-Reji
Caparisoned Elephants at a Church Feast in Kerala, India ( Walking down the steps to the tune of the Band)
Nearly every festival in the southern most Indian state Kerala includes at least one elephant draped in gold-plated caparisons. In recent years, even mosques and churches have been known to hire elephants for religious celebrations.
Kerala’s annual temple festivals, known as poorams, are competitive, and there’s great pressure to add glory to the temple by bringing in more and more elephants every year, which usually requires hiring private elephants to supplement the ones the devaswom already owns. During temple season, roadside posters herald the appearance of popular elephants, some of which have their own fan clubs.
To control the elephants, their handlers, known as mahouts, often treat them roughly with poles and pointed hooks.
“They will learn that I am the mahout only if I hurt them,” one handler said at a small temple festival in Tiruvalla last year. “All elephants have to be kept in chains.”
Current regulations allow elephants to be paraded only for a few hours at a time, but such rules are ignored at festivals like the one in Tiruvalla, where the mahouts said their elephants would be working from dusk till dawn.
But as elephant mania has swelled, new recommendations and regulations are introduced every year to keep the use of elephants in check – and possibly to phase it out entirely.
In 2010, the same year that the elephant joined the tiger in being designated a National Heritage Animal in India, a report issued by the government-appointed Elephant Task Force gave an audacious vision of the future of captive elephants in Kerala. Known as the Gajah report, its recommendations included an eventual ban on the commercial use of elephants and even on their use in religious ceremonies. All privately owned elephants, the report suggested, should become government property; captive elephants’ current owners would instead be considered their “guardians
Caparisoned Elephants at a Church Feast in Kerala, India ( Walking down the steps to the tune of the Band)
Nearly every festival in the southern most Indian state Kerala includes at least one elephant draped in gold-plated caparisons. In recent years, even mosques and churches have been known to hire elephants for religious celebrations.
Kerala’s annual temple festivals, known as poorams, are competitive, and there’s great pressure to add glory to the temple by bringing in more and more elephants every year, which usually requires hiring private elephants to supplement the ones the devaswom already owns. During temple season, roadside posters herald the appearance of popular elephants, some of which have their own fan clubs.
To control the elephants, their handlers, known as mahouts, often treat them roughly with poles and pointed hooks.
“They will learn that I am the mahout only if I hurt them,” one handler said at a small temple festival in Tiruvalla last year. “All elephants have to be kept in chains.”
Current regulations allow elephants to be paraded only for a few hours at a time, but such rules are ignored at festivals like the one in Tiruvalla, where the mahouts said their elephants would be working from dusk till dawn.
But as elephant mania has swelled, new recommendations and regulations are introduced every year to keep the use of elephants in check – and possibly to phase it out entirely.
In 2010, the same year that the elephant joined the tiger in being designated a National Heritage Animal in India, a report issued by the government-appointed Elephant Task Force gave an audacious vision of the future of captive elephants in Kerala. Known as the Gajah report, its recommendations included an eventual ban on the commercial use of elephants and even on their use in religious ceremonies. All privately owned elephants, the report suggested, should become government property; captive elephants’ current owners would instead be considered their “guardians