Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  I visited a particular central Burmese logging village once in 2013 and again in 2016. During the first visit, the villagers were busy gathering bamboo from the surrounding forest to reinforce their homes in preparation for the coming monsoon storms. The homes were built of materials that anticipated eventual abandonment: thatched roofs, skeletal structures and divisions made entirely of bamboo, beams held in place by pegs and rope rather than with screws and nails, and so on. In 2016, by contrast, many of the homes had noticeably changed. There were more metal roofs now, made of corrugated iron sheets. The bamboo stilts were sometimes reinforced with metal rods or concrete. People’s gardens looked more elaborate, with more fruits and vegetables growing and with decorative flowers.

  The logging officials, in the meantime, who live in far-off cities, had declared the area overlogged in 2015 and had already built a brand-new logging village many miles away, in an area with plenty of mature teak. Exploring the forestlands around the currently occupied village, I could see why officials announced it should be abandoned. There were trees everywhere, including some teak, but the streams and springs in the area were drying up, a consequence of diminished tree density. When I followed the mahout Otou to watch him fetch his elephant Gunjai, the only usable watering hole in which Gunjai could take his morning bath (an important part of the morning ritual for both elephant and mahout) was barely a foot deep. Soon it too would run dry.

  The new village the government had built was on a wide river with a good current: a fine location from the perspective of an elephant. Already a few mahouts had moved here, having been offered a premium in their wages. I spent an afternoon with some of them. Pointing to various corners of their new homes, they observed that the government had done a poor job building the new dwelling structures. Rather than weaving the bamboo slats together in a full latticework, to create firm flooring and insect-resistant walls, the builders of the new village had used a faster but less effective construction method, where only a few perpendicular slats held all the parallel slats together.

  There were huge gaps in the flooring and in the walls. The government had also cut corners when finishing and treating the bamboo, which in places was attracting termites. Joints had been fastened with nails, which were rusting, rather than with bamboo rope. The new village was also many miles up the river, far from the nearest road. For the most part, neither the mahouts nor their family members wanted to move here, even if the wages were better.11 Comparing this new work site with the older village, with its main street and its shops and its well-built homes and pleasant gardens, I thought no one in their right mind would move their family from the old setting to the new one. And yet the forestlands around the old village were drying up, and the new village site sat adjacent to tracts of mature teak.

  By contrast, the tribal logging areas in the Trans-Patkai region do not have this conflict. Loggers follow the harvest from tract to tract, and their families settle in a single village around which they build their lives. The Trans-Patkai mahouts are also more autonomous, making decisions about when to move a camp from one glen to another among themselves. Given their location deep in the forest, in places only they (riding their elephants) can access, no outside bureaucratic authority could possibly control the harvest schedule. But this system has its social disadvantages too: the tribal loggers must spend long periods of time away from their families.

  From the perspective of government logging officials in Burma, the camp system would also have the disadvantage of being extremely difficult to administer from a central bureaucratic office. The government-run timber industry’s village system gives outside administrators a kind of lever over the logging mahouts’ lives. The villages usually have at least one main road and so are accessible to administrators or to veterinarians making surprise visits.12 The villages are also where educational and medical services are provided and where wages are disbursed. The mahouts are still able to gather resources from sections of the forest beyond the administrators’ view—the charcoal camps, for instance, are not condoned by the industry officials—but overall, the village system keeps the mahouts connected to a formal bureaucracy in ways that the camp system in the Trans-Patkai tribal areas does not.

  Mounting tensions between administrators and mahouts over village location has strained the Burmese government’s teak-logging system. The system has also encountered a new, more challenging issue in recent years. The economic design of the government’s timber industry assumes that the best and most valuable teak will come from forests with very few roads scarring the soil. From this assumption flow two further premises: that logging done with elephants can be just as profitable as logging done by motorized machinery, and that a portion of these profits can then be directed toward the elephants’ welfare. Yet in recent years, the foundational assumption—that teak grown in “roadless” forests is more valuable—seems to have held true only when Burma’s economy was closed and protected. Of late, the Burmese teak industry has had to compete with its counterparts abroad, especially in Central America. This new market pressure, and the increased availability of machinery, has led to the motorization of larger and larger swaths of the Burmese teak industry.13

  This in turn has contributed to overlogging. The situation is nowhere near as severe as in Thailand, which once had a thriving teak-logging industry but so deforested its hills that erosion and calamitous downriver flooding ensued, leading to a sweeping logging ban in the early 1990s.14 But the Burmese situation is still serious enough that Burmese forestry officials have recently instituted temporary limits on logging, allowing mahouts to harvest only about a quarter of the timber tonnage they were harvesting before—a cutback that should, the forestry officials hope, give the forest time to recover.15

  The cost is borne, in large part, by the mahouts themselves, whose wages are paid per ton. The timber enterprise has no plan to compensate the mahouts for their lost income. A number of mahouts have responded by gathering ironwood trees from the forest, to make charcoal. Charcoal is nowhere near as valuable as teak, of course, but it gives the mahouts a commodity to sell, to make up for their lost earnings, which are significant (and entirely avoidable, if the government would simply pay them more during the tonnage limitation period).16

  The mahouts’ charcoal-making camps, though surely not an optimal use of forest resources, can be fascinating in action. The scene is full of smoke and steam and elephants carrying great ironwood logs upon their tusks. Sometimes the logs are simply burned in piles. But in another method, large cavelike rooms are hollowed out from nearby bluffs, and a chimney is dug upward until it reaches the hillcrest above. Logs are loaded into the cavern through a hillside door, then lit, and the door is filled in with clay, except for a few small holes that allow oxygen to flow into the subterranean chamber. I saw several of these structures in a row along a steep incline by a forest stream. Elephants were unloading logs at open doorways. Other chambers had already been sealed, and smoke was puffing out through the chimney openings above. The sight was lovely and strange: cozy and funereal at the same time.

  THE MAHOUTS of the main government-run logging village I visited in central Burma were mostly ethnic Burmans. The village was characterized by this relative homogeneity in spite of a large nearby population of ethnic Karen mahouts. The Karen mahouts worked on private logging tracts. I would see their trucks pass by the government area frequently. The trucks were easy to pick out because they had a crucifix hanging behind the windshield. The government logging village had no church and was intended to be a Buddhist-only community: it had a Buddhist religious building near the main road and several shrines for the worship of forest spirits, or nats.

  By contrast, the elephant logging camps in the Trans-Patkai allow people from multiple religious and ethnic backgrounds to work side by side during the day and to return to their respective villages at night. Thus, in the southwestern hills of Kachin State, Hkamti, Kachin, and ethnic Burmese mahouts worked in relative harmony together, even t
hough the Burmese and Hkamtis return every night to villages whose main religious structure is a Buddhist stupa or monastery, while the Kachins return to a village with a large church.

  Tenam, the long-haired mahout who brought me into the Mithong logging forest to meet Air Singh, was Hkamti, but he preferred to wear a traditional Kachin hat. I asked him about it over lunch. He laughed and answered that a Hkamti hat is too ornate and impractical for logging work; the Kachin hat was simpler and more comfortable. The choice was pragmatic but also signaled the sort of social intermixing that occurred in this work milieu. Tenam had many Singpho-Kachin mahouts working under him and in some cases alongside him.17 Air Singh’s mahout was a Kachin teenager, Gam, whose fellow mahouts hailed from a wide array of groups: Hkamtis, Singpho-Kachins, Nepalis, Assamese, and Adivasis. The lead mahouts and tract owners were all Hkamtis and Singpho-Kachins, who’d divided the forest between themselves using a streambed as a border.18 But the workers under them were a mix of all five groups, if not more. The lingua franca among the mahouts was Assamese.

  Of these groups, the Hkamtis have played the most important historical role in diffusing forest mahout skills throughout this part of the world. Even the proudest Kachin mahouts I spoke with conceded, with a grudging smile, that the Hkamtis were in effect the core group, with the longest-lasting traditions, within the Trans-Patkai’s mahout culture. The elephant skills seem to have originally come from the west—from Bengal and Assam. Nobody is sure when this was exactly. Apparently it was well over a thousand years ago, before today’s ethnonyms (Hkamti, Kachin, etc.) show up in any historical record. Up until the nineteenth century, the Hkamtis had their own tiny kingdoms in the Hukawng Valley and the Putao Plain, political nodes that aided the spread of elephant skills eastward and southward. The Kachins, who originally migrated from Yunnan, became associated with elephant work much more recently, in the nineteenth century, learning the art of mahoutship from the Hkamtis.19 The Morans seem to have been engaged in elephant work for as long as the Hkamtis but did not play as prominent a role in diffusing the culture.20

  These groups have a history of struggling over territory, yet they share in common the experience of having fled powerful, expanding kingdoms and empires. The Morans were pushed into the Trans-Patkai when the Ahom kingdoms expanded up the Brahmaputra River. The Kachins fled Mongol and Han invasions in Yunnan. The Hkamtis migrated from larger Tai polities to the southeast. Once they reached the mountainous refuge of the Trans-Patkai, these groups became intermixed, though in ways that preserved certain distinct languages and cultural traditions.21

  Imow, we should remember, was half Kachin and half Hkamti. Miloswar, the elderly Moran fandi who told me the story of the khoonkie elephant Sokona, had a Hkamti daughter-in-law. Intermarriage between Morans and Kachins in the Lohit and Dihing valleys seems to be rarer, perhaps due to the groups’ topographic ordering: the Kachins are associated with a relatively high contour line up in the hills, the Hkamtis with a transitional area between hills and plains, and the Morans are mostly in the lower Dihing Valley. The scheme has lots of exceptions, but it generally helps an outside visitor make some sense of the dizzying network of interfamilial and intertribal ties. Nevertheless, some social scientists have reported a kind of ethnic “shape-shifting,” in which individuals or clans shift from “Hkamti” to “Kachin” under certain political circumstances, or vice versa.22

  Such an interpretation is disputed, but tribal fluidity and heterogeneity would perform a useful law-evading function as well. Forestry officials might hear that an illegal activity is taking place in a certain sector of the forest (illegal elephant capture, illegal logging, smuggling of goods, etc.). If the investigators know that the mahout they’re seeking is, say, a Hkamti, then they go directly to the nearby Hkamti village and begin their interrogations there. But if the sector of the forest is associated with mahouts hailing from many different groups and villages, the investigation has no obvious next step. People at the Hkamti village will say that a Moran mahout must have done it; people at the Moran village will say that a Kachin mahout must have done it; and so on.23

  In the Lohit and Dihing valleys, mahouts are also Adivasi, Nepali, Assamese, and occasionally Chakma. All these groups migrated from elsewhere. The Adivasis came from central India during the nineteenth century to work on the tea plantations of Assam, which were rapidly expanding up the Brahmaputra Valley during the British colonial era. The Adivasis are sometimes called, simply, the “tea tribes” because of their association with tea harvesting. However, many of them farm other crops, and a few are mahouts. I once met a young Adivasi mahout at a sawmill camp in the Lohit Valley named Gudu. He was eighteen years old and fed his elephant bananas as we talked. Gudu came from a family of farmers, but the nearby farming areas had become crowded, and wages for agricultural work had declined.

  By contrast, wages in the logging industry stayed strong, so he headed to the Lohit logging area. At first, he worked at a sawmill, where logs dragged in by elephants were cut up and then trucked out for eventual sale. Most of the sawmill workers in the area were young Adivasi men like himself. The Hkamti sawmill owner saw that Gudu had good rapport with the elephants bringing in the logs, so he offered Gudu a job as a mahout’s assistant. Gudu thrived in the new position and was now in charge of this elephant eating the bananas. (The elephant had given me a ride to the mill some fifteen minutes earlier and nearly tossed me off.) His wages, he said, were significantly better than they would have been had he stayed on the farm. Furthermore, “I like the sense of adventure, of being out there in the forest with my elephant, who is really like a best friend who understands me in every way.” Gudu added that his mother was unhappy about his chosen profession and wanted him to return to the farm.24

  I encountered another Adivasi mahout, below the Lohit Valley, in Assam, in an area of huge tea plantations. The domesticated elephants here dated from the days when the tea plantations used elephants for draft labor and were interpenetrated by forest. Nowadays those forests are gone, and the industry is organized around motor transport. But many of the big tea estates still keep elephants as a mark of prestige, and they keep mahouts on the payrolls as well. The elephants have relatively little to do all day and have no forests in which to roam or mate, but they still have rivers and tree groves in which to spend their days.

  This tea plantation mahout and his elephant had wandered up from the nearby river, to a cluster of shops alongside the main highway. Cavalierly, the elephant was reaching his great trunk into a shopkeeper’s window for a loaf of bread. The shopkeeper jumped in his seat with surprise. The mahout looked on nonchalantly, arms crossed, from high on the elephant’s neck. A boy stepped out of the shop with a box of crackers and fed them to the elephant. Then on the other side of the market lane, another shopkeeper said something with a scowl. The mahout took offense, leaped down from the elephant, and ran up to the shopkeeper with a menacing grin on his face. The shopkeeper was smaller, and the mahout had no trouble picking the poor man up and dragging him toward the elephant.

  With the agility of a playground tyrant, the tea plantation mahout then turned the shopkeeper upside down, so that his feet were pointing upward. The elephant promptly wrapped his trunk around the unfortunate shopkeeper’s ankles. At this point the victim said something that I took to mean, “I take it back!” He was released from his misery. This absurd scene gave me a sense of the power wielded by a man whose best friend weighs five tons. And yet at the forest camps up in the hills, I had never seen anything remotely like this display. This bullying behavior was, perhaps, what happened when an elephant and mahout pair functioned as mere status symbols for a powerful estate in the plains, rather than as work partners at a site in the forest.

  DOES AN ELEPHANT care whether its mahout is a man or a woman, a Hkamti or a Kachin, an Adivasi or a Moran? Likely not. Do the social relations and distinctions among the humans at the camps and villages make no difference at all to the elephants, then? They likely do, primarily
because many of these relations trace back to a village system or a camp system as the chief spatial principle organizing the elephants’ lives. An elephant logging village is a planned, bureaucratically managed environment where an elephant is likely to cross paths with veterinarians or with professionals who have a broad sense of the methods in many regions. An elephant might perceive intervention from this “professional” world as negative if it senses that its mahout tenses up when the “man with the trousers” approaches with his report book. Or an elephant might be glad to get attention from trained veterinarians or from forestry managers who are planning a new village site on a broad river with an attractive current.

  Similarly, a domesticated elephant might have good reason to prefer the camp system, which keeps it in constant proximity with wild elephants. Furthermore, the mix of tribal groups at the forest camps increases the likelihood that the elephant will change hands a few times during its life, thus passing through different forest areas and encountering different wild herds. That said, from the elephants’ perspective, the camps may also have drawbacks. Tribal mahouts’ training and daily treatment of elephants in the Trans-Patkai region tends to be harsher than in the government-run villages, where elephant officials have systematically pushed the mahouts to do training based on positive rewards rather than punishments.

  Another drawback of the Trans-Patkai area—though the elephants are likely not directly aware of this problem—is that modern, weather-resistant roads are gradually snaking their way into the region, and will likely bring forces of agricultural and urban development with them. Signs of change are especially noticeable on the Indian side of the Trans-Patkai where, slowly yet surely, the government has been constructing expensive all-weather road infrastructure to link the Lohit and Dihing valleys with the motor traffic network in Assam. Large concrete viaducts, sometimes many miles long, are rising in the jungle. If completed, they will turn torrential monsoon river courses like the Sissiri into geographic features to be merely passed over rather than moved through. These road projects will not reach every village and inhabited monsoon island. But once the new infrastructure is completed, it will permanently alter the spatial organization of the region. Likely, the local political balance will tip away from forest-based economies. If this happens, it’s not clear what will become of the elephants or who will protect them. Perhaps the Indian government can set up wildlife preserves. But the same state forces that built the expensive new roads might need to open previously forested areas to new development in order to generate the revenue needed to pay for the infrastructure.25