Perahera elephants and working elephants

 

I have been watching the Perahera, year after year as a child.  It was the highlight of the August holidays when we went to see our grandparents in Kandy.  Anglophile, Christian and Central Bankers, my family used to secure seats at the Hatton National Bank where us kids watched the perahera from the balcony with wondrous eyes while the adults made it a social event with buffet,  alcohol and the company of the others.  Coloniality at its best. For us it was the spectacle, the dancers, the drummers, the fire lanterns, the smell, the noise, the colour.. and the elephants, always the elephants…Later I watched the Perahera as a Peradeniya undergraduate sitting with batchmates on the street, a very different view.  The embarrassing coloniality was shed, and it was all about being part of the crowd, belonging….Not till anthropological and historical curiosity got the better of me  many years later did I know anything about the significance of the Perahera beyond the carrying of the relic, so really appreciated Sunela Jayewardene’s recent piece Elephants, Ego and Rain on Groundviews

The elephants were central of course and of course we counted them.  Sunela is right.  We don’t need a hundred elephants to honour the sacred tooth relic.  But the  more of them there were, the more spectacular the evening was… and I am ashamed that I was as indifferent to their pain and suffering as I was  to the significance of the ritual.  I can’t remember knowing  they were shackled, I couldn’t remember recognising their uncomfortable swaying…In many ways the Perahera gave them a dignity that they were deprived of at that other awful spectacle of childhood memory,  the Elephant Dance in the Dehiwela Zoo. 

Just before the millennium, a friend, Paul Starkey, whose life interest has been in ‘working animals’  and I travelled around the central province looking at working elephants. At that time they were ‘loggers’ hired out by their owners to move felled trees on to lorries to be transported to saw mills. Most of the elephants were owned by traditional Kandyan families and left their stations very early in the morning. The traditional training methods that Sunela mentions in her article must have been in force, because there seemed almost a symbiotic relationship between the elephant and its mahout. They displayed a mutual respect for each other.  As the primary worker, the elephant had agency to decide whether the log could be lifted or not at any point in time.  By stubbornly refusing to raise the log if the balance was not correct,  the elephant was able to suggest that the humans in the team shift the chain so it could pull from a different direction.    The whole process felt a lot more sustainable – there was no need to destroy a number of trees to get lifting machinery to  that single fallen (or felled) tree log because the elephant could drag the log across the undergrowth between the other trees. And the elephant earned its keep from its own ‘logging revenues’  without its maintenance being a huge drain on its owner.  Here are some photos from Paul Starkey.

I am assuming machines have replaced elephants in  the logging business. As Sunela points out the increase in domesticated elephants seems no longer sustainable, so I fully endorse her call for the state to make reparations for the suffering of these beautiful majestic creatures and provide them with a spacious natural habitat.