Elephants at the Sonepur cattle fair. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Sonepur (Bihar), Nov. 17: A samosa may cost Rs 2,500 at the Sonepur cattle fair but the elephants come free. Officially, the animals are just given away.

The owner writes on a piece of paper “I am donating my elephant to so and so” and the receiver then pays, say, Rs 25-30 lakh without asking for a receipt.

“Selling or buying elephants was banned country-wide in 2003,” senior forest official P. Kumar said.

Then how does the trade go on at the famous annual fair, held at a site 50km from Patna, before thousands of pairs of eyes and under the nose of the government?

The authorities have deployed a 300-strong “community police” to check fraud at the fair and the volunteers stopped a vendor from swindling a Dutch couple out of Rs 10,000 for four samosas yesterday. But officials say they don’t really want to stop the bigger fraud that has become the cornerstone of the fair, which draws huge crowds and foreign tourists for a month every year.

“We don’t want to kill the fair,” a forest official said.

Although the event, believed to be at least 2,400 years old, is called a cattle fair and sees legal trade in horses, cows and buffaloes, the elephants are its mainstay. And so they have been at least since the days of Chandragupta Maurya in the fourth century BC, according to legend.

After elephant sale was banned, the Bihar government wrote to the Centre asking the fair be exempted because “the elephant is associated with the culture and religion of the Sonepur fair”. It never received a reply.

“Besides, the elephant owners are fabulously rich landlords who enjoy political and social clout. We are forced to shut our eyes sometimes,” a forest official said.

The elephant owners, however, are downbeat.

Parasuram Singh, a landlord from Nawada in north Bihar’s Siwan district, has brought his elephant to the fair, which began on November 13. He says it is one of only 68 elephants on display.

That’s a paltry figure compared with the 3,000 to 4,000 jumbos that used to come from places as far as Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Myanmar and Malaysia in the ’70s and ’80s.

For the past three years, neither animals nor buyers have been coming from outside the state.

Hundreds of buyers would once arrive from Kerala to buy elephants for temples in the southern state. “But they don’t come any more, because they cannot take the animals back on the strength of the donation chit,” the official said.

Even if Bihar officials don’t create obstacles, those of other states on the way are likely to ask why a landlord from Bihar would donate his elephant to someone from far-off Kerala.

An elephant at the fair costs Rs 13 lakh to Rs 30 lakh. The Telegraph saw a buyer offering Rs 28 lakh to Parasuram, who was pressing for Rs 30 lakh.

Fair officials, who keep a record of the “donation” papers, said 10 elephants were sold last year. This year, four have been traded so far. “We hope nine to 10 will be sold this year too,” owner Dhrup Singh said.

Dhrup is afraid for the fair’s future. “Times have changed; our children have moved to the cities. We are the last of the elephant-rearing generation,” he sighed.

Parasuram still regrets that his son Chandrashekhar chose to shift to Delhi, where he has made good as a millionaire businessman. “I had asked him to study but not to move out to the polluted cities,” the father said.

For Dhrup and Parasuram, owning elephants is not just a business but a matter of family prestige. It’s a proof of one’s wealth, for an elephant eats sugar cane, wheat and barley worth Rs 50,000 a year and mahouts and other servants have to be hired for its upkeep.

“We have owned elephants since my great-grandfather’s day. Yeh khandaan ke shaan ki nishani hai (it’s the family’s badge of honour),” Parasuram said. “As a business it may bring profit or loss, but it’s a huge honour to be referred to as a hathinashin (elephant owner).”

Then, there’s the small matter of love. Parasuram says only an elephant owner can understand the emotional bond between animal and master.

“Once I boarded a bus near my village. My elephant Chakradhar somehow sensed it -- he came onto the road and blocked it with his trunk,” Parasuram said.

“The other passengers became panicky. I got off, talked to Chakradhar and kissed him. Only then he let the bus move.”

According to mythology, the Sonepur fair began after Lord Krishna saved an elephant from a crocodile at the site, where the Gandak meets the Ganga. The horses and cattle came later.