Where Does Nature End and Culture Begin? The Cultural Elephant
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1Although ‘misinterpretations’ of the human-elephant relations were not always arbitrary and my informants hinted at the dwindling human-elephant relations, the fear of the activist discourse that oversimplifies the bond as a relation of torture was palpable, however complex this relation is with its pitfalls. This chapter looks at how my informants respond to the ethicality of elephant captivity within the wild-domesticated, nature-culture framework and how their attributions to the sociocultural dimensions of elephant behaviour complicate these strict binary divisions.
2The nature of communication was traditionally held to be linguistic (Mead, 1962) and as nonhumans do not verbally report to us on their experience, there was scepticism regarding animal emotions (Titon, 2021; Birch, 2022; Waal and Andrews, 2022). Such limits of communication are hinted at when Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote ‘[n]o situation seems more tragic, more offensive to heart and mind, than that of a humanity coexisting and sharing the joys of a planet with other living species yet being unable to communicate with them’ (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, 1991). These distinctions defined by language concurrently enabled the idea of human exceptionalism, the Cartesian binary of man and animal (Derrida, 2003; Latour, 2005), and with it the idea of pristine nature out there and culture as the domain of the human (Strathern, 1980). With the more-than-human turn in social sciences, scholars are questioning the notion of human exceptionalism, bringing out the complexities of a shared world and historically situated interspecies relationships (Fuentes 2013; Govindrajan 2015; Lorimer, Hodgetts and Barua 2017; Mathur 2021). Donna Haraway’s naturecultures (2003) approach and study of companion species (2008) are insightful in analysing the inseparability of ecological relationships from the social and challenging the notion that views human interventions such as domestication as non-natural behaviour.
3This chapter contributes to this exciting work on human-nonhuman proximal relations. The first section looks at how my informants question the ‘wildness’ attached to elephants by making comparisons to other companion species and further explores how the nature-culture, wild-domesticated binaries begin to dissolve in the human-elephant relations in Kerala. The second section delves into the cultural attributions my informants make in distinguishing the elephants caught in Kerala forests from the elephants caught in forests of North India. I show that such character attributions on the one hand, reflect an extension of anthropomorphic geographical otherisation to elephants (Dervin, 2015), but on the other hand, show how people who closely live with elephants pay attention to the regional differences in elephant behaviour and the role of socialisation.
Why Don’t You Question the Captivity of Cows and Dogs?
4Within the scholarly-activistic production of elephants as truly belonging in the world, holding elephants in captivity is something that my informants reflected upon. Although my informants felt bad that the elephants had to be tied down, for them it was a necessity as elephants are giant beings that increase the risk of danger if allowed to roam freely in human-dominated spaces. Beyond this, they challenged my questioning of holding elephants in captivity by invoking parallels with other companion species. Lalita said, ‘We tie animals like goats, cows, and dogs. Do we question it? We have to tie the ones that have to be tied. The ones that can be left untied must be left untied. Wild elephants can roam freely in the wild but tamed ones need to follow rules like humans.’ This way of rationalisation by invoking the human relation with other animals was dominant in other interactions. Nitheesh, a lawyer by profession, reflected on both sides of the debate,
‘If you ask me about elephant captivity, it sounds like a vegetarian-nonvegetarian debate. Vegetarians say it is not right to kill hens, but without killing them we cannot eat chicken. Hens have the right to live, why are we catching them, why are we killing them – there is no single answer if you ask me such questions. For a vegetarian, what a non-vegetarian does will be wrong, but non-vegetarians can ask - why do you pluck plants, they have a life too – and how do you answer such a question? All living beings have life. If so, we cannot eat tubers or fruits. This can only open a debate.’
5Such differentiations also came up in my conversations with the young girls at the hostel where I stayed:
Girl 1: Isn’t it actually very sad, that these elephants are tied in chains?
Girl 2: What about your dog that you keep in chains and inside your house?
Girl 1: But we give them love.
Girl 2: So do the mahouts and the owners.
6My informants are drawing important parallels that challenge us to rethink the different modes through which humans interact with other species, pointing at an ethical conundrum whereby humans treat different animals differently. Human understandings of affection and utility shaped how my informants interpreted their relations with dogs and elephants. Human-dog relations are prevalent, making them familiar and hence knowable, unlike the rare human-elephant relations. As human-animal studies scholars show, classifications are influenced by sentience, affect, and utility where certain kinds of animals are typically treated better than others, which also determines which companion species relations are justified (Herzog, 2010; Hovorka, 2019).
7Beyond the questions of affection and utility, and the absurdity of human moral puzzles as Nitheesh points out, the captivity here becomes a matter of the contested wild-domestic divide. It is important to note that, unlike other companion species, elephants are not biologically domesticated for preferred traits, which could also suggest the ‘wildness’ attached to elephants over other companion species. However, the historical relations between humans and elephants in India where elephants have been used for wars, labour and religious purposes through taming practices cannot be ignored. Quoting Arthashastra, the ancient Sanskrit manual of statecraft, which explains elephant capture and active reservation of elephant habitats, Locke suggests that the human hand is not insignificant in shaping the ranging behaviour of elephants we call ‘wild’ and ‘free-roaming’ (Locke, 2016). The parallel mistreatment of biologically domesticated cows despite their avowed sacred status in India is a case in point in understanding this divide that shapes different ethical obligations. Left to scavenge in urban areas, domestic cows often come to a slow and painful end as they eat plastic-infested waste and other detritus.1 Cows are understood to be socially intelligent but there are certain animals that particularly draw the attention of animal rights discourses and this appears to work on the threshold of an assumed binary between ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ animals. The romanticised imaginaries of elephants in the wild channelled by the news, documentaries and other media play out in these hierarchical values placed on elephants. The assumed ‘wild’ and therefore ‘more natural’ status of elephants invites greater scrutiny and more calls for protection than animals inhabiting the realm of domestic culture.
8Marilyn Strathern brings out the tensions between the strict binaries of nature and culture when she writes that the culture/nature distinction is itself a product of culture (Strathern, 1980). Donna Haraway builds on such tensions in her book Companion Species when she states:
‘Some radical animal people are critical of any human training of another critter. What I see as polite manners and beautiful skill acquired by the dogs I know best, they regard as strong evidence of excessive human control and a sign of the degradation of domestic animals… Karen Pryor and other trainers of so-called wild animals in captivity, such as dolphins and tigers, have been accused either of ruining them by introducing nonnaturalistic behaviours’ (Haraway, 2008).
9Following Strathern and Haraway, this then begs the question: What remains of nature when nature is made culture? Can we see an animal in the so-called domestic sphere as an entity in captivity or as another example of domesticated companion species? The binary divisions of Wild vs. Captive, Nature vs. Culture begin to dissolve in the sphere of elephant ownership, where despite the pecuniary outcomes and windfalls, the human-elephant relation is an intimate companionship.
Elephants from North India ‘Cheat’
10As discussed in the last section, culture was for the longest time understood to be the domain of the human. Scholars have now not only demystified the idea of ‘pristine nature’ (Strathern, 1980), showing that humans and nonhumans have co-evolved, but have also demonstrated that cultural knowledge, in the sense of socially acquired and transmitted skills, is not unique to humans (Locke, 2011; Fuentes, 2013). My informants’ interpretations of the behaviour of wild elephants and captive elephants echoed an understanding of these forms of socially acquired skills. A successful human-elephant bond in itself evidenced that elephants can approximate the semantic intentions behind human linguistic commands and gestures. As mahout Rajan says, ‘our sound and tone are picked up by the elephant. Palakkad elephants have Palakkad tongue.’ According to my informants, elephants could understand the different styles of Malayalam2 without much prodding or punishment, indicating that the response to a vocal command is not merely a mechanical response to disciplining strategies, but that elephants seem to approximate meaning when a similar sounding, yet new word is introduced.
11Apart from the skills of understanding the intention behind linguistic commands and gestures, elephants were understood to exhibit regionally specific behaviours. Mahouts found elephants caught in Kerala forests to be ‘smarter’ than the elephants caught in North Indian forests which they attributed to the proximate human-elephant interactions in the Western ghats.
‘The elephants in the forests here (Kerala) live closely with humans and hence they constantly check for pits with the trunk or press the mud down to see if there is a pit underneath. Bihar elephants are not that smart, we make them smart after they come here. Those elephants don’t know anything, simply they follow. Elephants here are intelligent because they know about the people here. Bihar elephants are mostly in the forest, they don’t know people’s nature.’ – Rajan.
12As Western Ghats is biodiverse, animals live in proximate relations with humans; such close interaction has led elephants in Kerala to develop strategies to circumvent the human strategies of trapping elephants while elephants from North India don’t engage frequently with humans and hence haven’t adapted to human ways. Elephant behaviours were thus understood to significantly change when they lived in proximity with humans. When I recounted this to my aunt, she had an interesting encounter to share:
‘We were going to my sister’s house in Wayanad. Suddenly there was an elephant on the road, it wasn’t crossing the road but just standing there, blocking the road. We were very scared; the elephant was very close to us. It was a wild elephant and if it charged at us, that would be the end. Many people tried to shoo the elephant away, but it was not moving. But the moment the green-coloured forest jeep approached; the elephant started walking to the forest. The elephant was so smart, he knew which colour the forest jeep was.’
13Studies also show such adaptive behaviours of both humans and elephants due to frequent human-elephant conflict encounters in Wayanad where farmers point out that elephants quickly learn to circumvent all the human strategies and continue to enter the crop fields (Munster, 2016).
14It was in the Punnathur elephant fort that I came across an interesting dimension to this geographical differentiation regarding captive elephants. As many of the captive elephants at the fort were from North Indian forests, I asked a mahout if he can differentiate between them. Besides the physical differences, the mahout said that Bihari elephants ‘cheat’. I was amused at the association of the word cheat with elephants as elephants are known to be gentle, loving beings. When I asked how they cheat, he said:
‘What is the meaning of cheat? Backstabbing. Bihari elephants do that. They are brought up in a different discipline. They love us, but they might take anger first on the mahout. But Kerala elephants protect the mahouts, they give signal with trunk to keep us away and then take the anger out on the rest of the people.’
15I discussed this anecdote with mahout Satheeshan to know if this is something mahouts have heard from others or something they experienced, as mundane communicative practices and interactional routines are social fields in and through which sociocultural attributions are perpetrated (Elyachar, 2010; Rumsey, 2010).
‘If the elephant doesn’t like the touch coming from someone, it might take it on the mahout. Bihari elephants are quick in reacting and do not differentiate between mahout and the rest when angry. That is the way of the elephant. I have heard of such stories and have also seen them. Elephants caught in Kerala hit people with the tail or throw a palm branch before fully losing their temper. That gives us time to move aside.’ – Satheeshan.
16The mahouts at the fort interpreted the differences between North Indian elephants as cheating and Kerala elephants as well-mannered (maryaadhakkar) to be agential and intentional, while Satheeshan construes it as behavioural differences, by pointing out the spontaneity of North Indian elephants and the slowness of South Indian elephants. As elephants do not verbally tell us about their intentions, whether words such as ‘cheating’ and ‘protecting’ are anthropomorphic values mahouts attach to the ways of being (reethi) of elephants is uncertain.
17These regional distinctions, however, could be seen as an instance of anthropomorphising, extending the human geographical otherisation to nonhumans. The geographical distinctions of moral ascriptions are common where East-West, Mountain-Valley distinctions are evoked by communities in organising everyday life (Yanagisako, 2002; Dervin, 2015; Gal and Irvin, 2019). The semiotic logic of comparison is ubiquitous in everyday activity where differentiation depends on making comparisons and is authorised by regimes of value where in order to exist, one needs to make sense of other people as much as others make sense of us (Dervin, 2015; Gal and Irvin, 2019). This is apparent in how my informants address elephants caught in Kerala forests as nattana (elephants belonging to our land) while elephants caught in Bihar, Assam or Andaman are generally addressed as Bihari or Assami. Such forms of otherisation to distinguish Kerala (South India) from the North Indian states are reminiscent of a similar approach where all migrant labourers from North India are either termed as Bengalis or Biharis by the people of Kerala, terms which are now considered derogatory in the public sphere. This regional pride and sense of superiority of Kerala elephants was further manifest when the mahout at the elephant fort said, ‘just look at the variety of bananas we have in Kerala. They have a special charm and taste. North Indians have just one kind of banana. Anything that is native to our land has its beauty, and it is the same with elephants.’
18Some attributed the behavioural differences to the disciplinary strategies in North Indian states (although nobody was clear on how the disciplining strategies are different), while others suggested that the character of an elephant depends on the character of the forest they come from. Elephant photographer Anoop confirmed such geographical distinctions: ‘I cannot prove it to you theoretically, but I have often heard that elephants from different forests show different character.’ Reasons behind such nuances between character and place were hard to pin down although my informants found distinct patterns in elephant behaviour. Whether the nature of the discipline or the nature of the forest, it visibly shaped how the elephant and humans interacted with each other. Gibson’s theory of affordances suggests that every being interacts with the World, modifying it and it modifying the being (Gibson, 1977; Ingold, 2007; Titon, 2021). Ecological psychology recognises the role of the environment in the development of a being and these attributions of geographical differences in elephant behaviour, beyond an instance of stereotypical otherisation, indicate how animals and the world co-evolve (Costall, 2001). These geographical differences in behaviour further explain the situatedness and intersubjectivity of nonhuman species (Csordas, 1994) and how a shared environment changes living beings in distinct ways, further destabilising strict nature-culture binaries.
19The subtle ways through which the mahouts attended to these patterns of behavioural distinctions suggest that the enmeshed nature of this interspecies relationship needs to be fleshed out more and shown to be a lot more complex than animal rights activism or legal discourse can adequately understand, explain, and represent. The anxieties my interlocutors express regarding the ‘elephant belongs to the wild’ narrative is profound and produced in relation to a certain legal and activistic framing of human-animal relationality that is understood to be limited in understanding what it is like to live intimately with ‘other’.
Notes de bas de page
1 Independent, Inside India’s plastic cows; How sacred animals are left to line their stomachs with polythene, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-delhi-plastic-cows-shelters-bjp-modi-gaushala-a8794756.html (accessed on 8 March 2023).
2 There are regional distinctions in spoken Malayalam.
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