Stalling Elephant

This delicately painted image shows an elephant refusing to obey its two drivers (mahouts). Elephants were prized possessions for India’s aristocracy, and they were used for transportation in battle, when hunting, and on ritual occasions. Elephants consume large quantities of food each day, so they are exceedingly expensive to keep. Because elephants are so large, and because taming elephants can be difficult and dangerous, these animals became important emblems of a ruler’s power and leadership skills.

Close examination of this painting reveals that the body of the elephant, its saddle blanket, and the costumes of the two mahouts are rendered in marbleized patterns, a decorative effect that is achieved by swirling oil-based paints on the surface of water and then lowering paper carefully onto the paint. The artist would have had to repeat this process at least four times to achieve the different colors and patterns in this painting, using stencils or some sort of resist coating to keep the paint in the desired areas. This highly specialized technique was practiced briefly in only one or two courts in the southern Indian region known as the Deccan and appears to have fallen out of use after the seventeenth century.