'The Elephant Whisperers' trumpets humane element in wildlife conservation

Three years ago, I was at Teppakadu elephant camp in Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu.

A new kraal at the edge of the camp caught my attention. There I saw a tribal woman near an elephant calf lying on the ground. She told me that the calf had been orphaned and that she had been engaged to take care of it. I talked to her about communicating with elephants. Little did I realise that Belli — for that was her name —would be featured in a first-ever Oscar-winning Indian documentary.

Also Read: Meet the ‘Indiana Jones of conservation’ who wrote The Elephant Whisperer

Borman and Bellie, tribal folks, are hired by the Forest Department to look after this calf.  Mortality among such foundling calves is high and the foresters are keen that this one, named Raghu, should be saved. The way these two take care of their ward, bond with it, their day-to-day work, the life of the tribal community, form the story of the film The Elephant Whisperers. Here the couple develop a deep attachment with the calf.

Tribals as caretakers

The Tamil Nadu Forest Department has a long tradition of employing tribal folks as caretakers of elephants. Two tribals are assigned to one elephant. Their knowledge of wild animals is often greater than that of academic wildlifers.

Also read: Elephants are like our children, says Belli of Oscar-winner ‘The Elephant Whisperers’

Ecologist Priya Davidar, who lives at the periphery of Mudumalai sanctuary, has written about the elephants that frequent the neighbourhood of her home and talks about the bonding that can develop between elephants in the wild and humans. Earlier, Iain Douglas- Hamilton, who was researching in Tanzania, talked about such experience in his book Among the Elephants (1975).

Dwindling numbers

At the centre of the film is the elephant. These animals have been on this earth much earlier than in history. Their fossil remains keep surfacing from different parts of India. Though the elephant is one of the earliest to be protected by law in India, in 1879 itself, their number has been plummeting at a startling rate. In 1992, the Centre set up the Project Elephant.

It has been estimated that only about 50,000 Asian elephants are left in the wild and India has the largest population — about 27,000, and 3,500 in captivity. And Western Ghats has a high concentration of them. Recently elephant has been given the status of ‘heritage animal’. Still, the increasing pressure on their habitat makes elephant conservation a daunting task.

Gajah Report of 2010, which the Indian Government produced, revealed a dismal picture of the status of elephants and their habitat, which continues to degrade and dwindle.  A few days ago, we read the news of three female elephants near Dharmapuri getting electrocuted, orphaning two calves.

Also read: How Jairam Ramesh connected The Elephant Whisperers with Wild Life Act

Batting for wildlife

The Elephant Whisperers has other dimensions to it. It speaks for wildlife conservation while telling the story of rehabilitation of a lost elephant calf. Without being preachy, it touches upon a burning problem in conservation — man-animal conflict.

The calf Raghu lost his mother when she came into contact with an illegally erected electric fence. Belli, the woman looking after the calf, lost her husband in a tiger attack. The indigenous forest-dwelling folks — here in the film Kaattunayakar — who have lived in the forest, along with the animals for millennia, are now being squeezed out of their homes.

The film gives us peeps into their precarious lives. There is an astonishing sequence of a man gathering honey from the beehives on a steep rock surface. And there is this touching and vivid moment of Bellie, by the fireside, telling the story of her life to her granddaughter.

Most wildlife movies in India give the idea that there are no people in the wilderness. You see, only animals are in the forest, devoid of people. This promotes a certain kind of conservation which has come under close scrutiny. Critics refer to it as “fortress conservation”.

Also read: The Elephant Whisperers bags Oscar for Documentary Short Subject

The Forest Rights Act of 2006, according to a government note, “recognises the symbiotic relationship of the scheduled tribes with the forests, reflected in their dependence on the forest as well as in their traditional wisdom regarding conservation of the forests”. But sad to record, this Act remains a non-starter.

Stunning shots

The incredible variety of wildlife of Western Ghats is shown in a montage of images, beginning with a colourful giant squirrel, a grazing gaur, a grey langur tending its young, a crested serpent eagle on its perch and a sloth bear ambling along. Even the rare vulture makes an appearance. Of course, there is a tiger in the film. Mudumalai is a Tiger Reserve.

The essence of the Southern deciduous forest is effectively caught in these images. The storyline is intercepted by stunning landscape shots of the forest, screen full of terminalia trees bereft of leaves, the hill ranges and the streams. This is the home of the elephant. The Moyar falls, the monsoon clouds, the sun like a golden orb sliding into the tree tops and the starry night sky  — all these images contextualise the narrative visually. Now, we have drones to do this and the filmmaker has put that device to good use.

Not a cakewalk

There are problems that are peculiar to making films on nature. The behaviour of the animals being unpredictable the filmmaker is not in control of his subjects. It is impossible to work with shooting script while making a film on nature. Alfred Hitchcock once said, “In feature films, the director is God; in documentary films, God is the director.” You cannot instruct an animal to act in the way you want it to. And in India, the filmmaker has to contend with a labyrinth of rules and regulations for filming in the forest.

Also read: PM Modi praises Karnataka tiger reserve staff for saving injured elephant

Documentary film poses challenges very different from a feature film. Here at best, the filmmaker can work with only a basic idea in mind. This can change completely as she starts shooting the film. Often she has to choose the sequences as they come. She has to film the sequences as they unfold before her. And most of the structuring is done while editing.

For the Ooty-based filmmaker Karthik Gonsalvas, this is her first film. The producer Guneet Monga gained attention through the celebrated films The Lunch Box (2013) and Masaan (2015). This film demonstrates the possibilities of cinema, how this art form can be used to sensitise viewers to the natural world that surrounds them.

(S Theodore Baskaran is a wildlife conservationist and film historian)