Elephants and Kings

An Environmental History

Thomas R. Trautmann

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226264530
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: World History

Because of their enormous size, elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizations—such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and China—kings used elephants for royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, or the conspicuous consumption of ivory—all of them tending toward the elephant's extinction. The kings of India, however, as Thomas R. Trautmann shows in this study, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war.
Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3, 000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations, Trautmann throws into relief the structure of India's environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.

2

War elephants

PRINCE RĀMA, HERO OF THE EPIC RĀMĀYAṆA, is in exile in the great forest of Central India. He has been sent there by his father, king Daśaratha of Ayodhyā, on account of a promise he made to Rāma’s stepmother, queen Kaikeyī. Daśaratha having died, Kaikeyī’s son Bhārata, one of Rāma’s younger half-brothers, has reluctantly agreed to rule Ayodhyā as regent while Rāma completes his term in the forest. Early in the exile Bhārata journeys to see Rāma, who showers him with questions about the welfare of the kingdom. Taken together, these questions express a conception of perfect kingship. Some are lofty: “You have made brave men your counselors, I trust, dear brother, men you look upon as your very self—men who are learned, self-controlled, and highborn, and able to read a man’s thoughts in his face.”¹ Others are practical: “I trust you pay, when payment is due, the appropriate wages and rations to your army, and do not defer them.” No surprises here, and many of these ideals of kingship could travel readily to other kingdoms in other countries. But there is one that is specifically and characteristically Indian:

kaccin nāga vanaṃ guptaṃ

kuñjarāṇaṃ ca tṛpyasi |

You are protecting the elephant forests, I trust, and attending to the needs of the elephants.²

Indian kings need elephants and therefore need forests; the forests have to be protected and elephants’ needs attended to. In this respect the forest is not the opposite of the kingdom—as a place of exile, to take the example at hand—or not only so; it is also an essential part of the kingdom. This expression of the duty of a good king connects the fortified royal capital to the elephant forest. It gives us a means of bringing the forest, forest people, and wild elephants into the history of the long era of kingship in India.

Understanding the logic and history of the Indian model of kingship as it involves the use of elephants is the task of the first part of this book. But this royal use of elephants was not only universal and normative for kingdoms within India, it was also powerfully influential beyond. From India the techniques of elephant use in battle spread both to the West: Persia, Hellenistic Syria and Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Ghazna; and to the East: the Indianizing kingdoms of Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia on the mainland of Southeast Asia, and of Java and other regions of Indonesia. In the second part of the book I will show these developments as a connected whole, and, indeed, put Indian kingship and its elephant use in comparative perspective of the widest scope.

The ideal war elephant

Elephants served a variety of functions in Indian kingdoms—as the conveyances of kings, haulers of heavy materials for monumental architecture, perches from which to hunt game, leaders of temple processions, mythological guardians of the quarters, and even as the god Gaṇeśa. But war was their primary function. This firstness of the elephant’s use in warfare was a logical priority, not a chronological one; as we shall shortly see, elephants were resources for ancient Indian kings long before the war elephant was invented. But, once invented, the war elephant served ever after as the standard, and all other functions became secondary and derivative. For this reason we need to examine the war elephant as the prototypical form which conditioned all other uses and representations.

This is an important principle of method for our inquiry. It is necessary to keep in mind that the war elephant disappeared from the picture some centuries ago. The ancient practices of elephant capture, training, and care have continued into the present, but the modern use of elephants has been dominated, rather, by timber extraction and other practices, and more recently by the critique of traditional practices by the animal welfare movement, each of which gives the human culture of elephant use a different centering and significance. This can have a distorting effect upon interpretations of the ancient scene, a problem of which we need to be aware.

To get to the ideal of the war elephant of ancient times we are well served by the fact that the Sanskrit poetics of kingship and warfare is preserved in an extensive archive. This comprises the epics—the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata—and poems in praise (praśasti) of kings in inscriptions. Such texts do not give us the nuts and bolts of kingship—for those we will have to consult the science of kingship (arthaśāstra). They give instead ideal types, models of kingship in its perfected form, and as such are useful in showing us the logic of things.

Let us look, then, at how the war elephant appears in the poetry of kingship. This passage, taken from the Mahābhārata, is a particularly good one, not because it expresses a rare insight but on the contrary because it is perfectly typical of the representation of war elephants in poetry relating to Indian kingship. The terms of this verse (with one exception) recur in countless iterations of the type of the ideal war elephant.

bhīmāś ca mattamātaṅgāḥ	prabhinnakaraṭāmukhāḥ |
kṣaranta iva jīmūtāḥ	sudantāḥ ṣaṣṭihāyanāḥ ||
svārūḍhā yuddhakuśalaiḥ	śikṣitair hastisādibhiḥ |
rājānam anvayuḥ paścāc	calanta iva parvatāḥ ||

Terrifying rutting elephants with riven temples, well-tusked sixty-year-olds like gliding clouds, well-mounted by trained elephant-riders skilled in fighting, followed behind the king like moving mountains.³

Thus the ideal war elephant is a male, with large tusks, terrifying in appearance, at the height of its powers at age sixty, and in the state of elevated sexual ardor and combativeness called musth. Above all it is massive and stately, like a cloud or a living mountain. It is mounted by skilled fighter-riders. Let us examine each of these terms in greater detail.

First, its age. It is surprising, and perhaps for readers of a certain age pleasing to find, that sixty years is considered the ideal age of a war elephant. This is not frequently mentioned but is confirmed by another passage which likens two wrestlers to fighting elephants:

tāv ubhau sumahotsāhāv	ubhau tīvraparākramau |
mattāv iva mahākāyau	vāraṇau ṣaṣṭihāyanau ||

They both had extraordinary staying power, both had ruthless strength and stood as large as two rutting sixty-year-old elephants.⁴

In another passage, a sixty-year-old elephant is among the rich gifts brought by royal guests to the anointment of Yudhiṣṭhira as king, from which we infer it is thought to be the ideal age on such a momentous occasion.⁵ When we consult the “elephant science” literature in Sanskrit, we regularly find a discussion of the elephant at different ages, decade by decade, up to 120 years, with six decades of increasing powers, and six decades of declining powers.⁶ As we saw, elephants at age sixty are on their last set of molars and cannot live a great deal longer. The sixty-year ideal age posited in the Mahābhārata is probably based on an observation of their increasing powers over the six decades, while the six decades of decline must be a later theoretical elaboration.⁷

The ideal war elephant, then, is a fully mature male. Possibly the sixty-year ideal has to do with it having very long tusks by that age, for tusks, as noted in the previous chapter, grow throughout the animal’s life. But sixty is the age when elephants are nearing their end. The Arthaśāstra holds that forty is the age at which a war elephant is at its prime, which seems more realistic.⁸

The criterion of large tusks excludes the female elephant, though females were certainly captured and trained for other functions, including luring wild male elephants for capture. It is possible that the preference for capturing well-tusked (sudanta) elephants has acted as a selective pressure, increasing the proportion of makhnas among wild elephant populations in India over the last two thousand years and more.⁹

Most of the attributes are connected with the single quality of massiveness of body, likened to clouds and mountains. As the largest living land animals, elephants inspire awe (bhīma, terror) in people, this being part of their usefulness to kings. This central quality, their fearsome bulk, results in heavy demands upon kingdoms deploying war elephants. As high-maintenance assets, elephants require kings to devote considerable resources toward acquiring and holding them. We must assume that such kings weighed costs against benefits when deciding the animal was well worth the expense.

Among the huge costs involved, the first is food, in excess of 150 kilos daily, for in the wild, as I have noted, the animal feeds every waking hour.¹⁰ Capture, taming, and being put to work alters that regime drastically; in particular, time devoted to work is time subtracted from feeding and seeking food. Not only must the captive elephant be fed, it must be fed rations of higher-energy food to enable the heavier workload.

G.H. Evans, a superintendent of the Civil Veterinary Department in colonial Burma at the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote a treatise on elephants and their diseases in which he put the matter succinctly: “If the animal in his natural condition, in which he develops a very small degree of energy, requires a whole day and the greater portion of the night to feed, whereby he may be able to replace that energy, then in the domesticated state when a greater consumption of energy is demanded and a reduced time prescribed for the repair of the loss, food must be supplied in a more concentrated form.”¹¹ Underlying this passage is the conception of an energy budget, even if it is not quantified in calories. Work in captivity radically unbalances the energy budget, and the balance must be restored with high-energy food. Which is to say th...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Sources and credits
• Preface
• Prologue
• Elephants and Indian Kingship
• The Spread of the War Elephant
• After the War Elephant
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index