Books

ELEPHANTS AND KINGS: An Environmental History by Thomas R. Trautmann. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2015.

THE boundaries of environmental history in India have been decisively broadened by Elephants and Kings, Thomas Trautmann’s engaging and erudite account of why elephants have survived in India when they have disappeared over much of their former range, especially China. Covering more than three thousand years of recorded history and a terrain that extends from North Africa to East Asia, forensically interpreting the material record while trawling through texts as diverse as the Arthashastra and a history of the Ringling circus, Trautmann’s scholarship is as hugely impressive and graceful as the pachyderms he discusses. Put simply, this is a marvellous book.

Trautmann argues that elephants were prized by Indian kings because they provided a tactical edge in military operations. However, unlike horses which could be bred in captivity and put to use from a young age, elephants had to be captured from the wild since they bred poorly outside the forest and were uneconomical to maintain for the first twenty years of their lives because they could not be put to work. ‘So, for all practical purposes, war elephants had to be captured as adults in the wild and then trained. It is this feature of the institution of war elephants that tied Indian kings to the forest: it ensured their practical interest in protecting forests and the wild elephants in them.’ This also meant that Indian kings had to have productive relations with forest people and barbarians (mlechchha) involving trade and tribute, indicating that forests and their inhabitants were not isolated entities that were the antithesis of plains-based polities, but were intrinsic to the institution of kingdoms and empires.

By 500 BCE, the use of war elephants had become the norm in North India, where it gradually displaced a Vedic culture centred on horses and chariots. While elephant armies were described in the Mahabharata (composed in 800-900 BCE), the heroes of the great battle of Kurukshetra were invariably chariot warriors. Notably, the epic identified riders of war elephants as kings of certain tribes and countries ‘forming an arc from north to south along the eastern side of the Indian subcontinent’. These regions were later mapped in the Arthashastra (written around 350 BCE) as reputed to have the best elephants. With the rise of the kingdom of Magadha in the eastern Gangetic plains, especially its empire under the Maurya dynasty, the war elephant came into its own. This historical trajectory was also a geographical one: ‘a journey which took the people calling themselves "Arya" from the land of horses into a land of elephants, from the grassy steppe of Central Asia to the monsoon forest of the Ganga valley in North India.’

For Trautmann, this spatial and temporal shift was marked by a close link between the invention of a military technology – the war elephant – and the invention of a political form: kingship. ‘Kingship had both the developed form of warfare into which elephants could be fitted to advantage, and the enormous resources required for the capture, training, maintenance, and deployment in war of elephants from the forest.’ Historians associated with Alexander, who visited India briefly in 327-4 BCE, record that elephants were rare or absent in republics. The political economy that sustained them is epitomized by the Mauryan kingdom. Megasthenes, ambassador to the court of the first Mauryan emperor, Chandragupta, described its organization: ‘A disarmed farmer class whose function is to generate the bulk of taxation which pays for the army; a landless warrior class paid from the treasury; and a monopoly by the king of the ownership of elephants, horses, and arms. This system must have been the main engine of Mauryan expansion, and its unprecedented success would, in turn, have provoked emulation by kings who saw it.’

The institution of kingship enabled the incorporation of elephants as an essential limb of the four-legged beast that was the ideal army: chaturangabala, composed of foot, horse, chariot and elephant divisions. Trautmann traces the spread of this model from North India to South India, Sri Lanka and South East Asia, and westwards into North Africa and Europe. It is startling to learn that elephants were a part of the armies of Alexander as well as Julius Caesar; in fact, they ‘appeared in most of the great battles of antiquity’. To trace their presence, Trautmann explores what must have been unfamiliar territory to an Indianist: the histories of Mesopotamia, China, ancient Greece and Rome. He also steps out of his comfort zone of ancient India to discuss war elephants in the Mughal empire in the 16th century. The sure-footedness with which this book moves across this vast canvas reveals another, awe-inspiring, aspect of Trautmann’s scholarship to readers who know the close-grained and meticulous nature of his previous work.

His mastery of classical texts allows Trautmann to draw on Sanskrit poetry and treatises for telling glimpses into the military significance of elephants; using sources as varied as Kalidas’s Ritusamhara and Neelakantha’s Matangaleela, his account occasionally takes on the air of a detective story, deducing a coherent narrative from apparently unrelated, scattered clues. Since the practical knowledge of working with war elephants lay with unlettered mahouts and was passed on orally, there are crucial gaps in the written record which Trautmann is partially able to redress with his innovative approach.

Finally, the comparison between India and China: Trautmann relates the persistence of elephants in India and their retreat in China to the different ‘land ethics’ of these regions, the relations between farming and pastoralism, and military technologies. In China, for reasons which this brief review cannot detail, cavalry was preferred in warfare and elephants were not incorporated into the army. At the same time, intensive agriculture was vigorously promoted. With little value placed on elephants or their habitats, their decline was rapid. This devaluation has a parallel in a period much closer to us: with the Industrial Revolution, the technological and economic efficiency of steam power made animal power obsolete. As elephants, horses and bullocks were displaced from the economy, the land uses associated with their upkeep – forests and pastures – also came to be downgraded in terms of conservation.

Elephants and Kings is a magisterial work which is a pleasure to read. The only flaw in the book is that the main argument is repeated several times; a redundancy in a book as lucid as this. For this is how environmental history should be done: by seamlessly combining a wide-ranging vision with detailed attention to all the elements that converge in the intertwining of nature and culture.

Amita Baviskar

Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi