JOIN USFor a country that loves elephants, the Oscar must be a thrill. Or is it?
It is only right that The Elephant Whisperers just became the first Indian documentary to win an Oscar with its sensitive portrayal of Bellie, Bomman, and Raghu, the elephant, given the long history of love for elephants in India. Sanskrit literature and legends are replete with elephants, from the god Ganesha to Indra’s magnificent white elephant, the Airavata. The eight directions are said to have eight mighty guardian elephants holding up the earth. In fact, there is a whole genre of the gaja shastra or ‘elephant science’ in Sanskrit literature to impart knowledge about elephants. Sanskrit poets wax eloquent about elephants -- kings are said to have the stately gait of an elephant, and beautiful women are said to have thighs like the elephant’s trunk. Considering these poets got rewarded, these must have counted as compliments!
Preserving the elephant forests is presented as an important duty of the king as far back as the Ramayana. The Arthashastra contains a large section discussing how the king should maintain the elephant forests at the edge of his kingdom. This includes details about appointing forest guards, elephant keepers, border guards, attendants, and forest rangers. According to the Arthashastra, the guards are to be given royal orders to kill anyone who harms the elephants. However, the king can reward those who bring ivory from an elephant that has already died from natural causes.
War elephants formed one quarter of the four-limbed army -- the others being foot soldiers, horses, and chariots. The Mahabharata gives us poetic descriptions of mighty tusked war elephants with rut streaming down their temples, wreaking havoc in the Kurukshetra war by annihilating the opposing army. But war elephants were clearly not the stuff of legend. The A’in-i-Akbari of Abu’l Fazl describes the interest that the Mughal king Akbar took in the training of his elephants -- he is said to have been an expert on mounting and subordinating any kind of elephant, however wild and dangerous.
Legend goes that the famed king of Vatsa, Udayana, had the unique hobby of taming elephants by playing some special music on his lute -- so much so that when the rival king Pradyota wanted to capture him, he pulled a Trojan-horse-like maneuver, placing a gorgeous white elephant on the edges of the forest filled with soldiers who trapped Udayana as he ventured out alone to tame the elephant. Udayana, who was captured, refused to submit to Pradyota. When Pradyota wanted to learn the art of taming elephants from Udayana, the latter said that he would only teach one who accepted him respectfully as a guru. Unwilling to pay him tributes, but wanting the secret art to stay within the family, Pradyota convinced his daughter, the princess Vasavadatta, to learn the art from Udayana. Determined to prevent a romance, he ordered a curtain to be placed between the teacher and student, lying to Vasavadatta that the guru suffered from leprosy, and to Udayana that his student was self-conscious about being a hunchback. Once, when Vasavadatta was playing badly, Udayana insulted her, and she angrily swept aside the curtain to give him a piece of her mind. Well, the inevitable happened. They decided to elope, and elephants came to their rescue. This time, Vasavadatta requested her father for an elephant in order to put her lessons to test, and they managed to elope one night when the palace guards were busy with celebrations.
Happy-ever-afters aside, politicians in India are now scrambling to include “elephant whispering” as a new qualification on their resumes, hoping to tap into the country’s love for these majestic creatures. And who knows, maybe they’ll finally learn a thing or two about environmental protection. But let’s not get our hopes up, after all, elephants are still more likely to be seen in political rallies than in their natural habitats.