he Elephant has always been one of the wonders of the world, amazing in his aspect and full of delightful and surprising qualities. Nor does familiarity lessen his hold upon the imagination of mankind. Next after the cow he seems to be of all the beasts the Hindu favourite. At the present moment the most carefully-kept studs of Elephants are in the hands of Hindu Rajas, and the Muhammadan Nawāb prefers the horse. This is an ancient predilection on the part of the Hindu. While other animals represented in Hindu Art are merely decorative and conventional, or awkward and ill-understood, there is invariably a strong feeling for nature in Hindu elephant sculptures and paintings. The contrast may be noticed in most old temples, but especially in the sculptured gates or tori of the Sanchi tope in Central India, where all kinds of animals are shown, but the elephant alone is carved with complete knowledge, and unvarying truth of action.
GANÉSHA (FROM AN ANCIENT HINDU SCULPTURE)
The grave beast is as great a favourite of the poet as of the artist. The back view of the elephant as he shuffles along, is like nothing so much as that of the stout and elderly "long-shore" fisherman and sailor of our English watering-places, whose capacious nether garments, alone among human habiliments, have the horizontally creased bagginess peculiar to the elephant. Dickens said long ago that the elephant employs the worst tailor in all the world. But these wrinkled columns suggest feminine grace to the Oriental poet, and "elephant-gaited" is the supreme and also the invariable expression for the voluptuous movements of women: "A voice as sweet as that of the Koil, and a gait as voluptuous as that of the elephant: An eye like the antelope's, a waist like the lion's, and a gait like the elephant's," are specimens of an endless series of descriptions of female beauty. Nor are these expressions confined to ancient poetry, for they are as current to-day as ever they were. Walking behind elephants and women, I have occasionally seen a hint of the poet's meaning, but only a hint; and one is driven to the conclusion that the simile, like many more in Oriental verse, is mainly conventional. The beast gets along so quietly he might almost be said to glide, but his movements have little of the fine rhythmic swing and poise one sees in the noble gait of a well-formed Hindu woman.
As furnishing a head to Ganésa, Ganésh, or Ganpati, the wise and humorous god who is invoked at the beginning of all enterprises, whose auspicious image is placed over most Hindu doorways, and whose mystic sign (familiarly spoken of as a Ganésh) stands on the first page of Hindu ledgers and day-books, the elephant has an immense hold on the affections of the people. His sign 卍 is the svastika, the cross fylfot of our Western heraldry and the hermetic cross of Freemasonry, traceable from Troy town to China. The traveller and the pilgrim look to Ganésha for protection, the merchant for fortune, the student for advancement, and the housewife for luck.
The popular version of the origin of Ganésha is that during one of the absences of the great Lord Shiva, Parbati his wife, taking a bath, rubbed some tiny pellets off her skin and amused herself by moulding them into the form of a child, till at last she breathed life into it. Shiva returned and was outraged to find a baby where no baby should be, so he promptly cut off its head with his sharp war-quoit. Then Parbati explained and Shiva said in effect: "Dear me! this is very sad, why did not you speak sooner?" Then, catching sight of an elephant standing near, he cut off its head and clapped it on the decapitated baby. "Now, it's all right!" said he, "I was always rather hasty." And, to make amends, he ordained that in every enterprise Ganésa's name should be the first called upon. So the elephant's head grew on the God-like body, that is to say, on the corpulent body of a well-fed Baniya, who in his four hands bears suitable emblems,—a disc or war-quoit, sometimes interpreted as a cake, an elephant goad, a sacrificial shell, and a lotus. His seat is a lotus, and his steed or vâhan a rat. In this state he sits over thousands of Hindu doors. His effigy is modelled in clay and gaily painted for most Hindu households in Western India, and on his great feast-day, after four days' worship, thousands of such effigies are borne with shouting and rejoicing to be thrown into the sea or the nearest water. If Ganésha stood he would be the very image of many fat, rupee-worshipping Baniyas, to be seen all over India,—even as—with some irreverence—I have ventured to draw him. But he never stands, though a fat man is often spoken of as a "cow-dung Ganésh."
SHIV OR MAHADEO, WITH THE INFANT GANÉSH (FROM AN INDIAN LITHOGRAPH)
Although at first sight merely monstrous to Western eyes, this quaint personage grows in interest as one learns his attributes and becomes familiar with his character and person. He seems, as he sits meditatively poising his heavy head, to be the Nick Bottom of the Hindu Pantheon, with a touch of the jovial humour immemorially associated with fat men. Like Falstaff, he appears to chuckle over his bulk and to say, "I cannot tell whether it is the weight of my head or of my belly (in Southern India he is familiarly known as the belly God) that prevents my rising, but here I sit and survey mankind with cheery geniality." Campbell in his "Pleasures of Hope" speaks of "Ganésa sublime," which to those who know him for what he is,—the sagacious and respectable "God of getting on"—is a deliciously incongruous epithet and a false quantity besides.
