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The show-stealers of the Mysore Dasara festivities
| The caparisoned elephants are handpicked for the specific tasks that they carry out with aplomb year after year |
Balarama will be carrying the golden howdah for 10th year in a row
Vanaraja has been identified as a possible successor to Balarama
MAJESTIC: Dasara elephants are groomed for an envious task.
MYSORE: Infusing an element of grace and royal splendour to Mysore Dasara are the caparisoned elephants which are handpicked for the specific tasks they carry out with aplomb during the festivities.
These elephants, decked in all their finery during the Vijayadasami procession, steal the show year after year.
And leading them on Thursday will be Balarama, yet again carrying the 750-kg howdah with Goddess Chamundeshwari.
The howdah has 80 kg of solid gold on it.
And this is a task for which not every elephant is qualified. “Endowed with regal looks, the tusker should have a flat back and display equipoise under extreme stress,” say experts.
Fifty-year-old Balarama, which displays this quality in full measure, will have the honour of carrying the howdah for the 10th year in a row.
The authorities are also working overtime to groom a suitable successor to Balarama, which is by no means an easy task.
“Some tuskers have a majestic presence but panic under stress situations and are ill suited to the rigours of the Dasara,” according to veterinarian Nagaraj, who is in-charge of the Dasara elephants.
So, Vanaraja, which is aged around 40, has been identified as a possible successor. But it will take a few years before the elephant can pass the “fitness test” to mantle the responsibility of carrying the golden howdah.
The task of identifying a suitable successor to the howdah elephant has always been a formidable challenge and the palace archives have interesting material on the efforts made in the past to find the right tusker for the purpose.
The erstwhile Mysore Kingdom had a Gajashala or a department of elephants to look after them.
The elephants were not only groomed and trained to mantle State duties such as welcoming important visitors but also to participate in religious festivals.
The correspondence section in the palace archives brings to fore interesting facts about the strenuous task involved in the identification of the howdah elephant. These letters and official records pertain to the period 1880 to 1950, and one comes across names such as Biligiriranga which was reckoned to be the favourite tusker of the last Maharaja of Mysore Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar.
Biligiri, as it was popularly known, was captured on May 2, 1936 at Biligirirangana Betta. According the reports of Game Preserve Officer D.N. Neelakantha Rao, “the tusker did not strain in the least despite playing drums and wind instruments”.
He gave a thumbs-up for the behaviour of Biligiri, which was about 10-ft tall and aged 25 when it was captured.
Senior officials of the Gajashala had made trips to other parts of South India, Assam and Burma, as evident in the correspondence with the Huzur Secretary. Neelakantha Rao appears to have visited Burma and also Siam or Thailand in search of a suitable elephant, but without success till Biligiri filled in the slot.
A letter of July 31, 1930 from an elephant dealer Narayana Namboodri of Cochin (now Kochi) and addressed to the Maharaja reads, “I have a big elephant about 10.5 ft in height and it has no bad habits.” But the deal could not be clinched.
The other elephants that were inspected included Ramachandran, Damodaran, Govindan and Kesavan.
The oldest of the elephants to have carried the howdah was 70-year-old Pattabhi Raman, procured from Tirupati. Drona was another celebrated elephant whose accidental death by electrocution in 1998 created a crisis which was resolved with the appointment of Balarama. And giving him company will be Abhimanyu, Gajendra, Vijaya, Arjuna, Sarala, Srirama, Prashanth, Vikrama, Kavita, Revati and Harsha, all braced up for the grand finale of Dasara festivities.
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