Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human-Elephant Relations in South Asia [Illustrated] 9780199467228

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Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Title Pages (p.i) Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence (p.ii) (p.iii) Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence

(p.iv)

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in India by Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India © Oxford University Press 2016 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. First Edition published in 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in Page 1 of 2

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Dedication

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Dedication (p.v) To Professor Charles Santiapillai (1944–2014), wildlife advocate, teacher, and mentor (p.vi)

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Acknowledgements

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

(p.ix) Acknowledgements Piers Locke, Jane Buckingham

This book originated from an international conference held at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, from 7 to 8 May 2013. Convened by the editors, the ‘Symposium on Human–Elephant Relations in South and Southeast Asia’ brought together a range of scholars and researchers based in Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, the UK, and the USA. For their encouraging support, we wish to thank Professor Thomas Trautmann, Professor Raman Sukumar, and the late Professor Charles Santiapillai, to whom this volume is dedicated. For funding and logistical support, we are grateful to the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund, the School of Language, Social and Political Sciences (LSAP) at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and the New Zealand South Asia Centre (NZSAC). For the inaugural address, we are grateful to Professor Steve Weaver, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research), for the Maori pōwhiri (welcome ceremony), we are grateful to Professor Angus Hikairo Macfarlane, and for an introductory reflection on the Hindu elephant god Ganesha, we are grateful to Professor Aditya Malik. For their additional help hosting our guests, we are indebted to Professor Beth Hume, our NZSAC colleague Dorothy McMenamin, and our research students Chandan Bose, Samantha Eason, and Kierin Mackenzie. Thanks also go to Maan Barua, Surendra Varma, Erin Ivory, Ingrid Suter, and Nikki Savvides, who all gave excellent presentations and contributed to the success of the symposium. 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, Page 1 of 2

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

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

(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

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

(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

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations Piers Locke

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords This chapter considers the complex ways humans and elephants affect each other socially, historically, and ecologically. Concerned with interspecies coexistence in environments now so transformed by human agency as to warrant the designation of a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—it argues for a new approach to human–elephant relations that might help us rethink the contemporary challenges of conservation and welfare. This involves rejecting an intellectual tradition that has kept human histories separate from animal ecologies and, instead, embracing the multispecies turn, which recognizes the limiting conceit of sequestering the cultural human from the natural animal. It does so by proposing ‘ethnoelephantology’ as a shared discursive space and an integrated research programme that takes the relationship between humans and elephants as the unit of analysis, seeking to bring together approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The chapters in this volume represent a step towards such an approach to human–elephant relations. Keywords:   Anthropocene, posthumanism, multispecies turn, ethnoelephantology, companion species, non-human agency, landscape, biography

Problems and Possibilities in Human–Elephant Relations There is no doubting the complexity of interconnections that bind humans to elephants, especially on the South Asian subcontinent where elephants have played an integral material and symbolic role in the human civilizations that have flourished alongside them. Indeed, this is a highly distinctive relationship between two cognitively elaborate and socially complex species that have Page 1 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations influenced each other’s lives, environments, and imaginations in profound ways. The range of meanings attributed and purposes extended to elephants is staggering. Humans have conceived, encountered, and appropriated elephants as prey, as cohabitants, as dangerous pests, as weapons of war, emblems of prestige, symbols of divinity, objects of entertainment, icons of conservation, commodities for exchange, vehicles for labour, as well as intimate companions. These meanings and purposes are variously explored in this book in relation to a multitude of interlinked issues that include military resources, political power, scientific knowledge, religious values, expert labour, intimacy (p.2) and conflict, habitat and biodiversity, and even genomic possibility. Of course, what humans have meant for elephants in South Asia in different times and places is rather more elusive. Finding themselves bound up with human enterprises of power, wealth, worship, pleasure, and preservation, both captive and free-roaming elephants currently face major threats to their continued survival and well-being. For today’s freeroaming elephants, South Asia is a place of rapid human population growth, territorial expansion, and industrialization that produces toxic environments, fragments habitat, and both increases and exacerbates conflict with humans.1 For today’s captive elephants, South Asia is a place where they are no longer used or valued in the same ways or to similar extents as in the past, leaving many unemployed, undervalued, and poorly cared for.2 Consequently, humans are presented with acute problems of elephant welfare and elephant conservation, for which they cannot reasonably be absolved of responsibility. 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 terraforming 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 So, as we increasingly appreciate the problematic consequences of economic growth and technological development in this ‘Age of Man’, with its disturbed landscapes, disrupted ecosystems, and afflicted life forms, both human and nonhuman, we have cause to reconsider how we conceive and inhabit the changing environments we share with others, including elephants. Perhaps then, it is time Page 2 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations to (p.3) reappraise the consequences of anthropocentric traditions of thought, science, and action that have dominated the affairs of human technological development for so long, and seek instead to adopt a new perspective? Movements have been afoot in this regard for some time. Research in the cognitive and behavioural sciences has played a key role in undermining the conceits of human uniqueness that have supported the claims to human supremacy that underwrite so many environmentally irresponsible endeavours. For instance, culture is no longer understood as exclusive to humans, at least in the sense of socially transmitted forms of knowledge and practice.5 The ethical implications of sharing a world in which we know we are not the only thinking, feeling, and social animals (as so many of the indigenous peoples of the world have long appreciated) are surely profound.6 Meanwhile, philosophers and social theorists have critiqued the intellectual architecture of Western thought integral to the constitution of the modern, globalized world, the material apparatus of which we might see as a driver of the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. This has involved rethinking the separation of the cultural human from the natural animal as fundamentally different kinds in different spaces subject to different modes of analysis and investigation. Concerned with the conceptual segregation of the figure of man in Western scientific and scholarly traditions, post-humanist thinkers have alerted us to the confounding limits of human exceptionalism and the ecological decontextualization it has encouraged.7 The built environments of human civilizations and the economic activities that support them can no longer be treated in isolation from the ecological processes of a natural world made possible by so many other life forms. Just as an overly anthropocentric humanism is being recast, so too is a scientism overly keen to contain, diminish, or ignore the human, which has also helped sustain the conceit of a pristine wilderness. Ecological theory is no longer in thrall to equilibrium models that discount historical process and exclude human agency, and there is increasing recognition of the need to better integrate the human dimension into the environmental sciences, even if epistemological and methodological rifts with the approaches of the humanities and social sciences persist.8 Consequently, in fields including anthropology, geography, history, and science and technology studies, which are renewing a neglected (p.4) dialogue with the natural sciences, there is a turn towards a new multispecies perspective as a better way of considering the other forms of life that also inhabit our humanly altered world.9 In this view we recognize that humanity is constituted through its lives with non-human others, as they are with us, and that this conflicts with understanding configured through reductive intellectual oppositions.10 Inspired by this more-than-human turn in the humanities and social sciences, which challenges the limitations of anthropocentrism, and which reconsiders the agency of non-human life forms as meaningful actors in a world shaped and Page 3 of 24

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. Indeed, it is this idea for a multispecies approach to human–elephant relations that motivated the symposium from which this book developed. In May 2013, at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, anthropologists, biologists, ecologists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and Sanskritists from nine countries met for two days of presentations and discussions on diverse aspects of the relations between humans and elephants. At this intimate gathering of researchers, the typical disciplinary barriers between the arts and the sciences did not seem quite so insuperable. Despite our differing disciplinary specializations and the differing intellectual habits, concerns, and expertise they inculcate, we managed to talk with each other rather than past each other. Dialogue seemed meaningful and productive, with a sense that we were beginning to breach boundaries and confound disciplinary expectations; scientists spoke about histories, anthropologists about animal behaviour, (p.5) and political scientists about genomics. At this multidisciplinary gathering, an integrated interdisciplinarity seemed like a viable future prospect. The question remains then—how does this book rethink human–elephant relations as its title suggests? Such an endeavour is of course a work in progress, only just begun, but here I shall give a few general indications before discussing the contributions of each chapter. First, I suggest this rethinking involves denaturalizing the so-called wilderness. The chapters in this book remind us that such notions depend on conceptual artifice, since even the ‘natural’ environments of elephants are revealed as directly and indirectly managed spaces, produced by the negotiated influences and consequential effects of humans and elephants (and others) upon landscapes created by abandonment, recolonization, reservation, and ecological intervention.12 Recognizing that even supposedly natural landscapes are not free of anthropogenic influence and human managerial impulse, the chapters in this book eschew the term ‘wild elephant’ in favour of ‘free-roaming elephant’. By choosing not to reinforce the misleading implication of a condition free of human influence, our attention is instead directed to the movement of elephants, encouraging us to consider how they travel and inhabit spaces configured by Page 4 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations multiple agents in multiple ways. Furthermore, ‘free-roaming’ is preferred over the normative ideal of ‘free-ranging’, since the traditional migratory pathways understood to constitute a range have historically developed in a shared landscape and are frequently obstructed by the infrastructure of human development, giving rise to the problems of conflict, conservation, and welfare with which several chapters in this book are concerned. While elephants may be free to roam, in the sense of walking without impediment or human command, they are not always free to range, in the sense of following unobstructed routes. Indeed, the managerial impulse regarding space in which to move and dwell is longstanding, and this book reminds us that humans (particularly those with the sovereign authority to do so) have been actively reserving habitat for elephants in South Asia for millennia, thereby influencing their ranging behaviours. Second, I suggest rethinking this interspecies relationship involves seriously attending to variation among elephants as individuals and groups with biographies produced by their characteristics, their (p.6) historical experience, and their interactions with other lives in particular landscapes.13 This means attending to elephants as more than generic representatives of a species, which brings us to my third point. This rethinking involves understanding species not so much as immutable entities of a taxonomic system, but rather as evolving ways of life in historically changing environments,14 which can help us consider humans and elephants as companion species that become who they are through reciprocal influence.15 Finally, I suggest we can rethink human–elephant relations by recognizing the anthropocentric perspective from which we have typically evaluated our interactions with and formulated our policies towards elephants. I argue that by seeking to overcome this limiting humanist bias with its exclusionary logics, we can strive for a new kind of ethical outlook and ecological perspective based on the recognition of elephants as thinking, feeling beings not entirely unlike ourselves, inhabiting spaces variously shared and configured with ourselves.16 As anthropologist Agustín Fuentes has similarly argued for human–primate intersections,17 the agency of elephants must then be integrated with accounts of our histories, societies, economies, and polities, as well as our cultural practices and representations, just as we must reinsert ourselves into accounts of the biophysical environments where multiple species encounter and affect each other in the course of their unfolding life ways. 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 Page 5 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations Elephants’, is concerned with situations of intimate encounter, exploring the mutualities of humans and elephants as working partners. The third section, ‘Sharing Space with Elephants’, is concerned with problems of conflict over territory and resources, revealing the limits of conventional narratives of confrontation and encroachment. Even to separate sections by thematic concern (p.7) is somewhat arbitrary, and it is hoped that not only historical and geographical commonalities will be evident to the reader, but also conceptual continuities.

Humans and Elephants through Time Raman Sukumar begins this section with a magisterial survey of the history of elephants and humans, from prehistoric to modern times, considering the spectrum of appropriations, encounters, and intersections that link the species. This primarily descriptive essay engages with the shared histories, shared lives, and shared landscapes that are explored in greater detail in each section of the book, providing a comprehensive perspective and summary guide to human– elephant relations in South Asia. Sukumar intimates common themes of mastery, management, and subordination that are further explored in this section. Connections between expert knowledge, skilled practice, and technical mastery emerge as a common concern. This is evident in the management of freeroaming elephant populations, which Trautmann and Olivelle examine with regard to statecraft and the reservation of forests to supply war elephants for India’s ancient kingdoms. It is also evident in considering the utilization of captive elephants, which Trautmann, Olivelle, and Buckingham explore with regard to relations between kingship and war elephants, and which Baker explores with regard to colonial scientific fieldwork. Shifting to paleontological discovery, representational practices, and modern biotechnological possibility, this theme of mastery and expertise is also evident in Fletcher’s chapter. Rather than being concerned with human control over the bodies and movements of and interactions with elephants, Fletcher, instead, directs us to consider the science of mammoths, their public presentation, and the possibility of using elephants to recreate their extinct relatives. 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 worldmakers 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 The interdependencies between humans and elephants as world-making companion species variously explored in the temporal frame of this section warrant further consideration. In a short but (p.9) comprehensive survey that reflects a lifetime commitment to elephants through research, writing, and advocacy, Raman Sukumar alerts us to the political, economic, religious, and environmental considerations necessary for understanding the human–elephant nexus in South Asia. Charting the origins of the sacred status of elephants and their practical utilities for humans, he indicates how attitudes of reverence, practices of preservation, and institutions of appropriation emerged in dynamic relation. It becomes clear that the complex relations between humans and elephants can only be understood by attending to their symbolic significance and material existence in an integrated way. This perspective unfolds through an account that takes us through the historical sequence of South Asian polities, considering the differing confluences of beliefs, ideologies, and material relations that have variously affected elephant lives, habitats, and populations. From elephants as symbol of imperial glory, to colonial commodities, endangered Page 7 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations 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 elephantrich 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. Trautmann’s chapter is particularly significant for revealing the historical entanglement of humans not only with captive elephants in situations of violent intimacy, but also with free-roaming elephants and their environments as politico-economic resources. Drawing on the Arthaśāstra to reveal the reservation and management of forests for elephant supply, he reveals how elephant habitat has been shaped by human political projects over several millennia, and how ancient civilizations have implemented schemes to maintain and regulate elephant populations.

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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations Patrick Olivelle’s analysis of knowledge pertaining to the management of captive and free-roaming elephants in the Arthaśāstra, surely represents one of the most significant contributions to our understanding of Sanskrit elephant lore. Works of ancient elephant knowledge like the Matanga Lila and the Gaja Sastram have featured most often in discussion of these Sanskrit texts. However, their mythic and poetic style makes them rather more problematic for historical analysis of the knowledge and management of elephants in ancient India. As a manual of statecraft though, the Arthaśāstra is stylistically rather different, and as the author of a recent translation of this work, Olivelle is particularly qualified to make a persuasive assessment. Olivelle indicates the suitability of the Arthaśāstra for historical reconstruction by noting the felicitous comparison between instructions for fort construction and archaeological evidence. First, he explores the management of free-roaming elephants, noting as Trautmann does in his chapter, that Kauṭilya instructs kings to establish and manage elephant forests at the frontiers of their territory, and (p.11) that he provides opinion as to the regional sources of the best-quality elephants. These forests are guarded spaces with an elaborate order of functionaries who are responsible for conducting censuses of free-roaming elephant populations, with the assistance of mounted, captive female elephants. Crucially, these were also endeavours in which the collaboration of forest people was highly valued. While this represents a rich source of information, unfortunately, the information on elephant capture is not so well elaborated. However, Olivelle can tell us that hunts were conducted before the rainy season when elephant herds tend to congregate at lakes and rivers, that the capture of infants for entertainment purposes was countenanced, and that the elephant hunt was very likely a ceremonial event attended by dignitaries. The management of captive elephants is another topic on which the Arthaśāstra provides essential information, emphasizing the relationship with the state as the primary agent directing the procurement, care, and deployment of elephants. The superintendent of elephants was the most senior functionary in this regard, responsible for the protection of the elephant forests, the construction and maintenance of elephant stables and elephant equipment, the retinue of attendants, including veterinarians and trainers, and the assignment of food and work. Olivelle even tells us that fines could be imposed on workers who neglected or mistreated elephants, a practice embraced by the Mughal emperor Akbar, whose elephant staff could receive severe punishments, as Buckingham’s chapter reveals. We also learn about systems of classification, by age and size, and also by training and disposition; reference to the commercial trade in elephants; and instructions for the use of elephants in war. Olivelle concludes with a rebuttal of dismissive analyses of the validity of the Sanskrit literature on elephants, having demonstrated that both free-roaming and captive elephants were subject to elaborate forms of management, dependent on accumulated knowledge and expertise. Just as Charles Santiapillai and Page 9 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations 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. Also pursuing Olivelle’s strategy of analysing historical texts, Jane Buckingham explores the significance of the elephant for the Mughal (p.12) state under Akbar’s reign (1556–1605), as the horse-based warrior culture of the TurcoMongols was superseded by elephant-based traditions of Indian political authority. Although the development of artillery and firearms reduced the strategic value of war elephants, they nonetheless served as battering rams, and as bearers of baggage and Mughal elites. Perhaps more significant was Akbar’s shrewd understanding that mastering dangerous male elephants in musth, a personal interest from his teenage years apparently, would convey to all his prowess and virility. Indeed, Buckingham argues that these elite interspecies relations represented a way for Akbar ‘to project himself as the embodiment of imperial masculinity’. Consequently, Buckingham details Akbar’s interest in riding elephants who themselves were valorized in the illustrated biographies of his imperial rule, introducing us to the elephants Dilsankar and Fanjbidar, gifted to him by his father, the emperor Humayun, and the elephant Damudar, gifted to him by Bhairam Khan, who served as regent until Akbar reached the age of accession. The record of his control of the elephant Hawai’i to engage in battle, crossing a bridge of boats to reach the fort at Agra, is particularly significant, a scene immortalized in paint. Buckingham’s analysis goes further though, explaining how management of the elephant stables presented an opportunity to integrate non-elite groups within the Mughal administration. Akbar both rewarded and punished his mahouts, and ensured that his elephants were served by a full apparatus of support not unlike that detailed by Kauṭilya in the Arthaśāstra. Buckingham also makes clear Akbar’s appreciation of the strategic value of elephants as regal commodities of tributary fealty, which allowed him to extend his imperial reach through patrimonial relations of elite obligation. Yet, the business of elephants in the business of empire went further, facilitating the mobility of a court on the move, travelling to wage war, consolidate control, and suppress rebellions. Furthermore, the hunting of free-roaming elephants for capture represented an additional pretext for extending territorial control and incorporating local elites into Akbar’s hierarchy of loyalty and status (mansabdari). Buckingham demonstrates, then, that not only did elephants serve as symbols of Akbar’s imperial authority and masculine virility, but also that elephants were active agents and material resources in the formation of state power.

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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations (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. As Baker’s analysis demonstrates, Ball, a functionary of the British colonial order, thought of elephants not only in objectified terms but also as sentient team members treated as non-human staff, in other words, as living beings with particular physiologies and individual temperaments. Other cited historical traces show that such views were not uncommon. This also reveals a methodological concern with trace and erasure. The evidence of elephants upon the historical record is not always readily evident, and as with histories of subaltern agents, is often effaced by virtue of the norms and conventions of inscriptional practices, a problem also acknowledged by Trautmann in his chapter. By exploring not just the utility of elephants for Ball and Hooker, but also their relationships with them, Baker reveals elephants as non-human subalterns and historical actors with individuality and intentionality who played an integral role in practices of field research. 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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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations megafauna in our cultural imaginaries of cohabiting forms of human and elephant life. Fletcher introduces us to the increasingly prominent yet controversial project of de-extinction, which now seems close to possible by virtue of genomic analysis, biotechnological development, and a serious dose of well-financed scientific enthusiasm. As a way to selectively repopulate the planet with extinct species, she notes that even the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has cautiously engaged with the idea, albeit with the proviso that species resurrection should only be attempted on the basis of clear conservation goals and assessments of translocation suitability. However, this vision of de-extinction as a component of a carefully considered programme of ecological restoration, seems far removed from the actual endeavours of de-extinction, which seem more concerned with the technical possibilities of synthesizing an animal life form than with the ethical implications and ecological practicalities of its existence as part of a viable population in suitable habitat. Indeed, Fletcher situates the current excitement about mammoth de-extinction in a deeper cultural history of Pleistocene fascination, revealing these technologies as the latest developments in a series of endeavours by which we have imagined, simulated, and presented the woolly mammoth as an iconic accomplice in the human story. Surveying the discovery of mammoth fossils, their role in the birth of palaeontology, madcap attempts to find remnant populations, and their representation in museums and novels, Fletcher notes the potency of the mammoth for stimulating popular support for science and for evoking dreamscapes that allow us to enter lost worlds. As Fletcher intimates, this potent cultural imaginary, supported by a history combining science with entertainment, and fact with fantasy, reveals the idea of bringing back the mammoth as a sensational (p.15) prospect ripe for capitalist exploitation. Fletcher hopes then that we invest not only in dreams of bringing the mammoth back from the dead (if at all) but also (perhaps more importantly) in efforts to bring the Sumatran elephant back from the brink.

Living with Elephants In this section, we explore some of the legacies of the prior knowledges, practices, and purposes humans have developed regarding Asian elephants, foregrounding the lived experience of interspecies companionship in the contemporary deployments of human–elephant teams in national parks, in logging, and in touristic encounters. We encounter three ethnographic studies of captive elephant management, in Nepal, in Arunachal Pradesh, and in Sri Lanka. Drawing on fieldwork in the government elephant stables of the Chitwan National Park, Piers Locke explores mahouts’ interspecies relations with regard to elephants’ ambivalent state of domesticity, their social and cognitive capacities, and the cultural concepts that help mahouts mediate relationships involving cooperation and coercion. Nicolas Lainé focuses on logging operations Page 12 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations 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 freeroaming elephants that differentially articulate with Buddhist Sinhalese culture, and which produce different attitudes, different knowledges, and different concerns. Locke’s chapter considers a conundrum integral to the management of captive elephants, namely the question of how to make sense of a relationship founded on both trust and domination in which elephants seem complicit in their own captivity. He explores this question with regard to a tradition of expert custodial labour in the government elephant stables of the Chitwan National Park. If elephants have not relinquished their agency and cannot be treated merely as dependable subordinates, how then do their custodians negotiate relations with their captive companions? The answer, based (p.16) on participant observation with elephants and their mahouts, is that they embrace the contradictions intrinsic to this relationship by recognizing and variably emphasizing three ontological states that they attribute to their elephants. These are animality, personhood, and divinity. In developing this analysis, Locke rejects the humanist foundations of ethnography that he finds inadequate for understanding interspecies social life, employing instead the more-than-human perspective of ethnoelephantology. This enables Locke to conceive the elephant stable not merely as a place where humans keep elephants, but rather as the site of a hybrid moral community in which humans and elephants demonstrate emotional affinity and moral responsibility towards each other. He shows us that each form of life is commensurably valued, and that the career biographies of elephants and mahouts are mutually constituted. Yet, even as mahouts experience the stable in the interspecies terms of companionable life, Locke acknowledges the stable as a structured space of hierarchical command and control that subordinates elephants to human purposes. This points to the ambivalence intrinsic to the human–elephant relationship that the handlers must somehow negotiate, a relationship that involves trust and domination, cooperation and coercion, care and violence. Acknowledging that the states of animality, personhood, and divinity are coextensive yet variably emphasized, Locke finds that these ontological states correlate with relational modalities that he identifies as domination, companionship, and veneration. In order to help convey the fluid manner by which these shifting states are variably asserted in daily life, Locke draws on the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, the refractive turns of which yield new Page 13 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations configurations of form and colour. He explores animality and domination through a focus on didactic instruction, personhood and companionship through embodied practice, and divinity and veneration through elephant training as a multispecies rite of passage. Locke also considers the local cultural logic that makes the boundaries between animals, persons, and gods permeable, and concludes that these multiple conceptions help mahouts manage the moral complexity of a confounding relationship through combinations of loving affection, reverential awe, and coercive discipline. (p.17) Nicolas Lainé provides a detailed and visually illustrated analysis of logging operations in Arunachal Pradesh, focusing on two elephants and their respective work teams. Eschewing a humanist approach to logging that might (quite reasonably) consider it as a historical phenomenon with political, economic, and environmental implications, he, instead, examines logging ethnographically as a form of interspecies labour, attending to the experiential perspectives of both life forms. In seeking to present the elephant as a collaborative agent, rather than merely an animate instrument, echoing Julian Baker’s concerns regarding elephants in colonial scientific fieldwork, he explores the implications of considering labour through the lens of cooperation rather than coordination, and conduct rather than behaviour. Drawing on a psychodynamic approach to animal labour, Lainé suggests that coordination is inadequate for understanding human–elephant labour because it suggests an instrumental consideration of articulated operations. Cooperation, by contrast, presupposes the social relations in which activity is conducted and permits the mediated deliberations by which tasks are jointly accomplished. These social relations involve exchange whereby the participation of elephants in human work is not merely rewarded by the provision of livelihood essentials, but also, more broadly, by rendering what Lainé’s human informants conceive as a ‘good life’ for their elephants, which comprises care and consideration. Lainé similarly rejects behaviour as an analytic frame in favour of conduct. The rationale for this is to avoid the behaviourist discourse of the animal sciences, particularly Pavlovian interpretations likely to produce accounts that emphasize the conditioned responses of the elephant merely as an animate mechanism responding to environmental stimuli. Acknowledging the scientific support that recent work on elephant sociality and cognition provides, Lainé is instead concerned with presenting the elephant as a consciously intentional colleague capable of acting autonomously, of engaging in effective interspecies communication, and also of choosing to withdraw its cooperation. In presenting an analysis of elephant agency and interspecies labour in the context of companionship with humans, Lainé also contends that assumptions of animal labour as only involving alienation and exploitation are partial and limiting. Instead, he argues that the shared context of work represents a space of relations (p.18) between species, involving interwoven biographies responsible

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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. While arguing for the primacy of practical experience in configuring mahouts’ relations with their elephants, Klixbull reminds us that Buddhism is significant for reasons that exceed its anthropomorphic folklore. He notes that it provides a worldview in which the transcendent boundaries between reincarnating living beings are permeable, and that culture, religion, and history inform the ethical attitudes, ritual practices, and interpretive frames by which mahouts negotiate their interspecies relations. This mode of analysis is extended to his contrasting case, where again he evaluates the relative significance of cultural heritage and lived experience, shifting from a case of companionship and mutuality to one of conflict and antagonism. Klixbull introduces us to the village of Weragala near the city of Habarana in Anuradhapura district, exploring farmers’ opinions, experiences, and understandings of elephant conflict through their testimonies. We learn of their fear, their experiences of attack and depredation, and their attempts at surveillance and dissuasion. (p.19) Significantly though, while considering the symbolic associations and legal restraints the farmers face in dealing with an animal that is both a sacred being and a conservation icon, Klixbull documents the practical knowledge of elephants that farmers have acquired through their problematic encounters. Ultimately then, in both cases Klixbull highlights experiences of responsive encounter for generating the expert knowledge, skilled practice, and affective dispositions crucial to interspecies interactions, while also attending to the cultural contexts and inhabited spaces in which these human–elephant relations unfold.

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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations Sharing Space with Elephants The dual focus of Klixbull’s chapter, on intimacy with captives and conflict with their free-roaming conspecifics, serves as segue to the final section of the collection, concerned with challenging the discursive conventions of human– elephant conflict through greater attention to landscape history, population displacement, non-violent encounter, local knowledge, and mutual adaptation. The concern with shared space begins with a chapter also concerned with Sri Lanka. Charles Santiapillai and Shanmugasundaram Wijeyamohan provide a historical overview of humans, elephants, and landscape in Sri Lanka in order to contextualize contemporary dilemmas of conservation and conflict, reminding us to consider the significance of cultural, historical, and ecological relations of cohabitation over the longue durée. With Paul Keil’s ethnographic chapter, the temporal focus narrows as he explores those aspects of problematic human– elephant coexistence that are not always violent. By revealing the shared use of landscapes sculpted by human and elephant as fellow agents in the world, and the accommodations each species can make to avoid the other, Keil shows there are other ways to conceive a relational dynamic more complex than the conventional parameters for studying human–elephant conflict typically allow. Moving from Assam to Kerala, Ursula Münster reports on a situation of greater violence in which humans are confounded by the ability of elephants to outsmart their defensive technologies. She reveals how the entangled histories of humans and elephants have produced disturbed socializations that intensify fear and aggression, and increase violent encounter. (p.20) Adopting a different strategy for investigating interspecies conflict in neighbouring Tamil Nadu, Tarsh Thekaekara and Thomas F. Thornton survey the diverse experience of and attitudes towards elephants among multiple social groups, arguing for a more sociologically attentive approach to human–elephant conflict in which possibilities for relatively peaceful coexistence are not discounted. 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 Page 16 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations 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. Most crucially though, Santiapillai and Wijeyamohan remind us that while we may look to the sacred significance of the elephant in Hinduisim and Buddhism to understand the persistence of the elephant in Sri Lanka, we must not forget the establishment of (p.21) thousands of man-made reservoirs. These irrigation works, dating back to the era of the Anuradhapura civilization, helped increase the island’s ecological carrying capacity for elephants. By appreciating the anthropogenic character of landscapes shared with elephants, it becomes clear that there has been a synergistic relation between free-roaming elephants and agrarian civilization. Its technological innovations not only helped support statemaking projects dependent on dense human populations and agricultural surpluses, but also the ecological needs of elephant populations. This helps reveal the elephant as a companion species that was also integral to the political, economic, and symbolic culture of these societies, the contemporary conservation of which has to be understood in relation to the historical entanglement of humans and elephants. Paul Keil’s chapter exemplifies the concern of ethnoelephantology with recognizing the significance of elephants’ subjective agency for understanding interspecies encounters, and with tracing the mutual entanglements of human and elephant lives and landscapes. He does this by exploring the ways in which human–elephant encounters at the fringes of forests and villages in Assam are not only determined by histories of forest and wildlife management, socioeconomic development, enforcement of legal regulations, and religious values, but also by the social and environmental agency of elephants. Adopting Tim Ingold’s conception of life as an unfolding process involving paths of movement and growth by which entities become enmeshed in a world of interactions, Keil develops an analysis of pathways shared by humans and elephants that is attentive to both species. This enables him to consider how roads, trails, and corridors are variously constituted and sustained through the complementary activity of humans and elephants. Keil shows us that while humans and elephants share pathways, they typically do so in ways intended to avoid direct encounter. This involves an appreciation of the ways in which humans and elephants attend to the presence and traces of each other.

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Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations By adopting Ingold’s notion of wayfaring, Keil is also able to consider each species not only as ecosystem engineers who configure biophysical landscapes, but also as world-makers inhabiting spaces that are made meaningful.21 This serves to integrate the ecologically instrumental and sociologically experiential aspects of dwelling. Significantly, this allows Keil to interrogate the assumptions of (p.22) conventional approaches to human–elephant conflict, which he reveals as predicated on a division between human space and elephant space, so that each species confronts the other at the boundaries of their respective habitats. This leads to understandings of encroachment, in which the presence of one in the space of the other is deemed unnatural. Yet in a world of fragmented habitats, mutually constituted landscapes, and shared spaces, it is patently obvious that such presumptions—based as they are on the problematic oppositions of nature and culture, human and animal—are not conducive to the quest for effective solutions to the dilemmas of how humans and elephants can live together with minimal conflict. Instead, Keil intimates the profitable possibilities of an approach to human–elephant conflict that is not constrained by the perspectives and preoccupations of conventional forms of either conservation biology or social science. Concerned with more fractious situations of problematic interspecies cohabitation, Ursula Münster’s chapter on human–elephant conflict in and around the Wayanad Wildlife Reserve, Kerala, also exemplifies the possibilities of a multispecies approach. While trained as an anthropologist to understand human social life, she concedes the necessity of also attending to elephants as social beings with particular biographies and particular psychological characteristics, arguing that both human and elephant have become who they are, acting as they do, in environments mutually shaped by the relational dynamics of their interconnected activity. 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. Incorporating selected commentary material from Thekaekara’s extensive interviewing, the authors present an indication of the attitudes, opinions, and experiences regarding elephants from across the social spectrum. This includes members of Adivasi groups including the Paniya, the Bettakurumba, and the Kattunayakan, the Chetty agricultural caste, migrant groups including the Malayali and Sri Lankan Tamils, rural elites, and Forest Department staff. In so doing they reveal a diverse and conflicting range of viewpoints. Consequently, they identify five common conceptions of elephants—as ‘demons’, as unpredictable animals, as non-human persons, as victims, and as ‘gods’—and four cultural–ecological explanations for increasing human–elephant conflict, which include humans encroaching on elephant habitat, forest degradation, increasing elephant populations, and the changes wrought by 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 Page 19 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations hindered by disciplinary constraint. The multispecies perspective of ethnoelephantology informing this volume may be seen as a response to the inadequacies of sequestered forms of expertise, promoted through compartmentalized domains of discussion with distinct rhetorical styles, theoretical terminologies, and epistemological perspectives. Such an endeavour is not without precedent, and there have been previous collections bringing together contributions from scholars and researchers across the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.23 However, while experts from disparate disciplinary backgrounds and modes of professional practice have previously come together to discuss human–elephant relations from diverse vantage points, rarely if ever have such endeavours explicitly involved the aspiration to establish a common discursive space and to foster an integrated research programme. 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. Page 20 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations Perhaps we should be reconfiguring our forms of research practice as well, recognizing that this may require new forms of multidisciplinary collaboration. In other words, rather than just talking with each other, perhaps we need to be working with each other, so that researchers habituated to different forms of research practice involving different forms of expertise can collaborate effectively. 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 Page 21 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations Falkenmark, Louise Karlberg, Robert W. Corell, Victoria J. Fabry, James Hansen, Brian Walker, Diana Liverman, Katherine Richardson, Paul Crutzen, and Jonathan Foley, Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity (Stockholm: Institute for Sustainable Solutions, 2009). (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. (6.) In considering human–environment relations, anthropologists have documented the non-dual thought systems of many indigenous people, which present such a contrast to the oppositional logics of Western thought. See P. Descola, ‘Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice’, in Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by P. Descola and G. Palsson (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 82−102; P. Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). (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. (9.) See P. Locke and U. Münster, ‘Multispecies Ethnography’, in Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, edited by J. Jackson (online, 2015); S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 25, 4 (2010): 545–76; and L. Ogden, B. Hall, and T. Kimika, ‘Animals, Plants, People, and Things: A Review of Multispecies Ethnography’, Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4, 1 (2013): 5–24.

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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. (11.) P. 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. (12.) For example, in a recent discussion of conservation in the context of a world so thoroughly configured by the terra-forming influences of humans, Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of a unitary domain of pristine nature should now be considered redundant. See Jamie Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). (13.) For an example of research recognizing the distinctive significance of particular elephants and elephant populations with regard to problems of human–elephant conflict, see Nishant M. Srinivasaiah, Vijay D. Anand, Srinivas Vaidyanathan, and Anindya Sinha, ‘Usual Populations, Unusual Individuals: Insights into the Behavior and Management of Asian Elephants in Fragmented Landscapes’, PLoS One 7, 8 (2012). (14.) Tim Ingold, ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 71, 1 (2006): 9–20. (15.) Haraway, When Species Meet. (16.) See Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), especially chapter 6—‘Beyond “Compassion and Humanity”: Justice for Nonhuman Animals’. (17.) Agustín Fuentes, ‘Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology’, Cultural Anthropology 25, 4 (2010): 600–24. (18.) See Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); and Haraway, When Species Meet. (19.) Anna Tsing, ‘Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species’, Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 141–54. (20.) Thomas R. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2015). (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 Page 23 of 24

Conflict, Coexistence, and the Challenge of Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds’, reprinted in 1992 in Semiotica 89, 4 (1992): 319–91. (22.) See also Helen Newing, Conducting Research in Conservation: Social Science Methods and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011). (23.) Perhaps most notable of these is Christen Wemmer and Catherine A. Christen (eds), Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008). (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

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages A Brief Macro-Scale History Raman Sukumar

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords This chapter provides a magisterial survey of human–elephant relations from prehistoric to modern times, considering encounters, intersections, and appropriations in a way that equally attends to both material existence and symbolic significance. It charts the sacred status and practical utilities of elephants for humans in a historical sequence that considers political relations, beliefs, and ideas, and material encounters. It explores the elephant as prey, as a weapon of war, symbol of imperial glory, colonial commodity, an endangered species, and as a captive individual, thereby introducing some of the topics and issues explored in further detail in subsequent chapters. Drawing on the author’s longstanding involvement with and expertise in understanding elephants, it also considers the challenges presented by the decline of elephant populations, the conditions of their captivity, the expertise for their management, and the possibilities for humans and elephants to learn to live well together. 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 Page 1 of 14

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. A comprehensive survey of the human–elephant relationship would ideally cover not only several Asian countries where the creature is found today, but also the West to examine the historical legacy of the captive elephant, and also Africa to understand the cultural contrast with the Asian situation. I shall, however, focus on India as it perhaps captures the fullest expression of this relationship through history, for which the richest literary and visual sources are available, while making brief observations regarding other countries (p.32) and societies. Ideally, an account of the human–elephant relationship should range from the macro-scale historical picture of the role of the elephant in the rise and fall of kings, as so ably explored by Thomas Trautmann,1 to subaltern expressions, as with the mahout–elephant bond or the farmer–elephant interaction, drawing from both the social and natural sciences.2 This is an extremely challenging task, not only because the scope is vast, but also because much of these ‘explorations in ethnoelephantology’, as Piers Locke has termed them, have begun only recently. I shall, therefore, confine myself largely to a macro-scale historical view of the human–elephant relationship, drawing upon my earlier detailed account.3 This chapter is, thus, more descriptive than analytical in its approach.

The Elephant as Food The genus Elephas evolved in Africa, along with its cousins of the elephant family, Loxodonta and Mammuthus, about 6–7 million years ago, and migrated to Asia about 4 million years ago.4 Elephas maximus evolved in the Indian subcontinent during the Late Pleistocene period from the ancestral Elephas hysudricus whose fossils are well known from the Siwaliks.5 The nature of the interaction between the elephant and humans in prehistoric times is not well understood. We know that ancestral humans, Homo erectus, who evolved in Africa about 1.8 million years ago and moved into the Indian subcontinent at least about 1 million years ago, used heavy-duty stone tools (the so-called Acheulian technology) to butcher and scavenge from dead elephants. Evidence for active hunting of elephants by Stone Age humans is non-existent in the subcontinent and rare across Asia. However, recent work suggests that the elephant (Elephas antiquus) was the most important source of protein and fat to H. erectus in the Levant, and that the demise of the former also drove the evolution of a new form of lighter and more agile human adapted to hunting smaller, swifter animals.6 The co-evolution of human and elephant becomes apparent then.

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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

The Elephant as a Beast of Burden The taming of the elephant was a watershed in the history of the human– elephant relationship. It is widely believed that the Harappan seals depicting elephants that date to between 2800 and 2600 BCE8 constitute the earliest evidence for tame elephants but this is disputable as they do not show even a single animal with a human rider.9 A terracotta figurine of an elephant from Harappa dated to 2200–1900 BCE, with red and white painted bands on its forehead much like present-day captive elephants are decorated for parade, certainly suggests that the animal was used for ritualistic or ceremonial purposes in this ancient civilization.10 It can also be argued that the elephant was almost certainly independently tamed by non-Harappan people in the subcontinent at an earlier time.11 A number of other wild animals including dogs, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, cattle, and buffalo had already been tamed and domesticated by this time. The zebu had been domesticated by the Harappan people about 5000 BCE. What remained was the largest land animal, the elephant, and it was only a matter of time before the skills acquired by ancient humans in capturing and subduing large, fierce animals were effectively used to tame the largest of creatures as a demonstration of their physical and mental prowess.12 The first instance of taming this large animal may itself have been a rather tame affair with an elephant calf straying into a settlement along with a herd of domestic cattle, much like what happens even today, sparking the desire to keep it as a pet.13 Once achieved, this event provided the impetus for the elaboration of a culture that involved the capture and use of perhaps over one million elephants in the course of history.14 The elephant would have been obviously used as a simple beast of burden, but even this would have required advanced skills on the part of humans in capturing and training them to be subservient.

(p.34) The Elephant as a War Machine The next major event in the human–elephant relationship was the use of the captive elephant as an instrument of war.15 The decline of the Harappan civilization by 1700 BCE and the entry of the Indo-European or Aryan people into the subcontinent around this period set the stage for a new form of engagement with the elephant. Essentially a horse-based culture, the Aryans began to assimilate the elephant culture they encountered in the land they had Page 3 of 14

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 IndoGangetic 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 The rise in ancient India of republics, kingdoms, and eventually empires, spurred the organized capture and deployment of elephants on a large scale in the army. Although Alexander of Macedon defeated Porus’s elephant army at the Battle of Jhelum in 326 BCE, the former’s soldiers refused to advance beyond the Beas river into the Indian heartland as they had heard of more powerful kings waiting with a much larger elephant force, estimated by various Greek sources at between 3,000 and 6,000 animals, beyond the Ganges.19 Even if the veracity of these claims is doubted, it cannot be denied that armies with large numbers of elephants were certainly within the realm of possibility in the Gangetic basin during the late fourth century BCE.20 With the (p.35) emergence of empire, under the Mauryans, the size of the elephant corps expanded further as an integral part of the four-armed fighting force. Megasthenes, the Greek envoy to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, gives a figure of 9,000 elephants in the Mauryan army, captured mainly through the stockade method.21 When taken together with elaborate descriptions of the training and deployment of war elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (c. 300 BCE– 300 CE), it is clear that the Mauryans built up a formidable war machine in which the elephant played a pivotal role. A sophisticated infrastructure was set up to capture, train, maintain, and deploy the elephants; the hastyadhyaksha or Chief Commander of the Elephant Corps was the head of the elephants and the gajavanas, the forests they were sourced from.22 As also discussed by Patrick Olivelle in this volume, the Arthaśāstra lists no less than eleven posts, from veterinary doctors to mahouts, guards, and cooks, employed by the elephant establishment. The elephant sanctuaries were protected by guards under the leadership of a nagavanadhyaksha (superintendent of elephant forests) and the death penalty imposed on anyone killing an elephant within them. The Page 4 of 14

The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages conservation paradigm enunciated by Kauṭilya, however, seems entirely utilitarian—the sanctuaries were needed to ensure a regular supply of elephants for the king’s army. The elephant does not appear to be conferred any sacred status under Chandragupta’s rule, though this would change under his successor Ashoka.

The Elephant as a Sacred Animal The theoretical underpinnings of the sacred elephant can be inferred from the mythological story of the origin of elephants as related by the sage Palakapya. This ancient elephantologist states that ‘Brahma created elephants for the profit of offering sacrifice to the gods, and especially for the welfare of kings’.23 Once the elephant became indispensable not just as a beast of burden but also as a supreme war machine in the armies of ancient kings, its preservation became imperative. The Arthaśāstra is emphatic that the protection of elephant forests would ensure the supply of these animals for the king’s army. The expediency of elevating such a useful creature to a sacred status seems obvious, even if understanding the social and symbolic means by which these cultural significances were established is rather complex. (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 (midthird 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 emergence of Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity of brahmanical Hinduism, can only be traced to the early centuries of the Common Era. The earliest sculptures of Ganesha come from the Mathura region in northern India during the Kushan period of the fourth century, and transformed into the classical form during the Gupta period of the fifth century as seen from depictions in central India.27 The antecedents of Ganesha are poorly understood but it is widely believed that an elephant-headed deity, possibly considered as a creator of obstacles and worshipped by tribal agricultural societies, was eventually transformed by Brahminism into the supreme remover of obstacles.28 The emergence of Ganesha as a deity may well have its origins in local experiences of human–elephant conflict at the fringes (p.37) of forest and field, and may have been later elevated to supreme status by an elite section of ancient Hindu society for whom the animal was useful as a beast of burden and instrument of war.29 We can draw parallels between the sacred cow and the sacred elephant, both of which were more useful alive than dead.30 The Arab scholar Al-Biruni who travelled in India during the early eleventh century observed that such useful animals were not consumed as food.31 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 Elephant as a Symbol of Imperial Glory The early Muslim invaders and rulers of the north during the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, from the Ghaznavids and Ghuris to the sultans of Delhi, did not seem to show interest in absorbing the local culture of capturing elephants from the wild and training them for use in war.34 This is not to say that these rulers did not covet elephants—indeed the opposite is true. They obtained war elephants in large numbers through their conquests or as tribute from subcontinent rulers.35 The pilkhana or elephant stables of the Muslim rulers were perhaps best stocked during the rule of the Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq who held about 3,000 elephants, a third of these fit for use in battle, in 1340 CE.36 This, however, declined steeply to only 120 elephants by 1398 CE, when the central Asian warlord (p.38) Amir Timur invaded and sacked Delhi, and used these elephants to transport his loot back to Samarkhand. A serious decline of Page 6 of 14

The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages free-roaming elephants in regions such as Bengal and Kalinga, whose rulers supplied the elephants to the sultans, combined with a weakened ability of the rulers of Delhi to extract tribute perhaps contributed to the depletion of the pilkhana, a factor that some historians attribute to the eventual fall of Delhi. 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 midtwentieth century38). Elephant was pitted against elephant in royal sport. Freeroaming 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.

The Elephant as an Agent of Colonial Expansion The colonial period in Asia witnessed a rather different kind of engagement with the elephant. As also considered by Santiapillai and Wijeyamohan in this volume, the Portuguese and the Dutch rulers of Ceylon during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the elephant as a commodity to be traded for profit.39 While a maritime trade in elephants prevailed since at least the tenth or eleventh century from Kalinga, Pegu, and Ceylon, the seafaring Portuguese used their superior shipbuilding skills to export greater numbers of elephants from Ceylon to various rulers in India, including the Mughals and those of Page 7 of 14

The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages Vijayanagar, Bijapur, Golconda, Thanjavur, Madurai, and Bengal. They also introduced the corral or kheddah method of capturing entire elephant herds in stockades in order to maximize the numbers caught for trade.40 After defeating the Portuguese, the Dutch took over the elephant trade, which they administered to maximize profit. Exclusively promoting the stockade method, they prohibited the use of earlier methods such as pits and nooses to capture elephants in view of their potential to cause death. The scale of the trade can be gauged from the 1,500 stalls to house elephants in the northern town of Jaffna at its peak.41 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. Elephantcatching 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 From a contemporary perspective, sport hunting of elephants debased the creature to the status of ‘big-game’ to be hunted for pleasure and for trophies. Although hunting of elephants was far more common and widespread in Africa, the Asian elephant too did not escape the attention of British shikaris, particularly active in Ceylon, where over 8,000 elephants were killed, about 2,400 of these attributed to just three British ‘sportsmen’ from the military, during the mid-nineteenth century.47 Elephants were also killed in the hundreds for sport or population control in Wayanad in southern India48 and in the Page 8 of 14

The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages thousands in Burma.49 Big-game hunting has been interpreted not just as a commercial pursuit of animal products such as ivory and skin, but also as ‘subsidy for … European advance, the period of acquisition, conquest and settlement’, and more interestingly as a ‘contemporary rediscovery of medieval chivalry’ linked to ritualized warfare and an obsession with Social Darwinism.50 A key question is how colonial rulers could indulge in sport hunting of an animal revered so highly in two major religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, when even the Mughal rulers respected local sentiments, capturing but not killing (p.41) elephants. The answer may lie in local people accepting such hunting as bringing them relief from the depredations of free-roaming elephants.51

The Elephant at the Crossroads With the coming of independence during the mid-twentieth century, the responsibility for protecting the free-roaming elephant population from overexploitation and extinction, as well as redefining the culture of the captive elephant, now squarely rested with the Asian sovereign states. This has been a difficult task in practically every range state of the free-roaming elephant.52 The imperatives of post-independence economic development have been achieved through the sacrifice of tropical forests on an extensive scale, thus fragmenting and compromising the natural habitat of the elephant, especially in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. Wars have ravaged the forests of the IndoChinese region and indirectly resulted in the decline of the elephant to critical levels in Vietnam and Cambodia, though Laos offers better prospects for the species. At the same time, the widespread consumption of elephant meat has also contributed to this decline in Indo-China and in neighbouring countries. The continued capture of elephants for the logging industry in post-independence Burma has likewise reduced the free-roaming population to a level below the captive stocks, which have also been declining. In neighbouring Thailand, the elephant has also been brought into captivity in large numbers and, with the cessation of logging, increasingly channelled into the lucrative tourism industry.53 Only a remnant of free-roaming elephant population survives in a fragmented part of the Yunnan province in southern China.54 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. Northeastern 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 eastcentral 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. Page 9 of 14

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). (2.) 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. (3.) Raman Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants (Mumbai: The Marg Foundation, 2011). (4.) Vincent J. Maglio, ‘Origin and Evolution of the Elephantidae’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia 63 (1973): 1–149; Nadin Rohland, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Joshua L. Pollack, Montgomery Slatkin, Paul Matheus, and Michael Hofrieter, ‘Proboscidean mitogenomics: Chronology and Mode of Elephant Evolution Using Mastodon as Outgroup’, PLoS Biology 5, 8 (2007): 1663–71. (5.) Maglio, ‘Origin and Evolution of the Elephantidae’. (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). (9.) R. Carrington, Elephants: Their Natural History, Evolution and Influence on Mankind (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959). (10.) Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization; Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (11.) D.K. Lahiri-Choudhury, ‘Indian Myths and History’, in The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Elephants: From Their Origins and Evolution to Their Ceremonial and Working Relationship with Men, edited by S.K. Eltringham (London: Salamander Books, 1991), 130–47. (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. (13.) Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (14.) R. Sukumar, The Asian Elephant: Ecology and Management (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989). (15.) As discussed further by T. Trautmann in this volume. (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. (18.) Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (19.) J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (New Delhi: reprinted by Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2000, originally published 1877); H.H. Scullard, The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). (20.) Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (21.) McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian. (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:

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The Human–Elephant Relationship through the Ages Subarnarekha, 1982), 254–81; L.N. Rangarajan (ed. and trans.), Kautilya: The Arthashastra (New Delhi: Penguin, 1992). (23.) F. Edgerton, The Elephant-Lore of the Hindus: The Elephant-Sport (Matanga-lila) of Nilakantha (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University, 1931; reprinted by Motilal Banarsidass, New Delhi, 1985); Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (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. (25.) As also discussed by Niclas Klixbull in this volume. (26.) Reviewed in Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (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). (28.) See Nanditha Krishna and Shukunthala Jagannathan, Ganesha: The Auspicious … The Beginning (Bombay: Vakils, Feffer and Simons, 1992); G.S. Ghurye, Gods and Men (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1962). (29.) Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (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). (33.) Reviewed in Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (34.) Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (35.) Simon Digby, War Horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate: A Study of Military Supplies (Oxford: Orient Monographs, 1971). (36.) Digby, War Horse and Elephant in the Dehli Sultanate. (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). (42.) Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Trading Knowledge: The East India Company’s Elephants in India and Britain’, The Historical Journal 48, 1 (2005), 27–63; Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants. (43.) Dhriti K. Lahiri-Choudhury, The Great Indian Elephant Book: An Anthology of Writings on Elephants in the Raj (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). (44.) Sukumar, The Asian Elephant. (45.) V. Krishnamurthy and Chris Wemmer, ‘Veterinary Care of Asian Timber Elephants in India: Historical Accounts and Current Observations’, Zoo Biology 14, 2 (1995): 123–33. (46.) V. Krishnamurthy and C. Wemmer, ‘Timber Elephant Management in the Madras Presidency of India (1844–1947)’, in A Week with Elephants, edited by J.C. Daniel and H. Datye (Bombay Natural History Society, Bombay, and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 456–72. (47.) J. Emerson Tennent, Ceylon: An Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and Topographical with Notices of its Natural History, Antiquities and Productions, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860). (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. (50.) J. M. MacKenzie, ‘Chivalry, Social Darwinism and Ritualized Killing: the Hunting Ethos in Central Africa up to 1914’, in Conservation in Africa: People, Policies and Practice, edited by D. Anderson and R. Grove (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 41–61. (51.) Sukumar, The Story of Asia’s Elephants.

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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). (54.) See Michael J. Hathaway, ‘On the Backs of Elephants: Transnational Environmentalism and Elephant “Agency”’, in Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 152−84. (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.

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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts Thomas R. Trautmann

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores the ancient origins of the war elephant in India and its dissemination as a technology based on the union of man and elephant. Considering the westward spread to the Persian and Hellenistic kingdoms, and the later eastward spread to the Indianizing kingdoms of Southeast Asia, it argues that the emergence of the mahout as a professional elephant rider depended on the sponsorship of kings, who also managed reserved forests to ensure their continued supply. Writing a deep history of mahoutship is recognized as a methodological challenge, since the mahouts themselves left only minimal traces in historical records. This challenge is further extended by the call to connect the ancient history of mahoutship in the era of the war elephant to the ethnography of mahoutship as a dwindling profession with declining expertise in the differing contexts of contemporary elephant keeping. 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 Page 1 of 24

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. Because of the skimpiness of evidence, it is probably impossible to write a proper history of mahouts; but their role is so very important, both to the use of war elephants and the spread of the institution, that it is worth trying anyhow, gathering what scraps we may on this important topic. The prospect of being able to join the ethnology of mahouts of today with their ancient history, and of understanding them as individual points of variation in a continuum that is very long and wide, is irresistible, if hopelessly overambitious. One of the problems of making this connection is implied by what has already been said: the war elephant went extinct as an institution in the nineteenth century, which means that the conditions of elephant-use by humans in South and Southeast Asia over the last couple of centuries have drastically changed. Capturing the effects of this change is part of the challenge of joining mahout history with mahout ethnography that I will have to address in the last section of the chapter.

War Elephant, Mahout, Aṅkuśa The ideal war elephant is a fully grown male with large tusks, aggressive to the point of being nearly ungovernable, captured with these traits in mind and trained to be put to use in war. Hyper-aggressiveness is its great military virtue, which makes the war elephant different from all other domesticated animals used in warfare. Something of male–male elephant combat in the wild is channelled into battlefield training. The mahout is essential to direct that combativeness in a way that is militarily fruitful. In a very real sense, the war elephant is not (p.49) just an elephant with certain attributes, it is the unity of elephant and mahout. No mahout, no war elephant; and if the mahout is killed in Page 2 of 24

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 (hatthimeṇḍa) 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 Page 3 of 24

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 The Mahābhārata confirms this geography of elephant supply, and connects mahouts with the same geography. Collecting together all the Mahābhārata passages describing war elephants in action, the countries mentioned form an arc, from north to south, eastward of the site of the action, which is set in the upper Ganga Valley. That is, war elephants are associated with Bihar–Bengal– Assam; central India; and the south. The mahouts and other elephant-men are from countries of these places, or are forest people such as Niṣaḍas or Kirāṭas; or are called mlecchas (foreigners).17 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), captureand-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.

Diffusion of the War Elephant I believe the circuits of exchange through which the institution of the war elephant spread were king-to-king relations, of diplomacy, alliance, war, taking of booty, levying of tribute and the emulation of successful kings by other kings. In these circuits of movement, mahouts often accompanied elephants to their new royal owners so that knowledge of elephant-use travelled with the elephants themselves. This is a capital point. As we shall shortly see, there are proofs in Page 5 of 24

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. A scheme of the diffusion is given in Figure 2.1. It begins in north India. Somehow, by stages we cannot discern, the war elephant became universal as a norm of kingship sometime after its invention in the late Vedic period, about 1000 BCE. The process was complete (p.53) by the time of the rise of Buddhism and Jainism, about 500 BCE. The idea of the fourfold army, including the elephant as one of its four divisions, prevailed as the current ideal of military completeness. With it, the institution of the mahout was distributed throughout the north, including to regions such as the upper Indus Valley where wild elephants were few and of lesser quality. The period from 500 to 300 BCE is one of contending states in northern India, of which sixteen kingdoms and republics are named as the leading players in the sources. Over two centuries of rivalry and alliance, one of them, Magadha on the middle Ganga, conquered and absorbed all the others, first in the growing kingdom of the Figure 2.1 Diffusion of the War Elephant Nanda dynasty, and then, from Source: Thomas R. Trautmann about 321 BCE, in the empire of the Mauryas, founded by Chandragupta, which eventually encompassed much of present-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. 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. We can get a fix on this comparative advantage from Greek sources on Alexander’s brief period in India (327–324 BCE). These sources give figures for the fourfold armies of king Porus, one of the leading kings of the Indus Valley, in horse country, and reports of the army of the Nanda king in the Ganga Valley, an elephant country. In battle, Porus had a force of 4,000 horses, 300 chariots, 200 elephants, and 30,000 foot soldiers. The army of the Nanda king was reported as Page 6 of 24

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 Page 8 of 24

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts 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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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts 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 JacqHergoualc’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 ShiPage 10 of 24

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts lu, an extraordinary daily chronicle of the Ming dynasty (1368−1644), some 40,000 pages long. Geoff Wade has extracted and translated passages having to do with Southeast Asia and put them online.34 Of these, sixty-seven have to do with elephants, spanning, nearly, the whole period of the Ming. Embassies bearing tribute came from kingdoms of Annam, Champa, Cambodia, Siam, and Java. The tribute often consisted of live elephants. Elephant drivers are mentioned several times, sometimes among recipients of gifts made to the embassy and its king when tribute has been accepted. For example, on one occasion the king of Champa sent his son as envoy to the Chinese emperor, on the occasion of his birthday, presenting fifty-four elephants, elephant tusks, rhinoceros horn, pepper, ebony, laka-wood, and floral silk cloth, and, to the heir apparent, elephant tusks and other products. The account is particular about the counter-gifts bestowed by the Chinese upon the Champa envoys, down to the elephant drivers, who were given gifts of clothing.35 Elephant drivers are sometimes mentioned in this record as being transferred with the tribute of live elephants. On one occasion, tribal allies of the Ming in Yunnan were made elephant drivers in the Ming military,36 an honour under the circumstances; but under other circumstances persons were made elephant drivers as a punishment,37 which shows the low esteem of the position. Elephant drivers are not invisible in these records; in fact, they get mentioned quite a bit, but always in connection with Yunnan and the kingdoms of Southeast Asia. They are not Indians; more often than not they are Chams. 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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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts 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 Thus mahouts register distinctly, in Greek and in Chinese sources completely independent of one another, at the far ends of the distribution of tamed elephants used for war. Both bodies of testimony show that mahouts and the practical knowledge of which they were the vessels were essential, and that mahouts accompanied their elephants when they became royal gifts in diplomatic exchanges.

After the War Elephant With the demise of the institution of the war elephant, which dominated and gave coherence to the cultures of elephant-use for nearly 3,000 years, we come to the crux of the problem of how to write a deep history of mahouts: the problem, that is, of connecting the ancient history of mahouts with the presentday ethnography of mahouts. To do so, we have to form some conception of the changed conditions of the (p.61) post–war elephant era, so that we can have a means of discriminating between the continuities and the changes in the relations of mahouts today with their craft-ancestors of the past. 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 Piers Locke’s pioneering ethnography of mahouts in Nepal shows the way in which the elephant stables of the Nepali royal hunting establishment in Chitwan have been repurposed for conservation and eco-tourism, and he tracks both the continuities and the changes that overtook the mahouts in the process.43 One of the continuities is the conferring of public badges of the honourable position Page 12 of 24

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts mahouts hold in the system of statuses, in the form of a distinctive kind of turban (pagari). This observation suggests ways of reading ancient evidence, and indeed we find mahouts with aṅkuśa and turban in ancient sculptures such as those of Sanchi and in Mughal paintings (Figure 2.2). To be sure, men of all social ranks wear turbans in the Mughal paintings, even common labourers and boatmen; what the ethnography urges us to look for is not the turban itself, but evidence that it is a kind of livery signifying being in the king’s service. In the Indianizing kingdom of the Khmers, in representations of armies at Angkor Wat, the Bayon and Banteay Chmar, mahouts again carry aṅkuśas but are mostly bare-headed, or have hairdos or headdresses indicative of Khmer or Cham ethnicity. Here, the aspect of signing connection with the king’s service may lie, rather, in the

Figure 2.2 Mughal War Elephants Source: Akbarnama, painting, 1586–9, V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum. ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

(p.62) printed cotton jackets the mahouts

wear.44 These at least are the kinds of details worth pursuing in bringing the ethnography to bear on the earlier history of mahouts. Another would be that mahouts at Chitwin used to get honoraria (bakshish) at the end of royal hunts, a practice which must go back at least as far as Akbar. His elephant-men got a reward of a month’s wages every time the emperor mounted an elephant, according to the Ā’īn-i Akbarī.45 In Nepal, the practice had come to an end, with the end of royal hunts and of kingship itself. 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 Page 13 of 24

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts 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 Page 14 of 24

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts further timber extraction, as in Laos47 and Thailand.48 International animal welfare sentiment against the capture, training, and use of elephants for work has been a contributing factor. As a result the present conditions of mahouts are different from those of the period when the war elephant dominated human uses of elephants, and their future prospects are bleak. Mahouts regularly state that they do not want their sons to go into the trade.49 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 Page 15 of 24

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts the international trade in tropical hardwoods themselves, on the periphery of the large timber operations of the state and the international corporations. This is my conception of the context in which to understand the fine analysis of Nicholas Lainé, of methods of capture and training (p.66) among the Khamti of Assam on the border of Myanmar, speakers of a Shan language.57 This training is done by singing rather than talking to the newly captured elephants, and as the author perceptively notes, Megasthenes, Greek ambassador to Candragupta Maurya, stated, more than 2,000 years ago, that singing was used by elephant trainers in Mauryan times. This is a thrilling example of the kinds of continuities that a deep history of mahouts may reveal. But there are also many discontinuities that separate the Mauryan-era practices and those of the Khamti. Megasthenes’ description of the method of capture presupposes that an adult male, suitable for warfare, is what is wanted, as a tame female elephant was used to lure the wild male into the enclosure. The Khamti, on the other hand, capture immature elephants, believing that they cannot be persuaded, by song, to abandon their ‘forest heart’ and take on ‘man heart’, if they are adults. The method of capture is melashikar, which involves lassoing a young individual when chasing it from the back of a larger, adult elephant. Moreover, elephants are owned singly, by men who are owner-operators of timber businesses. The scale is altogether smaller. The overall context is profoundly different from the Mauryan period, in which, as we have seen from Megasathenes, the king held a monopoly over elephants, horses, and arms, in large numbers. Khamti practice contains some elements continuous with a long past of mahoutship in South and Southeast Asia, and others shaped by quite new economic and political conditions. It also contains, in the account of Lainé, local conceptions about the forest spirits residing in the hair-ends of young captive elephants, which must be removed by singeing them with torches.

Summing Up, Looking Ahead To sum up this very brief overview of a very long and hard-to-uncover history: the deep history of mahouts is most fruitfully conceptualized as a field of variation in which there is both continuity and change. In the hundred or more generations across which the skills of mahouts have been transmitted, the instances (individual mahouts) are connected by the apprenticeship of a younger generation to the older, often (but not always) related by descent. The transmitted knowledge is not (p.67) standardized but it has some strong continuities, especially the use of the aṅkuśa. Doubtless, many other things having to do with feeding, chaining, harnessing, and driving are stable across large swathes of time and geography. 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; Page 16 of 24

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts the availability and numbers of wild elephants; the conditions of international trade; the state of technology as it concerns elephant-use; and so forth. The second has to do with the effects of the spread of what is a subaltern form of knowledge across many different peoples speaking many different languages and having many local beliefs and practices. Here, the documents of ancient times are likely to be least helpful because of the great social distance between the literate classes who create the written documents and the non-literate but highly skilled mahouts who do not use them. The Arthaśāstra, to my mind, is the ancient written document that is closest to the practical knowledge of the elephant-men of its time.58 Later texts attribute the knowledge derived from elephant-men to the mythical past, and to an inspired sage. The mystification of subaltern knowledge serves to exalt it by attributing it to more exalted sources. To accomplish a deep history of mahouts we need to use the ancient documents gingerly, with this social distance fully in mind, but use the ethnography of present-day mahouts as fully as we may, as a means of comparison and a resource for new ways of reading the ancient record. 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 giftgiving, such as the elephant given to Charlemagne from the caliph Harun alPage 17 of 24

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts 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. That elephant-handler techniques in zoos and circuses derive from those of mahouts is generally understood, but little studied. An excellent study of American circus elephants by Nance offers the tantalizing information that the second elephant to reach America came from India with its mahout, who tended it for the thirteen years of its life in the New World, from 1803 to 1816.61 What is needed is to identify both continuities and changes in the transmission of knowledge from mahouts to such elephant-handlers, as well as the formation of new routines of practice and theories of elephant training by the elephanthandlers. The prospects for success for such a project are not good. In the first place, practices are variable and not standardized, and are largely conveyed by apprenticeship and not in writing. In the second place, the critique of the keeping of elephants by circuses and zoos (p.69) over the last few decades, from an animal welfare or animal rights direction emanating from Europe and America, but with a worldwide influence and participation, has made the subject intensely controversial, so that zoos and circuses are wary of inquiries.62 Mahouts and the aṅkuśa have been criticized, directly or indirectly, along with elephant-handlers of circuses and zoos in faraway places. Holders of elephants everywhere have felt the force of the animal-welfare critique and have been put on the defensive. Responses have been various. The animal-welfare critique has contributed greatly to the ending of timber elephants in most countries—to be replaced by machinery powered by fossil fuels. This is one of the last of the steps by which animal power has given way to the use of fossil fuels, with all the environmental consequences that it entails. Some zoos have accepted the critique and placed their elephants in refuges; others have attempted to ameliorate the conditions of their elephants and adopted new methods of protected contact to replace traditional free contact practices of elephant-handlers.63 There have been attempts to codify and propagate practices of mahouts most consistent with animal welfare goals.64 There have been attempts to ameliorate the deteriorating condition of mahouts.65 There have been lawsuits and campaigns to mobilize public sentiment against captivity. Under such conditions, investigation of the relation of mahoutship to elephant-handler practices is made very difficult and fraught, as every finding of fact will weigh on one side or other of current controversies.

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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts Nevertheless, insofar as we might be able to reconstruct it, a deep history of mahouts would not impede, and may help, find ways forward that advance elephant welfare without sacrificing the welfare of mahouts and forest people. 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). (2.) Piers Locke, ‘History, Practice, Identity: An Institutional Ethnography of Elephant Handlers in Chitwan, Nepal’ (PhD thesis, University of Kent, Canterbury, 2007). (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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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts (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.). (7.) Pittaya Homkrailas, Prawit Rōtčhanaphrưk, and Kānthǭngthīeo Hǣng Prathēt Thai, Ta Klang: The Elephant Valley of Mool River Basin (Bangkok: Tourism Authority of Thailand, 2002). (8.) Ben Kiernan, ‘Serial Colonialism and Genocide in Nineteenth-Century Cambodia’, in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History, edited by A. Dirk Moses (New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 211–12. (9.) Rām, The Vālmīki-Rāmāyaṇa: Critical Edition, edited by G.H. Bhatt and U.P. Shah (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1960–75), 1.6.23. (10.) R.L. Turner, A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 572; s.v. 9950 mahāmātra. (11.) Manfred Mayrhofer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen (Indogermanische Bibliothek, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1986), 397. (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. (13.) Kangle, The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra, 2.31.9–10. (14.) Kangle, The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra, 2.31.16. (15.) Kangle, The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra, 2.2.15–16. (16.) Kangle, The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra, 7.12.22–4. (17.) The Mahābhārata (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1917), 7.68.31–2; 7.87.16–18; 8.17.1–4, 17–18, 20; 8.59.10; 8.62.35–7. (18.) Trautmann, Elephants and Kings, ch. 2. (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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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts people in this sense form an important political category whose cooperation kings must strive to get, difficult though it is to do so. (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. (21.) Trautmann, ‘Elephants and the Mauryans’. (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). (23.) Mahāvaṃsa, The Mahavamsa, translated by Wilhelm Geiger (London: Published for the Pali Text Society by Luzac, 1958). (24.) Arrian, History of Alexander 4.30.8. Arrian: History of Alexander and Indica, translated by P. A. Brunt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), Loeb Classical Library 236, 269. (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. (26.) Lionel Casson, ‘Ptolemy II and the Hunting of African Elephants’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 123 (1993): 251. (27.) Roger Goossens, ‘Gloses indiennes dans le lexique d’Hesychius’, L’antiquité classique 12 (1944): 47–55; Paul Goukowsky, ‘Le roi Poros, son elephant et quelques autres’, Bulletin de correspondence hellenique 96 (1972): 483 n. 36. (28.) Goossens, ‘Gloses indiennes dans le lexique d’Hesychius’. (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. Page 21 of 24

Towards a Deep History of Mahouts 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). (31.) Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h, The Armies of Angkor: Military Structure and Weaponry of the Khmers (Bangkok, Thailand: Orchid Press, 2007). (32.) Wen Huanran’s work on elephants is described in Elvin’s ecological history of China, whose title, The Retreat of the Elephants, alludes to Wen’s work (2004). The original is in Rongsheng Wen (ed.), Zhongguo li shi shi qi zhi wu yu dong wu bian qian yan jiu. The relevant chapters (15–17, pp. 185–219) were translated for me by Charles Sanft. (33.) Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). (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. (36.) Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu, 21 September 1448. (37.) Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu, 24 September 1445. (38.) Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu, 6 May 1388. (39.) Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu, 25 May 1388. (40.) Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu, 6 August 1388. (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. (43.) Locke, ‘History, Practice, Identity’. (44.) Jacq-Hergoualc’h, The Armies of Angkor, 76–81. (45.) Ā’īn-i-Akbarī, Abūal-Faz̤l ibn Mubārak, The Ā’īn-iAkbarī, 1.47. (46.) H.L. Seneviratne, Rituals of the Kandyan State (Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology, Book 22. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts (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). (48.) Savvides, At the Brink of Extinction. (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. (50.) G.H. Evans, Elephants and Their Diseases: A Treatise on Elephants (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1910). (51.) U. Toke Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant (Rangoon, Burma: Trade Corporation, 1974). (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). (53.) Mar, ‘The Studbook of Timber Elephants of Myanmar with Special Reference to Survivorship Analysis’, 196. (54.) Evans, Elephants and Their Diseases; Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant. (55.) Evans, Elephants and Their Diseases, 13–14. (56.) Mar, ‘The Studbook of Timber Elephants of Myanmar with Special Reference to Survivorship Analysis’. (57.) N. Lainé, ‘Pratiques vocales et dressage animal’. (58.) See Patrick Olivelle, Chapter 3, this volume. (59.) Locke, ‘History, Practice, Identity’. (60.) Aelian, De Natura Animalium. On the Characteristics of Animals, translated by A.F. Scholfield (Loeb Classical Library, Nos. 446, 448, and 449; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 11.25.

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Towards a Deep History of Mahouts (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’.

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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra Patrick Olivelle

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords This chapter makes a major contribution to our understanding of Sanskrit elephant lore. Unlike other scholarship that has focussed on texts with mythic and poetic styles that are somewhat resistant to reliable interpretations of the state of ancient elephant knowledge, this text analyses the Arthaśāstra, a rather more instrumental manual of statecraft. We learn how kings are instructed to establish and manage elephant forests, about the various functionaries involved in capturing, training, and caring for elephants, the significance of fines imposed for mistreating elephants, systems of classification, the commercial trade in elephants, and their use in war. Demonstrating that both captive and freeroaming elephants were subject to elaborate forms of management, dependent on accumulated knowledge and expertise, the author also engages in a rebuttal of dismissive analyses of literature denying their validity as sources of reliable knowledge and instruction. Keywords:   Kauṭilya, Arthaśāstra, Sanskrit literature, wild elephant management, domesticated elephant management, mahout, knowledge of elephants, elephant forests

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 domestic and wild elephant populations, it may be profitable to learn lessons from the past. A text that reveals this interaction during the first century CE is Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (KAŚ), which is the focus of this chapter. As I, in my recent translation of the text,4 and Trautmann5 half a century ago, have demonstrated, the Arthaśāstra is not a work of the Maurya period to which it has been wrongly assigned by many scholars, but was written by Kauṭilya in the middle of the first century CE. After a major redaction, the text as we now have it dates to a period between the second and third century CE. (p.76) Its characterization when it was first discovered during the early years of the twentieth century still rings true: ‘Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya is perhaps the most precious work in the whole range of Sanskrit literature.’6 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)

Management of Wild Elephants Page 2 of 16

Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra 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 So, Kauṭilya instructs the king to establish an elephant forest or sanctuary (hastivana) at the frontier of his territory, along with other kinds of forest preserves such as those for game animals and forest produce. In these sanctuaries elephants would live wild and in their natural habitat, but such sanctuaries had defensive perimeters supervised and guarded by an array of state officials and employees. At the frontier, he should establish an elephant forest guarded by foresters. The Superintendent of Elephant Forests should protect elephant forests located near hills, rivers, lakes, or marshy land, with the help of elephantforest wardens, keeping the boundaries, entrances, and exits under surveillance. They should put to death anyone who kills an elephant. Anyone who brings the two tusks of an elephant that has died naturally shall receive a reward of four and a quarter Paṇas.10 In this passage, the official in charge of protecting elephant forests is called nāgavanādhyakṣa, superintendent of elephant forests,11 while at KAŚ 2.31 an official called hastyadhakṣa, superintendent of elephants, is tasked with protecting elephant forests, pointing to different source material used by Kauṭilya. It is also possible that the latter was a high-ranking official who had overall responsibilities for all elephants, both wild and domesticated, because he is also tasked with building stables and supervising a large body of specialists and workers looking after military elephants. The boundaries of elephant forests were well marked and their entrances and exits well guarded. The wardens, who were probably the on-site supervisors, were called nāgavanapāla. The people who patrolled the forest and kept poachers at bay were called aṭavī, a term generally referring to forest tribes. It would have made sense to employ such individuals who were familiar with and accustomed to travelling in forests. The wardens were authorized to (p.78) put to death any poacher who killed an elephant.12 The punishment for setting fire to an elephant forest was execution by fire.13 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 consisting mostly of females, and of single male elephants. It does come as a surprise that these workers, or at least their bosses, were literate, because they were expected to keep written records of the elephant census. The elephant-forest wardens (nāgavanapāla), assisted by elephant keepers (hastipaka), foot chainers (pādapāśika), border guards (saimika), foresters (vanacaraka), and attendants (pārikarmika)—their body odours masked by rubbing elephant urine and dung, camouflaged with branches of Bhallātakī-tree, and moving about with five or seven female elephants acting as lures—should find out the size of the elephant herds by means of clues provided by where they sleep, their footprints and dung, and the damage they have done to river banks. They should keep a written record of elephants—those moving in herds, those roaming alone, those driven from a herd, and the leaders of herds, as well as those that are vicious or in rut, the cubs, and those released from captivity.14 Capturing Wild Elephants

The transition from wild to domesticated necessarily involved capturing suitable wild elephants, training them to follow human commands, and finally to engage fearlessly in battle. Unfortunately, the Arthaśāstra has little to say about the methods employed in the capture of elephants, although the information about the methods used in taking the census may indicate some of the strategies also used in the hunt. The following proverb makes it clear that it was taken for granted that elephants were used to capture elephants: ‘Riches are captured with riches, like elephants with elephants.’15 We do have, however, some interesting information about the organization of the elephant hunt itself. First, the hunt took place in the summer before the rainy season, that is, midMay 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. The time for capturing elephants is the summer. A 20-year-old should be captured, while cubs, ones with small tusks, ones without tusks, the sick, and female elephants that are pregnant or suckling should not be captured.16 They should capture elephants that, in the judgment of elephant trainers, have excellent marks and demeanour.17 In the first passage we have three interesting words most likely deriving from the vocabulary of elephant trainers that are probably here Sanskritized: vikka, Page 4 of 16

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

Management of Domesticated Elephants Information on the management of domesticated elephants in the Arthaśāstra, although copious, is skewed by the fact that the text focuses on elephants owned by the state. So it has little to say about (p.80) elephants that may have been owned and used by private individuals and businesses for commercial, entertainment, or religious purposes. Nevertheless, it provides detailed information regarding the maintenance and training of elephants not found in any other document from the period. 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: The Superintendent of Elephants should provide for the following: the protection of the elephant forests; stables, stalls, and places for lying down for male and female elephants and cubs that are under training or capable of work; the amount of work, rations, and green fodder assigned for them; allotting of work to them; their fastenings and equipment; their military trappings; and the retinue of attendants such as veterinarians and elephant trainers.20 This retinue, called upasthāyikavarga, included a broad array of specialists and ordinary workers listed in this passage: ‘The retinue of attendants consists of veterinarian, trainer, mahout, groom, guard, decorator, cook, feeder, foot restrainer, stall guard, sleep attendant, and the like.’21 With regard to the veterinarians, it is unclear whether these were specialists in elephants, because vets are mentioned also in the context of other animals. Further the term cikitsaka is also used for physicians treating humans.22 Kauṭilya provides a list, no doubt partial, of the ailments that veterinarians Page 5 of 16

Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra should treat: ‘Veterinarians should treat elephants suffering as a result of a journey, sickness, work, rut, or old age.’23 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: He should have a stable constructed, a stable whose height, width, and length are twice the length of an elephant; that has additional stalls for female elephants, an entrance hall, and a ‘princess’ configuration;25 and that faces the east or the north. He should have each stall constructed square in shape with each side the length of an elephant, a stall that is equipped with a smooth tying post and a floor made of smooth planks, and that has an outlet for urine and excrement. He should have a place for lying down that is the same in size as a stall but half as high prepared, within the fort for military and transport elephants, and outside the fort for elephants under training and for vicious elephants.26 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 He should have a stable constructed, a stable whose length corresponds to the number of horses, whose width is twice a horse’s length, which has four doors and a central area for rolling on the ground, as well as an entrance hall, and which is equipped with planks for seating near the main door and teeming with monkeys, peacocks, spotted deer, mongooses, Cakora-partridges, parrots, and myna birds. He should have (p.82) a stall facing east or north constructed for each horse, a stall that is square in shape with each side the length of a horse and with a floor made of smooth planks, that is equipped with a hamper for feed and an outlet for urine and excrement. Alternatively, he may adjust the direction in accordance with the requirements of the stable. The stalls for mares, stallions, and foals should be at separate ends.27 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 Arthaśāstra provides two different classifications of elephants, one according to age and size, and another according to their training and disposition. According to the first, the best is a forty-year-old elephant, seven aratnis or 3.36 metres in height and nine aratnis or 4.32 metres long. Next is a thirty-year-old, and the lowest is a twenty-five-year-old.29 Work elephants are divided into four categories: the ones under training (damya), war elephants (sāṃnāhya), riding or transport elephants (aupavāhya), and vicious (vyāla).30 Each of these is subdivided into several kinds, and the discussion of the elephant under training gives us some idea of the training methods: Trainees are of five kinds: one becoming accustomed to someone getting on its shoulders, one becoming accustomed to being tied to the post, one becoming accustomed to water, one becoming accustomed to pits, and one becoming accustomed to the herd.31 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 Page 7 of 16

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 state during a time of financial emergency: ‘Dealers in gold, silver, diamonds, gems, pearls, corals, horses, and elephants are subject to a tax of one-fiftieth.’40 Another interesting anecdote concerns travelling musicians and performers, people involved in ancient Indian show business.41Among other venues, they also performed in the royal palace, and when they did so, there were additional precautions taken to protect the life of the king in attendance. Interestingly, a bit of circus also appears to have been involved, including performances using elephants: ‘Performers should entertain him without employing performances involving weapons, fire, or poison. Their musical instruments should remain within the palace, as also the ornaments of their horses, carriages, and elephants.’42 The presence of elephants in the countryside is also evident in rules pertaining to the construction and maintenance of roads. In prescribing the width of various kinds of roads, Kauṭilya says that roads for elephants (hastipatha) should be two Daṇḍas or about 3.8 metres wide.43 Under enforcement of rules regarding damage to roads, he says that someone obstructing an elephant road is to be fined 54 Paṇas.44

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 When deployed in a battle array, Kauṭilya tells us how elephants should be engaged in battle, the distance between each, and the foot soldiers assigned to guard each: There should be three men fighting in front of a horse; fifteen in front of a chariot or an elephant, as also five horses. The same number of foot guards should be employed for a horse, a chariot, and an elephant.49 Riding on an elephant was clearly a sign of authority and prestige. ‘High-ranking supervisors,’ it is said, ‘are those who ride on elephants, horses, and chariots’ (uttarādhyakṣā hastyaśvarathārohāḥ).50 While inspecting his troops, the king rode on a horse or an elephant.51 We have also seen that trained elephants were also used in capturing wild elephants, as well as in ordinary hunts organized for the king within (p.86) the animal preserves specially established for the royal hunt.52 We have a confirmation of this from the description left by Megasthenes, the ambassador of Seleucus I to the court of Candragupta Maurya at the end of the fourth century BCE.53 It is, however, unclear whether elephants were also used in transportation and heavy lifting; at least the Arthaśāstra is silent on this point. 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 elephantscience 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 hairsplitting 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. (2.) Trautmann, ‘Elephants and the Mauryas’, 235. (3.) See Trautmann, Chapter 2, this volume. (4.) Patrick Olivelle, King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Page 11 of 16

Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (5.) Thomas R. Trautmann, Kauṭilya and the Arthaśāstra: A Statistical Investigation of the Authorship and Evolution of the Text (Leiden: Brill, 1971). (6.) F.W. Thomas, Cambridge History of India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), I: 467. (7.) Dieter Schlingloff, Fortified Cities of Ancient India: A Comparative Study (London: Anthem, 2013). (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. (9.) R. P. Kangle (ed.), The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1969), 2.31.10. (10.) pratyante hastivanam aṭavyārakṣaṃ niveśayet | nāgavanādhyakṣaḥ pārvataṃ nādeyaṃ sārasam ānūpaṃ ca nāgavanaṃ viditaparyantapraveśaniṣkāsaṃ nāgavanapālaiḥ pālayet | hastighātinaṃ hanyuḥ | dantayugaṃ svayaṃmṛtasyāharataḥ sapādacatuṣpaṇo lābhaḥ || (KAŚ 2.2.6–9). (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. (12.) KAŚ 2.2.8. (13.) KAŚ 4.11.20. (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). (15.) KAŚ 9.4.27. (16.) grīṣme grahaṇakālaḥ | viṃśativarṣo grāhyaḥ | vikko moḍho makkaṇo vyādhito garbhiṇī dhenukā hastinī cāgrāhyāḥ || (KAŚ 2.31.8−10).

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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (17.) anīkasthapramāṇaiḥ praśastavyañjanācārān hastino gṛhṇīyuḥ || (KAŚ 2.2.12). (18.) KAŚ 5.6.10. (19.) KAŚ 13.3.6. (20.) hastyadhyakṣo hastivanarakṣāṃ damyakarmakṣāntānāṃ hastihastinīkalabhānāṃ śālāsthānaśayyākarmavidhāyavasapramāṇaṃ karmasv āyogaṃ bandhanopakaraṇaṃ sāṃgrāmikam alaṃkāraṃ cikitsakānīkasthaupasthāyikavargaṃ cānutiṣṭhet || (KAŚ 2.31.1).

(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). (23.) pathivyādhikarmamadajarābhitaptānāṃ cikitsakāḥ pratikuryuḥ (KAŚ 2.32.18). (24.) sthānasyāśuddhir yavasasyāgrahaṇaṃ sthale śāyanam abhāge ghātaḥ parārohaṇam akāle yānam abhūmāv atīrthe ‘vatāraṇaṃ taruṣaṇḍa ity atyayasthānāni | tam eṣāṃ bhaktavetanād ādadīta || (KAŚ 2.32.19–20). (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. (26.) hastyāyāmadviguṇotsedhaniṣkambhāyāmāṃ hastinīsthānādhikāṃ sapragrīvāṃ kumārīsaṃgrahāṃ prāṅmukhīm udaṅmukhīṃ vā śālāṃ niveśayet | hastyāyāmacaturaśraślakṣṇālānastambhaphalakāstarakaṃ samūtrapurīṣotsargaṃ sthānaṃ niveśayet | sthānasamāṃ śayyām ardhāpāśrayāṃ durge sāṃnāhyaupavāhyānāṃ bahir damyavyālānām || (KAŚ 2.31.2–4). (27.) aśvavibhavenāyatām aśvāyāmadviguṇavistārāṃ caturdvāropāvartanamadhyāṃ sapragrīvāṃ pradvārāsanaphalakayuktāṃ vānaramayūrapṛṣatanakulacakoraśukasārikākīrṇāṃ śālāṃ niveśayet | aśvāyāmacaturaśraślakṣṇaphalakāstāraṃ sakhādanakoṣṭhakaṃ samūtrapurīṣotsargam ekaikaśaḥ prāṅmukham udaṅmukhaṃ vā sthānaṃ niveśayet | śālāvaśena vā digvibhāgaṃ kalpayet | vaḍavāvṛṣakiśorāṇām ekānteṣu || (KAŚ 2.30.4–7). (28.) KAŚ 2.4.8.

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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (29.) KAŚ 2.32.11. (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. (33.) aratnau taṇḍuladroṇaḥ, ardhāḍhakaṃ tailasya, sarpiṣas trayaḥ prasthāḥ, daśapalaṃ lavaṇasya, māṃsaṃ pañcāśatpalikaṃ, rasasyāḍhakaṃ dviguṇaṃ vā dadhnaḥ piṇḍakledanārthaṃ, kṣāradaśapalikaṃ madyasyāḍhakaṃ dviguṇaṃ vā payasaḥ pratipānaṃ, gātrāvasekas tailaprasthaḥ, śiraso ‘ṣṭabhāgaḥ prādīpikaś ca, yavasasya dvau bhārau sapādau, śaṣpasya śuṣkasyārdhatṛtīyo bhāraḥ, kaḍaṅkarasyāniyamaḥ || (KAŚ 2.31.13). (34.) Trautmann, The Clash of Chronologies, 237. (35.) KAŚ 2.32.22 (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. (37.) See the helpful map provided in Trautmann (2015: 13).

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Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (38.) kāliṅgāṅgārajāḥ śreṣṭhāḥ prācyāś cedikarūṣajāḥ | dāśārṇāś cāparāntāś ca dvipānāṃ madhyamā matāḥ || saurāṣṭrakāḥ pāñcanadās teṣāṃ pratyavarāḥ smṛtāḥ | sarveṣāṃ karmaṇā vīryaṃ javas tejaś ca vardhate || (KAŚ 2.2.15–16). (39.) KAŚ 7.12.22. (40.) KAŚ 5.2.17. (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). (42.) KAŚ 1.21.16–17. (43.) KAŚ 2.4.5. (44.) KAŚ 3.10.5. (45.) hastipradhāno vijayo rājñaḥ | parānīkavyūhadurgaskandhāvārapramardanā hy atipramāṇaśarīrāḥ prāṇaharakarmāṇo hastinaḥ || (KAŚ 2.2.13–14). (46.) atyuṣṇopakṣīṇe kāle hastibalaprāyo yāyāt | hastino hy antaḥsvedāḥ kuṣṭhino bhavanti | anavagāhamānās toyam apibantaś cāntaravakṣārāc cāndhībhavanti | tasmāt prabhūtodake deśe varṣati ca hastibalaprāyo yāyāt | viparyaye kharoṣṭrāśvabalaprāyo deśam alpavarṣapaṅkam | varṣati maruprāyaṃ caturaṅgabalo yāyāt || (KAŚ 9.1.45–50). (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. (48.) puroyānam akṛtamārgavāsatīrthakarma bāhūtsāras toyataraṇāvataraṇe sthānagamanāvataraṇaṃ viṣamasaṃbādhapraveśo ‘gnidānaśamanam ekāṅgavijayo bhinnasaṃdhānam abhinnabhedanaṃ vyasane trāṇam abhighāto vibhīṣikā trāsanam audāryaṃ grahaṇaṃ mokṣaṇaṃ sāladvārāṭṭālakabhañjanaṃ kośavāhanāpavāhanam iti hastikarmāṇi || (KAŚ 10.4.14). (49.) aśvasya trayaḥ puruṣāḥ pratiyoddhāraḥ | pañcadaśa rathasya hastino vā, pañca cāśvāḥ | tāvantaḥ pādagopā vājirathadvipānāṃ vidheyāḥ || (KAŚ 10.5.9– 11). Page 15 of 16

Science of Elephants in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra (50.) KAŚ 2.9.29. (51.) KAŚ 1.21.25. (52.) KAŚ 2.2.3. (53.) See J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (London: Trübner, 1877), 72. (54.) KAŚ 2.17.13. (55.) KAŚ 2.18.13 (56.) KAŚ 2.22.6. (57.) KAŚ 3.17.8. (58.) Melin Peris, ‘Abusing the Elephant: Pseudo-Specification and Prognostication in Ancient Elephant Lore’, Gajah: Journal of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group 20 (2001): 51. (59.) Franklin Edgerton, The Elephant-Lore of the Hindus: The Elephant-Sport (Matanga-Lila) of Nilakantha (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985, originally published 1931). (60.) Peris, ‘Abusing the Elephant’, 52. (61.) Edgerton, The Elephant-Lore of the Hindus, 5–7. (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.

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Symbolism and Power*

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Symbolism and Power* Elephants and Gendered Authority in the Mughal World Jane Buckingham

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords In the context of a horse-based warrior culture adapting to the elephant-based traditions of Indian political authority, this chapter not only explores elephants as symbols of imperial authority and masculine virility for the Mughal emperor Akbar, but also considers their significance as decisive agents and as material resources for the formation of state power. Through an analysis of Abu Fazl’s biography of the Mughal emperor, the Akbarnama, we learn of his interest in elephants, who were mastered when they were in the unpredictable state of mast, which conveyed the emperor’s masculine prowess and hence his suitability to rule. We learn how the elephants themselves were valorized, how Akbar rewarded and punished his mahouts, how he used elephants as regal commodities of tributary fealty, extending his patrimonial rule, while also facilitating the mobility of his court to travel, to wage war, and suppress rebellions. Keywords:   Akbar, Akbarnama, mahouts, Ā’īn-i Akbarī, war elephants, captive elephant management, mahout, mast, nonhuman agency

According to Simon Digby, elephants were more important in the military expansion of the Delhi Sultanate than horses, but during the Mughal period, from the time of Abū al-Fatḥ Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Akbar (1542–1605), known more commonly as Akbar I or Akbar the Great, increasing use of artillery and firearms reduced the elephant’s strategic value in both the Indian and Mughal armies.1 Even so, for Akbar, the elephant remained a valuable military asset, Page 1 of 20

Symbolism and Power* functioning less as a weapon and more as a means of embodying both the symbolic power of the Mughal emperor and his military authority. Despite the use of artillery and musketry, protected by body armour, the elephant was used by both Mughals and Europeans as a battering ram to demolish fortifications well into the eighteenth century.2 Elephants would bear baggage and equipment in support of the military but of greater symbolic importance was the fact that elephants played a critical role as the bearers of the Mughal elites. At the back of the battlefield, following the emperor as part of the Mughal’s itinerant court, the harem, comprising those women of the family and household of most value to the emperor, were mounted on elephants and (p.93) protected by a dedicated military force.3 On the battlefield itself, in Indian tradition, the ruler and leader of the army was elevated both literally and figuratively by his or her position on the back of an elephant.4 The elevation of the military leader, often the king or emperor, was both symbolic and tactical. While the ruler could be seen even by troops at the edges of the field, the battle remained live. Once the leader disappeared from sight, killed, injured, or otherwise displaced from view, the battle was lost. By the time of the fragmentation of the Mughal empire, the elephant was less appealing as a means of elevating the military leader. This was to some extent a result of a culture of horsemanship among the Afghan, Mughal, and Persian forces competing for the spoils of the empire. But it was also to reduce risk. Nadir shah wondered: ‘What strange practice is this that the rulers of Hind have adopted? In the day of the battle they ride on an elephant, and make themselves into a target for everybody!’5 With advances in targeted weaponry and artillery, the risk to the leader increasingly outweighed the strategic advantage of elevation on an elephant.6 Even so, for Akbar, building his identity and authority as he transformed the Timurid outpost claimed by Babur into a sub-continental empire, the image of the elephant in war remained a part of his military apparatus of great material and symbolic value. In the Akbari period, a well-managed elephant was still recognized as an asset in war. As Abul Fazl noted: ‘Experienced men of Hindustan put the value of a good elephant equal to five hundred horses; and they believe that, when guided by a few bold men armed with matchlocks, such an elephant alone is worth double that number.’7 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. Much of the scholarship on Akbar’s expansion and consolidation of the Mughal empire during his fifty-year reign focuses on the strategic integration of the Rajput elites, the establishment of a formalized bureaucracy to manage land and revenue, and the representation of Akbar through Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama as a new kind of Islamic ruler, the perfect man, embodying both spiritual and imperial leadership.13 As the poet Fayzi, Abul Fazl’s brother, commented, ‘kings are the shadow of God on earth’, but Akbar was more than this standard concept of the Islamic king. Akbar was ‘the emanation of God’s light’.14 Akbar’s religious policy, strategic marriage alliances, and ability to acculturate to the existing warrior values of Hindu elites are credited as key to his success.15 The importance of animals to the empire’s success is mentioned primarily in terms of the military resource provided by horses and elephants.16 (p.95) 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 TurkoMongol 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. If one adopts the perspective of ethnoelephantology, then analysis would incline one to recognize the ‘mutual entanglements’ of the emperor and the elephant in configuring Akbari imperial authority.20 This has implications for two areas of Mughal historiography in particular: the cultural appropriation of elephants during the Mughal period, and their role in the performance of gendered authority in the Mughal empire. Akbar’s fascination with elephants and his relations of mastery over them in developing his symbolic authority adds a human–elephant dimension to the argument offered by Siddiqui and the Aligarh school, and critiqued by Subrahmanyam and Watson, that under Akbar the Mughal empire became less Turko-Mongol and more Indianized, deliberately integrating elements of Indian political relations, particularly with the Rajputs, as a means of stabilizing an empire that had been established rapidly.21 Further, by centring the human–elephant relationship within the construction of Akbari imperial culture, the role of human–elephant relations in promoting specific masculine values as aspects of Akbar’s imperial identity (p.96) becomes clear. By exploring elite interspecies relations as a means for Akbar to project himself as the embodiment of imperial masculinity, this chapter brings discussions of gender and power into the emerging space of ethnoelephantology. Research into gendered aspects of Mughal elite culture has focused on the Mughal harem as a trope of the exotic,22 and more recently on its significance for Mughal domestic, economic, and political life.23 The focus of this chapter, however, is on the contribution of elephants to the projection of Akbar as man and emperor, drawing substantially on O’Hanlon’s analysis of north Indian pre-colonial models of masculinity.24 O’Hanlon’s work challenged the invisibility of masculinity as a ‘norm’ of gender relations and argued for the significance of distinct ‘masculine values’ in the construction of north Indian elite culture.25 This remains foundational to understanding the gendered dimension of Mughal power. By emphasizing the personal and relational aspects of Akbar’s engagement with elephants as elements in the construction of Mughal power and of Akbar as emperor and ‘perfect man’, this chapter brings an ethnoelephantology perspective to a gendered analysis of Mughal imperial identity. First, it engages with the elephant as an aspect of Akbar’s self-expression and projection of himself as perfect man and emperor, his imperial power co-extensive with his masculine identity. And second, it discusses the role of the elephant as a means

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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.

Elephants as Partners in Empire For the Mughals, the elephant was a being with agency, embodying distinct qualities and attributes and capable of expressing emotional and moral perception.26 The names given to elephants during the Mughal period say something of the qualities valued by the Mughal elites. The names also reveal how elephants were understood to be expressions of various aspects of royal power complementing the authority of the emperor just as they had the power of royalty in Indian tradition. All captive elephants in Indian elite stables were named, some for attributes of beauty, some for qualities of virtue such as dignity and embodiment of divine attributes. The naming of Akbar’s own elephant Asmun Shukoh (Heavenly dignity) reflects (p.97) his self-perception and deep interest in spiritual matters.27 Other elephants, such as Dalsingar (Ornament of the Army) and Aurang-gaj (Throne elephant) were named for their military and royal attributes. The Mughal courtier Danishmand Khan (1578–1657) mentions Fath-gaj (Victory elephant).28 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* subduing unrideable elephants were presented by Abul Fazl as evidence that, though young, Akbar was powerful and would control dissent; a ‘Divine athlete’, clearly under God’s protection.35 (p.98) 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. Once he succeeded Humayun as emperor, Akbar’s relationship with elephants became increasingly important in demonstrating his imperial power. Abul Fazl reports that from the age of fourteen ‘the power of H[is] M[ajesty] in riding mast elephants rose to such a pitch that that victory-supported one would unhesitatingly mount on a mast elephant which experienced drivers despairingly declined to ride’.40 In the Ā’īn-i Akbarī, Abul Fazl returns to the link between (p. 99) Akbar’s imperial power and his ability to command and control khasa (imperial) elephants: ‘His Majesty, the royal rider of the plain of auspiciousness, mounts on every kind of elephant, from the first to the last class, making them, notwithstanding their almost supernatural strength, obedient to his command.’41 Akbar as perfect man and perfect emperor could use his physical and moral

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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 significance of Akbar’s control of Hawa’i amid the scene of chaos and danger would have been clear to the Indian princes and Mughal elites. Hawa’i was most likely part of the booty from the defeat of Hemu, the Indian prince who had posed a serious challenge to Mughal power in the first year of Akbar’s

Figure 4.1 Akbar’s Adventures with the Elephant Hawa’i Source: Akbarnama, painting, c. 1586–7, V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum. ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

accession.42 Hawa’i was one of the best elephants in Hemu’s stable and was ridden by the Hindu ruler at the Second Battle of Panipat against the Mughal forces led by Bhairam Khan in 1556. Abul Fazl, while condemning Hemu as a ‘seditious soul’ could not help presenting him as a worthy opponent, a valiant and skilled warrior who, ‘ill-fated[,] … rode proudly on … Hawa’i … and, glanced from side to side and at the brave swordsmen, and the onset of the rankbreaking ghazis’.43 In riding Hawa’i, Akbar reasserted Mughal supremacy over an Indian king who had won several victories over the Mughals before being struck by an arrow, losing his seat on Hawa’i and thus the battle.44 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. Akbar’s conscious manipulation of his relationship with elephants to augment his authority is best illustrated by the story he told his son later in his life. It is a far simpler account than Abul Fazl’s of Akbar’s ride on Hawa’i and demonstrates his willingness to use the reputation of the elephant to put on a performance which would be talked about not only in elite courts but also in villages and marketplaces. Akbar’s relationship with Hawa’i enabled him to spread his reputation as fearless and unbeatable—an emperor who would confront and control rebellion and disobedience, even at the risk of his own life. At the same time, an older and more spiritually settled Akbar was able to reflect on his and the elephant’s survival as evidence of God’s protection. Jahangir recalls in his memoirs: 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 fullblooded (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 Page 8 of 20

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 As Akbar’s authority became established, he formalized his interest in elephants and integration of the elephant into the structures and symbols of his empire. Akbar embedded elephant lore and culture into the Mughal culture of human– animal relations by developing an elephant breeding programme. As Abul Fazl noted: ‘In former times, people did not breed elephants, and thought it unlucky; [but] by the command of His Majesty, they now breed a very superior class (p. 103) of elephants, which has removed the old prejudice in the minds of men.’51 We can see the breeding of elephants as a metaphor for Akbar’s subordination and domestication of India’s rulers. Akbar’s Indianization of the Mughal empire included controlling the provision and distribution of elephants as the principal symbols and mechanism of military and sovereign power. Only a ruler could possess an elephant and Akbar could not only possess and control the intelligence networks and land required for successful wild elephant capture but could also breed his own elephants of the quality and type representative of his imperial authority. 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, Page 9 of 20

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, ‘tigerseizing’, 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. The evaluative ranking of elephants reflects the depth of entanglement between human and animal in the symbol and practice of the Mughal empire, particularly as the mansab, or ranking system, became normalized under Akbar. Alongside members of the Mughal warrior class, the court, and the harem, Akbar included Page 10 of 20

Symbolism and Power* 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)

Elephants in the Integration of Elites and Non-elites into the Mughal Empire Akbar’s relationship with elephants was not conducted at Figure 4.2 Trained Elephants Execute the elite level only. Although the Followers of Khan Zaman Akbar frequently took the role Source: Akbarnama, painting, 1586–9, of elephant driver to V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum. demonstrate his physical ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London. capacity, he did so well aware that he was intervening within an Indian culture and tradition of elephant driving and lore which was relatively unfamiliar to the horse cultures of the Turko-Mongols. The importation of quality warhorses into India from the Persian Gulf and central Asia was key to the Mughal development of a swift, mobile cavalry of skilled bowmen—the basis of their military superiority over the Indian armies and the slower Indian war elephants.59 Elephants were part of the booty of war and were given as tributary presents indicating relations of dominance, (p.106) honour, and respect between unequal elites.60 Elephants were linked with royalty and divinity such that only the emperor and select elites were permitted to be carried on their backs.61 The elephant drivers, though from specialist classes, were however not elites and Abul Fazl’s frequent mention of the response of the elephant experts to Akbar’s control and management of the elephant was a reflection of Akbar’s respect for this class and for the ‘elephant servants’ and those who managed the imperial elephant stables, typically invisible in elite sources as Trautmann also notes in his discussion of earlier sources in this volume.62 While riding an elephant was an opportunity to display physical prowess and imperial authority, it was also an opportunity to integrate non-elites working within the Mughal elephant stables into the bureaucratic and patronage Page 11 of 20

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 Page 12 of 20

Symbolism and Power* 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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Symbolism and Power* 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. Akbar’s deliberate Indianization of Mughal elite culture integrated the Indian traditional association of elephants and kingship86 into an ideology of the Mughal ruler as emperor. While the aggressive male mast war elephant decreased in military significance, he increased in ideological value, both as a symbol of imperial authority and an expression of the emperor Akbar as the perfect embodiment of Mughal masculine values. Akbar took a practical interest in the breeding and training of elephants for the royal stable and, with the aid of imperial artists and writers, incorporated the elephant into both the physical and artistic representation of the new empire. The mast elephant became part of the specific imagery of imperial Akbari authority and the control of the young emperor over male elephants in rut became a metaphor for Mughal imperial power. Elephants were considered active agents in the formation of Akbari power, and the relationship between Akbar and his elephants demonstrated their participation in his formation as emperor and man. Not only did Akbar embody in his person the masculine value of fearlessness and skill in harnessing the heightened powers of the (p.110) elephant, but his personal qualities were also proof of his authority over the warrior elites who were crucial to the power and stability of the emergent Mughal empire. Capture and management of elephants also provided structures for deeper integration of both elites and non-elites into the mechanisms of the Mughal state. Greater concern with human–elephant relations allows for new forms of historical analysis. It brings new insight not only into the military, administrative, and symbolic construction of the Akbari Page 14 of 20

Symbolism and Power* 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,

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Symbolism and Power* Victoria and Albert Museum) illustrates the 1567 Mughal campaign against the rebels Khan Zaman and Bahadur Khan. (10.) For discussions of Akbar’s interest in the use of images to project an ideology of Akbari imperial power particularly through the illustration of the Akbarnama, see Michael Brand and Glenn D. Lowry, Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory (New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1985), and Milo Cleveland Beach, The Imperial Image: Paintings for the Mughal Court (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1981). (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. (19.) See Olivelle and Trautmann, Chapters 3 and 2, this volume.

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Symbolism and Power* (20.) 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. (21.) Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Mughal State—Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 29, 3 (1992): 291–321; Geoff Watson, ‘Interpretations of Central Asian Influences on Mughal India: The Historical Debate’, South Asia 18, 2 (1995): 1–22. (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. (24.) Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Masculinity in North Indian History: The Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies 4, 1 (1997): 2–19; O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body’. (25.) O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Masculinity in North Indian History’, 2–4. (26.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 41–8: 123–39 passim. (27.) Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Akbar’s Personality Traits and World Outlook: A Critical Reappraisal’, Social Scientist 20, 9/10 (1992): 20–3. (28.) Irvine, The Army of the Indian Moghuls, 179. (29.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XVIII: 115. (30.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 41: 123–4. (31.) O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body’, 894. (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. (33.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XVIII: 111–12. (34.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XVIII: 111–13, 112n2. (35.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XVIII: 111–13, 112n2. Page 17 of 20

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. (37.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XVIII: 115. (38.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XVIII: 115. (39.) Alam Khan, ‘Akbar’s Personality Traits’, 82–3; Smith, Akbar the Great Mogul, 38–9, 246–7. (40.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XVIII: 115. (41.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 47: 139. (42.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XI: 65. (43.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XI: 64. (44.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XI: 64. (45.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XXXVII: 232. (46.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XXXVII: 233. (47.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 41: 130–1. (48.) The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri: or Memoirs of Jahangir, translated by Alexander Rogers, edited by Henry Beveridge (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), Vol. II, 41–2. (49.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 45: 134. (50.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 45: 135. (51.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 41: 126. (52.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 41: 123–30. (53.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 41: 123–4. (54.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 48: 138–9. (55.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 41: 128. (56.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 42: 131. (57.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 44: 125, 46: 124, 48: 138–9.

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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. (59.) Jos Gommans, ‘Warhorse and Post-Nomadic Empire in Asia, c. 1000–1800’, Journal of Global History 2, 1 (2007): 1–21; Gommans, Mughal Warfare. (60.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XXXVII: 227–9. (61.) Trautmann, this collection. (62.) For insight into the culture and status of South Asian mahouts, see Niclas Klixbull, Chapter 9, this volume. (63.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 44: 132. (64.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 44: 125. (65.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 47: 139. (66.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 48: 139. (67.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 48: 131. (68.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 48: 139. (69.) Ā’īn-i Akbarī, 48: 139. (70.) Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient/Journal de l’histoireeconomique et sociale de l’Orient (1999): 47–93; Gavin Hambly, ‘TurkoMongol Gift-Giving in Diplomacy and Ceremonial Bonding’, in Robes and Hono: The Medieval World of Investiture, edited by Stewart Gordon (New York: Palgrave, 2001). (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

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Symbolism and Power* by Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15–24; Balabanillar, ‘The Begums of the Mystic Feast’, 126–8. (74.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, XI: 65. (75.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, LIV: 341. (76.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, LIV: 344, note 2. (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. (78.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, LIV: 343. (79.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, LIV: 354. (80.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, LIV: 354. (81.) On sport as an aspect of military training and maintaining court hierarchies, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Military Sports and the History of the Martial Body in India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, 4, (2007): 490–523 and M.N. Pearson, ‘Recreation in Mughal India’, The British Journal of Sports History 1, 3, (1984): 335–50. (82.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, LIV: 354. (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. (85.) Akbarnama, Vol. II, LIV: 343. (86.) Trautmann, Chapter 2, this volume.

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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork Elephants as Instruments and Participants in Mid-Nineteenth-Century India Julian Baker

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords Examining the role of elephants in the colonial fieldwork of geologist Valentine Ball and botanist Joseph Hooker in British India, this chapter asks us to consider elephants in histories of scientific discovery not just as facilitating devices but also as contributing participants. The author demonstrates that elephants were not only vehicles of access, instruments of observation, and expedient symbols of authority, but also particular sentient beings treated as non-human staff. Concerns with trace and erasure in the historical record are raised as a challenge for writing ‘trans-species history’, but investigative persistence reveals that Ball and Hooker’s elephants may be understood as non-human subaltern actors with individuality and intentionality who played an integral role in scientific fieldwork. 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! —Joseph Dalton Hooker1

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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. While often considered by scientists, elephants have rarely featured as contributing to scientific endeavours. What roles, then, did elephants such as Hooker described play in peripatetic fieldwork? The historian Richard Sorrenson has argued that the ship functioned as a scientific instrument in the eighteenth century, influencing the geographic knowledge navigators and naturalists gathered en route. The ship, which conducted a scientific discovery, ‘was never merely a vehicle … anymore than a telescope was merely a vehicle that transported images of heavenly new worlds to an observer’.2 Rather, the ship expanded the sciences of navigation and natural history as the telescope had expanded and framed understanding of the cosmos. By calling attention to the enabling, constraining, and mediating roles of the ship, Sorrenson usefully extends our notion of an instrument to include mundane yet vital devices of travel and observation. Sorrenson immediately proceeds, however, to compare James Cook’s ship the HMS Endeavour to the donkey used by Alexander von Humboldt in South America, and asserts that this donkey cannot be considered a scientific instrument for three reasons: it contributed no authority, by way of the commissioners, route, and equipment, to the data Humboldt collected; it ‘left no traces on the maps’ Humboldt later drew up; and, in contradistinction to a large vessel, ‘the Donkey did not offer Humboldt a superior, self-contained, and protected view of the landscapes and civilizations he viewed’.3 Though Sorrenson’s thoughts on elephants remain unknown, his three-part denunciation restricts understanding of past ‘traces’ and remains speciesspecific. First, historical vestiges, or lack thereof, depend as much on culturally and historically specific customs of record, as on actual deeds. Humans and human devices are not the only contributors to the historical record. Indeed, humans have always lived in symbiosis with animals; there has never been a purely human space in history.4 While indelibly anthropocentric, animals can be Page 2 of 20

Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork considered to have inscribed their actions on historical accounts through (p. 117) participation in human projects and through recorded actions.5 Elephants, moreover, differ markedly from donkeys. As anthropological, conservation, and ethological studies record, elephants possess complex socio-psychological characteristics and subjective agency.6 In mid-nineteenth-century India, elephants served manifold functions: religious icons, carriers of kings, machines of war, and industrial apparatus. Today, elephants continue to leave their mark on societies: they fuel regional economies by attracting visitors and enabling resource extraction, they cause suffering and loss by trampling fields and raiding crops, and they give meaning to human cultures via religion, history, and cohabitation.7 If Sorrenson does not consider Humboldt’s donkey an instrument, it is little surprise that he does not suggest it was a participant in Humboldt’s research. This, I believe, stems from anthropocentrism and the (related) legacy of Enlightenment rationality, which has long exalted the sovereign human subject.8 In addition, both Indian and Western scholarship have tended to write of elephants as ‘other’ animals: as South and Southeast Asian implements or symbols, rather than those of Europeans or colonialists.9 In mid-nineteenthcentury India, however, British colonialists—following Mughal example—used elephants extensively: for military freight and weaponry, for diplomatic ceremony, for hunting, for public works’ construction, and for tourism.10 Engineers also employed elephants to haul measuring chains, sextants, and camp kit during the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India.11 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)

Elephants as Instruments: Physical and Social Access Access and mobility are prosaic necessities of naturalist observation. Yet the sheer ability to enter, inhabit, and traverse terrain underlies all subsequent forms of inscription and circulation of knowledge. In mid-nineteenth-century India, an area larger than western Europe, few paved roads, much forest, and many watercourses separated the naturalist from their quarry—or simply from their next site. Seasonal conditions added obstacles. From June to September, rivers swelled, soil sagged, swamps pooled, bugs bred, and vegetation erupted, Page 3 of 20

Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork 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. Sorrenson’s first denunciation—that Humboldt’s donkey did not provide a ‘superior, self-contained or protected’ viewpoint—may be correct. But elephants did provide such roving, elevated transport by virtue of their size, strength, and training. For Ball and Hooker, the elephant was an instrument of access and observation. Laden with instruments, specimens, camp equipment, and provisions, and prone to wander through pathless tracts, naturalists relied on physical access. John Law has described how fifteenth-century Portuguese explorer-merchants sailing to India rendered themselves mobile and secure— and thus able to effect successful trans-oceanic maritime trade—by mobilizing the specific properties of the Portuguese carrack (a weaponized transport ship).12 In order to enter, traverse, and survey the backwoods of India, Ball and Hooker had to become similarly mobile and secure. 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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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork Ball’s primary task was to survey and assess coal, iron, and copper deposits. He spent most workdays searching out and inspecting sediment outcrops, often in riverine tracts where erosion exposed strata and bedrock. During his first season examining tributary beds in southwest Bengal, Ball’s equipage comprised twenty-one people and gear. For three months they lacked an elephant: ‘Four bullock carts … were my only means of carriage; how unsuited they were to the country I had to go

Figure 5.1 The Camp at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Source: V. Ball, Jungle Life in India: Or, The Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist (London: De la Rue, 1880), 504.

through will presently appear.’14 Thick vegetation, muddy trails, swamps and rivers bogged their progress. When heavy rains and rising water shrank their river-braid campsite, Ball and team loaded the bullocks at speed—losing provisions—and narrowly escaped ‘never leaving the place’. Several weeks later he acquired an elephant; his narrative does not mention watercourse difficulties again. Instead, Ball took to the howdah to observe rock formations and collect samples in swollen streams.15 More recreationally, where an ‘abundant variety of ducks and waders’ gathered in jheels (seasonal swamp or marsh), he paused geologizing to observe and shoot. ‘Where I could not get a boat,’ wrote Ball, ‘I employed an elephant to retrieve the fallen ducks.’16 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 Page 5 of 20

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 This posthumously published passing line, specifically, and observation and collection from the howdah, more generally, reveal a critical detail: not only did the elephant render the riding naturalist mobile and secure, allowing them to access forest terrain, it also augmented their perception. The telescope had enabled astronomers to perceive farther than the unaided eye, thereby revealing ‘new worlds’. As for navigation, botanical and geological questions required actual voyages that left laboratories, libraries, and scientific societies at home. In order to discern and collect specimens in the Tarai and Rajmahal forests, Ball and Hooker needed a sufficiently secure and unobstructed viewpoint in dense, predator-inhabited riparian forests and a means to return with cases of dried flora and minerals. They had to become, in the words of John Law, ‘mobile, durable, forceful and able to return’.26 As a telescope enabled astronomers to observe beyond the range of human sight, and as a ship enabled navigators to chart antipodal oceans and coasts, so the elephant enabled Ball and Hooker to access, inhabit, and observe the Indian environment beyond their bodily range Page 6 of 20

Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork and capacities. The Asian elephant is an animal physiologically evolved to ‘longdistance living’ and is able to carry 1,000 pounds of rider and baggage through challenging terrain,27 qualities colonial hunters relied upon and detailed at length.28 In this sense, the elephant offered ‘a superior, self-contained, and protected view’ tailored—by evolution—to the terrain. The elephant might therefore be considered a species of forest frigate or jungle microscope. 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. Excluded contributions to European scientific fieldwork raise a broader issue germane to colonial and South Asian history, namely the effacement of local knowledge and assistance. To downplay or erase the knowledge, capacity, and influence of ‘native’ help was de rigueur for colonial travel narratives. To efface the work of animals raised fewer eyebrows. Geographers have compared the representation of certain animals to gendered and racial discrimination of humans, whereby certain species are characterized in a similar manner by which masculinist and colonialist reasoning placed women or ‘natives’ below the Caucasian male on a cognitive and social hierarchy.33 Neither did the naturalists formally acknowledge their hired elephants, nor did they adequately acknowledge the enabling support of their guides, translators, porters, cooks, and tent-pitchers. In his Himalayan Journals, Hooker did not name a single nonnoble Indian, though he detailed every Westerner by title, vocation, and surname. He believed local Indians, without university education or Linnaean classification, lacked comprehension of their own plants. His Bengali and Sikkimese assistants exasperated him: they had no reference works for comparison; they frequently believed species to be unique when Western collections showed them to be geographical variants; and they ‘troubled’ him with numerous local geographic names. In addition, European scientific travellers faced disciplinary pressure to present themselves as independent, trustworthy, and authoritative, and discursive pressure to detail timely, ‘on the spot’ records by way of reliable instruments and trained eyes.34 So it is not surprising that elephants left no discernible traces on the maps Ball and Hooker Page 7 of 20

Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork 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 Questions of scientific credibility lead to Sorrenson’s third denunciation that a pack animal would not lend authority to the data collected. Mid-nineteenthcentury colonial travel, however, required not only (p.124) physical but also social and political access. In order to traverse local districts, Ball and Hooker needed regional authorities and peasants to tolerate their presence, however transient. Sorrenson’s point seems at first to hold: Asian elephants held little clout in nineteenth-century geological and botanical circles. But it wanes when we conceive of credibility beyond British and European scientific societies, for the elephant demonstrated status and authority in the eyes of local Indians. Over millennia, elephants in India have been associated with political power and aristocratic prestige.36 In the nineteenth century, most Indian nobles, from local rajas to Mughal princes, were obliged to possess a certain number of elephants.37 The emperors Jahangir and Aurangzeb kept several thousands for war, hunting, elephant combat, transport, and harem conveyance. By the midnineteenth century, Company administrators and merchants had, for almost two centuries, emulated the spectacle and ceremony of their Mughal rivals. In his East India Vade-Mecum (1810), Captain Thomas Williamson advised the traveller to hire a uniformed retinue not only for protection but also to inspire the attention and cooperation of locals in matters of lodging and food procurement.38 While attendants garnered esteem, elephants commanded respect. A late-eighteenth-century traveller wrote that ‘nothing indeed is more suited to lend the impression of grandeur and pomp and to inspire veneration than to see a great personage majestically seated upon a throne at such height on an enormous animal superbly caparisoned’.39 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

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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork assemblage. Elephants did contribute authority to the data Hooker and Ball collected, but indirectly, diplomatically, and on Indian terms.

Elephants as Participants: Individuality and Agency Most fieldwork requires human and non-human assistance: scribe, guide, translator, camera, voice recorder, and measuring tape, for example. While such assistants play a subsidiary role, they enable the researcher to transmute phenomena to data. One dictionary defines a participant as ‘a person who is involved in an activity or event’.42 While elephants are not normally considered persons, they were individuals who took part in Ball and Hooker’s fieldwork. Certainly, elephants were crucial as carrier and observation vehicles. They carried the bulk of camp kit, instruments, and provisions; furnished unobstructed views; cleared vines and small trees from the path; stamped down grass and thickets; helped keep watch at night; raised the rider safely above ground level; and used their trunk to gather rocks and plants. In addition, their social status augmented that of the European traveller. In this sense, hired elephants participated in travelling fieldwork. Animal obedience is, however, often understood as a lack of agency or individuality. While this should not be the case, these qualities display themselves more obviously in the writings of Hooker and Ball, where elephants rebelled or forced the traveller to modify their journey. In other words, elephants became independent, volitional actors in the theatre of colonial fieldwork when they defied their submissive and subservient animal role. Foremost, elephants entailed a suite of challenges and adaptations. They required each travelling naturalist to adapt his itinerary to elephant physiology. Laden with baggage, elephants required Ball to adapt his route to the local topography and to adapt local vegetation to the loaded elephant. Two times in the Jharkhand Province, where ‘the jungle was so thick along the tracks which my camp had to pass’, Ball hired local villagers to ‘cut down the trees, which would have obstructed the loaded elephants’.43 Such adaptation also worked in (p.126) reverse: seasonal climate forced Ball to adjust elephant sleep schedule to the itinerary. During a particularly hot spell one June, Ball completed a 225kilometre march through the Jharkhand Province ‘in ten days, or, to be more correct, in ten nights, for owing to the heat it was necessary to save the men and cattle as much as possible’.44 They started about midnight and reached the next campground by seven or eight in the morning. The mahouts would put the elephants ‘to bed, at eight o’clock, in order that they might obtain forty winks before being loaded for the march at twelve’.45 Dependence on elephants for carriage meant that their particular personalities, pace, and needs affected how travel and fieldwork proceeded. While elephants enabled progress, they could also impede it: absent elephants—feeding, fetching supplies, or fleeing—delayed departures. Elephants stuck in ditches or swamps slowed stages.46 Rough, wet, or hilly terrain, as well as weighty loads, fatigued Page 9 of 20

Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork elephants, requiring additional recuperation and reduced speed.47 As much as possible, Ball harmonized their capabilities with the planned march. He and his mahouts adjusted the loads according to the distance covered, terrain, feed and rest periods. Travelling through the forests of central India, Ball had to relinquish eight hired pack-bullocks and so forced his elephant to bear additional baggage. This redistribution of cargo had consequences, however. Ball wrote, It distressed me much to find that long-continued carrying of heavy loads had very seriously affected the pace at which the elephants could go. From about three miles an hour on a good road, it had fallen to two, and was now barely one and a-half. This was often the cause of serious discomfort on these long marches, as it involved long delays.48 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 Elephants took part in travelling fieldwork not only by physiological requirements but also by personal dispositions. Elephant individuality is a common theme across scholarly and practical experiences of elephants.52 Contemporary ethnographic research has traced the (p.127) unique personality, inclinations, and psychology, which result in each animal from the particular human–animal relationships experienced by them and their upbringing.53 The hands-on, commercial experiences of nineteenth-century circuses, zoos, and colonial kheddahs (enclosures) have likewise left a rich register of elephant identities and actions.54 Nineteenth-century accounts tell a similar story. Colonial sportsmen and elephant specialists documented names, temperaments, and incidents.55 In addition, a range of recorded deeds indicates individuality. Elephants babysat infants, remembered riders, took retribution, raided markets, exacted tribute, and escaped captivity.56 That one officer described the ‘insubordination’ of an elephant suggests that the Company military treated their animal ‘recruits’ as sentient and accountable individuals.57 Religious, royal, and mahoutship traditions of the subcontinent, as well as practicalities of training, called for elephants to have names. Company regiments adopted the practice of naming elephants from the Mughals.58 But most European travellers failed to publish elephant names. Hooker recorded only one, ‘Elephas’, in his diary.59 This Latinate moniker and its lack of appearance in Hooker’s Himalayan Journals travel narrative suggests that he did not know or care to use the elephant’s given name. But Hooker had relatively little experience with elephants; a few weeks spread over four months. Ball’s experience was different. Over a dozen annual tours of four to ten months he got Page 10 of 20

Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork to know individual elephants by name and personality. Mowlah, Bhari, Anarkelli, and Peari served multiple seasons as part of his retinue. He described not only their age, size, stamina, and strength, but also their emotions, dispositions, and behaviour. In the pages of Jungle Life in India, Ball’s hired elephants had as complex and idiosyncratic characters as his hired jemadar (armed official), doctor, and mahouts, and received more mention than any chauprassie (menial servant). 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, this straying of the elephants in heavy jungle, although generally quickly followed by recapture, always caused me a good deal of anxiety. I knew that if not captured the same day, each day would increase the difficulty by a rapidly augmenting ratio, owing to the larger radius of country that would have to be searched, and the greater wildness and intractability of the elephants as they had further opportunities of enjoying freedom from all restraint.65

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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork Here, Ball captures a perennial concern of mahouts: elephants, while known, controlled, and even loved, nonetheless remain in human service at least partially against their will. The mahout, his wife, and his children collectively fed, bathed, supervised, and ministered to the elephant, often sleeping close by when on the road. This familial inclusion was not happenstance. Elephants require intimate social bonds with human partners akin to those they form naturally.66 That they are subject to forceful capture and years of discipline as well as care and intimacy illustrates the contradictory relationships elephants experience with humans.67 Thus, even a short escape could (p.129) spell catastrophe for a travelling naturalist. The nineteenth-century elephant expert George Sanderson wrote that even a taste of liberty could retract the tolerance and loyalty built up over years.68 Ball’s practices of overloading, shackling, and recapturing his animal ‘employees’ indicate that traveller–elephant relations were less than convivial on the job. 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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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork 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. Such a reconceptualization, like post-structural and feminist refusals of ‘man the subject’, might reclaim elephants from the intellectual margins ‘by destabilizing that familiar clutch of entrenched stereotypes which works to maintain the illusion of human identity, centrality and superiority’.77 Ball was in charge, and his mahouts directed the elephants. But it would be a mistake to believe that over fifteen years of itinerant fieldwork he and his jemadars, mahouts, and chauprassies were the only team members who contributed sentient individuality and intentionality to Ball’s geological fieldwork. While it remains impossible to know what Mowlah, Bhari, and Peari desired—except occasional or permanent freedom—describing their influences on Ball’s travelling fieldwork can be considered a step towards inclusion of animal ‘others’ in the theatre of history.78 In the context of Indian colonial history, such reconceptualization also bears on the unjust reality of archival records, which tend to omit (p.131) the influence of local human subjects, and the consequent, persistent challenge of excavating such influences and subjects.79 The ‘work’ of elephants may provide a methodological entry point for post-colonial and other historians who seek to trace the agency and actions of local Indians, such as mahouts, jemadars, and chauprassies. Elephants, themselves and through their skilled human handlers and partners, reveal the extent to which European naturalists relied on locals and local modes of knowing. Thus, alongside strategies of reading colonial records against the grain,80 examining historical elephants may paradoxically open a means to make visible the subjectivities and agencies of human others in Indian colonial history.

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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork Finally, Indian and Western scholarship tends to portray elephants as ‘other’ animals: as natural and cultural property of South and Southeast Asia. This is both correct and problematic. Asian elephants undoubtedly played a key role in the biological and cultural evolution of South Asia. However, as Whatmore and Thorne remark, the elephant has been ‘so long caught up in social networks of livelihood and transport, commerce and war, ceremony and entertainment, that traces of its presence litter the histories and geographies of civilizations and everyday lives’.81 Elephants and their significations have circulated since classical antiquity, particularly to America and Europe since the nineteenth century for use in zoos, menageries, and circuses.82 Yet, since the eighteenth century, British colonialists in India used elephants extensively for freight, as machines of war, in diplomacy, for hunting, for construction, and for tourism.83 While the British learned from and emulated Mughal examples of elephant capture, rearing, and use, elephants became a standard colonial implement. Elephants may not seem like botanical or geological instruments. Yet, like a ship or a telescope, the elephant extended the bodily and social capacities of a travelling European in the challenging terrain of mid-nineteenth-century eastern India. It enabled naturalists such as Hooker and Ball to traverse, observe, and collect; it rendered them mobile, secure, and also enabled them to return with specimens intact.84

Notes:

(1.) Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals (London: John Murray, 1854), 10. (2.) Richard Sorrenson, ‘The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth Century’, Osiris 11 (1996): 222. (3.) Sorrenson, ‘The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth Century’, Osiris 11 (1996): 222. (4.) Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Animals, History, Culture) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). (5.) Nance, Entertaining Elephants.

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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork (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. (7.) See Locke, ‘Explorations in Ethnoelephantology’. (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. (9.) Maan Barua, ‘Circulating Elephants: Unpacking the Geographies of a Cosmopolitan Animal’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, 4 (2013): 1–15. (10.) John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Raman Sukumar, The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behaviour, and Conservation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Trading Knowledge: The East India Company’s Elephants in India and Britain’, The Historical Journal 48, 1 (2005): 27–63. (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. (14.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 10. (15.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 247.

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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork (16.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 247 (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). (18.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 654. (19.) Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 400. (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. (22.) Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 107. (23.) Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 108. (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 (26.) Law, ‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control’, 259. (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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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork (31.) Sorrenson, ‘The Ship as a Scientific Instrument in the Eighteenth Century’, 222. (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). (35.) Jardine, Secord, and Spary, Cultures of Natural History. (36.) Sukumar, The Living Elephants. (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. (40.) Hooker, Himalayan Journals; Ball, Jungle Life in India. (41.) Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 220–31. (42.) Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/participant. (43.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 480. (44.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 336. (45.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 337. (46.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 577–95. (47.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 597. (48.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 481. (49.) Poole and Granli, ‘Mind and Movement: Meeting the Interests of Elephants’, 3–5.

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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork (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’. (54.) Sivasundaram, ‘Trading Knowledge: The East India Company’s Elephants in India and Britain’; Sukumar, The Living Elephants; Nance, Entertaining Elephants. (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. (56.) Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824–1825 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1829), 354; Emma Roberts, Oriental Scenes, Sketches and Tales [in Verse] (London: Edward Bull, 1832), 249. (57.) Andrew L. Adams, Wanderings of a Naturalist in India: The Western Himalayas, and Cashmeres (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867), 313–14. (58.) Sivasundaram, ‘Trading Knowledge: The East India Company’s Elephants in India and Britain’. (59.) J.D. Hooker, S.H. Hooker, and Huxley, Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, 239. (60.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 275. (61.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 275. (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. Page 18 of 20

Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork (63.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 577. (64.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 577–8. (65.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 577. (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’. (67.) Locke, ‘Explorations in Ethnoelephantology’, 90. (68.) Sanderson, Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India, 62. (69.) Ball, Jungle Life in India. (70.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 28. (71.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 29. (72.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 584. (73.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 600–3. (74.) Ball, Jungle Life in India, 620. (75.) Keay, The Great Arc, 52, 78, 118, 178. (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. (79.) For example, Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983). (80.) Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, 9–11. (81.) Whatmore and Thorne, ‘Elephants on the Move’, 187.

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Trans-Species Colonial Fieldwork (82.) Sivasundaram, ‘Trading Knowledge: The East India Company’s Elephants in India and Britain’; Nance, Entertaining Elephants. (83.) MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature; Sukumar, The Living Elephants. (84.) See Law, ‘On the Methods of Long-Distance Control’.

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The Hall of Extinct Monsters

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

The Hall of Extinct Monsters Mammoths, Elephants, and Nature in the Palaeo-Future Amy L. Fletcher

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords This chapter introduces us to the project of de-extinction, made possible by virtue of biotechnology and genomic analysis, in relation to the mammoth as a contender species for resurrection. It connects this desire to synthesize animal life, inadequately considered in relation to ethical implications and ecological practicalities, to a deeper history of fascination with Pleistocene life. Consequently, de-extinction becomes the latest in a series of endeavours by which we have imagined, simulated, and presented the woolly mammoth as an iconic accomplice in the human story that evokes dreamscapes of lost worlds. This potent cultural imaginary, supported by a history that mixes science and entertainment, reveals the idea of bringing back the mammoth as a prospect ripe for capitalist exploitation, which the author contrasts with the plight of the Sumatran elephant, a living species on the brink of extinction. Keywords:   mammoths, de-extinction, paleogenomics, Pleistocene, cultural imaginary, environmental imaginary, Sumatran elephants

This Mammoth Moment In 2012, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) changed the conservation status of the Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus, subspecies sumatranus) from endangered to critically endangered, following the halving of the population in one generation to some 2,800 documented elephants. Deforestation is the primary reason for the elephants’ precarious situation. At least six herds in Riau Province—a major centre for the Indonesian paper, pulp, 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, deextinction has moved from the fringes of science to the mainstream, due to the confluence of rapid advances in biotechnology, the financial support of wellplaced 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 deextinction 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 candidate for eventual resurrection, its image popping up frequently in TED talks,5 the cover of magazines such as National Geographic, and even in the pages of learned scientific journals such as Science and Nature. Even the IUCN has cautiously engaged with de-extinction, convening an expert group to consider the criteria that should govern the choice of eventual reintroduction candidates. Framing de-extinction as an incremental development in the study and practice of conservation translocation, these scientists argue that ‘planning the resurrection of species should be preceded by clearly stated conservation goals, and an assessment of translocation suitability’.6 That observation seems unassailable in scientific and perhaps even ethical terms. Yet, despite the efforts of many palaeo-geneticists and molecular biologists to keep the focus on the normal science conducted with ancient DNA, which has since the mid-1980s illuminated our understanding of climate change, species migration, and evolution, many of us continue to dream about woolly mammoths walking the Earth again. In this chapter, I therefore move from scientific questions—whether it can be done and, if so, what would be the implications for conservation—to an analysis of the social and cultural significance of these woolly mammoth dreams. Via an exploration of the Western cultural history of the woolly mammoth and a narrative analysis of contemporary media representations of the de-extinction debate, I argue that the goal of bringing back a woolly mammoth is a modern environmental imaginary, that it represents a political vision of nature,7 one both desperate and daring, in which technoscience undoes the intense anthropogenic environmental damage of the past and takes us to a redemptive Palaeo-future. Essentially, the promissory mammoth incarnates our desire to get back to the Garden. 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 Page 3 of 17

The Hall of Extinct Monsters human health. For example, sociologists of science and technology have demonstrated that blood is a promissory matter;10 that it is ‘the bearer of a whole range of anticipatory claims about its future therapeutic possibilities and has been substantially reconfigured in expectation and hope’.11 This same anticipatory imperative now seems to be shifting from the medical sector to the environment, as important stakeholders deploy the promise of conquering extinction to garner support and attention, and the woolly mammoth becomes a primary object through ‘which the future is being vigorously imagined’.12 The remainder of this chapter explores the intersecting cultural and scientific meanings of the woolly mammoth, tracing the path by which it became an artefact that links the past and the future. The next section focuses on our strange fascination for mammoths, which in the West began in the eighteenth century. The third section evaluates woolly mammoth genomic researches filtered through the mass media, while the fourth evaluates the vision of nature that underwrites efforts at de-extinction. The chapter concludes in the Hall of Extinct Monsters at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, where a nineteenth-century American audience first encountered majestic beasts of the deep past, in order to reflect upon whether or not the mammoth and the elephant might find a place in the lost world of the future.

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 Page 4 of 17

The Hall of Extinct Monsters 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 As a de-extinction icon today, the mammoth serves a cultural function similar to the one that it did in the nineteenth century, when it figured prominently in early natural history museum exhibitions. The line between science and entertainment, policed so heavily in the second half of the twentieth century, was much fuzzier in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. For example, in a comparison of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) and Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935), Marianne Sommer demonstrates that both the writer and the naturalist intuited that generating popular interest in and support for science would require the creation of evocative dreamscapes that encouraged the spectator to suspend disbelief and to step into simulated lost worlds.19 The science fiction novel and the natural history museum educated the public through a powerful blend of science and entertainment. In this sense, P.T. Barnum (1810–1891), the circus impresario and unabashed capitalist, had much in common in his time with the esteemed Margaret Murray (1863–1963), an English Egyptologist, who used the alluring spectacle of mummy unwrappings to introduce a large audience to her scientific work, a practice that became relatively commonplace in early twentieth-century Egyptology. As Kathleen Sheppard notes, these well-attended demonstrations helped to create a craze for all things Egyptian, while, through ‘the lecture and [her] book, the ancient bodies and the mysteries they could unravel were revealed to scholars and the public alike’.20

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The Hall of Extinct Monsters Mammoths and mastodons, their distant proboscidean cousins, also conjured with ancient bodies and mysteries and helped to establish the pre-eminence of science as a mode of understanding in our time. Yet that pre-eminence remains scaffolded on spectacle. As John Gray argues in The Immortalization Commission (2011), ‘During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century science became the (p.143) vehicle for an assault on death. The power of knowledge was summoned to free humans of their mortality. Science … became a channel for magic.’21 Mummies, mammoths, and mastodons proved instrumental in generating that sense of magic and in bringing the past into the present in tangible ways. Today, in the digital age, TED talks may compete with novels and magazines for audience attention, but the woolly mammoth continues to figure as prominently in cyberspace as it did in print and in the museum. Though ancient DNA analysis is based on serious science, the idea that a string of chemicals plus some high-tech human intervention could reanimate life, could literally conquer death, continues to exert its magic. When a scientist as eminent as George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences at Harvard and MIT, suggests that ‘bringing back’ a genetically modified variant of the woolly mammoth is now possible, we are placed in the admission line to future nature yet also find ourselves back at P.T. Barnum’s three-ring circus, spectators once again trying to parse the line between fact and fantasy, hope and hype. Just as naturalists used the woolly mammoth to make the Ice Age real to our forebears, many stakeholders now deploy its image as a way not only to bring the past into the present, but also to project both into the future, to wrap a narrative around scientific developments that in the abstract can be maddeningly elusive to a non-specialist audience. As the following section demonstrates, we still need the woolly mammoth to travel with us through the labyrinthine new world of ancient DNA and reproductive genomics.

Opening Windows to the Past: The Spectacle and Science of Mammoth Resurrection In 1897, Reverend H.N. Hutchinson released a curious book titled Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Animal Life. The book popularizes palaeontology and geology with the narrative verve and passion characteristic of the late nineteenth century. Interspersed throughout are intricate illustrations by J. Smit (and others) of dinosaurs and giant armadillos, mammoths, mastodons, moa, and sea serpents. The book teems with ancient and mysterious (p.144) life and reverberates with Reverend Hutchinson’s delighted awe of modern science’s ability to reveal hidden worlds. He writes that 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 Page 6 of 17

The Hall of Extinct Monsters nakedness with flesh and skin, and to see them as they were when they walked this earth.22 As the twentieth century progressed, the art and science of palaeoimagery23 expanded from pen and paper to encompass interactive museum displays, movies and, in the digital era, immersive video games, theme-park rides, and computer-generated imagery. Though it would require extraordinarily sophisticated biotechnology to accomplish, the audacious goal of resurrecting a woolly mammoth is just the most recent variant of this desire to reanimate the extinct. Aptly, just as the McClure’s Magazine story about killing the last mammoth bewildered an audience at the start of the twentieth century, one of the first hoaxes in the genomic era occurred in 1984 when Technology Review published a parody article claiming that a joint American–Soviet experiment had succeeded in creating a woolly mammoth via ancient DNA and reproductive cloning.24 Though many readers suspected that this might be a joke (it was published on April Fool’s Day, after all), the editor nonetheless published a clear retraction of the piece in October 1984, given the confusion and publicity that had followed in its wake. 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 wellpreserved 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 Page 7 of 17

The Hall of Extinct Monsters Bernard Buigues and his research team extracted the remains in a twenty-threeton 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. In 1999, Alex D. Greenwood and colleagues published the first Pleistocene nuclear DNA sequences extracted from a 13,000-year-old ground sloth specimen and a 33,000-year-old cave bear. This research project also provided strong evidence that the mammoth is more closely related to the Asian than to the African elephant.27 By 2001, (p.146) Alan Cooper and his team mapped the first complete mitochondrial sequence of an extinct species, the New Zealand moa,28 as did Haddrath and Baker in an independent analysis.29 In 2006, which Cooper called the ‘year of the mammoth’,30 two major mammoth projects reported results that showed, respectively, the first complete mitochondrial sequence from a Pleistocene animal (as well as confirmation that the mammoth and Asian elephants are sister taxa)31 and thirteen million sequenced base pairs of nuclear DNA taken from a woolly mammoth bone.32 Finally, in a highly publicized finding, the Mammoth Genome Project (Pennsylvania State University), under the leadership of Dr Stephen C. Schuster and Dr Webb Miller, announced in 2008 that it had sequenced the largest amount of nuclear DNA from an extinct species to date, having mapped approximately 70 per cent of the woolly mammoth genome (an estimated 4.7 billion nucleotides). Schuster and Miller focused on the scientific merits of their research, which gained international media attention, stating that ‘in general, our work shows that it is possible to open a window to the past and study animals that are long gone at the same level of genetic detail as when examining modern species. The lessons being learned from studying extinct species can help us understand the processes that are driving today’s endangered species toward possible extinction’.33 Other scientists weighed in to applaud the legitimate scientific milestones achieved by the Mammoth Genome Project, but cautioned that cloning a woolly mammoth remained unfeasible. For example, Dr Michael Bunce, Head of Ancient DNA Laboratory at Murdoch University, noted that ‘just because we know the DNA code of something does not mean we can genetically tinker with it to the extent required to recreate extinct organisms—this kind of Page 8 of 17

The Hall of Extinct Monsters progress is still a pipe-dream’.34 The Guardian also cautioned that publication of the genome would not lead to mammoth cloning since science still did not have the ability to synthesize chromosomes in the laboratory.35 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 Hall of Extinct Monsters notion that deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is life’s rewriteable code—dates at least to the 1950s and now underwrites the dream of de-extinction.

Lost Worlds and Future Nature James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins jointly received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the double-helical molecular structure of DNA. In 1963, Life International Magazine introduced a large popular audience to the implications of this breakthrough via a major cover story on what it referred to as the ‘amazing chemical control system which governs heredity, and hence all of life on earth’.42 It heralded the discovery of a new country called ‘molecular biology’ that ‘promised to yield unprecedented power for man—power to manipulate nature in ways that he cannot now even imagine’.43 The metaphor of DNA as a type of control system or code, and the concomitant idea of malleable nature, continues to exert an extraordinary influence on Western molecular biology. Dr Jeremy Austin, Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, may have momentarily diluted hopes for mammoth cloning in 2008, when he noted that despite publication of the near-complete mammoth genome, reproductive cloning would still be like ‘trying to build a car with only 80 percent of the parts and knowing that some of the parts are already broken’.44 Yet, though his specific point about cloning remains accurate, Austin’s hesitation about future mammoths seems somewhat old-fashioned. In less than ten years, mass media and scientific emphasis have shifted from cloning woolly mammoths to speculation about such new techniques as genome editing, stem cells, and synthetic biology. Pasqualino Loi and colleagues note in an article titled ‘Biological Time Machines’ that ‘we must remember that we are just at the dawn of the artificial life era’,45 which suggests that there are no longer any limits to the wildernesses that we might imagine. The resurrected woolly mammoth becomes a necessary environmental promissory note for the age of artificial life, a projected tangible outcome used to engage mass attention and marshal support for expensive, large-scale research projects. In an analysis of P.T. Barnum’s masterful and lucrative nineteenth-century (p.149) blend of science and entertainment, Mark Storey argues that the three-ring circus provided an answer to the ‘familiar and pervasive concern of the period: the problem of paying attention amidst modernity’s spectacular distractions’.46 The distractions have only multiplied in this postmodern era, as scientific fields compete vociferously for funding, prioritization, and voters. Just as Jumbo the elephant drew large crowds to Barnum’s extravaganzas, so does the promissory mammoth lure us into the tent of biotechnology. 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. In 1910, the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., opened the Hall of Extinct Monsters. The dinosaur and mastodon skeletons that entranced early visitors were joined in the 1970s by a representative woolly mammoth display (that actually drew upon fossils from over fifty different specimens, some of which were likely those of Columbian mammoths). Today, National Fossil Hall, which is currently undergoing an extensive renovation and will re-open in 2019, hosts an unrivalled collection of approximately forty-six million fossil specimens and remains one of the most popular destinations in the extensive Smithsonian complex of museums, able to envelop audiences in simulated worlds of deep time. It’s a venerable American tradition, this mix of Page 11 of 17

The Hall of Extinct Monsters 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. Which brings us back to the critically endangered Sumatran elephant: Does it have a place in the new world of de-extinction? (p.151) A newspaper article on the possibility of extinct species cloning conjectured that if scientists were successful, ‘humans in the 21st century may witness both mass extinctions and astonishing revivals, as different species from different eras meet opposite fates’.51 This observation returns us to the paradox with which this chapter began. Dr Kazufumi Goto, a reproductive biologist from Japan, may be sincere when he states that ‘by reviving the mammoth, I would like to teach people the importance of co-existing with animals’,52 but his premise seems odd at a time when humans are squandering virtually every chance to co-exist with the charismatic megafauna that are already here. Our biotechnologies have far outpaced our collective political will to find ways to ensure that the large and beautiful monsters can survive modernity in the wild. De-extinction is a transformative idea that is built upon several disruptive and powerful technologies. Its most ardent and sophisticated advocates are aware, as per Stewart Brand of the Revive and Restore Foundation, that ‘one or two mammoths is not a success. 100,000 mammoths is a success’.53 Hope for the survival of the Sumatran elephant and other Asian subspecies could be found in the knowledge that will be gained from de-extinction research and the fact that many approaches to bringing back the woolly mammoth require access to Asian elephant eggs from surrogate females (though the ethics of using these eggs is currently in doubt, given our lack of knowledge about elephant reproduction, the risk involved in retrieving the eggs, and the species’ endangered status). Ironically, our anthropocentrism might prove an asset in this case since, as with the great apes, elephants bear an uncanny resemblance to us, making their final disappearance too terrifying to contemplate. In the words of Dr Hendrik Poinar, Woollies are a particularly interesting, quintessential image of the Ice Age [and] we seem to have a very deep connection with them, like we do with elephants. Maybe it’s because elephants share many things in common with us. They bury their dead. They educate the next of kin. They have social knits that are very close. Or maybe it’s actually because we’re bound by deep time, because elephants, like us, share their origins in Africa some seven million years ago.54

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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 deextinction 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. (4.) Henry Gee, ‘Memories of Mammoths’, Nature 439 (2006): 673. (5.) TED, ‘Deextinction: A Collection of TED Talks’, https://www.ted.com/topics/ deextinction, accessed 24 May 2016. (6.) Philip J. Seddon, Axel Moehrenschlager, and John Ewen, ‘Reintroducing Resurrected Species: Selecting DeExtinction Candidates’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution 29 (2014): 140. (7.) Richard W. Judd and Christopher S. Beach, Natural States: The Environmental Imagination in Maine, Oregon, and the Nation (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future Press, 2003). (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.

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The Hall of Extinct Monsters (9.) Antonio Regalado, ‘A Stealthy De-Extinction Startup’, MIT Technology Review (19 March 2013), http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512671/astealthy-de-extinction-startup/, accessed 24 May 2016. (10.) Charis Thompson, ‘The Biotech Mode of Reproduction’, paper presented at the School of American Research Advanced Seminar on Animation and Cessation: Anthropological Perspectives on Changing Definitions of Life and Death in the Context of Biomedicine, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2000. (11.) Nik Brown, Alison Kraft, and Paul Martin, ‘The Promissory Pasts of Blood Stem Cells’, BioSocieties 1, 3 (2006): 330. (12.) Eugene Thacker, ‘The Science Fiction of Technoscience: The Politics of Simulation and a Challenge for New Media Art’, Leonardo 34, 2 (2001): 155. (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. (14.) Matthew Chrulew, ‘Hunting the Mammoth, Pleistocene to Postmodern’, Journal for Critical Animal Studies IX, 1/2 (2011): 34. (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. (20.) Kathleen L. Sheppard, ‘Between Spectacle and Science: Margaret Murray and the Tomb of the Two Brothers’, Science in Context 25, 4 (2012): 525–49. (21.) John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011), 1. (22.) Hutchinson, Extinct Monsters, 106–9. Page 14 of 17

The Hall of Extinct Monsters (23.) Campbell, The Extinct Animal Show. (24.) Diana Ben-Aaron, ‘Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth’, Technology Review 87 (1984): 85. (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-woollymammoth-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. (28.) A. Cooper, C. Lalueza-Fox, S. Anderson, A. Rambaut, J. Austin, and R. Ward, ‘Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequences of Two Extinct Moas Clarify Ratite Evolution’, Nature 409 (Feb 2001): 704–7. (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. (32.) H.N. Poinar, C. Schwarz, J. Qi, B. Shapiro, R.D. Macphee, B. Buigues, A. Tikhonov, D.H. Huson, L.P. Tomsho, A. Auch, M. Rampp, W. Miller, and S.C. Schuster, ‘Metagenomics to Paleogenomics: Large-Scale Sequencing of Mammoth DNA’, Science 311, 5759 (2006): 392–4. (33.) Mammoth Genome Project, The University of Pennsylvania, http:// mammoth.psu.edu/, accessed 24 May 2016. (34.) Agence France-Presse, ‘Mammoth Genome Cracked: Key to Cloning?’ Cosmos: The Science of Everything, 20 November 2008, http://

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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. (38.) Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’, translated by Arthur B. Evans, Science Fiction Studies 55, 18 (1991), http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/ backissues/55/baudrillard55art.htm, accessed 24 May 2016. (39.) Hendrik Poinar, ‘Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth!’ TEDxDeExtinction, March 2013, http://www.ted.com/talks/ hendrik_poinar_bring_back_the_woolly_mammoth, 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-mammothdna-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-mammothmaybe/, 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/sciencenews/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 (46.) Mark Storey, ‘Spectacular Distractions: P.T. Barnum and American Modernism’, Modernism/modernity 21, 1 (2014): 108. (47.) J. Folch, M.J. Cocero, P. Chesné, J.L. Alabart, V. Dominguez, Y. Cognié, A. Roche, A. Fernández-Arias, J.I. Martí, P. Sánchez, E. Echegoyen, J.F. Beckers, A.S. Bonastre, and X. Vignon, ‘First Birth of an Animal from an Extinct Subspecies (Capra pyrenaica) by Cloning’, Theriogenology 71, 6 (2009): 1026. (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. (49.) Fletcher, Mendel’s Ark. (50.) Nikolas Rose, ‘The Politics of Life Itself’, Theory, Culture and Society 18, 6 (2001): 1–30. (51.) Cox, ‘Resurrecting Species’. (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-mammothcometh.html?_r=0, accessed 24 May 2016. (54.) Poinar, ‘Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth’.

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Animals, Persons, Gods

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Animals, Persons, Gods Negotiating Ambivalent Relationships with Captive Elephants in Chitwan, Nepal Piers Locke

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords Focusing on the government elephant stables of the Chitwan National Park in Nepal, this chapter asks how mahouts negotiate relations with elephants that involve trust and domination, cooperation and coercion, and care and violence. It argues that they embrace the contradictory qualities of the relationship by variably treating their elephants as animals, persons, and gods, through relations of domination, companionship, and veneration that foreground the intentional agency of elephants. Rejecting the humanist bias of ethnography, it also argues for the stable not so much as a place where humans keep elephants, but rather as the site of a hybrid moral community in which humans and elephants demonstrate emotional affinity and moral responsibility towards each other, albeit in a structured space of command and control that subordinates elephants, as well as humans, to institutional purposes. Keywords:   ethnoelephantology, captive elephant management, mahout, hattisar, non-human agency, hybrid community, custodial labour, domination, companionship, veneration, Chitwan

Trust, Domination, and Domestication Domestication is integral to accounts of human civilization. These are usually stories that speak of transition to a mode of highly coordinated human existence and productive activity involving new technologies for appropriating natural resources. The leitmotivs of these familiar stories include the birth of agriculture, the development of animal husbandry, and the elaboration of organized labour, social stratification, and regulatory governance. They tell us Page 1 of 18

Animals, Persons, Gods how humans transformed landscapes, materials, and non-human life through technologies of biophysical power and political mobilization. Such accounts tend to emphasize mastery and control, supporting anthropocentric traditions of scholarship in which animality is opposed to humanity, and nature to culture. However, when we consider the domestication of non-human animals in more detail, the certainties these intellectual coordinates seem to provide begin to evaporate. For instance, one might ask if we can adequately account for animal domestication as a process by which non-human bodies and behaviours are shaped and directed for human purposes.1 With (p.160) regard to humans and other mammals, it becomes apparent that these separatist perspectives can encourage us to ignore the mutualities of co-evolution and cohabitation, and hence also the moral and conceptual dilemmas that shared but subordinated life in a common world presents. The relationship between humans and elephants is exemplary in this problematizing perspective.2 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. This mutually entangled relationship between humans, elephants, and environments not only confounds simplistic separations of the social and the natural, but also presents a conundrum for captive management. Inhabiting the forest, these were creatures captured by force and subjected to training at the direction of kings from cultures already familiar with domesticating four-legged animals for vehicular transport.6 Elephants can and do reject the conditions of their captivity though,7 and it cannot be imposed and maintained by force alone. Elephants are complicit in their captivity, developing affective relations with their human custodians and always retaining their own subjective agency. However, this cooperation is provisional and (p.161) can be rescinded at any

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Animals, Persons, Gods time. It is, then, a relationship born of and to some degree maintained by violence, but also sustained through trust, albeit conditional and uncertain.8 Integral to understanding the phenomenon of the captive elephant, then, is an unstable dynamic of trust and domination between two socially sentient animals that become partially attuned to each other through lives of shared intimacy. As non-human animals subject to restricted movement and constrained sociality, captive elephants find themselves in a ‘regime of violent care’, involving moral obligation, practical labour, and affective affinity.9 In the historical and geographical context of South Asia, elephants have been socially and culturally integrated into human life in complex ways that include longstanding traditions of expert custodial labour. How, then, do custodians of these large, intelligent, and powerful creatures negotiate a relationship in which elephants cannot be treated merely as servile and dependable animate machines? The uncertain and contradictory elements of the human–elephant relationship not only concern scholars who grapple with intellectual puzzles, but also the expert practitioners who must accommodate themselves to life with elephants. Indeed, during my ethnographic investigation of these interspecies relations in the government elephant stables of the Chitwan National Park in Nepal, involving my own apprenticeship as a mahout,10 I encountered a crucial cultural strategy for negotiating an ultimately ambivalent relationship. This strategy involves mahouts variously attributing to their elephants states of animality, personhood, and divinity, which are variously emphasized according to activity, context, and orientation.

Captive Elephants in Nepal To appreciate how and why Nepali mahouts conceive elephants as animals, persons, and gods, we must first consider the role and significance of captive elephants in Nepal. A schematic outline of this history reveals the use, value, and meaning of elephants, as well as the interspecies relations that developed from the labour that captive care requires. Historically, we may view the elephant as sacred commodity and individuated non-human. Elephants signified power and prestige, were exchanged for profit, gifted in tributary obeisance, driven in hunting (p.162) expeditions, and, most recently, used for biodiversity conservation and wildlife tourism, but always in ways that have relied upon close relations between particular humans and particular elephants. 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 Page 3 of 18

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 Elephants were also integral to a distinct method of big-game hunting elaborated under the rule of the Ranas, an elite group that had displaced the Shah kings who first established Nepal as a sovereign entity. These enterprises were integral to the elaboration of the hattisar, a distinct elephant-keeping institution with its own occupational culture, staffed by local Tharu people, primarily from the landless classes of their local society. The skilled effort of the human and non-human staff of the hattisar remained crucial as the eras of elephant capture and big-game hunting gave way to a new era of conservation that combined newly imported technologies with traditional local practice.13 With the establishment of national parks, programmes of biodiversity conservation, and the rise of wildlife tourism, captive elephants and their mahouts were deployed in service to new projects endorsed by the state,14 some of which involved new alliances with foreign funding agencies and non-Nepali researchers.15 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 Entangled Lives in a Multispecies Institution Subject to countervailing tensions in which neither species can retain the upper hand, the close relations between elephants and mahouts residing together in the hattisar give us cause to reconsider the original meaning of the domestic as that which belongs to the home. For the stable is the place that humans and elephants must make their home together. In thinking about relations of domestication as intimate cohabitation, we might look to a new body of scholarship that is not only critical of the anthropocentric perspectives that produce the separatist dualities I earlier mentioned, but which seeks to develop an alternative understanding of how we become human not in opposition to nonhumans, but through lives shared with them.16 This body of work shows us how historically the figure of the human has been discursively constituted through a form of conceptual segregation that ignores the interspecies interdependencies by which other species are commonly understood.17 It also proposes an approach to shared life that extends social theory beyond the human, considering the (p.164) agency of non-humans, their social, historical, and ecological intersections with humans, and the potential for combining and confounding the distinction between the sciences of the cultural human and the natural animal.18 This more-than-human or multispecies perspective is useful for thinking about the Nepali elephant stable not just as a place where humans keep elephants, but also as a place where the lives of humans and elephants are intimately bound together and shaped by each other. As such, the hattisar may be understood as a home for humans and elephants who together comprise a hybrid moral community. Indeed, we may think of the sarkari hattisar as a multispecies institution that entangles the lives of two types of socially sentient animals, creating a space where humans and elephants demonstrate emotional affinity and moral responsibility towards each other. During my research, it became apparent to me that care and concern is not merely expressed by humans towards elephants, but also by elephants towards humans. Physically enclosed and socially segregated, the sarkari hattisar is an enclaved site of regimented social order where both elephant and human bodies, removed from their ordinary social milieu, are disciplined through routine, much of it conducted in unison. Daily life involves joint participation in elephant food procurement and feeding practices, through the collection of grass or other fodder, the manufacture and consumption of grass packages containing nutritional supplements of unhusked rice, salt, and molasses, as well as time spent together bathing, grazing, and roaming in the rivers, forests, and grasslands of the national park. While the performance of these activities and the effective interspecies communication they depend on become habitually inculcated for both human and elephant, it is nonetheless coordinated by a command structure that is internal to the elephant stable. Ideally, each elephant is tended by a three-man care team comprising the ranks of mahut, or stable-hand; patchuwa, or grassPage 5 of 18

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 This characterization of the stable as a multispecies institution supporting a hybrid moral community again reveals the ambivalence of the human–elephant relationship. The Nepali stable may be a structured space of hierarchical command and control that subordinates elephants to a human occupational group with a subaltern status, but it is also a site for close working relationships involving affective understanding between human and non-human companions. Mediated by mahout instruction, elephants are expected to conform to the wishes of the governing superiors of the hattisar; although compared to their human companions, their opportunities to negotiate their conditions are far more constrained. They may speak, but they have no voice. However, if we consider a mahout’s obligation to his masters, as well as his intensive responsibility to his elephant companion, which may deprive him of regular contact with his family, then we might also think of the mahout as a captive too. 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.

Ontological States and Relational Modalities ‘Elephants are people too’ was a ubiquitous refrain I heard from many of my mahout companions. Not entirely consistent with other ways they spoke about their elephants, this claim encouraged me to consider the multiple and seemingly contradictory categories mahouts applied to their elephants. It was also a claim, I realized, that poses a threat to an intellectual order preoccupied with what social theorist (p.166) Donna Haraway calls human exceptionalism.20 This claim to human uniqueness, integral to Western traditions of humanist scholarship, has become increasingly untenable though, beginning perhaps with evolutionary understandings of life as a phylogenetic continuum, and further weakened as twentieth-century science demonstrated that not only Page 6 of 18

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. As an ethnographer, the mahouts’ attribution to their elephants the multiple ontological states of animality, personhood, and divinity represented a challenge of cultural and intellectual interpretation. Through sustained participant observation, I recognized that at different times, in different places, during different activities, mahouts were more likely to emphasize one state over another. I realized that while these states are understood as coextensive, their salience varies as part of a strategy for mediating an intrinsically problematic relationship. Indeed, I found that each state could be associated with a concomitant relational modality, which I identify as domination, companionship, and veneration. Only the dynamic of companionship is balanced, the others place human and elephant in converse hierarchies, making a handler a master in one, and a devotee in another. How then might one make sense of the shifting states of being that mahouts attribute to their elephants? Here, the metaphor of the kaleidoscope might be useful for thinking about the fluid manner by which the relative salience of these attributed states continually shift, the configuration changing according to spatio-temporal activity and attitudinal stance, like the refractive turns of the mirrored cylinder that yield new configurations of colour and form.22 As a participant observer with mahouts and elephants, I learned about the personhood of elephants through my own apprenticeship, (p.167) particularly the experience of embodied practice, when interspecies companionship was especially marked. This apprenticeship also involved didactic instruction however, which revealed the hierarchical modality of domination. While the kinaesthetic union of embodied practice was most crucial for relating to elephants as fellow persons, there were of course other aspects of hattisar life in which other states and relational modalities became more salient. For the third modality of veneration, which constitutes elephants as divine beings, the ritual practices of the elephant stable were crucial. Let us consider these states and modalities further.

Personhood, Companionship, and Embodied Practice Most forms of tutelary apprenticeship entail the mastery of a set of transposable skills, transmitted from expert to neophyte through demonstration and imitation.23 However, apprenticing as an elephant handler does not depend on Page 7 of 18

Animals, Persons, Gods proficiency in enacting skills alone, but also in negotiating a relationship between two particular sentient beings, albeit mediated by an expert tutor. While this does involve the acquisition of new competencies and is similarly predicated upon a relationship between a neophyte and an expert, in this context, mastery entails a mutual attunement of body and being to produce communicative efficacy between human and elephant. This efficacy involves interactions that are vocal, visual, and tactile, which depend on the establishment of a reciprocating relationship of affective understanding. Key to this relation of interspecies learning is a form of companionship characterized by inter-subjective intimacy. It was the practical experience of becoming close, mutually responsive companions that was perhaps most crucial for attributing personhood to elephants. My apprenticeship could not be adequately understood in terms of me merely learning how to act with the elephant to whom I was partnered, a female named Sitasma Kali.24 Rather, it involved a reciprocal process, which, in the language of social theorist Donna Haraway, we might describe as a mutual becoming. This entailed each of us incorporating the other into our storied lives.25 It involved a routine in which time spent together in the jungle, (p.168) cutting grass, bathing, or grazing helped me acquire proficiency in my interactive bodily comportment with a non-human being. Through the repeated tactile encounters of our mutual familiarization then, we each inserted the other into our personal biographies. Apprenticeship learning typically depends on the development of an empathic bond between tutor and tutee.26 In the case of becoming a mahout however, the object of one’s enskilment is a subject accorded typically anthropic powers of intentional agency for which empathic connection is critical. Making this kind of affectively responsive connection with Sitasma Kali was integral for me to achieve basic competency as a mahout. 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 Page 8 of 18

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.

Animality, Domination, and Didactic Instruction But Sitasma’s chief driver or phanet, a man named Ram Ekval, also mediated my apprenticeship with Sitasma. His didactic instruction served to shift the modal register from companionship to domination, a turn of the kaleidoscope yielding a new relational pattern. The language of instruction revolved around driving one’s elephant, suggesting a mechanistic perspective of handler-directed control. Imperfectly converting practical knowledge into propositional knowledge, Ram Ekval’s verbalizations instilled in me an inventory of verbal commands and an understanding of when and how to use the stick (kocha) to coercively discipline Sitasma.28 He also demonstrated the ways to depress my toes in order to request Sitasma to go right, left, forward, backward, to sit, to stand, and so on, all to be mastered in practice through imitation. Constituting a set of techniques for intentional action, this emphasizes human control over elephants as objectified subjects, negating companionable mutuality in favour of domineering authority. The pedagogy of elephant handling then, widespread in the discourse of mahouts, in contrast to the mutuality of enskilment, has the effect of de-emphasizing elephant personhood. This ontological rupture, this irreverent distancing from a personhood usually shared with elephants seemed to be experienced by mahouts as problematic. As a necessary prelude to practical enskilment, it was tacitly acknowledged that such instrumentalized instruction exaggerates the realities of human control in captive elephant management. We would be fooling ourselves if we believed our mastery simply amounted to subjugation, since its efficacy is always dependent upon consent. The conundrum that the elephants’ cooperation ultimately presents is explained with regard to the necessity of respectful relations, which is why I found the aberrant treatment of elephants as merely servile animals to be such a powerful trope of cautionary tales in which bad handlers get what they deserve. In (p.170) discussion of accidents and fatalities involving mahouts, it was significant that elephants were almost never blamed.

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Animals, Persons, Gods Kaleidoscopic Shifts between Animality, Personhood, and Divinity The proposition that elephants exhibit personalities was considered self-evident among Nepali mahouts, irrespective of cultural background. On many occasions this claim was supported by handlers explaining to me that elephants have memories of prior experiences that influence attitudes and behaviour, that elephants can effectively communicate preferences, that elephants have reasoning and problem-solving abilities, and that elephants can demonstrate loyalty, affection, and grief, as well as bear a grudge! These are of course all abilities that scientists have documented,29 and from which some have dared to infer a non-human personhood.30 Are these not qualities also the attributes of humans, many mahouts rhetorically asked. In this case, it is experiential knowledge of elephants rather than received wisdom that is primary in attributing personhood. Despite this assertion, I found there were other discursive contexts just like those of handling pedagogy, in which not only was domination emphasized over companionship, but personhood and divinity deemphasized in favour of animality. 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. By contrast, at the perimeter of the stable, when mounting their elephants before entering the jungle, when they were just about to resume mutuality with their companion, most mahouts reverentially touched their forehead, chest, and Page 10 of 18

Animals, Persons, Gods 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.

Caste, Cosmos, and Divinity This brings us to the final modality and its associated state, the veneration of elephants as divine beings. This is most highly marked at the Khorsor Elephant Breeding Center during elephant training, a more-than-human rite of passage that commences and concludes with sacrificial rituals to the goddess Ban Devi and the god Ganesha. The ritual process places the juvenile elephant and (p. 172) his or her principal trainer in a liminal state, they are kept apart and subject to various ascetic prohibitions, while also involving all the mahouts, whose participation yields a heightened sense of communal solidarity or communitas.33 More than just a practical exercise, it is conducted according to religious observance to ensure the good will of the gods for the acquisition of new competencies and for transforming human and elephant into a mutually bonded working pair. Furthermore, during the month of Asar, a puja is performed in which a selected elephant, carrying a driver, is made the object of devotional worship as an instantiation of Ganesha. Finally, at Chitwan’s other sarkari hattisar in Sauraha, which still employs its own pujari or ritual officiant, I witnessed a disappearing tradition in which a modest puja was conducted at short posts that served as markers for remembering dead elephants. Every Tuesday, the day of Mars, the planet with which Ganesha is associated, the pujari would ritually purify the posts with water, leaving red tika powder and a few flower petals as gifts for the god and the elephants who contain his divine substance. 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 Page 11 of 18

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 This simultaneity of animality and divinity in elephants encompasses both low and high status within a hierarchical continuum of (p.174) being. Puzzling upon this led me to consider the implicit logic of caste and how integral it is to the handlers’ hierarchical and sociocentric conception of cosmic nature. The Page 12 of 18

Animals, Persons, Gods word for caste, a group of identical substance, that is of guna composition, whose interactions with other groups of differing ‘substance-nature’ must be strategically and ritually mediated according to a rationale of purity, is jãt. This word also means type, kind, or even species.39 Thus it was that I realized that for the handlers there was no problem in extending the logic of caste to elephants, it being as much an essentialist theory of kinds, as a social theory of discrete, ranked groups.40 Indeed, on a few occasions senior mahouts expressed to me the difference between humans and elephants as akin to differences between two cohabiting and interacting castes. Furthermore, the Sanskrit genre of texts on elephantology, known as Gaja Sastram, which parallel and elaborate upon oral traditions of practical knowledge, recognize eight ranked castes of elephant, understood in terms of guna composition.41 I have argued that this literature, through various redactions, continued to influence Nepali veterinarian texts into the early twentieth century.42 For example, we are told the rajoguni elephant is angry, impatient, and restless; the tamoguni elephant is disobedient, fearful, and weak, while the satvaguni elephant is of good temperament, beautiful appearance, and is quick to learn. However, the idea of elephant castes defined by their respective ‘substance-natures’ did not feature in everyday practice. Instead, three types of elephants were recognized according to differing bodily forms, just as the British colonial officer George Sanderson had reported for nineteenth-century Bengal.43 These may be seen as analogous to varna, the hierarchical classes into which castes are grouped44 and include koomeriah, the regal first-rate, dwásala, the blended second-rate, and meerga, the deer-like third rate. For mahouts, the taxonomic principle of caste to which the ordering of people is subject is then theoretically as applicable to relations between humans and elephants as it is separately among humans and among elephants. The idea of two castes ritually regulating their interactions with each other seems highly appropriate to the situation pertaining to humans and elephants in the sarkari hattisar of Nepal, where senior mahouts insisted on the importance of ritual practices in mediating interspecies relations. (p.175) 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. If human–elephant relations in Nepal’s sarkari hattisar are beset by tensions between trust and domination in conditions of cooperative captivity, then what does it mean to claim that the attribution of animality, personhood, and divinity represents a cultural strategy for resolving an ultimately ambivalent relationship? This is an important question because it encourages us to distinguish a general explanatory model from particular lived realities. Qualifications are required here. When handlers suggest that elephants are persons and gods as well as animals, they are not making assertions that they expect to have to support with persuasive arguments, rather they are making claims that are culturally meaningful and practically useful. Similarly, just as mahout–elephant relations vary according to the specificities of their intersecting biographies, so too does the emphasis with which mahouts assert the plural ontological states of elephants. As (p.176) custodians of the occupational culture of the government elephant stables, senior handlers encourage the idea of elephants as animals, persons, and gods, which is instilled through the conforming pressure of a shared practice that is discursively configured. As a strategy, the question is not so much one of sincerity and compliance as it is of the efficacy of a moral framework by which humans can accommodate themselves to a confounding relationship with elephants. This is a confounding relationship not merely in terms of countervailing values that present elephants as precious commodities, sacred beings, and intimate companions, but also in terms of the practical conundrum of a powerful, intentional being with easy access to its wild habitat that seemingly cooperates in its own captivity.

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 Future “Apeman”: Chimeras, Human Evolution, and Disciplinary Coherence’, Current Anthropology 48 (2007): 637–52. (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. (4.) Tim Ingold, ‘From Trust to Domination: An Alternative History of Human– Animal Relations’, in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Tim Ingold (London: Routledge, 2000), 61–76; Tim Ingold, ‘Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in the World’, in The Perception of The Environment, 172–88. (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. (6.) See the chapter by Trautmann in this collection. (7.) As Susan Nance also remarks regarding circus elephants in nineteenthcentury USA. See Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Animals, History, Culture) (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). (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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Animals, Persons, Gods (13.) Etienne Benson, ‘Demarcating Wilderness and Disciplining Wildlife’, in Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, edited by Bernhard Gissibl, Sabine Höhler, and Patrick Kupper (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 173–88. (14.) Ingold, ‘Building, Dwelling, Living’. (15.) Etienne Benson, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). (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. (18.) S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 25, 4 (2010): 545–76; Laura A. Ogden, Billy Hall, and Kimika Tanita, ‘Animals, Plants, People, and Things: A Review of Multsipecies Ethnography Environment and Society’, Advances in Research 4, 1 (2013): 5–24; and Piers Locke, ‘Explorations in Ethnoelephantology: Social, Historical and Ecological Intersections between Asian elephants and Humans’, Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4, 1 (2013): 82–3. (19.) Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology: Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India 1945–1997 (Hyderabad: Sangam Books Ltd, 2003). (20.) Haraway, When Species Meet, 8. (21.) Locke, ‘Explorations in Ethnoelephantology’, 83. (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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Animals, Persons, Gods (24.) D. Haraway, ‘Encounters with Companion Species: Entangling Dogs, Baboons, Philosophers, and Biologists’, Configurations 14, 1 (2006): 97–114. (25.) Van Dooren, Flight Ways. (26.) As Thorstein Gieser has recently argued by combining Tim Ingold’s emphasis on practical environmental engagement in situated social relationships with Kay Milton’s emphasis on emotion as a learning mechanism in filtering attention. See Thorsten Gieser, ‘Embodiment, Emotion and Empathy: A Phenomenological Approach to Apprenticeship Learning’, Anthropological Theory 8, 3 (2008): 299–318; Ingold, The Perception of The Environment; and Kay Milton, Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion (London: Routledge, 2000). (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. (30.) See Gary Varner, ‘Personhood, Memory and Elephant Management’, in Elephants and Ethics, 41–68; and for an extended discussion of apprenticeship and personhood, see Locke, ‘Elephants Are People Too’. (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. (33.) For an anthropological discussion of rites of passage and the role of liminality and communitas, see Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). (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’. (35.) Ellen, ‘The Cognitive Geometry of Nature’. (36.) Richard Burghart, ‘Hierarchical Models of The Hindu Social System’, Man (n.s.) 13 (1978): 519–26. (37.) McKim Marriott, ‘Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism’, in Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange, edited by Bruce Kapferer (Philadelphia: Institute for The Study of Human Issues, 1976), 109–42; M. Marriott and Ronald Inden, ‘Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems’, in The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia, edited by Kenneth David (The Hague: Mouton, 1977), 227–38; and McKim Marriott, ‘Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 23, 1 (1989): 1–39. (38.) Lawrence Babb, The Divine Hierarchy: Popular Hinduism in Central India (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1975), 52. (39.) Marriott and Inden, ‘Toward an Ethnosociology of South Asian Caste Systems’; Richard Burghart, ‘The Formation of the Concept of Nation-State in Nepal’, Journal of Asian Studies 44, 1 (1984): 116–18. (40.) Burghart, ‘Hierarchical Models of the Hindu Social System’. (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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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India Nicolas Lainé

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords This chapter ethnographically explores the relations between humans and elephants in logging operations in terms of interspecies labour, presenting elephants as collaborating participants rather than merely animate instruments. This involves examining labour in terms of cooperation rather than coordination, to avoid the merely instrumental consideration of articulated operations, and conduct rather than behaviour, to avoid simplistic Pavlovian interpretations of conditioned responses to environmental stimuli. The approach, informed by recent research on elephant sociality and cognition, allows for analysis in terms of interactive understanding. Revealing elephants as consciously intentional colleague capable of withdrawing their cooperation, this chapter also shows the partiality of accounts of animal labour as only involving alienation and exploitation. Furthermore, the worksite is revealed as a space of interspecies relations in which identities are co-produced, and which cannot simply be reduced to human domination. Keywords:   captive elephant management, northeast India, logging, mahout, non-human agency, interspecies labour, logging, collaboration, Khamti, Arunachal Pradesh

This chapter outlines an integrated approach for understanding the working union of humans and elephants. Considering their different physical and cognitive capacities, it asks how their respective subjectivities can meaningfully engage with each other through forms of interspecies communication that are both vocal and tactile. It does so in relation to ethnographic data from research

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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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. The owner intervenes. Mohan must drag the log over the tree once it is attached to the chains. ‘Agaat ahaa!’ (Come to me), the owner says to his elephant. He and Chao Nakalang then unfold the chains that hang on the saddle of Mohan. Chao Nakalang wraps them around the log. Once the log is connected to the chains, he moves away from the scene and lets the owner guide Mohan: Figure 8.1 Mohan Pushes the Log ‘Agaat, Agaat!’ (‘Move forward, Source: Nicolas Lainé move forward!’), he shouts to him. With his mighty strength, Mohan succeeds in hauling the log over the trunk. ‘Hoy hoy, oigol, pischu!’ (Hoy hoy, finished, stop!), shouts the owner to Mohan when the log reaches the slope. 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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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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). (p.183) Chao Nakalang’s duties here consist of removing obstacles to facilitate the progress of his log-bearing elephant. He cuts small trees and branches and removes rocks that could hurt Mohan. The pathway does not permit linear passage; it twists and turns, requiring delicate negotiation. The owner and the mahout focus their energies on facilitating the elephant’s progress. Mohan picks up branches to rub his body and to eat. With each step Mohan leaves a depression in the muddy ground, providing convenient spots to plant our feet.

Figures 8.2 and 8.3 The Owner Walks beside the Animal while the Latter Is Dragging the Log Source: Nicolas Lainé

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. The working session of a human–elephant partnership described above relates to a sequence of timber operation as observed during my doctoral fieldwork among the Tai-Khamtis in northeast India. Despite only representing a part of the different tasks in which Tai-Khamtis and elephants are engaged for timber operations, it nonetheless indicates the intensity of the relationship shared by Tai-Khamtis and their elephant partners.

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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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 Drawing on the more-than-human perspective of multispecies ethnography, as first outlined by Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, this chapter explores human–elephant relations in the workplace.3 It is difficult to make an elephant perform a task if he or she does not want to. This is particularly true if one is engaged in a long-term partnership that cannot be sustained through fear and domination. Similarly, a utilitarian and instrumental understanding that only considers the dominating power of the human is inadequate for understanding this relationship and how it gets work done. Rather, we also need to consider consent and reciprocal involvement. Consequently, (p.184) this chapter argues that elephants engage as subjective, intentional actors through partnerships with humans to achieve common tasks. 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. This paradigmatic change has also been accompanied by forms of disciplinary decompartmentalization that embrace research from the natural sciences that help us understand the experiential animal worlds that they inhabit or, in other words, what von Uexkull called umwelt.6 These works have shown that far from being machine-like automatons, animals can not only act within, but also think about and make representations of their environments. As foundational ontological categories in the humanities and social sciences have been reevaluated, researchers have begun reconsidering the role of animals in the formation of social groups and the apparatus of social life. Accorded a subjectivity previously ignored, animals are increasingly recognized not just as Page 4 of 20

Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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 Of particular relevance to conduct and collaboration in human–elephant working relations is Porcher’s proposal that we examine (p.185) these hybrid communities through the lens of labour. For her, the world of labour is above all an encounter between the experienced worlds of human and non-human animals. She argues that in the context of work, human and non-human animals not only partake in a common world, but also produce this world together and transform it through their collaboration. This suggests that non-human animals are no longer considered as passive beings merely used by humans, but rather as living subjects that are at least partly conscious of their actions. Labour indeed transforms the cohabitation of humans and elephants, integrating each into a shared world. The workplace is specific to both of them; neither the usual world of the animal, nor a social world exclusive to the human.11 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

From Work to Working With: Collective and Individual Dimensions of Labour Seeking to understand the place and relations of animals at work, Porcher has extended to animals the theory concerning the psychodynamics of labour. Research in this area focuses on the activity of labour and the individual transformations it generates. It shows that to perform required tasks effectively, work cannot be understood as a simple application of regulations, procedures, and organization. Working activity both derives from prescribed rules and procedures, and the behaviour of subjects performing tasks.13 It implies ‘gestures, know-how, a body involvement, mobilization of intelligence, the capacity of reflection, interpretation and to react according to situations; it is the power to feel, to think and to invent’.14 All of these (p.186) operations

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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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. Moreover, working activity is often, if not exclusively, conducted within a collective. When performing an operation like that of the introductory ethnographic vignette—engaging Mohan, his owner, and his mahout—everyone is engaged towards a productive aim. As revealed by Dejours, productivity (i.e., the result of the common working task) is not based on the utility of one to another, but on the fact that they work together and get involved in a productive activity: for working, cooperation is required. According to Dejours, cooperation is ‘the way in which, collectively, workers reshuffle, realign, readjust the coordination so that it becomes efficient’.15 This definition makes a clear distinction between cooperation and coordination. If the coordination ‘merely ensure[s] the articulation of singular activities’,16 cooperation presupposes a willingness on the part of everyone to share and to jointly deliberate on the task to be accomplished; it requires trust and visibility among workers. In addition, when all the concerned subjects draw on their singular intelligences to produce a common dynamic, they comprise a collective of labour, that is, ‘a team that has built its rules through a deontic activity and “space of deliberation”; the place where they are discussed’.17 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 nonhuman 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 Page 6 of 20

Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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)

Conduct rather than Behaviour as Interpretive Frame Working, as we have seen, relies on the subjectivity of workers. To perform a job well, one must be capable of intelligent, inventive, and creative activity. Thus, in my observations on the Tai-Khamtis and elephants at work, I was less concerned with the finality of tasks than with the way in which elephants make their own contribution. Therefore, I analyse the various tasks performed by and with elephants in timber operations through the notion of conduct, conceived as ways of acting, which assume intelligence and action.23 I deliberately focus on conduct rather than behaviour in order to avoid the limitations of behaviourist discourse from the animal sciences, which does not presume the intelligence of the individual. Indeed, in its most Pavlovian sense, a concern with behaviour might produce interpretations that explain the action of elephants only in terms of their conditioning at the hands of humans. This would give primacy to the action of the human, at the expense of demonstrating the mutual participation and interspecies communication of the human–elephant working unit. Interpreting animals’ actions in terms of conduct allows us to envisage them as conscious and intentional actors rather than merely living beings directed by genetic programming and behavioural modification. This contrast between Page 7 of 20

Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India conduct and behaviour is useful for considering whether elephants have understood required tasks or if they simply act as beasts of burden, responding to orders dictated by their mahout. Also, a focus on conduct rather than on behaviour is useful for identifying elements that indicate the meaningful involvement of elephants, which might include issues of intelligence, consent, and the refusal to work.

Understanding Interspecies Communication This labour of logging in Assam involves the moment when human and elephant act, communicate, and understand each other together. In order to perform a common task and to achieve concrete and effective action together that would lead to it, an enduring relation is needed between the two species. Thus, specific attention must be given to the forms and terms of communication at play between (p.189) Tai-Khamtis and elephants. During my research, I observed that the majority of communication from mahout to elephant is vocal, accompanied by gestures and physical contact when the mahout sits on the elephant. 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. So the psychodynamics of labour constitutes a theory of subjectivity, which focuses on the mobilization of intelligence and the ways in which work is individually and collectively experienced. Coming back to the case of Khamti– elephant timber operations, the point is not to claim that the participation of elephants qualifies as a job, but to look at how they do the job, how they mobilize their bodies and intelligence, and engage intersubjectively with humans to carry out joint actions. To be intellectually concerned with the issue of working with non-human animals is to take into account the individuals and the relationships. By considering work as the product of two cooperating species, we can appreciate mahouts and elephants as companions. During timber operations, Khamtis and elephants act and communicate according to their respective physical and cognitive capacities. To what extent Page 8 of 20

Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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?

Autonomy and Constraint in Timber Elephant Operations Contrary to most other situations in South Asia, timber operations among the Khamti are not directly linked with the colonial period.27 In this part of Assam, the timber industry, of which the elephants are an essential part, emerged in post-independence India. It rapidly became integral to Khamti economy. However, a prohibitive order made by the Indian Supreme Court in 1996 led to a collapse of the industry. Nonetheless, this activity remains the main occupation for elephants and a significant source of income for the Khamti.28 In timber operations, elephants and their mahouts are involved in each step of the operations. Once a felled tree has been transformed into logs, it must be transported to a gathering place. Khamti mahouts and elephants are then engaged in the loading of the logs onto trucks, which carry them to the factory for processing. On the way, they may also help the trucks escape the challenging forest terrain. 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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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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). In the introductory vignette, it is clear that the elephant does not only pull or drag logs. The description of the labour performed by Mohan allows for further analysis of the conduct of human and elephant and their execution of these logging tasks. Regarding the capacity of elephants to drag logs, some mahouts told me that an adult elephant was able to drag logs weighing up to three tonnes. A survey conducted in Sri Lanka

Figure 8.4 Ropes and Equipment for Dragging Logs Source: Nicolas Lainé

estimated that elephants could pull at least half of their total weight.29 The most imposing adult males weigh five tonnes, so they would be able to pull up to two and half tonnes. In addition, this survey calculated that, on average, an elephant walks about two kilometres per hour by doing so, and that the maximum distance covered—and recommended—for a working (p.192) day was seven kilometres. Based on these data, one tonne load can be drawn in two hours over a distance of four kilometres. However, these estimations do not take into consideration topography, terrain, or the form and the length of the logs. The performance of this task can indeed be dangerous, especially on muddy ground and inclines, as in the introductory vignette. Animals’ legs can easily sink to the Page 10 of 20

Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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 Loading the truck requires no rope or specific equipment to be put on the elephant’s body. The elephant only wears the sai kho around its neck, so that mahouts give commands with their feet behind the elephant’s ears. Unlike dragging operations, where mahouts walk beside their elephants, in the case of loading the truck, both work directly together and have to adjust their actions. Among the Tai-Khamtis, the mahout is constantly sitting astride the neck of the elephant on a carpet, both for his own convenience and to prevent his clothes from rubbing the elephant’s skin. In the following description, we meet a makhna elephant (a male without tusks) called Aipang, who is aged about sixty years. The mahout, Chao Mein, who teams up with him, is the elephant owner’s son. This is the third consecutive day that the same team (driver, assistant, mahout, and elephant) leaves the village to load the waiting logs in forest. 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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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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. Page 12 of 20

Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 195) fall on the trailer, but unfortunately it is askew. In order to push it completely onto the trailer, Aipang, with his head laid on the trailer, pushes the extremity of the log in an attempt to align it parallel with the trailer. The log is, however, not straight and extends far beyond the trailer. There, without words or any indication, Aipang turns back, straddling the mai, and reaches to the back of the truck. Meanwhile, with a small shim, the driver blocks the side of the log at the top of the trailer. The mahout stops giving foot commands. As soon as he restarts, the animal pushes with his head to the side of the log that was out of the trailer; he rotates it and makes it straight. The first log is now well in place. 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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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India 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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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India (p.198) Authority, Volition, and Interspecies Understanding In dragging logs (as in the introductory vignette), voice is the primary medium of communication. Very few voice commands are used: ‘agaat’ (go ahead) or ‘pischu’ (stop). Mohan moved forward alone, only stopping when he was concerned about the way ahead. During loading (as in the second vignette) tactile communication complemented verbal communication. Gestural communication between human feet and elephant ears was used to suggest that the elephant should begin, continue, or stop a manoeuvre. Incidentally, gestural contact can also be punitive. The mahout can use his nails to scratch the especially thin and sensitive skin of the elephant’s ears.

Figure 8.5 Once the Truck is Fully Loaded, Aipang Removes the Ramps Source: Nicolas Lainé

Figure 8.6 Reaching the Village, Aipang However, considering the Helps the Truck number of successive Source: Nicolas Lainé operations elephants make when loading trucks, it is significant how few verbal commands are used. There are no commands that express how to load a log on a trailer. Command words are only effective in relation to the elephant’s ability to interpret them according to context and purpose. Mahouts rely on their companions’ intelligence, which is understood as an ability to make sense of human expectations in (p.199) relation to the possibilities afforded by capabilities in particular situations at particular times. It is also noteworthy that among the Khamtis, elephants do not follow specific training for the work they eventually engage in. It is by imitation and experience that they learn how to develop competency in performing required tasks. This also involves mahouts becoming familiar with and confident in their elephants’ abilities to think and act. In loading logs, mahouts offer almost no guidance for correct placement. Mahouts may intervene to respond to recalcitrance though.

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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India Clearly, instruction alone is insufficient to account for the elephant’s activity. Elephants demonstrate their own initiative in completing logging tasks. 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.

Collaborative Labour and Intersubjective Engagement Although the physical strength of elephants is an important component of their labour contribution, we have seen that their cognitive and sensory capabilities for making decisions and understanding the affordances of their bodies in Page 16 of 20

Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India working environments are also crucial. Furthermore, elephants demonstrate these adaptive abilities not only according to the situation, but also in relation to the men with whom they are working. The individuality of each animal and their varying motivational disposition influence the performance of logging labour tasks. In each operation, elephants know what they are doing, and the work is completed only through their involvement. Whenever an elephant is no longer invested or has not seen his owner for several days, the working activity is likely to falter. Elephants are working, then, not only because they mobilize their strength and their sensory abilities, but as a result of their volition. Nevertheless, although evidence for the intelligence of elephants is a relevant consideration,33 the question remains as to whether these human–elephant interactions constitute collaborative labour or merely a sequence of coordinated actions. This question is at stake because we have seen that coordination might imply a mechanistic view of the elephant, controlled according to human will, without any claim as (p.201) to the subjective agency of elephants as thinking and feeling sentient beings. I argue for collaborative labour by noting the adaptive ability of elephants to autonomously negotiate problems, and by noting the relational context between humans and elephants, involving qualities of mutual trust and empathic and communicative understanding. Describing the loading operations, I have shown that interspecies communication was based on the trusting confidence between the mahout Chao Mein and the elephant Aipang. The description reveals that instruction alone is insufficient to account for elephants’ activity and that they exercise their own initiative in completing logging tasks. Crucially, this suggests the elephant’s autonomy and intentionality as a fellow worker collaborating with humans. By emphasizing the intersubjective engagement of Tai-Khamtis and elephants, I have sought to challenge assumptions that animal labour only involves alienation and exploitation. As we have seen, work cannot be reduced to its productivity finality; it is also a vehicle for constituting interspecies social relations. At work, the mood and fatigue of each worker, human or non-human, impacts the others. Everyone has the power to influence the result of the action being done. While we may conceive of humans and elephants as members of a hybrid or interspecies community,34 it is nonetheless a community characterized by asymmetric power relations, as Locke also remarks for Nepali mahouts and their elephants in Chitwan.35 Moreover, by living and working with elephants, TaiKhamtis are engaged in a caring relationship with them. The importance of elephants for those who live and work with them on a daily basis requires the avoidance of abuse. Indeed, an injured elephant cannot work, affecting the livelihood of its human companions. Thus, by working with elephants, Tai-

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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India Khamtis not only share their lives with these animals, they, above all, share a condition of living.36

Notes:

(1.) Shorea assamica. (2.) See Trautmann, Chapter 2, this volume. (3.) S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich Kirksey, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 25, 4 (2010): 545–76. (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). (8.) Latour, Politique de la nature. Comment faire rentrer les sciences en politique (Paris: La Découverte, 1999). (9.) Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). (10.) F. Brunois, ‘Pour une approche interactive des savoirs locaux: l’ethnoéthologie’, Journal de la Société des Océanistes 120–1 (2005): 31–40. (11.) Jocelyne Porcher, Éleveurs et animaux: réinventer le lien (Paris: Presses universitaires de France [PUF], 2002): Porcher, Vivre avec les animaux. (12.) 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.

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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India (13.) Christophe Dejours, Travail vivant tome 2: Travail et emancipation (Paris: Payot, 2009). (14.) Dejours, Travail vivant tome 2. (15.) Dejours, Travail vivant tome 2, 100. (16.) Dejours, Travail vivant tome 2, 101. (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. (18.) Porcher, Éleveurs et animaux. (19.) Porcher, Vivre avec les animaux. (20.) Jocelyne Porcher and Tiphaine Schmitt, ‘Dairy Cows, Workers of the Shadow’, Society and Animals 20, 1 (2012): 39–60. (21.) Dejours, La panne. (22.) Haraway, When Species Meet. (23.) Porcher and Schmitt, ‘Dairy Cows, Workers of the Shadow’. (24.) Stéphane Rennesson, Emanuel Grimaud, and Nicolas Césard, ‘Insect Magnetism: The Communication Circuits of Rhinoceros Beetle Fighting in Thailand’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, 2 (2012): 257–86. (25.) Charles Stépanoff, ‘Human-Animal “Joint Commitment” in a Reindeer Herding System’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, 2 (2012): 287–312. (26.) André G. Haudricourt, ‘Domestication des animaux, culture des plantes et traitement d’autrui’, L’Homme 2, 1 (1962): 40–50. (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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Conduct and Collaboration in Human–Elephant Working Communities of Northeast India (29.) S. Atapattu and P. Jayasekera, Elephants in Logging Operations in Sri Lanka, Forest Harvesting Case-Study 5 (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] publication, 1999). (30.) J. H. Williams, Bill l’Éléphant (Paris: Hachette, 1951), 49. (31.) ‘Mai’ is the common Tai word for ‘wood’. (32.) U. Toke Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant (Rangoon: Trade Corporation, 1980), 131. (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 selfconsciousness 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. (34.) Dominique Lestel, L’animal singulier (Paris: Seuil, 2004). (35.) See Locke, Chapter 7, this volume. (36.) N. Lainé, ‘Role of Elephant-Keeping Culture in the Conservation and Welfare of Asian Elephants’, India Seminar 651 (November 2013): 70–5.

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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations Niclas Klixbüll

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords This chapter considers the relative significance of cultural and practical factors for understanding human–elephant relations in Sri Lanka, with regard to captive elephants’ companionship with mahouts and free-roaming elephants’ conflict with farmers. Arguing for the primacy of practical experience, it nonetheless highlights the significance of Buddhist cultural heritage, even as the former situation is conducive to positive symbolic association as the latter is in conflict with them. A worldview involving ultimately permeable boundaries between different types of reincarnating living beings is recognized as significant in both cases, supporting interspecies intimacy in the former while mitigating antipathy in the latter. While attending to the cultural contexts and inhabited spaces in which these interspecies encounters occur, this chapter highlights the responsive experiences that generate the expert knowledge, skilled practice, and affective dispositions crucial for understanding these interactions. Keywords:   captive elephant management, human–elephant conflict, interspecies encounter, mahout, Sri Lanka, Sinhalese, Buddhism, Jatakas

The significance of the elephant in Sri Lanka cannot be understated. As with other regions in South Asia considered in this volume, its many different roles similarly include working animal, deity, cultural and historic symbol, cropraiding pest, and wildlife tourist attraction. The human–elephant relationship in Sri Lanka is venerable and multifaceted, and while the elephant serves as a close working companion for some, it may appear as a threat to the livelihood of others. Considering the Buddhist cultural context, this chapter explores Page 1 of 18

Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations perceptions and attitudes towards elephants in two different Sinhalese occupational groups, specifically mahouts, who maintain intimate and personal relationships with captive elephants, and farmers inhabiting jungle frontiers, who encounter free-roaming elephants through relations of conflict. Both these groups have cultural and religious connections with the elephant, but hold differing attitudes towards it. Through comparative analysis, I demonstrate that experiences of elephant encounter produce new meanings and attitudes that conform, confound, and complicate its generic cultural significance. This chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork with mahouts at the Millennium Elephant Foundation in Randeniya, (p.206) complemented by secondary and more limited research with onion and rice farmers in the North Central district of Anuradhapura. While the research with mahouts concerns interspecies companionship through intimate interactions, and the research with farmers concerns interspecies competition over land and resources, both cases are analysed in relation to a common religious tradition which presents the elephant as a sacred being.

Buddhism, Elephants, and People The religious and symbolic significance of the elephant in Sri Lanka dates back centuries, at least to the spread of Buddhism in the third century BCE.1 The Jataka tales, a compilation of ancient literature concerning previous incidents in the life of Buddha, demonstrate the symbolic and ethical significance of animals in human society. In these didactic short stories, we encounter the Buddhist ethic of universal love and compassion that shows how to live and act in a world of unavoidable suffering. What makes these tales interesting in relation to the Buddhist attitude towards animals is that acts of compassion, selflessness, and love are often performed by heavily anthropomorphized animals and not necessarily by people.2 In the Jatakas all living entities can feel both compassion and suffering, and Sarao argues that the Jatakas 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 Page 2 of 18

Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations subordinate themselves to human interests. Nonetheless, we also encounter a symbiotic relationship between humans and animals, in which animals communicate as similarly sentient beings, and in which animals also have cultures and kingdoms. Respect and admiration for animals are intrinsic to the Jataka tales in which interspecies relations with humans represent allegorical lessons for intra-species relations among humans. 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 Religious admiration for the elephant is demonstrated in the Buddhist peraheras, festivals in which caparisoned elephants participate in large parades to honour the Buddha. This tradition is believed to date back to the earliest times of Buddhism in Sri Lanka in the third century BCE.7 Bulls, cows, and calves participate in these festive and religious parades wearing colourful gowns covered in lights. The largest Sri Lankan perahera is the Esalaperahera in Kandy, a ten-day festival, where the largest and most magnificent bull-tusker of (p.208) the parade carries the relic of the Buddha’s tooth. While all elephants in Sri Lanka are infused with sacred significance, the bull tusker is especially noteworthy. This extends to ritual prohibitions, and convention dictates that no woman should ever ride a tusker. While elephants may be valued as tourist attractions, as symbols of Sri Lankan wildlife, as iconic species for conservation, or as working captives, their longstanding symbolic significance in Buddhism always informs these roles to some extent. Everyday notions and ritual practices based on the beneficence of the elephant or its body parts are numerous. Dreaming of an elephant is said to bring the dreamer luck, placing elephant bones within the foundation of houses is believed to bless the buildings, elephant paintings may bring fortune, and rubbing the jaw bone of an elephant on a sick Page 3 of 18

Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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. Historically, mahouting was viewed as both a noble and respectful profession with deep family traditions.9 During the time of kings, mahoutship held a position second only to farmers and equal to that of very skilled jewellery artisans in the hierarchal caste system.10 Because of the elephant’s intelligence, enormous size, and appetite it requires great attention and a highly skilled handler. This, as well as the risks of working with an animal that can easily kill its keeper, may explain why the profession was respected. During my fieldwork I failed to meet a single elephant that had not previously killed at least one mahout. One elephant, a tuskless bull in his thirties, Bandara, had killed five of his previous mahouts. Sunil, an experienced mahout and informant, who had become a close friend of mine, was killed when a young female elephant charged him. He was a husband and a father of two. It is therefore vital for the mahout to know his elephant, its thoughts, and behavioural patterns in order to control it, which is why many mahouts will spend more time with this four-tonne animal than their families.11

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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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 fourtonne 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.

Companionship and Interspecies Family Ties For the elephants of the Millennium Elephant Foundation, which provides volunteer tourist experiences, daily routine involves bathing in the river that runs through the compound. The morning wash is perhaps the most crucial time for nurturing and strengthening the relationship between mahout and elephant. Besides cleaning through intensive scrubbing (usually with a sharpened coconut husk), cutting nails, and inspecting for foot rot and other infections, mahouts also focus on verbal interaction at this time. The mahouts with whom I developed the closest relations, Jayasena and Chandana, would talk to their elephants for the duration of the activity, stressing the importance of this verbal engagement. While Chandana had handled the female Rani for sixteen years, Jayasena had spent twenty-seven years, over half of his lifetime, with his female Lakshmi: 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]. I learnt first-hand how verbal communication between handler and elephant strengthens the relationship as I spent every morning of the first two months of my apprenticeship sitting in front of Lakshmi, calmly talking while feeding her Page 5 of 18

Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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. Referring to an elephant as a human family member parallels the manner in which people in Sri Lanka generally refer to each other in social groupings, where family titles are given on the basis of age, (p.212) gender, and intimacy. This shows the sense of interconnection that mahouts feel towards their elephants, made manifest as a result of their intensely intertwined daily lives. A conventional Western world view, rooted in the dualist oppositions of nature and culture, human and animal, might incline us to dismiss this merely as anthropomorphism, but it is worth considering the Buddhist worldview informing such untroubled extensions of the familial to the non-human. Whereas the Abrahamic cosmologies posit a world in which transcendence is reserved Page 6 of 18

Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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.

The Emotional Lives of Elephants Knowing that elephants can be as emotionally changeable as humans, my human informants were led to reflect upon the importance of attending to an elephant’s fluctuating disposition. 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 Elsewhere, animal trainers also appreciate the importance of taking the emotional states of animals seriously, as Mary Midgley remarks in her discussion of anthropomorphic modes of interspecies communication.15 Those who work with elephants understand ‘that one ignores an elephant’s “mood” at one’s peril’.16 Contrary to more recent research affirming the cognitive and emotional capacities of this sentient non-human mammal,17 Midgley treats the attribution of personhood merely as a form of strategically efficacious anthropomorphism.18 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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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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 As Locke found in Nepal, the elephant handlers or hattisare of Chitwan held views about the personalities of elephants that were similar to those of Sinhalese mahouts. He writes: a conception of non-human personhood is also utilized by Nepali elephant hattisare to make their interaction with elephants meaningful.… I would argue that to the extent that I was able to acquire the dispositions and schemas comprising the group habitus of Nepali elephant handlers, then I too incorporated this mode of engagement in my daily practice of living with elephants.21 While these mahouts engaged with their elephants as persons, he claims it should not be mistaken for mere anthropomorphism, since their understanding of the emotional lives of elephants represents more than just a cultural framework of interpretation. Indeed, their experience of elephants’ faculties is confirmed by developments in the animal sciences which support the extension of personhood beyond the human.22As with Locke’s exploration of the Hindu world view informing the institutional culture of the elephant stable or hattisar, Page 8 of 18

Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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?

Practical Engagements with Elephants The extension of personhood through a focus on practical engagement has corollaries with developments in Western philosophy. The idea of worldhood on all levels of existence, including nature, history, (p.215) and culture is, according to Martin Heidegger, shared and communal, and, as others have suggested, can be extended beyond the human. This directs us to consider the connections between all living entities, and not just in instrumentally ecological terms. Here we may recall the earlier reflections of Edmund Husserl and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who suggested that life is experienced through the lived body, and who thereby attempted to rethink understandings of culture, nature, and environment. Some commentators consider this to be the ‘ground-breaking discovery of phenomenology that ultimately led to a full rejection of Cartesian epistemology, the latter of which provided the foundation for the modern conception of rationality and nature …’23 In connection to this, Husserl presents what he calls the other ego, which makes it possible for a new infinite domain of what is considered other. He states that the objectified world, which we all are participating in, is filled with other egos as himself. This claim implies that animals as well as humans may be other egos also engaged in world-making in a shared environment. Besides living alongside each other in the same biophysical world, this also suggests that the intersections of their world-making constitute a community of shared life.24 Besides being deployed to suggest a multispecies communal world, phenomenology rejects the mind/body dualism by emphasizing the ways in which the world is experienced through the body. Meaning and understanding are therefore acquired through direct perceptual engagement with the world. Albeit in an originally restrictive sense, Heidegger calls this being-in-the-world, a term that suggests our everyday involvement with the various components of the world cannot be seen as existing prior to our application of meaning. Rane Willerslev describes this rather eloquently: ‘Our practical involvement with things is prior to the cogitating ego, confronting an external world “out there”, and that which is revealed through involved activity is ontologically more fundamental than the context-free properties revealed by detached contemplation.’25 No matter how much we reflect, contemplate, and mentally abstract ourselves from the world, we will always be in it, interacting with it through direct and immediate relationships. The self and the world are thus ultimately inseparable. In relation to this, Tim Ingold argues against the constructed boundary between the domain of the in here, the environment, and Page 9 of 18

Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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 there is no inside and outside, and no boundary separating the two domains. Rather there is a trail of movement or growth. Every such trail traces a relation. But the relation is not between one thing and another— between the organism ‘here’ and the environment ‘there’. It is rather a trail along which life is lived: one strand in a tissue of trails that together make up the texture of the life world.26 In this figuration, Ingold sees the world and all its inhabitants as part of a large meshwork of trails that interconnects like a web. Perceiving the world as a community of entities enables animists to understand non-human animals as beings with their own agency and personhood based on empirical observations about their behaviour.27 This way of understanding nonhuman life bears comparison with the way Sinhalese mahouts conceive their working environment among elephants. Like the Siberian Yukaghir hunters studied by Willerslev, mahouts establish relational understanding of certain animals through practice, experience, and oral tradition. Elephants are acknowledged as a different kind of being, albeit with faculties not dissimilar from our own, which make possible relations of meaningful emotional connection. But while the possibility of committing anthropomorphism has long represented a taboo for animal ethologists, who often struggle to resist extending human-like qualities to their subjects, the mahouts, who are not concerned about restricting decisive and emotional intentionality to humans, face no such conflicts with their non-human companions.28 They consider their elephants as fellow social beings who can feel, think, and emote, making them sufficiently similar to humans to develop intimate, reciprocating social relationships with them. While a phenomenological approach may be useful for thinking how bodily experience and direct interaction can produce knowledge, such knowledge as verbal commentary is nonetheless also mediated through representations emerging from participation in cultural traditions that perpetuate particular ways of thinking. For this reason, the occupational history of mahouts and the cultural context that informs it should not be ignored. Thus, behavioural analysis of interactive intimacy is important, and a phenomenological approach to corporeal (p.217) experience can help describe a knowledge obtained regardless of the elephant’s symbolic associations. However, this should not be taken as a mandate to ignore cultural and religious factors. Such considerations are surely relevant to understanding interpretive frames, motivations, ritual behaviour, and ethical attitudes. Culture, religion, and history explain not only the institution of captive elephant management in Sri Lanka, but also the

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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations reproduction of the attitudes, conceptions, and practices of interspecies custodial labour by which mahouts relate to elephants.

Jungle Frontiers and Free-roaming Elephants While we see intimate personal relationships of companionship between mahouts and captive elephants, the relationship that has developed between their free-roaming conspecifics and Sri Lankan farmers tells a different story. As with the mahouts of the Millennium Elephant Foundation, the small farming communities in the Anuradhapura district are culturally and spiritually bound to the elephant because of its vital role in Buddhism, and they also understand elephants through lived, bodily experience. However, the relationship that has evolved between farmers and free-roaming elephants is one of conflict and antagonism rather than companionship and mutuality. This relationship is significantly configured through competition over food resources. Free-roaming elephants are seen as a threat to the livelihood of humans. For humans, crops have been lost, homes damaged, and well-being negatively affected, with both human and elephant casualties resulting from violent encounters. As elephants become competitors for human food resources, farming comes to involve surveillance and protection as well as cultivation of crops. Here, it seems that the positive associations deriving from the cultural and religious symbolism of the elephant are overshadowed by its agency as a crop-raider that can easily ruin a harvest overnight. For some, this conflict suggests a fundamental incompatibility between humans and other mega-fauna. Perhaps this is too simplistic, as other contributors to this volume also suggest. If we take a historical and ecological perspective, it becomes clear that Sri Lankan elephants (p.218) represent a companion species closely implicated with the development of human civilization; their fortunes dependent on human practices of environmental modification and demarcation.29 An appreciation of the interconnected histories of humans and elephants reminds us then that conflict has become most acute in the context of recent socio-economic development.

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 freeroaming 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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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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

Elephants and the Farming Village In my admittedly limited investigations with farmers, elephants only featured indirectly through the farmers’ testimonies of elephant incidents and their commentaries on conflict mitigation strategies. In the small village of Weragala, situated east of Habarana, I was told how free-roaming elephants impacted the inhabited area. I learnt that people usually avoid venturing outside after dark and struggle to procure the services of motorized transport like tuk-tuks or even ambulances due to the probabilities of encountering a wild elephant. Fear of elephants was prevalent in farming communities like these, especially as residents were so familiar with incidents of fatal encounter. During the dry season for onions and the wet season for rice, farmers occupied homemade tree Page 12 of 18

Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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 elephantgod 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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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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 handsized 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. The knowledge these farmers deploy derives from understanding the behavioural patterns and motivational dispositions of free-roaming elephants. The farmers shared with me their descriptions of the lives of free-roaming elephants; their preferred foods and dietary habits; their ways of recognizing individual elephants and identifying different (p.222) physical and behavioural characteristics; advisable behaviours when encountering elephants in the jungle; how to escape a charging elephant; how to distinguish elephant movement patterns and migratory routes in the jungle; how to determine the size and height of an elephant by measuring footprints; and the differences between solitary males and female-dominated herds. The local environmental knowledge of elephants I encountered was extensive, and not without similarity to the more focused and systematic methods deployed by trained animal behavioural scientists in the field (who also need to know how to handle themselves in the context of encounter!) Indeed, in a discussion of Inuit traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), Rinkevich argues that TEK is not a substitute, but rather a compliment to Western scientific practice.40 This seems pertinent to the occupational and residential social groups described here, who establish repertoires of knowledge of elephants as cognitively and socially complex animals through their own practical experience, one group through interspecies intimacy with captive elephants, the other through antagonistic encounters with free-roaming elephants.

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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations 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. Although I have given priority to the understandings of elephants that emerge from different modes of encounter, it should be clear that the cultural significance of elephants in Sri Lanka is not inconsequential. It provides a framework of meaning in which mahouts develop and maintain enduring relations with captive elephants, and it informs the rituals of respect farmers perform to honour elephants in the hope that they will not cause them grief. Indeed, the cultural and religious symbolism of elephants and the affective dispositions it encourages is surely historically entangled with longstanding historical experience of elephants, as Trautmann demonstrates in this volume regarding the deep history of human–elephant relations in South Asia. This has implications for studies of captive elephant management and for studies of human–elephant conflict, reminding us that instrumental analyses that fail to attend to local experiential knowledge and that disregard the cultural dimensions of human–elephant relations are unlikely to yield adequately informed accounts for animal husbandry or wildlife conflict mitigation.

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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations

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. (3.) K.T.S. Sarao, ‘Buddhism, Environment, and Animal Rights’, Budddha channell, last modified 12 June 2015, http://www.buddhachannel.tv/portail/ spip.php?article 3844. (4.) Francis and Thomas, Jataka Tales, 225, 279, 21. (5.) Francis and Thomas, Jataka Tales, 395, 134. (6.) Har Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publications, 1999), 295. (7.) Wisumperuma, ‘Religious Use of Elephants in Ancient Sri Lanka’, 16–17. (8.) Teresa Cannon and Peter Davis, Aliya, Stories of the Elephant of Sri Lanka (Melbourne: Airavata Press, 1995), 17. (9.) See Trautmann, Chapter 2, this volume. (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. (12.) Piers Locke, ‘History, Practice, Identity: An Institutional Ethnography of Elephant Handlers in Chitwan, Nepal’ (PhD thesis, University of Kent, Canterbury, 2007), 4. (13.) James A. Serpell, ‘Pet-Keeping in Non-Western societies: Some Common Misconceptions’, Anthrozöos 1, 3 (1987): 170. (14.) Jayasena. (15.) Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984).

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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations (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. (18.) In Masson and McCarthy, When Elephants Weep, 21. (19.) Jayasena. (20.) See Piers Locke, ‘“Elephants are People Too”: Affective Apprenticeship and Fieldwork With Nonhuman Informants’, forthcoming in HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory. (21.) Locke, ‘History, Practice, Identity’, 220. (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 Nonhuman 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. (26.) Tim Ingold, ‘Rethinking the Animate, Reanimating Thought’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 71, 1 (2006): 12–13. (27.) Samantha Hurn, Humans and Other Animals: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Human–Animal Interactions (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 44–7; Willerslev, Soul Hunters, 19. (28.) See Andrew C. Isenberg, ‘The Moral Ecology of Wildlife’, in Representing Animals, edited by Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 46–64. (29.) See Charles Santiapillai and S. Wijeyamohan, Chapter 10, this volume. (30.) Charles Santiapillai, S. Wijeyamohan, Ganga Bandara, Rukmali Athurupana, Naveen Dissanayake, and Bruce Read, ‘An Assessment of the Human–Elephant

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Cultural Values and Practical Realities in Sri Lankan Human–Elephant Relations Conflict in Sri Lanka’, Ceylon Journal of Science (Biological Sciences) 39, 1 (2010): 21–33. (31.) Sampath K. K. Ekanayaka, Ahimsa Campos-Arceiz, Mahinda Rupasinghe, Jennifer Pastorini, and Prithiviraj Fernando, ‘Patterns of Crop Raiding by Asian Elephants in a Human-Dominated Landscape in Southeastern Sri Lanka’, Gajah 34 (2011): 20–5. (32.) See Paul Keil, Chapter 11, this volume. (33.) V. Sivakumar, J.A.P. Bodhika, Ruchira Jayatillaka, Chandrawansa Pathiraja, S.K. Pathiratne, S.R.B. Dissanayake, S. Wijeyamohan, and C. Santiapillai, ‘Decibel Level of Firecrackers and Its Possible Impact on the Hearing of Marauding Elephants in Sri Lanka’, International Journal of Science, Environment, and Technology 2, 4 (2013): 592–600. (34.) Ekanayaka, Campos-Arceiz, Rupasinghe, Pastorini, and Fernando, ‘Patterns of Crop Raiding by Asian Elephants in a Human-Dominated Landscape in Southeastern Sri Lanka’, 34. (35.) Jamie Lorimer, ‘Elephants as Companion Species: The Lively Biogeographies of Asian Elephant Conservation in Sri Lanka’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, 4 (2010): 492. (36.) Lorimer, ‘Elephants as Companion Species’, 497, 501. (37.) Santiapillai, Wijeyamohan, Bandara, Athurupana, Dissanayake, and Read, ‘An Assessment of the Human–Elephant Conflict in Sri Lanka’, 23. (38.) Daniel Münster and Ursula Münster, ‘Human–Animal Conflicts in Kerala: Elephants and Ecological Modernity on the Agrarian Frontier in South India’, in Fields and Forests: Ethnographic Perspectives in Environmental Globalization, edited by Urusala Münster, Daniel Münster, and Stefan Dorondel (Munich: Rachel Carson Center Perspectives, 2012), 5, 46. (39.) Santiapillai, Wijeyamohan, Bandara, Athurupana, Dissanayake, and Read, ‘An Assessment of the Human–Elephant Conflict in Sri Lanka’, 21. (40.) Sarah E. Rinkevich, ‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge’, Endangered Species Updates 25, 2 (2008): 18–19.

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Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Conservation and the History of Human– Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka Charles Santiapillai S. Wijeyamohan

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0011

Abstract and Keywords This chapter provides an historical overview of humans, elephants, and landscape in Sri Lanka in order to contextualize the contemporary challenges of conflict and conservation. We learn how the construction of reservoirs in the era of the Anuradhapura civilization helped support a high-density elephant population. We learn about Sri Lanka’s role in an ancient international network that valued elephants and their products, captured and killed for live export and for ivory sales. We also learn about the interest elephants held for Sri Lanka’s succession of European colonial powers: the Portuguese, the Dutch, and then the British. This leads us to the issue of sport hunting of elephants and the establishment of reserves that would later be transformed into national parks for biodiversity conservation in the post-colonial era. The elephant is revealed, then, as a companion species integral to and shaped by state power, economic activity, and symbolic culture. Keywords:   anthropogenic landscapes, human–elephant conflict, elephant trade, biodiversity conservation, Anuradhapura, European colonialism, national parks, Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, experts on elephants mushroom like bacteria in a Petri dish. Everyone has an opinion, especially on how many elephants there are in the wild. This is a good sign as it indicates the measure of public interest in and support for elephant conservation, and it is largely due to the iconic status of the elephant in Buddhism and Hinduism, which makes its conservation popular and widely acceptable. Nevertheless, the elephant in Sri Lanka has an image Page 1 of 12

Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka 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. Conservation of nature and natural resources in Sri Lanka is an ancient tradition that can be traced back to the time when Buddhism was introduced to the island in the third century BCE during the reign of King Devanampiyatissa, who holds the distinction of having (p.230) established the first wildlife sanctuary in the world more than 2,200 years ago.1 Even the art of capturing and training elephants from the wild is an ancient tradition that was introduced to the island in the fifth century BCE by the ancestors of the Sinhalese who, according to Nicholas, brought with them ‘their inherited skill in the domestication of this animal’.2 The earliest reference to elephants in Sri Lanka can be found in the accounts of the first Sinhala King, Prince Vijaya, who chose the daughter of the Pandyan king in south India for a queen. The Pandyan king is reputed to have sent his daughter across the sea to Sri Lanka accompanied by a large retinue together with horses and elephants as dowry. Thus it appears that long before the Indo-Aryan peoples of north India, the Dravidian people in the south had discovered the art of capturing and taming free-roaming elephants.3

The Distant Past In the distant past, when human population was small and the extent of wilderness large, elephant and other wildlife enjoyed wide distribution and good numbers. Then, there were human islands in a sea of elephants; then, in Sri Lanka as well as in Africa, ‘the situation reversed to a sea of people with elephant islands’.4 According to the fourteenth-century Franciscan friar Odoric, who travelled through Asia just twenty years after Marco Polo did, elephants were plentiful in the island, a view shared by the other great fourteenth-century Moroccan explorer, Ibn Battuta. There are numerous references to elephants in Sinhalese literature, which include ancient Pali chronicles. Then elephants were so widespread and plentiful that they were regularly and routinely captured, tamed, and either used locally in war and peace by kings or exported abroad. The state-elephant known as Mangalahatthi was always a tusker, which the king rode both in war and peace.5 The most famous of the war-elephants was Kandula, the state-elephant of King Duttugemunu. In that epic battle between King Duttugemunu and King Ellalan in 161 BCE as chronicled in the Mahawamsa, the two kings fought each other mounted on Kandula and Mahapabbata, respectively. Free-roaming elephants were always the king’s property and so came under royal protection. (p.231) The state-elephant was maintained in a special stable known as the hatthisala where it was secured at night to a post called the alhaka.6 In addition to the state-elephant, the king’s stables also had several war elephants, invariably Page 2 of 12

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 sixthcentury 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.

The Portuguese Period (1505–1658) Spices and elephants were the items that attracted the colonial powers to Sri Lanka. Even the great Portuguese explorer and navigator, Vasco da Gama, who Page 3 of 12

Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka 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. The Portuguese, aware of the commercial value of elephants, began to use trained elephants to capture and train free-roaming elephants by the methods practised by the Sinhalese. Free-roaming elephants were plentiful across much of the island. They were found even close to Colombo. But the main stronghold of the free-roaming elephant was the Vanni region in the north and along the Walawe Ganga in the south from where most of the elephants were captured. Elephants were also found in large numbers in the Kandyan kingdom in the central hills during the Portuguese period. They were the property of the king and so they could not be captured, killed, or maimed, under pain of death, without the king’s permission.17 As elephants were the property of the state, there was a separate department for their management, headed by an officer of the royal court named Gajanayaka (p.233) Nilame. No one, then, hunted elephants for sport. According to Robert Knox (1681), elephants were also used as a method of execution by the king of Kandy. Knox also observed that tame elephants were never allowed to breed among themselves. What the Sinhalese did instead was to release into the wild a tame female elephant with her forelegs shackled so that she could be recovered after she had mated with a free-roaming bull.18 This practice introduced new genes into the captive population of elephants from the wild and thereby contributed to their improved management. The Sinhalese used a variety of methods to capture free-roaming elephants for the king. They always captured elephants individually, either by noosing them or by using pitfall traps. They were never captured en masse. It was the Portuguese who introduced the technique of capturing large number of wild elephants by kraaling them. The ‘kraal’ is an Afrikaans or Dutch word derived from the Portuguese curral for an enclosure. The advantage of kraaling is that it enabled a large number of elephants to be captured with minimum injury and low mortality. There was a brisk trade in elephants by the Portuguese, who are known to have employed about 3,000 men in the department of Elephant Hunt. Elephants were captured in the south and in the Vanni region of the island and marched to the north to Jaffna through the Elephant Pass and sent abroad in boats from the island Urukuthurai, known today as Kayts, which in Portuguese

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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.

The Dutch Period (1658–1796) The Dutch occupation saw the continuation of the capture and export of elephants for profit. During the Dutch period, the use of elephants in war ceased, instead, they were mostly used in religious ceremonies and in pageantry. They vastly enhanced the capture of elephants using the kraal method for export. The practice of capturing elephants using pits or nooses was not encouraged by the Dutch, given the heavy casualty among the elephants. They held kraals twice a year, mostly during the dry season, and in 1666, in just one operation, they captured 97 elephants from Matara in the south which included 7 tuskers, 37 males, and 53 females.20 Almost 16 per cent of the males were (p. 234) tuskers! The king of Kandy was reported to have had 300 tuskers in 1707. Captured elephants were branded on their rumps with a double V.O.C. (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or the Dutch East India Company) mark and a serial number. Trade in elephants was lucrative to the Dutch, who made huge profits, about 100,000 florins per year, but in 1711 and 1715 the profits went up to more than 250,000 florins.21

The British Period (1796–1948) With the defeat of the Dutch on 16 February 1796, the British became the third and most powerful colonial rulers of Ceylon. They continued the capture of freeroaming elephants in kraals, two of which were held in 1800 and 1801 at Tangalle in the south coast and Negombo on the west coast, respectively. Between 1800 and 1900, 52 elephant kraals were established for the capture of free-roaming elephants, at the rate of 2 kraals per year.22 The captured elephants were trained, some of whom were exported abroad, while the rest were employed in the construction of roads. With the arrival of the British, sport hunting was introduced, which led to the decline of elephants, given the indiscriminate slaughter. Despite the decline, rewards were still given by the government for ‘taking elephants’. According to Nicholas, the slaughter by shooting for sport and for monetary rewards between 1831 and the end of the century depleted the free-roaming elephant population by 10,000 or more animals.23 However, the most serious threat to elephants was not direct hunting, but the conversion of their habitat from forest to plantations, especially in the hill country. The establishment of coffee and later tea plantations was preceded by massive deforestation of the hill country from which the elephant has almost disappeared today. It was the decline of elephants that led some of the British sportsmen to campaign for the establishment of hunting reserves where they could continue their sport. It was these hunting reserves, which later became nature reserves and national parks.

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Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka The Post-colonial Period (1948 to the Present) Today, conservation of elephants comes under the aegis of the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC). Despite the fact that (p.235) the elephant enjoys wide distribution and good numbers, criticisms are often levelled at the DWC every time an elephant is killed. The situation of the free-roaming elephant in Sri Lanka although not rosy is not entirely hopeless. It is largely owing to the efforts of the DWC that Sri Lanka can boast of a substantial population of elephants, estimated to number about 6,000.24 This is a conservative estimate as the dense and tangled nature of the thorn scrub vegetation in the dry zone makes it almost impossible to arrive at an accurate number of elephants. Even though Sri Lanka represents just 2 per cent of the area of the range states where elephants occur in the wild, it is home to roughly 10 per cent of the global total. This in itself is no mean achievement, when compared to the record of other range states. Vietnam for example, has lost most of its elephants and today is left with a population of 76–94 animals,25 that is unlikely to survive for long, while Laos, which is almost six times the size of Sri Lanka, is home to just 600–800 elephants despite the fact that 60 per cent of the land is forested and the human population is just three million.26 As custodians of wildlife in general and the elephants in particular, the DWC must be recognized for its efforts in making sure that elephants are maintained at a level above that of the minimum viable population size to ensure their long-term survival. The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus ssp. sumatranus) is categorized as ‘endangered’ on the IUCN Red List.27 The survival of one of the world’s last remaining megaherbivores (i.e., any plant eating land mammal whose body weight exceeds 1,000 kg) in Sri Lanka in such significant numbers can be attributed not only to the tolerance of both Buddhists and Hindus to whom the elephant has a special religious significance, but also to the high elephant carrying capacity of the low country dry zone. The establishment of thousands of man-made irrigation reservoirs by the ancient kings in the absence of natural lakes has made it possible for elephants to exist in high densities and range extensively. Given their large size and intemperate appetite, elephants as dominant herbivores have the ability to transform habitats, particularly when their densities are high. They have a more profound impact on the ecosystem dynamics than even the top predators. In high densities, elephants can become a threat to biodiversity. The low country dry zone has become the last stronghold of the elephants, after they (p.236) were pushed out of the highlands when the British started to convert forests into coffee and then tea plantations. In their search for food and water, elephants are known to make seasonal migrations. However, with the increase in human population density and changes in the land-use patterns, elephant habitat is being continuously fragmented and, hence, there is no longer much room for elephants to move about and adjust

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Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka their densities to changes in the land-use. As a result, much of the present-day elephant range extends into and overlaps with agricultural lands. 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 Although elephants are charismatic animals, they evoke conflicting emotions; most people love them, some fear them, while a few really hate them. If humans and elephants are to co-exist, the conflict must be minimized by reducing the costs and increasing the benefits to humans living with elephants, while conserving viable elephant populations. It is now becoming increasingly clear that the only way this can be accomplished is through the conversion of the elephant from being a ‘dangerous pest’ to an ‘economic asset’.

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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. In Sri Lanka, manslaughter by elephants receives greater publicity and evokes strong emotions. The human–elephant conflict is a complex conservation problem, and hence it would be unfair to blame only the DWC every time an Page 8 of 12

Conservation and the History of Human–Elephant Relations in Sri Lanka 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.

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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’. (4.) R.M. Laws, ‘Experiences in the Study of Large Mammals’, in Dynamics of Large Mammal Populations, edited by Charles W. Fowler and Tim D. Smith (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1981), 19–45. (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’. (10.) Konstantin Nossov, War Elephants (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2008). (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. (14.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book’. (15.) Nicholas, ‘From the Warden’s Field Book’.

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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. (19.) Vimala Ganeshananthan, The Yaal Players: Memories of Old Jaffna (Colombo: Kumaran Book House, 2013). (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’. (24.) S.R.B. Dissanayake, R. Marasinghe, M. Amararathne, S. Wijeyamohan, P. Wijeyakoon, and C. Santiapillai, The First National Survey of Elephants in Sri Lanka (Mihintale, Sri Lanka: A Report Prepared for the Department of Wildlife Conservation by Ringling Brothers. Centre for the Study of Asian Elephant at Rajarata University of Sri Lanka, 2012). (25.) Cao Thi Ly, ‘Current Status of Asian Elephants in Vietnam’, Gajah 35 (2011): 104–9. (26.) Khamkhoun Khounboline, ‘Current Status of Asian Elephants in Lao PDR’, Gajah 35 (2011): 62–6. (27.) 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. (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 (29.) S. Wijeyamohan, Ganga Bandara, Rukmali Athurupana, Naveen Dissanayake, and Bruce Read, An Assessment of the Human–Elephant Conflict in Sri Lanka (Florida, USA: Unpublished Report Prepared for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Center for Asian Elephant Conservation, 2008). (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). (32.) R. Sukumar, The Asian Elephant: Ecology and Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). (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.

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Elephant–Human Dandi

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

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

Abstract and Keywords Exploring the possibilities of ethnoelephantology, this chapter considers an approach to human–elephant conflict and coexistence that is constrained neither by the conventions of conservation biology nor by social science. It examines how humans and elephants in Assam construct, navigate, and share space through a focus on pathways variously constituted and sustained through the complementary activities of each species. Considering humans and elephants not only as ecosystem engineers who configure biophysical space but also as world-makers who make inhabited space meaningful, it challenges conventional approaches to human–elephant conflict, typically predicated upon ideas of confrontation at the boundaries of species-specific spaces. In a world of fragmented habitats, mutually constituted landscapes, and shared space, such ideas, rooted in problematic oppositions between nature and culture, human and animal, are revealed as deficient for understanding the challenges of interspecies cohabitation. Keywords:   ethnoelephantology, human–elephant conflict, coexistence, cohabitation, pathways, mutuality, Assam

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 sites of interspecies encounter. The Assamese refer to the most commonly travelled of these paths as dandi. At Chakardo, locals use the term dandi to refer to commonly travelled routes and main trails produced by elephants that run through the forest, or the habitat corridors, utilized by elephants that cross through the village towards the nearby Deepor Beel wetlands. However, haathi dandi are not used solely by elephants, human lives and daily routines also follow and cut across these dandi. In terms of their historical co-evolution, humans and elephants have occupied shared social and ecological landscapes, and lives have been so deeply entangled with humans as to necessitate a unit of analysis that comprises the intersections between the species. Piers Locke proposes an ‘ethnoelephantology’, arguing that if we are to grasp the (p.243) human– elephant nexus, then it needs to be approached from a variety of disciplinary angles.1 We must take into account not only the face-to-face negotiations between individuals of each species, but also the entire gamut of phylogenetic and ontogenetic histories, physiological and cognitive capacities, materials and histories, geographies, as well as historical, economic, social, and political forces.2 Thus, the encounters of humans and elephants along forest fringe spaces in Assam can be seen to be co-determined by colonial and post-colonial histories of forest and elephant management, by the religious status of elephants, by their legal agency and protection under the Wildlife Protection Act 1972, the cognitive capabilities of elephants, and the socio-economic status of humans. As an anthropologist, I follow people in order to meet elephants, thus my ethnography of human–elephant relationships is revealed through my informants, how they respond to elephants and how elephants respond to them. Walking along these interspecies paths, one becomes attuned to the traces and presence of humans, elephants, and other non-humans, and how their lives mutually affect the other. While what is termed as ‘conflict’ can occur during harvesting season, generally encounters throughout the year are less dramatic, lacking the anxiety, loss, and violence that often characterizes human–elephant conflict.3 It is in these mundane situations that we can uncover relational dynamics that go beyond the common interpretative rubric of opposition between humans and wild animals. 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 coconstituted 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 Data is drawn from twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork at the village of Chakardo, one among a chain of villages stretching between the foothills of the Rani-Garbhanga Reserve Forest (RGRF) and the shores of Deepor Beel, a wetland and wildlife sanctuary. The RGRF, the connected Jarasing unclassed state forest in Meghalaya, and the Jarasal and Kawasing reserve forests are home to an estimated 115 elephants who forage in the nearby hills, descending to bathe and feed in the wetland over uncounted generations.8 The human settlement that separates forest and wetland is a rapidly developing area, with increasing anthropogenic pressures. The villagers who most often encounter elephants along these dandi are those who remain on the margins of socioeconomic centres; they are poor rural farmers who live alongside elephant habitat and who are dependent on the forest for resources. During my fieldwork, I would follow people, occasionally in person or often through their recollections, on the web of trails that thread throughout the forest as they would go and collect wood. Also, I would follow forest officers who guided me to nodal points of intersection between human and elephant worlds, where elephants navigate the village landscape to access the adjacent wetland. This chapter will illustrate two encounters with the same herd of elephants, on the same day, while following my informants. 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

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Elephant–Human Dandi space. In conclusion, I consider how we need to construct a more nuanced view of the entangled lives of human and elephant communities.

The Entangled Threads of Human and Elephant Elephants are long-ranging animals, establishing a familiar area from birth by walking with their herd. Being nomadic, they travel long distances, foraging in line with the rhythms of the day, and repeatedly migrating to various landscapes according to the shift of the seasons. This continuous ‘threading’ through the world, between individual plants and across entire ecosystems captures what Ingold calls ‘wayfaring’, which he presents as the fundamental mode by which human and non-human living beings inhabit the world.9 Ingold utilizes the concept of a thread or a line being traced out to grasp the wayfaring life as continuously unfolding movement and growth. We weave our way through the world, reciprocally entangled with other animate and inanimate things, giving shape to each other; an embodied perceptual coupling with other beings that Ingold refers to as ‘dwelling’.10 In our interactions we leave behind ‘traces’; these might be both physical changes in the environment or the altered course of other living beings. We become entangled with our own traces and the traces of others. As Haraway similarly argues, we ‘become with many’:11 we are emergent, continuously inheriting and being constituted by the lives and histories of all manner of bodies and meanings. Locke’s argument for ethnoelephantology and the study of the deep and mutual entanglement of humans and elephants are aligned with Ingold’s and Haraway’s narrative of the world, whose inhabitants are enmeshed and continuously affecting and being affected by the other on multiple levels. Humans and elephants are both remarkable ecosystem engineers.12 In the course of dwelling within the world, humans and elephants leave deep traces, literally shaping landscape and ecology. These ‘engineered’ landscapes feed back not only into the course of (p.246) their own lives, but also into the movement and growth of other organisms.13 Elephants live at ‘temporal and spatial scales larger than our own’,14 and the worlds that they trace out paint a remarkably different picture. Asian elephants in Assam travel long distances within and between vast forests as nomads, while villagers generally become tied to the individual lives of domestic animals and plants at fixed places of dwelling. Regardless of the scale of habitation and the particular ecology in which they thrive and to which they give shape, for both species their relations and movements are not necessarily confined to any particular space. Poor villagers living on forest fringes will make daily excursions into the forest, and elephants will regularly navigate their way through anthropogenic spaces as they bind together different ecologies through the effects of their migratory patterns. In Ingold’s terms, both animals are ‘place-binding’ rather than ‘place bound’.15 From this perspective, an organism does not live within space, but along lines on which it travels to the relations it revisits. The places that humans

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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) Within an organism’s environment, and as opportunities for locomotion relatively free of impediment, paths are an example of what the ecological psychologist James Gibson calls an ‘affordance’.19 For example, jungle trails cut through dense vegetation, while concrete sidewalks provide level ground and accommodate wheels. However, just as paths open up opportunities for movement, they also constrain them. Leading us one way rather than another, they orient and guide our bodies through the world, embodying the promise of something.20 Paths are often a direct route to resources with seasonal reliability, and when revisiting them, one no longer has to orient oneself in relation to something else.21 For humans and elephants alike, engagement with this promise of attainment is deeply habitual, and paths will draw our eyes and bodies towards them. Further, revisiting a path may be inter-generational, a repeated activity shared by oneself and others. In this respect, a path might be, according to archaeologist Chris Tilley, ‘a paradigmatic cultural act, since it follows the footsteps inscribed by others, whose steps have worn a conduit for movement which becomes the correct or best way to go’.22 The state of Assam is often imagined socially, historically, and ecologically as a frontier region. ‘Footpaths [were] often obliterated by the inseparable jungle’ and dangerous encounters with wildlife, including elephants, were amongst some of the obstacles faced by British colonial expansion.23 Modern Assam has undergone rapid deforestation with the further expansion of human habitat and fragmentation of forests, an effect driven by agriculture, infrastructure, industry, and ultimately human population expansion. From 1980–2 to 1996, the forest Page 5 of 26

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 Sukumar, in The Living Elephants, illustrates a brief historical account of the relationship between humans and free-roaming elephants prior to the development of agriculture, which he frames primarily in terms of a predator– prey dynamic. With the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, a new dimension occurred, that of conflict: ‘Elephant–human conflicts intensified over this resource and over space as permanent settlement and agriculture gradually spread through the elephant’s habitat.’29 Modern-day conservation solutions to the deaths of elephants over increased competition for resources have focused on reinforcing the boundaries between forest and village, keeping human and non-human separate. To deter elephants from entering village space, ditches are dug, electric fences are raised, and a host of other strategies deployed. Fringe dwelling communities are trained in alternative livelihoods that divert them from entering elephant inhabited forests to collect forest product. Studies of human– elephant conflict, fixed and reified though the capitalized initials ‘HEC’, utilize an oppositional rhetoric in which elephants ‘raid’ crops and deforestation is referred to as ‘encroachment’ on elephant habitat.30 In this formulation, humans and elephants confront each other across the boundary lines of species-specific habitat. Anthropologist John Knight argues that it is evident that studies of human– wildlife conflict are typically premised on a ‘dichotomous view of people–wildlife relations according to which animals in human space are deemed unnatural’.31 With HEC, it is often described the other way around, with humans ‘encroaching’ upon elephant space and resources, provoking antagonistic responses from elephants. Knight further observes that very often biodiversity conservation projects enforce this dichotomy by imagining a natural space that Page 6 of 26

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)

Human–Elephant Forest Trails I was with friends—a local forest guard and a mahout—walking from Chakardo to another village, about one hour’s walk inside the forest. We began by following one of the minor criss-crossing trails that cover the hills closest to the village. Once lined with Sal trees, these hills are now composed mainly of shrub and bamboo. Further on, where the trees grew denser, we met the main track. The trail was well worn and wound between steep gradations and hills on either side. This trail is a main haathi dandi often frequented and given shape by elephants as they thread their way through the hilly landscape. It is also a path that humans regularly use as they move through the forest. 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 Page 9 of 26

Elephant–Human Dandi on forestry maps as a main transportation route between Chatar and Chakardo.42 This track facilitated the transport of Sal timber, possibly by bullock carts, to nearby Guwahati. While much of it is now overgrown, there is evidence of how the path was wider in the past, with certain sections, now crumbling, reinforced with stone to enable transport of heavy loads. The traces of British colonial exploitation still give shape to this path that is now only used by local humans and elephants. (p.253) Discussing hominid dispersal from Africa during the Pleistocene, Haynes speculates that mammoths ‘partly re-engineered Pleistocene ecosystems, also contributed information and enhancements to human foraging efficiency, thereby helping to make some rapid explorations, dispersals, and colonization so successful’.43 The traces that the huge bodies of elephants carve into the environment opens up affordances which humans also can exploit. There are numerous reports in the colonial literature of British and locals taking advantage of well-established elephant trails in order to move through what was otherwise difficult and hilly terrain.44 While there is no direct evidence, given that elephants have been visiting the beel for generations, it is likely that the colonial Forest Department would, then, have exploited already existing dandi at Chakardo and co-opted them as roads to suit their own purposes. Similarly, Chakardo locals have also co-opted these spatial conduits between villages for their own purposes. The activities of the British administration would have served RGRF elephants well too, what remained of the widened path enabled less impeded movement. 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 previous activity, only intelligible by virtue of behavioural understandings. We participated in the lives of elephants from a temporal distance, as my guide enacted for me what traces revealed about prior activity. In one place, tall grass was flattened out over a large area and scattered with dung, a spot where, I was told, elephants momentarily rested. On another day, we found a path slightly collapsed by a precariously placed elephant foot, on the precipice of a steep slope. My mahout friend demonstrated how he believed the elephant had reached out and attempted to grasp with his or her trunk the branch of a favoured tree several metres away. 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. Quietly, we listened for the sound of bamboo breaking. Depending on the direction the wind is blowing, the more acutely attuned villagers can catch the sweet and pungent smell of a nearby herd. We waited, our vision obscured by a bend in the trail. Suddenly, the brittle crack of bamboo breaking followed by some more sounds emanated from somewhere nearby. My friends decided it was best we turn around, claiming that the elephants were still on the path. They hurriedly turned back, probably more for my sake than anyone else’s, informing me it was a herd; if it was a male we probably would not have heard him. While multispecies theory often emphasizes the world-shaping and fleshy interactions that occur between human and more-than-human species, becoming entangled with a free-roaming elephant is not desirable.48 Face-to-face meetings are feared by locals and avoided if possible. If elephants are heard or seen from a distance, many will (p.255) turn around and return at a later time. Braver persons might alter the lines they take, opting for a nearby and clear route. Unobstructed by danger, they will continue quietly to their destination, closely attuned to the elephants, maintaining a distance far enough not to disturb them and elicit a response, and high enough to make it too difficult for the elephants to reach them. However, if one crosses paths with an elephant by accident, people often laugh and tell me that they just run. Elephants are considered dangerous, and locals claim if you disturb them, they will give chase. Most villagers will not discriminate in their response between herds and lone males, stating that females protecting children will also respond antagonistically. However, males are generally considered more dangerous, and you will not be 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.

The Chakardo Corridor Later, after returning home, I received a phone call from the forest officer that elephants, likely the ones we had seen earlier, were spotted close to the village fringe and were expected to cross to Deepor Beel. (p.256) It was evening as I drove my motorcycle along the main road that traced its way through the village. Around this time of night, many of the trucks and taxis are no longer active. Instead, I shared the road with cows that lay on the warm tarmac, or were following the road to return home. In rural India, you become accustomed to navigating with cows in mind. Roads, unfortunately, are not solely for human purpose, and in the case of these bovines, being sacred animals, they definitely have right of way. They shaped how I travelled along these paths, as I weaved between them, became tense, and attempted to predict where they might move next. 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 Page 12 of 26

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. A corridor is generally defined as a route between two wildlife habitats. The fragmentation or the threat of fragmentation of the habitat by anthropogenic pressures can be a conservation problem for far-ranging species such as the elephant. Highlighting and hopefully securing a relatively undisturbed path between the fragmented forest is the process by which a wildlife corridor is formed. What has become the Chakardo corridor has not always been used as a dandi; in fact, it is only in approximately the last fifteen to twenty years that this has become one of the main routes to the beel. A forty-five-year-old man, who lives next to the dandi, remembers that when he was a child elephants used to occasionally pass on the other side of his house, through a forested section where a school now stands. Other sections where elephants (p.257) used to descend or still descend have become blocked or more difficult to negotiate. The paths that afford movement between RGRF and Deepor Beel have become shaped and determined by the traces of a growing human population and the shifting socio-economic landscape that develops with it. Due to expansion of the village and the development of stone quarries, commercial enterprises, and property prospectors, who often build large concrete walls around their properties, other paths that tied together elephants and the wetlands have been cut. Speaking about the area in general, and not about elephant movement, a local tells me, ‘It was all open ten years ago, but now it’s all boundaries.’ 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 Page 13 of 26

Elephant–Human Dandi hesitation was unsurprising. A large number of people were assembled on each end of the road—forest officers, curious and concerned villagers, and passers-by. Persons indiscriminately cast their torches against the dark tree line, attempting to illuminate the elephants whose presence was only revealed through the tops of trees swaying. A small track emerged into (p.258) the paddy field and it was expected that the elephants would appear from there. Suddenly and unexpectedly from the dark, there was a loud squeal, a young elephant practically bounced out from the trees and became caught in the crossbeams. He or she quickly spun around and raced back to disappear again under forest cover. Elephants are animals of significance in India. Being an awe-inspiring species, these charismatic creatures attract people, and entanglements are shaped by a number of social, religious, and political factors. For the Assamese, elephants are considered culturally and symbolically important figures. At Chakardo, they are revered animals, their presence associated in varying degrees to the destroyer of obstacles, the elephant-headed Ganesh, and their bodies can often become sites of worship.51 As a legal agent, elephants have been under the protection of the Forest Department since 1879, first as a potential resource for capture and then for conservation under the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. Forest officers are responsible for the lives of elephants and their behaviour if they move beyond the boundaries of managed forests. The elephant, a national heritage animal as of 2010, has also been the focus of two major state-organized task forces and committees in the last twenty years,52 two important agendas being securing corridors and the safe passage of elephants across railway tracks. 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) The elephant is a figurehead for conservation efforts.53 Their pathways through anthropogenic landscapes become a nexus point for international attention and monetary support, with various national and global actors.54 For five years, the Page 14 of 26

Elephant–Human Dandi Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), supported by the UK-based charity, Elephant Family, conducted the Train Hits Mitigation Project at Deepor Beel and wider Assam. WTI’s approach was two-pronged: first, to educate train drivers on how to approach areas where elephant paths might intersect, and second, to facilitate coordination between local contacts, forest officers, and rail department officials, in order to allow elephants safe passage.55 However, Elephant Family withdrew funding mid-2013, and an elephant expert and enthusiast from Guwahati supported the project only for another six months. While certain villagers employed by the project lost their jobs and are no longer engaged with monitoring elephants and trains, local forest officers insist that coordination persists smoothly without the support of the WTI. 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

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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.

Elephant–Human Social Landscape By providing interrelated stories about my experience with local people and local elephants, I have sought to illustrate the ways in which proximate communities of humans and elephants are bound by common and intersecting pathways. Humans and elephants trace out and inhabit a shared landscape, facilitating, inhibiting, and negotiating the movement of each other. The paths, as traces of their practical activities through time, may be seen as part of what ethnoprimatologist Augustin Fuentes calls a ‘mutual ecology’, a ‘dimensional space that an organism lives in and creates interactively with multiple species’.56 A mutual ecology generates affordances that are not limited to the animals that shape them; elephants and humans exploit the ecologies and environments that the other ‘engineers’. Their habitats do not simply overlap but are deeply intertwined and co-shaped. Pathways are an emerging product of a host of different forces. To understand the course of human or elephant life unfolding along these paths, we need to attend not only to animals, but also, as Lestel and Taylor point out, to the broader relations we are embedded in, including ‘plants, fungi, and even Page 17 of 26

Elephant–Human Dandi landscapes’.57 This chapter’s ethnographic illustrations of paths touch upon this; the terrain of the hills directs the course of dandi, while the growth of plants and trees shape the appearance and disappearance of forest trails. Furthermore, as emphasized in Locke’s proposal for ethnoelephantology, we must also remain sensitive to the historical and political forces that have shaped and continue to determine the paths all animals follow. At RGRF–Deepor Beel, the forest village and roads engineered by the colonial British continue to (p.263) subtly guide the lives of elephants and humans as they go about their daily activities. The forest itself, one of the few remaining vital habitats for elephants, is a place whose borders are enforced by government regulation. Finally, the Karbi settlers of this area, a community who in the past were likely driven to the submontane tracts of southern Kamrup by more powerful actors,58 originally carved out the open paddy fields that now serve as the only remaining ways of directly accessing Deepor Beel. 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. How, then, can we conceptualize the relations at Chakardo? Humans and elephants may co-shape and sometimes share paths and places, but their corporeal encounters are fleeting and do not foster familiarity. Humans and elephants will respond to each other by fleeing or giving chase, by proceeding cautiously or actively avoiding; affective relations in encounters are characterized by anxiety, (p.265) fear, or anger. Jepson and colleagues point out that relations between humans and free-roaming elephants leave little space for elephants as ‘convivial companions’.62 However, we might conceptualize Chakardo villagers’ relations with elephants as possessing a kind of conviviality, albeit in a rudimentary form. Van Dooren and Bird Rose argue for a mode of being with non-human animals that is attentive to the other as we move through the world, a kind of inclusiveness in our activities.63 As humans and elephants inhabit the forest and village in these ethnographies, each has an awareness of the other and responds to the rhythms of each other’s activities particularly between night and day. These strategies of avoidance are also enacted in other human–elephant landscapes: In Amboseli, Kenya, elephants who live in close proximity to the Masai will also actively avoid contact, and this allows them to share and use resources at different times.64 With their shared and overlapping Page 19 of 26

Elephant–Human Dandi pathways, humans and elephants inhabit a negotiated social landscape made possible by mutual patterns of avoidance. Humans entangled in the place-binding trails of elephants become sensitive to their non-human purpose, attending and responding to their traces, becoming with elephants in the process. There is scope in shared pathways for exploring the complicated knots of entanglement of humans in the lives of elephants. Not simply ecosystem engineers, elephants are world-makers, just as anthropogenic environments are not simply ecological landscapes: ‘the capacity to experience places as meaningful and significant is one that is shared well beyond the human species’.65 Paths between things, whether they are trails or corridors, may be understood as cultural traces of the lives of individuals and communities. The dandi within a forest and the corridors across fragmented landscapes reveal the life, learning, and cultural practices of both humans and elephants. In the human–elephant landscape of Chakardo, these human and non-human life worlds cannot be so easily teased apart.

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. (4.) These concerns are multidisciplinary in scope, including geography, anthropology and other humanist disciplines. See, for example, Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (eds), Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human– Animal Relations (New York: Routledge, 2000); Haraway, When Species Meet; S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 25, 4 (2010): 545–76; Dominique Lestel and

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Elephant–Human Dandi Hollis Taylor, ‘Shared Life: An Introduction’, Social Science Information 52, 2 (2013): 183–6. (5.) Catherine Johnston, ‘Beyond the Clearing: Towards a Dwelt Animal Geography’, Progress in Human Geography 32, 5 (2008): 633–49; Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Storied-Places in a Multispecies City’, Humanimalia 3, 2 (2012): 1–27. (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. (7.) For another discussion between human–elephant entanglements and Ingold’s work, except through the lens of geography, see M. Barua, ‘Bio-GeoGraphy: Landscape, Dwelling and the Political Ecology of Human–Elephant Relations, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, 5 (2014): 915–34. (8.) Anonymous, Elephants in Assam: A Book Freshly Delineating Elephant Ranges Based on Elephant Estimations Carried Out in Assam (Assam: Assam Forest Department, Wildlife Wing, 2009). (9.) Ingold, Lines, chapter 3; Ingold, Being Alive, chapter 12. (10.) T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000). (11.) Haraway, When Species Meet. (12.) Clive G. Jones, John H. Lawton, and Moshe Shachak, ‘Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers’, in Ecosystem Management, edited by F.B. Samsom and F.L. Knops (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996), 130–47; N. Sekar, C.L. Lee, and R. Sukumar, ‘In the Elephant’s Seed Shadow: The Prospects of Domestic Bovids as Replacement Dispersers of Three Tropical Asian Trees, Ecology 96 (8): 2093– 2105; and Gary Haynes, ‘Elephants (and Extinct Relatives) as Earth-Movers and Ecosystem Engineers’, Geomorphology 157 (2012): 99–107. (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

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Elephant–Human Dandi Biogeographies’ of Asian Elephant Conservation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, 1 (2010): 170–4. (15.) Ingold, Being Alive, Chapter 12. (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. (18.) A.J.T. Johnsingh and A. Christy Williams, ‘Elephant Corridors in India: Lessons for Other Elephant Range Countries’, Oryx 33, 3 (1999): 210–14; Wenjing Pan, LiuLin, Aidong Luo, and Li Zhang, ‘Corridor Use by Asian Elephants’, Integrative Zoology 4, 2 (2009): 220–31. (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). (21.) Thomas Widlok, ‘The Dilemmas of Walking: A Comparative Review’, in Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, edited by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2008), 1–19. (22.) Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 31. (23.) Rajib Handique, British Forest Policy in Assam (Guwahati: Concept Publishing Company, 2004), 25. (24.) Anwaruddin Choudhury, ‘Status and Conservation of the Asian Elephant Elephas maximus in North-Eastern India’, Mammal Review 29, 3 (1999): 141–74; B. Talukdar and R. Barman, ‘Man–Eelephant Conflict in Assam, India: Is There a Solution?’ Gajah 22 (2003): 30–80. (25.) Anonymous, Elephants in Assam. (26.) For a fascinating map illustrating elephant routes through mosaic landscape in Golaghat, may of which are tea garden, see B.K. Talukdar, Multidimensional Mitigation Initiatives to Human–Elephant Conflicts in Golaghat and Adjoining area of Karbi-Anglong District, Assam (Guwahati: Aaranyak, 2006).

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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. (28.) A.C. Williams, A.J.T. Johnsingh, and P.R. Krausman, ‘Elephant–Human Conflicts in Rajaji National Park, Northwestern India’, Wildlife Society Bulletin 29, 4 (2001): 1097. (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. (31.) John Knight, ‘Introduction’, in Natural Enemies: People–Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective, edited by John Knight (New York: Routledge, 2000), 22. (32.) Corridors of tolerance were described as ‘a multi-use passage along the elephants’ traditional migration routes that allows co-existence’ (A. Zimmermann, T.E. Davies, N. Hazarika, S. Wilson, J. Chakrabarty, B. Hazarika, and D. Das, ‘Community-Based Human-Elephant Conflict Management in Assam’, Gajah 30 (2009): 34–40, at 39. (33.) Augustin Fuentes argues this point from the perspective of ethnoprimatology, but it applies equally to ethnoelephantology. See Agustin Fuentes, ‘Ethnoprimatology and the Anthropology of the Human–Primate Interface’, Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 101–17. (34.) Natasha Nongbri, ‘Elephant Hunting in Late 19th Century North-East India: Mechanisms of Control, Contestation and Local Reactions’, Economic and Political Weekly 38, 30 (2003): 3189–99; Tiplut Nongbri, ‘Forest Policy in NorthEast India’, Indian Anthropologist 29, 2 (1999): 1–36. (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. (40.) Such a quality is similar to paths produced by African elephants (Gary Haynes, ‘Mammoth Landscapes: Good Country for Hunter-Gatherers’, Quaternary International 142–3 [2006]: 20–9). (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). (43.) Haynes, ‘Mammoth Landscapes: Good Country for Hunter-Gatherers’, 20. (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. Page 24 of 26

Elephant–Human Dandi (46.) Ingold, Being Alive, 24. (47.) Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, ‘Introduction’, in Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, edited by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (Hampshire, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2008), 1–19. (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). (49.) A. Köhler, ‘Half-Man, Half-Elephant: Shapeshifting among the Baka of the Congo’, in Natural Enemies: People Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective, edited by John Knight (New York: Routledge, 2000), 50–77. (50.) Ingold, Lines, 81. (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. (54.) See J. Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), chapter 7. Also M. Barua, J. Tamuly, and R.A. 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). (56.) Agustin Fuentes, ‘Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists and Ethnoprimatology’, Cultural Anthropology 5, 4 (2010): 603. (57.) Lestel and Taylor, ‘Shared Life: An Introduction. Page 25 of 26

Elephant–Human Dandi (58.) B.N. Bordoloi, Alienation of Tribal Land and Indebtedness (Guwahati: Saraighat Printers, 1986). (59.) Barua, ‘Bio-Geo-Graphy: Landscape, Dwelling, and the Political Ecology of Human–Elephant Relations’, 14. (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). (61.) Jadhav and Barua, ‘The Elephant Vanishes’. (62.) P. Jepson, M. Barua, R.J. Ladle, and K. Buckingham, ‘Towards an Intradisciplinary Bio-geography: A Response to Lorimer’s “Lively Biogeographies” of Asian Elephant Conservation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36, 1 (2011): 170–4. This paper was in response to J. Lorimer, ‘Elephants as Companion Species: The Lively Biogeographies of Asian Elephant Conservation in Sri Lanka’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, 4 (2010): 491–506. (63.) van Dooren and Rose, ‘Storied-Places in a Multispecies City’. (64.) Kadzo Kangwana, ‘The Behavioural Responses of Elephants to the Maasai in Amboseli’, in The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective on a LongLived Mammal, edited by Cynthia J. Moss, Harvey Croze, and Phyllis C. Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 307–17. (65.) van Dooren and Rose, ‘Storied-Places in a Multispecies City’, 5.

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Challenges of Coexistence

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Challenges of Coexistence Human–Elephant Conflicts in Wayanad, Kerala, South India Ursula Münster

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0013

Abstract and Keywords Concerned with fractious relations of interspecies conflict in and around the Wayanad Wildlife Reserve, this chapter considers the knowledge, experience, and claims of forest officials, veterinarians, biologists, farmers, forest labourers, and mahouts. In the context of colonial and post-colonial projects of resource extraction, economic development, and wildlife conservation, this facilitates descriptive analysis of a crisis of interspecies conflict, where humans and elephants struggle to survive together in a crowded silvicultural and agricultural landscape subject to dispute over imperatives of development, conservation, and welfare. Acknowledging the adaptive intelligence of elephants and their ability to outsmart defensive technologies, the author notes how the relational dynamics of this troubled interspecies history produces disturbed socializations that intensify fear, aggression, and violence. Keywords:   human–elephant conflict, knowledge of elephants, defensive technology, disturbed socialization, Wayanad, Kerala

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. Their remarkable ability to learn, adapt to new situations, memorize migration routes, and return to habitual feeding places was one of the main reasons residents at the forest border in Wayanad drew cross-species parallels and recognized resemblances with humans. This perspective was shared by foresters, biologists, elephant mahouts (handlers), and wildlife veterinarians working at the wildlife sanctuary, who asserted that elephants’ ‘almost human intelligence’ and human-likeness were the main reasons why human–elephant conflicts proved so difficult to mitigate. ‘We keep on coming up with new systems to scare elephants away and prevent them from entering the fields. However, after a month, they already know how to circumvent the barriers and hindrances. Each year the elephants jump over walls that are higher and trenches that are deeper,’ a former Wildlife Warden told me in despair. The ‘elephant-scaring device’, which he invented to imitate the roaring sound of a tiger to scare crop raiders from the fields at night, was only useful during the first few applications. Very soon, the mega-herbivores became accustomed to the resonance and realized that nothing dangerous would happen to them while grazing on the fields. In order to follow their migration paths through the humanly modified landscape and to satisfy their need for nutritious food and water, elephants have become experts (p.274) in outsmarting the human

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Challenges of Coexistence technological infrastructure intended to separate elephants from spaces reserved for human productive activity. This chapter considers the challenges of human–elephant coexistence in a south Indian landscape renowned for its violent interspecies conflict. I argue that to understand the complexities of human–elephant conflict, elephants, like humans, need to be taken seriously in social, historical, and psychological terms. The behaviours and characteristics of elephants, and what it means to be and ‘to become’ an elephant alongside humans in a fragmented and degraded forest landscape matter when one analyses interspecies clashes at the forest fringes.1 For this reason, I highlight how humans and elephants share intertwined histories and life worlds. Both humans and elephants are ‘simultaneously actors and participants in sharing and shaping mutual ecologies’.2 In other words, they are both agents subject to political, economic, and ecological circumstances configured by the relational dynamics of their activities. Conflicts between humans and elephants, I argue, have evolved over time. Both humans and elephants bear the consequences of living together in an environment shaped by decades of colonial and post-colonial forest management, long histories of resource extraction, human migration, capitalist expansion, and environmental degradation. As an anthropologist, I am keen to develop a relational analysis of human– elephant conflict that not only attends to human suffering at the forest fringes, but also extends ethnographic inquiry to incorporate the lived experience of other-than-human species. This approach is informed by a recent call in the environmental humanities and social sciences to critically reconsider human exceptionalism by turning towards multispecies or more-than-human forms of ethnography that are attentive to the ways in which human life is interconnected with and dependent on other life forms.3 This is especially pertinent in these times of anthropogenic environmental crisis. As numerous species rapidly disappear from our ecosystems, anthropologists and others are seeking ways of telling ‘lively stories at the edge of extinction’4 that ‘emotionally and ethically entangle us’ in the lives of other species, stories that can help us formulate alternative ways for species to live and survive together on our shared planet.5 Identifying the challenges and the possibilities for sharing space with elephants in times of ecological crisis represents one such attempt. (p.275) 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 Page 3 of 24

Challenges of Coexistence research aims to mediate these techno-scientific ways of knowing with the situated lived experience and practised expertise of local farmer-observers, indigenous elephant handlers, and forest labourers who interact with elephants on an almost daily basis. To record stories about their everyday encounters and relationships with elephants, I relied on the standard ethnographic tool-box of interpreting narratives, memories, biographies, and oral histories while following my human informants on their daily duties or simply by spending time with them at their respective workplaces. This chapter highlights the similarities and connections between these multiple ways of knowing elephants in order to reject the binary opposition between modern/scientific versus indigenous/ traditional epistemologies and to counter the tendency in wildlife science and conservation biology to consider so-called Western science as the only legitimate source of knowledge on animal behaviour and the non-human world. Apart from my encounters with human subjects during my ethnographic fieldwork, I have been able to observe free-roaming elephants on several occasions, mostly while travelling to forest enclosures by jeep or driving on the busy National Highway 212 that leads through the core area of the wildlife sanctuary, where elephants often feed on the waste of tourists and try to traverse the heavily navigated road. Rather than directly interacting with elephants, however, I followed their traces of destruction: I visited the paddy fields that elephants had cropped and trampled down; I witnessed the coconut and areca nut trees they had snapped off and uprooted at night; and I listened to the stories of agriculturalists, of whom many spoke about their loved ones lost in elephant attacks, while others showed me scars of their injuries that the animals had inflicted upon them during night-time encounters. (p.276) 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.

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Challenges of Coexistence Surviving in Anthropogenic Landscapes ‘From an elephants’ perspective,’ local environmentalists told me repeatedly, ‘the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary (WWS) is one of the best habitats on this planet.’ Despite its long history of logging, poaching, and ecological loss, biologists argue that the protected forests of the region hold hopeful potential for the long-term survival of these charismatic herbivores.6 The softly undulating plains of the Wayanad plateau, its open forests of dry and moist deciduous trees, its plentiful bamboo, and its extensive stretches of grasslands and fertile marshy valleys [vayal] are ideal landscapes for elephants to flourish.7 Indeed, the WWS and its adjacent forests host the world’s largest free-ranging population of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), estimated at around 8,000 to 9,000 of the 26,000 to 28,000 of India’s elephants.8 Especially during the dry months between the monsoon rains, Wayanad’s considerably damper and higher elevated forests are important refuges for elephant herds migrating from the south Indian lowlands in search of water and food. During the dry summer months, from March to May, the elephant population densities in Wayanad are among the highest in Asia. (p. 277) 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 longterm 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 genetic variability are much more vulnerable to extinction, according to Dr Arun Zachariah, the WWS’s wildlife veterinarian and disease ecologist. The wildlife vet is an expert on the elephants in the region; he has conducted more than 400 elephant post mortems in the biosphere reserve and leads genetic analysis and molecular disease diagnosis of the sanctuary’s wildlife. He argues that the flow of genetic material between different elephant clans is essential for maintaining a gene pool large enough to ensure a genetically diverse population that can withstand disease epidemics. The NBR’s corridors (p.278) permit the elephants to continue to use their habitual migration routes, thereby preventing inbreeding and sustaining maximum genetic variation. Outside of the protected areas network, however, human population growth, intensification of agricultural land use, roads, dams, railways, power-generating plants, and other infrastructure hinder the animals’ movements. Elephants need to migrate for different reasons and to differing extents according to ecological conditions and historical patterns. Their ranging pattern is motivated by their search for water and for forage with different properties. Travelling through different habitats and ecological spaces, most animals of the south Indian elephant population walk up to 50 kilometres a day and drink up to 200 litres of water to satisfy their nutritious needs.16 Seasonal climatic conditions also influence elephants’ ranging behaviour. When water and food in the lowlands becomes scarce, they ascend to the higher and moister elevations of the Western Ghats. When elephants’ habitual migratory corridors are blocked by human intervention and their ecological dynamics dramatically altered, they have to find ways to pass through villages, cross roads, climb over fences, or swim through dam-reservoirs that have subsumed riverine landscapes. 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. According to cultivators and foresters, most conflicts and deadly encounters with elephants happen during the monsoon season when elephants’ favourite foods are ripe, a claim confirmed by the forest department’s statistics.17 During the summer months, the elephant population density is much higher in the WWS, forest fires are common, grazing opportunities are fewer, and water is scarce. Nevertheless, fewer conflicts occur during the dry season. The diverse elephant experts I interviewed agreed that Wayanad’s crop-raiding elephants were not driven out of the forest by food scarcity. Rather, they were attracted into the fields by a desire for culinary delicacies and a longing for humancultivated crops. ‘They have developed a habit [thinnu padichatha] of eating cultivated foods [krishi edukunnathu] like banana, jackfruit, and paddy. That is why they go into the fields,’ Maadan, a Kattunaika forest watcher, told me. In the case of elephant bulls, the need to feed on nutritious paddy was the reason for them to crop-raid, the wildlife veterinarian argued. Paddy, a grass cultivated by humans, was preferred by elephants to the forest’s ‘wild’ grass species as it contains more protein and provides energy much faster.18 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

(p.280) Crisis in the Forest Elephants and humans have both been important forces in transforming landscapes and vegetation.21 Biologists highlight the role of elephants as keystone species in an ecosystem because they speed up ecological cycles and disperse the seeds of numerous plant species on their long migration routes.22 As the forest’s largest herbivores, elephants are often called ecosystem engineers: due to their feeding habits they control the forest’s plant biomass, and their grazing regulates the growth of weeds and grasses in a forest and prevents the excessive growth of shrubs and creepers on the forest floor, enabling smaller herbivores such as deer, sambar, or gaur to find enough food. Yet, as with so many landscapes now protected, it is human animals that have

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Challenges of Coexistence disproportionally altered the so-called jungles of Wayanad and gradually turned the forests into spaces of ecological crisis. 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. Today, even in the sanctuary’s designated core-area, monotonous teak plantations stretch as far as the eye can see.26 The forest floor is arid and few species of low-growing plants, insects, birds, or small mammals find enough light, water, nutrients, or food to survive. In the summer months, from January to March, teak plantations are prone to forest fires as the ground is covered with dry leaves in these months. Only a small spark is needed to set these leaves on fire, burning large parts of the plantation and adjacent forest areas, killing smaller animals, and driving the larger ones to congregate in the small moist pockets of the sanctuary. Whereas these plantation ecologies are unfavourable for most species, a few plants grow exceptionally well: ‘Invasive species have spread like wildfire and infested the forest,’ George, a forest ranger, told me with concern in his voice, pointing towards the high shrubs that fully cover the forest ground in many parts of the sanctuary. These include Lantana camara, originally introduced as an ornamental plant in British botanical gardens, as well as Eupatorium odaratum, both of which thrive beneath the plantation trees.

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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 Besides anthropogenic disturbance in the sanctuary, foresters and ecologists drew my attention to the ecological competition that elephants face with another animal, one of human’s closest companion animals: the cow. Presently, about 10,000 to 15,000 cattle enter the forest to graze daily on the meadows and moist vayals. Adivasi watchers, trackers, and lower officials, who patrol the forest in search of poachers and injured animals, reported large herds of cattle occupying elephants’ habitual water holes and moist grazing ground in the sanctuary. ‘They will not dare to come close to the water hole if they see a herd of cattle with their human guard,’ Kalan, an anti-poaching watcher, said. Biologists agreed that elephants are disturbed by the presence of domestic herbivores. As stated in the WWS’ management plan: ‘The wild animals grazing, browsing, and trampling habits are affecting the establishment of natural regeneration both in the natural forests as well as in the mixed native species plantations. Due to high cattle population in this area combined with location of 62 human enclosures Page 9 of 24

Challenges of Coexistence 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 allmale 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. Kattunaika forest workers, mahouts, forest officials, and environmental activists all agreed on the observation that elephants are affected by human disturbance in the forest. Kattunaika watchers, in particular, had noticed how the behaviour of elephants and other animals had changed over time. Kalan, an experienced Kattunaika mahout, told me that some fifty years ago, when he was just a child, his people rarely encountered elephants in the forest or on their honeycollecting expeditions. If they did happen to meet an elephant, it would usually silently disappear deeper into the forest. Today, they are more aggressive (akramikkunnathu), said Kalan, even charging tourist buses on occasion.

(p.285) Naturalcultural Conflict Zones The district of Wayanad is known in south India for its severe human–animal conflicts. In December of 1982, the first killing of a person by an elephant was reported at the Thirunelly police station. In the 1990s, after the inclusion of Wayanad’s forests in the national ‘Project Elephant’, the Forest Department started to fortify the boundary through trenches and fences along the 93 kilometres of sanctuary and fields in Wayanad. However, these protection measures have been largely unsatisfactory and have not stopped the raids and killings. Recent years saw a dramatic rise in incidents of protected animals, especially elephants, transgressing the sanctuary’s fragmented boundaries, raiding the fields of farmers, attacking people, and endangering human lives.32 Since 2006, farmers have submitted 9,966 applications to the Forest Department 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. Human communities and households in Wayanad are differentially exposed to elephant attacks and crop raiding. Many farming communities at the fringes of the forest live in constant fear for their life and their crops. Christian settlers, who arrived in this region in the 1960s and cultivate cash crops near the forest boundary, increasingly voiced their anger and despair at the conflict with elephants. Some of them have heavily invested in cash crops like coffee, ginger, and pepper34 and lose capital if elephants trample their fields. Agriculture has intensified over the last ten years in Wayanad, and people are not (p.286) willing to share their crops with the animals and accept the loss.35 Many of the farmers are hoping for high gains. ‘Twenty years ago it was normal to lose a certain amount of paddy to the elephants who, even then, used to visit their field and caused destruction on their way,’ Jos, a Syrian Christian farmer, recounted. ‘People are not ready to face loss nowadays’ was his explanation as to why so many cultivators actually wanted to be relocated from their enclosures in the forest so they could live without fear. As an expression of protest against the Forest Department and its wildlife management, the wildlife veterinarian and forest officials reported increasing incidences of arson, sightings of poisoned elephant bait, cases of electrocution of wild animals with self-made high-voltage fences, and the shooting of small-shot charges against elephants.36 Many cultivators have been enraged by the Forest Department, seeing it as inefficient, bureaucratic, and corrupt. Further, trenches are badly maintained, contracts with the department (to dig trenches) remain notoriously unpaid, and, most importantly, according to the settlers, compensation payments after wildlife raids are delayed, securing the payments is bureaucratic, and the amount, even though increased since 2014, is insufficient. At the time of my fieldwork, farmers could only request compensation payments for their loss of crops, areca nut, or coconut trees once a year. Compensation payments were not sufficient for the plants and crops they had lost.

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Challenges of Coexistence Forest officials recounted that most of the perpetrators of violence against elephants and the forest have proposed reinforcing the boundary between human and non-human spheres. Many agricultural settlers at the border of the sanctuary envision their history and their future without considering animals. Human–elephant conflicts are highly politicized in Wayanad and have grown out of a situation of emotional anxiety and political exasperation. Recently, a new type of activism has emerged in Wayanad: anti-wildlife activism. Organized direct-action groups such as ‘Wildlife Resistance Forum’ and ‘Wildlife-Free Wayanad’ express their anger and despair at the treatment of wild animals through direct action protest against the Forest Department. The proponents, mainly comprising Christian settlers, church leaders, trading communities, and pro-development advocates, demand that the forest’s fences should be fortified and wildlife contained in separate (p.287) and highly monitored spaces not interfering with human development and ‘progress’. They request a fortress conservation model that social scientists have been critical of with regard to dispossession and the manufactured wilderness it produces.37 Many of Wayanad’s forest-bordering residents, however, have lived and shared space with wild animals over many generations. Wayanad’s indigenous agricultural castes such as the Wayanad Chetty and some of the region’s adivasi groups like the Mullu Kurumar or Kurichiyar, many of whom live on and cultivate communally owned forest- bordering land, have a lot of experience in driving away elephants from their fields and houses. Traditionally, they used to watch their fields all night from watchtowers, or machans, as they are known throughout India and Nepal. At night, if elephants came to raid their crops, they would light firecrackers, throw burning torches at the animals, and make a lot of noise, drumming and shouting, which would drive the elephants away from the fields. Cooperation between family and community members was key to successful cohabitation with elephants; Raju, a Kurichiya farmer, said: 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 ‘manpower 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’.

Mitigating Interspecies Relations Apart from a few so-called traditional farmers, most of Wayanad’s cultivators at the sanctuary’s fringes considered the Forest Department, the ‘owner’ and custodian of India’s forestland, as solely responsible for mitigating the region’s increasing human–animal conflicts. In Wayanad, as in other regions of South Asia, the Forest Department employs subaltern forest workers to accomplish the practical and often dangerous tasks of wildlife and forest conservation.40 At the WWS, conservation work, especially the task of mitigating conflicts with cropraiding elephants, is a more-than-human occupation.41 Trained elephants and their mahouts are important actors in managing the conflict-ridden encounters at the naturalcultural contact zone between wildlife and humans. 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 cropraiding 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 ‘highrisk-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 cropraiding 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. Several forest officials I interviewed questioned the rationale of elephant-scaring operations. Rather than managing the elephants, Radha, a forest ranger, argued that using trained kumkhi bulls to mitigate conflict was actually to ‘keep the human mind at peace’. The official was convinced that neither the relocation of problem bulls, nor the night-time operations of driving elephants out of the fields were the right means to solve conflict problems and enable improved future cohabitation between both species. ‘If you chase them out, elephants will just find another way to re-enter the field. They will just come back after a while, 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.

‘Becoming Elephant’ in Ecologies of Conflict The elephants of Wayanad, like their co-dwelling humans, have been impacted by environments politically and ecologically shaped by colonialism, timber extraction, and capitalist modernity. Elephants have experienced ivory poaching and capture, the loss of their home ranges, depletion of their foraging grounds, and obstruction of their migratory corridors. As biologists have argued, for elephants these have been transformative experiences at the level of social groups and larger populations. In Wayanad, the British intervened in evolutionary processes by capturing and killing tuskers at a large scale for ivory: a colonial legacy that is still (p.291) visible in the forests today. As Fred Kurt notes for Sri Lanka, this artificial selection by poaching and selective catching has changed sex ratios in elephant groups, resulting in more tuskless makhnas than tuskers in the forest, and, at the same time, it has led to ‘disturbed socialisations’ in elephant herds.45 If there are fewer bulls in a population, Kurt argues, the young generation of male elephants are no longer controlled and ‘educated’ by older males in the same way. Well-organized herds fall apart, specific role allocation in a group is disrupted, and more uncontrolled, less ‘educated’ juveniles who are more prone to aggressive behaviour and crop raiding assume prominence.46 Young elephants go through a long period of apprenticeship where they have to be taught to behave, how to take care of their younger siblings, how to pay deference to the weak, and even how to behave altruistically.47 If they don’t learn these social behaviours, Kurt argues, the group becomes disorganized and their behaviour changes, which can lead to more aggressive behavioural traits.48 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. Cropraiding 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. In Wayanad, many residents vividly described the behavioural transformations of elephants and other forest animals over time. Kattunaika forest watchers, who had spent most of their life dwelling and working in the sanctuary, reported how elephants had altered their characteristics and conduct. The forest workers, however, did not attribute increased aggressiveness to past trauma or violence. Instead, they ascribed the elephants’ skills to adapt quickly to new situations as reason for their transformation. According to their interpretations, elephants had lost their fear of humans over the years and had become more ‘angry’ [deshyam]. Due to the intensification of wildlife protection measures since the 1990s, the animals had not only increased in number, but also showed less ‘respect’ [marinade] and more aggressiveness towards humans. They explained that since hunting, poaching, and timber extraction ceased in Wayanad, elephants have learnt that humans no longer pose a severe danger to them. Even many Kattunaika, for whom collecting and selling honey and medicinal plants from the sanctuary used to be an important source of income, reported an increasing fear of coming across elephants in the forest. Some of them, especially the women, even stopped entering the protected zones beyond the elephant trenches and electric wires altogether, with the consequence of losing an important aspect of their livelihood. The solution for solving human–elephant conflicts that members of these formerly forest-dwelling communities proposed was a return to the practice of chasing, hunting, and trapping elephants for conversion to captive life. Intelligent and adaptive as they are, elephants would be easily re-disciplined and would learn that humans were to be treated with ‘respect’. The prohibition of carrying a gun in times of human–elephant crises was felt as one of the gravest cultural injustices to them. For the Kattunaika and other members of formerly hunting groups like the Kurichiya and Kurumba, talking about human–animal conflicts might also have been an opportunity to argue for regaining their traditional livelihood. Yet, they clearly believed that Wayanad’s elephants, just like other species in the forest, become what they are in specific material situations and relationships of crisis. Elephants are, as Thom van Dooren notes for species in general, ‘adaptive, emerging, and evolving’.51

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Challenges of Coexistence (p.293) Possibilities of Conviviality Competing with elephants over agricultural products, cultivators at Wayanad’s forest borders have become attentive spectators of elephant behaviour, cognitive ability, and especially their alimentary tastes and dislikes. Some farmers who have (involuntarily) entered into close observational relationships with elephants can distinguish between different elephant personalities, behavioural traits, skills, and preferences. The captive elephants’ mahouts, on the other hand, who enter into very intimate relationships with their trained kumkhi elephants, are convinced of their ability to display humour, feel grief, express emotion, use tools, act altruistically, remember events from many years in the past, show social behaviour, teach their calves novel behaviours, and even strategically plan their future actions.52 These insights coincide with the findings of Wayanad’s wildlife scientists and veterinarians, who, knowing elephants from their daily experience working for the forest department, try to come up with practical solutions to alleviate the violent clashes between humans and elephants. The local scientists’ positions, in turn, correspond to recent advances in the sciences of animal behaviour and cognition that challenge the anthropocentric assertion that ‘subjectivity’, ‘personhood’, and ‘culture’ are uniquely human traits.53 Consequently, the humans of Wayanad have learnt to be creative in finding evernew ways to prevent elephants from entering their fields and destroying their livelihoods. Farmers experiment with different technologies to drive away their hungry visitors. During my last visit to Kerala in 2014, a different human invention attracted people’s attention and raised new hopes for enabling human– elephant coexistence. A resourceful beekeeper in Wayanad found out that his honeybees could provide an unexpected solution to human–elephant conflicts. Elephants’ strong natural aversion to the high buzzing sound of bees is effectively used in Kenya to keep the large mammals from farmers’ fields.54 Indian bees, Apis cerana indica, the beekeeper told me, make three different buzzing sounds; especially when they are angry, their buzz is very fierce. Browsing the internet, the Indian beekeeper got inspiration and technical advice from the African experiment and established a 700-metre beehive fence all along forest-bordering fields frequently raided by elephants.55 (p.294) As soon as the elephants hit the fence, he reported, the beehives fall to the ground and the angry buzz of the insects drive the pachyderms away. With the side effect of producing ‘elephant-friendly honey’, as the beekeeper euphorically described this marketable product, many farmers might turn towards this answer to appease the violent conflicts. A forest ranger, on the other hand, was less hopeful about the project. Bees only come out during sunlight, he explained, and elephants mainly crop raid at night. The only option for the bee fence to work would be to have electric artificial lights. 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 Acknowledging elephants’ individual characteristics and emergent traits urges us to re-think current ‘fortress’ approaches to conservation that continue to rely on a strict separation between human and non-human spheres, between ‘wildlife’ and ‘people’, and instead envision a multispecies landscape where human–elephant coexistence is possible. Attending to elephants as individuals in wildlife raises the question of whether the idea of environmental justice needs to be extended to include (at least certain) non-human animals.60

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Notes:

(1.) Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). (2.) Agustin Fuentes, ‘Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists and Ethnoprimatology’, Cultural Anthropology 25, 4 (2010): 600. (3.) Scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds have contributed to the emerging field of multispecies studies under various terms. For ‘multispecies ethnography’, see S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 25, 4 (2010): 545–76; for ‘anthropology of life’, see Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); for ‘anthropology beyond humanity’, see Tim Ingold, ‘Anthropology Beyond Humanity’, Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 38, 3 (2013): 5–23; and for ‘more-than-human geography’, see Sarah Whatmore, ‘Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a More-than-Human World’, Cultural Geographies 13, 4 (2006): 600–9; and Jamie Lorimer, ‘Multinatural Geographies for the Anthropocene’, Progress in Human Geography 36, 5 (2012): 593–612; for ‘extinction studies’, see Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, ‘Unloved Others: Death of the Disregarded in the Time of Extinctions’, Special Issue of the Australian Humanities Review 50, 11 (2011): 1– 4; and for an overview, see Piers Locke and Ursula Münster, ‘Multispecies Ethnography’, Entry for Oxford University Bibliographies Online (2015) http:// www.oxfordbibliographies.com; and, Laura A. Ogden, Billy Hall, and Kimiko Tanita, ‘Animals, Plants, People, and Things: A Review of Multispecies Ethnography’, Environment and Society 4, 1 (2013): 5–24. (4.) Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). (5.) van Dooren, Flight Ways, 13. (6.) Government of India, Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary Management Plan (Trivandrum: Kerala Forest Department, 2012), 2. (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 AntiHumanism: Wildlife Conservation in the Third World’, The Ecologist 27, 1 (1997): 16. (10.) Wayanad’s tigers were recently photographed by trip-wire cameras set up with the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) financial support (R.K. Narasimen, A.M. Kumar, P.P.C. Jayam, S. Chinnaiyan, M. Nagarathinam, and A.A. Desai, Status of Tigers: Co-Predators and Prey in the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, Kerala, India [New Delhi: WWF–India, 2013]); and local forest officials were excited to learn that the sanctuary hosts more than seventy-five tigers out of India’s remaining tiger population, which is estimated at 1,706 individuals altogether. Numbers are according to the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Status of Tigers in India (New Delhi: National Tiger Conservation Authority, WWF–India, 2011). (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. (14.) Daniel Münster and Ursula Münster, ‘Consuming the Forest in an Environment of Crisis: Nature Tourism, Forest Conservation and Neoliberal Agriculture in South India’, Development and Change 43, 1 (2012): 205–27. (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.

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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. (17.) Government of Kerala, Report on Man–Animal Conflicts in Wayanad: North and South Wayanad Divisions (Kapletta: Kerala Forest Department, 2012). (18.) For crop raiding, see also Sukumar, The Living Elephants, 299–306. (19.) Fred Kurt, Von Elefanten und Menschen (Bern: Haupt, 2014), 67. (20.) Haraway, When Species Meet, 244. (21.) Sukumar, The Living Elephants, 298. (22.) Kurt, Von Elefanten und Menschen, 77. (23.) Government of India, Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary Management Plan, 3. (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). (26.) An area of 7,494.817 hectares (1 hectare =0.01 square kilometre) of the sanctuary are teak plantations and 2,057.171 hectares are mixed plantation of teak and softwood. See Government of India, Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary Management Plan, 18. (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-athreat-to-wildlife/article6432731.ece?css=print, accessed 30 January 2015. (28.) Government of India, Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary Management Plan, 3. (29.) Government of India, Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary Management Plan, 20. (30.) Government of India, Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act (New Delhi: Ministry of Law and Justice, 2006). (31.) See Münster and Münster, ‘Consuming the Forest in an Environment of Crisis’. (32.) Government of Kerala, Report on Man–Animal Conflicts in Wayanad. (33.) Government of Kerala, Report on Man–Animal Conflicts in Wayanad.

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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. (35.) Daniel Münster, ‘Internal Migration and Agrarian Change in Kerala: Embourgeoisment, Land Reforms and the Neoliberalization of Agriculture’, paper presented at the workshop Agrarian Transformation in India: Its Significance for Left Politics, Wolfson College, University of Oxford, 13–14 July 2011. (36.) Government of Kerala, Proposal for Mitigation of Man–Animal Conflict in Waynad District (Kerala Forest Department: Wayanad Wildlife Division, 2011); Sukumar, The Living Elephants. (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). (39.) Münster and Münster, ‘Consuming the Forest in an Environment of Crisis’. (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’. (41.) U. Münster, ‘Working for the Forest’. (42.) Sukumar, The Living Elephants, 105, 371. (43.) Sukumar, The Living Elephants, 114. (44.) Interview with Dr Arun Zacharia, 2 January 2015. (45.) Kurt, Von Elefanten und Menschen, 68. (46.) Kurt, Von Elefanten und Menschen, 68. (47.) Kurt, Von Elefanten und Menschen, 52. (48.) Kurt, Von Elefanten und Menschen, 68.

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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. (51.) van Dooren, Flight Ways, 13. (52.) U. Münster, ‘Working for the Forest’. (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. (56.) Sukumar, The Living Elephants. (57.) See William M. Adams, Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation (London: Earthscan, 2004); Dan Brockington, Paige West, and Jim Igoe, ‘Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas’. Annual Review of Anthropology 35, 1 (2006): 251–77; Rosaleen Duffy, Nature Crime: How We’re Getting Conservation Wrong (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). (58.) Adams, Against Extinction. (59.) Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), 99. (60.) Adams, Against Extinction; Brockington, West, and Igoe, ‘Parks and Peoples’; Duffy, Nature Crime.

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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India Tarsh Thekaekara Thomas F. Thornton

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.003.0014

Abstract and Keywords Focusing on an ecologically fragmented landscape characterized by multiple uses, inhabited by diverse social groups with multiple livelihoods, this chapter highlights the inadequacies of conservation strategies based on keeping humans and elephants in separate spaces. It argues for better integration of conservation biology methods with social science expertise, and the importance of attending to the different histories, interests, and attitudes of human groups encountering elephants. The authors identify five conceptions of elephants, and four cultural–ecological models of explanation for increasing human–elephant conflict. This reveals that not all landscape inhabitants accord elephants the same ontological status; that explanations for conflict vary according to cultural and ecological circumstances; and that communities with longer histories of interaction tend to be better accommodated to them. Concluding that conservation policy must address strategies for interspecies space sharing, they also argue that greater attention to social and cultural diversity and community participation should inform future policy. Keywords:   human–elephant conflict, interspecies coexistence, knowledge of elephants, conservation policy, community understanding, community participation, Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu

Human–Elephant Conflict in Conservation Discourse Elephant conservation, like much of the rest of the conservation movement, has traditionally relied on the creation of ‘protected areas’ (PAs)—areas set aside exclusively for the conservation of wildlife. But only 22 per cent of the Asian Page 1 of 30

Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India 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 Page 2 of 30

Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India compensatory payments from the Indian government amounting to about 150 million rupees and 10,000−15,000 houses.11 (p.302) 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. Given the complexity of conserving elephants in a crowded country like India, the policy space has seen significant expansion in the last few years. In 2010, the central Ministry of Environment and Forest constituted an ‘elephant task force’, of mostly academic scholars, to look into the long-term conservation of elephants across India. Noting that it was ‘not immediate extinction as much as attrition of living spaces and the tense conditions of the human–elephant encounter on the ground that require redress’, they made some significant suggestions regarding a more holistic approach, looking at ‘elephant landscapes’ that exceed the boundaries of protected areas, which could be governed more democratically by local ‘elephant reserve committees’, and incorporating ‘conflict management task forces’.19 But with changes in the ministry, most of these recommendations were never implemented. (p.303) In 2012, on account of mounting tensions between the interests of people and free-roaming elephants in the south Indian state of Karnataka, the High Court constituted yet another expert ‘elephant task force’, with a mix of natural and social scientists, as well as conservation managers/practitioners, to look into the issue and make suggestions for lasting elephant conservation and management recommendations. The task force, after much deliberation, suggested a zoning Page 3 of 30

Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India exercise under three categories relating to the priority of conservation versus livelihoods in landscapes: Elephant Conservation Zones, where primarily elephant conservation would take priority over competing livelihood goals; Elephant–Human Coexistence Zones, where both elephant conservation and human livelihoods would have to be balanced and reconciled; and Elephant Removal Zones, where concerns of human safety and livelihood would take precedence over competing conservation concerns about elephants.20 While there was broad-based support for this approach, none of the experts could agree on how this would unfold on the ground in terms of actual maps, without significant impacts on some elephant or human populations. This process revealed the inherently political nature of conservation and human–wildlife management. Will local communities be involved in the decision about their land and homes becoming a part of an elephant coexistence zone? Urban areas would of course be removal zones, and existing protected areas would be conservation zones, but what about all the areas in between? Where and how do you draw the boundaries of coexistence and shared space?21 Many of these complexities are apparent in the Nilgiris, a diverse, multi-ethnic and multi-livelihood landscape which forms the basis of this case study.

‘A Grounded Event Approach’ to understanding Human–Elephant Interactions in the Nilgiris The first author is a conservationist and researcher, who has grown up in the region, and has been working with the Shola Trust. Our work is based on the assumption that since people and wild animals have lived alongside each other in the past and since their separation does not seem tenable, there is no option but to learn to live together in the years to come. Over five years, given the growing relevance of (p.304) being able to ‘live with animals’ at both national and international levels, we have attempted a systematic approach to understanding human–elephant interactions in order to mitigate conflict. Through this work at the Shola Trust, about eighty cases of human–elephant interactions and conflict have been documented, considering the situations that produce interspecies encounters, the behaviours of both species, and postconflict assessments of what happened and why. These on-the-ground conflict events and informants’ reconstructions of them form an important component of the analysis. Just as important, however, are situations in which conflict events have been avoided or minimized through strategies of accommodation whereby one or both parties yield or negotiate some ‘activity space’ so as to pursue their needs without conflict. It is in considering these forms of accommodation in relation to avoided conflict, documented through additional literature review, interviews, surveys, and participant observation between 2009 and 2014, that we find significant diversity in human–elephant interactions among the major ethnic groups in the Nilgiris region. After describing the cultural–ecological landscape of the Nilgiris, we compare the major ethnic group relations with elephants from both ontological and practical points of view, considering how these orientations inform human responses to elephants in the context of real Page 4 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 Nilgiris, Its People, and Their Interactions with Elephants The Nilgiri Hills are a part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (NBR) consisting of about 5,500 square kilometres of forests at the junction of the south Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala. It contains six protected areas and is extremely diverse with altitudes varying from 250 metres to 2,650 metres and rainfall from 600 millimetres to 4,600 millimetres.22 The NBR hosts the single largest populations of both elephants and tigers in India and is a part of the Western Ghats–Sri Lanka biodiversity hotspot.23 The region is also highly populated—with approximately two million people living in it, spread across thirty different communities with varying ethnicities and modes of subsistence, varying from small-scale business people and (p.305) entrepreneurs in the towns, to settled agriculturalists, wage labourers, and hunter-gatherers.24 The region is home to a range of different ethnic communities and has witnessed successive patterns of immigration. 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 Community

Indigenous

Tribal

Subsistence Mode/ Occupation

Legal Land Owners

Bettakurumba

Yes

Yes

Traditionally HunterGatherer (HG), now also occupied in wage labour

No

Kattunayakan

Yes

Yes

Also traditionally HG and now occupied in wage labour, but still most forest dependent of all the tribes

No

Paniya

Yes

Yes

Also traditionally HG, but now mostly occupied in wage labour

No

Chettys

Yes

No

Settled agriculturalists (SA), now also involved in small local businesses

Yes

No, arrived 1940s onwards

No

Agriculturalists, though mostly growing cash crops, with the educated younger generation moving to urban centres

No

Malayalis

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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India

Community

Indigenous

Sri Lankan Repatriates

No, 1980s onwards

No

Wage labourers and small scale cash crop farmers

No

Rural Elites

No, 1900s onwards

No

Tea/Coffee plantation owners, again with younger generation mostly in other parts of the country/world

Yes

No

Government employment and temporary residence in the Nilgiris

N/A

Forest Department

Tribal

No

Source: Compiled from the first author’s interviews

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Subsistence Mode/ Occupation

Legal Land Owners

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,

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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India assumptions of invariably incompatible human–elephant coexistence are clearly questionable. 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) In the following range of interview excerpts, surveys, and participant observation from the first author’s interactions with the people in the region as a local stakeholder (perhaps from the ‘local elite’ and ‘conservationist’ groups), as well as a researcher (more of an ‘outsider’), we describe the variation among the different communities in how they interact with and perceive elephants. 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 —Kunjan, from a discussion with a group of Kattunayakans in Therpakolly, a village just south of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve. 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 Kattunayakans are the most forest dependent of all the communities, as is described by their name: Kattu (forest) Nayakans. They have been the subjects of studies concerned with them as ‘near-pure’ hunter-gatherers35 as well as more recent studies concerned instead with understanding how they have lost their forest rights and been co-opted by colonial and post-colonial governments for their expert environmental knowledge.36 They are sometimes feared by other communities as sorcerers and practitioners of ‘black magic’ and have had very little interaction or interdependence with the other groups. Early colonial ethnographers note that ‘if a single Badaga met a Kurumba in a lonely, jungly place he “not unfrequently” died of sheer fright’, where Badaga refers to a community from the upper plateau (p.309) of the Nilgiris, and ‘Kurumba’ is used generically for all the forest-dwelling tribes.37 This fear continues, and more traditional Paniyas and Bettakurumbas still believe they would ‘die of chest pain’ if they entered a Kattunayakan house. Despite their relative isolation, they have had a history of working occasionally as wage labourers, yet it is usually in a position where the employers were more dependent on them than vice versa.38 Given their intricate knowledge of forests, a few of them have also worked for the Forest Department, which though describes them as ‘possessing a certain amount of aloofness and dignity, pride and reticence’ not found in the other tribes.39 In the neighbouring state they are called Jenu (honey) kurubas, and much of their lives revolve around honey collection, a tradition that has changed little over the years and is still central to their identity. These Kattunayakan observations about their interactions with elephants are significant in that they reflect both stability and change in human–elephant relations among two Kattunayakan villages. In the first case, peaceable coexistence still applies, while in the second case displacement (of elephant gods and of ‘known’ elephants) and disjunction (regarding balanced reciprocity in human–elephant relations) has developed, with a resultant turn towards alternative technological solutions—electric fences—now being implemented in some areas. The Forest Department, as well as large conservation NGOs such as WWF-India, have been advocating the use of electric fences as a means of reducing conflict with elephants.40 So the idea that people and elephants cannot live alongside each other is well established, and any discussion about elephants starts with describing the problems. But the electric fences they have in mind are not quite the same as the Forest Department and conservation NGOs envision: 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. —Bommi Amma, a Bettakurumba woman from Chembakolly. Colonial-era anthropologists suggested that the Bettakurumbas originally lived on a mountain range called the Vollagamalai in Karnataka, which is reflected in their name Betta (hill) Kurumba, and that they represented remnant populations from the Pallava dynasty, after its fall during the seventh and eighth century CE, where their long isolation in the Nilgiri and Malabar forested regions made them ‘wild and uncivilized’.41 In their own oral history, however, they prefer to think of themselves as always having been forest people, even though their exposure to the outside began long ago. Maharajas employed them to trap and tame freeroaming elephants in kheddah operations, and the British and the Indian Forest Departments continued this tradition. Even today, all the mahouts in Mudumalai are Bettakurumbas, and they are also employed as guards and watchers and as guides for tourists and researchers entering wildlife areas.42 The trusting relations of animists described by numerous anthropologists are evident in their dealings with elephants.43 They claim that once the appropriate rituals are carried out, they only have to approach a herd, and some elephants ‘would separate out from the herd and give themselves up to be caught’. This is indicative of an understanding in which non-human animals are akin to persons (regarding elephant personhood for Nepali mahouts, see Locke, Chapter 7, this volume), who are capable of understanding and responding to human overtures according to principles of reciprocity.44 Bommi Amma’s assessment suggests that electric fences and other techno-fix solutions to maintain impermeable boundaries between humans and elephants are not only impractical to manage, but are also unjust, and disrespectful to the needs and intelligence of both species. This suggests that according to these commentators, relations between humans and animals must be cultivated and negotiated. 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 Page 11 of 30

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. We urgently need better protection from the elephants. The forest department is not doing anything to help us. A poor family invests all their savings, taking loans against their gold to plant a few acres of bananas, and in just one night their whole life is destroyed by elephants. We don’t even get compensation from the Government since we don’t have patta for the land.46 We have had many protests demanding that proper trenches and electric fences (p.312) are built to keep the elephant inside the forests, but no one is listening. —Ramesh, ward member from the Cherangode Panchayat (local selfgovernment), at a meeting on the problem of human–elephant conflict called by the Revenue Divisional Officer. Sri Lankan Tamil repatriates, another migrant group, also view elephants as a constant and expanding threat: You [addressed to the first author as a local stakeholder] have to help us somehow. We live in constant fear. Elephants never used to be here before, Page 12 of 30

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. —Ramaswamy, a Sri Lankan Tamil from O’Valley. 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 —Bomman, of the Bettakurumba tribe and the secretary of the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam, at the same meeting with government officials described earlier.48 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. —Marigan, a Kattunayakan elder from Chembakolly. 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 ‘local elites’ are also somewhat more tolerant of elephants: 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. —Herman, President of the Gudalur Rotary Club. 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 Page 14 of 30

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) Differing agricultural practices also seem to have a significant bearing on the human–elephant interface. Traditional practices seem to have been more vigilant and resilient in dealing with elephants, but with rapid change, there is uncertainty about how people and elephants can coexist in the future, even among the indigenous communities. 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. —Paalan, a Paniya elder from Muduguli, a village inside the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve. 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 Page 15 of 30

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: Growing paddy is very difficult. We have always had problems with elephants. In the old days there was no other choice; we needed the (p. 316) rice to eat. We had various bell systems to warn us when elephants came. Then we would all get together and beat drums and chase them away. Now people can’t take that much trouble. If the elephants eat the paddy everyone does not come to help. Children will not want this hard lifestyle. Once they go to school and college they will not come back to this. They will get good jobs and move to other places. Both respondents seem to suggest that changes in peoples’ capacity and willingness to respond to elephants have been affected by the inevitabilities of ‘development’, for example, children going to school and getting ‘good’ jobs such that they can no longer be bothered to watch over or cooperate to drive elephants away from valuable crops. This, in turn, leads to increased conflict. This notion was further expanded by a Kattunayakan: In the long term we will have to do something about elephants. Once my son grows up he may want to buy a motorbike. Then we will need a road here and that won’t be good for the animals. And it’s dangerous as well; people on bikes get killed by elephants quite often we hear. 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 Page 16 of 30

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 freeroaming 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. —A forester in Pandalur, one of five ranges in the Gudalur Forest Division, shortly after the launch of an SMS-based elephant monitoring and early warning system. 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: Ah yes, elephants. As if the tea industry didn’t have enough trouble already! Elephants living on our estates are a growing concern, but I have to say it’s not yet a very serious issue. Some of the labour lines and living quarters have needed electric fences around them and we have to be careful about moving around in the evenings. We have to also sometimes chase elephants out of certain plots or move labourers (p.319) to other plots, but it’s all still manageable. There is no real damage to tea—a few bushes get trampled from time to time, but nothing significant. What the future holds I don’t know though. If elephant numbers keep going up there will be a lot more trouble and I don’t see what can be done. You guys have Page 18 of 30

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 —John Zacharias, a small estate owner, at the Gudalur Cosmopolitan Club in a discussion about the elephant problem. 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. —Mrs Mohan, an eighty-year-old woman who lives with her daughter on Heath field estate, also an estate owner, at the same meeting as above. 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. —Harikrishna and Sangeetha Mohan, on their experiences at Heath field, their family-owned estate near Gudalur. We do have considerable damage from elephants on the whole, but actually we are quite proud of it. Whenever relatives and friends come (p.320) over, we walk them through our estate and show them all the signs of where the elephants have been and what they have done. It’s all part of this estate life. —CM Anthony, also a small estate owner near Gudalur.

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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.

Towards a Political Ecology of Human–Elephant Conflict Political ecology concerns power and competition in human–environment interactions.58 At the landscape scale such competition and power struggles may emerge in interspecies and interethnic conflict. This study has revealed diverse human groups inhabiting the Nilgiris, holding widely varying perceptions about elephants and the causes for their increasingly problematic relations with people, which depend on their cultural and ecological orientation to the landscape. This diversity is hard to neatly classify or cluster, but some broad generalizations can be advanced to help us consider the range of views about human–elephant relations and their implications for responding to human– elephant conflict. First, concerning the characterization of elephants—how are they conceived and their interactions with people explained? There appear to be five broad conceptualizations that emerge: 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.’ Concerning increasing frequency of human–elephant interactions, usually framed as ‘increasing conflict’ with people, there is widespread agreement. However, there are again varying ideas about the motivations or reasons behind this phenomenon (i.e., why this is so); these can be clustered into four cultural– ecological explanations: 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. Page 20 of 30

Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India 3. Increasing elephant populations are overflowing from protected areas and forests into human habitation and livelihood sites in unprecedented numbers. 4. Lifestyle change through socio-economic development has compromised the ability of humans to live with elephants. 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 Perceptions of Elephants’ Status Community

Demons

Paniyas

Causes of Increasing Conflict

Wild Animals

√

Non-Human Victims Persons

Gods

Habitat Destruction

√

√

Bettakurum bas

√

√

Kattunayaka ns

√

Chettys Sri Lankan

√

√ √

Increasing Elephant Population

Forest Developmen Degradation t and Changing Lifestyles

√

√

√

√

√

√

√ √

√

√

√

√

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. However, since few ethnic groups recognized as hunter-gatherers still primarily pursue such a mode of subsistence, it would be problematic to speak of a singular ‘hunter-gatherer mentality’ in relating to elephants. Indeed, the problem of defining hunter-gathering and whether foraging populations can be understood in isolation from adjacent social formations is much debated.59 At the same time, it is widely accepted that key elements of animistic thinking and reciprocal relations with animals endure as cultural models of interaction with flagship species like elephants, despite rapid modernization. Cultural models, as widely shared understandings of the world with implications for acting in it, are significant here, and among the Bettakurumba and Kattunayaka social groups these include conception of elephants as non-human persons.60 At the same time, the componential aspect of cultural models reminds us to avoid essentializing generalizations, allowing for variation and fuzziness in thinking within groups. This is evident, for example, in the Paniyas’ dual position on elephants as both wild animals and non-human persons. While we have not carried a formal cognitive or componential survey of cultural models for this project, the interviews and analysis have sought to uncover the key components of each ethnic group’s mental models of elephants’ ontological status and role in HEC. Our results show that there are both shared and non-shared ideas about elephants as beings and their role in HEC. This, in turn, affects the degree to which various inhabitants of the Nilgiris are willing to put up with the challenges of coexistence with elephants. More work on understanding cultural models could further tease out the sources of consensus and dissonance in the attitudes of various groups and subgroups. Such results might help inform a more nuanced and effective policy towards human–elephant conflict and coexistence. As cognitive anthropologist Scott Atran and his colleagues suggest: ‘How people conceptualize nature is linked with how they act in relation to it … cultural differences in mental models and associated values play an important role in Page 23 of 30

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 mutualistanimistic 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. For policy relating to the human–elephant interface to be effective and useful, it must factor in the diversity of human social groups, particularly regarding their shared histories with elephants. The very notion of human–elephant conflict should be community specific, based on a sound understanding of the communities’ relationship with nature and historical interactions with elephants. ‘HEC mitigation strategies’ need to become more holistic, inclusive, and participatory (p.325) unlike the one-size-fits-all solutions currently conceived. Assessing continuities and divergences in cultural models of human–elephant relations among various livelihood groups in particular landscapes can provide a

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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). (2.) Maan Barua, ‘The Political Ecology of Human-Elephant Relationships in India’ (DPhil Thesis, Oxford: University of Oxford, 2013). (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. (8.) Ewen Callaway, ‘Elephants Master Basic Mathematics’, New Scientist, 20 August 2008, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14569-elephants-masterbasic-mathematics.html#.U_fL9tbALFY, accessed 11 December 2014. (9.) Craig Holdrege, ‘Elephantine Intelligence’, The Nature Institute (Spring 2001): 10–13, http://www.natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic5/elephant.htm, accessed 20 November 2014. (10.) Matthew Mutinda, Geoffrey Chenge, Francis Gakuya, Moses Otiende, Patrick Omondi, Samuel Kasiki, Ramón C. Soriguer, and Samer Alasaad, Page 25 of 30

Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India ‘Detusking Fence-Breaker Elephants as an Approach in Human–Elephant Conflict Mitigation’, PloS One 9, 3 (2014). (11.) Janaki Lenin and Raman Sukumar, ‘Human–Elephant Conflict in India’, Sanctuary Asia (April 2011), http://www.sanctuaryasia.com/magazines/ conservation/5214-human-elephant-conflict-in-india.html, accessed 5 December 2014. (12.) Bibliographic database search on Scopus (www.scopus.com), conducted 15 August 2014. (13.) Bibliographic database search on Scopus (www.scopus.com), conducted 15 August 2014. (14.) John Knight (ed.), Natural Enemies: People Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective (London: Routledge, 2000). (15.) R.H. Schmidt and R. Beach, ‘What Is “Wildlife Damage Management”?’, Wildlife Control Technology 1, 1 (1994): 4–5. (16.) Eugene S. Hunn, Darryll R. Johnson, Priscilla N. Russell, and Thomas F. Thornton, ‘Huna Tlingit Traditional Environmental Knowledge, Conservation, and the Management of a “Wilderness’ Park”, Current Anthropology 44, Supplement (December 2003): S79–103; Fikret Berkes, Johan Colding, and Carl Folke, ‘Rediscovery of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as Adaptive Management’, Ecological Applications 10, 5 (2000): 1251–62. (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. (20.) Lenin and Sukumar, ‘Human–Elephant Conflict in India’. (21.) M.D. Madhusudhan, personal communication.

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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India (22.) C. Sudhakar Reddy, Prachi Ugle, M.S.R. Murthy, and S. Sudhakar, ‘Quantitative Structure and Composition of Tropical Forests of Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary, Western Ghats, India’, Taiwania 53, 2 (2008): 150–6. (23.) Norman Myers, Russell A. Mittermeier, Cristina G. Mittermeier, Gustavo A.B. da Fonseca, and Jennifer Kent, ‘Biodiversity Hotspots for Conservation Priorities’, Nature 403, 6772 (2000): 853–8. (24.) R.J. Ranjit Daniels, The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve: A Review of Conservation Status with Recommendations for a Holistic Approach to Management: India (Paris: UNESCO and South–South Cooperation Programme on Environmentally Sound Socio-Economic Development in the Humid Tropics, Working Paper 16, 1996). (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. (27.) Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). (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. (29.) Nurit Bird-David, ‘The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters’, Current Anthropology 31, 2 (1990): 189– 96. (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. (31.) S. Rajan, M. Sethuraman, and Pulok K. Mukherjee, ‘Ethnobiology of the Nilgiri Hills, India’, Phytotherapy Research 16, 2 (2002): 98–116; Paul Nicholas

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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India Anderson, ‘Community-Based Conservation and Social Change amongst South Indian Honey-Hunters: An Anthropological Perspective’, Oryx 35, 1 (2001): 81–3. (32.) Hockings, ‘All Aboard the Nilgiri Express!’. (33.) While loosely translating to ‘elephant god’, the phrase in a Kattunayakan context, along with the idea of ‘pooja’ (worship), is more nuanced than the usual religious interpretation of the terms, and relates more to their animistic relationship with elephants and other ‘non-human persons’, discussed more in Nurit Bird-David, “Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40, S1, Special Issue Culture A Second Chance? (February 1999): S67–91. (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; BirdDavid, ‘Animism’ Revisited’. (36.) Ursula Münster, Chapter 12, this volume. (37.) W. Francis, Madras District Gazetteers: The Nilgiris (Madras: Government Press, 1908). (38.) Bird-David, ‘The Nilgiri Tribal Systems: A View from Below’. (39.) K.V. Zvelebil, ‘Jenu-Kurumba: Brief Report on a “Tribal” Language of the Nilgiri Area, Tamilnadu, South-India’. Journal of the American Oriental Society 108, 2 (1988): 297–301. (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 electric fence around some villages in the region and are keen to expand this programme as a means of reducing human–elephant conflict. (41.) Edgar Thurston and K. Rangachari, Castes and Tribes of South India (Madras: Government Press, 1909). (42.) For a similar case with Kattunayakans in Wayanad, see Münster, this edition. (43.) Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000).

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Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India (44.) Ann Fienup-Riordan, Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yup’ik Eskimo Oral Tradition (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. 1995); A. Irving Hallowell, ‘Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View’, in Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, edited by Stanley Diamond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960):19–52. (45.) Siddhartha Krishnan, ‘Of land, Legislation and Litigation: Forest Leases, Agrarian Reform, Legal Ambiguity and Landscape Anomaly in the Nilgiris, 1969– 2007’, Conservation and Society 7, 4 (2009): 283. (46.) Patta refers to a legal title deed for the land. Many of the immigrants do not have this, despite the law making them the full owners of the land if they have been in uninterrupted possession for fourteen years or longer. (47.) Daniel Bass, Everyday Ethnicity in Sri Lanka: Up-Country Tamil Identity Politics (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2013). (48.) A local 18,000-member-strong indigenous people’s organization. (49.) Bird-David, ‘The Nilgiri Tribal Systems: A View from Below’. (50.) A. Aiyappan, The Paniya: An Ex-slave Tribe of South India (Calcutta: Institute of Social Research and Applied Anthropology, 1992); Francis Kulirani, ‘The Shrinking Livelihood Strategies of the Paniyar’, in Livelihood Strategies among Forest-Related Tribal Groups of South India: Contextual Analysis of Local Livelihood Strategies at the Centre for Indian Studies, edited by Christer Noström, Interdisciplinary Conference at the Centre for Indian Studies, Mysore, India (Lund: Swedish South Asian Studies Network [SASNET], Lund University, 2003), 1–10. (51.) Krishnan, ‘Of Land, Legislation and Litigation’. (52.) Aiyappan, The Paniya: An Ex-slave Tribe of South India. (53.) Kulirani, ‘The Shrinking Livelihood Strategies of the Paniyar’. (54.) James Woodburn, ‘Egalitarian Societies’, Man 17, 3 (1982): 431–51. (55.) Münster, this edition. (56.) The Shola Trust has been involved in setting up an SMS-based early warning system to alert people of elephant presence around their village and hopefully minimize accidental encounters between people and free-roaming elephants. (57.) The quote is from a discussion about what the problems with elephants were and what needed to be done in the future, and ‘you guys’ broadly refers to the wildlife conservationists in the region. Page 29 of 30

Ethnic Diversity and Human–Elephant Conflict in the Nilgiris, South India (58.) Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2012). (59.) F. R. Myers, ‘Critical Trends in the Study of Hunter-Gatherers’, Annual Review of Anthropology 17 (1988): 261–82; T. Headland and L. Reid, ‘HunterGatherers and Their Neighbors from Prehistory to Present’, Current Anthropology 30, 1 (1989): 43–66. (60.) Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn (eds), Cultural Models in Language and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 4. (61.) Scott Atran, Douglas L. Medin, and Norbert O. Ross, ‘The Cultural Mind: Environmental Decision Making and Cultural Modeling within and across Populations’, Psychological Review 112, 4 (2005): 744. (62.) Cynthia J. Moss, Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

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Bibliography

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

(p.330) Bibliography Piers Locke, Jane Buckingham

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About the Editors and Contributors

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

(p.354) About the Editors and Contributors Piers Locke, Jane Buckingham

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 coproduced 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.

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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, multispecies 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 Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. She is currently working on a monograph about south Indian encounters with wildlife in times of extinction. Patrick Olivelle is Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit and Indian Religions at University of Texas at Austin. He has been President of the American Oriental Society, and he has won book awards from the American Academy of Religion and the Association of Asian Studies. His books include King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India (Oxford University Press, 2013), Viṣṇu’s Code of Law (2009), The Life of the Buddha (2008), Manu’s Code of Law (2005), and Upaniṣads (1996). Charles Santiapillai was a conservation biologist particularly known for his work on Asian elephants in Sri Lanka. Formerly an Associate Professor of zoology at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and was the founding editor of Gajah, the journal of the IUCN’s Asian Elephant Specialist Group, the author of key reports and policies for elephant conservation, and the recipient of numerous medals for his service to conservation. Most recently Charles was director of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Center for Asian Elephant Conservation at Rajarata University, Sri Lanka. Raman Sukumar is Professor at the Center for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science. A world-renowned expert on elephantecology and conservation, his books include The Asian Elephant: Ecology and Management (1989), Elephant Days and Nights (1994), The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behavior and Conservation (Oxford University Press, 2003), and, most recently, The Story of Asia’s Elephants (2011). Tarsh Thekaekara recently completed a master’s degree in conservation biology at the University of Oxford. He has commenced a PhD at the Open University, and he works for the Shola Trust, an organization dedicated to conservation and local livelihood. His research focuses on the problem of rogue elephants in human settlements in the Nilgiri Hills. (p.357) Thomas F. Thornton is Director of the Environmental Change and Management Programme and Associate Professor at Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment, and is a senior research fellow at the Environmental Change Institute. An anthropologist, he has worked for decades with indigenous groups in North America and Eurasia in the areas of human ecology, adaptation, local and traditional ecological knowledge, and conservation and resource management. 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.

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Index

Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human–Elephant Relations in South Asia Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham

Print publication date: 2016 Print ISBN-13: 9780199467228 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199467228.001.0001

(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 Cuvier, Georges, 141 Dacca, 40 Dalsingar, 97 Damooda (Damodar) valley, 115, 121 Damudar, 98 damya, 82 dandi, 242–65 Chakardo corridor, 255–76 human–elephant forest trails, 251–5 Darius, 55 Dasarnas, 83 Deepor Beel wildlife sanctuary, 250, 255–62 de-extinction, 14, 149, 151 deforestation, 137, 247 Delhi Sultanate, 92, 95 Descola, Philippe, 173, 184 The Diamonds, Coal and Gold of India (Ball), 122–3 didactic instruction, 169–70 Digby, Simon, 92 Dilsankar, 12, 98 Dinesh, 289 Dionysius, 56, 231 Dispur, 249 disturbed socializations, 19 divinity, 170–1 Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), 285 DNA analysis, 145, 146 Dolly (sheep), 144, 147 domestication, 159–61 domination, 159–61, 169–70 dreamscapes, 14, 142 Dutch, 20, 39, 233–4 dwasala, 174 dwelling, 245 East India Company, 39 East India Vade-Mecum (Williamson), 124 eastward diffusion, of war elephants, 57–60 ecological crisis, 280–4 ecological restoration, 14 ecosystem engineer, 21, 245, 265 Edgerton, Franklin, 86, 87 Egypt, 56 Ekval, Ram, 169, 171 electric fence, 248, 272, 273, 309–12, 324 Elephant Conservation Zones, 303 elephant corridor, 245, 277 Elephant Family (charity), 259 Elephant–Human Coexistence Zones, 303 elephant husbandry, 40 Page 4 of 14

Index elephant raids, 285 Elephant Removal Zones, 303 elephant-scaring device, 273 Elephant Task Force, 302, 303 Elephas antiquus, 32 Elephas hysudricus, 32 Elephas maximus, 31, 32 embodied practice, 167–9 emotional states, elephants, 212–14 encroachment, 22 endangered, 137, 138, 149, 150, 235, 279, 301 Enlightenment rationality, 117 enskilment, 168, 169 entanglements, 8, 10, 21, 95, 104, 245, 250, 258, 264 environmental imaginary, 139 Esalaperahera, 207–8 eschewing, 17 ethnocentrism, 302 ethnoelephantology, 4, 21, 95, 242–3 Eupatorium odaratum, 281–2 (p.361) Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Animal Life (Hutchinson), 143–4 Fanjbidar, 12, 98 farmers, and free-roaming elephants, 217–22 Fath-gaj, 97 Fazl, Abul, 94, 97, 98–9, 100, 101, 103–4, 106, 108–9 Flora Indica (Hooker), 122 food, for elephants, 82–3 Forest (Conservation) Act (1980), 282 forest frigate, 122 Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, 311 fortress conservation, 287 fragmented landscape, 22, 23, 265, 276, 277 Fuentes, Agustin, 6, 262 Fulvius, 57 Gaja Sastram, 10, 174 gajavanas, 35 Gajmukta, 104 Galpola, Ruwan, 213 Ganesha, 36–7, 171–3, 260–1 Gaugamela, 55 Gautama, Siddhartha, 36 gene pool, 277 genome editing, 138, 147–8 Ghaznavids, 37 Ghuris, 37 globalization, 314 Goffman, Erving, 170 Golconda, 39 Page 5 of 14

Index Goto, Kazufumi, 151 grahaṇa, 79 Great Trigonometrical Survey, 117, 130 Greece, 55 Greenwood, Alex D., 145 Gudalur, 306 Gulimoola, 308 gunas, 173, 174 Gupta period, 36, 37 Guwahati, 242, 259 Habarana, 220 habitat degradation, 248 habitus, 25, 170 Hall of Extinct Monsters, 150–2 Hannibal, 57 Harappa, 33, 36 Haraway, Donna, 8, 166, 187 hastidasana, 36 hastimangala, 36 hastin, 76 hastipaka, 50, 78 hastipatha, 84 hastivana, 77 Hastividyarnava, 37 hastyadhaksa, 77, 80 hatthimaha, 36 hatthisala, 231 hatthivatikas, 36 hattisar, 162, 164, 165, 170, 172 Hawai’i, 12, 99–100, 108 Hellenistic kingdoms, 56 Hesychius, 56, 57 Himalayan Journals (Hooker), 122, 123, 127 Hinduism, 36, 40, 229 historical coevolution, 242 Homo erectus, 32 Homo sapiens, 32 Hooker, Joseph, 13, 115, 116, 121, 122–3, 124 horses, 33, 51, 53–4, 63, 76, 77, 82–3, 92, 94, 104, 105 howdah, 121, 123 Hoysalas, 37 (p.362) Huanran, Wen, 58 human detritus, 284 human dimension, 3, 302 human–elephant conflict (HEC), 19, 22, 23, 42, 248–9 mitigating, 288–90 in Nilgiris, 300–3 political ecology of, 320–5 in Sri Lanka, 218–19 Page 6 of 14

Index in Wayanad, Kerala, 272–95 human–elephant forest trails, 251–5 human exceptionalism, 166 human–wildlife conflict (HWC), 300–1, 302 Humayun, 98 Hutchinson, H.N., 143–4 hybrid community, 16, 164, 165, 184, 185, 201 Ice Age, 143 imperial authority, 12, 94, 95, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107 Indian Forest Service, 40 Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act (1973), 282 individuality, elephants, 125–31 Indos, 56–7 Indus Valley Civilization, 75 Ingold, Tim, 184, 244 instruments, elephants as, 118–25 International Elephant Foundation (IEF), 138 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 137, 138, 139, 301 interspecies communication, 188–90, 198–200 interspecies family ties, companionship and, 210–12 interspecies intimacy, 213 intersubjective engagement, 200–1 invasive plants, 281 Iran, 57 ivory poaching, 42 Jaffna, 39, 233 Jahangir, 101 Jarkov, 145 Jataka tales, 206–7 Java, 59 Jayasena, 18, 208, 210–11, 213 Jefferson, Thomas, 141 Jenu (honey) kurubas, 309 Jumbo the Elephant, 149 Jungle Life in India (Ball), 122, 127 jungle microscope, 122 Kali, Sitasma, 167, 168–9 Kalinga, 83 Kalsi, 36 Karbi, 249, 263 karma, 173 Karnataka, 277, 283, 304, 306, 310, 315 Karusa, 83 Kattunaika, 280, 283, 284, 292 Kattunayakans, 306, 308, 310–11 Kauṭilya, 35, 75–86. See also Arthaśāstra Kazufumi Goto, 145 Kerala, 22, 277, 283, 293, 304, 306, 311, 315 keystone species, 280 Page 7 of 14

Index Khamti, 15, 66, 187, 189, 190–8 Khan, Bhairam, 98 Khan, Danishmand, 97 Kharvai, 33 Khayrullin, Radik, 147 kheddahs, 39, 127, 310 Khmer, 58, 61 Khorsor Elephant Breeding Center, 171 (p.363) koomeriah, 174 kraaling, 233 kumkhi, 289 Kurichiya, 287 Kurt, Fred, 291 Kurumbas, 306, 308–9 Kushan, 36 labour collaborative, 200–1 custodial, 8 dimensions of, 185–7 Lagos, 56 lakap, 191 Lakhna, 97 Lakshmi, 18, 210–11, 213 Land of the Mammoth (documentary), 145 landscapes, 249–50, 262–5 anthropogenic, surviving in, 276–9 fragmented, 22, 23, 265, 276, 277 Lantana camara, 281–2 Laos, 41, 64 lap belt, 191 Latour, Bruno, 184 life world, 216, 274 liminal state, 172 livelihood, 17, 23, 131, 201, 205, 217, 248, 292, 293, 303 Living Elephants, The, (Sukumar), 248 Loi, Pasqualino, 148 Long Now Foundation, 138 loyalty, 212–13 machans, 287 Madras Presidency, 307 Madurai, 39 Magadha, 53–4 Mahabharata, 50, 51 Mahakapi Jataka, 206 Mahavamsa, 55 Mahawamsa, 230 mahouts, 10, 15, 47–52, 166, 205 ethnography of, 60–6 in Mudumalai, 310 Page 8 of 14

Index Sinhalese, 208, 214 in Sri Lanka, 208–9 training of, 63 mahut, 164 makkana, 79 Malabar, 310 Malayali, 23, 306 Malaysia, 41 Mammoth Genome Project, 146 mammoths, 137–40, 142–3 Man and the Biosphere programme (MAB), 277 Mangalahatthi, 230 mansabdari, 12, 107 Manu, 50, 76 Manvayal, 311, 313 Mar, Khyne U., 64, 65 Marriott, McKim, 173 mastodons, 142–3 Matakabhatta Jataka, 206 Matanga Lila, 10, 37 Mathura, 36 matriarch, 261, 279 Maurya, Chandragupta, 35, 54, 66 Mauryas, 53, 54–5 Maya Lyakhovsky Island, 147 meerga, 174 Megasthenes, 20, 35, 54, 66, 231 Meghalaya, 244, 249 melashikar, 66 Mesolithic, 33 Midgley, Mary, 212, 213–14 Millennium Elephant Foundation, 210, 217 Miller, Webb, 146 Ming Dynasty, 59–60 Ming Shi-lu, 59 (p.364) Minneriya, 79 Minneriya Preserve, Sri Lanka, 79 mlecchas, 51 moa, 143, 146 modha, 79 Mowlah, 127, 128, 129, 130 Mudumalai, 310 Mughals, 11–12, 38, 61, 92–109 and naming of elephants, 96–7 and punishment for misuse/ill treatment of elephants, 106–7 Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq, 37 Mullu Kurumar, 287 multispecies approach, 22 multispecies institution, 163–5 Page 9 of 14

Index Murray, Margaret, 142 musth, 12, 49, 171 mutatis mutandis, 81 mutual ecology, 262 Myanmar, 64, 65, 67, 199 Nagarhole, 277 nagavanadhyaksa, 35, 77 nagavanapala, 77, 78 naive realism, 302 Nandas, 54 Narayan, Satya, 171 National Fossil Hall, 152 national parks, 15, 20, 162, 164, 277, 282 naturalcultural conflict zones, 285–8 naturalcultural contact zones, 279 Neolithic, 33 Nepal, 62 captive elephants in, 161–3 ethnography of mahouts in, 61 Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (NBR), 277–8, 304 Nilgiris, 300–25 human–elephant conflict, 300–3 human–elephant interactions in, 303–4 social groups in, 305 North Africa, 75 Numidia, 56 occupational culture, 162, 176 Onesicritus, 20 Ooty, 307 padapasika, 77 pagari, 61 Pakistan, 53 Palakapya, 35 Pallavas, 37 Pancanada, 83 Paniyas, 306, 309 pârikarmika, 77 participants, elephants as, 125–31 Pashupati seal, 36 patchuwa, 164 Peari, 127–8, 129 Pegu, 39 Pence, Gregory, 145 peraheras, 207 perfect man, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101 Persia, 8, 55 personhood, 167–71, 214 phanet, 164, 169 phenomenological approach, 216–17 Page 10 of 14

Index pilkhana (elephant stables), 37 Pleistocene, 14, 140–3, 253 poaching, 255, 276, 291, 311 Poinar, Hendrik, 151 political ecology, of human–elephant conflict, 320–5 Portuguese, 20, 38–9, 118, 232–3 Porus, 34, 54 post-traumatic stress syndrome, 291 practical engagements, 214–17 prasad, 171 Prasad, Kha, 168 Project Elephant, 285 protected areas (PAs), 300 (p.365) Ptolemy, 56–7 puja, 171, 172 pujari, 172 Puranas, 37 Raising the Mammoth (documentary), 145 rajas, 173 Rajmahal, 121, 122 rajoguni, 174 Rajput, 94, 95, 107 Ramayana, 50 Ranas, 162 Rani, 18, 208, 210 Rani-Garbhanga Reserve Forest (RGRF), 244, 249–50 elephant deaths at, 258 Rashtrakutas, 37 rations, for elephants, 82–3 raut, 164 relational dynamics, 8, 22, 23, 163, 165, 274 religious significance, of elephant in Sri Lanka, 206–24 relocation, 283, 290 reproductive cloning, 138, 144, 148 Revive and Restore, 138, 151 rewilding, 138 Riau Province, 137 rite of passage, 16, 171, 175 Rome, 57 Rose, Nikolas, 150 sacredness, of elephant, 35–7 Sada, 104 sai lik, 191 saimika, 77 sai pan, 191 sai pan kho, 191 samnahya. See war elephants samsara, 173 Sanderson, George, 129, 174 Page 11 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 Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), 259 Wilkins, Maurice, 148 woolly mammoth, 138–41 Wrangel Island, 138 Yunnan, 41, 58, 59–60 Zachariah, Arun, 277, 288, 291 zoos, 68–9, 127, 131, 281

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