Captive Elephants used for commerce, not culture: Docu director

In November 2014, when Toronto based biologist, Sangita Iyer visited "soul-animal" Lakshmi, in her hometown in Kerala, she was devastated to see the elephant reeling under pain having been blinded by her mahout. Lakshmi, is among the many elephants who are held captive by religious authorities in Kerala to be used in the state's globally popular temple festivals.

"It was devastating to witness how they treated my soul animal Lakshmi. She was tortured to blindness. I still remember when I first met her, she had gorgeous honey brown eyes. She is one of the few female elephants in Kerala and I bonded with her on a much deeper level.

"But, when I saw her in 2014, my jaw dropped because her left eye was swollen shut and tears were constantly streaming out. When she openend her eye, I saw a white scar in her eye. When I asked around, I learnt that her mahout beat her mercilessly because she ate his food that was left unattended. One of his blows struck her in the eye and she became blind," Iyer says.

In the absence of a veterinarian who was supposed to treat Lakshmi's eye, the local people nailed the ailing elephant to make her lie down and forced open her eye with their "filthy hands" to pour in the eye drops, she narrates.

To bring the plight of captive elephants like Lakshmi to the attention of the concerned authorities and create an awakening within the larger public, in 2015 she came out with a documentary titled, Gods in Shackles, which was screened here recently.

"I saw that they were shackled so tightly, they had massive tumors on their hips and raw bleeding wounds on their ankles. Many blind elephants were being paraded in the sun as tears streamed down their eyes. It was heartbreaking and I knew that I had to do something about it. That's how I decided to make this film," she says.

The 92-minute documentary follows the lives of four "celebrity" elephants for a year, including Lakshmi. A fifth male elephant named Sundar who made international headlines for having been able to break the shackles of captivity has also been featured. 

In the span of the two and a half years during which Iyer made the film, she visited Kerala at least eight times to collect footage and collaborated it with scientific researches carried out by non-profit organisations like The Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Location Centre, The Animal Welfare Board of India and The Asian Nature Conservation Foundation.

According to her findings, out of the 40,000 Asian elephants from across the globe, India is home to at least 27,000 of them. She also points out that the country also has the largest number of captive elephants - 3,000 - who are used for various commercial purposes like tourism, culture and religion.

"The government of India has to really pay attention. I believe it has a moral obligation to take care of India's heritage animal because what we have is a global treasure and we need to protect it," she says.

The objective of the film, she says, is to awaken the masses and to empower them with knowledge so that they can take conscious action and demand that using elephants for any commercial purpose be stopped.

"On one hand they worship Lord Ganesh and on the other they torture his very embodiment; they say it is about culture but really it is about commerce. I also felt that there is a vast majority of people who are completely ignorant of the truth but there is also a group who are turning a blind eye wilfully and those are the people who need to be jolted and shaken up and that can be done only through public outcry," she says.

The film also features a cell-phone clip from March 2015, that shows a temple elephant breaking loose and running amuck the residential areas in the city causing panic.Here, the nature and wildlife filmmaker argues that captivating elephants only results in a "lose-lose situation" where not only the animal is harmed but also people get into danger.

"Overall it is neither good for the elephants, nor for people. It is such a lose-lose situation. This year alone there have been 12 elephant deaths and 9 human deaths. What is the point of having these festivals and celebrations when people are getting killed, elephants are getting killed. They are running amuck causing damage to both life and property," she says.