Muthu Raja
Sri Lanka had a bad rap for everything from war to economic-mismanagement, but now we have a novel bad rap for severe elephant abuse. Muthu Raja, an elephant gifted by the King of Thailand, ended up in a temple allegedly being abused and overworked.
Most folk are in denial. They say that this sort of stray occurrence is an aberration and doesn’t reflect Sri Lanka’s general attitude towards elephants. They also say that those who see the abuse of elephants at the Peraheras (religious pageants and processions) rarely see the same at zoos.
But what are the historical realities? Since exactly when did Sri Lankans start considering these massive animals as property, and begin placing a value on them as chattel to be exploited for hard labour?
It has been a while. The former National Security Minister the late Lalith Athulathmudali for instance probably did not know the origin of his relatively uncommon name.
Or if he did he may have contested the fact that the patronymic Athulathmudali was reportedly a family name that originated after one of his ancestors, who as nobility, was bestowed with the gift of a herd of elephants by the King for his services. Hence, the title Athun – lath – mudali (the Chief who was gifted elephants), later corrupted by usage, to Athulathmudali. Of course some of the minister’s political detractors apparently couldn’t stand this idea of any association with feudal ancestry and opined that Athulathmudali merely meant ‘man who sold the tickets.’ (Athulath weemata mudalak ayakarranna) — or the Mudai (tax-collector) who sold the entrance passes at the Gate.
Those asides apart about the names people inherited from an apparently aristocratic family lineage, the fact remains that Sri Lankan nobility at some point in history began regarding elephants as chattel. The animals were trained for labour, for purposes such as logging, and sometime thereafter perhaps, began the tradition of tuskers being hired-out for religious pageants.
ARISTOCRACY
If these majestic creatures — cliché but true — were being treated as chattel, and then culturally appropriated, there was something wrong with that aberration in our culture, because it can be said with certainty that Athulathmudali or no Athulathmudali, elephants especially when they are as a species close to extinction, are not chattel to be used as beasts of burden.
But once a tradition begins and animals are considered as symbols of affluence or cultural appendages, these traditions die hard. That seems to be what happened in Sri Lanka. Elephants were bought and sold, and of course it’s the same as horses being bought and sold to draw carriages in say Dickensian England, before the advent of the automobile.
But yet, not quite. Horses are common and are easily domesticated. Elephants essentially belong in the wild, and though widely domesticated especially in a local historical context, that has been on the whole an unsuccessful experiment.
Today, it seems some elephants are kept in a domesticated state under licence, but it has been a long time since the habit or tradition of associating elephants with nobility and power became an anachronism. That’s of necessity, because shrinking living spaces mean that these animals cannot be efficiently domesticated any more, never mind who wants to gift elephants to important people, the King, or his cousins.
But yet, it’s hard for certain potentates to get rid of a certain mentality. They continue to think of these huge dumb animals as property and have visions of them as chattel to be shackled and used for logging and adorning pageants. Worse, these palpably unnatural practices became commercialized and elephants, if they were previously considered status symbols by the Athun-lath now were seen as animals that were given a price tag for appearance — such as one hundred thousand rupees for one walkabout on the macadam.
There may be no doubt that certain activists see elephant conservation as a crusade against Buddhism. It may be that they only see the negativity of elephants being used in the Peraheras and don’t care much about the cruelty to these animals in other locations such as zoos, and sometimes in the so-called elephant-corridors where these mammoths are poached for tusks or eliminated with the gruesome ‘hakka patas’ which is literally a firecracker, which once in, goes off in the mouth.
VENERATED
But elephant-cruelty is elephant-cruelty and there are no relative merits. The pachyderms that are shackled and tortured in temple premises or the Wallauwas of the modern day aristocracy are no better off than the ones that are hunted-down or get run over by trains and die in the so-called elephant corridors.
But Sri Lanka, a beautiful country of nature lovers and conservationists, if one is to go by the historical record, is now being seen as a land of elephant-abusers. The Thai authorities have promised that under no circumstances would the abused elephant Muthu Raja be returned to Sri Lanka.
If we do not recognize our ‘mentality’ problem, we will continue to be seen as a nation of elephant abusing animal haters. That’s not just a bad rap, it’s also a cultural indictment of sorts. Of course we can be more than elephant-abusers and could also be ostriches that have our heads buried in the sand. Or a species that is whipped into paroxysms of fury whenever we are reminded that we may have vestiges of ingrained animal-cruelty in our culture — something akin to a red flag to a bull.
So what would we rather be — bulls, ostriches or plain old elephant-abusers, or none of the above? Of course we’d rather eschew these negative labels, but the problem is that people are often too weighted down by their cultural baggage.
Some of them still like to own elephants, if not physically — because that’s not practical anymore — at least in a psychological sense, as a means of re-living their fantasies as the Nobles who were gifted elephants.
In Thailand too, elephants were used as beasts of burden and the vast majority of elephants in that country — as large a number as 97 per cent — are domesticated. Elephants were used in wars in ancient Thailand and as a result, due to war victories, became venerated animals.
BURDEN
This sort of history means there is none of the nonsense in Thailand of elephants being the source of the uppity-pretensions of Nobleman, as has become the rather absurd practice in Sri Lanka. When we attempt to shed light on that mentality there are folk reminding us that elephants in Peraheras are better than elephants in captivity, as if there is a difference.
We are not elephant-abusers, it’s just that our Nobles were. But noblesse-oblige which certainly existed in our aristocratic culture didn’t seem to extend to elephants.
Our Nobles were rarely gentle in their ways and if they had anything in common with these animals, it was probably the way they walked — puffed up and with rears in the air — which was fine with elephants, but makes for buffoons when imitated by human beings. But stuffy, starchy attitudes are what made these exaggerated characters from our past want to own elephants. These mighty animals made them feel mighty, and subsequently this attitude carried over to the realm of the religious domain.
That’s because Nobles were gifted elephants, and they in turn gifted theirs, to the Temples. One would have thought being in the temple domain under the care of monks would have been better for these animals than being with Nobles who had apparently lost their marbles.
But this was not to be. There is evidence that some monks used the animals commercially, renting them out as beasts of burden, and if the animal rescue activists are right, this was the case with Muthu Raja now recuperating in Thailand.
Animals that are subject to abuse have a right to be rescued and we have an obligation to rescue them or support the rescuers. If there are some people who feel that’s culturally out of whack, or pointedly un-Buddhistic, I’d say tough. They and their Jumbo-sized egos.
Rajpal Abeynayake