Kochi: If elephants were stocks their price to tail-hair multiples would give a good indication of whether they are over-valued or not.
The four-month-long festival season has started in Kerala’s temples—the season starts in January, peaks in February and March, and tapers off in April—and local organizing committees are shopping for elephants.
And given that pride, and a lot of money from West Asia—where a lot of people from the state work (and from where they repatriate funds to families back home)—is at stake, not just any elephant will do.
The pachyderm of choice has to be tall, have large ears, a trunk that almost reaches the ground, long and unbroken tusks, and an impressive fan of hair at the end of its short tail. The committees—similar to those in Maharashtra that organize the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations and those in Kolkata that do the Durga Puja ones—get to pick on around 800 elephants on offer.
On average a tusker that is taller than 9ft, with large ears and a trunk that reaches the ground can fetch its owners—temples, usually, and families that have traditionally made a business of elephants—Rs10,000-15,000 a day during this season. If more than one temple has its celebration on the same day, and there is a bidding war for an elephant, prices can go up to Rs35,000 a day.
“The demand for elephants is just picking up. We have fixed rates of up to Rs10,000 and when there is more than one request for an elephant on a particular day, we have a tender and the highest bidder gets it,” says Madhavan Kutty, secretary of the Thiruvambady temple, which is a major participant at the Thrissur pooram or festival with five elephants.
The auctions are fuelled by wealth from abroad and run on pride. Guruvayur Padmanabhan, a tusker owned by the Guruvayur temple in Thrissur, went for Rs2,22,222.22 in a fancy bid by the Nenmara temple festival committee in Palakkad in 2006.
The elephants have been pushed to iconic status by the temple festivals, known as poorams. The more popular elephants, such as Padmanabhan, now compete with film stars for billboard space. They are ornately decked and paraded to the beats of orchestras, or melam, involving more than 100 percussionists.
The height of frenzy is such that devotees even carry home the mud on which Guruvayur Padmanabhan treads as he is regarded a representation of the temple’s deity. There are even gajamelas, or contests, to honour the tallest elephant.
The Kerala tourism department organized the latest contest at Cherai in December, where the elephants were made to stand in a row with their heads held high for seven minutes—tusker Thechikootukavu Ramachandran was declared the tallest.