Elephas maximus By Stephen Alter, Penguin, Rs 350

This book is best described as an intelligent foreigner’s guide to Indian elephants in the best-known wildlife sanctuaries and national parks in India. Such books have a useful role to play in increasing awareness of the need for conservation and promoting eco-tourism. Books on the African elephants are many. On Asian elephants, books for the non-specialist reader which rely more on written words than pictures are few. Stephen Alter’s Elephas Maximus stands out among them for its elegant prose, sensitive descriptions of landscape and its extensive, if not exhaustive, research. A research book it does not claim to be but it succeeds in being “a homage to Elephas Maximus and an alarm call for its protection”. It should appeal particularly to visitors to India wanting to step out of the golden triangle of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur and its gilded five-star ambience.

The author, through his travel journal and descriptions, takes the reader on a conducted tour of Corbett National Park, Rajaji National Park, Nagarhole, Mudumalai, Periyar, Garuvayur temple, Mysore Palace, Kotah’s medieval past, Sonepur Mela and Kaziranga. This is interspersed with bits of history, ancient epics, mythology, classical Sanskrit poetry, palaeontology, evolutionary biology, anatomy, the story of the making of the film The Elephant Boy, Elephanta Caves, Ganesh Chaturthi festival, the cult of the Ganesha, Bombay Natural History Society, Theppakaddu elephant camp (Tamil Nadu), the story of the makna (a tuskless male) called “Loki”, and the story of Veerappan, the elephant poacher. The result is a knowledgeable and well-written travel guide.

Such books have a much wider readership than serious books on the subject and therefore serve a different but valuable purpose. The book has an extensive bibliography, not usual in such publications. When covering such a wide canvas, it is only to be expected that the brush will wobble at places. A total ban on (sports) hunting was imposed not in 1972 but in 1991 by amending the 1972 Act. Tigers preying on elephant calves are not rare. On an average five such incidents per year were reported from Kaziranga between 1992 and 1997. Did Neanderthal tribes in Europe hunt the mammoths to extinction, as alleged? Did they hunt mammoths at all or scavenge on the carcasses?

The Elephant Preservation Act of 1879 did not specify that tusks of any elephant killed in Assam could be claimed by the hunter only if he had shot a makna as well. This applied only to elephants shot under Elephant Control Rules of Assam framed under the 1879 Act. The object was to control the number of marauding adult males. There was no binding to shoot a makna when putting down proclaimed killer rogues under a separate provision of the act.

The erudite discussion about “weeping” becomes pointless when one recalls that elephants do not have lachrymal glands. Experts do not agree that ten feet is the maximum height for an Indian elephant. This controversial dictum of Sanderson was later revised by Sanderson himself after he personally measured a tusker belonging to a Raja, which stood ten feet six inches at the shoulder. The Dhaka Kheddah Establishment of the Government, the only such establishment in India, actually predates Sanderson by decades. Sanderson was neither the first nor the last superintendent of the establishment, which was later, in 1906 or thereabout, transferred to Rangoon.

The seven-page long bibliography has some unfortunate gaps. It does not mention such classics as Milroy, or Evans, or Shebbeare , not even Stracey’s Wildlife in India (1963). These little slips notwithstanding, this well-written book will help elephant conservation in India.