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The sun was setting, and she was smiling as she applied unholy purple paint to an idol that would become the cynosure of all eyes in some street on the occasion of Vinayaka Chaturthi.
Among the Hindu pantheons, there are few gods with wider appeal than Ganesha. They are considered brave, clever, intelligent and capable of overcoming any obstacle. The culture imbues elephants with similar qualities: a noble temperament combined with strength, and an unforgiving memory. Even the Pope was a fan. Hanno, the pet white pachyderm of Pope Leo When Hanno died (supposedly from a laxative made from gold), the Pope cried and wrote the epitaph himself.
Chanakya’s Arthashastra says that a good king reserves entire forests for them, because the strength of the army of elephants (which functioned like the formation of tanks in ancient warfare) determines the outcome of the war.
The Mughals used elephants in war, to attack and defeat the enemy, and in peace, to strengthen the royal image. Akbar is shown taming elephants in mustachios to underline his masculinity (when serum testosterone levels reach 60 to 140 times the non-mustachioed normal). Jahangir reportedly had 40,000 captive elephants – more than the number in the forests of India today.
In 1877, the then Viceroy Edward Robert Lytton rode an elephant to his infamous Delhi Durbar to fit the Mughal image while millions were starving in a severe famine. Sixteen years later, Bal Gangadhar Tilak incorporated the elephant-headed Ganesha into the freedom struggle by making Chaturthi a community festival.
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There’s just something about elephants. Despite being the largest animals on land, they are surprisingly gentle. Are they intelligent? They navigate complex social hierarchies in which females lead herds of more than 100 members.
They are extremely protective of their young: On a visit to the Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in Karnataka, I spotted a newborn baby amidst the herd. Within seconds, the mother and two women surrounded the child, leaving only a vague memory of seeing him. Later, my husband and I watched a family cross a large lake. For more than half an hour, the baby was tossed from several trunks and carried safely above the water, while the boisterous youngsters were frolicking some distance away.
Young elephants can be mischievous and charming in equal measure. In Nagarhole also we found two calves named Apoorva and Airavat. Apoorva clung to her mother, who took us away unconscious. Airavata hung back and then speeded up to cut his baby tooth and collided with poor Apoorva, who writhed in pain and clung even further to her mother. Another woman tried to stop Airavat, but to no avail.
Elephants appear to self-heal. At the end of pregnancy, which usually lasts 22 months, African elephants chew the leaves of the Boraginaceae plant to induce labor; Kenyan women make tea from this plant for this very purpose.
Elephants efficiently exploit hidden underground sources of water. They use a variety of tools: branches become fly-swatters, branches are used to drape solar fences.
While experimental evidence on the intelligence of captive elephants is unclear, researchers in the field are united in their praise of the animal’s intelligence. Raman Sukumar, renowned elephant expert and vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told me, “There are different ranges of intelligence, but what amazes me is how well elephants learn about the problems and issues they face.” Think…they have better intelligence.”
They are also subtle. When they encounter an elephant skeleton, they caress the bones, running the tips of their trunks over the nooks and crannies, just as we might mourn over a grave.
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Awesome, mischievous, clever and subtle. Should they get rights?
Elephants are continuously ceding land to humans. The Bhimbetka Caves, an hour from Bhopal, contain some of India’s finest cave art, some of which extends back to prehistoric times. Elephants are seen 61 times in these. There are no elephants in this area now.
When elephants became extinct in ancient Egypt, the pharaohs began hunting them in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, where they also died out.
Ancient writings such as the Gajashastra, a manual on elephants from the 5th century BCE, suggest that they lived in the forests of the Indo-Gangetic plain; Now both elephants and forests have disappeared from here.
A recent study shows that suitable habitat for elephants has shrunk by two-thirds since the subcontinent was colonized. Following the launch of Project Elephant, their numbers appear to have recovered from 1980s lows, but the recent decline in Kerala (from about 6,000 in 2017 to about 1,700 in 2024) is worrying. However, Sukumar advises caution when drawing conclusions from the census because drought-related deaths, large-scale capture, and poaching, which are common culprits for population decline, do not work here, he says.
Human-elephant conflict is at an all-time high, killing 600 humans and 100 elephants per year. To understand why, consider the beginning of the elephant. Their paleo-ancestors probably originated near the Tethys Sea in the present-day Himalayas. Their closest relative is the sea cow.
There are consequences to this watery past. Elephants lack neuroendocrine control over water loss because they do not have sweat glands between their toes. For example, desert ungulates conserve water by controlling the amount of water they sweat when they are short. Elephants can’t do this. So, when the heat rises and other methods of removing heat (bathing, covering themselves in mud, flapping their ears, etc.) prove inadequate, they lose buckets of water through their skin.
A study tracking the skin temperature and water loss of captive elephants found this: in the tradeoff between losing heat and losing water, elephants prioritize losing heat, and therefore risk dehydration without adequate water and shade. Let’s pick it up.
An elephant drinks 150 to 200 liters of water and eats 150 kg of fodder in a day. Multiply this by the size of the herd, in the context of fragmenting forests and disappearing grasslands across India, and one begins to see the problem.
Maybe that’s why elephants move around so much. They need shade during the day. In the dry season, they seek out water bodies, while in autumn and winter, they prefer open spaces such as grasslands. The latter coincides with harvest time, which is why human-elephant conflict peaks in winter.
Moving with the seasons on historic routes, they cannot be neatly confined within protected areas. To make matters worse, elephants are moving in pursuit of their favorite food. A forest guard of Palani Hills says that elephants come as soon as the jackfruit harvest season arrives. A young bull, he said, will look like clockwork as the potatoes ripen. He was shy, he only needed a flashlight to hide behind a nearby tree, face hidden but body completely visible, he waited for the humans to go away so he could look at his beloved potatoes. Could get.
As elephants become crop-raiders, they invite backlash.
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At other times migration is forced. According to Sukumar, elephants are moving from Odisha and Jharkhand to Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh (MP), where mines have destroyed their homes and unfavorable climate could lead to their dispersal.
On a visit to Bandhavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh a few years ago, we were told that four tiger cubs had gone missing in the chaos caused by the entry of a herd of elephants into the Tala area. Our guide explained that this was the first time elephants had set foot here in living memory. Today, reports state that the lock is home to 50 pachyderms.
There is also a problem of invasive plants. Elephants do not eat lantana, which has invaded large areas of Indian forests, where it outcompetes native edible shrubs. Due to less fodder inside the forests, elephants move to fields.
The reverse may be true: removing invasives triggers the return of elephants. In the Berijam range of the Kodaikanal hills, the forest department cleared 250 hectares of forest and planted a variety of grasses on the land. Soon, the elephant herd started returning.
Destruction of grasslands across India poses a threat. These were considered worthless by the British, who could not see beyond the wood, and grasslands replaced plantations and fields. Elephants suffered hardships as grazers and grazers. What do elephants do when fields replace grass?
They move through them, chewing and inviting conflict.
India’s cultural respect for elephants has kept the retaliation in check to some extent. A study based on interviews with over 100 farmers in North Bengal found that many people from Hindu and tribal communities consider the elephant sacred and thus are less likely to demand compensation when it damages their crops. Are also hesitant.
As one respondent said, “The elephant is not at fault. It comes to fill its stomach because the forests have become empty.” This attitude appears to be prevalent across large parts of India. In India, six humans die for every elephant killed in human-elephant conflict, while in neighboring Sri Lanka, three elephants die for every human.
Myanmar’s elephants are being poached not only for their ivory but also for their meat and skin. Poaching numbers are low in India, but, make no mistake, when we become careless, there are many people waiting to kill elephants for their ivory.
But…tolerance has its limits. Repeated destruction of fields causes suffering on both sides. Do you remember the image of an elephant, its trunk blown off by a hidden country-made bomb, standing in a river writhing in pain and waiting to die?
What to do? We can start by understanding why elephants move, respecting the corridors, and then working with local communities to protect farms, adequately compensate for crop damage, and free our forests from the invaders.
A company earns carbon credits by clearing hectares of prosopis to make biochar. This approach can be applied elsewhere as well. Furthermore, fragmented forests are more sensitive to climate change, and grasslands are better suited to river flow (summer) flow than invasive forests.
The story of elephants is the story of India’s seasonal water and how climate change and fragmenting fragile forests are making us both vulnerable.
It is possible that by helping the elephant, we are helping ourselves.
(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watersheds. She can be reached at tradeoffs@climateaction.net)
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