Not everyone sees this as a fairy tale. Serious concerns have been raised that animals matter more than people and that the local population has paid a high price for Kaziranga’s ‘success’.
We shall see.
Day One Hundred : Kaziranga
We’re at the gates to Kaziranga National Park, awaiting the opening ceremonies of the much-publicized 2nd Elephant Festival. There could hardly be a greater contrast with the serenity of Majuli Island. Crowds are gathering on both sides of the road and, occasionally, a policeman will stride into the middle of them, waving his hands and blowing a whistle as if his life depended on it.
A constant blast of truck horns reminds us that the road we’re standing beside is the NH 37, Assam’s equivalent of the M1. Large signs call this stretch of it the Elephant Corridor, but it takes more than a sign or two to turn truck drivers into conservationists, and the presence of the crowd only seems to encourage them to drive faster.
The rich are here, men in suits and women in gorgeous saris, and the poor, in extended family groups, stand and watch them. A procession of elephants is gathered further up the main road, but nothing can begin until the local big-wigs are here.
Maan and I pass the time talking about Indian politics. He gets vociferously angry about the general level of corruption, but even more worried about the BJP, the right-wing Hindu nationalists currently in power. They’re communalist, anti-Muslim and suspicious of ethnic minorities of any kind. A travesty, he thinks, of the principles of tolerance and diversity on which India was founded. He’s about to tell me more when hysterical police whistle-blowing announces the arrival of a ministerial convoy accompanied by a jeep with a machine gun mounted on the back. This, it transpires, is only the Minister for Environment and Forests and it’s a further hour before incandescent whistle-blowing and ferocious arm-waving narrowly avoid members of the public being mown down by the vehicles bearing Chief Minister of Assam and his party.
Priorities having been duly established, the long-suffering elephants begin to process down the road towards us. I count 41 of them, all colourfully attired in the national colours of red and green and carrying advertising for the Numaligarh Oil Refinery, whose tankers have been scattering us to the sides of the road all morning, and who are, astutely, chief sponsors of the Elephant Festival.
The elephants walk slowly, silently, with expressions of infinite patience. Their mahouts, in freshly pressed brown overalls and matching safari hats, look solemnly ahead. The crowd streams after them along the avenue of rosewood trees that leads through the fields to the arena. Many of them are representing local groups and organizations. They carry their pro-conservation banners aloft, shouting, singing and sidestepping the increasingly generous piles of elephant dung.
Once in the arena, a short speech explains that the motivation behind the elephant festival is to encourage local people to see the elephant as their friend and not something that tramples through their villages, damages their crops and destroys their livelihood. Unfortunately, this is but the first of many speeches on the theme of elephants as our friends, which the elephants and ourselves have to stand and listen to for over an hour in the hot sunshine.
Once the long paeans to biological diversity and ecological integrity are over, the elephants can get on with what they’re there for. Playing football. It didn’t seem a very bright idea when I first saw it in Kunming and it doesn’t seem so here. Elephants are not natural footballers. You might as well get the Arsenal squad to pick up tree trunks with their noses. It’s just not their field of expertise. They do their best, of course, but their ball skills are painfully slow and their ponderous movements and the commentator’s attempts to present this as the last few seconds of a World Cup Final hint at desperation.
The elephant tug of war, on the other hand, is much more promising. The point here is quite simple - to show how much bigger and stronger elephants are than humans. Not an oft-disputed fact, you might think, but the proof of it is wonderful to watch. No matter how many men rush out of the crowd to grab the rope, and I reckon there were at least 60 clinging on to it at one point, the elephant merely has to walk a couple of steps to have them tumbling after him like the tail of a kite.
Later in the day, when the elephants have been taken away from the arena to be fed and watered, I encounter them in a different and quite unforgettable light. We are allowed close to three elephants and a calf as they trundle down to a muddy creek for their evening ablutions. At first, like all of us, I’m a spectator, impressed by the rapport between the mahouts and their charges, marvelling at the ease with which they persuade these colossal creatures to lie on their sides in the water. This is a rare thing to see, and can only happen if there is absolute trust between elephant and man and an environment with no outside threat.
Then they ask me in among them. At first I’m apprehensive. I have once in my life, in Africa, seen the terrifying power that can be unleashed when an elephant takes a dislike to you, and I approach very warily, stepping gingerly into the ankle-deep mud. As I do so, one of the elephants, a 55-year-old bull called Joiraj, decides to stand up. Like a small island coming to life, he rears up above me, stretching up to his full 14 feet and proceeding to fling water from his trunk over his back.
He’s a magnificent animal with a proud set of long, curved tusks and not someone I’d mess with. The keeper, however, has no such qualms.
‘Boit! (Sit!) Tere! (Lie On Side!)’ he shouts and within a matter of seconds he has several tons of bull elephant crumpling down into the water and rolling over like a dog waiting to be scratched.
The mahout beckons me forward and indicates where Joiraj most likes to be washed.
So it is that at the age of 60 I find myself rubbing an elephant of 55, behind his ears and particularly at the point where the tusk disappears into the folds of his cheek. His eyes roll towards me, registering languid approval. I’m told that he likes nothing better than to be slapped quite hard on the bridge of his nose. Tentatively at first, then, at the mahout’s urging, rather more powerfully, I strike the top of his trunk. But it’s only when I give him a really good whack that he appears to enter elephant heaven, rolling his eyes, stretching out his legs and emitting an infinitely appreciative rumble. The sound of a contented elephant is a wonderful thing, and I’m amazed that this battleship-grey hide, and these hard, immemorially ancient flanks can be as sensitive as a cat’s chin.
In the evening we’re driven into the heart of the park for a barbecue organized by the Minister for Forests at one of the anti-poaching camps.
One of the guests is a fellow Englishman, Mark Shand, who knows about conservation and knows his Himalaya well too. We swap a few stories. He is very keen that we should film a man he’s just met who claims he can call rhino.
‘Looks a bit like Benny Hill, round glasses, big grin. And he’s best after lunch, when he’s had a bit to drink.’
Day One Hundred and One : Kaziranga to Guwahati
In the park at first light, a layer of mist draped like gauze across the cotton trees. Maan and I are climbing aboard for an elephant safari, getting on the easy way, up an access tower and then straight onto one of the wood-frame howdahs that can accommodate six people.
By happy coincidence we’re aboard my new friend Joiraj, and as we step ponderously out into the park, I ask Maan about the future of the elephant in Kaziranga. He thinks that it’s all part of a wider picture. Unlike in Africa, there has been a long tradition in India of domesticating and training elephant, primarily for the logging industry. Now the pendulum is swinging away from cutting down and more towards the preservation of forest, so a different role must be found if the elephant is not to return to its natural state, with all the damage that can cause to local inhabitants.