Sri Lankans love their elephants with an almost religious fervor. They attribute to them not only the strong memory of legendary fame, but great intelligence, and deep and complex emotions, much like our own. They can show great affection to the mahouts (elephant handlers) who treat them well and have been known to kill those who treat them cruelly. During the country’s long civil war, pitched battles sometimes paused as both sides waited for elephants to pass.
Here are two photos I took that show something of the range of their roles. In one, you see a shot of the Perahera religious festival, held in the city of Kandy each year. It features, among its many dancers and other groups, elephants in elaborately lighted costumes (the lights are operated by batteries). They are truly—almost literally—the stars of the event. Thousands of people line the street of the old capital to see them pass. The curious thing is that you can smell the elephants coming long before you see them. A bit like cattle, the smell is not a bad one, but earthy and pungent.
The second photo shows them in their more day-to-day role as workers, carrying large loads and helping in logging operations.
Here’s a passage about the city of Kandy from my novel, “Sri Lanka” (the bit about the headline in the Kandy newspaper is true):
(We) topped the last forested ridge and looked down on the town of Kandy, lying within a bowl formed by the surrounding hills.
A lake dominated the center of the town. On its shore stood the island’s most revered Buddhist temple. In the days of the old kingdom, before the British had come, Kandy had been the island’s capital. Here, the old palaces and offices of state still crowded around the temple’s thick walls and flaring rooflines, dissolving any distinction between spiritual and temporal order—or, more accurately, lending the government the mandate of heaven by its proximity to the temple complex. For the island’s Sinhala majority, overwhelmingly Buddhist, the temple represented the navel of the world, its physical and spiritual center.
Because Kandy remained an important regional capital, I had booked two days of appointments with local government officials, civic leaders, and administrators of the local university. My last appointment, however, was the one I looked forward to the most: a visit with the editor of one of the few newspapers published outside of Colombo. I enjoyed the paper’s small town feel and admired its earnestness even as I puzzled over its syntax, coming to cherish such quirks as the headline for a story about an activist civic association that read, “Kandy Ass. Deserves Respect.”