Two tribals from Nilgiris win the Mark Roland Shand Conservation Award for creating Lantana elephants.
The finished Lantana elephants on display in Mudumalai. Photo: Supplied
An elephantine problem needs a jumbo-sized solution, especially when it comes to man-animal conflicts.
Tribespeople, the traditional forest dwellers of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve (NBR) spread over Bandipur, Nagarhole, Madumalai and Wayanad, have a storied history of conservation. They continue to safeguard the forests against large-scale encroachment and adverse policies affecting the forests.
Once such policy led to the proliferation of foreign, invasive weeds, that overwhelmed the growth of local flora. The tribesmen have found a partial solution for the problem by sculpting life-size elephants — like the ones that often maraud their villages — from the Lantana camara and Senna spectabilis weeds.
The indigenous artisans of NBR, who have been fighting the threat posed by Lantana by carving out these elephants out of the weeds, have now won global recognition.
Two tribal youths engaged in sculpting Lantana elephants have won the United Kingdom’s prestigious Mark Roland Shand Conservation Award.
On Wednesday, 28 June, two youths from the Bettakurumba tribe, Ramesh Maran (32) and Vishnu Varadhan (29), received the award from the King and Queen Consort of England.
Mark Roland Shand, who died in April 2014, was a celebrated British travel writer and conservationist. Brother of Queen Camilla, Shand had penned four travelogues, besides conducting extensive research on elephants.
Lantan plants in bloom in the Nilgiris. (Supplied
Author of the celebrated book Travels on My Elephant, Shand was the chairman of Elephant Family, a wildlife foundation he co-founded in 2002.
In addition to removing invasive species from the environment, these installations provide a livelihood to communities dependent on the forest and foster human-wildlife coexistence, observed the committee.
The recognition is reaching the NBR tribals when human-animal conflicts have peaked, and invasive weeds have significantly aggravated the crisis.
Both Lantana and Senna are preventing the germination of local vegetation. Undergrowth is impossible in areas unhabituated by these weeds that don’t attract insects or herbivores animals. They also damage the soil quality, impact ground water availability, and affect the wildlife food chain.
In NBR, the tribals are making Lantana Elephants under a project supported by The Real Elephant Collective, which partners with the Shand’s Elephant Family.
King Charles and the Queen Consort greeting the winners at the awards ceremony. (Supplied)
Close to 120 indigenous people in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka are engaged in making Lantana elephants and other sculptures. They have earned over ₹3.5 crore in income over the past five years working on this project.
Some 125 of these life-sized Lantana elephants were displayed in London parks in 2021, and close to 250 of them have been auctioned to raise funds for Human-Wildlife Coexistence in the NBR.
The funds raised from these exhibitions support projects promoting human-wildlife coexistence in India, starting with a Coexistence Fellowship programme being offered to young people across India. The programme is hosted by the Transdisciplinary University in Bengaluru and the Coexistence Consortium.
While orders for the elephants keep pouring in, the Real Elephant Collective has partnered with Rangde to launch the Nilgiri Elephant Fund to raise working capital to keep local artisans employed.
“The Government of Tamil Nadu is happy to see the state’s indigenous people are getting such recognition. The ancient bond between people and elephants should be celebrated widely,” Supriya Sahu, Additional Chief Secretary, Environment, Forest and Climate Change for Tamil Nadu, told South First.
Lantana elephants on display in England. (Supplied)
“This multifaceted project clears Lantana from the forests, provides indigenous people with a livelihood, and celebrates human-wildlife co-existence. The Lantana elephants will soon be touring around the state as well,” she said.
Ramesh, who received the award on behalf of those who are part of the project, has been identifying and profiling the behaviour of individual elephants as part of a research programme by The Shola Trust and Tamil Nadu Forest Department.
The research showed that only about seven of the 150 elephants in the Gudalur region of the Nilgiris district were spreading havoc in villages.
The finding helped in significantly reducing the man-animal conflict since managing the seven problematic elephants was significantly easier than chasing all elephants away from human habitations.
These individual elephants formed the basis of the making of the Lantana elephants, each of which is modelled on a real wild elephant.
“I am really happy to meet the King and Queen and get recognition for my community and the work done to remove Lantana from the forests. No one believes us simple people from the Nilgiris are coming here for this honour. Even the immigration officer didn’t believe us and he read the invitation letter many times,” Ramesh gushed to South First in an emailed statement.
Vishnu’s father was a forester working for the Tamil Nadu Forest Department in the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve. His family has been working with elephants for at least six generations — as far back as they could remember.
He was also involved in identifying individual elephants and later started working on making Lantana elephants. “It is nice to visit London and see that people care so much about elephants even though there are no elephants here,” he said.
“We went for a guided tour of London and we heard they used to have elephants in Buckingham Palace. You can also see elephant imagery in many places in London. Because of the Kartiki Akka’s (Kartiki Gonsalves’s documentary) The Elephant Whisperers, everyone knows about mahouts and elephants now,” he added.
Vishnu was surprised to see Lantana elephants made in the Nilgiris at the royal palace.
Vishnu and Ramesh presented the King and Queen with a coffee-table book on mahouts and elephants at the Theppakadu Camp, produced by the Real Elephant Collective and the Tamil Nadu Forest Department.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Kartiki Gonalves was also felicitated with the Tara Award for her film, The Elephant Whisperers. The movie highlighted the bond between indigenous people and elephants.
A still from ‘The Elephant Whisperers’. (Twitter)
Dr Aritra Kshettry, the Co-Director of the Coexistence Consortium, said: “Coexistence is of global relevance today. To change the conservation paradigm from protecting small pockets of forests to living well with nature worldwide. Wild animal populations are recovering worldwide, adapting to living alongside people. People also need to learn and adapt to tolerate these animals. India is an outlier in how people can tolerate and coexist with animals, and the lantana elephants are doing an exceptional job of telling these coexistence stories worldwide.”
The charity, Elephant Family, has a long history of undertaking high-profile and innovative campaigns to raise awareness and funds for Asian elephants. The King and Queen continue to be patrons of the organisation.
A thicket-forming shrub native to tropical America, Lantana camara arrived in India as an ornamental plant in the early 1800s.
In recent decades, it escaped from gardens and took over entire ecosystems, now occupying almost 40 percent of the country’s forest regions.
With its proven ability to adapt to the changing climate, Lantana can tolerate high temperatures and moisture. The species now threatens about 300,000 sq km of Indian forests.
