[INDOLOGY] June 3rd GCSAS Lecture Series: Alongside Captive Elephants: History and Science Between Species

[Akshara Ravishankar]

Dear colleagues,

We are excited to announce the final talk in the series “More-than-Human
South Asia: Ecologies, Knowledge, Bodies, and Senses,” organized by the
Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies, on *June 3rd, 4 pm CET. *This will be
an online lecture by Andrea Gutiérrez, titled "Alongside Captive Elephants:
History and Science Between Species"

More information can be found below. You can also register for online
attendance here
<https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/dcf5b0ba-ae89-414f-a0c8-56b3668e4656@d7811cde-ecef-496c-8f91-a1786241b99c>
or
via the QR code in the attached poster.

Hope to see many of you there!

Title: Alongside Captive Elephants: History and Science between Species

Speaker: Andrea Gutiérrez, University of Texas, Austin

Abstract: Popular beliefs and misunderstandings about elephants persist in
media ranging from natural histories of antiquity to contemporary comics.
This is in spite of the robust corpus of classical South Asian texts
belonging to the millennia-long knowledge system known as gajaśāstra or
elephant science. This śāstra’s cohesive, comprehensive understanding of
the animal is informed by empirical study, observation, and measured
speculation. This same knowledge system aided and perpetuated the captive
elephant tradition in South Asia and beyond as it instructs on capturing,
training, and trading in elephants to work for humans. This phenomenon of
captive elephants cared for and maintained by many humans per
animal persists to the present day as a vestige of historical forms of this
exceptional human-animal relationship and accounts for the large proportion
of captive to wild elephants in current populations of this endangered
species.

This talk’s research forms part of a book project that writes a history of
captive elephants as animal history, utilizing various archives including
epigraphy, coinage, material culture, and literary sources to expand upon
details of elephants’ intimate relationships with humans over the longue
durée. This talk focuses on three misunderstood or neglected aspects of
historical captive elephant life: 1) the trope of the flighty, panicky
(thus “dangerous to his own side”) war elephant, re-interpreted using
understandings from within gajaśāstra, 2) evidence of elephant trade in
early South Asia, and 3) the topic of elephant fever in materia medica,
both as a feature of captivity and in relation to human fever, past and
present. Altogether, utilizing gajaśāstra alongside other sources allows
for a more complete picture of elephant history than other accounts can
provide.
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