Save the Elephant

The Prime Minister’s Office’s dismissal of the proposal for a National Elephant Conservation Authority is sad. It ignores the elephant’s enormous significance in India. For an animal that dominates many aspects of life here — as an anthropomorphic deity, genteel guardian of temples, formidable war machine of yore , even tireless worker in the forests — the elephant is curiously underplayed, underestimated and underappreciated.

Consider the insouciant use of the Greek-derived word ‘pachyderm’ as a synonym for the elephant even by Indians, thereby reducing it to a mere thick-skinned, non-ruminant ungulate, which is what the western zoologist sees it as. Only the very thick-skinned, and those unaware of the elephant’s cultural significance here, would see nothing amiss in sticking our 35,000 representatives of the Elephas Maximus Indicus in a defunct genus that once included warthogs, aardvarks, hippopotami, tapirs, wild boars and rhinoceroses.

For so many Indians, the elephant is much more than just a thick-skinned, ivory-tusked trophy of the shikaris of yore. Nor do we concur with that other western notion of the elephant — as Disney’s lovably idiotic Dumbo.

Our different perception is apparent right from the Bollywood’s portrayal of the wise and loyal elephant in Hathi Mere Sathi to MF Husain naming his cinematic ode to womanhood (and Madhuri Dixit) Gajagamini for the langorous, hip-swinging walk that the elephant and the muse famously share. Rudyard Kipling came closest to the Indian notion, when he created the grand and powerful Colonel Hathi, who dinned the mantra ‘an elephant never forgets’ into the western psyche. The PMO should at least play its part to ensure we don’t forget the elephant.