Elephants play a major role in festivals, especially sacred celebrations in the southern Indian province of Kerala. They are marched in parades and take part in religious rituals, including events at Hindu, Muslim and Christian places of worship.  During many of these appearances, elephants are decked out in “nettipattam”—a glittering, gold-colored triangular ornament that covers the elephant’s forehead and extends down between its eyes to the top of its trunk. Elephants are often ridden by mahouts, trainers who display an elaborate golden idol above the animals’ heads, and accompanied by musicians loudly playing flutes and drums. Excited crowds gather to view the spectacle.

Elephants represent Lord Ganesha, probably the most popular Hindu deity in India. He is pictured as a man with an elephant head, and his statue can be found in a vast number of homes. He is revered as the god of good fortune, the remover of obstacles and a source of intellect and wisdom. He is frequently honored at the start of ceremonies because of his role as the god of beginnings. 

But the presence of elephants at ceremonies is also a horrifying spectacle. They are chained around their legs and bodies, and mahouts walking at their sides use the chains to guide and control them. Trainers also carry bullhooks, long sticks with hooks on the end, to help restrain the elephants. Elephants are beaten and confined in chains for as long as 24 hours a day.  

There are no successful programs to breed domesticated elephants. Although the capture of wild elephants is prohibited, there are exceptions to the rules and corrupt officials who overlook the restrictions. 

Why do these continue? Because it is big business. The cost of renting an elephant for a religious spectacle is reportedly $2,000 per day, and demand is continually driving up the price. Temples pay for hired elephants from their treasuries, and if they don’t have sufficient funds, they often solicit money from surrounding communities. The presence of elephants is not only an important way that religious organizations bring people and contributions to their temples, it also attracts visitors to communities that sponsor parades. And peddlers in great numbers hawk their wares at these events.

Despite the abuse, elephant populations in Southern India and Sri Lanka (where they also have a role in festivals) are increasing, unlike everywhere else in the world. Ironically, they are devastating the foliage and plant life in their preserves in these countries. Since elephants forage for grass and other vegetation, they have invaded villages and other crop-growing locales. Animal rights groups prevent them from being culled by hunters, and even when a cougar appeared in an elephant preserve, protestors successfully objected to letting it cull its prey. 

Elephants have long been a problem in Asia. In George Orwell’s famous essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” he describes his experience as a minor British police officer posted to a rural area in what is now Myanmar. When a wild elephant killed a coolie, he set out with his rifle and was followed by thousands of unarmed natives who wanted to witness the spectacle. Inwardly he did not want to shoot the elephant but he felt driven to respond to the expectations of the crowd. In retrospect, he realized that by shooting the elephant, he “was only an absurd puppet” and he wondered whether “others grasped that I had done it to avoid looking a fool.” He realized this act was not only a source of personal shame, but a symbol of the larger problem faced by the British Raj. He concluded, “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”

The British Raj has long since been replaced by the world’s most populous democracy. The not entirely peaceful transformation from an exploited colony to a sovereign nation has not led to the liberation that Gandhi and other founders had hoped for. Some of the problems have existed since the last British troops, a battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, marched through the Gateway of India, boarded ships in the Mumbai harbor and sailed away. The continuing bloody conflict between Muslims and Hindus was already underway. The extraordinary poverty that preceded independence has festered since then. 

Among the persistent problems is widespread bribery by Indians officials at all levels of government. The New York Times reports that even supposed grammar school teachers bribe authorities for their jobs, don’t attend classes and take other employment while receiving a paycheck for teaching. The net result is that the overall reading level of students throughout India has dropped substantially. And there are the more immediately life-threatening problems of pollution and overpopulation. The unhappy fate of elephants seems like a minor aspect of India’s overwhelming difficulties.

But the plight of the elephant in modern India has symbolic significance, just as it did for Orwell, as their treatment reflects the tyranny of democracy attempting to govern more than a billion people. For Orwell, there appeared to be a clear solution—an end to British subjugation of the subcontinent. By contrast, in independent India, there are no clear solutions. 

 

Herb Kutchins is a professor emeritus in the Division of Social Work at California State University, Sacramento. These days he is a wanderer in Africa, Asia, South America and elsewhere, and an itinerant reporter for the Light.