Asia > Sri Lanka > Cultural Triangle > Dambulla > Articles > In the Land of Raja

It came as a bit of a surprise that the first elephant I was to see at close quarters in this, the most elephant-orientated nation in the world, was a dead one. But I was not alone. 15 years after his death there were still queues to see ‘Raja’, the great Maligawa Tusker. It was vaguely reminiscent of standing in line to see Lenin, except this was a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka not a Mausoleum in Red Square, and the atmosphere all round was less frosty. But there was a similar sepulchral frisson – part reverence, part prurience – as we shuffled towards the museum door.

“Raja has been closer to Lord Buddha than any creature on earth”, Nanda, a roofing salesman explained as we inched along, “that’s why we honour him. He is like a god himself.”

Raja had been top temple elephant at Sri Lanka’s famous Temple of the Tooth, and every year, at the Esala Perahera, the mighty beast, fully caparisoned and with silver lotus-flower sheaths on the end of his great tusks, had swayed through Kandy’s streets, holding aloft the tiny tooth relic in its heavy silver howdah on his back. He had walked in the shade of a white canopy and temple attendants had rushed to unroll a white carpet before him so his massive feet wouldn’t touch the corrupted earth. “When the crowds shouted ‘Sadhu! Sadhu’”, Nanda said, “Raja used to trumpet back.”

The famous tooth is believed by Sri Lankans to have belonged to Buddha himself - snatched from the flames of Buddha’s funeral pyre in the 6th century BC by a devoted monk and smuggled to Sri Lanka in the 4th century AD in the hair of a princess. You used to be able to see it on special occasions – all yellowing three inches of it, longer and stranger than any tooth known to man. Sceptics say it is a cow’s.

But ever since some Tamil Tigers drove a truck into the outside wall of the temple compound five years ago, blowing themselves and a dozen devotees to pieces, the controversial molar has been guarded closer than a military secret. It remains encased like a Russian doll inside seven gold caskets inside an inner chamber behind bomb-proof doors and gilded iron bars. Twice a day at puja time the doors are opened and the devoted can gaze through the bars at the outermost casket.

The tooth that gets the elephant-ride at the festival is actually a replica of the real (or not-so-real) thing. Even the caskets it travels in are copies. But this doesn’t matter to the thousands of Sri Lankan Buddhists who throng the processional route every year. The tooth is there in spirit, and so, by extension, is Lord Buddha, radiating goodness on all and sundry from the back of the ambling pachyderm.

Raja, Nanda explained, had been marked out from birth for this elevated role. He’d been captured in 1925 in the jungles of Batticaloa on the East coast. Elephants in Sri Lanka are traditionally believed to belong to a caste system; only the elephant’s caste is determined not by heredity, like humans; but by their physical features. Tuskers belong to the aristocratic Chaddanta caste and are therefore candidates for temple elephants. “But Raja was more special than just any tusker”, said Nanda, “he was ‘hathpolaya’ – that means when he was standing he touched the ground with seven parts of his body.”

I tried to tot them up. His famous tusks had arched magnificently skywards, so they couldn’t be in the equation. That made his four legs - obviously, his trunk, his tail - I suppose, and…..?

“Male organ”, added Nanda helpfully, “You know, when he’s in musth, when he…”

“I see”, I interrupted hastily. It didn’t bear thinking about.

But of course it was the first thing I found myself checking when we were finally standing in front of the legendary animal and no, the taxidermist had done Raja no favours in that department, clearly deciding discretion the better part of valour. Stuffing an elephant is no mean feat – the taxidermist had received the equivalent of a Sri Lankan knighthood for his pains – but Raja the Mighty looked sadly diminished in other respects too, shut away from his fans behind bullet-proof glass, an old man in secondhand clothes. The wrinkles went lengthways down his trunk and preserving fluid was leaking from around his glass eyes so it looked for all the world like he was weeping. For Nanda, though, the magic was undimmed. “See, even his back was flat – perfect for carrying!”

Raja’s young replacement hasn’t yet achieved his predecessor’s legendary status. But then, he’s from Thailand, flown in by an American transport company – `You name it, we move it’ – in a Hercules. It isn’t quite the same.

Though there are still over 3,000 elephants living wild in Sri Lanka, there are few tuskers left. Some say centuries of capturing them to serve in Sri Lanka’s temples has affected the gene pool. But go to any of the famous ancient sites – Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Sigirya – and you see the ghosts of tuskers past. The creamy white dagobas, great domed reliquaries like upturned bells with their finials spiralling to nirvana, are guarded on all sides by ranks of tuskers carved in stone. Lotus ponds in the ancient royal pleasure gardens have elephants cavorting across the rocks as if still enjoying their bath. Temple steps begin and end with trumpeting sentinels.

All these magnificent constructions – the thousand-columned palaces with their colossal foundations, the stone causeways and monolithic statuary, the massive reservoirs or ‘tanks’ (some so vast they were referred to as inland seas), with dam walls five metres high – owe their existence to the harnessed muscle-power of armies of elephants. But like Nanda’s feelings for Raja, appreciation of the elephant goes beyond merely appraising it as a forklift with feelings or an appealing architectural motif. In Sri Lanka the elephant has claimed a place in the collective unconscious that in other parts of the world might be occupied by dolphins, say, or horses. It is a kindred spirit, a soul-mate, a parallel intelligence, a treasured familiar. The elephant treads the same path as mankind, shares his destiny.

Though there seemed to be live elephants everywhere - temples, village processions, elephant polo matches, special elephant orphanages, by the roadside hauling logs and clearing debris, swaying along on tourist safaris, even wild herds in the national parks - my first close encounter came unexpectedly, on a beautiful stretch of road from Polonnaruwa. We’d stopped the car to watch a dozen or so safari elephants being given their daily bath, snorting and splashing and rolling about in the river. In the deeper pools the elephants lay on their sides, submerged completely, using their trunks as snorkels. Their mahouts, a characteristically roguish-looking bunch with camouflage vests and shark’s tooth medallions, bone-handled knives in their belts, were standing on the elephants’ flanks, scrubbing away with handfuls of leaves.

One of them beckoned me to climb up on his elephant, making the most of an unceremonious shove up the bottom to get me on board. I’d never ridden an elephant bareback before and it was surprising how bony the back felt. The skin was like living leather, wispy with recalcitrant hairs like the surface of a porky scratching. Comalee, a perspicacious old female with pale pink and freckly trunk, waded with me into midstream, trailing her leg-chain. At the mahout’s command, she dipped her trunk into the water, sucked up a bathful, raised her trunk and offloaded it over my head. I’d been had - fallen for that classic tourist-on-top-of-elephant-in-the-river trick. The mahouts were hooting. My clothes were not only sopping but covered in what looked like fish scales but was exfoliated elephant skin.

High on the dramatic granite outcrop of Dambulla, a stream of golden fair-weather cumuli begins to assemble around the setting sun like a herd of air-borne elephants. I realise that even after my ducking, I’ve gone a bit dippy about the creatures. The elephant has insinuated itself so far into my cerebellum I’m beginning to see it like the Sri Lankans do – ubiquitously – in the shape of a rock or a tree or a monsoon puddle. It is no longer a bizarre zoological anomaly; but intimately, uniquely familiar, almost human. Somewhere in the absurdity of that trunk - that questing hand that is also a nose - is a sensitive, searching intelligence; somewhere in that colossal weight and miraculous strength is a gravity-defying lightness, the ultimate achievement of mind over matter.

In the caves behind me, swallows swoop around frescoes, painted by Buddhist monks, originating from the 1st century BC. Among busy scenes of demons and gods and bodhisattvas, a once-ferocious bull elephant kneels at Buddha’s feet, overwhelmed by his lord’s gentleness. Nearby, Maya, the mother of Buddha, dreams of a white tusker, an allegory of her miraculous son-to-be. It comes now as no surprise to me that Buddha was, in one of his past lives, an elephant.


SRI LANKA TRAVEL BRIEF

Now that peace has broken out with the Tamils in the north, there has never been a better time to visit Sri Lanka, but the big hotel companies and international operators are moving in fast – so now’s the chance to catch it while it’s still small-scale and romantically idiosyncratic.

Since Sri Lanka’s two monsoons have become highly unpredictable over the past few years, all year is now open holiday season. Temperatures fluctuate by only a couple of degrees throughout the year – remaining close to 80 degrees Fahrenheit on the coast and 65 degrees in the hill country.

Don’t miss a sundowner in the capital Colombo on the terrace of the crumbling grand old Galle Face Hotel overlooking the Indian Ocean.

Best way to travel around is to hire a car with a driver which is only marginally more expensive, and a lot more convenient, than hiring your own car. All hotels and most resthouses have separate driver accommodation for no extra charge. ECD Global Ltd based in Colombo has good cars and experienced drivers. Distances look deceptive on the map - even Sri Lanka’s main highways are single lane and roads in the hill country are tortuously curvaceous.

Ram’s at 87 Colombo Street, 5 minutes from the Temple of the Tooth has wonderful south Indian food. Raja, the stuffed Maligawa Tusker, can be seen in a separate museum next to the Temple of the Tooth which is open daily from 6am to 4pm, with daily ‘pujas’ at 6am, 10am and 6pm. The Kandy Esala Perahera, the ten day festival culminating in an elephant procession honouring the sacred tooth relic, is held in July/August.

Nuwara Eliya up in tea-plantation country (mock tudor B&Bs; red telephone boxes;hot water bottles in your bed) is a bizarre slice of ‘Little England’. Have dinner in mad old colonial style (jacket and tie compulsory; waiters in white gloves; spotted dick and custard) at The Hill Club. Working elephants help harvest the eucalyptus trees in the surrounding area.

The Pinnewala Elephant Orphanage near Kegalle is a tourist magnet, but it’s still a great spectacle to see a herd of 30 or so elephants holding up the traffic as they cross the main road for their daily swim in the river.

Sri Lanka Tourist Board website: www.srilankatourism.org)

Sri Lankan Airlines flies direct from Heathrow to Colombo daily.

Suggested reading: Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje; Aliya – Stories of the Elephants of Sri Lanka by Teresa Cannon & Peter Davis; best guidebook – Footprint Sri Lanka Handbook.

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