The colonial masters classified Indian subjects according to animalistic iconographies of rebel tiger or docile elephant. Even prior to the colonial imaginings, orientalist gaze associated elephant with the Indian geographical imagery. After decolonization, due to circumstantial necessities India, one of the biggest elephant suppliers to Europe, started to gift elephants to war-stricken zoos not as merchandize but as envoys of peace and goodwill. This subverted the long tradition of environmental domination. This article argues that Nehru’s elephant gift diplomacy utilized the long-standing orientalist iconography to practise India’s soft power. Apart from that he successfully incorporated a colonial icon and rebranded it as nation’s diplomatic emblem.
The main theme of this paper is to revisit the question of caste and the politics of/on traditions. We have explored the questions of mythology; how ‘we’, the lower caste people associate and (re)interpret the mythical characters as a process of social upward mobility. So, is it the invention of tradition or is it the inversion of tradition or both? Interestingly, we could be able to locate a distinct regional pattern in this case. Thus, we argue that in the Northern part of India, specifically in Uttar Pradesh, though it is the process called the invention of tradition, it can be framed as a little tradition under the grand Hindu tradition. On the other hand, in the Southern part of the country specifically in Tamil Nadu, it is rather the process called the inversion of tradition which is much more radically grounded in sub-national ethos. Based on these premises, this article further argues that Uttar Pradesh’s caste politics is based on the invention of a tradition model which can incorporate the lower castes’ little traditions within the larger ambit of the Hindu grand narratives. Thus, new Hindutva politics has easily appropriated them within their polemic. On the contrary, in the South, due to the inversion of the tradition model embedded in a pre-existing political tradition and sub-national ethos, Hindutva failed to get a proper hold in recent times.
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