 I admit that I don't watch cricket matches except that yesterday it was worth watching the last over. For that alone it was worth it. Having said that, I made a small change, its knowledge of the ancient, in ancient times rather than since ancient times because I thought that that was too broad a canvas for me to cover. You know, we all know about the close relationship between elephants and people over such a long time period. We should ask ourselves a question as to what did ancient people really know about the elephant? Was it all mythology? I mean, all that they knew about the elephant, was it all sort of myth and something that can be dismissed by us who claim to be superior scientists, being very objective about looking at the elephant and so on and so forth? Or are there glimpses of truth and fact and something that we can learn from the elephant about their knowledge of the elephant? I'll very quickly go through this. I will not make a formal presentation in the tradition of the social sciences of a historian but through a PowerPoint presentation like this. Of course, the artistic depictions that Shibani referred to, the rock art and, you know, a lot of sculptural depictions of the elephant, paintings and so on. They do tell us a lot about the elephant and about what people thought about the elephant. But largely today I'll confine myself to the texts, you know, the Vedas, the two texts, the Greek texts, the Chathakas, other Buddhist sources, the Sangam poetry, Parakapya's Gajasastra, you know, or Hasti Ayurveda, which is a master piece I really consider in ancient knowledge of the elephant. Kautilya Arthasastra, Manasalosa, Visti. Hasti Vidyarnava is a fairly more recent, it's only about 300 or 400 years old, written by my name's Ek in Assam. Akbar Nama and Aini Akbar, of course, from the time of the Mughal emperor. Now, obviously as evolutionary biologists, you know, we have a tradition of evolutionary biology in this department. So we have to dismiss the first two paragraphs here, or three paragraphs here, that the origin of elephants is traced to a cosmic event and blah, blah, blah, blah. That is the myth of the elephant. But let me point out the last part to you. And that is Brahma created elephants for the profit of offering sacrifices to the gods. And especially for the welfare of kings, I think there's a very significant statement because I think here is where you have the theoretical underpinnings of the entire elephant culture that arose in Asia. And this single statement here, I do not know if others have recognized the significance of the statement that, you know, the elephants were created especially for the welfare of kings. Because almost, you know, throughout this historical, whatever, 2000, 3000 years of very close relationship between elephants and people, if there is one, you know, reason why we have had this close relationship that has sort of driven this entire relationship, it is a fact that elephants were useful in the armies of kings over such a long time period. You also had the African elephant that played a brief role in the armies of, you know, of, you know, battles in Europe and so on, especially, you know, not in Africa and in Southern Europe. But after that, you know, it's never had this such a long duration in terms of a relationship where for at least 2500 years or maybe even more, the elephant has been used as an instrument of war. And I have written about this earlier, and I think that's really the reason why the elephant was elevated to sacred status, first in Buddhism, by the way, and not in Hinduism, and then as a white elephant and later in Brahminical Hinduism as Ganesha. Okay, now what did the ancients know about the elephants? Okay, and I'll just quickly run through some aspects of this. If you look at the status and distribution of elephants, you have the Ramayana which states that the elephants at Ayodhya that were found in Ayodhya, these are captive elephants, obviously. They were born in the Vindhya and the Himalaya. Okay, nothing in between them, which is actually probably very telling because even today, you have elephant distribution along the Himalayan footers, and then you have, you know, during historical times, you have had the elephants in the Vindhyas and to the south of the Vindhyas. Now, the Indo-Gendritic basin was, has been settled and cleared of white elephants, you know, quite a long time ago. And therefore, also the Ramayana, say, you know, refers to the increasing use of elephants in the armies of the south. The Ramayana's army, for instance, has more elephants than Rama's army. Okay, so is this indicative of a larger population of elephants being found south of the Vindhyas in the peninsula of India where perhaps the settlements had not gone to such an extent as you have in the Indo-Gendritic basin by this time during the first millennium BCE. And therefore, you had much larger populations of elephants, which then the local tribes and, you know, other sheaths and so on, actually used as an instrument of war. There is, in the Atharaya Brahmana of the 7th century BCE, the ruler of Anga, he gives 10,000 tusk elephants, obviously. This is an exaggerated figure on the occasion of the Ashwamedha Yajna, where the horse is sacrificed, the horse sacrificed. And Anga refers to the present day Vihar or Jharkhand, you know, it's being split into two states today. So even if 10,000 tusk elephants is exaggerated, even if it's a few hundred elephants, still this claim indicates that present day Vihar, Jharkhand had a very large population of elephants. So that is something that we can glean from this that there were lots of elephants over there. And then Shivani again mentioned the jathakas, and there are some very interesting references to the elephants and their behavior and their distribution, their population status and so on of the jathakas. I just can't help projecting this painting, which is my favorite painting of all times, you know, of the elephant. This is the, you know, the Chattanta Jataka, you know, you should actually see this painting in Ajaktar to be able to really appreciate the significance of this. This is my favorite painting of all times, which is just a part of a much larger mural that covers an area which is about perhaps, I would say, larger than half, half, half this wall over here. I'm not going to go into the Chattanta Jataka itself, but the jathakas refer to the Bodhisattva as the leader of a great herd of 8,000 elephants, Kasabha Jataka, or in one instance, 80,000 elephants in the Himalayas. So here the jathakas speak about large populations of elephants in the Himalayas. Now, of course you might wonder, you know, 8,000 elephants, it says the Bodhisattva is the leader of a great herd of 8,000 elephants in one place or another, 80,000 elephants. You don't seem to be jelly. But let me tell you that this is probably the right order of magnitude. That would have been somewhere, you know, maybe 8,000, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 elephants. There can't be 800,000 elephants there. There can't be 800, only 800 elephants in the Himalaya. So it's roughly of the same order of magnitude. And as a practicing ecologist, you know, who does a lot of statistical models and so on, let me tell you that statistical confidence limits, we take an estimate of 30,000 elephants plus or minus 60% or whatever, you know, or 95% confidence limits, statistical confidence limits. It's not too wide of the map. I mean, even today when we go and actually make population estimates, we come up with estimates that are very, very wide, not necessarily better than what you get from here on most occasions. So I would say that this gives you an indication of the size of the elephant population. Somewhere in the several thousands, you know, almost certainly more than 10,000, maybe less than 100,000, this is the kind of status of elephants that you had in the Himalayan region. Now, of course, when we come to the distribution of elephants, where elephants were found, and this is a map we are missing, Tom Drotman, who wrote this paper in 1982, where based on the description of the Gajavanas for the elephant forest in the Kautilya Arthasastra, now, I know that the dating of the Kautilya Arthasastra is problematic. I have gone with the conventional scholarship of dating it between 300 BCE and 300 CE. That is from the Maurian times to, you know, about 300 CE or so. More recent scholarship seems to suggest Patrick Ollival, again, whom he has locked, knows we had a wonderful meeting in New Zealand a few years ago. He has done a new translation of the Arthasastra, talking to him. He said that no Arthasastra is much more recent and so on. I will try to argue that the Arthasastra is a little older based on this distribution. It lists the Gajavanas, elephant forests, you know, in the Maurian Empire. Now, it lists these eight Vanas. So, you have the Prachiavana, the Kalingavana, the Chedika Karusavana and so on and so forth, and they are actually listed. They are given here. The distributions are mapped by Tom Drotman. Now, interestingly, you will see that the range of the elephant does not extend to the extreme south of the country. It does not come to the south. So, you will find that there are no elephants, you know, described here. But we know that today that the largest elephant populations are actually found here. You know, in the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, the single largest population, global population of the ancient elephant is actually found here today. All right, so it is just, but this is not very surprising really because I would argue that the Maurian Empire actually stopped here. The Maurian Empire, the distribution of the southern limit of the Maurian Empire was somewhere roughly here. They had no knowledge of the elephant to the south of the land. Therefore, I would really argue that the Arthasasara, the description of the elephant forest in the Arthasasara, goes back to the Maurian times. It cannot be from too much of a later period when people would definitely have had knowledge of elephants in the south. There is another interesting thing that I would argue from the description of the elephant forest. When Kautilya describes the elephant forest, he says that the Saurashtravana and the Panchanandavana are mentioned as the worst for elephants. Worst for what elephants? For producing elephants that are fit for use in battle. You know, the Kumariya elephants, the robustly built elephants, the tusked elephants that could be captured and used in war. Now, this again is not very surprising because where are these two vanas? The Saurashtravana is here, right? It is an arid zone of the country and the Panchanandavana is over here. Now, elephants have practically disappeared by that time, you know, from these regions. By about 2300 years ago or 2000 years ago, whenever you want to date the Arthasasara, I would argue that the elephant had actually virtually disappeared from this area. These are extremely arid zones of the country. They are not really good for producing elephants. On the other hand, the Kalingavana is listed as being the best forest for producing elephants that were fit for use in war. But let us come to the Manasolasa of the 12th century. It is a big jump from that up to the 12th century. The Manasolasa is a text attributed to the western Chalukyan king Somadeva III. Now interestingly, the Manasolasa has a better knowledge of the distribution of elephants. So, here you see the description of the Kalingavana is extended to Dravidadesha. Dravidadesha is obviously the extension of the country. So, by the time of the Manasolasa, which is 12th century CE, they had a better knowledge of the distribution of elephants all over the subcontinent. But more significantly, the Manasolasa adds the Apparanthavana to Saurashtravana and Panchanandavana as producing the worst elephants. Now, where is the Apparanthavana? Apparanthavana is right here, right? Today, there are no elephants here. Elephants have disappeared from the western Ghats of Maharashtra. Because you go and see the western Ghats of Maharashtra, Maharashtra western Ghats have been completely deforested. It is in a very highly degraded state. It really can't support elephants. So, this could perhaps indicate that ecological degradation or whatever that are natural or otherwise, that initially was there in the northwest of the country and the Saurashtravana had already extended to the northern western Ghats. So, this is an ecological insight that we can possibly gain from what these different texts talk about the distribution of the elephant. Ecology. Now, feeding preferences of the elephant have been recorded in many ancient sources. And here, the Sangham texts are especially very detailed. The tendency of elephants to uproot trees, strip the bark, feed on several plants, putting grasses, bamboo, pit of the palmyra tree and so on and so forth. And the Sangham texts even talk about, you know, even dry twigs that are that, you know, during the dry season, the elephants would even feed on dry branches, which we all know today that they do. And in Sri Lanka and in parts of southern India during the dry season, if they don't get fresh green fodder, elephants would feed on dry branches. Now, this is a statement I found extremely interesting. There is a Sangham text of a poem which states that when a cow elephant in advance stage of pregnancy feeds on the tender, leafless shoots of bamboo, it aborts the feeders. Today, we know from, you know, a lot of chemical ecology work has been done that young shoots of bamboo and many other plants as an anti-herbivory defense, they produce cyanogenic compounds. So, the question I'm asking is, there's probably some truth in this statement. Is it possible that a female, a pregnant female feeding on young shoots of bamboo actually, you know, had experienced toxic levels of cyanogenic compounds, you know, hydrogen cyanide and therefore the calf, the embryo, the fetus is aborted, it's possible. So, that might be something interesting in this. Elephant human conflicts, perhaps there aren't too many descriptions, but there are descriptions of the Gadusasura or rather the Matangalila, which is a text which is about a thousand years old and of course the Sangham text which go back to about 2000 years before present. The Gadusasura actually begins with an account of elephants ravaging the crops in the kingdom of Anga. It begins with the people of Anga coming before the king, Roma Bada, and pleading with the king, saying that elephants have come and the wild elephants have come and they damaged all the crops, please do something about it. So, the king sends all his men out into the forest and the fields and rounds up all the elephants and brings them to his palace grounds. Then Sage Falkapya appears, he's the first elephantologist and he appears before the king and makes a plea with the king to let the elephants back into the forest because he, Falkapya, had wandered among the wild elephants and had observed the life of the elephant and then he goes on to relate the life of the elephant to the king and so on. So, that forms the text of the Gadusasura. So, elephant human conflict, you know, not something necessarily new. The Sangham text, the Tamil Sangham text, contain many references to elephants' raiding crops. Especially, he talks about solitary male elephants leaving their herd and raiding millet fields at night. There are just detailed descriptions of, you know, of how people try to scan these elephants away and after some time, you know, they are not able to get these elephants out of their fields, you know, and after in a drunken stupor, they simply go to sleep and then the elephants again sneak back into the crop fields. So, I say nothing much has changed in the land of the Tamils. Even today, you go to all the hill forest. It's exactly the same thing takes place. You know, the solitary male elephants, they have a higher tendency to raiding crops. You all know that from modern biological studies. And then, people get fed up out of some time. They have the teetop platforms. They haven't, you know, they've already had a lot of Erica, whatever. They go to sleep and the elephants continue to feed. So, there are obviously some very interesting descriptions of elephant human conflict in ancient texts. Many ancient texts recognize the individual behavioral traits of elephants. We know today that elephants are highly intelligent, very sensitive with high levels of cognition. There are differences in individual behavior of elephants. They have their own personalities and so on and so forth. The Arthasastra recognizes the elephants not amenable to training, as being mischievous, vicious, genuinely mad, or clever enough to feign madness. The sagacity and individual character of the war elephant is a repeating theme. King Purush Ajax, Dattagamini's Kandula who fights a war against Elara, and Akbar's Hawaii. All these elephants had their own individual characters. The Mughals recognize three behavioral types among the bull elephants based on the Hindu differentiation of dispositions of the human mind. So, you have Sath, you have Raj, you have Sath, the elephant, which is handsome and submissive, moderate in eating, and so on and so forth. Raj and you have Tham, which is self-filled, destructive, sleepy, and a voracious habitat. So, the Mughals also recognize that elephants have their individual temperaments and so on and so forth, and they classified all their elephants into one of these three. Okay, today, you know, chemical ecology is a field by itself among scientists and I have people here who want to work on chemical ecology of elephants and who have done some work already. So, the Matangalila of Nilakanta, okay, which just goes, places back to the Garju Satsra, takes upon smelling their own dung and urine, let them always be producing a tickling of the palate or an attraction for it. Very strongly referring to some kind of a chemical signal. And the Sanskrit and Tamil Sangam poetry allude to BVs hovering around the rut of a bull elephant to gather sweetness from the temples of young must-mates. Now, I brought this Matangalila to the notice of Bess Rasmussen, who was, unfortunately, she's no more. She's one of the foremost scientists on the chemical ecology of elephants, and she teamed up with Krishnamurthy, an Indian veterinarian, about 15 years ago, and actually collected the mass secretion of young adult males at Muthumalai and showed that it was qualitative different from that of old adult males. So, young males secreted sweet-smelling alcohols and ketones and acetates, just like what the ancient texts described. While old males secreted foul-smelling, non-anone ketones and so on and so forth, and front-alem. So, there was a qualitative difference in the nature of the secretion of these compounds. And they actually published a paper in the journal Nature in 2002, in which they say that the more the must-emmenations of young maturing males as vertically observed by the ancient Hindus had now been substantiated by modern scientific techniques. So, those are published in no less journal than Nature. Now, you'll see that must is an obsession in ancient times. It's an ancient obsession. You look at any artistic depiction of the elephant, except for the Indus seals. I don't know if Shubhani has looked at it closely. I'm not able to make out. It's too small for me to make out. Okay, this is a real bull elephant in must in Raja Ji in the North. You look at Ashoka's Gajatame's supreme elephant in Kalsi. There's a rock inscription of the third century BCE. Okay, very clearly if you look at this, okay, there are these lines coming from the temporal gland. Very clearly indicating that this is the supreme elephant is also an elephant in must. Okay, I've seen this rock. The photograph that I have taken, unfortunately, it's not coming out probably too clearly here, but you look at the photograph, you can clearly see the lines indicating must. So, the supreme elephant is a bull elephant in must. This is my favorite elephant sculpture of all time. This elephant must be more perfect than a real elephant. I can't see a kumriya bandh elephant as perfect as this. And we just had this mention of an elephant lifting its foot and being in motion. I can't see a better depiction of that than from the cow elephant behind this. This is as natural a scene that as you can ever get. But please take careful note of this. Do you see this little swelling here? Do you see a little in the... This is a master's cutter. This is a master's cutter. Can you see this little rounded temporal gland here? Between the eye and the ear. Okay, I don't think any historian of art actually noticed this. This is a bull elephant in must. Masterfully carved at Mamalapuram, which is near Chennai, not very far from Bangalore. And of course, we have the must for the bull of Emperor Akbar, Hawaii, and he rebelled in taming the fiercest bull elephants in must. Now what do the ancients know about elephants in must? Excitement, swiftness, order, low passion, complete fluorescence of the body, wrath, prowess, and fearlessness are declared to be the eight lexical elements of must. The Mata Nalila. That single sentence captures what we all modern biologists know about must and the elephant. I hope that Karpakam will be able to improve upon this definition of must. I mean, she's been studying bulls and musts for several years, and she wants to continue to study this. But I hope that we can improve upon this. But this single sentence captures everything that we know about must and elephants. Okay. I think in the interest of time, I'll just skip some of it. And the Sangam texts also talk a lot about the must and elephants and so on. And must as, and this passage I must quote from the Aini Agbari of Abul Fazal, the Badar Ratsun Mad Libra. Badar is the robustly built elephant, you know, fit for use in war. That is, you know, at the end of the rainy season must occurs at the end of the rainy season, September, October, Scott Peo. Okay. This is when a bull elephant can be expected to be in really good body condition, which kind of roughly collaborates. The Meir is a lanky elephant in Capricorn, Sagittarius, and Meir in any season. So Joyceful, in fact, has used game theory to argue that spacing out of must among older dominant bulls and younger subordinate bulls was a mechanism of conflict avoidance. So these kind of passages mean that there were ancient observers who knew that they didn't perhaps did not know the significance of this, but they had made very detailed observations on must and elephants. Now capture of elephants, there are very detailed descriptions in ancient texts which are not going to. And the Arthasastra actually prescribed that tusk elephants are captured. And therefore, in the northeast, for instance, you probably have one of the reasons, a lot of tuskless males that you see on the right, because of the selected capture of tusk males. The methods of capture, you know, again, in fair amount of detail, you have Megasinase, you have Arthasastra, you have the Sangam texts, the Matangalila, the Ainiagwari, all the different methods of capturing elephants. A lot of detailed descriptions. The training and management in captivity, and typically morphology and anatomy, the training steps, the diet, the treatment of ailments and diseases, these are the kinds of descriptions that you find. Simply because those are very neat for it. A lot of the ancient knowledge of elephants is based on captive elephants, because people had to maintain large numbers of elephants for use in war, you know, for use in battle and so on and so forth. And the whole knowledge base that built up in ancient times was because of this ancient need to be able to keep elephants in captivity, put them to human use and to use them in the battlefield effectively. So a lot of, a big body of knowledge largely developed around this ancient need. The management of elephants in the Maurian period set up sanctuaries and impose the death penalty on anyone killing an elephant, much like in modern times or wildlife protection laws and so on. But then by the Manasolasa, there's a very interesting change. You know, it says the Manasolasa repeats the assertion of the Arthasastra that an elephant forest is the best type of forest, but the rider that the king should protect it with the help of forest dwellers. This is a bit like, you know, the modern debates about whether we should have participatory wildlife management, whether tribals and other people should also help or participate in wildlife management or not. So there's a paradigm shift. So there are some very interesting debates going on in ancient times, also about how do we manage elephant populations. And I think this is my last slide is that, you know, during the colonial period, we had the forest reserves to extract timber. So we had the whole scientific management of the timber elephants, the need for it. There was this landmark treatise on elephants by Iwans, which was first, I think the first version of this came out in 1901, that initiated the European veterinary science of the elephant drawing upon local traditions. And then we had sport hunting and game preserves being set up for that. And knowledge of anatomy was very important because it gave big game hunters to shoot an elephant effectively. So the knowledge of anatomy again advanced during the colonial times, apart from the veterinary practice of how do you maintain elephants, treat their diseases and so on and so forth. And this landmark treatise by J. H. Iwans, that came up at that time. Okay, so thank you. This is just to advertise my book, which I have three copies of it at a heavily discounted price for, especially for visitors from abroad. If anybody needs it, I have three copies with me and I'll be happy to give that to you. Okay, thank you.