Chapter 5. War elephants and forest people
p. 113-122
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Revisiting the role of forest people
1In my book Elephants and Kings, I elicited the main features of a deep history of war elephants in India from the time of the early agrarian civilizations and the logic of patterns that accompanied its spread to the Middle East and North Africa, Southeast Asia and the southwest of China (Trautmann, 2015). The picture that emerged has areas that need clarification, but the substance of it is clear enough.
2I revisit here my argument that the war elephant was invented in North India, in association with kingship. In this chapter, inspired by the ethnography of Nicolas Lainé, I should like to reexamine the role in this process of what the ancient Indians call “forest people” and the possibility of their possessing a parallel tradition of elephant capture and use, as he suggests (Lainé, 2018; 2020).
3There is no evidence of the war elephant anywhere in the world before the late Vedic period, at or after 1000 BCE; and by 500 BCE, or slightly after, the time horizon of the life of the Buddha, according to the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism, the war elephant had been normalized as an institution of North Indian states. With this new leg of the army, it now goes upon the four legs of foot, horse, chariot and elephant; it is called the chatur-anga-bala or four-legged-army. The Greek writer Ctesias (5th century BCE) showed that the Indian war elephant was known to the Persian empire of his time. He argues that India had not been conquered by foreigners because of the war elephant, confirming thereby its Indian origin (Nichols, 2013).
4Although there is no evidence of the war elephant prior to that time, kings ruling the early agrarian civilizations of the Old World had been powerfully drawn to elephants as symbols of their own preeminence. The attraction of elephants as symbolic capital for early kings was not, however, beneficial to the elephants. Kings engaged in hunts of elephants (Assyria and Mesopotamia, Egypt, China), sacrifices of elephants for the funerals of kings (predynastic Egypt), taking of young elephants in tribute (Assyria, Egypt), and capture of young elephants for display in the royal capital (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Civilization). There is, however, no good evidence of the riding of captive elephants, let alone their use in war, until the invention of the war elephant by kings of India. From North India, the institution spread to South India; the Hellenistic kingdoms of Syria (Seleucids) and Egypt (Ptolemies), Carthage, the Indianising kingdoms of Southeast Asia, and Yunnan in China (Figure 1).
5The invention of the war elephant abruptly changed the effect of humans (more especially kings) upon elephants, from deleterious to protective. The early agrarian civilizations had increased human pressure upon elephants, and the spread of intensive agriculture into the forest habitat of elephants afforded loci for conflict through elephant crop-raiding, which impinged upon the interests of kings, whose wealth derived largely from farmers. But once Indians began to capture and train elephants for warfare, in the large kingdoms that could afford the expense of upkeep, wild elephants were revalued as a living military store, while war elephants became a critical military asset.
6The logic of this revaluation was given in the fact that the elephant is the largest terrestrial animal in our time and does not reach maturity, and usefulness in war, until the age of twenty, according to the Arthashastra (KA 2.31.9.), whence it is best left to feed itself and be captured and domesticated from the wild not once for all time, but one by one through the ages. By these means, the Indian kingdom came to be attached to its opposite, the elephant forest. The royal hunt, by the new logic, was reconfigured as a hunt from atop elephants, for animals other than elephants; and the killing of elephants for food and ivory by forest people was punished by death. The effects were profound. In Syria and China, where the war elephant was not taken up, elephants were hunted to extinction; while wild Asian elephants persist today in places which formerly had war elephants and thus protected wild elephants, namely (from most to least numerous today), India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Bhutan, Bangladesh, China (i.e. Yunnan), Vietnam, and Nepal (Sukumar, 2011: 319; Trautmann, 2015).
7Those who are often called tribal people are, in the ancient Indian texts, regularly identified with the forest, as “forest people” (atavi, vanacara). As seen from the vantage of the emerging kingdoms, such people were not conceptualized in relation to a certain kind of social system, toward which the word “tribe” gestures, but an environment, specifically the forest; and that environment was the one preferred by elephants.
8What was the effect upon forest people of the world created by Indian kings with elephants, a world governed by a new logic surrounding the production of war elephants out of wild ones by the large kingdoms? The effect we can readily identify is the royal protection of elephants, which would have fallen heavily upon hunters among forest people, especially those hunting elephants for food and for ivory. Forest people would have been harmed by the revaluation of elephants and the royal ban on elephant hunting.
9Paradoxically, royal protection of wild elephants in the royal elephant forest against hunters rested to a significant degree upon forest people employed by the king, if we consult the Arthashastra on the matter. The king is advised to establish an elephant forest at the frontier, guarded by forest people and with the help of elephant-forest wardens, keeping under surveillance the boundaries, entrances and exits. The overall objective is to thwart the hunting of wild elephants for food or ivory:
“They should put to death anyone who kills an elephant. Anyone who brings the two tusks of an elephant that has died naturally shall receive a reward of four and a quarter panas”(KA 2.2.6 and 8-9).
10Forest people and others keep track of elephant demographics and movements on a regular basis for the making of a written record:
“The elephant-forest wardens, assisted by elephant keepers, foot chainers, border guards, forest people, and attendants—their body odors masked by rubbing elephant urine and dung, camouflaged with branches of Bhallataki-tree, and moving about with five or seven female elephants as lures—should find out the size of the elephant herds by means of clues provided by where they sleep, their footprints and dung, and the damage they have done to river banks” (KA 2.2.7).
11When the king came to designate an elephant forest, we may take it that forest people already inhabited the same forests. Some of them were drawn into the royal service by the proffer of a wage to help guard the wild elephants against hunters, who may be forest people themselves. Those wages would have been at the lowest end of the scale of wages and salaries, which the Arthashastra gives in some detail. For the overseers of the elephant corps and of the elephant forest, the pay is 4,000 panas; for the elephant trainer, 2,000 panas; and for the guards, 60 panas (KA 5.3.11-12, 17.).
12This is about as much as the Arthashastra says about forest people specifically. They are not mentioned as such in other roles, which are discussed by function rather than ethnic composition, and we are left to wonder in which of these roles forest people would have been employed. In practice, many of these roles may have been filled by forest people, especially those of mahouts (drivers), who are listed among the lowly-paid even though their skills are essential and, deprived of which in battle, turns a war elephant into a menace to his own side. The trainer is paid distinctly more, and here, too, we may suppose at least some of these would be forest people, if only because they appear as trainers, notably in Assam and other places, in recent times (KA 5.3.12; Stracey, 1963). It would be reasonable to suppose that many of these roles were performed by royal servants recruited both from forest people and villagers.
13The testimony of the Mahabharata has a different character in that it speaks of named ethnicities (as distinct from the generic, nameless forest people of the Arthashastra, in an unnamed state in an undesignated region of India). Forest people are among the elephant drivers and fighters from elephant back, which shows that military roles as distinct from care-and-management staff will also have been filled in part by forest people. These include Kiratas and Nishadas, Easterners (Prachyas) and Southerners (Dakshinatyas), and Barbarians (Mlecchas) (Mbh. 8.17.1-4; Trautmann, 2015).
14The picture so far, sparse as it is, implies that individuals among forest people took up service at a wage from kingdoms. It is not much of a leap to suppose that those positions were passed on through family lineages so that there grew up among forest people (as among non-forest people) lineages of royal servants who learned their skills through unpaid apprenticeships to their fathers or uncles, since it is a common pattern in India for skilled workers and their knowledge to be organized in that way. Such lineages are shown by Piers Locke among the Tharu elephant men at Chitwan in Nepal, under the royal family until very recently, whose sons and nephews, serving as apprentices in the elephant camp, had food (dal-bhat) and lodging for free, but at no pay, while they learned the trade (Locke, 2006). The unwritten practical knowledge that was transmitted in this way from one generation to the next continued in this mode over the three-thousand-year history of the war elephant.
15Besides the mahout, then, and also the trainer, forest people probably occupied roles in the catching of wild elephants for training, too, again because we find them in such roles in recent times. This is abundantly the case in Assam, in its larger boundaries under the British and in the early days of Indian independence, but including now a much-reduced state of Assam, plus Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and the Sylhet District of Bangladesh (S. S. Bist in Milroy, 2002). Here, under the mela shikar form of capture by lassoing, the highly skilled role of phandi or lassoer, wielding the phand or lasso, is above all in the hands of forest people such as the Khamti, according to Stracey, whose methods have been the object of the ethnographic study of Nicolas Lainé (Lainé, 2020). These people, linguistically related to the Shans of Myanmar, raise interesting questions about the origin and spread of the mela shikar form of capture. As Stracey notes, Assam in the valley of the Brahmaputra River is not only a prime location for wild elephants and elephant capture for trade, but it is a corridor of connection between two worlds constructed with elephants—India and Southeast Asia—along which techniques of elephant capture, training and management could move from India to Southeast Asia, or from Southeast Asia to India. The Ahom kings who ruled Assam for several centuries were a war-elephant-using people, linguistically related to the Shans of Southeast Asia, who will perhaps have brought some elephant-handling techniques with them; although the text of elephant science or gaja-shastra is attributed to them, the Hastividyarnava appears to be well within the tradition of such texts in India.
16However that may be, it is certain that forest people were regularly involved in the most skilled aspect of mela shikar in the Assam of recent times; most skilled because the lasso was thrown while the phandi’s trained elephant was chasing after the wild elephant target at speed, and often through forest with all the hazards that posed for a phandi trying to throw the lasso while trying not to be knocked off his mount by the branches of trees. Dangerous, too, to the target elephant, who could be strangled by the noose if it were not checked by a wooden peg quickly put through the rope at the right point, to stop the noose from closing tight around the elephant’s neck.
17Thus the roles of forest people can be expanded from the cryptic statements of the Arthashastra to include tracking and protecting wild elephants, serving as driver or mahout, and in operations of capture and as trainer after capture. It is likely that in all these roles forest people formed lineages of specialized knowledge and its transmission. But in all truth, these would not be massive formations involving large numbers of forest people, but some few specific lineages of them, though the practical knowledge of which they were the custodians and the embodiment was critical to making a certain kind of world with elephants.
18It is apparent from what I have said so far, I hope, that the deep history of the war elephant can be greatly enriched by attention to ethnographies of elephant-involved human groups in the present, illustrated here by the work of Locke and Lainé, and bringing it into relation with ancient and medieval sources of history, that is, through a collaboration of history and anthropology, the one working upon the past but reaching forward in time, the other working in the present but reaching back in time for connections (Locke, 2006 ; Lainé, 2020).
19Because of the long continuities of practice over the three-thousand-year duration of the war elephant signalled by such examples, we can be confident a collaboration between (ancient) history and (present-day) anthropology can be successful in extending our knowledge of the deep history of the world made with elephants in India and Southeast Asia. This may give us reason to ask what may have been the role of forest people, if any, in the invention of the war elephant.
The contribution of forest people
20When I wrote my book, it was my belief that the war elephant was invented but once and that it was invented in India and spread elsewhere, including the very receptive region of Southeast Asia. My reasons were several. I believed the war elephant needed a state society of a kind afforded by the adoption of agriculture, sustaining a large army, and capable of organising the complex teams of specialists to capture, train, feed and otherwise manage and care for the health of elephants. I supposed that such teams included forest people as the Arthashastra attests, but were essentially formations of kingdoms of ancient North India. That states were essential seems to be proven by the emergence of the war elephant in Southeast Asia in connection with the first kingdoms there in the 1st century CE. The widespread use of such tools as the ankusha, the two-pointed hook for guiding and restraining the war elephant, is a sign of the once-only, state-sponsored invention of the war elephant and its spread from a centre in North India. Forest people, having political formations at a smaller scale, do not seem to be candidates for the invention of the war elephant.
21We need also to consider the prior domestication of the large farm animals, including cattle, sheep and goats, plus the horse, which was largely confined to military use drawing chariots under yoke, on the part of Indo-Aryan speaking peoples closely related to the Iranian peoples, also associated with horse breeding. The mastery of practices needed to manage these large domestic animals must have been an essential precursor of the invention of the war elephant. This is another reason to look to the early agrarian states as the locus of the invention of the war elephant. A final reason would be the movement of such states from horse country in the Indus valley, eastward into the elephant-populated monsoon forests of the Ganga valley, which is the likely place of the invention.
22However, reading Lainé’s ethnography of the Khamti (Lainé, 2020) has made me want to keep an open mind about the contribution of forest people to the invention of the war elephant. His work shows a non-war-related practice of capturing, training and employing elephants in small-scale timber extraction, which has a profile quite different from that of the war elephant, in that wild elephants are captured singly by mela shikar, and they are captured young, at an age when they are more tractable, not offshoots of the war-elephant complex, he suggests, but a second, parallel tradition of elephant management (Lainé, 2018). To be sure, the international trade in tropical hardwoods is a formation of the colonial era, not of ancient times, so the evidence needs further examination. Still, we see here a pattern of practice independent of the war elephant, one which does not depend upon a state.
23One point of attack is suggested by the splendid book of P. D. Stracey, Elephant Gold, written from the experience gained during a long career in the capture of elephants for the government of Assam (Stracey, 1963). Stracey’s book points out that Assam and the valley of the Brahmaputra River is a corridor connecting India and mainland Southeast Asia and that beliefs and techniques about elephants have moved in both directions across this space. He gives us a survey of the various methods of capture in India and Southeast Asia, presenting it as a historical geography combining knowledge of current methods with some references to ancient sources, notably Megasthenes. This is a sketch, but a very good one, on which we might work. Perhaps a place to start would be the catching practice of mela shikar. It is a method that combines simplicity (capture of a single elephant at a time) and great skill and courage (lassoing); it is found both in India and in Southeast Asia; it is associated with forest people; it focuses not upon large male tuskers to be trained for war, but younger, smaller elephants for riding and work. Possibly the Stracey historical geography of methods of elephant capture could be a starting point for a collaboration between sources, both ethnographic and historical.
24It is far too early to say whether the kind of collaboration proposed can answer the questions I have posed, but at this point, it seems a good prospect. To be sure, the first domestication of farm animals and war horses is only partly knowable in the absence of much direct evidence; there is no reason why the invention of the war elephant should be any different. Still, the evidence we have makes it probable that forest people were present at the creation and will have had pertinent knowledge of elephants that would have made them essential to the invention of the war elephant. It is possible they even had their own practices of capture and training of elephants.
Bibliographie
Ancient and Medieval sources
Arthaśāstra (KA)
Kangle R. P. (ed.), 1969 ‒ The Kaut.ilīya Arthaśāstra. Bombay, University of Bombay.
Olivelle P., 2013 ‒ King, Governance, and law in ancient India: Kaut.ilīya’s Arthaśāstra: a new annotated translation. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 753 p.
Ctesias
Nichols A., 2013 ‒ Ctesias on India (Introduction, Translation and Commentary). London, Bloomsbury, 192 p.
Hastividyarnava
Barkath S., 1976 ‒ Hastividyārn.ava, ed. and tr. Pratap Chandra Choudhury. Gauhati, Assam Publications Board, 266 p.
Mahābhārata (Mbh.)
Sukthankar V. S. (ed.), 1944 ‒ Mahābhārata: critical edition 1933-1971. Poona, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.
Modern sources
Lainé N., 2018 ‒ Thomas Trautmann 2015. Elephants and Kings. An Environmental History. Péninsule, 75 (2): 203-209.
Lainé N., 2020 ‒ Living and working with giants: a multispecies ethnography of the Khamti and elephants in Northeast India. Paris, Publications Scientifiques du Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, 272 p. https://doi.org/10.5852/nes02
Locke, P., 2006 ‒ History, practice, identity: an institutional ethnography of elephant handlers in Chitwan, Nepal. PhD thesis dissertation, University of Canterbury, 359 p.
Milroy A. J. W., 2002 [1922] ‒ Management of elephants in captivity. Ed. S. S. Bist. Dehradun, Natraj Publishers, 160 p.
Stracey P. D., 1963 ‒ Elephant gold. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 225 p.
Sukumar R., 2011 ‒ The story of Asia’s elephants. Mumbai, Marg Foudation, 300 p.
Trautmann T. R., 2015 ‒ Elephants and kings: an environmental history. Chicago, Chicago University Press, 372 p.
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