A new novella on the intractable relationship between forest and elephants is enormously impactful. The slim dynamo of a tale evocatively told by Avijit Dutt, known as one of the creative geniuses of Calcutta’s advertising world. In Gajraj: An Elephant Remembers, Dutt tells the story from the perspective of, and with, the voice of a 70-year-old male elephant.
What bursts onto the page, as you crack open the spine of the 62-page book, is a shower of sunlight. Here, the visual abundance of the hundred shades of the forest sways to the gentle rumble of the magisterial allure of Gajraj’s voice. The reader’s first encounter with the majestic animal has them besotted by a wise and compassionate being, a presence that is a livewire through the telling. It is a crucial story compellingly told: Of an old elephant Gajraj who is mentoring and showing a young elephant Harkat the dangers of a fast-changing world — a planet where brutal machinery of the rapacious corporations are felling thousands of trees, inundating forests, even as the fauna and animals and the men of the soil are fighting to keep Mother Nature alive.
The author’s dedication in the gripping overture of this tale puts the reader right on the page with the author: “To my mother for instilling the love of forests,” Dutt states in his inimitable, crystalline style.
My conversation with Dutt’s daughter, Niharika Lyra Dutt, a creative thinker and film and theatre personality who works in Mumbai, strengthens the deeper meaning of Gajraj. Lyra’s childhood memories about Dutt’s attempt to encourage the imaginary world in Lyra’s mindscape, and teach her courage and comfort in the bosom of nature, mirror the mentorship between Gajraj and Harkat — the bond between the two elephants. Lyra maintains that as far back as she can remember, it was her father who would encourage his daughters into play where the imagination and the world of storytelling would reign supreme.
“Sometimes my father would wake me up and construct a tent out of a bedsheet and say: ‘Look, there’s such a wind and we are on the top of the mountain; there’s a leopard outside. What are we going to do? Should we light a fire?’” Lyra says that she remembers those early growing-up years as enormously happy ones, the comfort zone the family lived in being persuasive instead of fearful, which made for an easy learning curve. So the learning was holistic and organic, nurtured by gentleness, the same mode of teaching we encounter in Gajraj.
The success of Dutt’s narrative comes from finding the perfect intersection between the elephant’s perspective and the retrieval of the elephant’s memory. The undeniable bond between Gajraj and young Harkat is a hugely powerful one. How did Dutt think of the characters of Gajraj and Harkat? “The two protagonists were a device designed to take the tale forward. And they grew of their own volition,” he says.
The language Dutt so effortlessly uses in this story is hauntingly poetic, neither pretentious nor forced. He is able to carry poetic prose through the entire story, thinking in metaphors, and is very sensitive to sounds, sights, taste, and touch, effortlessly capturing the rhythm of nature herself with words like “Once we lose the trees, we lose everything”; “memories are like rivers — swelling, gushing, reprimanding…”; “thirsty males in search of clusters of mohua trees”. When Dutt paints his canvas with unforgettable images of twilight, the “elbow of the river”, he immediately reminds us of Gerald Durrell or T.S. Eliot. I see an occasional brush of wry humour that is gentle and lends a quotient of joy in a brutal world where the planet is under threat.
Excerpts from the interview with Dutt.
What were your earliest memories of visiting the forests?
My father worked for the tobacco behemoth ITC, so the family travelled countrywide and became truly Indian. Not just at the forest reserves, but every clump of greenery was our path to hidden secrets. My mother would opt for a tent rather than a hotel; she had an active curiosity, which we inherited. By the time I was 15, my mother passed on, and I went to a boarding school. The various films I made took me to destinations I wouldn’t have normally encountered. The Jaunsar Bawar with its Himalayan polyandry, hill states and their various secrets.... The list goes on of how fortunate I have been.
You worked with stalwarts such as Ratan Tata and Alyque Padamsee and so many giants in the advertising and theatre industries. Could you speak about what you understood about mentorship and guiding the next generation in the various fields you have toiled and excelled in?
Fortunate rendezvous with various heavy-hitters have informed me and taught me how to look at life. To start with, teaching at St. Paul’s, Darjeeling, then doing theatre back in Calcutta with Badal Sircar and so on... doing the lights for Habib Tanvir’s Charan Das Chor, bringing Shambhu Mitra for the show and developing a fond relationship, meeting up with Uttam Kumar, through his step daughter, who I was dating. Shyamanand Jalan was a mentor and co-worker. We dramatised Mahasweta Devi’s Hazar Churasi ki Maa. The carousel of characters continued with their appearance in my life. From Sushmita Sen, who did her first TVC with me, to Dame Judie Dench, Bill Nighy and Richard Gere, my co-actors in Second Best Marigold Hotel. And in the corporate life, I worked in the biggest agencies, ultimately as creative director at Lintas, under Alyque Padamsee.
There is a craving for care and concern in the young elephant Harkat, and Gajraj fulfils a great deal of that. Would you say this is as much a story about implanting good values and practices in younger corporate leaders like Gajraj did for Harkat, as it is about ecology and the urgent need to save biodiversity and practise sustainability?
It actually springs from my relationship with my two girls. Not really wishing to be didactic. The allegorical aspect is about our unthinking pillage of the forests. ‘I’d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed unknown.’
You have been a Renaissance man and a global soul. You have seen and continue to see the brutality and need to fulfil greed and its many destructive avatars. What could corporates and governments do to create a tsunami of reversal of the destruction of trees?
I will stop short of prescribing solutions, mine is a task of making aware. The desire to extract from nature is all pervasive and extends to our environment guardians — the government — but they are working in collusion with private industry to plunder nature.
If you had your life to live all over again, what decisions would you make differently, and why?
That would require reams of documents to define the dream. Yet, the two patents I have filed in sanitation and healthcare while working with my CSR advisory hint towards the ideal world I would aspire to.
As a multi-dimensional creative force who has been successful in theatre, writing, advertising and film... do you think you have been a father and husband who has led by love rather than fear?
When we were young parents, we had procured many books to help us in child rearing. Shortly after the first born, we both decided to dump all the books and let her mimic skills show us the way. Similarly, with what they wanted to pursue was our chosen path to support, cherish and build.
Julie Banerjee Mehta is an author of Dance of Life and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College, is a literary columnist for t2 and conceptualises and curates the Rising Asia Circle