In an interview with the Mid-Day around two months ago, filmmaker Kartiki Gonsalves said she wanted to “give the indigenous people of the forest a voice,” and “capture their symbiotic relationship with their habitat” through her Oscar-winning documentary short The Elephant Whisperers. She also wanted to focus on the positives alone, she said, since “every story talked about man-animal conflicts.” As a developmental journalist who has been reporting on the concerns of indigenous communities in Nilgiris and Anamalai for years, I wonder how difficult it must have been to handpick these positives from an otherwise overwhelmingly negative situation, that holds little hope for tribal emancipation.
There is something to be said about Mudumalai as seen through the lens of Kartiki, her camera gently lingering over the strikingly pristine forests and lush rolling hills, where majestic elephants roam. As she sedately follows the lives of Kattunayakar couple Bomman and Bellie over five years, observing their tender intimacy with the two elephant calves they look after, she captures breathtaking images of life in the lap of nature.
True to her word, Kartiki’s attempt at positivity is the running theme of The Elephant Whisperers. The documentary, spanning no more than 39 minutes, is a revelatory experience in terms of visual spectacle and emotional resonance. No wonder it enamoured the jury of the 95th Academy Awards as well, creating history as the first Indian film to win the prestigious Oscar.
But this positivity is also starkly inconsistent with the other, less celebrated, efforts to retain the voice of indigenous people. How can any piece of art truly illustrate the voice of a community without addressing both the positives and negatives? How does one leave out the several systemic problems that define their lived realities?
For instance, though forest-dwelling tribal people have historically lived in harmony with elephants, factors such as shrinking habitats, climate change, and an exponentially expanding human population have contributed to a rise in undesirable interactions with the wildlife. In the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (MTR) too, the wildlife corridor between Western and Eastern Ghats where the film was shot, many local tribes including the Kattunayakars live in the constant fear of losing their home, or being killed or injured by wild animals. What were the social and environmental issues that triggered such negative interactions in the first place? How does this affect the daily lives of tribal communities? Is the creation of more protected and buffer zones the solution, or will it amplify the problem of indigenous displacement and further destroy their means of livelihood? Questions galore.
The first thing that struck me while watching The Elephant Whisperers was its overt focus on the Hindu practices among the Kattunayakars. One of the very first scenes in the documentary shows Bomman worshipping several Hindu deities, pictures of whom hang on the walls of his home. There is an intercut of a tusker out in the forest, followed by a closeup of the Hindu god Vinayagar, whose head resembles that of an elephant. “To us, seeing an elephant is equivalent to seeing god,” Bomman later says, as the couple takes the elephant calf Raghu to the local Vinayagar temple, where Bomman is a priest. Bellie and Bomman can also be frequently seen wearing vermillion and sandalwood paste on their forehead, as is the Hindu tradition.
But my interactions with Chandran, a Kattunayakan man from Ayyankolly in Pandalur, tells me a different story. According to him, Kattunayakars traditionally do not practise idolatry, and instead primarily worship ancestral spirits and elements of nature such as stones and trees. “There are 24 clans in the Kattunayakar tribe. Corresponding to that, we also have 24 versions of demigods and demigoddesses. For example, Heddhan is a male ancestral forest spirit, and different clans worship him differently. If he is Balamad Heddhan for one clan, he is Vengamala Heddhan or Kotapadi Heddhan for another,” he says.
With the gradual acculturation of tribes into the Hindu society, however, the praxis have begun to change. Over the years, many tribal communities have begun to worship Hindu deities such as Mariamman, Siva, and Vinayagar as well. But most Kattunayakars still primarily worship their ancestors, says Chandran.
These complexities are of much importance today, especially in the context of the rise of Hindutva rightwing, and its methodical attempts over the years to appropriate tribal identities for votes. In its present form, the film misses an important opportunity to remind the international community that India is a land of unfathomable diversity where every non-Christian or non Non-Muslim isn’t automatically a Hindu.
The MTR and adjacent forests, with its dense tribal population, are primarily located along the borders of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka. A majority of the tribes that inhabit these regions — Irulars, Kurumbars, Kattunayakars, and Paniyars among others — have their own languages that borrow words and phrases from Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada. When we are first introduced to Bomman in The Elephant Whisperers, standing on the banks of a sparkling Mayaaru (also known as the Moyar river), he is explaining the meaning of the term ‘Kattunayakan’ in his own language. “Kattunayakar means ‘kings of the forest’. This is my home, where I belong, where the wild animals roam free. This is also the land where my ancestors lived for generations,” he says.
This was a moment of hope for me as a viewer and as a journalist reporting on these communities, that the documentary was about to set a welcome precedent by using an indigenous language to narrate the story of indigenous people. But for the entirety of the film after the opening credits, Bomman and Bellie speak to the camera exclusively in Tamil, the presence of Kattunayakar language limited only to the conversations between the couple. Bomman tells me Kartiki had asked them to speak in both their own language and Tamil while shooting. But eventually, Tamil took precedence in the output.
Not all Kattunayakars can walk freely into the forest as Bellie and Bomman do in the documentary. Historically a hunter-gatherer tribe, Kattunayakars used to live a life of free movement within the boundaries of forests. But ever since the government unilaterally took over the task of forest conservation, discounting the indigenous people’s rights as members of this ecosystem, they have been increasingly ghettoised, forced to let go of their traditional way of living and instead stay confined in camps designated by the forest department. Even while foraging for minor forest produce (MFP) which is part of their lifestyle and culture, a thorough list of items gathered has to be provided to the authorities under the Forest Rights Act. Adivasi communities also face intense scrutiny and systemic harassment from the Forest Department.
Kattunayakars in the Nilgiris, like several other Adivasi communities that share a close bond with the forest, have long demanded free movement inside these jungles. Instead, people of the tribe now have little option but to abandon their connection with the forest, and work in tea plantations and fields of land-owning communities at Gudalur in Tamil Nadu and Sultan Bathery in Kerala. Only a few, like Bomman and Bellie, get handpicked by the authorities to be ‘Elephant Whisperers’.
Raghu, the now famous elephant calf from the documentary, had lost his mother at a very young age before he was handed over to Bomman and Bellie by the Forest Department. After the department was unable to integrate Raghu into his herd after his mother’s death, he was brought to Theppakadu, a century-old elephant camp in the Nilgiris, to nurse him back to health and raise him. Raghu’s mother had died of electrocution, as the documentary mentions in passing.
In fact, one of the most prominent reasons for the mounting unnatural deaths of elephants in the MTR is the illegal electrical fencing, often powered through high-tension live wires. A majority of these fences are erected by farmers who are simply trying to protect their crops and in turn their livelihood from wild animals. In the 10 years between 2012 and 2022, up to 82 elephants got killed due to electrocution in Tamil Nadu alone, says the RTI data provided by the Project Elephant Division of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change earlier this year.
Adivasi lives, and the nuances of their interactions with the wildlife, are nothing like the lilting romance between humans and animals in The Elephant Whisperers. Their reality is complex, and riddled by systemic exclusion and environmental concerns at large. They possess unique and varied cultural identities, far beyond the stereotypes imposed on them by mainstream society. They have languages, religions, social, economic, and political systems, resting on the pillars of their rivers, forests, and lands (jal, jungle, jameen).
The documentary’s success at the Academy has done its share of good. It brought to limelight the story of two unsung heroes from a marginalised tribe, who quietly live their lives tucked away in mountains. It led to a certain amount of affirmative action from the Tamil Nadu government, with Chief Minister MK Stalin announcing a funding assistance of ₹9.10 crore for the construction of houses for elephant mahouts and cavadis at the Theppakadu and Kozhikamuthi elephant camps. He also handed over a cheque for Rs 1 lakh each to Bomman and Bellie, the soulful protagonists of the documentary.
It is not every day that the Kattunayakars are discussed on a global stage. This was an opportunity for the makers of The Elephant Whisperers to bring to light the lives of a people who are called ‘Kings of the forest’ but actually live as servants of the new rulers. Some could even argue that this is an ethical obligation, particularly for storytellers hailing from privilege, and not merely a missed opportunity. By placing its priorities on aesthetics instead of journalism, the documentary ends up being reductive and contributes to the larger project of erasure of Adivasi lives.
Views expressed are the author's own.