New light on ancient Indian text on elephant

CORRESPONDENCE

616 CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 90, NO. 5, 10 MARCH 2006

Gajashastra, a more than two thousand year old text on elephants, contains a lot of fanciful and mythical descriptions, but between these, ‘hard data’ are strewn1. An interesting aspect is that ‘scent-flagging’ 2 of the tail of a receptive female elephant, discovered as late as 1972, was described in Gajashastra. I wish to point out that a recent paper3 describing behaviour patterns of a group of Asian elephants in England, sheds new light on an apparently nonsensical string of words in sloka 10, Garvinilakshmanan, in the abovementioned text. This sloka contains an accurate observation, namely that a receptive female elephant flings up her tail1, and ‘scent-flagging’2 published in 1972 is the term for flinging the tail up (after rubbing the vagina region). But the description in sloka 10 also says that the tail is flung up in a head downwards stance. This was incomprehensible to us when we reported our reappraisal of Gajashastra1. Confusion increased on perusing Edgerton’s annotated translation3 of Matangalila, the South Indian counterpart of Gajashastra, where he pointed out that in some old texts, the female elephant has been described/depicted as standing on her head while mating – apparently an arrant nonsense. Rees4 describes a rare behaviour pattern – appeasement ritual of a she-elephant in the proximate presence of a male. The photograph and drawing show the stance of the she-elephant, almost in a seated posture but with head and trunk downwards as if broken at shoulder length. With this impression I reconsulted the sloka and found that it reads – the she-elephant stays (assumes a stance) with broken head, shoulder and trunk.

It now seems possible that initially the accurate ancient observers recorded scentflagging of females in close proximity of males, so that the scent-flagging animal with tail erect flopped down and assumed the appeasement stance (in which the tail is not flung up). Some of the later commentators or copywriters, who never observed these behaviour patterns in nature, translated ‘head downwards, as if broken at shoulder level’ as standing on head, although in Gajashastra the picture is realistic.

I thank Anita Bhattacharya for reexamining the Sanskrit text.

1. Bandopadhyay, Anita and Brahmachary, R.

L., Curr. Sci., 1999, 77, 9–10.