Trunk call

Adil Writer’s sodafired stoneware; (left) Mohsin Rashid Matwal’s Babaloo

Two recent travels of mine were eye-opening in the context of elephant handling. First, the advertisement of playful bathing hours with small and big-sized elephants in the Chitwan National Park in Nepal; second, an opportunity to bottle feed the calves in the Pinnawala elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka. Both environments - apparently characterised by elephant care - did not quite seem to serve the intended purpose. In fact, they thrived on human fascination, craze if you will, for the company of cuddly cute elephants. It is this attraction that extends and manifests in an unnatural domestication and schooling of captive elephants. An undercover video recently exposed the exploitation of 3,000-odd elephants in Thailand camps, where baby elephants are trained to achieve the handstand pose to entertain tourists.

The cruelty behind elephant-fun acrobatics, as caught on camera, is disturbing. But the Trunkasana - a baby elephant upside down on its trunk - in Mumbai-based sculptor Arzan Khambatta's Playful Pachyderms, only fills the viewer with wonderment and affection for the species. It evokes the image of an animal's joyous best version - uncaged, unchained, untrained and unexploited.

Khambatta's five freely moveable table-top resin-fiberglass pieces - cuteness locked in a one-foot-cube - are baby elephant avatars. The smallest rests on a human palm, one sits without an agenda, another is poring over a book, one playing with balloons and the most adorable doing
the Trunkasana.

Khambatta, 55, architect-turned-artist and photographer, who works from his studio in Sewri, is a Yoga enthusiast. He could not resist the mammal's playful posture, celebrating the sheer joy of being a carefree baby. "I would discourage my elephant friends to attempt the yogic mudra," he clarifies in jest, adding the Trunkasana is symbolic of an idyllic ecstatic existence that elephants deserve.

Gallery Art & Soul Director Dr Tarana Khubchandani with sculptor Arzan Khambatta, who is exhibiting his Playful Pachyderms at the ongoing Little Trunkets show. The five freely moveable table-top resin-fiberglass avatars of the baby elephant, celebrate the sheer joy of being carefree

The quintuplets are the star attraction in the ongoing exhibition titled Little Trunkets at Mumbai's Art & Soul Gallery. Around 80 Indian artists, representing
various media and materials, have displayed artworks - through fiberglass, colours on canvas, paper origami, wood statuettes, sodafired stoneware, ceremics - to raise funds for the conservation of the Asian elephant (Elephas Maximus).

Of the 120 works on display and sale, 40 exhibits of 21 artists reflect the elephant allure in a loving and sensitive visual language. The artists, hailing from places as diverse as Auroville, Kolkata, Baroda, Kolhapur and Mumbai, have worked on their "elephants" in a lockdown-ridden Coronavirus-infected world in a record span of three months.

Suresh Muthukulam's Gajleela triptych outlines three elephant silhouettes filled with green foliage, and alongside the tapestry of trees and branches stands the human figure

Gallery Art & Soul Director Dr Tarana Khubchandani, whose initiative was supported by the World Wide Fund for Nature-India (WWF India), approached these practitioners somewhere around the end of May this year. By August 12, observed as World Elephant Day, the works were already up at the gallery. The artworks - priced between Rs 40,000 and Rs 10 lakh - will be up for sale up till the end of September.

The exhibition's title, Little Trunkets, was initially given by Khambatta for his five calves, which later gelled well with the give-back sentiment behind the show. Khubchandani and Khambatta believe that the species was among the most adversely-affected animals post the second wave of COVID-19. Despite being the pride of India's forests, it had suffered immensely due to human encroachment, deforestation, poaching and other assorted practices. If over 60 per cent of Asian elephants are in India - around 27,000 as against the total 50,000 - don't we owe them a livable life? This is the prime question put forth by Little Trunkets.

Puja Kshatriya's The Mighty Elephant (acrylic colours on fiberglass)

As folklore and science journals inform us, elephants have been super-intelligent inhabitants; they are gifted with a magical sense of smell that rivals the power of sniffer dogs. Endowed with the super-supple multi-purpose trunk, elephants aid seed dispersal; they can dig holes in riverbeds; elephants maintain grasslands and create pathways in the wilderness. Elephant presence is central to a rich ecosystem, which is why every small-big fund raiser for the protection of the keystone species is welcome.

In that context, Little Trunkets is a positive show of solidarity by all stakeholders, who believe in doing their bit for the Asian Elephant. Khubchandani, along with philanthropy partners Rishabh and Saloni Shroff and WWF India, deserve kudos for the ambitious scale of the exhibition, whose significant proceeds are going towards the care and conservation of the Asian variety of elephants. The organisers have rightly positioned and pitched elephant care in the larger narrative of regaining human connect with nature in a post-pandemic world.

Little Trunkets showcases diverse artistic styles of expression. Mural artist Suresh Muthukulam, 50, contributes a rich perspective from Kerala. The artist-educator, based in Muthukulam, Alappuzha district, has painted 100-odd abundant elephants in the past, especially for the Gajarupa series (2014). His fresh Gajleela triptych - acrylic on canvas, 5 feet by 9 feet - outlines three elephant silhouettes filled with green foliage; alongside this tapestry of trees and branches stand a human figure. In Muthukulam's composition, he is "the neighbourhood Krishna in trademark Indigo blue; approachable and friendly, unadorned by ornaments". The artist was raised amidst elephants. His home, parallel to the flowing Pamba, offers the daily visual treat of bathing-lolling elephants.

Like Muthukulam, sculptor-painter Mohsin Rashid Matwal, 35, hailing from Ichalkaranji, also has grown up watching elephant routines. As an artist resorting to rural Maharashtra vistas for the occasional reboot, Matwal spent hours sketching elephants and their mahouts. His friendship is seen in one remarkable statuette, titled Babaloo. The fiberglass work with an acrylic coat is a homage to one domesticated elephant in Sangli city, whom the school-going Mohsin met daily. Last year, when Western Maharashtra suffered severe floods, Matwal remained indoors in Sangli for weeks. The memory of the long-dead Babaloo came back to him, and in a record span a spitting image of Babaloo came to life. Little did Matwal know that a Mumbai gallerist would soon ask for Babaloo's inclusion in Little Trunkets.

Another artist from Maharashtra, the Kolhapur-based Yuvraj Patil, 41, displays two fantastic charcoal drawings in the show. Both works - 2.5 feet by 4 feet - depict the majestic elephants, used for royal passenger rides, at the Amer Fort in Rajasthan. Patil has devoted considerable time in the desert state to study elephants. His 2017 solo show at Mumbai's Jehangir Art Gallery rested on charcoal-with-acrylic compositions, in which he likened the elephant to a selfless explorer-monk. Patil says charcoal is a great medium to catch the soul of the animal. One can sense the charcoal impact on the canvas in the work of yet another senior Kolkata artist Shuvaprasanna Bhattacharya. The black-and-white in the 73-year-old's etchings lends a unique life-like three-dimensional heft.

Little Trunkets is a collage of gorgeous art, it is also a collector's paradise, especially for the wildlife supporter. The exhibits go a long way in lobbying for an elephant-nourishing landscape - a commitment that goes beyond celebrating one commemorative day. The collector can choose from a breathtaking spectrum. Rusi Bharucha's micro chalkstures capture the elephants in amazing details in a few centimetres; whereas Puja Kshatriya's realistic over three-feet-tall acrylic sculpture The Mighty Elephant stands out in a shining blue sparkle. One can also opt for abstract forms like Shayonti Salvi's depiction of the elephant herd in porcelain, embellished in gold. The herd image is particularly true to the Asian elephants, which operate in close-knit matrilineal family units, in which calf survival is influenced by "hum saath saath hain" social buffering, particularly from grandmothers.

Another commendable effort aimed at creating a culture of compassion towards the world's rarest elephant species is the multi-lingual Haathi Handbook to be published by WWF India next month. Written for the young reader, the upcoming book will be freely available, physical and online, in English and Hindi; it awakens school-goers to the value of the mega-herbivore super creatures. Impressionable readers will be sensitised to the treasure of the "umbrella species" whose existence is linked to a number of small-sized cohabitants.

India's Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change just declared its intent to conduct a scientific elephant census next year. Hopefully, the real elephant count emerges soon, not a crude estimation, with application of modern survey techniques suited to dense vegetation patches. And equally important is the hope that the young (and the old) in India do not treat the wondrous elephants as performers who respond to human cues.

27,000
No. of Asian elephants out of 50,000, found in India alone

Sumedha Raikar-Mhatre is a culture columnist in search of the sub-text. You can reach her at sumedha.raikar @mid-day.com