The elephant and imperial continuities in North India,1200–1600CE

UNDER THE DELHI SULTANATE

The late Ghurid and early sultanate writers only gradually transitioned to the Ghaznavid elephantine monarchy. This was because in the beginning they had not subjugated numerous other monarchs yet. As such, these early states formed primarily in the northwest of the subcontinent and were therefore mainly an equine military culture. The main location for obtaining elephants for the rulers from this area was the regions of the eastern Ganges in the modern states of Bihar, Orissa and Bengal—or Jajnagar and Lakhnavati. This was common knowledge in the northwestern parts of the subcontinent. Kalhana (fl. twelfth century), for instance, writes regarding the east India campaign of the Kabul king Lalitaditya that when his elephants arrived at the ‘land of their birth’ in the kingdom of Kalinga (Orissa), they refused to proceed any further. ¹⁶ He also writes that when the army moved further east into Gauḍa (or Gaur in Bengal), it obtained many other elephants. ¹⁷ Hasan Nizami (d. 1217), court historian during the reign of Iltutmish, also saw elephants as belonging to another space. The author likened his own longing for his home in Khurasan to an agitated homesick elephant: ‘The elephant breaks himself loose from his chains when he remembers his birth place’. ¹⁸ The connection between the elephant and eastern India was known to later authors as well. The historian Barani, for instance, wrote that Sultan Balaban would boast that he had given the countries of Sind and Lakhnavati to his two sons, whereby he would obtain his horses from the former and his elephants from the latter. ¹⁹ The reverse perspective was shared by the elite of Lakhnavati who convinced Tughril, the ghulam of Balaban who had captured many elephants in Orissa, to rebel because the sultan in Hindustan, lacking equivalent herds, could not assail a powerful ruler in the east. ²⁰ In short, east India was known as the home of the elephant and hence of powerful kingdoms.

However, we can observe in the works of early Persian authors from this period, Fakhr-i Mudabbir (d. 1236), Hasan Nizami (d. 1217) and Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani (d. 1266), the gradual transition from an awareness of the elephant as formidable danger from distant places to a weapon in the hands of the newly established sultanate. Specifically, while all three authors represent the earliest deployment of Ghaznavid literary models in India, only the latter two incorporate Ghaznavid literary strategies about the elephant. In short, Nizami and Juzjani exhibit the mindset of a self-consciously imperial court.

The warcraft treatise composed by Fakhr-i Mudabbir called The Arts of War [Adab al-Harb] and dedicated to Sultan Iltutmish merely depicts a late Ghurid/early sultanate military world that is dominated by the cavalry not elephants. Fakhr-i Mudabbir devoted 3 out of his 34 chapters to horses (their qualities, cultural importance, different breeds and their illnesses), but none to elephants. The cultural importance of horses was even given religious sanction. For instance, the author cited the prophet Muhammad to claim that God created the horse from the south wind and commissioned it to repeat any praise of God that was uttered by its rider. ²¹ He quoted the prophet again for having said that the greatest holy war is the one that is waged upon horseback. ²² Fakhr-i Mudabbir even told stories that showed God to be attentive to horses subjected to cruelty. He narrated an anecdote about the horse of an Israelite that was whipped by its trainers because the owner mistook the horse’s illness for obstinacy. God, hearing the cry of the horse gave it human speech with which it communicated the problem to the man. ²³

Where the author does mention elephants, he incorporates them into a story very much reminiscent of the Koranic chapter of the elephant. For instance, in the chapter entitled ‘On the determination and justice of kings and their good qualities’, the author told the story of a monarch whose son and heir had accidentally fallen off his horse and died while on a hunting expedition. Overcome with anger and grief, the king decided to vent his frustration on the population of the village where the accident had taken place. The villagers argued for their innocence and begged the king to spare them. The cruel king, however, refused to listen and sent his elephants to raze all the houses and crush the inhabitants under their feet. The helpless inhabitants prayed to God for help. Suddenly, a mysterious rider appeared on horseback, faced the elephants and shouted at them. The animals turned back in fear and trampled the king and all his soldiers to death. ²⁴

This story contains a number of important elements. The most obvious are the ones that evoke the Koranic story of Abraha. In both accounts, a cruel king is bent on the destruction of a seemingly defenceless place (the Kaʻba or the village). In both cases, the destruction is totally unjustified. In both cases, the potential victims are no match for the invaders but ask for help from God who aids them with supernatural powers. Finally, in both cases, the tyrant and his soldiers are crushed to the death. There are also differences between the two accounts. In Fakhr-i Mudabbir’s tale, God’s helper is a horseman (savār), paralleling the values of the Ghurid’s equine military culture. Also interesting is that in Fakhr-i Mudabbir’s account, the elephants are not destroyed like in the Koranic story but are actually turned into a weapon in the service of God’s horseman. Whether or not the author intended this, this ending foreshadows the trajectory of the Delhi sultanate and its interest in the acquisition of elephants.

Fakhr-i Mudabbir certainly knew about the advantages of elephants. He told stories, for example, that showed Central Asian kings being afraid of the beast. ²⁵ He described the wonder of Khurasani kings and the perfect trainability of the animal. ²⁶ Still at the time of his writing in the early thirteenth century, he generally portrayed Ghurid commanders and heroes in possession of horses finding ways to overthrow Rajputs and their elephants. ²⁷

In contrast to Fakhr-i Mudabbir, Hasan Nizami in his Taj al-Ma’asir (composed in 1205/6) serves as a transitional figure in the move towards imperial sovereignty. Nizami too originally only indicated the presence of elephants in the lines of Rajput foes of the Ghurids. ²⁸ The primary goal of the Ghurid armies, according to the author, was to disable the animal, even if it meant attacking it on the battlefield. So, for instance, Nizami describes a scene after a battle outside Varanasi where three enemy elephants were blinded by arrow shots, and the field eventually ‘disappeared under the severed limbs of men and elephants’ belonging to the adversaries. ²⁹ In this early phase, Nizami had no difficulty evoking the Koranic chapter of the elephant wherever appropriate. When illustrating the defeat of the ruler of Varanasi and his death during the battle, Nizami wrote that the rāy had been ignorant of the koranic verse ‘have you not seen what your Lord did to the elephanteers’ when an arrow struck him and knocked him off dead from his elephant’s litter. ³⁰

However, we can perceive a change in Nizami’s narrative, whereby sultanate forces started taking elephants as spoils of war from their adversaries. This process began modestly, with gains of three or eight elephants in certain cases. ³¹ However, the numbers seem to have gradually increased. Also significant was the fact that the new political reality of Ghurid conquests in north India would necessitate the symbolic use of elephant as well. After all, the conquest often involved the reinstatement of some defeated rajas back on the throne on behalf of the Ghurid Sultan as well as the blockage of revanchist attempts by other defeated kings returning from exile. ³² As mentioned above, in some cases, it was the subjugated rajas who directly evoked the Ghaznavid precedence in their negotiations. According to Nizami, when Muʿizz al-Din attacked Kalinjar in 1202, the rāy of Kalinjar, who was apparently a descendant of Nanda (Vidyadhara) and who had struggled with Mahmud of Ghazna two centuries before, showed obedience [ṭaʻat], servitude [bandagi] and devotion [ikhlaṣ] to the sultan. He then ‘mentioned the kindness and mercy shown to his ancestor at the time of Sultan Yamin al-Dawlah Mahmud [Ghaznavi]. Through his generals and grandees, he asked for mercy from the judgement of the Padshah’. ³³ Here, the creation of a conquest state suggested the use of the Ghaznavid model both to the conquerors and the conquered. In short, the Ghaznavid elephantine and imperial model was now being redeployed after 200 years.

This change is reflected in the sources by the removal of the relevant koranic phrases from the narrative. A good case in point is the scene of a battle between the two slave generals Iltutmish and Ilduz over supremacy in new territories conquered in north India. Here, both armies were equipped with elephants and used them against each other. ³⁴ Nizami still saw the animals as monstrous, but he could no longer draw on Koranic references to undermine his patron’s (Iltutmish) enemy, as the rhetorical ploy would naturally backfire. The establishment of the sultanate in Delhi by Iltutmish in the thirteenth century was thus a turning point.

Perhaps the most complete usage of the Ghaznavid literary models occurs in Juzjani’s Tabaqat-i Nasiri in which the author used a range of human–elephant interactions—both those involving the display of sovereignty and those depicting heroic engagement between a sultanate commander and the animal. In neither case did Juzjani resort to the Koran. A good example is the battle between the Ghurid ‘Ala al-Din Husayn against the later Ghaznavid Sultan Bahramshah. According to this story, ‘Ala al-Din decided to fight the powerful Bahramshah in order to avenge the death of his brother at the hand of the Ghaznavid ruler. Bahramshah dismissed the Ghurid upstart and boasted of his many elephants. Unfazed by this threat, ‘Ala al-Din produced two of his chief warriors whom he commissioned with bringing down an elephant in battle. The warriors resorted to a ruse, and bravely ran under the elephants in order to stab them in their stomachs. These acts of bravery encouraged the Ghurid army, which at this point (first half of the twelfth century) was primarily composed of infantry, to attack and put the Ghaznavid host to flight. ³⁵

In another anecdote, we find the warrior adventurer Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji, the self-styled conqueror of Bengal, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with elephants. According to this story, Bakhtiyar’s military exploits in the east had made him a favourite of sultan Qutb al-Din Aybak. This favouritism aroused the jealousy of other commanders who began mocking and undermining Bakhtiyar before the sultan. The sultan, in turn, demanded Bakhtiyar to prove his worth by engaging in combat with an elephant. During the combat, Bakhtiyar amazed the audience by striking the elephant’s trunk with his mace and chasing the frightened animal in pursuit. ³⁶

Such anecdotes of heroism could be found in a variety of literature available to thirteenth-century courtly audiences. For example, Bakhtiyar’s battle with the elephant recalls a similar engagement by the young hero Rustam, recounted in some manuscript traditions of the Persian epic Shahnameh (completed during the Ghaznavids), who also combated an elephant and struck it with his mace. Likewise, the contest between Ghurid soldiers and Ghaznavid elephants brings to mind a similar engagement during the early Islamic battle of Qadisiyah by four Arab warriors who disabled and put to flight two Sasanian elephants who, in turn, scattered the entire Sasanian frontline in their path and caused their defeat. ³⁷ It may be worthwhile to indicate similar exploits in the Mahabharata too. For instance, the heroic Kaunteya, son of the wind, was celebrated for his ability to ward off an elephant in rut. ³⁸ Closer in time to Juzjani was Kalhana who praised in his poem, the Rajatarangini the ancient king Khargendra as the ‘destroyer of the elephant array of his foes’. ³⁹

While we can be certain that Juzjani knew about early Ghaznavid literary precedents, we need not argue for a direct influence between Sanskrit narratives and the Tabaqat. What is significant is that the courtly audience of such anecdotes, or the attendants of such displays of martial prowess, would be able to understand the combat within the framework of whatever cultural-linguistic tradition they were familiar with—Persian, Arabic or Sanskrit. Such texts were either produced or read in various courtly settings and would reflect the prescribed norm of royal-warrior behaviour. All the while, it is worth noting that the anecdotes quoted in Juzjani allude to a variety of texts other than the relevant Koran verses.

Now, while serving to bolster the heroic credential of Ghurid/Sultanate warriors, the elephant also came to represent the sovereign, even as the expression of the most essential characteristics of an individual sovereign’s rule. This too was in line with Ghaznavid precedents. As I have argued elsewhere, the image of the sultan riding the elephant had come to stand for complete and harmonious sovereignty in which the elephant represented kingship or kingdom. ⁴⁰ At the same time, descriptions of the failures of kingship also relied on the elephant. A good case in point is the portrayal of Sultan Mas‘ud Ghaznavi during his disastrous campaign against the Seljuk Turks. The historian Bayhaqi used an image of the sultan atop the elephant as the best embodiment of the sultan’s character flaws which Bayhaqi obviously blamed for the defeat.

In short, the bad character traits of the sultan (his drug addiction, negligence and impotent rage) are best expressed while the sultan is riding the elephant. He has literary fallen asleep at the reins of the state. The same trope was used by Juzjani as well. For example, the author considered Sultan Rukn al-Din, son of Iltutmish to be a debauched and negligent ruler. While Juzjani reports many episodes depicting Rukn al-Din’s corruption, it was through the image of the sultan atop the elephant that our historian drove home his point. He writes,

[Sultan Ruk al-Din’s] desire was entirely for debauchery, feasting, and merrymaking. He had a voracity for corruption and dissipation. Most of his formal gatherings and gift-giving was for the benefit of musicians, clowns, and for pederasty. He would distribute gold excessively by riding drunk atop an elephant in the bazaar and strewing tankas of red gold. People would laugh and collect it. He was greedy for riding and sporting with elephants. ⁴²

Here, it was not enough for the author to criticise the king and his corruption. He needed to summarise the whole defect by citing a concrete example involving the elephant. What typifies the sultan’s negligence and reprehensible behaviour is the image of him riding atop the animal in the bazaar, drunk and wasteful, being mocked by commoners who happily reap in the benefit of the sultan’s disorderly behaviour. ⁴³

The same can be seen about Raziya—Iltutmish’s daughter and one of his successors. The queen sat on the throne of Delhi with support from a faction of the elite who considered her more capable than her dissolute brothers. Her reign was not uncontroversial. ⁴⁴ Juzjani again exemplified the provocative nature of her rule by a representation involving the elephant. He wrote,

Sultan Raziyya, abandoned women’s clothes and the purda. She donned the mantle and the crown and came out into the midst of the people. All the people could see her openly when she would come on the elephant’s back in order to sit on the throne’. ⁴⁵

Sexism was obviously one of the main objections to Raziyya’s rule. The prejudice against her, however, was not due to lack of confidence in her ability, but thanks to the fact that the queen was transgressing the dress code and physical restrictions placed on elite women. Juzjani makes Raziyya’s provocative action concrete by portraying her in the wonderful image of the monarch dressed in (male) royal garments, riding atop an elephant to her throne. This portrayal had a parallel in Kalhana who once personified royal prosperity and wealth as the goddess ‘Lakshmi, mistress of kings, who dallies on the back of her elephant’. ⁴⁶ This depiction was not always positive as it symbolised the maddening attraction of ambitious men. In other words, Juzjani’s description of Raziyya would evoke similar reactions among Persophone or Sanskrit-reading elite who objected to her rule. Whether in praise or criticism, it was while riding the animal symbol of sovereignty that each monarch embodied the most characteristic aspect of his or her reign.

The increased symbolic function of the elephant coincided with the practical and strategic need for the largest elephant stables. For instance, as Sunil Kumar has shown, the association of Raziyya and Rukn al-Din with elephants and their drivers (mahouts) in part reflected their relative distancing from the heavy cavalry of the Turkic slave commanders of their deceased father during the succession struggles of the late 1230s and early 1240s. ⁴⁷ This is the second important feature of the relationship between the Delhi Sultan and the animals in this period because the competition over its possession translated into intense care for the animal. So, for example, ‘Izz al-Din Tughan Khan Tughril’s obsession with gaining elephants extended to the point where he would even risk losing the battle in order to prevent harming elephants he could potentially capture. We see him, for instance, in April of 1244 ordering his soldiers to cease fighting (and thus losing the chance for victory) against the Ray of Jajnagar because he did not want ‘anyone harming the [enemy’s] elephants’. ⁴⁸ In the fourteenth century, we see another example of this again in Jajnagar, where Firuz Shah Tughluq decided to abandon his pursuit of another Ray of Jajnagar because ‘it was reported to him that a thick forest is attached to this place … and inside that forest there are seven ferocious males and one female elephant’. ⁴⁹ The chance of gaining elephants even trumped the need to win battles.

Care for the elephant was not merely practical but had cultural sanction as well. Kalhana, for instance, while cataloguing the terrible actions of the ancient king of Kashmir Mihirakula, included the killing of elephants in the list of the tyrant’s misdeeds. Kalhana writes that

When on reaching the ‘Gate of Kashmir’ [Mihirakula] heard the terrified cry of an elephant which had fallen over a precipice, he was thrilled with delight. The perverse-minded king was in raptures with joy over this sound, and had then a hundred other elephants rolled down by force. ⁵⁰

The evil reputation of Mihirakula here was earned through his senseless destruction of animals. Yet, the story also points to the cultural significance of the elephant in particular (no such concern is even shown for cows). In other words, Tughril and Firuzshah’s protection of their enemy’s elephants would be observed not merely as an act of practical calculation but also one of respect towards the animal through a code of behaviour that they universally shared with their adversaries.

This brings us to the expansion of the elephant hunt in the fourteenth century. Here, the crucial thing to remember is that the hunt was strictly for the capture of the animal not its killing. After all, ivory, which was indeed an import commodity in South Asia, was an imported good brought from Africa along with gold. ⁵¹ This meant that Indian elephants were hunted for their labour and not their tusks. Great care went into safely hunting the animal, and the methods employed were quite old. For example, according to ‘Afif, when Firuz Shah and his army arrived at the forests of Jajnagar, they discovered that the elephants were 10–11 kurohs (about 20 miles) deep in the woods. Immediately, orders were issued to all commanders to join hands and build a wooden stockade around a forest, a kaṭghar, 7 gaz high and 10 gaz thick, reinforced by mud. The king would personally ride around every day to ensure the quality of the construction. When the building was completed, a number of royal elephants and their drivers were released into the woods, and they began making a tremendous din by which they drove the eight wild elephants out of the forest. As they reached the edge, they were faced by another barrage of noise and commotion from the besieging army which, in turn, drove the animals back inside. Thus, the hunters exhausted the prey over several days. Next, elephant drivers went into the forest, climbed on trees and jumped down on the tired wild elephants as they passed under. Then, having secured their prey by means of ropes and iron chains, they took them out to camp to be presented to the king. ⁵²

This method of hunting is quite ancient and appears to be a variation on a similar practice in antiquity reported by Greek writers accompanying Alexander the Great. Megasthene had stated in his Indika that hunters would dig a trench around a patch of ground where wild elephants dwelled with a single bridge allowing access in and out of the enclosure. A number of tamed female elephants would then be released into this space and serve as bait. When the wild elephants entered, the bridge would be removed and the hunter would take turns fighting them with the tame elephants and starving them for several days. Finally, the hunters would tie the exhausted elephants to the tame ones and drive them in pairs. ⁵³ Naturally, the similarities of these practices do not reflect any sort of textual ‘influence’. Rather they demonstrate the antiquity and ubiquity of techniques and expertise for an elephant hunt in which the animal was not to be killed.

In sum, from a purely visual angle, the sultans of Delhi would appear as emperors (king-of-kings) and elephant-masters to their subjects in the most customary manner. As tenth-century inscription at Devagiri shows, it was quite normal for any king to appear in public to his subjects on elephants. The text reads, ‘And when, while he was cutting grass, the king, mounted on an elephant, came looking on at the cutters, Allaganda stood up on the very bundle of grass which was for the elephant. Then, behold the king said—We are pleased, ask a boon’. ⁵⁴ Everywhere, subjects from grass-cutters to kings associated monarchy with the elephant. An imperial polity was embodied by a supreme king who had mastered all the other elephant-masters. In short, from the time of Iltutmish until the death of Firuz Shah Tughluq, the Delhi sultanate presented itself as an imperial authority, master of elephants and king over a collection of tributary subkingdoms all harkening back to the Ghaznavid model. ⁵⁵

EARLY MUGHAL RULE

The seamless association of monarch and elephant during the Delhi Sultanate was briefly disrupted during the establishment of Mughal rule. The Timurid prince Babur had two options before him. One was the Ghaznavid model, with which Babur was familiar through his reading of Juzjani and probably indirect quotes from the Persian translation of al-ʻUtbi. ⁵⁶ On the other hand, through his reading of Sharaf al-Din Yazdi’s Zafarnamah, Babur was also aware of the potential of Koranic criticism of elephantine sovereignty. Essentially, once again the problem of elephant involved balancing its use as a source of power and its cost as satanic symbol of violence and tyrannical hubris. Babur, Humayun and Akbar all struggled with this dilemma, each attempting to render the animal into a docile body, a fact practically possible only with its neutralisation either through complete monopoly of its entire stock or through its substitution by another super-weapon—artillery. The ultimate success was achieved by Akbar near the end of his long reign, precisely when the power of the state reached unprecedented zenith and also when the growth of the artillery sidelined the military significance of the elephant. The changes that occurred at the end of the sixteenth century should not be viewed as the inevitable end of a linear progression. They came about through new realignments in the power structure of empire ultimately caused by external factors that were initially unrelated to the relationship between elephants and monarchy. The sixteenth century witnessed ruptures, experimentations, unresolvable conundrums under Babur and Humayun, and then new ruptures, new experimentation and eventual resolutions from 1556 to the 1580s and 1590s.

Early on, Babur quickly understood the symbolic significance of the elephant as soon as he entered South Asia. His first reference to the animal in his autobiographic memoirs was during a hunt in December of 1525. He writes,

I always used to wonder how a rhinoceros and an elephant would act if they were brought face-to-face. This time the elephant keepers were just bringing forward the elephants when a rhinoceros emerged. When the keepers drove the elephants forward, the rhinoceros ran off in another direction. ⁵⁷

The Rhinoceros hunt was the first ‘big game’ hunt in the Baburnama. The animal was targeted not for food, but obviously for a symbolic purpose. ⁵⁸ The elephant was being called to symbolise highest royal power. After all, Babur had already begun to distinguish himself from other Timurid and Mongol warriors by assuming the title of Padshah (‘emperor’ or ‘super king’) in Kabul. Using the few elephants in his possession now was consistent with his new imperial pretensions, very much in line with the Ghaznavid imperial model.

However, the elephant fulfils a second role in the memoirs. Babur perceived it as the sources of almost unbeatable power, excessive force and terror. These features harmonised very well with key elements of an embryonic model of kingship based on conquest. All the founders of new states in the post-Mongol era had used a particular brand of violence and terror to enforce their newly established and rather shaky rule. The Uzbek ruler Shibani Khan had committed massive slaughter and enslavement on the Qipchaq Steppe in 1509. ⁵⁹ Shah Ismaʻil Safavi had staged a grisly scene of immolation and cannibalism against two of his enemies in 1504. ⁶⁰ Babur himself, following the example of his ancestor Timur, had made towers of skulls from the decapitated heads of his dead Afghan foes in 1505. ⁶¹ As Foucault states, such acts of violence by the sovereign on the enemy’s body were the

anchoring point as the manifestation of power, an opportunity of affirming the dissymmetry of forces…, of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly … but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestation,… a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as ‘super-power’. ⁶²

In Babur’s case, the power of the monarch was displayed via its most awesome tools of violence—the elephant and the cannon.

We can observe the parallel development of the use of the elephant in the Baburnama for expressing the awe and terror of kingship. For example, just days after the rhinoceros hunt, word arrived at camp that Babur’s ally Alam Khan had been beaten by a detachment of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi during a battle, and that a single Lodi elephant had caused the rout: ‘Alam Khan’s men were busy pillaging and plundering. Sultan Ibrahim’s forces saw that their opponents were few, so they set out in their direction with a small detachment and an elephant. When the animal advanced, the opponents were unable to stand their ground and fled’ [emphasis added]. ⁶³ We see here the intimate connection between the elephant’s power and fear.

In a few weeks (January 1526), Babur chased after Alam Khan to punish his rebellious behaviour. At this point, the horror of the elephant assumed a concrete and gruesome tangibility—that of blood and dismemberment. After a brief skirmish between the forces of Babur and Alam Khan, the latter withdrew into his fort. However, as the entrance was blocked by horses, the elephants horribly trampled and crushed the other animals under their feet. ⁶⁴ Two sets of mental associations were made by Babur. One set, positive, involves the retreating of the enemy elephant leading to their defeat. Another set, traumatic, associates the enemy elephant with bloody dismemberment. Both were now featured in the Baburnama on Monday 26 February 1526. Humayun attacked a Lodi detachment by surprise, unhorsed them and brought back about a hundred prisoners along with seven or eight elephants. Babur ordered the men to be shot to pieces by matchlocks and cannons. ⁶⁵ This is a revealing action on Babur’s part. The elephant, the super-weapon of the Lodis, was not found in any significant numbers in Babur’s army. However, Babur possessed gunpowder weapons and with this super-weapon, he could accomplish similar destruction on the bodies of his enemies. The execution was clearly an experiment. The prisoners did not pose any danger to the Mughals. We see this grisly theatre re-enacted on Sunday 1 April 1526, when another 70 prisoners (accompanied by a handful of captured elephants) were brought in and again massacred. ⁶⁶

The quest for the elephant as the symbol of sovereignty reaches a key point at the battle of Panipat (1525). Babur twice repeated in his memoirs how he had heard that Sultan Ibrahim owned a thousand elephants. ⁶⁷ On the night of the battle, as the Lodis marched with their elephants and beat their drums, ‘the noise caused trepidation among soldiers who had never witnessed such pandemonium’. ⁶⁸ Babur countered this fear with his super-weapon of artillery: ‘Master Ali-Quli got off a few good gunshots from in front of the centre. Mustafa the artilleryman also fired some good shots from the mortars mounted on carts to the left of the centre’. Once the battle broke out, victory was made tangible in part by gaining the ultimate prize: ‘Droves of elephants were caught and presented to the elephant keepers’. ⁶⁹ Babur only had 15 or 16 of these animals before Panipat. Now he owned droves. ⁷⁰

Shortly after this, a transition occurs. Babur was now an emperor (king-of-kings) and the greatest elephant-master around. At this point in the memoirs, we observe an immediate assertion of control over the elephant as a docile body, at least in Babur’s service and at his command. Babur now assumed the gaze of the observer, measured and almost objective. He described the quality and function of the creature, as well as its price and place of origins. He writes in his memoirs that the elephants were obtained from the east and that the further east one went the wilder would be the animal. Certain eastern districts, he had learned, even paid their annual tribute in elephants. The elephants were useful as they could be taught many things. Their price depended on their size. They served in army units, but their most optimal use, as far as Babur was concerned, was in logistics. They could be used to cross rivers and to transport heavy loads especially mortars, the new weapon of the Mughals. ⁷¹

The early violent associations did not disappear, but they were transformed into a more stately gesture. When Babur survived a poisoning attempt on his life, he arrested and executed the culprits on Monday 24 December 1526. He writes, ‘I ordered the taster to be hacked to pieces and the cook skinned alive. One of the two women I had thrown under the elephant’s feet, and the other shot’. ⁷² As it can be seen, the elephant remained locked in association with a series of grisly acts that do violence on bodies. Shooting was especially paired with being crushed under the animal’s feet. However, the violence had become symbolic of Babur’s power. It was controlled, and the reins that unleashed the chaos and force of the beast were firmly in his hands.

In short, at the beginning of the establishment of Mughal rule, the Ghaznavid imperial model was fully operative, with the new emperor as an elephant-master. However, particular contingencies forced Babur’s hand. In Spring of 1527, Babur’s erstwhile ally Rana Sanga of Mewar headed a Rajput-Afghan alliance against the new Mughal emperor. As the eve of the battle approached, Babur began to draw on the rhetoric of ghaza (religious war) in order to motivate his soldiers and probably to split the alliance. This in itself was not a deviation from the Ghaznavid model that had already reconciled the rhetoric of holy war (as exemplified by iconoclasm in their particular case) with possession of elephants. However, the victory proclamation, which was dispersed around India and beyond, was not composed by Babur.

The author of this more broadly distributed document was Babur’s companion, Shaykh Zayn, who later served him as his chief religious minister [sadr]. Shaykh Zayn evoked the surat al-fil in his victory letter. Perhaps shortsightedly, the shaykh transformed Babur from a ghazi and elephant-master to a Muslim holy warrior fighting the elephanteers, referring to the Koranic chapter. He wrote, ‘those accursed infidel opponents of the Muhammadan law, like Elephanteers intent upon the destruction of the Ka‘ba, relied upon their elephants with bodies like mountains and countenances like demons … With those elephants the Hindustanis became as conceited as the Elephanteers’. ⁷³ But the readers and listeners to this exhortation would have known that the model for this trope was not the now more remote Ghaznavids; the association would have been closer at hand: Shaykh Zayn was drawing on the classic of early Timurid historiography, Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi’s Zafarnamah.

In this text, which we know was circulating widely at Babur’s camp, ⁷⁴ Yazdi had described the final battle between Timur and his South Asian opponent Sultan Mahmud Tughluq (r. 1394–1412) as a moment of desperation. Timur’s Central Asian soldiers, who had never seen elephants before, believed

that [the animals’] bodies are so hard that swords and arrows cannot harm them, or that their strength is beyond imaginable. They can uproot trees by charging them and knock down buildings by bumping into them. During battle, their serpentine trunks can grab the rider with his horse and toss them both into the air. ⁷⁵

Timur, we are told, addressed these fears by setting up barricades and by praying to God for assistance. ⁷⁶ During battle, Timurid warriors heroically attacked the elephants and put the Delhi army to flight. Yazdi drove home the point by citing the appropriate verse from the chapter of the elephant, ‘Have you not seen what your lord did to the elephanteers?’ Of all the literary-historical models available at Babur’s camp, the satanic association of the elephant, so conspicuously absent from Ghaznavid and Sultanate historiography, was fully present in a Timurid chronicle. Shayk Zayn’s adopting the particular anti-elephantine rhetoric of holy war from this source may have been a useful expedient at the time of the battle of Khanua, but it opened the door to similar criticism of the Mughals themselves.

Babur’s description of the temples in Gwalior, which he visited after Khanua, further underlined the exceptional quality of Shaykh Zabyn’s proclamation. As Babur explained, Gwalior had been ruled by Raja Bikramjit and his ancestors for over a century when the Lodis tried to capture it in the early sixteenth century. The feat was accomplished by Sultan Ibrahim in 1518 who took it from Bikramjit by truce. The Raja was killed during the battle of Panipat but his family was still in Agra when the Mughals took the city. They were captured by Mughal soldiers belonging to Babur’s son Humayun. The prince decided to negotiate with them. In exchange for their freedom and a portion of their property, Humayun obtained from them precious jewels including the legendary diamond of Koh-i Nur. ⁷⁷ It is not clear why Humayun opted for this peace, but his behaviour fits very well with the imperial model already discussed above.

The fort was captured through a ruse in November of 1526. During the uprising of Rana Sanga, the Lodi fort-keeper Tatar Khan Sarangkhani had contacted Babur and offered submission. When the Mughal forces arrived, Tatar Khan changed his mind. At this point, the chief Sufi master of the town, Shaykh Muhammad Ghaws tipped off the Mughal commander Rahimdad who, in turn, tricked Tatar Khan to let him in while his soldiers remained outside one of the city gates called the Elephant Gate (Hathi Pul), so-called on account of the large elephant statue built there. That night Rahimdad opened the gate and by morning, Tatar Khan had no choice but to turn the fort over and go to his interview with Babur for receiving a revenue assignment elsewhere. ⁷⁸ Capturing the city through the elephant gate must have seemed momentous to Babur, the new elephant-master of India, who always placed particular significance on coincidences.

Babur himself did not go to Gwalior until after the battle of Khanua. When he arrived there in September of 1528, he entered, perhaps unsurprisingly, through that very Hathi Pul, as if to signify his connection to imperial sovereignty and the elephant. ⁷⁹ Babur’s tour of Gwalior is important for a number of other reasons. It was here that he found, and described in fullest detail in the entire memoir, magnificent Hindu temples. One, in particular, impressed him for its height. In the thirteenth century, Sultan Iltutmish had built a congregational mosque next to it. Babur’s depiction of the harmonious coexistence of a Hindu and Muslim religious structure side-by-side is worth noting. The new emperor observed the sight in purely aesthetical terms without registering a normative opinion on the religious function of either site or their respective religions. The case with the large statue outside of the city walls was different. There temples were hewn out of rocks. Babur admired the place (Urwahi) but was shocked that there were naked statues with their genitals exposed. He therefore ordered the exposed genitals removed. Again the reaction is moral-aesthetic. The temple as a whole is not disturbed, but the nudity was ‘edited’. Later Babur returned to the fort, again through the Hathi Pul. ⁸⁰

In sum, the events associated with early Mughal conquests present us with an interesting window into the formation of Mughal sovereignty. With a single deviation in the battle of Khanua, Babur followed the Ghaznavid and sultanate models before him. The model continued into Humayun’s reign, although the early use of the Koranic verse by Shaykh Zayn seems to have created a sense of paranoia for the second emperor.

The symbolic problem of elephantine sovereignty especially afflicted Humayun. Elephants were displayed by Humayun’s court from the first instance of the new ruler’s tenure on the throne. The emperor’s sister Gulbadan later recalled that on the day of her father’s death on 25 December 1530:

Arayish Khan, an Indian officer said, ‘To keep the matter a secret is no good because in Hindustan it is the custom, when such a thing happens to rulers, for the people to pillage one of the markets. God forbid that the Mughals, unknowingly, should enter houses and mansions and put them to plunder. It would be appropriate to dress someone in red, mount him on an elephant, and have him proclaim from atop the elephant that His Majesty Babur Padshah has become a dervish and given the rule to Humayun Padshah.’ His Majesty Humayun Padshah ordered this be done. ⁸¹

This passage is noteworthy for a number of reasons. We can see how the new emperor yields to the expert advice of one of his ‘India’ officers. Moreover, the gesture sharply divides the emperor from the ‘Mughals’. Humayun is not the leader of the ‘Mughals’ but a sovereign concerned for the welfare of his new subjects, and the heart of this new position we find that ultimate symbol of imperial sovereignty—the elephant. This pattern was further intensified as the emperor left Agra within a few years of his reign and moved his capital south to Gwalior—the home of his erstwhile allies, the house of Raja Bikramjit.

15 May 1534 was the day set aside for Humayun’s coronation ceremonies. The emperor went out into the meadows outside of town to celebrate. It was a great occasion marked by merriment, gift-giving and pomp. As part of the festivities elephants were brought out. The way in which Humayun’s courtier Khvandamir describes this scene is highly significant. He writes, ‘Elephants with mountainous bodies and demonic faces were adorned with various garments of atlas and aksun, while archer youths sat on their backs’. ⁸² Kvandamir’s word choice in characterising the animal echoes almost verbatim Shaykh Zayn’s language in the victory proclamation at Khanua. The elephants have ‘bodies like mountains’ and ‘faces like demons’. In other words, both Shaykh Zayn and Khvandamir were evoking the demonic association of the elephant in Islam. Yet, while in the former text the Mughal Emperor was presented as a holy warrior who fights against the satanic potential of the beast, in Khvandamir, the emperor has mastered and tamed this danger. In Humayun’s presence, the ‘monster’ is held in check, dressed up, and controlled by Mughal archers.

However, there were always costs in appearing as the elephant-master because Humayun could always be disturbed through his equalisation with Abraha. We see this already in Gujarat, following the conquest of Champaner by Mughal forces. The chronogramme cited in Abul Fazl dates it to the first week of August 1535. ⁸³ The historian writes that during the festivities that followed the Mughal victory, a small faction of the Mughal army defected secretly and headed south to engage in conquest on its own, for the sake of creating a breakaway kingdom. The defectors were arrested and brought in for punishment. On Tuesday (10 August 1535), the culprits were presented for judgement. The emperor, following his custom of colour-coding court sessions based on the planetary signs of the day of the week, dressed up in a red garment in imitation of Mars, and read out the grisly sentences. The worst offenders had their hands and feet bound and were thrown before elephants to be trampled to death. ⁸⁴ What happened next demonstrates powerfully the reappearance of the crisis of elephantine sovereignty. Abul Fazl describes it as follows:

When this affair and judgement came to an end, the time for the evening prayers arrived. The imam (prayer leader), who was not exempt from stupidity, recited the Chapter of the Elephant in the first set. When he gave the final salutations, the emperor’s order of vengeance was issued that he should be thrown under the elephants too, because ‘he has intentionally recited the Chapter of the Elephant as a double-entendre, and has cursed us by presenting our justice as oppression’. Imam Muhammad Parghuli stated that, ‘this imam does not understand the meaning of the Koran’. But since the flames of the fires of wrath were flaring up, Parghuli heard nothing in return but rebuke. Later, when it dawned on the emperor what a simpleton the prayer leader had been, and the fire of his wrath subsided, he regretted what he had done and spent the whole night crying. ⁸⁵

These terrible events show the high cost of the symbolic associations with the elephant. Humayun as elephant-master, orders the enemies of the ‘crown’, really the enemies of the ‘elephant’, to be crushed to death by the same force of sovereignty that they had rebelled against. Yet, there is a great discomfort on the part of the sovereign about the brutality of his punishment. The recitation of the Chapter of the Elephant, even if committed as a terrible gaff by an imam who does not understand the text other than its connection to elephants, jabs at the emperor’s guilty conscience. He feels he has violated the norms of Islamic justice. This leads him to an even more violent reaction and more serious infraction—the arbitrary and vengeful execution of innocent man, an imam at that. When left to his own devices though at night, he cannot hold back the pangs of conscience and breaks down into tears. The problem of elephantine sovereignty that had been resolved since the time of the Ghaznavids had come back with full force. The Mughals were now faced with a problem that the Delhi Sultans had evaded for three centuries. Once again, Humayun had to represent two conflicting traditions of monarchy.

In addition to this, there was a second cost to an imperial sovereignty represented by the elephant. The Mughals were not the greatest elephanteers in north India at this time. We might recall that the main population of elephants was found to the east of the Gangetic plains. Babur was certainly aware of this. It was perhaps no coincidence that greatest challenges to the nascent Mughal state came from here, by Sher Shah Sur and Hemu Baqqal. The battle of Chausa (June 1539) was in fact a replay of long-term trends in the history of the regions. It involved the quest of rulers from the central plains (Delhi and Agra) for control in the east where geography, climate and animal life gave the advantage to those with knowledge of the local terrain. The distance, the heavy rainfall and the abundance of elephants favoured the Sur forces. When the two armies met, Sher Khan camped his men on higher ground, as protection against rain and flood. It was the Mughals who had to spend weeks in terrible conditions caused by the monsoon. Additionally, the march during the monsoon had caused the mass death of the pack animals in Humayun’s army. This meant that the cannons, each of which required several pairs of oxen to carry, would have been abandoned before Humayun crossed the river to its southern shore.

When the fighting broke out eventually, the Surs used elephants in the battle itself. According to Jawhar, the Mughal army was mainly using the animal for transportation and logistics—a fact already noted by Babur when he writes in his memoirs, ‘Elephants have several good qualities: they can easily carry heavy loads across large and swift-running rivers. Three or four elephants can haul mortar carts that would take four to five hundred men to pull’. ⁸⁶ In Chausa, as the day of battle dawned, a Sur detachment led by Khawass Khan charged three elephants right into the Mughal formation. The emperor himself was confronted by a galloping elephant at which he threw a spear but was subsequently shot in the arm by an arrow from the elephant-driver. ⁸⁷ The methods used by the Sur army were rooted in the tradition of medieval India’s use of elephants where the eastern areas of Bihar, Orissa and Bengal were home to the largest number of elephants. ⁸⁸

In short, while Humayun posed as the imperial elephant-master, following the Ghaznavid model, he had to confront the high cost of elephantine sovereignty. He did not have monopoly of the use of the animal vis-à-vis his enemies, and he was not master of the ethical/religious discourse that could turn the symbol against him. Both issues had to be resolved during the long reign of his son Akbar.

AKBAR AND THE ELEPHANT

Akbar’s self-presentation as emperor has long been seen through the lens of religious tolerance. Essentially, the argument goes that while perhaps experiencing personal spiritual curiosity beyond orthodox Islam early on, his religious ‘policy’ was governed first by making inroads towards the Rajputs in the 1560s, and failing at that, by toeing a strict Islamic line well into the 1570s. At that point, with an increase in the number of Rajputs and Shi‘a in the ranks of his nobility, Akbar then adopted a supra-Islamic religious attitude. ⁸⁹ While this depiction seems convincing in its broadest strokes, it is marred by some evidence to the contrary. Tracing Akbar’s relationship with elephants will help us gain a new perspective on his self-presentation as emperor.

Akbar’s protracted reign witnessed almost the entire range of elephant uses that had been observed in the previous eras—from war, to the hunt, to heroic duels and to symbolic use. However, we can observe some important changes towards the end. By the 1580s, the emperor who possessed both the largest herd of elephants in South Asia and the largest arsenal of gunpowder weapons, no longer ruled over a polity comprising tributary kings. Thus freed from the symbolic and actual need of the elephant, Akbar could now transcend all former emperors. His mastery over elephant and man elided the distinction between the two. He hunted and tamed ‘rebel’ commanders as he hunted and tamed elephants, and the elephant, in turn, was humanised as on par with subjugated warlords. It would follow that as he had domesticated and brought down the animal from its divine/satanic status, the emperor now was the closest living being to God.

This achievement was explicitly expressed starting in the 1580s and then projected backwards to the beginning of the emperor’s reign when the young Akbar had to face the challenge of the elephant. The crucial moment began with the masterful deployment of the animal in battle during the uprising of Hemu from the east (or ‘ḥudūd-i sharq’ as Abu al-Fazl calls it) against the Mughals. ⁹⁰ Abu al-Fazl says that Hemu possessed 500 elephants, capable of scattering squadrons, all dressed in armour, with small gunpowder weapons mounted on their backs. ⁹¹ It was thanks to a charge of 300 of these animals, led by Hemu himself, that the Mughal army was put to flight during their first encounter near Delhi. ⁹² Hemu used the same method a second time, and almost repeated his success had it not been for the fact that a Mughal archer shot him in the eye.

What is significant here is that, in the retelling of this event by the end of the century, Akbar’s historian Abu al-Fazl did not rely on the Chapter of the Elephant to denounce the non-Muslim enemy. The ultimate solution to the crisis of elephantine sovereignty was worked out through the elevation of the emperor closer to God. Abu al-Fazl writes, ‘He who looks for assistance to the elephanteer [filban] will always prevail upon the person who relies on elephants. No one can deny the domination of the person who holds secret communion with the creator of the elephant’. ⁹³ Here, the ‘elephanteer’ has been reinterpreted as the creator of the elephant—that is God with whom the emperor communes.

Again, this was a backward projection by Abu al-Fazl. A similar strategy was employed in the Tarikh-i Alfi where the author of the text claimed that Akbar had first reflected on ‘the maker of the elephant’, that is God, in 1566. During his battles against Ali Quli Khan and Bahadur near Gwalior, while crossing a river, Akbar’s elephant Khuda Bakhsh who was in a state of mast had suddenly sobered up. The commanders, who had great faith in the animal, began to worry. Akbar, however, encouraged them by stating that this was indeed a sign of victory, because in battle, reliance on the instruments of war actually detracts from reliance on God. ⁹⁴ Here the emperor’s words in the Tarikh-i Alfi echo Abu al-Fazl’s in that they both connect the emperor to a higher authority than the sacralised elephant. This was the ultimate and most long-lasting solution to the problem of sovereignty created by the use of the elephant. There was no longer any need to live up to the example of the prophet Muhammad if a king could directly commune with God. How did Akbar and his courtiers accomplish this feat?

Akbar began his career as a warrior and hunter of elephants. This had two functions. The first involved the military need of the fledgling Mughal state to gain possession of the largest herds in north India. We know for instance that Sher Shah Sur was said to have possessed 5000 elephants at the height of his reign. ⁹⁵ A quarter of a century after the re-establishment of their rule, that is, by around 1580, the Mughals could boast the same. ⁹⁶ In this way, no challenge similar to that posed by Ibrahim Lodi, Sher Shah Sur or Hemu could ever be mounted against them. In addition to this, the development of Abar’s image as a hunter of elephants had a symbolic significance and involved the need to turn the elephant into a docile and well-controlled body, submissive to the emperor’s will.

Indeed, we find a frenetic obsession with elephants in the first half of Akbar’s reign. According to Abu al-Fazl, Akbar was keenly interested in watching elephant fights in the 1550s and spent most of his time in this form of entertainment. ⁹⁷ Soon the youthful emperor made the transition from watching to participation. We find him in those early years stepping on the tusk of drunk elephants (who had killed their drivers) and riding them. ⁹⁸ On another occasion, the emperor’s elephant got his leg stuck in a hole. The frightened animal began thrashing around violently in order to free himself, throwing down the driver as a result, and even causing Akbar to fall over and dangle from the side of the beast with his foot caught in the ropes. The attendees rushed in and freed their prince, allowing the elephant to free himself after some struggle. To everyone’s wonder, claims Abu al-Fazl, Akbar climbed right back atop the creature who in turn calmly walked to the royal residence. ⁹⁹

Sixteenth-century chronicles repeatedly reported on such daring episodes, always accompanied by stories of desperate and hysterical courtiers vainly attempting to dissuade their youthful master from his dangerous hobby. We find Akbar on the back of a drunk elephant, chasing another elephant into a river and then trying to clamber up into a boat (with the emperor still on its back). ¹⁰⁰ We catch the emperor atop the animal in narrow alleyways doing battle against bandits in a village. ¹⁰¹ All these tales were meant to create a heroic image of the emperor as a tamer and master of elephants, as one who can render them into docile and controllable bodies. As ‘Ala al-Dawlah Kami Qazvini wrote in 1573, ‘[the emperor] mounts drunken elephants that no one else can even walk closely by. He renders them powerless [ʻajiz], obedient [muṭiʻ], and submissive [minqad]’. ¹⁰²

There is little doubt that this image was accompanied in part by a need to capture and control as many of these creatures as possible. After winning the second battle of Panipat in 1556 against Hemu, the Mughals captured 1500 elephants. ¹⁰³ Although later chroniclers tried to downplay this, we know from earlier sources that the emperor assumed the title of ghazi following this victory. ¹⁰⁴ Later, in June of 1564, when Akbar rode south from Agra in order to suppress the rebellion of ‘Abd Allah Uzbek, the emperor’s elephant drowned while crossing a river. However, the path had been intentionally planned through a forested area (Narwar) known for its large herds of wild elephants. Conveniently, an elephant hunt was organised and 70 elephants were captured and harnessed for the battle. ¹⁰⁵ The imperial army returned to the same spot in the next spring, after one of the commanders Asif Khan Haravi only sent to the emperor 300 elephants out of a total of 1500 captured during a campaign. ¹⁰⁶ A large hunt in the woods yielded over 300 and 50 elephants. However, as the disease spread in the royal camp, the emperor and his immediate family decided to return to Agra. On the way out, Akbar warned his top commanders that none of them was welcome back to court without bringing elephants with them. ¹⁰⁷ We can see in both these episodes that while the wonderfully detailed description of the hunt (in which Abu al-Fazl particularly delights) were meant to aggrandise the emperor’s ingenuity and courage, the original need for the campaigns had come about as a result of military exigency.

As time went on, when the imperial stables reached the critical number of 5000, their royal image underwent new transformations. First, the emperor’s person became equated with the elephant itself. ‘Arif Qandahari for instance, compared Akbar in 1565 to an elephant trampling under foot two rebel commanders Ali Quli and Bahadur khan (who were in turn likened to ants). ¹⁰⁸ At times, the imperial state was treated as the elephant, and the emperor as the driver. Again, ‘Arif wrote in 1580,

[The emperor] always personally handles the reins of the elephant. This fits the famous adage of great men who say, ‘an emperor [padshah] should not give his reins to another’. This means he should not leave his important affairs to others. Today, the emperor follows this path both literally and in a deeper sense. ¹⁰⁹

The idea is very old and goes all the way back to the Ghaznavid period. ¹¹⁰ But now, a new set of combinations can be observed during Akbar’s reign in 1570s, reflecting new developments and changing contexts.

After 1580, another major change occurred—namely, the importance of the elephant was reduced and the animal was humanised. This was an important year in Akbar’s reign. By then he had brought under control most of north India, he had collected the largest herd of elephants in the subcontinent, he had amassed the greatest arsenal of gunpowder weapons in the region, and also, he had worked out the most efficient and stable method of taxation in the empire after years of experimentation. ¹¹¹ In this phase, it was the grandees of the Mughal Empire who were equated with the elephant while Akbar’s status as the elephant-master was elevated above mere humans. This change of attitude plays into the divinisation of the emperor. Now Abu al-Fazl could refer to two early challengers to Akbar’s reign in the 1550s (Hemu and Shah Abu al-Ma‘ali) with metaphors used for drunk elephants ‘bad mast va divanah’. ¹¹² Their capture is also interpreted in terms of taming: ‘to bring them into chains’. ¹¹³ Abu al-Fazl also describes an encounter between Akbar and the envoy of the Daud the Afghan before a battle in which the emperor offers to avoid bloodshed by one of three methods: first to have the emperor Akbar and Daud joust man to man and let the outcome decide the fate of the battle; second to have one commander from each army engage in combat and let their fate decide the outcome of the battle; finally, Akbar suggested, each army can nominate an elephant for a fight for determining victory. ¹¹⁴ Although Daud did not agree to any of these suggestions, it is significant to note that by the 1570s, the elephant was no longer at the same level as the emperor and its status had sunk below the commanders.

This humanisation of the elephant (its rough equation with commanders) is echoed in the A’in-i Akbari. Abul Fazl says specifically that ‘in point of obedience and attentiveness to even the slightest signs, it resembles an intelligent human being’, or that ‘the teats of a female elephant, and the womb, resemble those of a woman’. ¹¹⁵ Our author even considers Akbar’s treatment of the elephant as part of his care for his ‘subjects’. ¹¹⁶ Finally, Abul Fazl writes that the killing of an elephant would be treated similarly to murder or manslaughter: ‘If a driver mixes drugs with the food of an elephant, to make the animal hot, and it dies in consequence thereof, he is liable to capital punishment, or to have a hand cut off, or to be sold as a slave’. ¹¹⁷

In short, the elephant grew to be just one of the symbols of rule, a mere trapping of kingship. As Simon Digby has argued, the decrease in the significance of the animal for warfare by the end of the sixteenth century also somewhat reduced its centrality. Still though, it continued to be used as the king’s mount well into the nineteenth century, and certainly in areas where it could be used for military purposes (such as Bengal) the elephant retained a great deal of its value. Still, in itself, this is an insufficient commentary on the relationship of the elephant with kingship and statecraft. More to the point, we have to conceptualise how during the preceding half-century, the image of monarchy had grown more and more divine and the elephant more and more human in imperial India.

CONCLUSION

Revaluating the history of kingship in medieval South Asia through an investigation of the use of elephants gives us a very different perspective into the nature of the imperial states that were formed in the north of the subcontinent from 1000 to 1600 CE. While the Persian and Arabic textual productions of these states help us understand their political self-expression to a subsection of their subjects, the uses of the elephant constituted imperial self-expression to the broadest range of audiences in their domain. The use of the elephant was not a textual exercise, although it left traces in the discursive tradition of the empires. To understand these traces we have to read them against the grain of the texts in which they were produced. A look at some recent scholarship that also draws on the Perso-Arabic texts of the period as this article can help distinguish the present approach.

For example, Blain Auer has shown that Persian historiography of the Delhi sultanate drew extensively on Islamic motifs (the Quran, the life of the Prophet Muhammad, Sufi hagiographies and Caliphal investiture) in its representation and legitimation of the Delhi Sultanate. ¹¹⁸ While Auer clearly demonstrates the presence of such motifs in the sources, I think his analysis does not sufficiently problematise the way Persianate authors grappled with this heritage. I think the appearance or disappearance of reference to Koranic chapter of the elephant may seem subtle and minor in comparison with the wealth of religious allusions in the chronicles. However, I hope to have shown that the absence of that particular sura reflects massive realignments in the political self-presentation of the sultans. Persian chronicles were simply one form of political expression and a minor one at that as they were produced about twice per century between the reigns of Iltutmish and Firuz Shah Tughluq. In other words, while Persian tarikhs are absolutely crucial for a retrospective understanding of many aspects of the Delhi Sultanate, they should not be seen as the primary self-representation of the state which instead involved using the elephant for performing rituals or waging war and violence. Peter Hardy’s insight, while still limited by the untenable and reductive communal binaries, is worth revisiting. He wrote,

if we are to seek the occasions from which acknowledgements and acceptances of authority as between Muslim and Hindu chiefs could arise, it might be more profitable to seek them where they were more likely … to occur—in the open air, that is on the field of combat, near the granary floor when there was revenue to be divided, perhaps in the chase where there was game to be hunted. ¹¹⁹

The Persian chronicle was a discursive genre for a limited audience, and while the discourse necessitated engagement with religious tropes from other genres, its authors still had to struggle to represent practices that lay outside or in opposition to its discursive norms. There was a wide range of strategies available to the chroniclers. For example, as Sunil Kumar has noted, fifteenth-century Indo-Persian writers would regularly employ ‘selective amnesia’, ignoring alliances made by their patrons with Rajputs or their employment of Brahmin viziers, while criticising their neighbouring sultans for the very same practices. ¹²⁰ The depiction of elephantine sovereignty is very much related to this point.

Other contemporary scholars have highlighted to a greater degree the wide range of use of discursive reservoirs, other than strictly Islamic-legal ones, by Indo-Persian authors. Muzaffar Alam, for instance, draws our attention to Sufi texts or Persian statecraft compositions that could expand the possibilities of representation and accommodation in a diverse, non-Islamic setting such as medieval India. Still, while I do not disagree with Alam’s reading of the sources, I would again contend that political expression was far greater in range than the discourses propagated in Persian texts. Also, the audience of these texts were more limited than the whole gamut of politically significant actors in medieval India. The reduction of the dizzying diversity of identity groups in pre-modern eras into ‘two communities’ (that is to say Hindu and Muslim) ¹²¹ is misleading. I suspect, for example, that the identification of Vedanta and Sufism in a Persian text would not have mattered much in the pacification of tributary kings in the elephant-rich forests of Jajnagar, and the reduction of these kings to the category of ‘Hindu’ would be politically quite meaningless in the pre-national period. In dealing with such individuals, the most important goal would not have been to ‘synthesise’ or ‘translate’ religious discourse, but rather to control the common symbol and tool of royalty as king-of-kings—the elephant.

As such, the sharp division between a more ‘orthodox’ sultanate and a ‘tolerant’ Mughal empire is quite problematic. As seen above, and as shown by other scholars, there was already an important presence of ‘Hindus’ in the service of the sultanate, whether as scribes, warriors, workers or headmen in charge of revenue collection. ¹²² What is then perhaps noteworthy is the change in discourse and representation between, say, fourteenth-century and sixteenth-century texts. We can only properly understand the significance of this change if we try to bracket the colonial and modern Hindu/Muslim binary.

The king-of-kings imperial and trading zone, originally put together by the Ghaznavids, did not require a unified discursive monopoly by the court. Chronicles were few, and most of these were not the product of official imperial demand. As contemporary designation implies, imperial territory, or mamalik-i Hindustan, ‘kingdoms of India’, was a patchwork of non-contiguous tributary kingdoms, princedoms and provinces, each with its own rights and privileges negotiated and renegotiated at times of conquest, much of it administrated indirectly through its own local elite. ¹²³ In such a setting, both ritual and actual display of supremacy were paramount in regularly asserting the power and existence of the ‘state’, avant le letter. The practices were easily replicable. They could be observed and reproduced similar to, for example, the rapid spread of temple-building activity in early medieval India. ¹²⁴ The history of Hindustan Empire must have been dominated primarily by a vast range of interconnections and interactions that have left almost no traces in the handful of unofficial Persian chronicles.

However, the imperial state changed through the sixteenth century with eventually an increased concentration of power at the imperial centre, the reduction of tributary relations, introduction of gunpowder weapons, and formation of a consolidated revenue apparatus. Within this altered structural context, the power and position of the emperor increased, while the significant of the elephant and lesser elephant-kings diminished. The real change in the nature of the imperial expression did not occur between that of a polity marked by religious intolerance to one characterised by accommodation between ‘communities’. Let us also not forget Babur’s experiments and Humayun’s conundrum; transitions were not as linear as narratives sometimes suggest. By the end of the sixteenth century, we have to appreciate how the increased power of the emperor allowed him to reach beyond a small number of subservient potentates whose goodwill and cooperation was no longer required, and to remember the concomitant far-reaching implications that these transitions brought in their wake.