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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral Don’t Create Trouble for Us: Being Mistaken as a Journalist/Activist Animal Rights Discourse: From Narratives of Suffering to Narratives of Intelligence The Complexity of ‘Trouble’ and Moral Breakdown The Cosmopolitan Elephant: Interactions and Interconnections Going Beyond ‘Misinterpretations’ Notes de bas de page

    Back Then It Was Culture, Now It Is Animal Torture

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    Staying with the ‘Trouble’: Reactions to Animal Rights Discourse and Changing Legal Apparatus

    Texte intégral Don’t Create Trouble for Us: Being Mistaken as a Journalist/Activist Animal Rights Discourse: From Narratives of Suffering to Narratives of Intelligence The Complexity of ‘Trouble’ and Moral Breakdown The Cosmopolitan Elephant: Interactions and Interconnections Going Beyond ‘Misinterpretations’ Notes de bas de page

    Texte intégral

    Don’t Create Trouble for Us: Being Mistaken as a Journalist/Activist

    1Residing on the banks of river Kaveri is a Tamil Brahmin (upper caste) settlement that migrated to Kerala from Tamil Nadu, a neighbouring state in South India. The Tamil Brahmins have built their niche in Palakkad, distinguishing themselves through architecture, attire, and the Tamil texture in their Malayalam.1 Each lane in the hamlet ends with a temple and the houses are stacked one after the other, sharing the wall and perhaps the family secrets. The clue to differentiate houses, I learnt, is to look for the kolam2 drawn at the entrance of each house. An art of mathematical precision of dots, lines, and curves, it is done by women early in the morning, their black hair dripping water after a bath. The men apply parallel lines of sacred sandalwood paste on their forehead and the sacred thread falls diagonally from the left shoulder to the right waist on their otherwise bare chests. Some are sitting in front of the house reading a newspaper. Some look at me through the railings of their house as I walk by, detecting the new presence.

    2One can sense the omnipresence of elephants in the elephant sculptures festooning the house gates, in the everyday chitchat inside the tiffin rooms, and in the pendants made of elephant tusk3 hanging by long golden chains that peep through the partially buttoned shirts or decorate the bare chests of men. Lalita is a lean woman in her late fifties who lives in this settlement. Unlike other women her age who wear a saree or nightie at home, Lalita wears a long skirt and a half-sleeve shirt; an attire worn by working, lower caste women that give them flexibility of movement. At Lalita’s home is the portrait of her dead father - ‘a man who loved all beings’, and two elephant statues on either side. It was my first day of fieldwork. She talked fondly about her elephant Krishnan, a gift from her father, but her words also imbued fear.

    ‘We can’t depend on people these days… Some will come in the name of research, but they have other intentions. In today’s times, rules and regulations are high (jasthi) and so are misunderstandings. It is not that we don’t want people to see the elephant, but it shouldn’t become trouble for us.’

    3There was apprehension in her words about ‘misunderstandings’ caused by people who have ‘other intentions’. Although this was also an indirect instruction to tread a careful path and not cause ‘trouble’, she was hinting at a broader tension that had become dominant in the contemporary human-elephant landscape. This tension surfaced in the following days. At the kiosk in Iritty sits Shankaran from whom I usually buy bananas for Krishnan elephant. I could go to other shops, but Shankaran seems like a sweet man, and he always adds a few extra bananas for Krishnan. On hearing about my research, Shankaran suggested that I join the elephant WhatsApp group run by ‘elephant-lovers’ in Iritty. I was excited as this would give me access to talks about elephants and the schedule of temple festivals. Immediately after he shared my number in the group, he received a call from someone asking if I would cause ‘trouble’ for them. Shankaran calmed him saying, ‘don’t worry, she is my relative, she is here for research’. Although I was not his relative, such lies, I learnt, were understood to be normal and acceptable in everyday life as long as it has no terrible consequences. Except, Shankaran was worried if I would really cause terrible consequences. Ending the call, he told me, ‘He thinks you are a journalist or something. I trust you, please don’t create trouble (kindamandi) for me’. I left the kiosk after telling him that I would be careful. Later that day, photographer Anoop connected me with Lalita’s nephew, Raj, whom it turned out was on the phone with Shankaran that morning. Raj manages the agency that rents elephant caparisons for temple festivals. Perhaps from the after-effect of the morning WhatsApp situation, he refused my request to record the interview, showing the call log on his phone, ‘see how many calls I just received from the forest office. I just want to be careful. We say something, you write something else. Even Lalita mami wouldn’t have told you everything.’ Even on the last day of the fieldwork, as I was giving her sweets, Lalita asked, ‘You won’t write bad things about us, right?’. Anoop had warned me of this in our pre-fieldwork conversations ­ that people might be hesitant to talk to me, interpreting me as an activist or a journalist. But little did I know that this doubt and fear that I would write something ‘bad’ would follow me everywhere. What did Lalita mean by ‘bad’ things and what was the ‘trouble’ that I could have caused? What do such sentiments suggest of the ethical-political universe that pervades their everyday life with elephants?

    4To unpack these questions, it was important, as Haraway tells, to stay with the ‘trouble’ (Haraway, 2016). Rappaport, in his lecture ‘The Anthropology of Trouble’ said that ‘if we are to engage the difficulties our own society faces, we need to develop conceptions of what it is that constitutes ‘troubles’ (Rappaport, 1993). Following Rappaport and Haraway, the subsequent sections will present the nuances of the ‘trouble’ by grounding it in the contemporary debates in animal rights discourses and how they reshape ethical engagement with animals. I use theoretical frameworks of ‘moral breakdown’ (Zigon, 2007) and moral and ethical assemblage (Zigon, 2010) to situate the institutional and embodied moral dispositions that had emerged out of the competing moral discourses regarding elephant captivity. For Zigon, ethical engagements are heightened moments of self-reflection when granted moral engagements with the world are questioned, leading to contestation and transformation of our moral lives. Drawing from Zigon, I show that the institutional reorientation of elephant management and the activistic/media portrayals of the human-elephant relation not only shaped a cautious approach towards new presences such as I, but suggested a contestation of their lives with elephants where my informants felt that their relations with elephants were scrutinised by a larger entity, leading to an emphasis on idioms of care and benign reciprocal relations. While the ‘moral breakdown’ is conceptualised at an individual, embodied level for Zigon (2007), I argue that it is both embodied and distributed among my informants. Following this, I show how in these larger debates, the elephant becomes a cosmopolitan category of conservation, stripping elephants of their local, historical connections (Guha 2006; Barua 2014), and I go on to further question the ‘globality’ of animal rights discourse by pointing out that local people also partake in this global production of animal rights discourse, where the global is produced through interactions and intersections (Tsing, 2005). In the last section, I employ some of my informants’ dissatisfaction with the current legal apparatus to posit that while activistic portrayals of the human-elephant relations are claimed to be ‘misinterpretations’, neither is the relation a holistic one, showing that the welfare of elephants and the welfare of human handlers don’t necessarily converge.

    Animal Rights Discourse: From Narratives of Suffering to Narratives of Intelligence

    5Scholars and activists writing and talking about animal exploitation are not a recent phenomenon (Singer, 1990; Thomas, 1993; Derrida, 2008; Berger, 2009). Moral philosopher Peter Singer’s work on the equal status of other species deriving from Bentham’s utilitarianism (Singer, 1975) was instrumental in reinvigorating the animal rights movement and the implementation of laws against animal cruelty. John Berger in his book Why Look at Animals points to the assumption of human exceptionalism, the associated domination of humans over other species, and the compartmentalisation of animals in zoos as objects to be looked at (Berger, 2009). The concern over elephant domestication and the use of elephants for labour, war and religious purposes is not new either, as reflected in the ancient text on elephant management Mathangaleela - ‘Forest elephants who dwelt there happily and by the power of fate have been brought to town in bonds, afflicted by harsh, bitter, cruel words, … by sufferings of mind and body, are quite unable for long to sustain life, when from their own herds they have come into the control of men’ (Edgerton, 1931).

    6While the human use of animals for labour has always been in question, the concern regarding other species has become a central way of engaging with the world in current times. The role of scientific advancement in shaping these popular attitudes on animals is profound. Various fields of study such as consciousness studies, evolutionary biology, the multispecies turn in anthropology, etc. are raising questions regarding the notion of personhood and sentience in nonhuman species, casting doubt on human exceptionalism (Arluke, 1994; Kulick, 2017; Nadasdy, 2017; Birch, 2022; Wall and Andrews, 2022). A recently published New York Times article mentions that ‘humanity seems to be edging toward a radical new accommodation with the animal kingdom’ (Wright, 7 Mar. 2022), reflecting on the shifting ethical realms these emerging studies on animal intelligence and personhood configure. These changing perceptions of animals resulted in the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (Low, 2012), a manifesto stating that animal consciousness exists on an evolutionary continuum departing from a neither/nor proposition, that received substantial attention in the press and from animal rights activists (Titon, 2021). Shifting from a narrative of suffering, animal rights groups now incorporate an evidence-based approach to address the question of animal pain.

    7Elephants are now understood to be self-conscious social beings that maintain lasting social relationships, make strategic decisions, and mourn their dead (Poole and Moss 2008; Varner 2008). Studies also highlight the significance of pain in captivity where elephants that are caught in the wild and go through physical punishment in confinement display symptoms that are associated with post-traumatic stress disorder in humans (Bradshaw et al. 2005; Clubb et al. 2008). The scientific production of elephant sentience and pain has revitalised the sentiment that elephants do not belong in captivity, expressing concern for their physical and mental health (Clubb and Mason, 2003; Lorimer, 2010), thereby making significant shifts in the legal apparatus regarding elephant welfare. Capturing an elephant is prohibited in India under The Wildlife Protection Act 1972 (Vijayakrishnan and Sinha, 2019) and animal rights activists in India are urging for policy changes that completely ban private ownership of elephants,45 emphasising a growing understanding that elephants belong in the ‘wild’. Consequently, the Kerala Captive Elephant Rules were framed in 2003 to ensure the welfare of elephants and mitigate conflict in captivity (Vijayakrishnan and Sinha, 2019), whereby elephant owners are required to submit medical certificates for elephants before parading and mahouts are not permitted to drink-drive elephants given the human-elephant conflict encounters attributed to drunk-driving, among other reasons.

    8But how did the ethical reorientation at the institutional level reflect in the everyday sentiments of elephant owners and mahouts? While many of these legal changes such as documentation of elephants and medical certificates were welcomed by many informants as being good for the welfare of elephants, the ban on the further capture of elephants and the representation of the human-elephant relation as a violent, torturous process generated a tense debate between animal rights activists and the elephant handlers in Kerala. There is a great deal of friction (Tsing, 2005) between animal welfare organisations and the private elephant owners and mahouts they employ. Jamie Lorimer writes that these frictions are formed around contrasting elephant epistemologies (Lorimer, 2010) and questions regarding where an elephant truly belongs, in forests or with humans. A recent court case in the United States regarding Happy the elephant substantiates how competing elephant epistemologies shape different ethical ways of being with elephants. In an affidavit filed on behalf of Happy the elephant to be moved from the zoo to a sanctuary in the US, the activist employed the scientific studies that ‘elephants are complex enough to weigh the challenges they face. They discuss among themselves and make collective decisions. You take all that away and you take away what it means to be an elephant’ (Wright, 7 Mar. 2022), suggesting a shift in what it means to be an elephant in the light of new knowledge and how it reshapes the ethical perceptions of human-elephant relationships. Such an epistemology where elephants become elephants only in the wild was, for my informants, not doing justice to the complex human-elephant relations in Kerala.

    The Complexity of ‘Trouble’ and Moral Breakdown

    9The complexity of ‘trouble’ and how I was perceived as a potential threat became clearer in further conversations with mahouts and elephant owners, particularly in a telephone interview with Nitheesh. A hesitation to confront controversial issues (especially because his parents’ elephant had killed its second mahout a few years ago) and a suspicious attitude towards me was evident at the start of our conversation and he chose his words carefully, perhaps also owing to his profession as a lawyer. In an effort to help me or avoid controversies or both, he suggested that it is ideal to visit places with several elephants and not Nitheesh’s parents who own a single elephant. When I recounted how a family with several elephants gave excuses when I approached them for a visit despite other mahouts confirming the presence of at least one elephant on their house premises, Nitheesh said,

    ‘See, it could be because of past events where people have written badly about mahouts. Especially when they hear that you are from Switzerland, they might be worried about what you are going to write and where the information goes. Even if the elephant excretes just after the stable is cleaned, journalists do not see that it was cleaned. What they see is that elephants are being forced to stay in unhygienic conditions. That doesn’t feel right because that is not how we treat our elephants.’

    10‘That doesn’t feel right because that is not how we treat our elephants.’ These words from Nitheesh are a productive space to understand the ‘trouble’ that my informants are hinting at where the journalistic narratives of human-elephant relations are claimed to be different from reality. I was often told not to take pictures of the wounds on the elephant or of the mahout applying medicine to the wound. The wounds, according to my informants, are due to several reasons: when elephants try to break away from the chain in aggression during the musth, when elephants scratch against something, due to accidental fault from the mahouts during festivals, or by mahouts who intentionally hurt elephants. Although the reason behind the wound could be any one of these, my informants were worried about how the images would be interpreted as ‘torture’ if they were circulated. This fear of how the human-elephant relations get interpreted or misinterpreted in the light of changing legal apparatus and animal rights discourse was further evident when Raj said ‘many elephants die in the forest from fighting with each other or other reasons. But if something happens to an elephant by an unintentional mistake from the human hand, we are doomed’. The fear of how the wound or the state of the elephant stable will be ‘misinterpreted’ and the everyday reactions such as ‘don’t take pictures of the wound’ suggested that the changing institutional and public discourse had caused a moral breakdown (Zigon, 2007) that shaped how my informants reorient, rethink and re-represent their lives with elephants. Zigon, in his elaboration of moral and ethical assemblages, explains that the two fields of morality, the institutional and the public discourse (art, media, protest, etc.), although separate are in constant dialogue with each other while the third field, embodied dispositions, are the everyday unquestioned forms of moral engagement (Zigon, 2010). But, as my informants express, all three fields – the institutional (legal apparatus), the public discourse (animal rights discourse, journalism, media), and the embodied dispositions (informants’ engagement with elephants) are in constant conversation with each other, where the shifts in the institutional and public discourse spill over to embodied dispositions, causing moral breakdown.

    11For Anoop, these ‘misinterpretations’ regarding captivity were interwoven in digitally mediated contemporary life, where the relation is amplified as torture when shifting perceptions present the relation in a new light (Waal and Andrews, 2022). He said, ‘[y]ears ago, the BBC and international media channels came to India to cover stories on human-elephant relations. Back then it was culture, now it is animal torture’, referring to this perceptual shift. These narratives are common in popular media depicting how animals are captured, disciplined through confinement, and later ill-treated by mahouts. They tell how elephants are forced to participate in parades with the constant threat of being struck with a stick and how captive elephants are separated from their mothers and transported to Kerala,67 urging for a complete ban on the private ownership of elephants.8 Often the photographs in such articles focus on the chained leg or are shot to present the elephants without mahouts to signify the lonely and tragic lives the elephants lead in human-dominated societies (Figure 1), suggesting that elephants are mistreated in human-dominated spaces and that they ‘truly’ belong in the wild. Although my informants’ references to such portrayals as amplifications could be right, the images reflect that mistreatment of elephants does exist, but I will come back to this later in this chapter.

    Figure 1: Chained elephant.

    Image 10000201000001B7000001301473B8236C70765C.png

    Source: PETA India.

    12For Nitheesh, such sensationalisation meant that the nuances of the human-elephant relation got lost in these representations. Once his mother, who was too honest a person according to him, said during an interview that their elephant Arjunan is a Brahminkutti.9 For Nitheesh, his mother said what was on her mind without any diplomatic filters. She must have meant that the elephant is brought up in a Brahmin tradition as the owners are Brahmins. Or as Nitheesh said,

    ‘She must have meant that the elephant is vegetarian as they don’t feed non-vegetarian food to the elephant. Whatever the case may be, the word Brahminkutti soon became a sensation in media with comments such as ‘do elephants too have a caste now’? And the next time there was a video uploaded about our elephant, it was followed by the comment, ‘here comes the Brahminkutti of Palakkad’. For YouTube channels, it is mere likes and comments, but this strikes in our hearts. The ones who comment might not even have seen an elephant or lived with an elephant. People only read the title of the news - the elephant that brutally killed the mahout - nobody wants to know the context or situation that caused it.’

    13Such practices of picking statements out of context and ‘trolling’ on social media exacerbated these misinterpretations and as Nitheesh tells, left out the contextual specificities of the human-elephant relation. Mahout Satheeshan told me ‘Aa parippu ivide vekilla’,10implying that such people who come to narrate the story of his elephant in a tainted light have no chance with him and are reproached immediately. Such scrutinisation of their mundane activities meant that my informants had to reorient their actions (Zigon, 2007) and engage in reverse scrutinisation where unfamiliar presences such as mine were approached with caution and everyday activities such as photographing the elephant performed and contained. Although Zigon uses the notion of moral breakdown in an embodied, individual sphere, the atmosphere of fear that I encountered in several instances shows that the moral breakdown is both a collective and distributed process, at public and embodied levels. Drawing from Webb Keane who suggests that ethical questionings and self-reflections are not completely isolated from the world, as ethical intuitions are also shaped by the shared codes of values within the community (Keane, 2016), I argue that moral breakdown (Zigon, 2007) is not just an embodied, individual process but an institutional and distributed one, as also reflected by the changing legal apparatus where institutions also feel the need to reposition themselves in matters concerning animal welfare.

    The Cosmopolitan Elephant: Interactions and Interconnections

    14Beyond pointing out that such portrayals left out the subtleties of the relationship, Nitheesh posed ethical conundrums in this vilification of the human-elephant relations when he said that the people who criticise ‘haven’t seen an elephant or lived with one properly’. Although my informants were not explicit about the regional or socio-economic background of ‘such people’, the statement implied that people engaging in such portrayals of human-elephant relations come from an urban upbringing and are not brought up in rural settings where human-elephant relations are common. This has come up in some instances of the animal rights discourse. In a recent petition by an activist to move Happy the elephant to a sanctuary, the zoo in the US reacted, stating that ‘we are forced to defend ourselves against a group that doesn’t know us or the animal in question, who has absolutely no legal standing, and is demanding to take control over the life and future of an elephant that we have known and cared for over 40 years’ (Wright, 7 March 2022). Similarly, when in 2014 the Jallikattu11 contests were banned by the Supreme Court in India after objections from animal rights groups, a farmer said, ‘those who haven't even seen a bull in real life are preaching about animal welfare to people like us who have been living with cattle for generations. This is nonsense.’12

    15Such instances, on one hand, show how my informants interpret knowing an animal by living with it to preside over knowing an animal through an activism discourse. But beyond this, my informants were hinting at a definite non-groundedness of animal rights discourse where people who critique the human-elephant relations are condemned for not having a first-hand understanding of the relationship. This non-groundedness and the globality of the animal rights discourse were also evident in my conversation with Raj where he attributed ‘all these foreign funds’ channelled to animal rights to be responsible for the ‘misinterpretations’. Mann Barua proposes that elephants in such processes get reconfigured as a cosmopolitan category where they are mobilised as a flagship species to generate support for conservation and wildlife (Jalais, 2008; Barua, 2014). Elephants evoke global ecological responsibilities where politics and ethics become a more-than-human endeavour, in and through which, as Latour argues, ‘a vast number of nonhuman entities make humans act’ (Latour, 2004). However, such cosmopolitanism, as my informants suggest, strips elephants of their local specificities and historical embeddedness with humans. Indian historian Guha further notes how such narratives of portraying elephants in captivity as unnatural and torturous have a bearing on how we account for environmental conservation in post-colonial contexts (Guha, 2006), where Western ideals of conservation or the hegemony of Indian elites (Guha, 1989; Rangarajan, 1996) that view elephants as pristine beings of the wild are imposed on local South Asian communities.

    16Although many scholars have hinted at this one-sided sentiment of the animal rights discourse (Lorimer, 2010; Petitt and Brandt-Off, 2022) and the globality of it, I want to complicate Guha’s and Barua’s emphasis on the cosmopolitanism of the conservation discourse as a bigger entity emerging from outside by suggesting that local people too are active participants in the production of these global narratives. One needs to walk down a few steps from Lalita’s home, under the shade of the Peepul tree, to reach Krishnan elephant’s stable. The steps are adorned with the fallen, yellow Peepul leaves. With a 35-degree Celsius heat and a hopeless thin umbrella from Switzerland, the shade of Peepul trees was a respite. Amidst the cacophony of crows and the bird sounds I cannot identify, people who walk by, take a look at the elephant and listen to the sound of the river Kaveri, stands Krishnan elephant swinging his ears. He is managed by mahout Rajan and apprentice Sriram with occasional visits from owner Lalita. I cannot go near as Krishnan is in musth, so I observe their interactions from a distance. The cacophony of sounds, which is otherwise soothing, is a hurdle when it comes to observing them from a distance. Krishnan’s legs were tied tightly as male elephants are ‘aggressive’ during musth, and he had developed a wound from trying to get off the chain. Such wounds, my informants said, are common during musth and require utmost care to avoid them. The musth was coming to an end and Krishnan was slowly being brought back to the usual life involving more human engagement and participation in festivals, and this was done through vocal commands and physical punishment such as beating. It was one such day, and a few people had surrounded to watch the elephant. As I and the people behind me were watching Krishnan, Lalita and Rajan spoke in a hushed voice about a boy behind me who appeared to be taking a video. I looked behind to see that the boy had his phone lifted up. Rajan walked to the boy and asked him what he was up to. The boy showed his phone saying, ‘Nothing, I am just texting’. Although the conversation ended there, Lalita said she was certain that the boy was lying and told apprentice Sriram not to talk about the wound to other young men who visit the Peepul tree as they will possibly share videos or photos of the elephant on social media.

    17This incident illustrates that Lalita and others are aware of how local people appropriate and feed into the animal rights paradigm through social media. Although local people partake in this ‘global’ animal rights discourse through such mundane practices, the intentions behind these practices can be different from that of the animal rights groups. I was told that people may employ the legal apparatus to obstruct a temple festival because they have some kind of enmity or jealousy with any of the stakeholders involved. According to Nidheesh,

    ‘There is a section of people who think that since rich people buy elephants as they have the resources, let them face some trouble. They try to obstruct temple events, saying that we have disregarded the policies on elephant welfare. Sometimes a ritual might require that the elephant needs to be walked during the day. Even if it is a few metres, some people will try to create issues by saying that we did not follow the rules. Rules for elephant welfare are good, but it must also be an accommodation of our rituals.’

    18Although intentions can be different, local people appropriate and co-create the animal rights discourse through such quotidian activities, where the localness of the global, cosmopolitan discourse becomes legible, thus complicating the cosmopolitanism of conservation discourse and going beyond what Barua and Guha conceptualise as a Western or elitist ideal that affects the local communities. Here, diverse intentions and different groups come together to attain their separate ends and, in their interactions, produce a narrative of elephant epistemology that is stripped of its historical and ritual specificities. Such interactions and interconnections also reflect Anna Tsings’ Friction where she explores the work of the universal by moving beyond the traps of global and culturally specific as positioned against each other, but as produced in interconnections (Tsing, 2005).

    Going Beyond ‘Misinterpretations’

    19Although my informants suggested that their relationship with elephants is ‘misinterpreted’ in the popular narratives, many felt that the changing legal apparatus such as the rules that protect elephants from standing in the sun for lengthy periods during festivals is good for the well-being of elephants.13 Nitheesh and Anoop who were aware of the role of the animal rights groups in the implementation of the legal changes appreciated their efforts. In our conversations they also acknowledged that not everything is a misinterpretation and that there are mahouts who beat elephants without fully understanding them, suggesting that the activist narrative of the mistreatment of elephants in captive settings14 is not completely arbitrary.

    20The dissatisfaction with the legal changes was evident in my conversations with Lalita and Rajan. Lalita was not happy with the legal apparatus that made everything procedural, where she had to assemble ‘a thousand documents for anything and everything’. Mahout Rajan was disappointed by the rules that made drunk-driving punitive. Human-elephant conflict encounters are frequent during temple festivals,15 causing damage to humans and property (Joy, 1990; Ajithkumar & Rajeev, 2003), and this has also driven the opposition towards elephant captivity. Many accidents are attributed to the ‘drunken’ state of musth in elephants or when mahouts are intoxicated after the consumption of alcohol (Munster, 2014); they then misread the cues of elephants, causing conflict encounters (Locke, 2015). Nitheesh said that before the new rules, mahouts often got drunk and made mistakes in understanding the elephant, causing the elephants to lose their temper. The drinking habits of the mahouts as a risky issue were also highlighted while I was growing up in Kerala and surfaced substantially during the fieldwork. Mahout Rajan’s response to the legal changes that made drunk-driving punitive sheds further light on this. Rajan is a man in his late 50s, and it was usual for Rajan to share some insights as he walked over to me after the morning work, perhaps feeling bad for all the waiting I did as I couldn’t go near Krishnan in musth. He said, taking out his local cigarette (beedi),

    ‘When I was a young mahout, I could do anything, including getting drunk. Now we are not allowed to carry the elephant in the temple after two shots. During Thrissur pooram (festival) years ago, I got drunk and my mundu (lower garment) flew away. I realised it only when I saw people laughing (laughs)… Now we have to report our name, star16, everything about us. And we have to blow and if the machine beeps…that is the end.’

    21Rajan was not pleased with the legal changes that made drunk-driving punitive. Not only because drinking is claimed as an act to face the fear of handling a giant being, but such drinking practices also shaped the ritualised social production of masculinity where handling an elephant was considered to be a big achievement. Mahouting is a masculinised profession and my informants often pointed out that women don’t and won’t take up such ‘risky and troublesome’ jobs. Once I was proudly proclaiming to a cow herder in Iritty about how I had managed to feed and bathe Shekharan elephant and that the only skill left to learn is how to climb palm trees, to which he said, ‘hayyye (expressing disapproval), you don’t do such difficult jobs, there are men for that!’ My informants’ references to the skills and courage required to handle a giant being suggested a certain (re)presentational trope to which drinking added a ritual quality, and like Jallikattu, a mode of displaying masculinity. The legal apparatus that took away these ritualistic aspects of drinking and made everything procedural for Lalita indicate how my informants reoriented themselves in relation to the legal apparatus.

    22Such instances also demonstrate that the interests of the elephants and that of the human handlers do not always converge, that what is good for elephant welfare might not be favourable to people. Such divergences of human and elephant interests were also reflected in the constant change of mahouts that my informants attributed as a major reason for human-elephant conflict. While mahouts stayed with a single elephant in the past allowing a long-term bond, my informants complained that mahouts change elephants frequently these days. A regular visitor at the Peepul tree platform17 in Iritty once mentioned that ‘when they find a place with a better salary, mahouts leave the existing elephant who will be replaced by another mahout. How would you know anything about the elephant, or the elephant know you in such a short period?’. The young apprentice Sriram overheard us speaking and said ‘there will be love for the elephant initially. But when family troubles occur, we need money. When money is not given on time, mahouts will leave the elephant. If the salary is 1,000 rupees more somewhere, people will want to go there’.

    23Apart from the frequent change of mahouts, the lack of patience among the new mahouts was also attributed to having increased conflict incidents. There was a common narrative among the informants that although the present generation is interested in mahouting, many have lost the patience that is central to this profession. Many point out that the immediate intention of the present generation is to somehow become a mahout, touch the elephant tusk and parade the elephant in temple festivals before giving time for the human and the elephant to understand each other. Mahout Jayaraman hinted at this when he said, ‘You can’t come today and expect to take the elephant tomorrow. We should know the elephant and the elephant know us. We need to build trust’. Such narratives among my informants on the shifts of mahout interests and disapproval of legal changes suggest that the relationship is also an instrumental one, where the interests of elephants and those of handlers do not necessarily converge. And therefore, the activistic/journalistic portrayals of the human-elephant relation are not totally random and stripped of the on-the-ground occurrences as some of my informants claim.

    Notes de bas de page

    1 Malayalam is the spoken language of Kerala and Tamil is the spoken language of Tamil Nadu.

    2 A form of traditional decorative art performed on the ground using rice flour, primarily in South India.

    3 The use and sale of elephant tusk for ornaments was prevalent, a practice which is illegal now given the poaching of elephants for the ivory trade.

    4 Mongabay India, As captive elephants starve, lockdown brings problematic practice to fore, https://india.mongabay.com/2020/05/as-captive-elephants-starve-lockdown-brings-problematic-practice-to-the-fore/ (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    5 India Today, Animal rights activists demand ban on elephant rides, https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/animal-rights-activists-demand-ban-on-elephant-rides-1109047-2017-12-18 (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    6 National Geographic, Wild Indian Elephant Dies Trying to Escape Captivity, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-asian-elephants-captivity-India (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    7 PETA India, HC and SC to Consider Kerala Captive Elephant Plight, https://www.petaindia.com/blog/hc-and-sc-to-consider-kerala-captive-elephant-plight/ (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    8 Mongabay India, As captive elephants starve, lockdown brings problematic practice to fore, https://india.mongabay.com/2020/05/as-captive-elephants-starve-lockdown-brings-problematic-practice-to-the-fore/ (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    9 Brahmin child. In the caste system, brahmins belong to the upper caste.

    10 The phrase is literally translated as “those lentils will not be cooked here”.

    11 Traditional sport/event played with humans and bulls in Tamil Nadu.

    12 BBC, India’s animal rights activists forced to lie low, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40740151 (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    13 According to the recent rule, elephants cannot be paraded or transported during daytime hours (10 am-3 pm).

    14 National Geographic, Wild Indian Elephants Dies Trying to Escape Captivity, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-asian-elephants-captivity-India (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    Mongabay India, As captive elephants starve, lockdown brings problematic practice to fore, https://india.mongabay.com/2020/05/as-captive-elephants-starve-lockdown-brings-problematic-practice-to-the-fore/ (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    India Today, Animal rights activists demand ban on elephant rides, https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/animal-rights-activists-demand-ban-on-elephant-rides-1109047-2017-12-18 (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    15 Indian Express, Elephants runs amok during temple festival in Kerala, stabs mahout to death, https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2020/feb/04/elephant-runs-amok-during-temple-festival-in-kerala-stabs-mahout-to-death-2098945.html (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    16 The date and hour of birth according to Indian astrology.

    17 Peepul trees often have a raised platform built around them, and are a space for resting, praying and social interactions.

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    1 Malayalam is the spoken language of Kerala and Tamil is the spoken language of Tamil Nadu.

    2 A form of traditional decorative art performed on the ground using rice flour, primarily in South India.

    3 The use and sale of elephant tusk for ornaments was prevalent, a practice which is illegal now given the poaching of elephants for the ivory trade.

    4 Mongabay India, As captive elephants starve, lockdown brings problematic practice to fore, https://india.mongabay.com/2020/05/as-captive-elephants-starve-lockdown-brings-problematic-practice-to-the-fore/ (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    5 India Today, Animal rights activists demand ban on elephant rides, https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/animal-rights-activists-demand-ban-on-elephant-rides-1109047-2017-12-18 (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    6 National Geographic, Wild Indian Elephant Dies Trying to Escape Captivity, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-asian-elephants-captivity-India (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    7 PETA India, HC and SC to Consider Kerala Captive Elephant Plight, https://www.petaindia.com/blog/hc-and-sc-to-consider-kerala-captive-elephant-plight/ (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    8 Mongabay India, As captive elephants starve, lockdown brings problematic practice to fore, https://india.mongabay.com/2020/05/as-captive-elephants-starve-lockdown-brings-problematic-practice-to-the-fore/ (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    9 Brahmin child. In the caste system, brahmins belong to the upper caste.

    10 The phrase is literally translated as “those lentils will not be cooked here”.

    11 Traditional sport/event played with humans and bulls in Tamil Nadu.

    12 BBC, India’s animal rights activists forced to lie low, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40740151 (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    13 According to the recent rule, elephants cannot be paraded or transported during daytime hours (10 am-3 pm).

    14 National Geographic, Wild Indian Elephants Dies Trying to Escape Captivity, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-asian-elephants-captivity-India (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    Mongabay India, As captive elephants starve, lockdown brings problematic practice to fore, https://india.mongabay.com/2020/05/as-captive-elephants-starve-lockdown-brings-problematic-practice-to-the-fore/ (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    India Today, Animal rights activists demand ban on elephant rides, https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/animal-rights-activists-demand-ban-on-elephant-rides-1109047-2017-12-18 (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    15 Indian Express, Elephants runs amok during temple festival in Kerala, stabs mahout to death, https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2020/feb/04/elephant-runs-amok-during-temple-festival-in-kerala-stabs-mahout-to-death-2098945.html (accessed on 8 March 2023).

    16 The date and hour of birth according to Indian astrology.

    17 Peepul trees often have a raised platform built around them, and are a space for resting, praying and social interactions.

    Back Then It Was Culture, Now It Is Animal Torture

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    Karippal, A. (2023). Staying with the ‘Trouble’: Reactions to Animal Rights Discourse and Changing Legal Apparatus . In Back Then It Was Culture, Now It Is Animal Torture. Genève: Graduate Institute Publications. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.iheid.9041
    Karippal, Anu. « Staying With the ‘Trouble’: Reactions to Animal Rights Discourse and Changing Legal Apparatus  ». In Back Then It Was Culture, Now It Is Animal Torture. Genève: Graduate Institute Publications, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.iheid.9041.
    Karippal, Anu. « Staying With the ‘Trouble’: Reactions to Animal Rights Discourse and Changing Legal Apparatus  ». Back Then It Was Culture, Now It Is Animal Torture, Graduate Institute Publications, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.iheid.9041.

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    Karippal, A. (2023). Back Then It Was Culture, Now It Is Animal Torture. Genève: Graduate Institute Publications. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.iheid.9020
    Karippal, Anu. Back Then It Was Culture, Now It Is Animal Torture. Genève: Graduate Institute Publications, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.iheid.9020.
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