It was with a heavy heart that I saw the image, last year, of a pregnant elephant, standing stoically in a river in Kerala’s Palakkad district, awaiting an imminent death. Despite being in excruciating pain from mangled, bleeding mouth and tongue, the hapless pachyderm never ran amok nor showed any sign of discomfort till her end.

However, what those ignorant ingrates who fed the unsuspecting animal with pineapple stuffed with explosives did not know was that elephant is not just another wild beast but a bulwark that protected a region from foreign invasions for millennia. Once a prized possession of Emperors and Kings by virtue of their being formidable war machines and deterrents besides gracing rituals and performing heavy-lifting tasks, the humble animals have now been relegated to the status of circus and ceremonial attractions.

It is an irony that the land of Mathanga Leela, one of the rare treatises on the science of elephants, written by Thirumangalath Neelakantan Musath, witnessed the macabre incident. There is an adage in Kerala that says ‘an elephant, whether alive or dead, can fetch its owner a fortune’. While captive elephants still command staggering prices, primarily on account of their demand for processions and logging jobs, their indispensability and importance in an almost completely automated world have suffered a setback. Advent of technology and their subsequent fall from grace have not only left the poor animals redundant but vulnerable to abuse and gradual extinction as well. From being an animal whose murder would have attracted capital punishment some two thousand and three hundred years ago to being an inmate of destitute animal shelters and a target of poachers and forest brigands, the majestic Asian creature has seen it all.

As the mighty animals retreat into inconsequentiality and, possibly, oblivion, let us examine the various occasions on which they played a pivotal role in safeguarding the territories of the Indian subcontinent.

Semiramis, the Assyrian Empress, tempted by the prospect of overlording the fertile, rich lands beyond the Indus River, attacked India somewhere between 811–806 BCE. In spite of initial gains, her huge army, with its caparisoned camels covered in black buffalo hide masquerading as elephants, suffered near total annihilation at the hands of the retaliating forces of the Indian King Sunakshatra. The fake elephants, when they confronted the real ones, ran helter-skelter complicating matters further for the Assyrian forces already under a barrage of spear and arrow attack. This was the only humiliating defeat in an otherwise invincible reign of Semiramis.

None dreamed of attacking India for the following 500 years. Then, in 326 BCE, Alexander III of Macedon invaded the subcontinent culminating in the Battle of the Hydaspes. According to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a few ancient sources, Alexander lost the battle to King Porus, though majority of the European historians saw it as a victory of the incursive army. Be that as it may, but it is quite clear that the over five hundred war elephants of the Paurava Kingdom scared the living daylights out of the Greek soldiers. And the disheartening news that King Dhana Nanda of Magadha was waiting with his 6000 plus battle-ready tuskers must have dented the morale of an already worn-out Greek-Persian combined forces prompting them to revolt against Alexander’s further campaigns in the region.

Before long, the mighty animals again came to the rescue — this time in the war between Chandragupta Maurya and Seleucus Nicator fought during the period 305–302 BCE. Not only did the Greek commander lose the battle but he was forced to cede a considerable part of his territory along the Indus River and his daughter in marriage to the victor. In return, the founder of the Mauryan Emperor gifted the vanquished 500 war elephants from his kraal that housed no less than 9000 of them. It was those elephants that helped Seleucus gain an upper hand in the Wars of the Diadochi, making him the ‘strongest’ contender to succeed Alexander.

There had, however, been a few episodes in history where the strategy of employing elephants in the battlefield backfired. The earliest such instance, of the threat being successfully thwarted by a wily General through ingenious means, is the Battle of Zama fought between the legendary Carthaginian General Hannibal and Roman forces under Scipio Africanus in 202 BCE. The pitched battle saw the 80 war elephants of Hannibal running into “corridors of slaughter”, a formation in which the Roman infantry and cavalry surrounded and pounced on the dreaded animals with spears, leading to a decisive victory for Scipio and thus ending the second Punic war.

Another warlord who successfully thwarted the onslaught of elephants was Timur Lang who defeated Nasir-ud-din Mahmud Shah Tughluq and captured Delhi on 17 December 1398 AD. The Turkic general effectively hindered the advance of the Sultan’s elephants by using caltrops on the battlefield. And, in yet another tactical move, Timur unleashed camels laden with wood on fire which rattled the war elephants of the Sultanate.

It was in 1526, in the first Battle of Panipat to be precise, that the Asian elephants had their tryst with canons. When Babur, the founder of the Mogul Empire, defeated Ibrahim Lodhi in the war, heralding the arrival of ‘Gunpowder Empire’ in the Indian peninsula, it also virtually brought to an end the hitherto undisputed reign of the mighty war elephants. The reverberations of the Uzbek’s artillery fire sent shivers down the spine of Delhi Sultanate’s soldiers and tuskers alike and the subjugation of the illustrious land was complete.

Although past their prime, the elephants deserve respect and care. I no longer view them as some ‘supernumerary’ animal, rather as battle-hardened, retired generals. And I now understand why my ancestors worshipped them as God.