As anyone who’s visited knows, India is one of the planet’s great contradictions. One minute you’ll be staring at a meticulously kept gold shop requiring sunglasses to avoid retina damage; the next you’re 10 metres down the road being accosted by two 7 year old boys and their dog for “1 dollar?”. It is, of course, what makes the country unique.
My wife and I recently spent a couple of days in and around Delhi’s backpacker haunt, Paharganj. Wandering mid-morning on the way to The Red Fort (Lal Qila), we turned a corner and found ourselves on a collision course with a large group of people in the mid-distance, waving what appeared to be flags. They were headed straight towards us along a road already crammed with autorickshaws, the obligatory cows, a strengthening surge of people flaunting the flimsy traffic rules and a variety of food. Thinking nothing more, we continued along our path, but as we got closer to the flag-bearers, we saw something that, in all my years of travelling through Asia, was unique. Which was, in itself, unique.
As the procession got closer, we noticed we were on a collision course with some kind of protest or rally. Which wouldn’t have been unusual in such a volatile place as India, were it not for the fact that the participants chose to utilise elephants as a political tool. We knew the gathering was political, as, draped over the side of the gigantic pachyderms, were out-of-focus pictures of expressionless people who looked as though they would be most at home were they representing something or other. This is one of the things I love about India: at least half the time, you have to stop and figure out exactly what it is someone is actually doing and why.
Although we couldn’t read the Hindi text on the banners adorning the elephants, we realised it probably wasn’t your normal march against water quality, government corruption, worker’s rights or the poor performance of the national cricket team. My wife and I figured you wouldn’t use elephants, even in India, if you didn’t want to make a point. In fact, elephants were perfect for making a point (or several), as, standing 11 feet tall, they provide a sizeable area just ripe for advertising. And they were probably cheaper than a flat-bed truck from which to espouse rhetoric through a hail of loudspeakers. As domesticated as Indian chickens are, they just weren’t going to cut it, although, I suppose if they’d been rubber, maybe they could have been used in some kind of Monty Python-esque street theatre fashion.
As the march passed by, slogans rang out left, right and centre, and there were myriad plastic trumpets and large military-style drums from which an almighty noise emanated. Despite this, the mammals were wholly compliant with their role in the procession and never flinched. Indeed, at one stage, it seemed they decided to add their own two rupees worth, bellowing forth an almighty noise from deep within their collective trunks as they rounded the corner.
And with that, they somehow disappeared through one of Delhi’s innumerable backstreets. If we hadn’t witnessed it with our own eyes, we would never have had any idea that elephants had just been calmly meandering in support of a protest. Apart from the three huge loads of shite, unmistakably elephantine, that is.
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