Musth beyond biological and management frameworks

1I had not visited the private elephant camp for two weeks. I stood with Bharat, a senior mahout, at a clearing at the bottom of a forested hill, waiting for the others to bring four Asian elephants down from where they were tethered the night before. As per our usual routine, we would then shepherd them among the trees and bamboo as they fed and socialised until the end of the day. The younger female, Rohila, was the first to descend. As I often did, I stood along the path and made myself available for her to extend me a curious trunk and cursory sniff. Next to arrive was Babul, a bulky bull with tusks. However, as he approached, Bharat gestured that I should step back. “Babul gorom hoise”—that is, “Babul has entered musth”. Understanding what this meant, I stepped back five or so metres to remain out of Babul’s reach, but to my surprise, Bharat was unsatisfied and asked that I step back at least twice this distance. Babul sauntered down the path, a slow, heavy, confident swagger, breathing deeply and spitting saliva through his trunk. Temporin streamed down the sides of his face, leaving long dark traces on his grey, wrinkled skin. His mahout Oupe followed alongside, continuously tapping his hind leg with a kanabari (a fashioned bamboo stick with a sharp end) while rhythmically repeating an encouraging command of “aget, aget, aget, aget” (“forward, forward…”). As Babul passed, he paused and briefly directed his attention towards me, ears boldly extended. I was taken aback. Even at this distance, he was still proximally sensitive to and agitated by my presence. I was aware of the elephant’s highly charged, personal space, which I had to respect. Babul appeared, in this moment, a different elephant than the one I had become familiar with over the past few months.

2Musth in Asian elephants is commonly defined as a temporary change in post-pubertal bulls. Brown and colleagues describe it as a “physical and behavioural manifestation of physiological changes” (Brown et al., 2020: 60) that includes temporal gland swelling and secretion, urine dribbling, and elevated testosterone. In a wild setting, musth is associated with changes in intraspecies communication, dominance hierarchies between males, and the facilitation of sexual relations (Ladue et al., 2021; Sukumar, 2003). Musth bulls range more widely and contact a broader environment (Keerthipriya et al., 2020). In a captive setting, musth has been typically framed as a “management” problem (Duer et al., 2016; Santiapillai et al., 2011). Captive bulls during this period are represented as being aggressive and non-responsive to commands. Management frameworks focus on implementing the best and ethical measures to control the bull and mitigate injuries to themselves, other elephants, and human handlers. These techniques include isolation and physical or chemical restraint (Brown et al., 2020).

3This chapter explores musth in the captive context. Over an 18-month period between 2012 and 2015, I regularly conducted participant observation with a small group of humans and elephants living and working in Kamrup district, Assam, India. This group constitutes what Dominique Lestel calls a hybrid community: an assemblage of human and nonhuman beings whose lives become interconnected and organised around shared practices and environments (Lestel, 2014). The analysis of Babul’s musth will draw on ethnographic observations and conversations made while conducting fieldwork with this human-elephant community during early 2013. Aimed at a multidisciplinary audience of elephant researchers, this chapter will represent and conceptualise the social register through which my interlocutors spoke about the interspecies relationship and the effects of musth. I will examine how Babul, in the grip of this temporary condition, shaped relationships with and between others in his proximity, both elephant and non-elephant (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Oupe and Babul.

4Musth will not be analysed as a management problem to be controlled, nor reduced to a set of biological and behavioural changes in an individual elephant. Instead, musth will be examined as a relational phenomenon. At the level of the dyad, musth is a condition temporarily modifying how the musth bull and other nonhuman or human beings mutually interact. At the group level, musth is a period of temporary disruption to routine interactions and reconfiguration of the broader social dynamics of the hybrid community. In addition to framing musth primarily through social changes, this paper extends the scientific ana-lysis of musth—typically embedded within intraspecies interactions—to include an examination of interspecies relations as well. Further, I frame biological and social processes as interconnected in musth and conceptualise the musth state as a biosocial event.

5The human-nonhuman community I worked with was idiosyncratic, composed of members with different social, political, and biological histories, and cannot be defined as a homogenous “Assamese” cultural system. The nine mahouts were from minority Rabha and Boro ethnic communities in Assam, most originating near the town of Chaygaon, Kamrup. This area has developed unique elephant cultures under the patronage of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial regimes. Kaushik Barua, the mahout’s Assamese employer, the elephants’ custodian (“one cannot own a god,” Barua once said), and camp manager, is a success-ful businessman and identifies with a collective of self-proclaimed traditional elephant catching/keeping families who consider these nonhuman beings as extensions of their household. The gharasiya hati (“domestic elephants” in the social, not biological sense) were caught, trained, and worked (except the domestic born, Rohila) under different owners and mahouts across Northeast India. Relationships between the actors that constitute this community always included tools (i.e., chains and kanabari), which are necessary for mediating human-elephant interactions. Barua’s resources permitted him to employ and house mahouts on a property at the edge of a forest, where he could keep his elephants. This forest is also home to an estimated eighty to one hundred wild elephants and one of the few remaining forests in a now highly-urbanised area. This environment was essential for the specific form that human-elephant relations take in this chapter. The hybrid community, with the mahout-tool-elephant relation at its centre, has been reproduced across South and Southeast Asia for four millennia. Instantiations of this assemblage express some historical continuity yet vary according to ecological, political, and cultural context (Trautmann, 2015). 21st-century variations include interspecies teams illegally hauling timber, manifestations of Ganesh living at temples, and elephants and their mahouts labouring in tourist camps. The concept of a human-elephant community is not limited to mahoutship. It can extend to sanctuaries and zoos in the United States, for example, where people and elephants intimately co-shape each other’s lives.

6In this chapter, I build on anthropological research that uses the hybrid community concept to examine mahout-elephant relations in South Asia. Nicolas Lainé’s anthropology of a minority ethnic, elephant-keeping community in Northeast India, analyses collaborative interspecies labour and a more-than-human society in which wild elephants and forest and village spirits also participate (Lainé, 2018; Lainé, 2020). Piers Locke explores elephants as multifaceted beings (persons, animals, and gods) and how mahout-elephant relations were structured by Hindu ritual practices and institutional discipline in Nepalese government stables (Locke, 2017). These ethnographies conceptualise elephants as social actors in the hybrid community: skilled, subjective, intentional beings in reciprocal communication with humans in contrast to mechanistic accounts of behaviour (Locke, 2013). The exceptional social and cognitive capacities of elephants are highlighted in each case to explore their active role in the interspecies relationship, that is, the animal’s agency or capacity to shape the dynamics of interactions and joint activities with humans. This research and the research in this chapter represent a multispecies ethnographic approach that studies the entanglement between human and nonhuman beings, nature and culture, as well as biological and social domains of knowledge (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010). The phenomenon of musth can further our understanding of human-elephant sociality and worlds. When musth is framed as a management problem, it emphasises human power by focusing on planning and control to limit elephant impacts. However, this anthropocentric focus obscures how management is merely a pre-emptive response and an attempt to mitigate an unpredictable, dangerous, and potentially uncontrollable state of being that disrupts regular routines and arrangements. An elephant in musth, I will demonstrate, expresses a formidable nonhuman agency that demands and effects change in the hybrid community.

Hot hati

7Musth cannot be disassociated from the socio-ecological setting in which it emerges. Its manifestation can vary depending on the presence of other bulls, the environment and health of the elephant (Ladue et al., 2021), and whether they are living in a wild or captive setting. Forest-living, free-roaming elephants in musth are not found to embody states of stress, contrary to observations of bulls living in constrained and routine working environments (Ghosal et al., 2013). Even the intensity of musth expressed in captive settings varies depending on how the bull is managed, with techniques differing between regions (Santiapillai et al., 2011). Some of the characteristics typically associated with musth—such as aggression, unresponsiveness, and unpredictability—are interpretations of behaviour situated within the human-elephant relationship, particularly the working mahout relationship. Before proceeding with a relational analysis of a bull in musth, it is worth understanding the words that interpret his condition. The terms used by mahouts I conducted fieldwork with can provide insight into how musth states are interpreted in different cultures and how bulls in this state are positioned as social actors in Assam.

8In Assamese, the formal term for an elephant in musth is bhati khola, where bhati refers to the temporal glands and khola means opened. However, my mahout-interlocutors never used this term in regular practice. Phrases such as hati gorom hoise, pagol etiya (“the elephant has become hot, he is now crazy”), and gorom pani (“hot water”; referring to the temporin secretion—see Figure 2) were common descriptions. The word gorom—which means “hot” (as opposed to thanda for “cold”)—is constantly used in daily life throughout Assam. It refers not only to temperature but experiences of excitation, agitation, arousal, sensitivity, and volatility in humans. For example, gorom can describe a disturbance due to poor health, such as inflammation, fever, and indigestion. A person who is angry or takes part in a heated conversation is gorom. Gorom describes a bodily, emotional, and subjective state shared across human and nonhuman beings. Hot and cold also describe the potentiality of substances to alter the body. Alcohol can be called hot water. Eating pumpkin can heat the body and excite indigestion. Neem leaves boiled in water can help “cool” an elephant sick from infection. Binary states of hot and cold are part of a South Asian system of classification and diagnosis (Manderson, 1987). A gorom elephant is an unbalanced subject and must be treated carefully. Their sensitive and volatile responses suggest that the bull senses, perceives, and is affected by the environment in irregular ways.

Figure 2. Oupe watching Babul in musth, as he drinks from a stream.

9Pagol means mad or insane and is a term used in relation to people acting unreasonably or outside of regular norms, often disparagingly. Among elephants, pagol is commonly understood in Assam as describing a free-roaming or working animal who is out of control and destructive. Among mahouts, pagol describes a bull who is gripped by such an intense gorom state they no longer respond to commands and behave unpredictably. In such cases, communication between human and elephant breaks down, and, as a mahout explained, “they do not understand their mahouts. They do not understand their owner. They are full of anger”. The elephant no longer perceives the well-meaning intentions of people nor recognises a fostered familiarity. Their clouded judgement must be understood in relation to a broader Assamese belief that elephants, as exceptional, even god-like beings, can demonstrate reliable insight into people’s positive or negative attitudes towards them and will treat them accordingly (Keil, 2017). Musth is a dangerous deviation from that social and moral connection. Although, mahouts recognise that the elephant’s overwhelming madness is neither intentional nor can be self-controlled.

The importance of routine

10The photos in figures 3 and 4 were taken two weeks before the noticeable onset of musth. On that day, like every day, we departed at 6.30 am to unchain Babul, Alaka, and Rohila from where they were tethered overnight in the forest. With forelegs hobbled to prevent them from moving too quickly ahead, we followed the elephants to their preferred drinking stream and then guided them up the hill to a location the mahouts knew still had fresh bamboo leaves during the dry season. The atmosphere was relaxed. The mahouts were content to follow the elephant’s pace, and the elephants accommodated the mahout’s intentions when commanded not to stop and browse. At the hilltop, we watched all three elephants feed among the bamboo and in proximity to each other. Babul kept to himself while the excitable sub-adult Rohila and her “adopted mother”, the patient and stoic Alaka, stayed close together. Babul was generally good-tempered yet aloof, a reputation observable through his treatment of elephants and mahouts alike. During this time, mahouts inspected the elephants for any sores or health issues. Work responsibilities were fluid, and other mahouts, like Bharat, occasionally helped to manage someone else’s elephant. Later, the elephants were tethered to the hillside, and we returned to camp for lunch.

11This is an ethnographic snapshot of the typical morning practice and inter- and intraspecies relations at the time. The group formed over five years. It began with Alaka and expanded as Barua brought more of his elephants and mahouts to this forest fringe site to create and manage an experimental, human-mediated herd in semi-naturalistic conditions. Group dynamics took time to test and establish, including affective relationships between elephants, smooth collaborative relations between mahouts and elephants, and mahouts negotiating working roles and practices among themselves and with the manager. These interspecies relations were developed across the modality of senses, elephant and human knowing each other through sight, smell, and sound. Their bodies, perspectives, affects, and actions became interconnected over time within this hybrid community, organised around routine practices.

Figure 3. Following the three elephants on a path to a stream.

Figure 4. Babul in the foreground, a few weeks before entering musth.

12Routine is an important part of working and living with elephants. Human and nonhuman identity, agency, and interpersonal and social norms are expressed through their day-to-day relations. Indeed, anthropologists have generally explored mahout-elephant relations through structural continuity and social reproduction. Piers Locke became familiar with the unique personality of Sitasma Kali, a female elephant, and wrote of the interpersonal understanding both species developed through their daily, mutually attuned, joint activities such as morning greeting, feeding, and forest patrolling (Locke, 2017). In Northeast India, Nicolas Lainé analysed how elephants caught from the forest learned to live by the norms of the Khamti village, a process of socialisation done through mahout-led training regimes and attachments to more experienced village elephants (Lainé, 2018, 2020). Successful collaboration between mahout and elephant—the ability to perform augmentative tasks as an interspecies team—depends on the bond and authority developed and conditioned through the discipline of work and daily rituals, such as bathing.

13In these hybrid communities, who the members are and what they can do are potentialities that take shape through their ongoing relationships with each other. The mundane relations of humans and elephants in the group are structured by the “arrangement” of common practices, tools, and environments (Lestel, 2014). While humans significantly structure the routines of these domestic social worlds, nonhuman bodies and intentions also reciprocally shape the course and outcomes of interspecies activities. Over time, as these arrangements are reproduced daily, human and elephant begin to establish interconnected meanings and affects (Lestel, 2014), such as a coordinated understanding of how to skilfully perform a certain task (Lainé, 2020) or mutual familiarity and the ability to interpret each other. Routine is an important factor in the development, maintenance, and representation of the hybrid community.

The disruption of routine

14Musth, then, presents a problem. A gorom elephant can interfere in regular practices and relations and provoke changes in the mutually constituted identity, agency, and norms of the group. This section will describe in ethnographic detail the changes that occurred as Babul heated up and cooled down over a two-to-three-month period, an unfolding state that altered the arrangement and social dynamics of the community along with it.

15There was an affective shift between elephants during Babul’s musth. This led to some elephants disassociating from Babul, and previously unproblematic intraspecies interactions now required mediation by mahouts. Bahadur, the other male, was already less likely to dwell in proximity with other herd members, often due to tensions between him and Babul; however, during the entire period of musth, there was a strictly coordinated effort by the mahouts to avoid having both bulls together at the same time in case they fought. Musth bulls will attempt to exert dominance over other males (Sukumar, 2003). I rarely saw Bahadur’s mahout during Babul’s musth, as he led the bull for the entire day in another part of the landscape. This included being away from the female elephants (and their mahouts), who were allowed to remain and feed in the same area as Babul. However, the older cow, Alaka, demonstrated her awareness of and response to the shifting intensity of musth. During these periods, Alaka, of her own accord, gave Babul a wide berth. And if he drifted closer to her while browsing, she purposefully retreated from him. “She is afraid”, her mahout said, interpreting her response to Babul’s gorom temperament. “She understands what he is like … But…” he laughed, “Rohila doesn’t!” Rohila was implied to be inexperienced with the potential aggressiveness of musth bulls due to her age and the conditions in which she grew up (being born in a domestic context).

16In contrast to Alaka, Rohila was drawn to Babul over the course of several weeks, a proximity that mahouts and the manager supported (Figure 5). This emerging connection was striking because Rohila was usually so attached to Alaka physically and emotionally. Rohila also started showing her first visible signs of puberty: her vulva slackened, drooped, and dribbled urine. She spent much of her time being intimate with the male, pressing her smaller body against his, exploring his face with her trunk. One morning, Rohila even squirted water at Babul! Research shows that oestrus females will solicit musth males and are more responsive closer to ovulation (Rasmussen & Krishnamurthy, 2000). At first, Babul remained indifferent—even defensive—towards Rohila’s clumsy advances. Over time, the bull became more accommodating, reciprocating the cow’s attention and smelling her sexual organs. We can imagine that these observable, physical interactions were immersed within an atmosphere of male and female olfactory chemosignals through which the two sexes sensed, knew, and affected each other (Schulte & Ladue, 2021; see Lorimer et al., 2017 on “animal atmospheres”). The emergence of oestrus and musth are not necessarily connected—musth can arise in the absence of oestrus, and oestrus is cyclical. However, the coincidence of Rohila in heat and Babul’s gorom state was speculated to further excite Rohila’s emerging changes. Bull and cow resonated with each other, a synergy that intensified their connection and encouraged new relational opportunities. Or, as mahouts politely interpreted it: morom (love).

17The social implications of musth are not limited to relations between elephants. While previously expressing an accommodating disposition, Babul, at his most intense, was highly sensitive towards unfamiliar people. “Beleg manuh mare dibo”, I was told—“Babul will attack strangers”. Not only villagers in the area were warned to keep their distance from the hybrid herd, but any mahout apart from his regular handlers, Oupe and Bhupen, needed to carefully modify how they regard and approach him. One day Bharat, who did work with Babul on the odd occasion, was tasked to handle him without his regular mahouts. Bharat faced an indignant, unpredictable, and aggressive individual who was impossible to guide safely at close quarters. Babul was, at this point, gorom and pagol: filled with madness and unable to recognise Bharat. The bull’s response demanded new relational strategies and mediating tools. Adopting an unusual method, Bharat shepherded the elephant using a slingshot, reinforcing his instructions from a safe distance. With some difficulty and risk, he guided the elephant to a stream to drink and then restrained him in the forest for the rest of the day. Musth temporarily transformed the political dimensions of the working partnership. There is a breakdown in the relationship as the elephant is no longer willing to coordinate with mahout intentions and incoherently responds to instruction. Bharat lost the right to command, and the liberties Babul permitted Bharat outside of musth were no longer recognised (see Hearne, 2007 on authorisation in working animal relations). Gorom elephants can assert their power by resisting or suddenly attacking or killing their mahouts.

Figure 5. Babul was accommodating to Rohila’s presence yet wary of others approaching.

18However, I was impressed how the relationship between Babul and his regular mahouts involved minor changes, at least on the surface. Mentioning my surprise one evening at camp, Oupe brought out the shirt, sweater, long pants, and beanie he wore at work and explained that during musth he used the same set of clothes every day. He never washed these clothes and only wore them when handling Babul. This technique helped maintain a stable working relationship by exploiting what mahouts considered the elephant’s primary sense—smell. Oupe never interacted with any other elephant while wearing these clothes. Even after taking a break, sharing a bidi (cigarette) with other mahouts, he observed caution by washing his hands and forearms in the stream. The aim was to avoid foreign smells apart from Babul’s or his own and maintain a predictable and familiar scent and presence. This discipline meant that Babul refrained from assisting other mahouts with their elephants, as he usually might, and kept his distance from Alaka, Rohila, and especially Bahadur. If an elephant’s agitation or pagol responses are provoked by the different or unfamiliar, Oupe endeavoured to become more closely aligned with Babul through scent, fostering a shared identity with this nonhuman individual: an identity distinguished from other members of the community and a kinship which transcended species difference (Govindrajan, 2018). While Oupe’s relational technique is not specific to the elephant-keeping culture of Chaygaon in Assam, by my understanding, it is uncommonly practised and representative of the intimate connection with elephants this culture is believed to possess (Sarma, 2011).

19Interestingly, the privileged position that Babul gave to his regular mahouts during musth could be exploited by these men to better negotiate with the other mahouts and their employer and manager, Barua. At one point, both regular mahouts returned to their home village for the day, leaving Bharat to manage an irritated Babul (mentioned previously). The coincidental reasons for leaving were, in part, related to one or both of their frustrations during this intense period of additional stress, labour, and responsibility. Their departure was also likely related to a grievance they had with Barua at the time. The mahouts’ absence, and the increased difficulty in managing a gorom Babul without them, emphasised the value of their relationship with the elephant and so placed mahouts in a stronger position to successfully make their opinion heard. Particularly when protesting to their employer, to whom they were in a socio-economically less privileged position (Scott, 1985). Musth also changes relational possibilities between humans, and mahouts can leverage this position as a source of political power or resistance. (On a separate yet related point, I spoke with a local farmer who recalled that he had never seen a wild musth elephant behave dangerously and unpredictably as he has seen working elephants. He always assumed that the mahouts—whether by food or a magic spell—induced the elephant into their pagol state to get out of work!)

Musth as a biological and social event

20Musth was a period of shifting associations. Social relations expanded and contracted. Depending on its intensity, some were repulsed, some were attracted, and others had to renegotiate or intensify their connection. Hierarchies were challenged, identities were strengthened, unexpected affects emerged, and novel mediating tools were deployed. These were dynamic changes that could cut across all the groups’ relations—between elephants, humans and elephants, and even among humans themselves—and disrupted the social and working routines. These changes are only temporary, a tension that snaps back to the normal arrangement when the musth period subsides. As these ethnographic examples demonstrate, musth is more than biological and behavioural manifestations in an individual bull. Musth in captive conditions can be characterised through its temporary reconfiguration of inter- and intraspecies relations that constitute the hybrid community. Musth is biosocial, where social changes cannot be disentangled from biological changes (see Ingold & Palsson, 2013).

21Musth determines the conditions of interaction, and its manifestation can be conceptualised as a biosocial event. An event has two crucial elements. First, an event refers to a temporal period. Indeed, musth, in its conventional biological conception, is often defined as a condition passing through sequential stages of early, full, and post musth. At my fieldsite, as the intensity of Babul’s gorom state changed, social tensions and group configurations in the community also shifted. Second, an event refers to a happening that is a marked deviation from the regular continuity of everyday experiences, activities, routines, and relations. Among humanities scholars, events are framed as significant periods, times when norms and order are destabilised, where alliances shift and new political possibilities develop, and often experienced as a period of uncertainty (Wagner-Pacifici, 2017). A description of an event captures a multiplicity of linked actors and processes that are implicated in the unfolding of the episode, either giving shape to, or being shaped by, the occurrence (Debaise, 2017). Analysis of events often attends to their specificity and uniqueness and attempts to capture the complexity of these episodes across multiple levels, from the individual to the structural. Finally, events in the humanities disciplines are often analysed for their historical significance.

22Musth, of course, is neither a one-off episode nor does it necessarily create dramatic changes in the long-term course of the human-elephant community: it is a state anticipated each year and, to a degree, normalised through good management strategies. Still, the concept of an event is useful. First, it attunes the researcher to the disruption, reconfigurations, and uncertainty in human-elephant relations during musth. Second, an event acknowledges musth’s specificity and that changes are situated and best understood within the socio-ecological context in which they occur. Finally, conceptualising musth as a biosocial event offers an integrative framework within which the gorom state can be described through interconnected biological and social processes. An integrative analysis of musth requires weaving together a temporal account that links local ecology, cultural practices, hormonal surges, physical changes, sensory signals and pheromonal atmospheres, perception, affect, and relational behaviours, and broader community dynamics

23Musth at my fieldsite was an event-full period, with changes that extended beyond the interpersonal and working relationships detailed above. An improved examination of musth would benefit from adopting a method that accounts for all human and nonhuman actors, materials, and practices that gain more significance during this time, whether directly or indirectly coinciding with Babul’s gorom state (e.g., Latour, 2005). During fieldwork, this included increased attention by Barua to inspect the elephants or calls to speak with mahouts and remind them to take care. New and larger chains were supplied and utilised. And a day was dedicated to worshipping the Hindu god, Ganesh, to “clear the air” of “bad feelings built up over the year” and at this critical time. What stood out in my ethnographic notes was the increased entanglement with local wild elephants. A gorom Babul toppled the tree he was tethered to and the next day was found wandering freely, striking out his own path inside the forest, possibly “wanting a female.” Another night, the mahouts believed that Babul’s vigorous and antagonistic presence, along with the scent of people that lingered on him, drew the attention of two young, wild males. They attacked Babul, seriously injuring and weakening him, a change which eventually altered the hierarchical dynamics between him and the other male in the community, Bahadur. Finally, Rohila’s oestrus state, inflamed by Babul’s musth, attracted the attention of a wild makhna (tuskless elephant). He unusually loitered in the area day and night for a month, accidentally frightening villagers collecting wood in the forest. We found him next to Alaka and Rohila one morning. He kept returning and eventually did impregnate Rohila the following year. Musth not only reconfigures community relations but is a time when unexpected connections are sought out and developed beyond the immediate members of the community, with some far-reaching consequences.

Conclusion

24This chapter has explored musth beyond physiological, physical, and behavioural changes in the individual bull and analysed its manifestation as changes in the social dynamics of the human-elephant community. Reconceptualising musth’s manifestation as an event that encompasses biological and social processes opens the opportunity for an interdisciplinary investigation. Different levels of analysis, from the physiological to the behavioural, relational to the cultural, are not competing but complementary to understanding this phenomenon. While musth is generally analysed for its intraspecies social effects, humans too are shaped by these changes. This integrative biosocial framework, extended to other human-elephant communities situated in different cultural, ecological, and historical contexts, can shed new light on how musth changes the lives of human and elephant actors. While other communities in different regions may be affected by musth differently—whether it is a zoo in the United States preemptively reorganising herd social groups; Thai mahouts restraining, isolating, and avoiding a bull at a tourist camp; or the tragic death of a South Indian mahout at a religious festival—all are examples that reflect musth’s power to shape the composition of human-elephant worlds.

25A final note: I began this chapter by highlighting the anthropological strategy of framing elephants as social actors to explore their agency in human-nonhuman relations. However, we cannot fully equate the agency embodied in musth to that of Babul as depicted in this chapter—the subjective and intentional nonhuman actor. While musth is expressed through Babul’s actions, it is also an involuntary condition that happens to him—in this way, he is not a catalyst of the event but caught up by it. Musth is a periodic surge at the hormonal level that then ripples out and causes corresponding changes in the elephant’s body-mind-world. Yet the waves of musth that grip the individual across repeated events throughout his lifetime originated before the organism—this wave is a pattern inherited and repeated across generations; an evolutionary force maintained through fitness. Musth seems to present new challenges for multispecies ethnography and demands a new analysis of human-elephant relations as it also requires a sense of bodies, time, and more-than-human agency that evades social theory and the concept of a social actor.