An Elephant Between My Legs

“Aage hut!”, I bellowed, but Bhola wouldn’t budge. I looked back helplessly at Phul Chand, who couldn’t hide his mirth. His bony frame shook with the paroxysms of suppressed laughter and his tongue shot out like a snake’s from the gaping arch created by the handlebar moustache and the missing incisors… I turned and looked down at the massive head between my legs… Bhola was unmoved. He just stood there shaking his head and flapping his ears… I pushed behind his ears again with my toes and repeated the command. This time, success… the elephant moved a few steps and stopped again… Humph!! It’ll be a while before I got to be a mahout….

Wondering what I was doing straddling an elephant? I was learning how to ride one. One of my favourite travel writers, Mark Shand had once traversed a part of the Indian hinterland on his elephant Tara, and fascinated by his experiences I resolved to follow in Tara’s footsteps, on my own elephant… I wanted to take an elephant through the forested foothills of the Shivaliks… sprawled out on that broad back, staring up at the blue sky and the blue mountains, interrupted every once in a while by a leafy forest canopy, rolling in rhythm with my mount’s moods, like a castaway adrift on gentle waves… waking up to the songs of a cuckoo, camping at night around a wood fire, under a starlit sky, with a body aching with the sweet pain of the day’s rigours and the mind aching in anticipation of adventures to come… Aaah… someday… just for a fortnight… someday… and so I went out looking for an elephant and a ‘hathi guru’.

That’s how I found Phul Chand, maneuvering Bhola through south Delhi’s chaotic traffic lanes one spring afternoon and asked him if he’d teach me how to ride one … Phul Chand asked me to ‘come up’. Bhola cocked his rear leg. I stepped on it and hauled my way up to the howdah… “mushkil hai sahab, mehnat hai”, he said. But I was prepared for the struggle. That weekend, I started my lessons…

That was some summers ago… but the other day, while driving along the Yamuna, I met Phul Chand again. His handlebar had grown grey by now and instead of the magnificent tusker, Bhola, he was atop a demure female, Pawankali… Initially he couldn’t recognise me but then his face broke into that familiar smile, tongue thrashing about wildly in that arch as he cracked an intelligible joke and I smiled politely… I followed him to his camp by the river where all the hathiwallahs stay… The great Bhola was chained to a tree… They seemed to have fallen on hard times…

The government had stopped the trading of elephants and even those with private owners couldn’t be sold or even transported across state lines. “Humara waqt khatam ho gaya sahab… elephant and man have been together for centuries… yeh rishta koi aajka hai, batao,” said Phul Chand ruefully as he chewed on a blade of grass while sitting on his haunches, staring blankly at the Yamuna… Nearby, on a string cot lay the owner of the elephants – Ashraf Miyan (that Phul Chand, the mahout, rode to work). “Alah–Udal ke zamane se haathi hamaare purkhon ke paas hain”, said Ashraf whose family has owned elephants for many generations. Hailing from western UP, Ashraf today is a disillusioned man. “The great art of working with elephants – symbols of power, for us and our civilisation, will soon die out… a centuries old art lost to future generations for ever…”.

There was a lull. While Phul Chand and Ashraf contemplated their future, I wondered whose cause needed championing… Looking at these great and noble beasts tethered to a tree, swinging their trunks and nuzzling each other affectionately, I wondered which side these sentient creatures would take. It seemed cruel to tie them and make them play the clown at weddings and processions, and yet on the other hand, the bond between man and elephant was not only ancient but also intense, far removed from the relationship between man and any other beast – truly a bond that had shaped history and our national psyche…

Elephants are unique. They are perhaps as far removed from other animals as human beings are… They, distinguished by their great physical stature and we, by our intellectual stature. In that respect we’re kindred spirits… There’s nothing else that looks quite like them… in a whole different mould altogether. Elephants, for the most part, are benevolent and intelligent beasts, docile, biddable and kind… and usually that’s all there is to the picture… But there’s more to this relationship than meets most eyes. Mahouts perhaps have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. They are enslaved to the elephant, caring for it night and day, as much as an elephant is enslaved to the mahout. But every mahout knows that even a moment’s carelessness around their charge could be their last…

Sometimes, these incidents occur because of uncontrolled playfulness by sub-adults, but while a game gone wrong between humans or creatures of similar stature will only result in minor injuries, such an accident between a creature that rarely weighs more than a 100 kgs and one that weighs more than 5000 kgs, could only end in tragedy for the former. But most often, these accidents happen when adult bulls go into a state called musth – an annual phenomenon where glands near the animals temples secret an oily liquid and the hormonal changes make the bull elephant sexually aggressive. In the wild, it is meant to give them the courage to challenge authority figures like other bulls so that they may fight to mate and the best genes are passed on to the next generation. But in captivity, the mahout is the only authority figure.

If you look for it on the net, you’ll find a horrific video of a domesticated elephant in Thrissur charging around wildly. When his mahout tries to stop him, he gets kicked down and flung around like a rag doll and then, while the man screams in agony, the elephant gores him with his tusks. This video is not for the faint-hearted but it brings to bear the unstoppable force of an enraged elephant and how quickly things can go wrong when an elephant is around. Experts say that noisy crowds, ill-treatment by mahouts, being forced to walk on hot tarmac on hot summers days, and being poked and prodded by strangers causes these pachyderms to lose their cool and many settle down quietly after a few minutes of madness. That may well be, but in those few minutes, a rampaging elephant has the potential to snuff out dozens of lives.

But when I told Ashraf this, he protested: “The mahouts in Kerala demand too much of their elephants… An elephant needs space and care and we give it to them… we’ve never had any accidents.”

He may be right, for now. It’s true that most such attacks have occurred predominantly in Kerala but I know of such incidents having occurred in Madhya Pradesh too. And circuses around the world have had their elephants turning on and killing their handlers. Ashraf and Phul Chand wanted me to champion their cause and help them petition the government and allow for trading in elephants and issue new licenses, but I wasn’t too sure. Domestic elephants, even those that are well-cared for, are not happy elephants. Elephants need a family and live in one all their lives. They are explorers and have an adventurous spirit. Rootless lives without permanent friends or family, chained to stakes, even if well-fed only make these exceptionally intelligent creatures depressed and sad. Looking at those elephants in chains, I knew this to be true…

Those who say that captive elephants are the only way of safeguarding the future of the Asiatic Elephant are missing the woods for the trees. Though well-meaning, such advice perhaps doesn’t take into consideration the fact that an elephant’s heart bleeds to be free and any captive elephant’s eyes will tell you that. Elephants rarely breed in captivity and that is proof of the stressful existence they lead in our cities and circuses. Trading in them is only possible if we allow their capture in the wild to sustain the demand, which Ashraf assured me, had only grown. At that, I told Ashraf that I couldn’t help him. An elephant capture is a heartrending affair and given a choice, any elephant would surely prefer risking a poacher’s bullet to a life in captivity.

Not my dreams, nor the livelihoods of Ashrafs and Phul Chands, not the death of a centuries-old-art nor the end of an era justifies the torture and capture of these magnificent creatures… And we needn’t worry, for the bond between man and elephant is primal, we don’t need ropes to keep it together… Just this February, in the forests of North Bengal, a wild elephant driven by hunger, entered a village and broke into a hut. In the dark, with his groping trunk, he picked what he could find and brought it outside. It was a five-year-old girl. Pandemonium had broken out and villagers had surrounded it but the elephant calmly placed the girl, Kalpana, between his front legs and stood his ground. He didn’t let anybody near, as if protecting her from the melee, flinging things at the villagers to keep them at bay until they settled down. 30 minutes later, he calmly went forest ward, leaving the child without a scratch on her …and this was a wild tusker...
It’s time we set the elephant free, for ‘tis time we realised that having an elephant between our legs doesn’t make us bigger, or better men…