Elephant whisperer

One, two, three… un, deux, trois… onji, radd, mooji… a mother teaching her daughter to count. Commonplace, except that the mother is Prajna Chowta, one of India’s very few women mahouts.

Set in the Kodagu-Mysuru forest region, this is a scene from Elephant Blues, a documentary directed by French filmmaker Philippe Gautier, who is also Chowta’s husband. Screened at the Montreal World Film Festival back in 2014, the film premièred in India early this month. Beyond just capturing the bond between Chowta and her daughter Ojas, who spent the first few years of her life in the forest with her mother, the film addresses the question of choice.

After her early education at a couple of boarding schools in Bengaluru, Ghana-born Chowta studied anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Following her Master’s, she decided to spend a few years with tribes in different parts of India. It was then that she got to interact with the people who worked with elephants.

Come home to the jumbos

The call of the pachyderm proved so strong for Chowta (46) that she returned to the forest and her roots. Rather than analysing the human-elephant relationship from a Western academic perspective, she preferred to study and understand the more intuitive and complex bond that exists between traditional mahouts and their elephants.Chowta travelled to several places where elephants were trained, from a camp in Kerala and Sakrebail in Karnataka to Bihar, Assam, and Myanmar, among others. Once she was trained, she set up the Aane Mane Foundation in 2000-01 for the conservation and study of Asian wild elephants. “Every day has been a challenge… we didn’t even have electricity in the early days,” she recalls when we meet at the Alliance Française de Bangalore ahead of the screening of her documentary. Gautier joins us and describes how they used kerosene lamps for lighting and hired carpenters to build a hut for them in the forest. The couple met in “Bombay and not Mumbai” (as Chowta insists) in the early ’90s when Gautier — whose films include Hathi, The Old Elephant Route and Elephas Maximus — was in the city for a shoot.

Today, complete with solar panels, their camp is a fully sustainable one. A typical day starts with tea or coffee, and then the elephants take over. They are let out into the forest and, while they roam in the wild during the day, Chowta busies herself with reading, writing and other everyday tasks. Once the animals return to camp, she becomes busy feeding them, checking for any wounds and so on. Currently, with the help of tribal mahouts, Chowta is training two female elephants and their calves.

Aane Mane has collaborated with French firm Geotraceur to develop and share a tracking system for elephants. Involving the use of GPS-enabled collars, the tracking system has been deployed in association with the Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Science. In 2016, Chowta’s work fetched her the French government’s Knighthood in the National Order of Merit.

Partnering local communities

The work with elephants also entailed building deep ties with the local communities — in this case, the Jenu Kurubas, the traditional honey-gatherers. The documentary throws light on these crucial ties. The then four-year-old Ojas (now 10) is seen playing with the tribals, speaking in their tongue and, in one instance, playing with dough as her mother and a tribal woman roll out chapatis. The film, in Chowta’s voice, is a loving letter to Ojas. When a tribe member dies, Chowta explains to the child that he is now merged with the elements. She endeavours to tell her daughter as much as possible about communing with nature, about the land we are bound to. Chowta’s life is so much in sync with her surroundings that she and Kunti, the resident elephant at the camp, were pregnant at the same time. Kunti’s baby, Dharma, was born seven months after Ojas. Dharma was the camp’s first-born baby elephant and Chowta learnt a lot about weaning baby elephants from their mothers by dipping into her own experience with Ojas.

Time to let go

Chowta was always sure of one thing. While she had chosen a life in the forest, a time would come when her daughter would have to be weaned away from it. No matter how tough that would be for her. And so, after some schooling in Madikeri and a bit of home-schooling, Ojas was sent to live with her grandparents in France to receive a formal education.

This is a poignant moment in the film — when Chowta unchains the elephant’s feet, it is much more than just a physical act; Chowta is letting the elephant back into its own habitat, weaning it away from herself. Similarly, she has to let Ojas go, into a world of her own making.

The elephant has taught her many things, among them human fragility. “It is in fragility that our strength lies,” she says, adding, “The elephant has taught me to look within.” Much like Palakapya, an ancient sage who lived and walked with elephants, Chowta walks tall among her gentle giants.

Savitha Karthikis a freelance journalist based out of Bengaluru

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