All The Reasons Why I Absolutely Loved 'The Elephant Whisperers'

There was a comic strip I would read as a child. In one of the issues, the plot involved a wounded elephant calf.

In this episode, the jungle tribes were shown as rejoicing when they came across a wounded elephant calf—it meant extra meat.

But a white man living among the forest tribes – a demi-god for them, ‘The Phantom', takes care of the calf. He makes sure that the calf becomes healthier.

The calf is eventually released into the forest as a young elephant.

Years roll by. A tyrant from a neighbouring kingdom – an Asiatic Sultan- captures a strong elephant – a killer. He raids the forest to capture slaves. The Phantom goes to counter him.

The sultan imprisons the Phantom and then as the elephant is set to crush the head of Phantom, it remembers the Phantom as his protector and the hero overpowers the evil Sultan with the help of the elephant.

This comic strip had in it untold narratives.

• The tribals were empathy-deficient with respect to animals.

These tropes entered the mind of a child without being subjected to any filters. One never noticed that these were propaganda stereotypes.

Fortunately, these stereotypes and narratives did not grow into a world-view thanks to the elephant-human relationship in India.

The Elephant Whisperers

The poetic documentary The Elephant Whisperers by Kartiki Gonsalves is a powerful visual presentation of the complex but organic reality that exists at the heart of elephant-human bonding in India.

All the aspects of the documentary have complemented each other to produce a deep sense of love. The music is non-intrusive. The visuals are non-cliche. There is no imposed narrative, and that gives the viewer a sense of co-creation.

A forest dwelling couple (Bomman and Bellie) take care of an orphaned elephant calf whom they name 'Raghu'.

They develop a bonding that is parental, with the elephant calf.

The mother of the elephant had been accidentally electrocuted – an indiciator of human encroaching into elephant living space.

The couple takes care of the elephant calf like a baby.

When they find him he is weak and would probably die. Hope is slender. But they love and care for him.

As he grows up, they get a sibling for him: female elephant, Ammukutty.

Viewers see the initial sibling rivalry between these two elephant children turning into fraternal love.

Later, Raghu has to be given up.

In between we see many emotional streams silently emerging and running into the visual river that is the documentary.

The wound of a loss of a child a mother has, receives the healing touch of the relationship with Raghu. The elephant calves understand the emotional state of their human foster parents.

'They wipe our tears', reminisces the lady.

The Deities are another presence throughout the documentary. The documentary shows how the elephants somehow become the most intimate attendants of the Deities.

In many ways, they also become the Deities.

The care-givers in general and the foster-parent couples in particular feel the Divinity in the elephants. In a telling way, the Vanvasi Bomman, who is the foster-father of Raghu is also the priest of the small Ganesha temple and he feels that his puja to Ganesha and his parental love for Raghu are both the same.

In the presence of their Grama-Kula Deities, the couple undergo a marriage reinforcement ceremony and the presence of elephants further sanctifies them.

The old couple live with their grand daughter. And in the night the grandmother tells the famous Indian story of the blind men trying to explain what an elephant actually is.

This story, highly philosophical, imputes a pragmatic and holistic perception of any situation and has evolved in this culture where elephants are part and parcel of everyday life.

In India elephants have been part of the civilisation. They are loved and appreciated. They are prized possessions for royalty and aristocracy. They are also a benign presence venerated and protected.

The relation between a mahout and the elephant is part of many fables and stories.

Using enchanting music to trap and tame wild elephants, is one of the characteristic themes in classical Indian literature.

King Udayana plays his lute Ghoshavati with which the wild elephant could be calmed and tamed.

The point is the conception that elephants were receptive to the soothing ability of music.

Tamil Sangam literature too speaks of mahouts as speaking in Sanskrit. Their training was also in Sanskrit.

Ganesha as a elephant-headed God is an ancient Deity in India. Though mainstream Indologists may contest the claims that He was known in the Vedas, the point is we know that we know through Harappan masks and seals that the elephant was considered divine even in the Indus civilisation. In the Atharva Veda, there is a hymn of six verses which considers the elephant-splendour as coming from the Goddess Aditi.

That is the first verse. It is quite interesting to see that in most of the later Puranic origin-stories of Ganesha, He springs from the Mother Goddess.

Though only the story of Parvati making him out of Her body dust is popular, another well known legend is the emanation of Ganesha from the glance of the Goddess at the face of Siva.

The last verse of an Atharva Vedic hymn states thus:

This shows both the divine and wild nature as organically united – one is not separate from the other.

This is the feeling one sees in the documentary through the eyes and hearts of those who live with these majestic animals. At the heart of the film is the magnificence of the elephant in the wild, coupled with its memory and trans-species empathy.

This is a seed documentary that contains in it inspirations to achieve many traditional knowledge-related explorations. It is multi-dimensional. It shows the love of the forest-dwelling couple for the elephants, the way they generate knowledge to care for elephants, the way they venerate elephants and how caring for the elephants becomes a sadhana for them and how this love for elephants get transmitted to the next generation.

Kartiki Gonsalves, who made this documentary, spent five years with the elephant-parents and their elephant children. The name of their tribe is significant – Kattu Nayakkan – the masters of the forest – rather like the master-guardians of the forest.

Their history, particularly during the colonial period, is crucial topic of study for a holistic historiography for India.

Another seed the movie plants is in the minds of perceptive viewers and students of Indian civilisation.

Perhaps Indian civilisation is the only one that has domesticated an animal of the size of an elephant and evolved a unique human-elephant ecosystem.

Part of this ecosystem is the vast knowledge of elephant medicines. A vast treasure of this knowledge exists. How could this have evolved? Perhaps Indian Ayurveda is the most decentralised, democratic medicinal network in the world. It has always interacted with the life experiences of couple like Bomman and Belli and it has gathered their knowledge into a system.

This is a system that has been evolving for at least the last two millennia.