Zooësis in the space of India: ‘body politics’ of the domesticated elephant

The question of zooësis assumes a particular urgency in the contemporary moment due to the unprecedented change in the intensity of human–animal interaction in the last two centuries.Footnote ¹⁰ The analysis of zooësis engages in twin critiques. The first is to question the ontological category of ‘human’, studying how the category of human, rather than having any inherent and natural qualities, is constructed in a process of positing animal as ‘Other’.Footnote ¹¹ The second posits zooësis as ‘encounter’ of human and animal. Here, rather than limiting the interrogation to the production of the category of human, the human–animal encounter is explored in relation to how it has changed the material life of both humans and animals, historically contextualizing the encounter with all its violence as well as the new possibilities of togetherness it offers. In this vein, feminist philosopher Donna Haraway starts her germinal study with the seemingly simple question, ‘Whom and what do we touch when we touch this dog?’Footnote ¹² The question of the relationality of the human–animal encounter in the form of a touch poses a radical challenge as Haraway moves away from anthropocentrism that presumes human as the only significant partner in the encounter. While highlighting the need to critique the construction of human, she poses a more significant question: ‘how does this touch make us more worldly, in alliance with all the beings who work and play for an alter-globalization that can endure more than one season?’Footnote ¹³ Alongside the questions of registering the absolute otherness of the gaze of the animal, her question highlights categories such as ‘work’ and ‘play’ that humans and animals engage in together in being worldly. In starting with the ordinariness of encounter, Haraway therefore moves away from treating the Western philosophical and theological basis (based mostly on textual sources) as the determining factor framing the encounter. Instead, the question of animal is a materialistic one that conjoins multiple axes of identification, power and new possibilities.

If one follows Haraway's theoretical manoeuvre, one needs to contextualize the materiality of the widely popular anthropomorphic and zoomorphic practices in India in its implications in modernity. Neel Ahuja, whose scholarship foregrounds the need to bring together postcolonial studies and animal studies, has argued that colonial taxonomy and the modern epistemology it was based on had at its heart what he calls a ‘speciated reason’, the taxonomic paradigm that emerged with the rise of ‘animal-centred evolutionary biology’ from the early nineteenth century. The speciated reason that conflated race and species, he argues, also naturalized ‘biological difference, legitimizing the definition of racial groups as subspecies . . . and reinforcing heterosexual reproduction as the privileged site of species definition for multicellular organisms’.Footnote ¹⁴ When Haraway critiques humanism by mapping the ‘discursive tie between the colonized, the enslaved, the noncitizen, and the animal – all reduced to type, all Others to rational man, and all essential to his bright constitution’,Footnote ¹⁵ she figures in the transnational aspect of modernity, marking animal also within the network of relations in the modernity project. It is in this complex network of relations that one needs to contextualize the elephant in The Elephant Project.

The elephant assumes significance in Hindu mythology, especially in the imaginations and practices surrounding the elephant god, Ganesha. Moreover, elephants have been significant historically in war, spectacle, entertainment and ritual. Within the space of Kerala the practices surrounding the elephant are particularly significant and widespread. As the ‘state animal’ of Kerala, two tuskers are shown on the official state emblem, facing each other with their trunks raised ‘guarding’ and deifying the crest at the bottom, with a conch in the centre and an Asoka pillar on the top. The two tusks at the back of the stage that frame Mikari's embodiment are therefore not simply suggesting a tusker; instead, they metonymically register the state and its taxonomic project. This is a representational project within which both woman as a category and the temple elephant are presented as (ideal) performing subjects, albeit in differing manners.

The narrative of gender equality and parity, and the position of women as modern citizen–subjects, is a constitutive part of the stabilization of Kerala identity in the ‘Kerala model of development’ that has often been hailed as an exemplary development model to be emulated by others in the developing world.Footnote ¹⁶ The temple elephant, on the other hand, upholds the ‘traditional’ aspect of Kerala identity. As the popularity and scale of display within pooram has increased since Indian independence, the decorated elephants holding the deity on their backs assume a central place in the tourist package of ‘brand Kerala’. This ritual space is gendered in the realm of both the human and the animal. The musicians, the mahouts and the attendants of the elephants are all male, and only bull elephants hold the deity in pooram. In the early 2000s, the small linguistic region of Kerala had six hundred captive elephants, of which five hundred were bull elephants.Footnote ¹⁷ Further, through laksana (lit. ‘quality’) an ideal classification is made among the bull elephants. Laksana, described in the Sanskrit texts and also widely disseminated in popular culture, stresses the specificity of dark colour, height, rising tusks and trunk trailing on the ground as defining an ideal elephant. It is these laksana, clearly positing a form of masculinity for the elephants – the classification supposedly highlighting both ‘grace’ and strength – which make them ‘celebrities’ in the state.Footnote ¹⁸ And since ‘the festival season and the musth season often coincide’, the scene in the poem of the temple elephant running amok is a familiar occurrence in the region – an occurrence around which ‘tradition’ in globalization, anthropomorphizing practices and governmentality (scientific discourse of medical treatment, tranquilization and management of domestic elephant population) meet and contest.Footnote ¹⁹

By recording these regional engagements, I am not positing any singularity of the practice. These aspects have a long (transnational) contestational history with regard to engagements with animals in general, and with elephants in particular.Footnote ²⁰ In his rich study on the transnational crossing of knowledge from the colonies to the metropole and vice versa, historian Sujit Sivasundaram takes up elephants as a site/body around which what he calls ‘trading of knowledges’ occurred.Footnote ²¹ Arguing that the knowledges in the space of the colony were in fact ‘appropriated and reinvented’, Sivasundaram critiques the discursive binary of British utilitarianism versus Indian stress on spectacle, aesthetics and moral qualities.Footnote ²² Though British anthropomorphism shared ‘much with Eastern religions and Mughal practice’, as the new scientific logic (in association with Christian natural theology) became aligned with colonialism, even as the British took from the colonies' knowledge about how to capture elephants, or to control musth, the discourse was built by setting up how the British method of catching elephants was ‘more benevolent’ than the ones used by the colonized.Footnote ²³ By discussing the continuing widespread practices in the regional context, I wish to bring out the situatedness and the intensity of the convergence of distinct discourses and practices around the body of the elephant. Considering the elephant body as a complex site and drawing a relation to the woman's body in the state taxonomic project, The Elephant Project as zooësis opens up the complex entangled terrains of intersectionality.

Encounter as ‘becoming with’: the ‘figure’ of the elephant

In one of the scenes, after indexing a break in the tusker's sense of reality, the performance presents the tusker in its imaginative space of the ‘wild’. As the soundscape through live wind instrument indexes ‘breeze’, Mikari sits on the ground, swaying to the breeze, smelling it. With the absence of a visible trunk, she takes in the smell with her whole body swaying. She stretches her body with hands extended upwards, as if one (human) is stretching after waking up in the morning. She stands up, and holding her back stooped, hands held parallel and facing down, fists rolled, she starts to move, slowly swaying her whole body. She has what can be called the ‘charm’ of the elephant (derived from the common Malayalam word aanachandam, lit. ‘elephant charm’, suggesting a leisurely swaying gait). In an abrupt instant, her hand becomes the ‘trunk’, plucking a branch or a fruit. Something bites her in the neck, and her neck and face are contorted. But quickly, she frees from the contortion to move again with the ‘charm’ of the elephant described above. She plucks a ‘coconut leaf’ stretching her ‘trunk’ up in the air, and holding the leaf with her trunk, she hits her forehead with it, and then the ground. Arms stretched out, she moves in a ‘free’ movement in a circle, and sits down. She is feeling ‘cold’; she tries to shoo a fly from her body. With more frenzied movement, she circles in a fast pace around the stage, lifts the stool at the centre over her head and forcefully places it in the middle of the stage. Climbing on the stool, and standing straight, she performs a gestural mode of acting derived from Kutiyattam.Footnote ²⁴ One can identify some gestures: she is swirling things, smelling things, one moment coming across as a clear gesture where she is holding a ‘bow’ and an ‘arrow’. Once again, suddenly something bites her neck, and she tries to get it off. In the process, she takes a hand out of the sleeve of the kimono, and suddenly her right hand moves into a gesture of holding a ‘dear one’ in her arms. After seeing her moving her lips with no sound, we suddenly see her singing in Japanese to her ‘dear one’, pointing to things and plucking things from trees and feeding the ‘dear one’. In an abrupt move, she collapses from the stool onto the floor. The live percussion rhythm of the Kerala temple ritual (paandi melam) reaches its loudest crescendo. She moves on the floor in pain, scared. Her neck strained, she again dynamically moves in circles around the stage and falls onto the stool. She climbs onto the stool, and, her back to the audience, creates once again the geometric pattern of the elephant. The ears are waving, and the rhythm of paandi melam is in full blast.

In the sequence described above, one can see distinct kinds of body movement. The tusker can be indexed through certain recognizable traits such as movement of body parts (a hand becoming a trunk plucking things in the air, tasting flowers and fruit, driving away irritating flies), and a specific gait. Here, the ‘freer’ sense of movement (elephant charm) demarcates the tusker in the ‘wild’. The embodiment foregrounds this ‘charm’ even in the case of sequences where the ‘wild’ is not simply a nostalgic space of total comfort and pleasure, as when something bites the neck or insects fly around and irritate. The second is a series of movements that I have described as ‘dynamic’ and ‘frenzied’, where the stress is not on indexing the elephant through recognizable traits, but involves fast circular movements around the stage. The third are the movements that signify a body in pain, where the body and neck are strained and the face is contorted – moments of collapse that signify a disruption in the unity of fantasy. The fourth is a series of movements directly derived from Kutiyattam, where the gestural language is an extremely codified alternate language in itself. The fifth are movements that are anthropomorphic, like stretching after waking up or singing lullabies like a human, which are not recognizable elephant characteristics but are those that can be ascribed to and ‘seen’ in an elephant. All these different categories are permeable ones, and The Elephant Project uses them in differing combinations.

By instituting the distinctions and showing the permeability of the categories, The Elephant Project articulates, as Chaudhuri has theorized about ‘becoming animal’, a process of zooësis that resists ‘metaphor and mimesis’. Instead, the performance ‘courts fleeting synecdoches, momentary metonymies, shifting interstices’, without following and instituting one ideal model (of animal/elephant) of which it is a mimetic practice (by a fixed position of human Other).Footnote ²⁵ So what is the elephant embodied in The Elephant Project? The embodiment enacts what Haraway conceptualizes as figure. Positing that ‘figures are at the same time creatures of imagined possibility and creatures of fierce and ordinary reality’, Haraway brings both ‘flesh’ and semiotic meaning-making together.Footnote ²⁶ Figures, she notes, are ‘not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material–semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another . . . figures have always been where the biological and literary or artistic come together with all of the force of lived reality’.Footnote ²⁷ It is precisely the co-existence of material and semiotic, ever-changing and shifting ‘nodes’, that characterizes the embodiment of the elephant in The Elephant Project.

Musth and modernity: antinomies of being worldly

The phenomenon of musth gives a specific thrust to the production of knowledge around the elephant. In the case of domesticated bull elephants, it necessitates that the elephant keepers develop a careful method of reading the symptoms and keeping under control the heightened aggression and sexuality of the animal. By pointing out that the elephant has been rushed back into the space of the ritual though it has not come out of musth fully, the poem offers a critique of the economic structures underlying the use of elephants and the ‘work’ a tusker undertakes (much like its human Others) within the exploitative structures of the present. Yet what is critical is that the poem uses musth to think conceptually through an alternate state of being worldly by drawing on a premodern history of ideas and practice around musth and linking it to power structure in the context of colonialism.

The etymology of the term ‘musth’, in fact, gives an indication of the conception of musth as a problematic for thinking through a different state of ‘being worldly’. The term ‘musth’ is derived from the Persian word mast, meaning intoxicated state (of a lover), and as a concept is specifically used in Islamic mystical traditions such as Sufi to refer to the state of a dervish as a lover totally intoxicated in Allah.Footnote ²⁸ It is a state in which aql (reason) is held in abeyance. In mast the bodily or sensual experience and the ‘excesses’ of bodily engagement such as drinking and vigorous body movements might be critical in both realizing and simultaneously standing as the external bodily manifestation of the state. But the state is one where there is an indifference and therefore an annihilation of the existing order of reality and norms. Unlike Haraway's materialism, musth conceptualizes a different way of being worldly. In this conceptualization, there is no binary between the intoxicated state of the one possessed and the real world of norms. Instead, mast is a reality or a state of being worldly, but not of this world. The reality itself is of a different order constituted by sense and affect. The Sanskrit word for the phenomenon is mada (or matt) and the word mada, as used in the significant treatise on elephants, Matangalila, refers to ‘excess of joy’.Footnote ²⁹ Mada is connected to the reality of the present – it arises ‘out of good health, vigor, and a happy life, attended by well-balanced humors of life’, but the state itself is of a different order where the ecstatic state is all that is real, and all that matters. Matangalila therefore notes, ‘joy, rapture, exhilaration . . . so the state of musth’.Footnote ³⁰ Musth as rapture/intoxication highlights the singular state of the one going through musth, and since it involves only a temporality of the ‘present’ of the heightened affective state's sensuousness, it is indifferent to ‘history’.

The poem figures in this conception of an alternate state of being worldly in love or rapture but also presents it as a specific problem of masculinity, specifically that of the subjugated masculinity of the colonized. On the one hand, the poem follows strategies of ‘becoming animal’ within the mythological imagination in Sanskrit texts. Historian Wendy Doniger, in her study of zoomorphism in Sanskrit texts, draws attention to the links among sexual acts, the killing of animals and birth of specific human language (poetry). Highlighting the myth of origin of poetry in the Sanskritic imagination, where the poet Valmiki (to whom authorship of Ramayana is ascribed) utters the first sloka in a moment of sorrow when he sees a hunter killing the ‘male of two mating cranes’, Doniger analyses the multiple instances where (mis)identification of humans as animals when they are engaged in sexual acts leads to their death.Footnote ³¹ Doniger convincingly shows that the texts posit a position where the ‘the possession of human speech is a prerogative that may deprive humans of their sexuality but may deprive animals of their lives – and may deprive of their lives humans who resort to animal sexuality’.Footnote ³² The poem, where the elephant meets its death when it makes a definite move in its fantasy towards a mate, follows this trope in Sanskritic imagination. But, what is critical is also the much-recognized memory of elephants as a tension in the actual practice surrounding domesticated elephants. Historically, the practice of captive breeding of Asian elephants has been negligible, both because of the difficulty of structuring the breeding in captivity, and because of the economic investment involved in raising an elephant that cannot be engaged in any productive work until it is about fifteen years old.Footnote ³³ So domesticated elephants embody a ‘primal’ event of subjugation, with the memory of the pre-captive days always a possible threat against conformity in the present.Footnote ³⁴ But here, since the elephant in musth is not any elephant but the ‘best’ tusker in the pooram being trained and performing before the people in power, the tusker makes for an exemplary case of subjugated masculinity of the colonized: the colonized (masculinity) dominated and disciplined by an external power, but one also having the potential of carnage and savagery.

With musth as an uncontrollable letting-go, the central question that arises is, where does the elephant slide to in its fantasy? Is it to the pre-captive days with an awareness of the present discipline/norm and ordinary reality, or is it an absolute fantasy, a forgetting of the ‘primal’ moment and the ‘history’ of disciplining itself, a state of mast? In other words, if there is violence at the heart of the taming, and one learns to discipline oneself, and even assume a place and derive a pleasure within the structures of power, how can one imagine liberation – will the liberation be an absolute letting-go of the history of disciplining itself? If the process of disciplining is indeed, as performance theory has shown, constituted through bodily practices rather than through ideas (definitely more emphatically in the case of domesticated elephants), how will the body sense its surroundings in the state of musth?

The Elephant Project takes the problematic of musth and its possibilities of imagining an alternate state of being worldly, but destabilizes the underlying structural bind of Sanskritic imagination as well as the masculinity logic. It does so by taking specific departures from the textual source, making it open-ended, and destabilizing the narrative in the process. First, the performance eschews the binary of the narrator versus the tusker, where the narrator as a voice of reason presents to ‘us’ the reality of the tusker lost in its fantasy. In the performance, the ‘reality’ is presented to ‘us’ and to the ‘tusker’ not by a voice of reason, but often by a contorted body, a body registered to be in pain. It is precisely the heightened state of sensuality, of a corporeal relation to the world, that indexes possible breaches within the fantasy world. What is critical in the gender reversal in Mikari's embodiment is that it opens up the additional caveat of linkage between human language and animals in Sanskritic imagination that makes the ‘becoming with’ of Haraway's theoretical manoeuvre even more significant in the Indian context. Analysing the distinction between prevalent imaginations of transformations into animals and talking with animals, Doniger concludes that in Sanskrit texts, talking with animals, or access to the language of animals, was a prerogative of the male domain. So while ‘all hypersexualized women are represented as talking animals’, they do so without ‘talking with animals’.Footnote ³⁵ Mikari's embodying as ‘becoming with’ in this sense is a ‘talking with’ through embodiment that is not allowed within the complex structural bind of Sanskritic imagination.

Second, the performance eschews the logic of linearity. In the poem, though temporality is not strictly linear as the tusker slides into the fantasy and explores the wild with an expanded temporality, the break in the ‘real’ space of the pooram is a clear moment – linked to the tusker's move towards the herd and the mate it imagines – from which there is no possibility of return. In its visualization of the tusker's peregrinations the performance negates this logic of the point of no return. For if one posits a real space of the pooram over which the fantastical is happening, there are multiple events of carnage, and multiple deaths, not just of the people in the ritual space, but also of the tusker. As a loop structure, closer to structures of trauma, the carnage and awareness of subjugation loops, returning again and again in differing ways. There are clear moments of awareness within the performance, such as a pained and contorted body on the ground looking at the audience in shock as the hands get stuck in the chain around the neck, while the body shivers on the ground in pain, or the confused state of the elephant trying to wash off ‘blood’ from the hands.Footnote ³⁶ But the loop structure breaks these moments as continuity within the imagination and as finality. After this awareness, one sees the tusker again continuing peregrination and sensual engagement with his surroundings. And amidst the peregrinations in the wild, one also sees without any rupture a carry-over with a difference of the ‘virtuosic’ body movements of the tusker's disciplined body.

The performance structure also goes against the finality of ‘death’, as in the climax one sees not just one death, but two distinct death sequences. The first involves a death onstage of the tusker, as an invisible gun (indexed by the sound of a gunshot) kills Mikari-as-tusker even as the tusker is running. She tries to get up, pulls herself through the ground towards the twin tusks at the centre (the state emblem) and crashes onto the mirror in the centre of it. As the mirror is a rotating one, her upper torso vanishes behind the mirror, and she makes the mirror rotate with her hands. After maintaining the movement for a short duration, she vanishes, or, more aptly, gives the impression of being sucked behind the emblem. In the second death sequence following the first, Mikari comes out onto the stage, now dressed in completely white attire. She faces the audience directly, addresses them with questions in Japanese, looks at audience members intensely, and slowly exits through the middle of the audience (Fig. 2). On the stage, one sees two men take out the tusks of the emblem, and two bare-chested males, one with a gun and another, an attendant, with a stick. Slowly the gunman takes aim and fires, and Mikari, amidst the audience, turns around hurt, and the lights black out. In this manner, the performance moves away from the defining moment of sexuality and mating as linked to death in the poem, to indicate the complex intersection of gender and animal within modern state practices. In The Elephant Project, the awareness of subjugation, death, sexuality, disciplined body and being in wild all criss-cross, with no structural logic of Indian mythology.

Fig. 2

Mikari enters dressed in white after the first death sequence of the elephant. The all-white dress resonates with the traditional female attire of Kerala women, mundu veshti (a dominant Hindu upper-caste attire). The sacred mark made with ash on her forehead and the paddy stalk in her hands bring to mind the harvest festival Onam, a popular marker of identity of the state. Courtesy of Theatre Roots and Wings.

So is there a possibility of imagining a moment of festivity beyond the subjugated singularity of the temple elephant? The performance presents it through a scene absent in the poem, and ironically with the strategy of fully fledged anthropomorphism. In one of the sequences, when the tusker collapses, three bare-chested males enter the stage wearing boar masks, two of them carrying drums and another a stringed instrument. While playing the instruments, one of them gives Mikari an elephant mask and the multi-coloured umbrellas used in pooram. The papier mâché masks, both of the boar and of the elephant, are not ornate and give the feel of popular and unfinished masks as they reveal curves and fissures. The music, rather than pooram, is that of flamenco, with a more popular amateur drum rhythm played by a boar onstage. The males start dancing what seems to be a banal, non-virtuosic dance, with short swaying of their arms and feet. Their faces, covered by the masks, draw even more attention to their non-muscular bodies swaying in such banal fashion. Mikari, wearing the elephant mask, takes a green umbrella and stands in the centre rolling it in her hands, while two boars ‘fan’ the elephant with vencamaram and the male dancers join in with the rolling of umbrellas and their banal dancing (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Alternate carnival of animals where the animals dance with the objects from the pooram, multi-coloured umbrellas and aalavattam, with which the elephant is being ‘fanned’ at the centre of the stage. Courtesy of Theatre Roots and Wings.

This short sequence of a ‘liberated’ space, or an alternate ‘carnival’ of the animals, is striking in that it breaks the frames for acting modes that are set up through the performance: it is the only group sequence, it undertakes fully fledged anthropomorphism, and it relinquishes the stress of pooram as involving measured and virtuosic displays. As John Berger highlights how anthropomorphism as a strategy offers a challenge to modernity, here the anthropomorphism does something complex.Footnote ³⁷ It disentangles the elephant from the discourse of masculinity, resisting the overlain and spontaneous ascription of masculinity to the elephants. While scholars have argued how returning the ‘goat’ in the scapegoat is a radical gesture destabilizing tragedy, here the reverse, removing the elephant from the masculinity discourse, becomes the most significant gesture.Footnote ³⁸ Centrally, while providing this imaginative space of an alternate carnival of animals with the props of the pooram, it does not posit a fully fledged Bakhtinian upside-down second world.Footnote ³⁹ It posits only that against the crescendos and heights of the pooram, whether it be the music, the fireworks or the overlain masculinity, the alternate carnival is a low-key affair, a time to have some ‘fun’ with the umbrellas and dance to the flamenco, but not a complete, fully fledged and self-conscious break from the representational violence. In this sense, the materiality of bodies in this sequence, specifically the banality of the dances, works parasitically on the entire materiality of the pooram that the performance re-creates. It is precisely this parasitic quality of the sequence that provides at a sensory level the most fundamental critique of the masculinity logic entangled with zooësis in the Kerala public sphere.

A zooësis that critiques anthropocentrism often presents the domesticated state of animals and their existence in the wild as radically different conditions. The Elephant Project takes the domesticated elephants in pooram undergoing musth to present human–animal encounter as intersectional, thereby troubling the binary of domestication/world of norms and the wild/freeing. Taking embodiment as the site of exploring disciplining as well as imagining a freeing, through the space of theatre The Elephant Project articulates an alternative possible way of ‘being worldly’ brought through affect and senses. This perspective that sees the virtuosic body as well as structures of identification in domestication/world of norms as a violence that at the same time is not completely rejected in the moment of freeing; instead, they are delinked from their underlying power structure. Thereby, while furthering the possibilities within the earlier conceptualizations of musth as an alternative state of being worldly, the performance negates the underlying masculinity logic and structural bind of Sanskritic imagination, as well as imaginations and practices surrounding elephants based on colonial/modern power in the contemporary space of Kerala in the contemporary space of Kerala.