a total of 2,241 elephants died as a result of the human–
elephant conflict and natural causes. This translates into an annual loss of 125
elephants. However, of the total 2,241 elephants who died, 1,258 animals were
known to have succumbed to gunshot injuries, while 33 were poisoned. Thus, on
average, about 72 elephants are being killed or poisoned by irate farmers in the
ongoing human–elephant (p.238) conflict at a time when the forest cover has
declined to less than 22 per cent. The human–elephant conflict is very serious in
the North Western Province where a total of 853 elephants (38 per cent) were
killed from 1990 to 2007.
According to the statistics available at the DWC, during the 16-year period from
1992 to 2007, a total of 866 people were killed by free-roaming elephants, of
which 675 were men and 112 women, and 79 children. Thus on average about
54 people were killed per year by free-roaming elephants in Sri Lanka. Annually,
about the same number of people die from rabid dog bites. Sri Lanka has three
million dogs, of which 20 per cent are strays. In the year 2006, about 150,000
people were bitten by dogs. Poisonous snakes kill about 1,500 people annually.
In 2012, a total of 252 elephants (this number includes not only those that were
killed in the human–elephant conflict but also those that died accidentally on rail
tracks, those that were electrocuted, and those that died of old age) perished in
Sri Lanka, while 66 people lost their lives. If the conflict between man and
elephant is bad today, it is going to be much worse in the decades to come. The
present conflict between man and elephant is the result of competition for land
and its resources, and it has become one of the most serious conservation
problems for which general solutions remain still elusive. It appears that Sri
Lanka may have more elephants than it can sustain without much conflict with
man.
elephant is killed or when elephants retaliate and kill people. Nevertheless, the
DWC must address the legitimate concerns of the rural people who share their
land with elephants and provide tangible help to those who bear the brunt of
elephant depredations.
The Future
Despite the growing concern and measures adopted to deal with the human–
elephant conflict to-date, the problem still remains unresolved. Thus, there is a
need to adopt innovative measures if elephants are to survive in significant
numbers outside the system of protected (p.239) areas. The management of
human–elephant conflict has to be integrated into a proper land-use policy, and
it also must recognize the elephant as an economic asset to the community.
Unless people value living with elephants, the killing of elephants will go on. If
the local people could perceive the elephant as an economic asset instead of an
agricultural pest, then they would tolerate it on their land. One way that local
people can benefit from the elephant in their midst is from the tourist revenues
it generates, whether through small-scale ecotourism or through the
manufacture of paper from dung, production of biogas from dung, or the
promotion of organic farming using dung. Failure to convert the pest into an
asset would only exacerbate the human–elephant conflict and endanger the
survival of many elephants, especially the bulls in agricultural areas. Hostility to
the elephant is very palpable in agricultural communities, and we need to
convert this hostility into an appreciation of the need to conserve the species for
the future. The debate over elephants is an emotional one between the
preservationists and the pragmatists. The problem with wildlife is that the
people who wish to preserve it are rarely those who have to bear the cost.34
Although it is unlikely that the human–elephant conflict can be eliminated
altogether, every effort must be taken to reduce it to tolerable levels.
Sri Lanka has a rapidly growing human population and an economy highly
dependent on agriculture. While thousands of people are struggling to eke out
an existence in the dry zone, elephants are prospering both within and outside
protected areas. In areas of high human–elephant conflict, there is a need to
capture marauding elephants and bring them into captivity. Management
measures such as elephant drives and elephant translocations have largely failed
to reduce the conflict. In the end, conservation of the elephant in Sri Lanka is
inextricably linked to the welfare of the people who bear the brunt of elephant
depredations. It is they who will decide for how long and on what terms can
elephants continue to share our world.
Page 9 of 12
Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka
Notes:
(1.) Michael J.B. Green, The World Conservation Monitoring Centre, IUCN
Directory of South Asian Protected Areas (Gland, Switzerland, and Cambridge,
UK: IUCN—The World Conservation Union, 1990).
(2.) C.W. Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in
Antiquity (i) The Sinhalese Period’, The Ceylon Forester 1, 3 (1954): 52–8.
(3.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(i) The Sinhalese Period’.
(5.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(i) The Sinhalese Period’.
(6.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(i) The Sinhalese Period’.
(7.) D.P.M. Weerakkody, Taprobanê: Ancient Sri Lanka as Known to the Greeks
and Romans (Brepols: Turnhout, 1997).
(8.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(i) The Sinhalese Period’.
(9.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(i) The Sinhalese Period’.
(11.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(i) The Sinhalese Period’.
(12.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(i) The Sinhalese Period’.
(13.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(i) The Sinhalese Period’; Rohan Jayetilleke, ‘The Highest Standard of
Abhidhamma Learning in Myanmar’. The Daily News, 3 September 2003, http://
archives.dailynews.lk/2003/09/03/fea06.html.
Page 10 of 12
Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka
(16.) C.W. Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in
Antiquity (ii) The Portuguese, Dutch and British Periods’, The Ceylon Forester 1,
4 (1954): 103−11.
(17.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(ii) The Portuguese, Dutch and British Periods’, 103−11.
(18.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(ii) The Portuguese, Dutch and British Periods’, The Ceylon Forester, 1, 4 (1954):
103−11.
(20.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(ii) The Portuguese, Dutch and British Periods’.
(21.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(ii) The Portuguese, Dutch and British Periods’.
(22.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(ii) The Portuguese, Dutch and British Periods’.
(23.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book: The Ceylon Elephant in Antiquity
(ii) The Portuguese, Dutch and British Periods’.
(25.) Cao Thi Ly, ‘Current Status of Asian Elephants in Vietnam’, Gajah 35
(2011): 104–9.
(28.) Graham Child, Wildlife and People: The Zimbabwean Success: How the
Conflict Between Animals and People Became Progress for Both (Harare:
Wisdom Foundation, 1995).
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Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka
(30.) T. Ferrar, ‘Wildlife and Society’, in Guidelines for the Management of Large
Mammals in African Conservation Areas, edited by A. A. Ferrar (Pretoria: South
African National Scientific Programmes Report No. 69, 1983), 35–50.
(31.) H.T. Dublin, T.O. McShane, and J. Newby, Conserving Africa’s Elephants:
Current Issues and Priorities for Action (Gland, Switzerland: WWF-International,
1997).
(33.) C.W. Nicholas, ‘The Present Status of the Ceylon Elephant’, Ceylon Today 1
(1952): 19–21.
(34.) S.K. Eltringham, ‘Can Wildlife Pay Its Way?’ Oryx, 28, 3 (1994): 163–8.
Page 12 of 12
Elephant–Human Dandi
Elephant–Human Dandi
How Humans and Elephants Move through the Fringes of Forest and Village
Paul G. Keil
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0012
The village of Chakardo, on the outskirts of the major city of Guwahati (Gauhati)
in Assam, is located along the fringes of elephant habitat. In order to study how
locals live alongside free-roaming elephants, one needs to follow various paths
and be aware of where human and elephant paths intersect. Habitually revisited
routes are important aspects of the lives of both animals and are also significant
Page 1 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
While the humanities and social sciences have often ignored the agency of
animals in their research, there is now a shift in the humanist disciplines to open
up our social and historical narratives and frameworks to the presence and
effects of animals.4 By acknowledging and focusing on the fact that we live
alongside animals, interspecies narratives attempt to capture the reciprocating
interactions that shape everyday lives, with an emphasis on exploring the agency
of non-human animals within those interactions. As a theoretical project, it seeks
to challenge the modern ontological boundaries that divide, idealize, and
Page 2 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
juxtapose the domains of the human and the non-human, nature and culture.
Experiences of living alongside animals that give cause to challenge such divides
often lead to questions about how the interspecies trajectories of humans and
animals unfold in the context of inhabiting shared, hybrid spaces.5 (p.244)
This chapter draws heavily upon the conceptual language of anthropologist Tim
Ingold, who asks us to think of life lived along paths—and not bound within
particular spaces—and how we become enmeshed with other things, living and
non-living, through the course of inhabiting a world understood by movement
and growth.6 I take the question of paths quite literally and investigate how
humans and elephants move through their daily practices and their environment
at my field-site; how the trails, roads, and corridors they traverse are both co-
constituted and shared; and how the two species negotiate encounters along
these routes. These paths followed by elephant and human intersect and
converge in various ways, continuously opening and closing.7
I begin with Tim Ingold’s work concept of life as lived along paths, and apply it
to elephants and humans, keen to show that their entangled habitat can reveal
something different from the common trope of conflict. I then introduce the
field-site, describing two ethnographic examples of meeting elephants. The first
looks at a main dandi in the (p.245) forest, considering how humans and
elephants utilize the same trails. The second concentrates on an elephant
corridor that runs through the village, focusing on the range of local and global
threads tied into and facilitating the elephant’s movement through non-forest
Page 3 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
Page 4 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
and elephants inhabit and shape through the course of their dwelling are often
intertwined.
A crucial feature of the places that humans and elephants inhabit are paths that
have emerged from their wayfaring. Forest tracks and corridors can be integral
landscape features for understanding elephant behaviour. Colonial and hunting
literature report accounts of elephants using well-worn trails across mountain
slopes.16 Forest elephants in the northern Congo have created and maintained
permanent elephant tracks over the years, producing routes between preferred
fruit trees.17 Elephants will return to the same corridors, moving between
ecological zones on a seasonal basis.18 At Chakardo, too, elephants are
exceptional producers and maintainers of paths. In some parts, the forest is
made more accessible through a vast web of dirt tracks that have been carved
out of the vegetation by herds moving across the landscape. Elephants will
habitually revisit and move within the same sections of the village in order to
travel to the wetland. Both elephants and humans utilize paths in the landscape
in a habitual manner, through practical activities that help constitute relations
with plants and animals, and through movements that reflect seasonal changes.
Paths are traces of the relationships we form and reform, in turn shaping the
course that we take in the future. (p.247)
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Elephant–Human Dandi
cover in Assam dropped from 25.2 per cent to 17.2 per cent.24 Many of the 5,620
elephants in the state live within government-managed forests, though they will
also incorporate anthropogenic landscapes into their ranges.25 The paths of
humans and elephants have begun to cross more frequently, and often with
tragic effect.
The classic example of intersecting paths is the ‘caution: elephant corridor’ sign
that is found across certain sections of highways throughout Assam. Elephants
will utilize parts of the human-dominated landscape—such as tea gardens—as a
corridor between fragmented forests.26 Crops planted and harvested by humans
are sites of conflict between humans and elephants. For villagers who live (p.
248) on the forest fringes, deaths often occur due to people accidentally coming
across an elephant.27 The problem of conflict is not only an increasing problem
in Assam and elsewhere, but is also the generally accepted narrative in scientific
and conservation studies of human–elephant interactions: ‘When elephants and
humans interact, there is conflict from crop raiding by elephants, injuries and
deaths to humans caused by elephants, elephants killed by poachers for ivory,
and habitat degradation caused by humans.’28
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Elephant–Human Dandi
should be free from human agency. By invoking this critique (p.249) I do not
mean to imply that the causal reasons for HEC are incorrect or solutions offered
are impractical, nor that integrative solutions are not considered, for example,
‘corridors of tolerance’.32 Rather, beginning an analysis of human–elephant
interactions from a conflict angle limits its focus only on the punctuated and
violent instances of the human–elephant interface. Conflict studies ignore the
everyday encounters that may occur throughout the year or in other less
affected areas. Further, it conceptualizes a world where human and elephant
places are exclusive and at odds with each other, instead of, as this chapter will
argue from an ethnoelephantological perspective, deeply entangled and not so
easily divided. Envisioning a more integrated unit of analysis between
anthropogenic and other ecologies, a human–non-human social landscape may
allow us to move beyond the dynamic of competition and conflict.33 In other
words, there might be other stories to tell regarding humans and elephants
crossing paths on the fringes between wild and domesticated space.
Forest–Village–Railway–Wetland Landscape
The modern landscape, distribution, and population of elephants in Assam have
been influenced by British colonization and regulated flows of forest resources,
including elephants.34 The Rani-Garbhanga Reserve Forest (RGRF), was first put
under the management of the Forest Department in 1882, and leased for
elephant capture operations in the mid-twentieth century. The RGRF elephants
feed on a variety of grasses, shrubs, leaves, fruit, and bamboo, particularly in
the northern Rani section, a hilly terrain that extends south to the state of
Meghalaya.35 In Assam and Meghalaya, fragmented pockets of forest have been
disconnected from the RGRF due to deforestation and the lines of human
development and infrastructure. As a result, elephant populations that would
previously migrate across the RGRF range have been isolated, stranded in
fragmented forests and wildlife sanctuaries.36
The Karbi inhabitants of Chakardo have practised cultivation here for at least
150 years.37 Since the Assam capital was relocated in nearby Dispur in 1972,
there has been a steady increase in settlements in the area. Proximity to the city
has resulted in changes to socio-economic (p.250) status and local practices at
Chakardo, and the younger generation are more engaged in urban economies,
and only a handful of families continue to cultivate rice. Being close to the city,
land prices have increased, and poorer rural inhabitants are easily persuaded to
sell their land to property prospectors and commercial enterprises. Regardless,
a section of the community remains socio-economically disadvantaged, and many
of the older generation consider themselves as farmers and daily wage
labourers. The need for firewood means that it is often while cutting wood in the
forest that this poorer stratum of society will encounter elephants.
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Elephant–Human Dandi
The Deepor Beel wildlife sanctuary, protected due to its impressive migratory
bird population, sits on the northern side of Chakardo and serves as a place for
elephants to bathe and to consume wetland vegetation. Elephants need to pass
through human habitation from the RGRF hills in order to access the wetland,
and, according to local memory, have done so for generations. A dramatic shift
in the elephant–human relationship resulted from the construction of a
controversial train line that passes through the forest–wetland ecology, and
Chakardo itself. Operational since 2001, train accidents have resulted in twelve
elephant deaths. In response to the first elephant death in 2004, forest officers
of the Guwahati Wildlife Division were mobilized to monitor elephant movement
across the rail line towards the wetlands, and warn incoming trains of any
elephant presence or crossing.
Within the RGRF there are a number of well-known main dandi that elephants
will follow in order to move between different parts of the forest. These can be
mapped along the low lying tracts within the hilly landscape.38 A main forest
path will branch into a complex web of trails along the hills closest to the village,
but elephants will exit the forest boundary only along two major routes in order
to access the wetland. Both are located at Chakardo and each of these routes
requires crossing a railway track.39 The following section will illustrate
ethnographic stories of encounters with elephants along the forest dandi that
runs from the forest village called Chatar, through to Chakardo village. The
section after will focus on human-elephant entanglements along the pathway to
the wetlands on the western side of Chakardo village. The ethnographic
examples involve meeting the same herd of elephants on a single day, at
separate times and in separate places, along these routes. (p.251)
It was March, so there had been no recent rain, and we could see some obvious
traces of where the dandi had been sculpted by elephant footprints, now dried.
The earth was hard and pounded flat and wide, indicating years of repeated use
by these heavy animals, a characteristic of elephant paths.40 We chuckled
knowingly as we passed a bamboo clump that had been uprooted. Intentionally
or not, it had widened the trail. Other kinds of temporary traces revealed
elephant movement and presence. Dung of various age was laid out
Page 8 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
intermittently along the trail, and occasionally we saw fresh bamboo leaves
scattered along the path. This dandi ran from Chatar village to Chakardo, and
herds of elephants would take it frequently when travelling to Deepor Beel from
further within the forest. Elephants have had a long relationship with the
wetland and its plant life. At the start of monsoon, when the weather is the
hottest, the waters of the beel swell and reach out to the hills, and the elephants
come to bathe. Water hyacinth and lilies cover the surface and provide fodder
for elephants who may stay during the day. The dandi that led through the forest
towards this area might be classified as ‘boulevards’, long elephant paths that
allow quick access to different locations across the landscape.41 The structural
features of the landscape often determine the main routes that elephants will
forge, the main trails avoiding continuous ascent and descent. The path is a
trace of a relationship with the beel that has been revisited for generations and
continues to guide the present population.
Villagers appreciate how elephants use the dandi, though humans adopt the trail
for their own purposes. Locals recall humans using (p.252) these paths for
generations, particularly due to the direct route it afforded between villages.
The trail is utilized for ‘business’ as another friend tells me. He himself moved
between villages to sell goats, for example, on which he made a decent profit.
The several times I have taken this track we have passed men transporting
heavy pieces of illegally cut wood, the flat, easily traversed path no doubt a
boon. Others simply use the trail to access the nearby hills to collect firewood. It
is the rural poor, those still dependent on wood collecting, who most often take
advantage of these paths given shape by elephants.
Branching off or cutting across the main dandi were other trails, some recently
formed, with freshly crushed grass and scrub where elephants had fashioned
new lines in their continuous search for food. Other older tracks were now in
disuse and difficult to follow: the tracks barely visible, overgrown with shrub. On
another day, I followed a man on a small trail, climbing up a nearby hill to a
place where he knew dead branches lay. The rains had recently begun and the
water-starved plants, responding eagerly, had grown and covered the path. He
sliced the new growth with a large blade, maintaining the path, saying it would
turn into ‘jungle’ if he did not do so. New trails are forged and old trails
disappear continuously, depending upon the availability of resources along these
paths. I asked him if this was a haathi dandi. ‘Elephants, people … it’s the same,’
he replied. All create, maintain, and participate in the same shifting web of paths
throughout the forest.
These paths, and the courses they take, have been shaped by other histories
apart from the local human and non-human population. Chatar village was a
forest village established as a base by the British colonial government for
managing resource extraction. This trail was used as a main road by the colonial
Forest Department to access the village. As early as 1909, this path was marked
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Elephant–Human Dandi
We may understand these paths and the landscape they draw together as hybrid,
since they are constituted by the activity of multiple species. The threads of our
daily practices and social lives intermingle with the threads of non-human lives;
we follow paths shaped over time to more-than-human purpose. For instance,
the highway and railway system in Indiana, USA, grew from bison trails that
traced their way across the country.45 When we look at maps, at the pathways
followed by humans across generations that guide our movements upon the
landscape, we find that these culturally formed traces are not exclusively
human, and are not purely the products of planned intention imposed upon a
natural world. Instead, the lines of human movement and growth often merge
with and emerge from the lines of other animals we follow and engage with, and,
‘[v]ery often, humans take over from where non-humans have left off’.46
As Ingold and Vergunst remind us, walking is a social activity, attuned and
responsive to the flows of other things.47 Attending to tracks that guide our
movements along these hybrid paths, we engage with lives lived by other
wayfarers through the traces they leave behind. The remains of an old fire, a
whiskey bottle, and an empty tobacco packet suggested to me the evidence of
previous leisure (p.254) activity, perhaps somewhat illicit, and most likely
involving more than one person. Similarly, the traces of elephants suggested
Page 10 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
We occasionally passed others who travelled on the same forest trails. Walking,
we could hear the sound of wood being cut by persons perched on nearby hills,
and we often met locals returning home with bundles of bamboo. One kilometre
inside the forest, we passed a group of four men, hurrying in the opposite
direction, carrying no wood. There were elephants up ahead on the trail, they
told us. They were unclear about how many there were, but it was clear that the
men were not interested in staying. We pressed on, not wanting to turn back,
slowing our pace and keeping quiet, listening closely. Not much further we came
across the smouldering wood of a small fire, likely from the group of men we had
just met.
Page 11 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
aware of them until they are on the path behind you. I was advised to run off
trail and uphill, if such an encounter was to occur.
While paths are co-produced by human and elephant, and while both species
travel on the same trails through the forest, these are trails that should not be
occupied simultaneously. The presence of elephants inhibits human movement,
and villagers have learnt to safely occupy this shared landscape by developing
skills of awareness and strategies for avoidance. Generally, elephants do not
walk the hills closest to village during the day and keep to places and paths
deeper inside the forest. At dusk they draw closer, appearing outside of forest
cover only at night. Knowing this, people will rarely walk through the hills
during the evening. In Köhler’s ethnography of the Baka people, he notes a
similar negotiation of foraging spaces with the forest elephants in the Congo:
Baka gather during the day and elephants ‘gather’ at night.49 The elephants
typically avoid the Baka, possibly due to a remembered history of poaching.
Köhler interprets these as sites of potential conflict. While this may be valid, we
also might read this sharing of place differently, interpreting these alternative
foraging times as strategies of avoidance played out along a web of trails shared
by both human and elephant.
Domestic animals are not the only animals with whom my movement along this
road becomes entangled. Occasionally, one might be waved down by the
torchlight of a forest officer, instructing one to stop, switch off lights, and take
care as elephants are descending from the hills and are soon to follow their own
paths towards the wetland. Nowadays, elephants will only cross this road during
the evening at specific locations and return before the sun rises. Forest officers
will assemble along the road in order to monitor the elephants and make sure
they cross the railway line safely. This main corridor is comprised of a large
agricultural plot that extends from the hillside and to the shores of Deepor Beel.
There are no signs of a dirt track like in the forest; the paddy field defines the
path taken. Nestled between hills and houses, it is a large, flat section of land
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Elephant–Human Dandi
that affords not only wet rice cultivation, but also less impeded movement for
elephants. Despite increasing pressure from elephants on this particular piece of
land, a few farmers still persist in cultivating the paddies here.
This sentiment extends to the trains on the railway line that cuts through the
rice paddies, the dandi, parts of the village itself, and also the bodies of domestic
animals, humans, and elephants. After the recent death of a local forest officer
by a speeding goods train, a friend angrily remarked that all animals, human and
non-human, were no longer able ‘to move freely between the beel and the village
anymore’, as was their habit in the past. Since the rail line’s construction, not
only have elephant visitations dropped, but other animals such as deer and
leopards also no longer go to the wetland, though this is likely compounded by
other lineal developments and, possibly, by water pollution. As Ingold notes, ‘A
trunk road, railway, or pipeline cuts the byways frequented by humans and
animals in the vicinity.’50 Indeed, in Chakardo some locals see the railway as
cutting the RGRF–Deepor Beel landscape literally into two. Forest officers
believe that elephants and domestic animals have adapted and learnt the
dangers of the railway track. Still, approaching herds in the vicinity will huddle
fearfully together upon the sound of an approaching train.
One evening at Chakardo, after I had arrived at the dandi, the elephants were
cautious to make an appearance. We could not see the herd beyond the dark
cover of the treeline. The cracking of bamboo branches during feeding could be
heard earlier, but now a fallen silence indicated the herd was descending. Their
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Elephant–Human Dandi
Elephant deaths at RGRF–Deepor Beel have become less frequent in the last few
years. It was the first death in 2004 that served as the catalyst that brought
attention to the site as a corridor and threaded together local, state, and global
actors who have now become entangled with the dandi and manage it. Nightly
patrols by the Guwahati Wildlife Division now monitor elephants year-round,
gathering information about forest sightings, and mobilizing at the corridor if an
elephant is expected to take that route. They are currently assisted by a village
organized ‘elephant committee’, also funded by the Forest Department. These
elephant monitors will inform the railway control and station masters, who will
then notify a ‘caution’ to train drivers if elephants are approaching. Generally,
drivers are required to travel at a reduced speed and sound their horn to alert
elephants while moving through the conflict zone where paths intersect. The
monitors will stand guard by the rail line and halt the train if need be. Minimal
casualties now occur because of these coordinated efforts. (p.259)
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Elephant–Human Dandi
On the ground, national and global interests in the movements of elephants and
the maintenance of haathi dandi are enacted through the expertise of local
villagers. The casual forest officers and the elephant committee are all Chakardo
residents and all have extensive experience with free-roaming elephants. They
have knowledge of the landscape and movement patterns, and are able to
predict when and where elephants will appear in the evening. If intervention is
necessary, they know how to successfully influence elephant behaviour.
Furthermore, since they not only serve state and conservation interests in
preventing rail deaths, but also their own, these men will patrol pathway
boundaries and constrain elephant movement, making sure that the lines that
elephants take on their way to Deepor Beel do not deviate and become
problematically entangled with local concerns. Standing on either side of the
corridor and following the herds as they thread their way to wetlands, monitors
will shine torches, make loud grunting sounds, and occasionally light crackers to
produce loud explosions that will frighten off any elephants whose movements
are leading them too close to homes or the rice paddies that line the edges of the
corridor.
Elephants of RGRF are tied to Deepor Beel, their persistent revisiting reflects
the important role the wetland plays in their lives across generations. The paths
that guide their movement are constituted by (p.260) a host of forces that
serve to both inhibit and facilitate this relationship. Boundary walls and
speeding trains sever this relationship, but other humans help maintain the
corridor by mediating cars, trains, and other people, enabling continued
movement to the beel. When they emerge from the forest to cross to the
wetland, the elephants must negotiate a dense assemblage of human actors
whose influence gives shape to this path. Rather than just a connection between
two habitat zones, the corridor can be better conceived as an intermediary social
and political ecology that an elephant moves within and to which they must
remain attentive in order to safely revisit places.
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Elephant–Human Dandi
For the elephants that descended that evening, the path was cautiously engaged.
Those monitoring the elephants were aware of this response and made sure
lights were turned off, the path was kept dark, and that people maintained their
distance and kept quiet. The explicit presence and threat of humans was
minimized. Finally, in the dark shadows, the herd exited into the open field and
pressed ahead anxiously. Their movements were slow, quiet, and the bodies of
the young kept close as the herd huddled tightly together. The elephants would
momentarily halt and sometimes raise their trunks in the air, scanning the area
for sensorial traces of whoever might be present. Keeping our distance,
minimizing our presence, and opening up the corridor served not only to lessen
the anxiety and speed at which the elephants moved, but also shortened the time
the local guards had to wait until returning home for dinner. Sometimes, in
order to hurry up the elephants, village monitors will begin yelling and
screaming, frightening the animals from behind and coercing the herd to run, so
that they might enter the wetlands or return to the forest quicker.
Giving elephants space and allowing them freedom of passage are concerns
shared at local, state, and global levels. Many locals, possibly due to a lifetime of
experiencing elephants travelling through their agricultural living space, are
respectful towards elephants and tolerant of their presence. Outside of harvest
season, and prior to the need to monitor elephants crossing the rail line, people
were generally unconcerned about elephant’s movement between the hills and
the wetland. This attitude is supported by the broader Assamese belief that
elephants, as an animal incarnation of Ganesh, should not be disturbed.
Practical forms of knowledge shared by villagers acknowledge that that
surrounding elephants, not giving them space (p.261) to move, or simply
coming in close proximity to them, will agitate the animal and may result in the
elephant charging at you. In terms of religious values, it is believed that being
respectful towards the elephant as a living god will help ensure the elephant
does not cross your path at another time and punish you for mistreating him.
Speaking to a local shop owner, whose property is situated right next to a nearby
elephant corridor, I ask him whether he is ever afraid that elephants will damage
his home or harm his family. He tells me that when elephants come, he never
disturbs them, teases them, or throws rocks at them. And, more importantly, he
always acknowledges Ganesh Baba, he says as he raises his hands to his head,
simulating prayer. It is commonly believed that to disturb or tease the elephants,
to think bad thoughts, or curse the animal-deity is to invite the wrath of
revengeful elephants at a later date. Honouring Ganesh, according to some
villagers, protects one from harm in forest and in village. Of course adherence to
these beliefs varies. That evening, when elephants were crossing the paddy field,
an older lady who lived by the dandi called out to Ganesh Baba; a group of
adolescents present sniggered in response. The young men crept closer; the
possibility of provoking a dangerous response from the elephants as they
Page 16 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
crossed the road was exciting for them. The local older men issued a stern
warning, telling them to keep back.
While the lives and traces of humans play a vital role in maintaining and
patrolling the corridor, it is the elephant itself that activates the existence of the
pathway through this human-dominated landscape. On the ground, one never
forgets how formidable elephants are. Their huge bodies are dangerous to our
slower and more fragile frames, whether the threat is intentional or not. The
matriarch of the herd was cautious when she walked with her small children on
a path partly constituted by human activity, but her sheer size and ears flared as
a cautionary signal gave humans reason to give the animal a wide berth. When
forest officers stop cars, they do so not only to allay the elephants’ fears, but
also to ensure the safety of the drivers. Even when a train hits an elephant, there
is threat of derailment. Elephants, despite the obstacle that the railway line
presents, and in addition to on top of the other obstructing aspects of the
landscape including buildings and roads, still persist in following their evening
routes and maintaining connection with the wetland. And while the corridor (p.
262) intersects with a range of human threads and traces, when it is animated
through the elephant’s movement, the paddy fields, roads, and train lines
become co-opted temporarily into a haathi dandi. Humans cannot move through
the world in the same way that they would if the elephants were not present. A
farmer, who was ploughing his field, was asked whether he had seen any
elephants lately; he paused and replied with a sweeping hand motion across the
field, ‘This is a haathi dandi.’ Those that live along these intersecting paths
recognize that the land and what it affords can be something both for
themselves and for elephants.
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Elephant–Human Dandi
We can see then that the intersections between human and elephant worlds are
more complicated than that disclosed by the segregating opposition of the
human to the non-human. On the other hand it would be incorrect to posit that
human interests, paths, and traces can be perfectly aligned with those of
elephants. Indeed, as Maan Barua notes, ‘People’s lives and the tracks of
elephants get entangled with institutions of power.’59 We need to differentiate
varying human agents, local and state, current and historical, that construct
paths to different and sometimes conflicting purposes. While elephants have
been negatively affected by the traces of peoples dwelling in the area, so too
have other locals through development by more powerful figures. Linear
infrastructure such as rail lines represent ‘lines of occupation’, which are
unresponsive to the environment through which they pass.60 Trains do not slow
down or stop easily; their speeds and bodies are lethal to things that cross their
path. They literally cut a path through the landscape, severing relationships,
oblivious to the concerns of local lives, human and non-human alike. The tangled
threads of elephants, local villagers, urban commercial enterprise, and state
development, and conservation must be teased apart and the relations of power
appreciated.
I argue that in order to go beyond the limiting trope of conflict, we need to grasp
an integrated human and non-human landscape. This chapter has attempted to
overcome opposition between human and elephant habitats and lives, focusing
on human–elephant dandi as pathways that both species inhabit, binding
together forest and village ecologies. However, distinctions between the two
places are still meaningful, and both species are sensitive to this difference.
Humans, for example, have clear ideas about where the village ends and the
hilly forests start, and some will reverently invoke god’s name before crossing
the threshold. Similarly, elephants will display caution (p.264) before emerging
from forest cover, and when they do, it is very rarely during the daytime. The
dynamics of human and elephant interaction also vary depending on the context
Page 18 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
in which they encounter each other. As one farmer joked with me, if a human
and an elephant cross paths in the forest, the human will flee, but when they
meet in the village, it is the elephant who is more likely to be afraid.
Conflict is not the entirety of possible relations. Conflict zones can have severe
health consequences on both humans and elephants.61 The tension that
permeates these seasonal encounters undoubtedly affects villagers’ responses
towards elephants, and vice versa. The stories in this chapter explore mundane
engagements that occur throughout the year and that are generally
characterized by moments of tolerance between human and non-human
communities at sensitive fringes. By thinking along paths, we are able to
imagine both conflicting intersections and convergent movements. However, risk
of injury and death are always present possibilities on the lines that humans and
elephants take through the shared landscape. Furthermore, due to reduction of
forest habitat and increased proximity, encounters along these shared pathways
become more frequent, intimate, unpredictable, and aggressive as elephant and
human paths begin knotting in ways that they did not before. Villagers will
testify that whereas in the past elephants were more likely to avoid humans, now
they appear more often and are likely to charge. Neither volatile conflict nor
harmonious coexistence adequately captures how humans and elephants move
through forest and village. Instead, we need to think in terms of a continuum of
interspecies entanglements in order to better conceptualize human life
alongside potentially dangerous wild animals. We must also keep in mind that
the human–elephant dynamic analysed in this chapter is particular to Chakardo,
and that human–elephant landscapes with different histories, ecologies, and
agencies may reveal different patterns of interspecies engagement.
Notes:
(1.) Piers Locke, ‘Explorations in Ethnoelephantology: Social, Historical, and
Ecological Intersections between Asian Elephants and Humans’, Environment
and Society: Advances in Research 4, 1 (2013): 79–97.
(2.) See Haraway’s description of how she came to see ‘Jim’s dog’ in Donna
Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008).
(3.) For an excellent analysis of case studies illustrating the psychological impact
of conflict on rural farmers, see S. Jadhav and M. Barua, ‘The Elephant Vanishes:
Impact of Human-Elephant Conflict on People’s Wellbeing’, Health and Place 18,
6 (2012): 1356–65.
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(6.) In particular, see T. Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (New York: Routledge,
2007), chapter 3 and; T. Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge
and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011), chapter 12.
(13.) For some examples of how Asian elephants ‘engineer’ habitats for other
organisms, and also distribute seeds, see R.M. Pringle, ‘Elephants as Agents of
Habitat Creation for Small Vertebrates at the Patch Scale’, Ecology 89, 1 (2008):
26–33; Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, ‘Shit Happens (to Be Useful)! Use of Elephant
Dung as Habitat by Amphibians’, Biotropica 41, 4 (2009): 406–7; Ahimsa
Campos-Arceiz and Steve Blake, ‘Megagardeners of the Forest—The Role of
Elephants in Seed Dispersal’, Acta Oecologica 37, 6 (2011): 542–53.
(14.) Paul Jepson, Maan Barua, Richard J. Ladle, and Kathleen Buckingham,
‘Towards an Intradisciplinary Bio-geography: A Response to Lorimer’s ‘Lively
Page 21 of 26
Elephant–Human Dandi
(16.) P.D. Stracey, Elephant Gold (New Delhi: Nataraj Publishers, 1991), 27.
(17.) Stephen Blake and Clement Inkamba-Nkulu, ‘Fruit, Minerals, and Forest
Elephant Trails: Do All Roads Lead to Rome?’ Biotropica 36, 3 (2004): 392–401;
Hildé Vanleeuwé and Annié Gautier-Hion, ‘Forest Elephant Paths and
Movements at the Odzala National Park, Congo: The Role of Clearings and
Marantaceae Forests’, African Journal of Ecology 36, 2 (1998): 174–82.
(19.) James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York:
Psychology Press, [1986] 2013), chapter 8.
(20.) ‘Always distinct and clearly indicated, such traces embody the ‘values’
assigned to particular routes: danger, safety, waiting, promise’ (Henri Lefebvre,
The Production of Space [Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991], 118).
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Elephant–Human Dandi
(27.) J. Borah, K. Thakuria, K.K. Baruah, N.K. Sarma, and K. Deka, ‘Man–
Elephant Conflict Problem: A Case Study’, Zoos’ Print 20, 7 (2005): 22–4.
(29.) Raman Sukumar, The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behavior, and
Conservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 298.
(30.) While the term ‘encroachment’ is more often used in conservation NGO
reports, it is occasionally deployed in the academic literature, for instance, in
Anwaruddin Choudhury, ‘Human–Elephant Conflicts in Northeast India’, Human
Dimensions of Wildlife 9, 4 (2004): 261–70; Scott Wilson, Tamy E. Davies,
Nandita Hazarika, and Alexandra Zimmerman, ‘Understanding Spatial and
Temporal Patterns of Human–Elephant Conflict in Assam, India’, Oryx 49, 1
(2015): 140–9.
(35.) One of the few studies on elephants and elephant ecology at RGRF: J. Borah
and K. Deka, ‘Nutritional Evaluation of Forage Preferred by Wild Elephants in
the Rani Forest Range, Assam, India’, Gajah 28 (2008): 41–3.
(36.) B.N. Talukdar notes how the population that is now isolated in
Nongkhyllem wildlife sanctuary in Meghalaya state and Amchang wildlife
sanctuary in Assam would previously range in Rani-Garbhanga reserve forest.
Anonymous, Elephants in Assam.
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Elephant–Human Dandi
(37.) This 1869 map illustrates the presence of Chakardo, and surrounding
villages such as Pamohi, 150 years ago. All were inhabited by Karbi population.
J.P. Walker, Map of Assam, Kamrup District, 1865–69 (Assam State Archives,
Dispur, 1869).
(38.) A map drawn up for the Assam Forest Department in 2006 details these
‘corridors’ along the low lying tracts. See, http://assamforest.in/NP_Sanctuaries/
wls_DeeporBeel.php accessed 11/10/2015.
(39.) Ten years prior there were other points where herds of elephants would
emerge, often to raid crops. However, these are no longer used; in many places
land has been sold to prospectors and is no longer cultivated to grow rice and
stand fallow, divided into blocks by knee high walls.
(41.) It should be noted that the authors found that boulevards keep to the
ridges above streams. This did not hold true for the dandi in this paper, which
passed over in parts through a very shallow brook, although the path followed
the general rule and persisted along the path of least resistance (H. Vanleeuwé
and A. Gautier-Hion, ‘Forest Elephant Paths and Movements at the Odzala
National Park, Congo: The Role of Clearings and Marantaceae Forests’, African
Journal of Ecology 36, 2 [1998]: 174–82).
(42.) D.P. Copeland, Working Plan of Kamrup Sal Reserves, Situated on the South
Bank of the Brahmaputra River (Shillong: Eastern Bengal and Assam Secretariat
Printing Office, 1909).
(44.) For instance, ‘It has been said that the elephants have engineered and the
Looshais have improved the paths along the ridges; and it appears that with a
little cutting and pioneering, men and probably some pack animals might get
along well enough’ (Accounts and Papers of the House of Commons, Parliament
of Great Britain, 1872, 155) and Dr Ball, the botanist, reports of fieldwork in
West Bengal, ‘On most of the hills, the elephants have made paths with a gentle
ascent … where these existed I was enabled to do my work, [which] made me
frequently bless them and regard them, no matter what they might be to the
ryots, as at least my benefactors’ (V. Ball, Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1868, 30).
(45.) John A. Jakle, ‘The American Bison and the Human Occupance of the Ohio
Valley’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, 4 (1968): 299–
305.
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Elephant–Human Dandi
(48.) For instance, ‘But, like it or not, flesh-to-flesh and face-to-face, I have
inherited these histories through touch with my dogs, and my obligations in the
world are different because of that fact’ (D.J. Haraway, When Species Meet
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 97).
(51.) For a remarkable photo of a devout man laying bananas and touching the
feet of a wild tusker on National Highway 39 in Nambor Forest, Assam, see A.
Choudhury, A Naturalist in Karbi Anglong (Guwahati: Gibbon books, 2009).
(52.) Project Elephant was established in 1992, and the Elephant task Force
released its report in 2010. See, M. Rangarajan, A. Desai, R. Sukumar, P.S. Easa,
V. Menon, S. Vincent, Suparna Ganguly, B.K. Talukdar, Brijendra Singh, Divya
Mudappa, Sushant Chowdhary, and A.N. Prasad, Gajah. Securing the Future for
Elephants in India. The Report of the Elephant Taskforce (New Delhi: Ministry of
Environment and Forests, Government of India, 2010).
(53.) Maan Barua, Jatin Tamuly, and Riyaz Akhtar Ahmed, ‘Mutiny or Clear
Sailing? Examining the Role of the Asian Elephant as a Flagship Species’,
Human Dimensions of Wildlife 15, 2 (2010): 145–60.
(55.) See WTI’s report on train hit mitigation: U.K. Sarma, P.S. Easa, and V.
Menon, Deadly Tracks: A Scientific Approach to Understanding and Mitigating
Elephant Mortality Due to Train Hits in Assam, Occasional Report No. 24 (New
Delhi: Wildlife Trust of India, 2008).
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(60.) ‘These connections are lines of occupation … Drawn cross-country, they are
inclined to ride roughshod over the lines of habitation that are woven into it,
cutting them as, for example, a trunk road, railway or pipeline cuts the byways
frequented by humans and animals in the vicinity through which it
passes’ (Ingold, Lines, Chapter 3, p. 81).
Page 26 of 26
Challenges of Coexistence
Challenges of Coexistence
Human–Elephant Conflicts in Wayanad, Kerala, South India
Ursula Münster
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0013
Outsmarting Technology
‘They are just like us’ was the claim frequently made regarding elephant
behaviour and intelligence by small-scale agriculturalists living at the border of
the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary in Kerala, south India. The local cultivators
encounter free-roaming elephants on an almost daily basis in their paddy fields,
coconut plantations, and vegetable gardens at the forest fringes. The elephant
trenches and solar-powered electric fences that the forest department builds to
Page 1 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
protect agricultural land from elephant invasions hardly detain the hungry
herbivores from crop raiding. ‘The elephants quickly learn how to overcome all
obstacles that we have set up to keep them away,’ a young cultivator told me
who had just lost a large part of his yearly paddy harvest after the incursion of
an elephant herd the previous night. He recounted witnessing a new technique
by which elephants succeeded in crossing the three-metre-deep trenches that
demarcate the physical boundary between field and forest along most stretches
of the sanctuary’s fringes. ‘Some wild elephants watch us humans for many
hours (p.273) from a safe distance in the forest. They then learn to imitate us,’
he commented, describing how the large animals, ‘just like humans’, developed
the kinaesthetic skill to balance over the narrow plank that reached over the
trench and used their trunk to grab the wire that served as a handhold.
This was not the only occasion when I encountered stories about the astonishing
intelligence [budhi] and learning abilities of elephants during the twelve months
of my ethnographic fieldwork at the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary spanning the
years between 2008 and 2014. The human inhabitants of the region vividly
described the creative strategies elephants have developed to access appetizing
and energy-rich cultivated crops. Especially during the rainy season of the
south-west monsoon, from June to August, when jackfruits and mangos ripen
and paddy growing on the wetlands shoots up, elephants find numerous methods
to jump over high concrete walls, fell tall trees, or use their non-conductive
tusks to tear down electric fences, enabling them to trespass on human crop
land.
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Challenges of Coexistence
To understand how human–elephant conflicts have emerged and play out in the
lives of both species, this chapter draws into conversation different human ways
of knowing and experiencing elephants. Since 2008, I have conducted more than
seventy interviews with wildlife scientists, forest officials, wildlife veterinarians,
and biologists who strive to understand elephant behaviour through the methods
of biology, ecology, and genomics, using detached ethological observation,
remote sensing technologies, radio-telemetry, camera traps, and genetic analysis
as ways of producing measurable and quantifiable data about elephants. My
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Challenges of Coexistence
This chapter first discusses the challenges that elephants and humans face when
living and surviving together in a fragmented landscape of forests and
agricultural land. Second, it describes how colonial and post-colonial
anthropogenic disturbance has produced a socio-ecological crisis in the forest
that affects multispecies communities in profound ways. Third, the chapter
ethnographically engages with the naturalcultural conflict zones where violent
interspecies clashes occur, in which it becomes clear how humans and elephants
have affected each other while living together in disturbed environments.
Fourth, the chapter brings in human stories about elephant behaviour that
illustrate how elephants are understood as highly intelligent species that adapt
to living in a changing naturalcultural network of people, plants, infrastructure,
and technologies of wildlife management. Finally, the chapter summarizes how a
multispecies approach to human–elephant conflict can facilitate a more nuanced
and multi-layered discussion about the problems of human–elephant existence in
contemporary crisis zones.
Page 4 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
The WWS, adjoining the tiger reserves (TRs) and national parks (NPs) of
Mudumalai, Bandipur, and Nagarhole, are part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve
(NBR), which was established in 1986 as India’s first biosphere reserve under
UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere programme (MAB). Along with elephants,
numerous other endangered species of flora and fauna find asylum in the NBR:
animals that have gained ‘totemic status’9 in India such as India’s ‘national
animal’, the tiger (Panthera tigris),10 as well as the gaur (Bos gaurus), the
leopard (Panthera pardus), the sloth bear (Melursus ursinus), and the lion-tailed
macaque (Macaca silenus) all live here. The largest contiguous part of the NBR’s
total area of 5,520 square kilometres is located in the south Indian states of
Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, where ambitious regimes of wildlife protection have
intensified over the years.11 In Kerala, the reserve’s area is comparatively small:
the WWS has only 344 square kilometres and is located in a fragmented
landscape of settler, traditional, and adivasi12 cultivation in which cash crop
production13 and tourism14 have emerged as the backbone of the economy in
recent years. The WWS, nevertheless, is of great importance within the larger
conservation landscape of the Western Ghats as it provides a crucial corridor for
the seasonal migration of many species, in particular, the long-ranging
elephants.
Unlike the insular habitats of central and north-eastern India, the national parks
and protected areas of the NBR are interconnected through fragile corridors
that provide passage for elephants and other species to move within larger
landscapes. Elephant corridors are considered vitally important for the long-
term survival of this species in the densely populated south Indian environment.
Biologists argue that the genetic variability of a species is a key factor for its
continuing survival.15 Elephant populations living in insular habitats with little
Page 5 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
However, elephants have another motive for risky ventures into human
landscapes: ‘It is their passion for tasty food that attracts them to our
settlements,’ said Sanjay, a Kurichiya farmer, who grows paddy on the adivasis’
communal land in one of the WWS’s forest enclosures. Like most of Wayanad’s
cultivators at the forest fringes, Sanjay has become an ardent observer of
elephant behaviour. He memorizes the days, times, and seasons when elephant
herds arrive near his hamlet. To be able to make a living by cultivating his fields
near the forest, he watches elephants and other forest animals closely, adjusting
his cropping patterns to their food habits. Sanjay and the fellow paddy
cultivators of his teradavu, the hamlet where Kurichiyas live together in joint
families, noticed that in the rainy season, when the huge mango tree close to
their hamlet is fruiting, the sweet fragrance attracts elephants from far away.
Each year, the same group of elephants regularly feasts on the tender mangoes.
They spend all night eating until they have almost finished the tree in the early
morning hours. Likewise, elephants’ (p.279) desire for jackfruits leads them
into dangerous raiding expeditions. ‘Like us, they just cannot resist the fruits’
delicious smell,’ Sanjay explained. Elephants, who are renowned in Wayanad for
their exceptional memories, recall their routes: the oldest matriarch teaches the
Page 6 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
young ones about the best feeding places, where the most tasty and nutritious
food is. Crop raiders, as the wildlife vet also explained, thus teach this behaviour
to their offspring.
For the Forest Department officials I met, managing these endangered and
potentially dangerous animals at a conservation borderland, in close proximity to
human settlements, was the most challenging task they had encountered in their
careers. Conflicts with elephants and competition over resources are hard to
avoid, as biologists have asserted, because they share similar ecological needs
with humans, such as a preference for fertile and water-rich landscapes.19 In
addition, human activity has not only altered agricultural landscapes and turned
domesticated species into food-crops, but it has also transformed the so-called
jungle into ‘naturalcultural contact zones’ where traces of human presence are
ubiquitous. Today’s wildlife sanctuary is a highly managed space that has
developed into a landscape of crisis for many species.20
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Challenges of Coexistence
Even though humans had been part of the Wayanad forest ecosystem for
centuries in pre-colonial times, it was the arrival of the British that marked an
ecological watershed in the region’s environmental history. Since British times,
the Indian Forest Department has converted one-third of the WWS, 101.48
square kilometres out of the sanctuary’s total area of 344.44 square kilometres,
into monoculture plantations of teak, eucalyptus, and silver oak worth ‘billions of
rupees’.23 The protected area’s timber plantations are a colonial legacy: the
British East India Company discovered the wealth of teak in south India’s
Malabar region as early as 1805, and, subsequently, Wayanad’s forest areas
became subject to the extraction-oriented management regime of the colonial
Forest Department. In 1889, forest reservations were established and the British
imperial government brought wide areas of forest commons under direct state
control by declaring them ‘reserved forests’.24 The empire’s aim was to
maximize timber extraction without exhausting overall timber stocks. With the
help of ‘tribal workers’, mainly members of the hunting and gathering
Kattunaika, the British practised large-scale capture of elephants in trapping
pits.25 Kattunaika men took over the role of mahouts to train the captive
elephants for commercial timber extraction. Elephants and mahouts were
economically essential for colonial logging and timber production in this remote
forest (p.281) region. Timber works continued after Independence in 1947. It
was only in the 1980s that the Indian government shifted its management
paradigm from extraction to conservation and sold most of their eighty to ninety
working elephants by auction to temples, zoos, and private owners.
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Challenges of Coexistence
According to the Forest Department staff, these fast-growing plants are the
cause of increasing conflicts with elephants. These invasive plants reduce food
availability for the mega-herbivores since they are not eaten by elephants,
reproduce rapidly, and colonize spaces previously supporting grazing grass. As
foresters noted, even more disquieting is the fact that Lantana, in particular, can
grow so high that in many places elephants cannot see humans when they are
walking through the forest and vice-versa. If an elephant unexpectedly
encounters a human behind a Lantana thicket, being startled it often charges,
and attacks. Most deadly accidents happen either when people are walking
through the forest under the influence of alcohol or if an elephant unexpectedly
encounters a human. Several attempts have been made by the Forest
Department, environmental groups, and NGOs to eradicate these plants. Due to
the fast vegetative reproduction and heavy seed dispersing abilities of Lantana
(p.282) and Eupatorium, these projects, however, have not been successful so
far.27
Legal reasons also prevent the Forest Department improving the ecological
conditions for elephants and other animals in the forest. ‘We cannot even remove
one single teak tree from this sanctuary, because this is a protected area,’ a
former wildlife warden complained. Since the implementation of the Indian
Wildlife (Protection) Act (1973) and the Forest (Conservation) Act (1980), timber
activities are not permitted in India’s national parks, protected areas, or wildlife
sanctuaries. As per these laws, human activities are limited to a minimum in the
last havens of so-called wilderness. No more trees can be cut, not even the trees
on the former plantations. Yet, restoring the biodiversity of the forest, as the
wildlife warden and ecologists explained, would require selective felling, as well
as forest floor clearance, to enable native species to return. Attempts to
implement habitat restoration schemes, as suggested by local environmental
activists and members of Wayanad’s nature protection group (Wayanad
Prakrithri Samrakshana Samidhi), have had little success so far.28
within the sanctuary, the grazing impact is alarming.’29 The presence of cattle is
widely noticeable in many areas of the sanctuary. The grazing herds of ungulates
compact the soil, leading to severe soil erosion. (p.283)
To reduce the disturbance caused by cattle for elephants and other wildlife,
environmental activists and forest officials regard the relocation of adivasi
settlements as a major solution. Legally, only members of Wayanad’s adivasi
groups have the customary rights to send their cattle into the forest for
grazing.30 Yet, rumours abound among forest officials and forest-dwelling
farmers that ‘outsiders’ from the neighbouring state of Karnataka purchase
large herds of young cattle and buffalos and pay adivasis money to raise and
herd them until they are large enough to be slaughtered and their meat sold to
city-dwelling Muslims in the southern parts of Kerala. The sanctuary’s disease
ecologist was especially alarmed by these facts. Domestic cattle often act as
vectors of contagious diseases like foot and mouth disease, anthrax, or
rinderpest, which also spreads to wildlife.
Besides the disturbance caused for elephants by domestic cattle grazing illegally
in the forest, Kattunaika watchers and mahouts, who encounter free-roaming
elephants almost on a daily basis, drew my attention to another source of
trouble: ‘the animals on two legs’ are causing the most distress, as a Kattunaika
forest watcher put it. More and more wildlife tourists visit the WWS every year,
touring the sanctuary on drive-through jeep tours organized by the Forest
Department.31 The majority of them are domestic tourists from south India’s
growing urban centres like Bengaluru, Mysuru, or Kozhikode. On peak holidays
and weekends, there are up to fifty jeep trips a day taking tourist groups
through a fragile forest environment. The jeeps go slow and make a lot of noise
on the badly maintained roads. In the dry season they trail a cloud of dust.
Kattunaika workers who live in colonies near the sanctuary’s entrance are hired
by the forest department to accompany the jeep trips. These men, called
‘trackers’, stand on the jeep’s rear bunker-bar and their task is to spot wildlife
while the vehicle is running. They tell the driver to reduce the speed or even to
stop when they a see a herd of barking deer nearby, when a gaur is grazing in a
meadow, or when they spot an elephant between the trees. Madan, a young
tracker, described the irritation this form of drive-through tourism may cause to
wildlife:
Some tourists are not satisfied with the mere sighting of an elephant. They
like to see it walk or do something different. So they tease it. Sometimes
they shout at the animal, sometimes they even throw (p.284) stones at
them. Many tourists also want to feed the animals, so they throw banana
and biscuits, even though that is forbidden. That is why elephants are also
chasing [oodikkuka] tourists now.
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Challenges of Coexistence
Madan has grown up near the sanctuary’s entrance at the elephant camp. He
has closely watched wild and captive elephants since his youth. The wildlife
tracker interpreted the constant noise pollution caused by the jeeps and the
irritation of elephants by tourists as important reasons why the animals are
becoming more aggressive in the forests. Madan explained that in the summer
season, when it is hot in the forests and there is less water, elephants tend to
behave more aggressively towards people.
Tourism brings another challenge for wildlife management: human waste. All
along the busy highway 212 that connects Wayanad to the large cities of
Bengaluru and Mysuru, elephants and other forest animals, especially monkeys
and deer, congregate at the roadside to lick the salty plastic bags and scavenge
on picnickers’ leftovers. The wildlife veterinarian’s post-mortems provide
testimony to the human detritus that has entered the bodies of wildlife: images
of his post-mortem-dissections show plastic bags in the stomachs of elephants
and other mammals, and even a pesticide sack in the belly of a tiger. Some all-
male tourists groups come to drink alcohol in the forests. As forest workers
living in an adivasi colony near the highway explained to me, elephants are
especially attracted by the leftover bottles and empty beer cans. Once
habituated to feeding on waste, elephants and other forest animals are drawn to
this easily available source of food, regularly visiting these places of human
detritus.
Page 11 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
reporting the loss of agricultural crops due to wild animal attack. Since then, the
Forest Department has disbursed 5.10 crore rupees as compensation for these
damages. Since 2006, twenty-six people have been killed due to attacks by wild
animals. Behind these statistics is a very real experience of fear at the forest
boundary: people have experienced the trauma of violent animal attacks, human
death, and severe material loss through crop raids.33 In early 2011 alone, three
people lost their lives in elephant raids. While I was conducting fieldwork in
April 2011, the rage against the Forest Department turned violent after a
sixteen-year-old girl was killed by an elephant tusker while she was on her way
to Sunday school. As the news spread, more than 500 people gathered at the
scene. Grief and anger led to spontaneous arson of the forest, and the agitated
bystanders did not allow for the corpse to be taken for autopsy until the
Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) arrived in person.
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Challenges of Coexistence
In olden times, we would work all together to drive away the elephants.
Our men took turns in watching the paddy fields. That is why we managed
to deal with the animals. Today, more animals come out of the forest for
crop raiding. The young generation, however, is not interested in staying
up all night. They expect the forest department to protect us from crop
raiding.
Raju, like other Kurichiya elders, held the lack of community cohesion
responsible for the inability to cope with crop-raiding elephants. Many Kurichiya
and Kurumar farmers are increasingly giving up their joint family farming
system.38 They have divided their communally owned land into small privately
owned patches. Thus, fewer families collaborate to protect their fields. The few
wetlands near the wildlife sanctuary that are still cultivated are those of adivasi
communities who still live on their land and feel responsible for guarding their
crops. Many cultivators though, especially the Christian settlers who arrived in
Page 13 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
the Wayanad region after the 1960s, are increasingly giving up rice farming near
the forest fringes or in forest enclosures. Most of them don’t have the ‘man-
power to drive elephants from their fields’, as Raju explained. Consequently,
some sell their land to outsiders or (p.288) to real estate companies currently
investing in Wayanad’s expanding tourism industry that sees wildlife as a
marketable asset.39 Some farmers articulated their frustration about the
government and the Forest Department failing to ensure they could continue to
survive on the land they owned, and, as George, a Christian settler-cultivator put
it, ‘to keep their elephants out of our fields’.
According to biologists and local observers, the most troublesome animals are
sexually mature elephant bulls whose dominance rank is determined by body
size and structure.42 Dr Zacharia, the vet, explained that 89 per cent of all crop-
raiding conflicts are with bulls. Only 2 per cent of the conflicts happen with
elephant herds. Adult elephant bulls, especially the tuskless makhnas, require a
great deal of ‘high-energy food’ and thus exhibit what the doctor called ‘high-
risk-taking behaviour’ in search of calories. Adult bulls often display heightened
aggression towards humans and other elephants, especially during their period
of musth, when elephant bulls have heightened levels of testosterone and display
very aggressive behaviour. Musth typically occurs once a year in adult bulls and,
on average, lasts for one to three months. During this time, the elephant’s
temporal glands, located behind the eyes, swell and secrete the musth fluid,
which has a pungent smell. For elephants, who have a sensitive chemosensory
system, this smell is an olfactory signal of the bull’s dominance and his urge to
procreate.43 (p.289)
Elephant herds, particularly those with small calves, rarely enter the fields, as
they are aware of the imminent danger they are exposed to when encountering
humans who violently drive them away, throw stones, torches, or fire crackers at
them or shoot at them with small-charge rifles. Adult bulls, however, the doctor
recounted, have developed a special strategy to distribute the risks they are
facing: they join together in so-called ‘crop raiding cooperating groups’. The vet,
who frequently enters diverse and remote parts of the sanctuary, has observed
Page 14 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
that elephant bulls access and raid cultivated paddy fields in a group of six and
more animals. They have learned to form these strategic loose bonds through
what the doctor called ‘male adult schooling’.44 They learn from their
conspecifics that it is safer, more effective, and less risky to raid the fields
together.
When all other ‘traditional’ methods fail in driving away these ‘rogue raiders’
from the fields, the Forest Department calls Raju, one of the sanctuary’s
elephant mahouts. Together with one of the Forest Departments’ captive kumkhi
bulls Dinesh, he often travels long distances to start night-time elephant-scaring
operations. Raju, who is the first mahout, usually sits on top of Dinesh and drives
him close to the crop raiders in the field, accompanied by a team of adivasi
forest watchers. Sometimes, the mahouts explained, moments of intra- species
conflict occur when the trained bulls start fights with their free-roaming
counterparts in order to defend their human handlers. One particular incident
illustrates the unity of the mahout–kumkhi assemblage during elephant-scaring
manoeuvres. Once, Dinesh unexpectedly picked up the metal chain that he
carried around his head and grabbed it with his trunk. Without even waiting for
the mahout’s command, he started to use the chain to beat the crop-raiding bull.
As the mahouts explained, Dinesh’s display established his dominance,
intimidating the rogue bull who then retreated into the forest.
A particularly risky mission for workers, kumkhis, and their handlers is the
translocation of so-called problem bulls, animals that have a long history of crop-
raiding and violent behaviour towards humans, to more remote areas of the
wildlife sanctuary. Capturing and relocating trouble-making elephants is an
important management strategy in a legal regime that assigns elephants the
uppermost protection status. Such ‘elephant hunts’ are dangerous and require
the support of a large team of Kattunaika workers and mahout–kumkhi teams.
(p.290) In tracking and approaching a free-roaming elephant, they provide
backup for the veterinarian, who needs to come close to shoot the troublesome
bull with a tranquillizer dart. Mahouts and trackers tie ropes around the sedated
animal’s legs; when the animal awakens, after the antidote has been injected,
two kumkhi elephants take the free-roaming elephant between them and, pulling
it with ropes on either side, guide it to a truck that carries it to a more remote
area of the sanctuary or elsewhere in the state.
Page 15 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
when no one is watching, or they will just crop raid somewhere else,’ Radha
explained. For the forest ranger, who has more than twenty-five years of
experience working for the Forest Department, attending to the needs of
humans, listening to people afflicted by the raids, and caring for them were the
most important aspects of mitigating interspecies conflicts and for enabling the
possibilities of coexistence in a shared world.
Like humans, it is argued elephants can also suffer from post-traumatic stress
syndrome.49 Depression, anti-social behaviour, and heightened aggression as a
result of social and ecological stress changes the behavioural characteristics of
an elephant, which can have intergenerational consequences.50 Many of my
interlocutors in Wayanad held the exceptional memory of elephants, in
combination with their ability to acquire behavioural traits though social
learning in a specific herd, as important because of the region’s aggravating
wildlife conflicts. According to Dr Kalai Vanan, a renowned wildlife veterinarian
in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, elephants do not forget the traumatic
experiences of violent conflicts with humans over agricultural fields. Elephants
remember events from a young age onwards, and their individual characters are
moulded through their conflict-ridden interactions with humans. Furthermore,
elephant calves learn crop-raiding habits and aggressive behaviour towards
Page 16 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
humans from the experienced cow (matriarch) who leads their herd. Crop-
raiding behaviour is thus a behaviour that young calves acquire through social
learning in their mother’s herd, Vanan explained. Dr Zacharia, the WWS wildlife
veterinarian, showed me pictures of quite ‘real’ material manifestations of stress
in elephant bodies: his post-mortems report the increasing number of cases of
tuberculosis, (p.292) herpes, low body fat, and parasites that he interpreted as
indicators for stress and disturbance.
Page 17 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
Some farmers have entered what Raman Sukumar has called a ‘resigned
coexistence’ with raiding elephants.56 Many farmers have adopted cropping
pattern to the likes and dislikes of elephants: they avoid planting elephant
Page 18 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
delicacies such as jackfruit, mangos, or banana near their houses. Some have
learned to ‘gently’ drive elephants off their properties without enraging them.
Other farmers send their children to boarding schools in order to circumvent
dangerous walks along the forest line. Engaged foresters collaborate in these
efforts at conviviality by handing out their personal phone numbers for
emergency cases. Others, mainly Kurichiya farmers, have planted old rice
varieties that carry spike, which are less preferable for elephants and other
animals to eat.
This chapter has explored the possibilities that arise for conservation and for
mitigating human–elephant conflicts if we treat elephants not merely in generic
species terms, but take them seriously as individual, adaptive, socially intelligent
animals whose distinctive characters and habits have co-evolved while living
alongside humans in landscapes ecologically disrupted by human activity at the
sanctuary fringes. For understanding the complexities of human–elephant
conflict, we need to consider how the trauma of environmental change, practices
of capture, and violent encounters with humans have shaped individual
elephants’ behavioural dispositions in ways specific to their own biographies,
and have led to disturbed socializations among them.
The chapter is also a call to equally attend to the needs of humans and elephants
at the forest boundary. By drawing into conversation techno-scientific
understandings of elephant–human relations with the vernacular knowledge,
lived experiences, and embodied expertise of local people at the forest frontier,
this chapter has problematized (p.295) the binary of ‘wildlife’ versus ‘people’
that continues to configure and constrain wildlife science.57 By conducting
research that attends to the knowledge and concern of multiple interested
actors, I seek to demonstrate the possibility of productive dialogue between
ethnography, ecology, and wildlife biology. To date, research on elephant
conservation has been limited largely to the ecological sciences, as Thekaekara
notes in this volume. Many wildlife protection initiatives have failed because
they have implemented transnational and national conservation projects from
the ‘top down’, ignoring local environmental, political, and cultural realities.58
Greater recognition of these trans-species, local complexities can contribute to
critical discussion of elephant conservation by ‘de-naturalizing’ and historicizing
social and environmental conditions at the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary.59
Page 19 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
Notes:
(1.) Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008).
(4.) Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
(7.) Elephants don’t like undulating steep terrain. They like to walk a lot, and
they avoid steep slopes. I was told by the foresters and biologists that Wayanad’s
plateau is an ideal elephant-topography.
(8.) Mahesh Rangarajan, Ajay Desai, R. Sukumar, P.S. Easa, Vivek Menon, S.
Vincent, Suparna Ganguly, B.K. Talukdar, Brijendra Singh, Divya Mudappa,
Page 20 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
Sushant Chowdhary, and A.N. Prasad, Gajah: Securing the Future for Elephants
in India. The Report of the Elephant Task Force (New Delhi: Ministry of
Environment and Forests, Government of India, 2010).
(9.) Ramachandra Guha, ‘The Authoritarian Biologist and the Arrogance of Anti-
Humanism: Wildlife Conservation in the Third World’, The Ecologist 27, 1 (1997):
16.
(11.) Daniel Taghioff and Ajit Menon, ‘Can a Tiger Change Its Stripes? The
Politics of Conservation as Translated in Mudumalai’, Economic and Political
Weekly XLV, 28 (2010): 69–76.
(12.) Adivasi is a Hindi word meaning ‘original inhabitant’. I prefer using the
expression ‘adivasi’, rather than ‘tribal’, as it points towards the movement of
India’s indigenous groups to attain political self-determination. However,
Wayanad’s heterogeneous indigenous communities usually refer to themselves
as ‘tribals’, which in scholarly contexts carries discriminatory connotations. In
official contexts (census data, government institutions, etc.), India’s indigenous
groups are termed ‘Scheduled Tribes’ (STs), as declared in the country’s
constitution for purposes of positive discrimination (Government of India,
‘National Commission for Scheduled Tribes’, http://ncst.nic.in, accessed 22 April
2015).
(13.) Daniel Münster, ‘Farmers’ Suicides and the State in India: Conceptual and
Ethnographic Notes from Wayanad, Kerala’, Contributions to Indian Sociology
46, 1–2 (2012): 181–208.
(15.) Interview with Dr Arun Zachariah, wildlife veterinarian. See also Raman
Sukumar, The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behavior, and
Conservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 356.
Page 21 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
(16.) Sukumar, The Living Elephants, 158; A.J.T. Johnsingh and A. Christy
Williams, ‘Elephant Corridors in India: Lessons for Other Elephant Range
Countries’, Oryx 33, 3 (1999): 210−14.
(18.) For crop raiding, see also Sukumar, The Living Elephants, 299–306.
(19.) Fred Kurt, Von Elefanten und Menschen (Bern: Haupt, 2014), 67.
(24.) William Logan, Malabar Manual (Madras: Government Press, 1887), 58.
(25.) P. Premachandran Nair, First Working Plan for the South Wayanad Division,
1977–78 to 1986–87 (Trivandrum: Kerala Forest Department, 1987).
(27.) See also E. M. Manoy, ‘Invasive Plants a Threat to Wildlife’. The Hindu, 20
January 2015, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/invasive-plants-a-
threat-to-wildlife/article6432731.ece?css=print, accessed 30 January 2015.
Page 22 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
(34.) See Daniel Münster, ‘“Ginger Is a Gamble”: Crop Booms, Rural Uncertainty
and the Neoliberalization of Agriculture in South India’, Focaal: Journal of Global
and Historical Anthropology 71 (Spring 2015): 100–13.
(37.) Dan Brockington and James Igoe, ‘Eviction for Conservation: A Global
Overview’, Conservation and Society 4, 3 (2006): 424–70; Nancy Peluso, Rich
Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992).
(38.) T.R. Suma, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, ‘Customary vs. State
Laws of Land Governance: Adivasi Joint Family Farmers Seek Policy Support:
The Case of Kurichiya Joint Families in Wayanad, Southern India’, (Italy:
International Land Coalition, 2014).
(40.) Ursula Münster, ‘Working for the Forest: The Ambivalent Intimacies of
Humans and Elephants in South Indian Wildlife Conservation’, Ethnos (2014): 1–
23; D. Münster, ‘Internal Migration and Agrarian Change in Kerala’.
Page 23 of 24
Challenges of Coexistence
(49.) Kurt, Von Elefanten und Menschen; G.A. Bradshaw, Elephants on the Edge:
What Animals Teach Us about Humanity (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009).
(50.) Kurt, Von Elefanten und Menschen; Bradshaw, Elephants on the Edge.
(53.) Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (London:
Cape, 1982); Barbara J. King, How Animals Grieve (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2013); R.M. Sapolsky, ‘Social Culture among Non-Human
Primates’, Current Anthropology 47, 4 (2006): 641–56; Gary Varner, ‘Personhood,
Memory, and Elephant Management’, in Elephants and Ethics: Towards a
Morality of Coexistence, edited by Chris Wemmer and Catherine A. Christen
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 41−68.
(54.) Lucy E. King, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and Fritz Vollrath, ‘Beehive Fences as
Effective Deterrents for Crop-Raiding Elephants: Field Trials in Northern
Kenya’. African Journal of Ecology 49, 4 (2001): 431–9.
(55.) ‘Our Beehive Fence Design’, Elephants and Bees Project, Save the
Elephants, retrieved from http://elephantsandbees.com/beehive-fence/, accessed
30 January 2015.
(60.) Adams, Against Extinction; Brockington, West, and Igoe, ‘Parks and
Peoples’; Duffy, Nature Crime.
Page 24 of 24
Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0014
elephant’s home range comes under these legally protected areas, with the vast
majority of its range lying outside of these formal conservation zones.1 Their
home range is shared with 20 per cent of the world’s human population, centred
in South Asia, and so many people living in such close proximity with a large and
dangerous species like the elephant, would be impossible in a developed world
context.2 But in a country like India, with a high and growing human population
density of about 400 people every square kilometre, along with fast changing
attitudes and values, living with more than two thirds of the world’s Asian
elephants will be a serious challenge in the future. ‘Human–Elephant
Conflict’ (HEC) and, more broadly, Human–Wildlife Conflict (HWC) are assumed
to (p.301) be inevitable under such circumstances. The normative view among
biologists and conservationists, stemming from the PA-approach of a human–
nature separation, is that as people and wildlife compete for space and
resources, conflict proliferates in shared spaces or at the human–wildlife
interface.3 The term ‘HWC’ is now integral to conservation discourse;
considered ‘one of the main threats to the continued survival of many species in
different parts of the world, it is also a significant threat to local human
populations’.4
Asian elephants epitomize the problem of humans sharing space with wildlife.
Their requirement for food and water is tremendous. They need about 150
kilograms of fodder and 200 litres of water every day.5 They find human
agriculture an attractive food source and cause considerable damage to crops,
often break houses, and sometimes even kill people in accidental encounters.
Their life spans are comparable to humans, and they are one of the most
intelligent species by human indices of cognition. Their brains are comparable to
that of humans in terms of structure and complexity, with the cortex having as
many neurons as in the human brain.6 They are able to use tools, learn quickly,
and cooperate with each other in complex tasks,7 being one of relatively few
animals that are self-aware, respond to the mirror test, and are even able to do
basic arithmetic.8 They have also been observed expressing altruistic behaviour
and are known to mourn their dead through ritualistic behaviour.9 Given the
intelligence and complexity of these animals, simple barriers like electric fences
and trenches, though used extensively and successfully in the short term, have
had very little long-term success in separating human and elephant spaces.
Elephants either learn that their tusks are shock resistant or use insulating dead
wood to break the fences or push mud and fill out the trenches in the monsoons
to be able to get across them.10
Asian Elephants are ‘endangered’ as per the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature (IUCN) criteria, based on the population dropping by
more than 50 per cent in the last three generations (75 years). Despite this
apparent need for ‘conservation’, about fifty elephants are killed by people in
India every year. At the same time, every year about 350 people are killed by
elephants, and they damage over 300,000 hectares of crops, leading to
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
There has been a deluge of literature on the subject of HWC, and a database
search yields 1,049 results, with almost three papers being added every week.12
The majority of the published work is in the field of environmental science (737),
followed by agricultural and biological sciences (533), with the social sciences
coming in third (125).13 The issues of HWC are clearly interdisciplinary and
nuanced, and social scientists have been critical of the dominant role of the
natural sciences in this discourse, which typically aims to ‘solve’ the problem
without engaging in a deeper discussion of how the issue is premised upon a
human–nature dichotomy.14 Wildlife managers ‘tend to be well-trained in their
technologies and wildlife biology, and not well-trained in sociology, anthropology,
economics, history, psychology and political science’.15 They are often guilty of
what anthropologists term ‘naive realism’, assuming that human nature,
perceptions, and motives everywhere are the same, or of ‘ethnocentrism’,
assuming that a scientific way of thinking is naturally superior to local
understandings.16 The need to further understand the ‘human dimension’ is
particularly important since most wildlife managers are ‘outsiders’ who do not
take into account indigenous knowledge, hindering their ability to develop
culturally effective solutions.17 There have been an increasing number of
attempts to better understand what is often termed the ‘human dimension’ of
HWC.18 However, these tend to replicate the dualist presuppositions that
separate the natural from the cultural, and highlight the fact that further
progress is needed to bring about more effective interdisciplinary dialogue.
Page 3 of 30
Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
and avoided encounters. We then draw some conclusions based on these results
to inform a more comprehensive, nuanced, and diverse set of approaches to
human–elephant conflict.
The social groups in the region are hard to classify, but for this chapter we
broadly distinguish them into eight groups (see Table 13.1). (p.306) The
Paniyas, Bettakurumbas, Kattunayakans, and Chettys have been in the region
since record keeping began,25 but of them, the Chettys are not recognized as
‘Schedule Tribes’ like the others26 and are believed to have moved into the
region at some point in the distant past. The recognized ‘immigrants’ moved in
at various points—the plantation owners and ‘local elites’ from the late 1800s
onwards, the Malayali immigrants or ‘chettans’ from Kerala from the 1960s, and
the Sri Lankan repatriates as refugees from the 1980s. And lastly, though not an
ethnic group or community, we classify the Forest Department staff (supported
by local wildlife activists) as a separate stakeholder group or ‘community of
practice’, which has significant influence over the human–elephant interface.27
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
Table 13.1 Summary of the Status of Livelihoods of the Nilgiris’ Human Communities of Interest in Human–Elephant
Conflict
Page 6 of 30
Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
Sri Lankan Repatriates No, 1980s onwards No Wage labourers and small No
scale cash crop farmers
Page 7 of 30
Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
Understanding these groups and their differing relations with wildlife and the
natural environment is essential for comprehending human–elephant relations
within this landscape, although it presents considerable challenges. The Nilgiris
have been highly researched, starting from the early days of colonial
ethnography in the 1830s.28 But the vast majority of this has been limited to the
study of the four groups in the upper plateau of the Nilgiris.29 Very little is
written about the people of the Gudalur region, which includes communities in
this study. Even the basic identification of the different ethnic groups has been
unclear; many of the forest tribes, especially the Kattunayakans, Bettakurumbas,
and Kurumbas, were assumed to be the same and grouped together as the
Kurumbas.30 And the same tribes were often classified differently in different
states, for example Jenu Kurubas in Karnataka and Kattunayakans in Tamilnadu.
Thurston and Rangachari group the two together and also include Shola
Nayakas (Chola Naiackens) from Kerala in the same ethnolinguistic group.
Zvelebil attempts to further correct this by separating the Shola Nayakas from
the rest, but then incorrectly groups them with the Sholigas, a completely
different tribe in Karnataka. Even some recent studies tend to confuse the
different groups, all of which should remind us that ethnic boundaries are
historically emergent and can be fluid.31 While early ethnology provides useful
historical information and is indicative of the social context from which it
emerged, it is important to appreciate their problematic empirical value, with
some of them now considered ‘biased, amateurish and generally of poor
quality’.32 Drawing from the experience (p.307) of The Shola Trust working
among communities in the region, we provide a brief contemporary description
of each of the groups in order to understand the typical patterns of their various
interactions with elephants. Any such simplistic grouping of people is fraught
with generalization, essentialization, and subjectivity, but we make these
distinctions as an heuristic approach for understanding the diversity of
interspecies encounter in the region.
One of the most significant aspects of the Nilgiris relating to the human–
elephant interface is the somewhat unique agricultural land use pattern. The
relatively cooler high altitudes made the region very popular with the British,
and Ooty, the current headquarters of the Nilgiris district, became a popular ‘hill
station’ destination, used as the summer capital of the colonial Madras
Presidency. From the early 1800s, large plantations were established in the
region—tea starting at about 1,200 metres above sea level, and coffee below
that. Tea and coffee continue to be the dominant agricultural land use today,
with small scale agriculturalists and even some of the indigenous communities
taking to planting these cash crops. Neither of these crops faces any direct
threat from elephants or any other wild animals, as they are not eaten by
herbivores. There is only some incidental damage to the plants that occurs when
animals walk through patches. Without direct competition over resources,
Page 8 of 30
Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
There are nevertheless numerous challenges in living with elephants, the most
significant being accidental fatal encounters people have with elephants. In the
last five years, in the Nilgiris district alone, elephants have been responsible for
the death of at least thirty-five people. There is also significant damage to
property—elephants often break down fences and houses, usually out of
curiosity when no one is in the house or when they can ‘smell salt or food grains’
stored in the house. Poor and impoverished families bear the brunt of this—their
dwellings are less resilient than the concrete structures of the more affluent
families, which can withstand elephant attacks. Moreover, the financial burden
of repairing houses damaged by elephants is huge. With expanding human and
elephant populations and territories, coupled with rapid socio-economic and
cultural change and migration, the challenge of peaceable space sharing
increases. (p.308)
We have no problem with these elephants. We know them, and they know
us. Every year we do pooja for ‘Aanedevar’,33 and ask them not to disturb
our village. They listen to us. They don’t come and trouble us here even
though there are lots of jackfruit trees, but all the other people in this
whole area have lot of problems with elephants.34
The village is relatively well known among the other tribal villages in the area
for their rather unique approach to dealing with elephant problems. But in the
neighbouring Kattunayakan village of Gulimoola, the situation is different.
There is no Aanedevaru here anymore. They have all gone to other forests.
These are all other elephants and we don’t know them. They just come
through the village all through the year and have no respect for us.
Nothing serious has happened so far, but it’s getting very dangerous. Only
last week my uncle and his family had to run away from their house to
escape the elephants. The only thing left to do is put up electric fences or
trenches like everyone else is doing. What else can we do?
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
Still, we can’t have fences like the forest department puts up, surrounding
the whole village. Then where will the elephants go? We should put smaller
fences around few houses together, then we also can be safe and the
elephants also can move through to the other side. Smaller things like
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
snakes and rabbits can get killed in these big fences. We can’t also look
after such a large fence, the small ones are much better.
And longer discussions that go beyond the initial description of the problems
allow more nuanced views to emerge:
Electric fences will not really work. Many private estates have them, but
elephants are very intelligent, they know you can’t get a shock (p.310)
through dry wood, and so will throw a dead tree on the fence, break the
wires and then come in. Even if they manage to put some new kind of
fence or a big wall of some kind, it will be good for us, but unfair to
animals. We will get a ladder or somehow find a way to get across and get
what we need from the forests, but then the animals won’t be able to come
out.
The Kattunayakans and Bettakurumbas, along with the other indigenous groups
in the area, are now a minority population. (p.311) The view of elephants from
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
more recent migrants is different. A group from the neighbouring state of Kerala
has come to be called Chettans (elder brother) in the region. The majority of
them are Syrian Christians who converted in the first century CE when St.
Thomas arrived in Kerala. Having arrived in search of agricultural land, they are
considered ‘encroachers’ by the local government and local indigenous people.
Much of the land they occupy was previously inhabited by tribals. Typically
lacking concepts of land ownership recognized by the state and possessing very
few legal titles to the land, the Chettans were able to take over with relative
ease. They also occupied significant areas of government land, where they
claimed squatters’ rights. Known to be hard working, ambitious, and upwardly
mobile, they were quick to accumulate wealth. Their contact with the forest and
its wildlife is very recent, and culturally they lack traditional relations with it.
The local Forest Department hold this community responsible for much of the
poaching in the area, and one village—Manvayal—is believed to have been a hub
for the manufacture of illegal firearms used for poaching.
For how long the Chettans have been in the region is a question that is debated,
and seventy-five years’ residence is the benchmark for eligibility to forest and
land rights under India’s 2006 Forest Rights Act (FRA). Although a fair number
of migrants from Kerala did live in the district in the first half of the 1900s, the
majority of them were Moplahs (Muslim) from the Malabar region who did not
settle in the Nilgiris and were employed in the plantations. Chettan migration
became significant from the 1960s onwards.45 Most of the younger generation
have been through high school and college and are moving out of the region for
work. Given this history, for Chettans, elephants are a constant threat from
which they need the protection of land-management agencies.
Sri Lankan Tamil repatriates, another migrant group, also view elephants as a
constant and expanding threat:
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
but in the last few years they are always here. They come at night and
break down houses. We can’t go out to the toilet in the morning without
fearing for our lives. We can’t come back to our houses from the bus stand
if it gets later than six in the evening. More and more people are getting
killed every year. Either the government should give us land somewhere
else or they should chase all these elephants back to Mudumalai.
These Sri Lankan repatriates are of Indian Tamil origin, who had been taken to
northern Sri Lanka in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries by the
colonial rulers to work on tea plantations. As their population grew, there was
growing resentment among the majority Sinhalese community, and after Sri
Lankan independence, by the early 1960s almost a million Sri Lankan Tamils
were stateless. After numerous diplomatic discussions between India and Sri
Lanka, notably the Shrimavo–Shastri Pact in 1964, between 1967 and 1987
almost half a million Sri Lankan Tamils ‘repatriated’ to India, though it has been
argued that it was more of an ‘expatriation’ from a country that had become
their home.47
The majority of these repatriates were settled in the Nilgiris, where the
government converted large tracts of forests into tea plantations to employ
them. Over the last few decades, many of these families have moved out of these
estates and established their own small agricultural homesteads on government
and forest land, and thus have become encroachers in the eyes of the state and
local ethnic groups. Some, who had been repatriated to other parts of south
India by the government, also moved into the Nilgiris and occupied government
and forest lands, further reinforcing the ‘encroacher’ image. Other (p.313)
tribal groups, particularly the Paniyas, have also lost significant areas of land to
the Sri Lankan repatriates.
In most cases, we find it is the autochthonous groups that are most willing to
consider the rights of elephants to exist, travel, and forage, and also most willing
to criticize the reckless imprudence of human expansion, changing agricultural
practices, and forest management.
No matter what you do, elephants will come to eat bananas. No matter
how big your fence or how deep your trench, if not today or tomorrow, the
elephants will break it and come sooner or later. Even if there is only one
Mudumalai tiger reserve, the forests and elephants are everywhere. You
have to stop planting bananas, that is the only option. Because you plant
bananas there is more risk for everyone in the area. You must stop planting
these things that elephants like to eat.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
When the Chettans came and took over our lands it was not only we
humans who suffered. Lots of animals also used to live on these lands, and
other animals used to come and go. When they want to grow a crop they
start by removing everything else that grows on the land. So no animals
can be there after that.
Forests have decreased a lot in the last 20 years. Before the stretch from
Manvayal to here (the edge of the reserve) was a footpath, with forests on
both sides. Now it is full of houses and people living there.
—Siva, a Chetty from the Muduguli village inside the Mudumalai Tiger
Reserve.
The Chettys (Moundadan and Wayanadan) are considered native to the region,
but surprisingly little has been written of them. Their language is a mix of
Malayalam and Kannada (from the neighbouring states of Kerala and Karnataka)
and they ‘probably gradually emigrated from surrounding areas throughout
preceding centuries and encroached on land in the Nilgiri-Waynad’.49 It is clear
though that they have been in the region for a few centuries at least, and that
they have had other indigenous groups, the Paniyas in particular, locked into
‘bonded labour’ system has been well documented.50 The majority of them were
traditionally engaged in paddy cultivation in low-lying areas.51 They were not
hunter-gatherers, and though they (p.314) have lived in close proximity with
the forests, they do not have a history of dependence on forest products.
The forest department has allowed weeds like Lantana to take over the
forests, and now there is hardly any food or water left in the forest. So of
course the elephants now come out a lot more—they cannot just starve and
die inside.
The members of this group are relatively small in number and do not necessarily
see themselves as a culturally or ethnically distinct group. They come from
varying linguistic and social groups and form a peer group in the Nilgiris that
interacts regularly through social ‘clubs’, where English is the common language
of communication. They largely comprise business people or local estate owners
who own significant tracts of land across the region. The majority of them have
established title for their land and are not considered encroachers like most of
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
the other less powerful groups. Descended from a traditional ruling class, they
participate in politically influential social networks and employ large numbers of
people on their estates. However, globalization of the Indian economy coupled
with a general decline in the agricultural sector has produced for them a fragile
and ambiguous financial status, with many of the tea factories having to close
down. By and large, the younger generation is migrating out of the region to
urban centres in India and other parts of the world, viewing their family estates
more as holiday homes. On the whole, given that elephants do not eat tea or
coffee leaves, there is no immediate threat posed by elephants to this group and
their livelihood.
While almost everyone agrees there is increasing ‘elephant trouble’, the reasons
attributed for this vary significantly among the different communities. The
conservation lobby’s claim of dwindling forests and habitat destruction is
recognized locally, but the majority of forests converted to agriculture have been
privately owned land with natural forest cover, not lands legally classified as
forests. The problem, however, cannot be attributed to decreasing forest cover
alone. Changing management practices in the forest and the proliferation of
inedible ‘weeds’ like Lantana camara are changes that almost all constituent
groups cite as key drivers of human–elephant conflict. (p.315)
We always had to guard the ragi or rice when we planted it. We used to
make a shed in a tree over the crops and sleep there. If elephants came
then the whole family and sometimes even the whole village used to come
and make noise and chase them away. Now children have to go to school in
the day, and most of the village people go for work (labour). You can’t sleep
in the day, so you can’t protect your crops in the night.
The Paniyas are the largest tribe in the region, also inhabiting the neighbouring
district of Wayanad in Kerala and Coorg in Karnataka. They refer to themselves
as Ippimala Makkal, meaning the children of the Ippi mountain—the Banasura
peak of Wayanad. The name is attributed to them by others—Paniya (or Paniyan/
Paniyar) is the Malayalam word for worker, and their own oral history appears to
start with them being enslaved to the Chetty community. Though some refer to a
‘pre-historic’ period where the tribe was autonomous, they also note that
records from as early as the eighth century CE suggest that the Paniyas were an
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
enslaved community.52 The advent of the British in 1792 eventually led to the
abolishment of slavery in the early nineteenth century, though slave transactions
appear to have continued into the early twentieth century. This evolved in to a
system of indentured labour under the Chettys, in which people worked for daily
rations of paddy (unhusked rice) under a one-year verbal contract, a system that
appears to have persisted until 1976.53 Kulirani argues, however, that despite
this long history of enslavement, the mentality and worldview of the Paniyas are
still that of the hunter-gatherer, engaging with the outside world mostly on an
‘immediate returns’ system.54
A Chetty also had a similar view about the causes for increasing elephant
trouble:
The issue of growing elephant populations is another key point of much debate.
Official government statistics suggest the elephant population in India is
growing, a view confirmed by most elephant experts. But counting methods have
kept changing, and none of the experts agree with each other on the exact
elephant numbers. Given their large home ranges, an apparent increase in
population in one area may just be the movement of elephants from one area to
another. Wildlife activists and the Forest Department still fault the people for the
majority of the problems:
These people have all destroyed the elephant habitat, and now they claim
that they have problems with elephants. All of Gudalur used to be pristine
forests before all the encroachers came in and destroyed it. The elephants
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
have no forests left to live in or food to eat. Of course they will have
problems with the people. We need to evict all the people and let the
forests grow back and elephants roam freely.
The Forest Department does not represent a group with homogenous views, but
as a community of practitioners under a singular bureaucratic authority, they
nonetheless represent a key constituency with regard to local politics and policy.
Most of them are not (p.317) permanently resident in the region, as the state
Forest Department has a centralized recruitment process involving frequent
staff movements. A small minority of the staff are locals, but they too are often
transferred to other locations. Since the traditional role of the Forest
Department has been a ‘guns and guards’ approach to wildlife protection,
interactions with other groups are frequently hostile. Irrespective of their
particular orientations towards wildlife, humans in the region are typically
conceived as a hindrance to effective conservation. There is awareness of
differences between indigenous and migrant groups, and the Forest Department
relies heavily on the ‘invisible labour’ of indigenous people, as Münster
documents for Wayanad in neighbouring Kerala.55 Typically, Forest Department
staff subscribes to a modernist view of socio-economic development that
predicts the eradication of traditional value systems; they envision a scenario
where individual aspirations will become homogenous. As a result, cultural
differences are rarely considered relevant to the future of human–wildlife
management. It is also noteworthy that the Forest Department is closely
supported by wildlife activists and a section of the conservationists. For local
communities, the ‘wildlife people’ include the Forest Department as well as
conservationists and ecologists/conservation scientists.
The question of ‘chasing elephants back’ is also heavily debated. If they are at
the edge of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, it is relatively clear and they are
chased back in. But in a patchy matrix of forest, just where elephants ‘belong’ or
to where they should be chased is not clear. Generally, cohabiting elephants
spend the day eating and resting in forest patches and then use the night to
move between patches and raid crops. If there is serious trouble in the night and
people protest, the Forest Department may bring in tamed kumki elephants to
chase the free-roaming elephants. However, this is regarded as more of an
exercise in appeasing public sentiment than a serious attempt to move free-
roaming elephants. Everyone agrees that doing nothing is not a viable option, so
elephants are chased from one forest patch to another on a regular, and now
somewhat ritualized, basis.
The Forest Department, comprising mostly men charged with protecting the
forests and the elephants from the public, have their own set of problems. Their
traditional mandate has been to protect forest (p.318) boundaries, but with
increasing HEC, dealing with it has become a key part of their activities.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
Yes, elephants are by far our biggest problem now, and I appreciate all this
SMS based early warning systems you are trying to set up.56 The monsoon
is coming, and all our staff will now be harassed night and day by the
public. Even if the elephants are peacefully standing in the forest, these
people will gather in huge numbers and demand we chase them off. But we
have nowhere to chase them to. We may push them from one forest patch
to another. Then the people there will make a noise, and we will have to
chase them back. When the people call us we have to go right away.
Otherwise they will start themselves and then it is even worse … some
drunkard may even get killed …
But I have to honestly tell you this SMS system is no use for us. The new
DFO thought he would appease the public and gave his cell phone number
out to everyone. Now he gets calls at all 24 hours of the day, and has to
keep the phone switched off to get some peace …
What will our staff do when they get an SMS about the elephants? They
have no training or resources to deal with this. A simple thing like a jeep—
the first thing we need to get to a spot when there is real trouble: Our
range has two jeeps, but no drivers’ posts are sanctioned. Bitherkad has
one jeep but two drivers, one happily jobless. Cherambady has a jeep and a
driver, but no fuel allowance. This is the story of our forest department. We
have lots of issues to deal with before we can even start to think about how
to solve the elephant problem.
And then come the tea and coffee estates. These estate owners’ and managers’
interactions with elephants are relatively problem free since elephants and all
other herbivores don’t actually eat tea or coffee leaves. But living with large wild
animals is never completely problem free, as described by Mahesh Nair, the
manager of Parry Agro Industries’ Attikunna and Carolyn Tea Estate Divisions:
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
to start thinking of things like contraception for elephants; I hear they are
doing it very successfully in South Africa.57
There are also the smaller family-owned tea estates, and their opinions about
elephants vary widely:
What is this nonsense about coexisting with elephants? All you people talk
big about saving elephants, but who will save the people? What will you
tell the mother of the boy who got killed by an elephant last week in
Pandalur? Elephant numbers are increasing everywhere—you know this
well yourself—but still you all keep talking about saving elephants. From
British times rogue elephants that attack people have been killed, and we
should continue to do so. Elephants will never go extinct or anything
Don’t listen to all these people, my boy. The elephants are our Gods, don’t
forget that. The British came and stole all this land from the elephants and
killed so many of them. Now the elephants are just coming back to their
ancestral homes. They have every right to be here, irrespective of what all
these people say. This land first belongs to the animals. You must make
sure people all understand this, and at the very least allow the elephants to
come through their lands. They have no problems with elephants, they are
just small minded.
I keep our gate locked during the day to keep unwanted people out. But I
leave it open at night, to allow the elephants to move in and out, without
having to knock the gate down! … The herd comes right up to the veranda.
Last week, there were seven of them, they ate up all the flowers, but didn’t
do any other damage. They are actually very peaceful animals if you don’t
trouble them.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
For the estate owners, barring a few individuals with very negative opinions,
elephants can be tolerated since they do not directly compete for their crops—
tea and coffee plantations. However, coexistence has its limits when humans
become victims in encounters with elephants inhabiting the same landscape.
From their perspective, such problem elephants need to be controlled even if
elephants are understood to have the right to occupy their ancestral lands.
1. Demons: ‘During inauspicious times they come in the night like spirits
to torment us. They particularly target some people and houses.’
2. Wild/Unpredictable Animals: ‘They are just animals—you can never say
what they will do, sometime they are peaceful but sometimes they
destroy everything.’
3. Non-human Persons: ‘They are just like us, sometimes some are
peaceful, some trouble us for no reason, some animals are good and some
are bad.’ (p.321)
4. Victims: ‘Now there is not much forest or food left for them, so they
have no choice but to come out.’
5. Gods: With regard to prevalent Hindu belief and the Ganesha deity, the
conflict is explained by saying: ‘All the trouble is because of our sins.’
1. Forests are being destroyed and encroached upon by people, and the
elephants’ habitat is shrinking, forcing them into regular contact with
people.
2. Forests are being degraded, affecting food and water availability in the
forest even if the forest boundaries remain unchanged.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
These different conceptual and explanatory frames vary significantly among the
different communities inhabiting the Nilgiris, as summarized in Table 13.2.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
Table 13.2 Summary of Ethnic Community Perceptions of Elephants and Causal Explanations of Human–Elephant
Conflict
Community Demons Wild Non-Human Victims Gods Habitat Increasing Forest Developmen
Animals Persons Destruction Elephant Degradation t and
Population Changing
Lifestyles
Paniyas √ √ √ √ √
Bettakurum √ √ √ √
bas
Kattunayaka √ √ √ √ √
ns
Chettys √ √ √ √
Sri Lankan √ √ √
Repatriates
Malayalis √ √ √ √
Local Elites √ √ √ √ √
Forest √ √ √ √ √ √
Department
Source: Compiled from the first author’s interviews
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
How can these diverse results be useful in allowing people and elephants to
share space more peacefully in the Nilgiris or elsewhere? The first lesson is to
recognize that the ontological status accorded to elephants may not be shared
by all landscape inhabitants. Similarly, explanations for conflicting coexistence
may vary among inhabitants according to their cultural and ecological
circumstances. Many long-term inhabitants of the Nilgiris also recognize
difference among elephants, many of whom they accommodate to as known
individuals with particular habits and dispositions. A third key lesson emerging
from the Nilgiris is that communities with longer histories of sharing space with
elephants are often better able to live with elephants to the extent they continue
to engage with them through familiar landscapes and livelihood activities.
Indigenous communities, and hunter-gatherers in particular, seem to have a
completely different relationship with elephants, but even rural elites, who have
(p.322) (p.323) been living in the region for nearly a century, seem to have
adapted to living with elephants.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
creating intergroup conflict and, therefore, may hold the key to addressing these
conflicts.’61
At present, the diversity of views and conceptions regarding elephants and HEC
is not incorporated or even recognized in (p.324) conservation planning or
policy at either local, regional, or national scales. The average PA manager or
conservation scientist would be extremely sceptical of the hunter-gatherers’
notion of non-human persons. Yet biologists themselves, after series of
complicated tests, analysis, and observation, have discovered that animals like
dolphins, primates, and elephants have highly advanced mental capabilities,
interpersonal relations, and social structures, and they refer to these animals as
non-human persons.62 A broader understanding of elephants’ status as social
beings ought to be important for formulating future conservation strategies. This
study offers some first steps in this direction for a region where human wildlife
conflict and coexistence is proving to be an increasing challenge.
The ‘preservationist’ ideal, which has been the basis of the wildlife conservation
movement, aims to separate out human and wildlife spaces. In India this involves
elephant-proof trenches and electric fences, along with ‘weaning’ communities
off their forest livelihood base. Through a range of ‘eco-development’ measures
based on the World Bank’s Integrated Conservation and Development
Programme, the understanding is that the shift from material to post-material
need structure is the key to effective conservation. In the idealized post-material
world, individuals are no longer interested in the use of wildlife or forest-based
resources, but more in the preservation of it, for aesthetic and moral reasons, as
has happened in most of the developed countries across the world. But these
boundaries and ‘development’ pathways also put particular stress on human–
elephant relationships. The detailed relational knowledge and mutualist-
animistic perspective of Nilgiris hunter-gatherers is built not on establishing
absolute boundaries for humans versus wildlife but on determining optimal
tolerance and mutualism with wildlife as co-residents in an ecosystem that
should sustain humans and elephants, and which has co-evolved through the
agency of both.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
good starting point for devising more effective approaches for mutual
accommodation and coexistence in the Nilgiris region and beyond.
Notes:
(1.) M. Rangarajan, Ajay Desai, R. Sukumar, P.S. Easa, Vivek Menon, S. Vincent,
Suparna Ganguly, B.K. Talukdar, Brijendra Singh, Divya Mudappa, Sushant
Chowdhary, and A.N. Prasad, Gajah: Securing the Future for Elephants in India,
The Report of the Elephant Task Force (New Delhi: Ministry of Environment and
Forests, Government of India, 2010).
(3.) Andrew Balmford, Joslin L. Moore, Thomas Brooks, Neil Burgess, Louis A.
Hansen, Paul Williams, and Carsten Rahbek, ‘Conservation Conflicts across
Africa’, Science 291, 5513 (2001): 2616–19.
(4.) ‘Human–Wildlife Conflict’, WWF–World Wide Fund for Nature, 2014, http://
wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/species/problems/human_animal_conflict/,
accessed 13 December 2014.
(5.) R. Sukumar, ‘A Brief Review of the Status, Distribution and Biology of Wild
Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus)’, International Zoo Yearbook 40, 1 (2006): 1–
8.
(6.) Gerhard Roth, ‘Is the Human Brain Unique?’ in The Theory of Evolution and
Its Impact, edited by Aldo Fasolo (London, New York: Springer, 2012), 175–87.
(7.) Joshua M Plotnik, Richard Lair, Wirot Suphachoksahakum, and Frans B.M.
de Waal ‘Elephants Know When They Need a Helping Trunk in a Cooperative
Task’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America 108, 12 (March, 2011): 5116–21.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
(17.) Anne Parrish, ‘“There Were No Sus in the Old Days”: Post-Harvest Pest
Management in an Egyptian Oasis village’, Human Organization 54, 2 (1995):
195–204; Knight, Natural enemies.
(18.) Michael J. Manfredo and Ashley A. Dayer, ‘Concepts for Exploring the
Social Aspects of Human–Wildlife Conflict in a Global Context’, Human
Dimensions of Wildlife 9, 4 (2004): 1–20; S.M. Redpath, J. Young, A. Evely, W.M.
Adams, W.J. Sutherland, A. Whitehouse, A. Amar, R.A. Lambert, J.D. Linnell, A.
Watt, and R.J. Gutierréz, ‘Understanding and Managing Conservation Conflicts’,
Trends in Ecology and Evolution 28, 2 (2013): 100–9; A.S. Dickman, S. Marchini,
and M. Manfredo, ‘The Human Dimension in Addressing Conflict with Large
Carnivores’, in Key Topics in Conservation Biology 2, edited by David W.
MacDonald and Katherine J. Willis (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013): 110–26.
(19.) Rangarajan et al., Gajah: Securing the Future for Elephants in India.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
(25.) H.B. Grigg (ed.), A Manual of the Nilagiri District in the Madras Presidency
(Madras: Government Press, 1880).
(26.) The question of indigeneity is much debated in India. Tribals are classified
as ‘Scheduled Tribes’ (ST) in the Indian Constitution and the government refuses
to acknowledge them as indigenous, and uses the term ST, which is more of an
administrative and political construct than an anthropological classification.
India’s refusal to recognize them as ‘indigenous people’, a status denoting
internationally recognized rights to natural resources and more importantly to
self-determination is arguably based on a fear that in doing so it will encourage
ethnic separatist tendencies, jeopardizing the state’s territorial integrity. The
more widely used term in India, however, is ‘adivasi’ or original inhabitant. I use
the terms ‘tribe’, ‘hunter-gatherer’, ‘adivasi’, and ‘tribal’ interchangeably to
refer to these communities.
(28.) Paul Hockings, ‘All Aboard the Nilgiri Express!—Sustained Links between
Anthropology and a Single Indian District’, History and Anthropology 19, 1
(2008): 1–16.
(30.) Lieutenant-Colonel W. Ross King, ‘The Aboriginal Tribes of the Nilgiri Hills’,
Journal of Anthropology 1 (1870–1871): 18–51; David G. Mandelbaum, ‘Culture
Change among the Nilgiri Tribes’, American Anthropologist 43, 1 (1941): 19–26.
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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India
(34.) All quotes in this chapter are from discussions and ethnographic interviews
with people in the Nilgiris. Interviews were in various languages, with notes
written immediately after in English.
(35.) Bird-David, ‘The Giving Environment’; Nurit Bird-David, ‘The Nilgiri Tribal
Systems: A View from Below’, Modern Asian Studies 28, 2 (1994): 339–55; Bird-
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(40.) The World Wide Fund for Nature, India, has been working with the Tamil
Nadu Forest Department and has funded the construction of a solar-powered
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programme as a means of reducing human–elephant conflict.
(41.) Edgar Thurston and K. Rangachari, Castes and Tribes of South India
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(42.) For a similar case with Kattunayakans in Wayanad, see Münster, this
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(47.) Daniel Bass, Everyday Ethnicity in Sri Lanka: Up-Country Tamil Identity
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(56.) The Shola Trust has been involved in setting up an SMS-based early
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(57.) The quote is from a discussion about what the problems with elephants
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About the Editors and Contributors
Editors
Piers Locke
is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Canterbury.
He trained in South Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and
African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and in anthropology at
the University of Kent. In 2015, he was a fellow at the Rachel Carson
Center for Environment and Society, Munich. His research interests
in human–elephant relations began with fieldwork on captive
elephant management in Nepal, during which time he also co-
produced a documentary film called Servants of Ganesh. He is
currently writing a monograph based on this research, and
conducting archival research on the historical photography of
human–elephant relations in colonial South Asia.
Jane Buckingham
is Associate Professor of History at the University of Canterbury, New
Zealand. She specializes in Indian history and has published on
Indian colonial and post-colonial medicine and law, and on ancient
Indian models of business ethics. From June 2009 to January 2010,
she was Indian Centre for Cultural Relations visiting scholar at the
Centre for Business Ethics, Loyola Institute of Business
Administration, Chennai. Her medical history research has focused on
the history of leprosy in both India and the South Pacific and, more
recently, on the history of disability. This collection reflects her strong
interest in the history and culture of human–animal relations, and the
ethics of contemporary animal management practice.
Page 1 of 4
About the Editors and Contributors
(p.355) Contributors
Julian Baker
researches travel, landscape and mobility. His PhD thesis examined
how the palanquin, the elephant, and the railways shaped British
colonial travellers’ experiences of Indian climate and landscape. His
articles thus far have explored narrow-gauge mountain railways, the
aesthetic effects of overnight travel, and palanquin traveller–bearer
relations.
Amy L. Fletcher
is Associate Professor in political science at the University of
Canterbury, New Zealand. Her current research focuses on the
politics of biotechnology. She has recently published a book on
paleogenomics and de-extinction called Mendel’s Ark: Biotechnology
and the Future of Extinction (2014).
Paul G. Keil
is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at Macquarie University. A
Prime Minister’s Endeavour award recipient, Paul conducted
fieldwork in Assam among communities living on the fringes of
elephant habitat. His work attempts to speak across disciplines,
conceptualizing social worlds populated by human and non-human
agents. Previously, Paul has conducted research and published on
competitive sheepdog trials, as well as distributed cognition in older
couples.
Niclas Klixbüll
has an MSc in anthropology from Aarhus University. He conducted
fieldwork with Sinhalese mahouts in Sri Lanka, exploring the role of
anthropomorphism and cultural values in captive elephant
management. His fieldwork included apprenticeship as an elephant
handler at the Millennium Elephant Foundation.
Nicolas Lainé
is a postdoctoral fellow of the Laboratoired’anthropologiesociale,
Collège de France, Paris. He completed his PhD in ethnology on
humans–elephant relations in northeast India at the University of
Paris-West in 2014. He is the co-editor of Nature, Environment,
Society: Conservation, Governance, and Transformation in India
(2012), and he is currently conducting research in Laos, focusing on
local perceptions of elephant disease as well as on the species
heritage process.
Ursula Münster
is a social anthropologist with interests in political ecology, multi-
species ethnography, extinction, and human–wildlife (p.356) conflict
in the Anthropocene. She is a post-doctoral researcher at Ludwig
Maximilian University, Munich, Germany, and the academic
coordinator of the Environmental Studies Certificate Program at the
Page 2 of 4
About the Editors and Contributors
Page 3 of 4
About the Editors and Contributors
Thomas R. Trautmann
is Professor Emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of
Michigan. He has written on ancient Indian history, the
anthropological study of kinship, the history of Orientalist scholarship
on India, and environmental history. His most recent book is
Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (2014) on the
domestication and management of elephants over the last 3,000
years.
S. Wijeyamohan
has been working on elephant conservation in Sri Lanka for over
twenty years. He works at the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey
Center for Asian Elephant Conservation at Rajarata University, Sri
Lanka; he is a research fellow at the University of Peradeniya, Sri
Lanka, and at Missouri State University, USA.
Page 4 of 4
Index
(p.358) Index
accessibility, elephants, 118–25
Achemenid, 55
Acheulian technology, 32
adivasi, 282
Adivasi Munnetra Sangam, 313
Aelian, 67
affordance, 247
Afghanistan, 53, 56
African elephants, 42, 56, 68, 145, 150
agency, 125–31
Agra, 12
agricultural practices, 313, 315
agricultural settlers, 286
ahimsa, 36
Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 38, 62, 93, 94, 98–9, 101, 103
Aipang, 193–200
Airavata, 65
Akbar, 11–13, 38, 92, 93–4
relationship with elephants, 97–105
Akbarnama, 38, 93–4, 97, 100
Al-Biruni, 37
Alexander of Macedon, 34, 54, 55–6
alhaka, 231
Alinacitta Jataka, 207
Al-Rashid, Harun, 68
Amboseli, 265
Anarkelli, 127, 128, 129
ancient DNA, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144
Angara, 83
Angkor, 58
anikastha, 50
Page 1 of 14
Index
animality, 169–71
ankusa, 48–52
Annam, 59
Anthropocene, 4, 5
anthropogenic disturbance, 276–9
anthropomorphism, 128, 214, 216
anti-wildlife activism, 286
Anuradhapura, 18, 21, 206, 217
Aparantas, 83
Appian, 57
apprenticeship, 62–3, 166–7
arson, 285, 286
Artharvaveda, 34
Arthaśāstra, 10–11, 35, 50–51, 75–86
domesticated elephants, management of, 79–84
wild elephants, management of, 77–9
Aryans, 34
Ashoka, 36
Asmun Shukoh, 96
Assam, 21, 247
assemblage, 125, 260, 289 (p.359)
Assyria, 68
atavi, 77
aupavahya, 82
Aurang-gaj, 97
Aurangzeb, 124
Austin, Jeremy, 148
Babur, 93
Babylon, 56, 57
Bai-yi, 60
Ball, Valentine, 13, 118, 119, 121, 124, 126, 128–9
Ban Devi (goddess), 171, 172
bandhana, 79
Bandipur, 277
Bangladesh, 41
Banteay Chmar, 61
Barnum, P.T., 142, 148–149
Bayon, 61
bees, 121, 293, 294
Bengal, 38, 39, 40, 119, 121
Bettakurumbas, 306, 309, 310–11
Bhari, 128
Bharut, 36
Bhutan, 41
Bijapur, 39
Bikram Baba, 173
Bombay Burmah Trading Company, 64
Bourdieu, Pierre, 170
Brand, Stewart, 151
Page 2 of 14
Index
Brhat Samhita, 83
British East India Company, 39
bucardo, 149–50
Buddhism, 18, 36, 206–10, 229
Buigues, Bernard, 145
Bunce, Michael, 146
Burma, 41
Cambodia, 41, 47, 59
capitalist modernity, 290
Carthage, 57
cash crops, 277, 285, 307
Cedi, 83
Ceylon, 39
British period and, 234
Dutch period and, 233–4
Portuguese period and, 232–3
post-colonial period, 234–8
Chaddanta Jataka, 207
Chakardo, 242, 246, 249–50, 253, 255–62
Chalukyas, 37
Cham, 58
Champa, 59
Chandana, 18, 208, 210
Chandellas, 37
Charlemagne, 68
Chatar village, 252
Chembakolly, 310, 313
Chettys, 306, 313–14, 315–16
China, 41, 58–9
Chitwan National Park, 15, 161
Cholas, 37
Church, George, 143, 147
cikitsaka, 65, 80
circus, 68–9, 84, 127, 131, 142, 143, 149
Clovis hunters, 141
collaborative labour, 200–1
colonial period, 39–41
communitas, 172
companionship, 8, 18, 166, 167–9
and interspecies family ties, 210–12
companion species, 8
compensation, 286
Cooper, Alan, 146
cooperation, 17, 186
coordination, 186
Crick, Francis, 148
crop-raiding, 220, 248, 272, 285, 287, 291 (p.360)
custodial labour, 8
customary rights, 283
Page 3 of 14
Index
Sangam, 37
sanyas, 173
Sasa Jataka, 206
Sassanian, 61
satva, 173
satvaguni, 174
Schlingloff, Dieter, 76
Schuster, Stephen C., 144
Seleucus, 56
Shah, 162
Shergir, 104
shikaris, 40
Shoji Okutsu, 145
Shola Trust, 303–4, 307
Siam, 59
Siberia, 138, 145
Soane valley, 121
sociocentric, 173–4
somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), 144
Sorrenson, Richard, 116
Sri Lanka, 18, 19, 20–1, 42, 191
farmers, and free-roaming elephants, 217–18
human–elephant conflict in, 218–19
human–elephant relations in, 205–23, 229–38
religious/symbolic significance of elephant in, 206–10
Storey, Mark, 148
subaltern, 13, 32, 67, 165, 288
subba, 164
Sukumar, Raman, 7, 9, 248
Sumatran elephant, 137–8, 150
Surastra, 83
Syria, 56
Taimyr, 145
tamas, 173
Tamil Nadu, 20, 277, 304, 306
tamoguni, 174 (p.366)
Taprobane, 231
Taq-i Bustan, 61
Tarai, 121, 122, 162
tea gardens, 247
teak, 63, 280, 281
techno-scientific ways of knowing, 275
teradavu, 278
Thailand, 41, 64
Thanjavur, 39
Therpakolly, 308
Thirunelly, 285
timber extraction, 63, 64
timber operations, 190–8
Page 12 of 14
Index
Timur, 95
Timur, Amir, 37
tourism, 20, 117, 131, 162, 218, 277, 283–4, 288
traces (historical), 9, 13, 22, 116, 122, 131, 245, 251, 253, 254, 257, 260, 263, 265
traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), 222
train accidents, 250
training
elephant under, 82
of mahouts, 63
translocation, 14, 139, 289
tributary fealty, 12
trunk, 121, 122, 125
Tsing, Anna, 8
Tunisia, 57
tusk, 83
tuskless makhna, 193
umwelt, 184
Upanishads, 34
upasthayikavarga, 80
vanacaraka, 77
Vanan, Kalai, 291
Van Dooren, Thom, 265, 292
varna, 174
Vedas, 34, 51
veneration, 167
veterinary science, 40
Vietnam, 41
Vijayanagara, 37
vikka, 79
virility, 12, 95, 103
vyala, 82
Wales, Quaritch, 57–8
war elephants, 7, 8, 34–5, 47–52
diffusion of, 52–60
Watson, James, 148
Wayanad, Kerala
conviviality possibilities, 293–5
ecological crisis in, 280–4
human–elephant conflict in, 272–95
naturalcultural conflict zones, 285–8
Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary (WWS), 272, 273, 276–9
wayfaring, 21, 245, 246
Weragala, 18–19, 219–20
Western Ghats, 52, 277, 278, 304
westward diffusion, of war elephants, 55–7
wild elephants
capturing, 78–9
management of, 77–9
Wildlife Protection Act 1972, 243, 262
Page 13 of 14
Index
Page 14 of 14