a 19th-century Manuscript Reflects Indigenous and Colonial A…

In George Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant (1936), the narrator, a colonial police officer in Burma, describes the chaos caused by a tame elephant that has gone “must,” its mahout twelve hours away in the wrong direction. The incident culminates with the officer shooting the animal, despite knowing he should not. This invites a broader reflection: how might the story have unfolded if the mahout had arrived in time? What does this suggest about the deep, inherited expertise of mahouts and how it differed from the colonial approach to knowledge? An incomplete manuscript in the Bodleian Library, the Gajaśāstra, offers important clues.

Gajaśāstra or ‘Treatise on Elephants’ : a manuscript in the Bodleian

Among the approximately 9,000 South Asian manuscripts in the collection of the Bodleian Library, lies a beautifully illustrated, but incomplete manuscript. The particular manuscript is a mid-nineteenth century copy of a much older text, a complete version of which exists at the Sarasvati Mahal Library in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu. It was probably produced for a colonial administrator and executed between 1874 and 1878 on western paper.

The Bodleian copy opens with an invocation to Ganesa, and other deities, followed by a portrait of Serfoji II – suggesting its Thanjavur provenance.

The text unfolds as a conversation between the sage Pālakāpya, the attributed author of the text, and Romapāda, the ruler of Anga. When elephants wreak havoc in his kingdom, Romapāda has them captured and imprisoned. Pālakāpya then intervenes, urging Romapāda to release the elephants, and teaches the king how to train, care for, and respect elephants.

The Gajaśāstra traces the ‘mythical origins’ of elephants, and discusses their behaviour, characteristics, diet, use in warfare and methods of capture.

The Gajaśāstra and other elephant treatises in South Asia

The manuscript belongs to a long tradition of elephant treatises in South Asia, alongside texts such as the Hastyāyurveda (Treatise on treatment of elephants), Mātaṅgalīlā (Elephant-sport), Nārada’s Gajaśikṣā (Training of elephants), Nārāyaṇa Dīkṣita’s Gajagrahaṇaprakāra (Methods of catching elephants), Hastividyārnava (Ocean of Elephant Knowledge) or Fīlnāmah (Book of Elephant).

While the Hastyāyurveda mirrors other medical treatises (like Caraka-Saṃhitā, Suśrutasaṃhitā, and fragments of the Bower manuscript) in a prose-verse format, the Gajaśāstra and Mātaṅgalīlā are entirely written in verse.

Texts like the Hastyāyurveda and Gajaśāstra, though attributed to Pālakāpya, are rather products of centuries of knowledge accumulation rather than a single author’s work. Rather than being an instruction-manual, the Gajaśāstra uses verses and visuality (using different, vibrant colours) and myths to legitimize and bind together knowledge.

These texts signified the categorisation and codification of orally transmitted occupational knowledge and practices by using legends.

This knowledge was a product of intimate co-existence with the elephant and practical understanding of its behaviour and habits.

Franklin Edgerton, translator of Nīlakaṇṭha’s Mātaṅgalīlā, provides a glossary of around 150 specialised terms whose meanings do not appear in standard lexicons, highlighting the practical, experience-based knowledge embedded in them. Several elephant command words, still used by mahouts, come from non-Sanskritic sources, and draw on local languages and idioms.

The Gajaśāstra, for example, elaborates on the nature of elephants belonging to different age-groups (with specific names), their characteristics and methods of capture, on their various usages like in battlefields and transportation, their diet and medicines for various diseases, construction and maintenance of elephant stables, cutting of tusks, directions and restrictions on striking the elephant with a goad (ankus).

In its eleventh chapter, Gajarakṣaṇadinartucaryādhikāra (On the maintenance of elephants), the Mātaṅgalīlā explicitly declares that elephants fare better in their natural habitat than in bondage.

Such knowledge about elephants was not limited by culture or geography.

Rather, it flowed across South Asia through manuscripts and illustrations, with communities across the region revering elephants for their religious and political significance. A Thai elephant manual (tamrā chāng) in the British Library shows striking visual similarities with the Gajaśāstra. Commissioned between 1840 and 1860, this illustrated manuscript explores both the divinity of elephants and their care in daily life, echoing themes found in the Gajaśāstra.

It would be unfair to classify all these diverse strands of elephant knowledge in South Asia as merely ‘indigenous.’ This expertise developed over centuries through interactions that spanned regions, and older texts like the Gajaśāstra were continually reinterpreted, giving rise to new forms of knowledge.

Early texts on elephants and elephant keepers appear in Sanskrit, but by the 18th century, we see the emergence of a Persianate strand of this knowledge.

An interesting, but undated, illustrated miscellany collectively entitled Fīlnāmah (Book of Elephants), written in the late eighteenth century, gives us crucial perspectives.

Currently a part of the John Rylands Library, the first part of the miscellany¹, titled ‘Kursīnāmah-‘i Mahāwat-garī’ (Genealogy of Elephant-keeping), is written in the conversational style similar to the Gajaśāstra. It presents a mythical history of elephant-keepers, or mahouts; the author Sayyid Aḥmad Kabīr, claims his descent from the Prophet Noah, whom he describes as the first mahout.

The second part, titled Savāniḥāt-i Afyāl (“Mishaps of Elephants”), describes elephant husbandry, diseases, and treatments. Texts in this tradition also attempted to reshape Islamic views on elephant-keeping and the mahout occupation.

Co-existence and Interactions: Mahouts and Elephants

Mahouts, in the Indian subcontinent, were much more than elephant trainers: they were the animals’ primary keepers and caregivers. They could read an elephant’s traits, temperament, and illnesses through close observation and attentive listening. Living alongside their elephants, they developed an intensely close, almost familial bond.

By the 19th century, colonial rule dismissed these knowledge traditions as “old customs” and advanced their own “scientific” methods, reducing the elephant to an object to study and control.

Zoos, Circuses, Anatomy: The Colonial spectacle of elephants

Back in Europe, writers, artists, and natural philosophers cast the elephant as a creature of wonder and awe. Orientalised illustrations helped shape this imagination, as did classical works such as Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and Aristotle’s History of Animals, both of which portrayed the elephant as an extraordinary and almost mythical being. European zoologists and naturalists tried to fit the animal into emerging classification systems, in emerging new sciences of taxidermy while exhibitors and showmen promoted it as a marvel.

For most people in 17th-18th century Britain, elephants were known only through these classical accounts and through travel writings of Robert Knox’s. When elephants did arrive, they appeared as strange and unclassifiable beings, displayed as curiosities precisely because they defied existing scientific categories. Circus posters advertised them as “wonder,” “strange,” or “monstrous.” Only three elephants reached Britain between 1675 and 1720, and each arrival forced Europeans to grapple with an animal that felt both marvellous and unfamiliar.

In the Age of Enlightenment, the elephant (once known primarily through direct interaction and stories), became a subject of study.

The emphasis on empirical evidence and scientific method during this time, introduced a new form of knowledge production. Scholars examined, dissected, measured, and recorded it. European knowledge production was driven by documentation of measurements and physical characteristics.

In his Osteographia Elephantina (1713), Patrick Blaire documents in minute detail the dissection and preservation of an exhibition elephant from India that had drowned in Dundee.

His account, alongside the detailed engravings of the skeletal remains, carefully examined the elephant’s entire anatomy and dissection process. Afterward, the mounted skeletal remains of the Dundee elephant became an exhibit in the ‘Hall of Rarities’ in Dundee.

John Corse, a Scottish surgeon in the Indian Medical Service, wrote two essays for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1799. Crose, by ‘observation’ and ‘experiments’, established that elephants could breed in captivity, and also sent heads of elephants for examination of their dentition through comparison.

Such findings often sparked further investigations and responses, such as Sir Everard Home’s commentary on Crose’s paper. European societies debated and analyzed these results, applying a ‘scientific method’ to reach conclusions. Anatomical studies and public exhibitions soon became central ways of observing and understanding elephants and other animals.

From co-existence to control: indigenous and colonial approaches to knowledge

European anatomists and naturalists introduced new methods to study elephants, yet they often relied on classical notions. Blaire, for instance, interpreted dissection results as if elephants could read and write. At the same time, they drew selectively on indigenous (South Asian) expertise, dismissing local practices as unscientific. John Crose, for example, applied techniques like the keddah and observed seasonal behaviors in his experiments.

In India, the British leveraged pre-colonial knowledge to gain economic and military advantage. They observed mahouts’ intimate understanding of elephant behavior and applied similar techniques to hunts. European interpretations sometimes mirrored local practices, such as attributing castes, but framed their methods as superior through systematic experimentation.

The Bodleian Gajaśāstra

The Bodleian Gajaśāstra arrived as part of the colonial effort to collect and classify knowledge. It both appropriated pre-colonial elephantology and froze it as a static record for Western audiences. Unlike monolithic texts, pre-colonial manuscripts were contextualized, illustrated, and annotated.

In the nineteenth century, manuscripts, paintings, maps, and artifacts reached Britain through private and government channels, often ending up in museums and libraries. ²

The Bodleian Gajaśāstra, richly illustrated but with incomplete text, arrived at a moment when the elephant was becoming a spectacle. 

The manuscript shows a greater western influence than the one preserved in the Sarasvati Mahal Library in Thanjavur, especially in the depiction of the trees, which are similar to western techniques of blending, and depiction of soldiers in British military uniform. The text remains incomplete after folio 256, and the last few illustrations lack the detailing of the initial ones.

Interestingly, while colonial authorities dismissed local knowledge as ‘unscientific,’ they simultaneously preserved them as ‘curiosities’.

Collecting and classifying these texts framed them as the property of the colonized, transforming living knowledge into static visual artifacts – a record of the past. Yet the Bodleian Gajaśāstra also reminds us of pre-colonial knowledge methods that were built on observation, interaction, and co-existence rather than ownership and control.