The Elephant

S Balakrishnan *

Elephant is a loveable creature despite its big size. Who said big is not beautiful ? Elephant is magical; and it is unique because of its trunk which no other animal has. While it is for the experts to mouth statistics and talk about its conservation on World Elephant Day (Aug.12), a layman could only remember the personal encounters with the cute pachyderm.

The closest encounter was at Kaziranga National Park where we went on an early morning elephant safari to view another pachyderm, the rhinos. It was joyful to watch baby elephants briskly trot along with the trained elder elephants. Late in the evening, after jeep safari in the park, we had the privilege to bathe an elephant in the stream, as if thanks giving.

While this was a rough ride in the wild park, the elephant ride to the Amber Fort on a hillock near Jaipur was a royal one. Should I recall my stupidity of buying an ankush there without any thought about my ability to own & maintain an elephant ! A Tamil saying aptly explains this piquant situation of mine–‘as if one could afford to feed a tethered elephant’.

My elephant-related memory goes back to my toddler days when I had a foot-tall wooden elephant to play with at our maternal granny’s house. It valiantly bore the rough handling by a dozen and more grandchildren, slowly chipping off here & there, then a broken trunk, leg, tail, tusks and ultimately was consigned to the firewood stove!

When I went in search of it after many years to restore and preserve, I was saddened to hear this. Sigh! But I still have two childhood companions that are close to my heart-a small rosewood elephant with real ivory tusks (these, however, were lost and replaced with match stick splinters) and a brass elephant that was my granny’s toy, which means it is more than a century old !

I had enjoyed bathing and decorating them. Those days, children had toys made only of wood, clay and metal–all natural material. Then arrived rubber toys and the ubiquitous plastic toys, mostly made in China ! Hence our Prime Minister’s clarion call to return to our native toys and toy-making tradition.

My first elephant sighting and ride was as an eight-year-old boy in Madurai. The elephant of Meenakshi- Sundareswarar temple will visit our Rukmanipalayam area once in a week on a collection round. Did the mahout share the collection with the elephant !

The majestic elephant would reach the first floor balcony from where I would watch with bewilderment the massive figure move gently. Slowly I gained courage to place 10 paise at the tip of its sticky trunk to get its blessing, and then for a short ride on its back for 1/4 anna (25 paise). It was here that I saw elephants and other animals performing in circus. The circus lost its attraction when the animals were banned from it.

The first time I saw elephants doing logging was in Andamans in 1979. They dragged and loaded massive logs on to the truck. The Andaman forest had no elephants and they were brought from mainland specially for logging purposes. They had to toil hard to earn their daily food !

A 2000-year-old elephant welcomed me next in Orissa (Odisha)’s Dhauli. It was here that Emperor Ashoka, after the horrendous Kalinga war, embraced Buddhism. Hence he ordered this elephant statue, as if emerging from a rock (or was it left unfinished ?), symbolizing the dream of an elephant entering Maya, Buddha’s mother, before conceiving Siddhartha.

The pair of huge elephant statues at Konark Sun Temple and the other thousands of miniature elephants there prove that elephant was an integral part of life then. Was not elephant division one among the four army divisions of olden days !

Emperor Akbar had even built a memorial ‘Hiran Minar’ for his favourite elephant at Fatherpur Sikri, near Agra. The Konark elephant is so popular that it has been portrayed in our postal stamp. There is even a scene depicting ‘kheda’, capturing of wild elephants.

A few Tamil proverbs succinctly describe the plus and minus of the huge elephant : Dead or alive, an elephant is worth thousand gold coins (because of the ivory which trade has now been banned worldwide.

But I do have a mini ivory statue bought before the ban and before I got the awareness.); even an elephant slips (indicating that even the mightiest could slip/commit a mistake); if the ‘yaanai’(elephant) had a fortunate time, the ‘poonai’ (cat) will also get its turn; it is impossible to maintain a White Elephant. [Lord Indra’s mount is the white elephant Airavata.]

There are more than a hundred such sayings/proverbs in Tamil that relate to elephant which prove the close bonding between humans and the elephants. For generations, hasn’t elephant taught us the English alphabet “E” with ‘E for Elephant’? Let us treat the elephants humanely and preserve Nature’s link.