THE ELEPHANT'S JOURNEY by Jose Saramago

A 16 th Century Royal Entourage 

into the Heart of Today

         Reading of a novel varies from place to place, from time to time. When a Portuguese novelist involves Indian and Austrian cultures in his novel, it can be reviewed from different angles .The words may have different connotations too.

         The novel The elephants journey by Jose Saramago centres around two names mainly: Solomon, an elephant and Subro, its mahout. Both are of Indian orgin.It is mentioned that Subro and the elephant are black, especially among the white Portuguese, although it has nothing to do with racial discrimination.

         Historically, an Indian elephant travelled on foot from Lisbon to Vienna in the 16^th century. Several parts of India were Portuguese colony then.

         It was in 1551 that the Portuguese king John 3^rd decided to give an Indian elephant as his wedding gift to Maximillian , the Archduke of Vienna. Transporting the gift was obviously a difficult task. There was no other way for the king than to walk the elephant the long distance from Lisbon to Vienna. The unusual gift was 'something valuable and most striking' in the words of the king in Saramago’s novel.

          The real entourage from the Portuguese coast through Spain and over the Alps to Austria must have been tedious as they had to cross such a vast, monotonous land. But Saramago invents history by imagining the details of the real-life journey.

          An Indian elephant was entirely new to the people they passed by. It provides ground for Saramago to skew reality for satiric purposes .The winter himself interrupts the flow of narration by his witty reflections on human nature.

         The elephant becomes an embodiment of many misconceptions. At a point, a character says that god is an elephant, to which the priest who listened to replies 'god is in all creatures but none of them is god'.

         The mahout discusses religion with the fellow travellers. Being a Hindu, he has his own views on Christanity.But  the views from an outsider are not welcomed with ease by the others. When Subro tries to glorify the myth behind the Hindu deity Ganesh , it is

belittled  as fairy tales by a soldier .Subro retorts that it is ‘like the one about the man who , having died rose on the third day’. He also neglects the blasphemous remark that Parvathi /Kali ,one of the Hindu goddesses, could have been called a centipede if she had hundred legs instead of hundred hands. I do not know how a true devotee of Parvathi will take the comment whether it is by the soldier or Saramago himself. Anyway his comments on the trinities in both Christianity and Hindu mythology will not be read by an Indian and a Portuguese  alike. The word elephant itself probably connotes Ganesh in India whereas it is only a pachyderm with amusing proportions of body ('a trunk like that of no other animal in creation the elephant could never be the product of anyone’s imagination'- novel)in many other  countries .The term pachyderm is  used for elephant in many places in the novel. Only the translator knows what the original term used in the Portuguese script is. Mostly, it will be difficult to translate the term pachyderm to Indian languages. In addition to the mahout Subro and two men exclusively to assist him, the convoy constituted the men in charge of food and water supplies, the cavalry troop with its commanding officer responsible for security along the way and a quartermaster in a wagon drawn by two mules. Besides, the ox-carts bearing the water trough and loads of fodder made it unique. It is indeed irrational to expect all the animals to keep up the same pace. The crisis begins there. The rest is fun. The attitude of the people on the way, the probable threat of robbers, adverse climate, availability of water, shelter to spend nights-everything mattered.

         A people’s perception of other peoples is also worth discussing. It refers to the concept of hierarchy in every society. The commanding officer and his soldiers have some preoccupations about the general attitude of Austrians and Spaniards. Certain attitudes can insult human dignity easily. For example, see this excerpt from the novel:

         You never can tell with Spaniards they’ve been very cocky since they’ve had an emperor, and it will be even worse if, instead of the Spaniards, the Austrians appear, Are they bad people ,asked the commanding officer, They think that they’re superior to anyone else, That’s a common sin.

        The episodes in which a priest tries to sprinkle the elephant’s head with ‘holy water’ (in fact, water taken directly from the kitchen without having been touched by the empyrean) and gets kicked, gently though, the elephant forced to kneel in Padua and it raises a girl into air when everyone expects it to trample her etc. are quite natural in the eyes of the people who are familiar to the behaviour of an elephant. But, here, to the onlookers who are totally new to it, the elephant is divine or a wonderful creature.

        The boring journey, however, becomes a delight for the most part in the novel, The idea of writing a long story based on such a journey occurred to Saramago during a dinner arranged at a restaurant called the Elephant in Slazburg. The writer acknowledged his gratitude to Ms. Gilda, a Portuguese leitora at the University of Salzburg for inviting him for a talk to her students without which, he said, he would not have thought of such a plot.

         The novel contains neither sex nor violence. A reader new to his novels will take time to get used to the long sentence with sparingly used full stops and dialogues without quotation marks. We can ascribe it to his being an anarchist communist, a person who snipes at political establishments.

        To Jose Saramago, ‘literature is one of the richest springs from which the spirit can drink’

        History attests that Suleiman, the elephant which was called Solomon in Lisbon died in 1553. Subro, the mahout who was renamed as Fritz, had to leave Vienna on a mule. Suleiman’s body parts were kept as relics. A chair was made out of its bones and kept in the abbey at Kremsmunster. His tough hide was stuffed and later kept in the Old Academy in Munich and then in the Bavarian National Museum until a bombing wiped it off during the Second World War.

        The novel tells us that Solomon and Suleiman or David and Dawood are the regional variants of the same name. Whether you call something using the speech sounds of your language or those of some other language, the thing will remain the same. In course of time, it might take several other names as well. Nevertheless, your insistence on naming something in your own language is indeed a matter to be discussed.