Elephants in Kerala

I ended my last post with this picture of an elephant on the road in Kerala.

And I promised to tell you more about elephants in Kerala.





Well, besides a big number of elephants in the wild, Kerala is India's state with the largest population of domesticated elephants. The numbers mentioned range from 500 to 700. 

These elephants in captivity are owned by temples or by individuals. They are used for work, e.g. in timber factories. And they are used a lot for temple ceremonies.

On our way to Varkala we happened to run into one of those temple ceremonies and got out of the car to watch and take pictures.

It is very impressive to see all these elephants with this beautiful decoration.

Here they all had to pick up and carry some large palm leafs.

The man eating the ice cream, next to the owner is his mahout, his handler.
There are good and bad mahouts. Unfortunately 50% of the mahouts is known for alcoholism and often treating the animals badly.
In his other hand the mahout holds a thotti aka a hook, used to control the elephant.

This is called a caparison or nettipattam. The elephants also wear large necklaces.

An  elephant, depending on it's status, can bring it's owner up to 5000 dollars a day, for participating in a festival.

The life of these elephants can be very stressful for them. Long days, standing next to fires or next to loud firecrackers, being transported in the back of small trucks from one festival to another.

Seeing the big chains around their feet and belly makes me sad. I understand why they do it, since accidents have happened in which an elephant broke out and trampled several people to death during a busy temple festival.
But it would of course be much better to stop captivity of elephants all together!

This young guy made obscene tongue gestures to me, as I wrote about in my post.....

Quite shocking and ugly.

As usual there were also drum- and music-bands. Besides that there were beautiful, huge decorations that were carried along on one's shoulders. That must be very heavy, I guess! And there were 'ladies' in the parade, which were in fact men.

The guy with the red cap was both annoying and amusing. "Hey, here I am, take a picture of me!!!"

No, go away. I want the band, not you!

"Look, I fit in very well. No problem."

To be carried on the shoulders.

If you look closer, you see that they are wearing sort of body stockings. I guess to hide body hair and to look paler.

In India, encounters with men dressed as women happen all the time. Despite dressing totally as a woman, they seem not to mind that they are very recognizable as men.

More about them in my next post: Eunuch's, India's Third Gender.