IWN Analysis — Sunday, 4 October 2026
Stand close enough to a temple elephant in Thrissur or Tiruchirappalli and you will notice its freckles.
They spread in pale pink and white blotches across the trunk, the forehead and the edges of the ears, and on some older animals they cover so much of the face that the elephant looks as though it has been dusted with chalk, which may be why some people believe mahouts and owners scrub the grey away to bring out a whiter skin underneath, so that their elephants look a little more like the mythical Airavata, the white elephant who carries Indra, god of storms and rain.
What the patches are
The blotches are depigmentation, patches of skin that have lost their pigment, and where the pigment is missing the skin shows pink, especially when it is wet. Descriptions of the species note that Asian elephants have skin that is partly depigmented on the trunk, ears or neck, and that the Sri Lankan subspecies tends to have larger and more distinct patches on the ears, face, trunk and belly. The Global Sanctuary for Elephants says the speckling can be influenced by genetics, nutrition, habitat or age.
Wild elephants carry the patches too. When researchers led by T.N.C. Vidya set out to identify individual wild elephants in Nagarahole National Park, depigmentation was one of the traits they relied on, grading the ears of wild animals as having none, slight, present or prominent patches, and also noting pale patches on the trunk and body, according to their 2014 paper in Gajah, the journal of the IUCN’s Asian Elephant Specialist Group.
The same paper may help explain why captive elephants seem so much more spotted. Unless the patches were prominent, the researchers found, depigmentation “was often visible only when the ears were wet or in certain light conditions.” A wild elephant is usually seen at a distance, dusty and dry, while a captive one is bathed every day and stands a few feet from onlookers with its skin washed clean. The elephant care manual that the FAO published with Thailand’s Forest Industry Organization even recommends that mahouts scrape the skin daily with half a coconut shell to keep it clean.
Some pale patches do signal a problem. The same FAO manual describes fungal skin infections that begin as grey-white specks on the ears or throat, and notes that some leave bright pink blotches up to 10 centimetres across, the colour of skin the fungus has depigmented. It advises treating such infections early, before they become harder and costlier to cure.
The white elephant in myth and statecraft
The idea of the white elephant runs deep in the religions of South and Southeast Asia. Airavata is described as pristine white, born from the churning of the ocean of milk and taken by Indra as his mount, and his consort Abhramu’s name means the one who binds the clouds, a link between elephants and rain that recurs throughout Indian myth. In Buddhist tradition, Queen Maya dreamed that a white elephant with six tusks entered her side on the night the Buddha was conceived. In Thailand, Airavata became Erawan, and Bangkok took him as its symbol.
Thailand and Myanmar turned the myth into statecraft. Any “white” elephant found in Thailand is presented to the king, and Thai law since 1921 has defined one by seven signs, including pale eyes, palate, nails, hair, tail and genitals and “white or earthen coloured skin,” the Bangkok Post has reported. In life these animals are usually a soft reddish-brown that turns pink when wet. In Myanmar, the discovery of a white elephant has long been read as a sign of a ruler’s legitimacy, and the military government has made use of that, even putting white elephants on its banknotes. The English phrase “white elephant”, for a prize that costs more than it is worth, is often traced to the story that kings would give such an animal to a courtier who had displeased them, knowing its upkeep would ruin him.
The Indian elephant-lore tradition took a less flattering view of pale skin. The Matangalila, a medieval Sanskrit treatise on elephants, lists a body “filled with blackened or whiten blots” among the unfavourable marks of an elephant, according to a study of the text. By that text’s reckoning, a heavily blotched elephant was a flawed animal.
Symbols of power, then and now
What these traditions share is the idea of the elephant as a mark of status for whoever holds it. In Mauryan times only kings were allowed to own elephants, as the mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has written, because owning one was proof of wealth and power. The ecologist Raman Sukumar has described the history of the Asian elephant over two millennia as “essentially a history of its use to further the imperial ambitions of Asian kings and European powers.”
The kings are gone, but the arrangement survives in a new form. Almost a third of Asian elephants live in captivity, mostly in India, Myanmar and Thailand, according to a 2019 study by researchers at the universities of Sheffield and Turku who tracked Myanmar’s timber elephants. Figures placed before the Supreme Court in August put India’s captive population at 2,725 elephants across 27 states and union territories, 1,678 of them held by private individuals, up from 2,067 recorded in 2018, ANI reported. Of the 2,075 elephants whose DNA had been mapped, only about a third could be confirmed as captive-born, according to an analysis of the figures by Climate Fact Checks.
The bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana said it would not interfere with religious practice, and put the problem in a single line: “Respect for divinity should extend to the elephant.”
The calves from Assam
That line came to mind last month as five young elephants, the youngest of them five years old, were trucked from Assam to temples in Tamil Nadu over the objections of conservationists and with court challenges still pending, as IWN reported. The transfers were cleared under rules framed after a 2022 amendment to the Wild Life (Protection) Act, which allows captive elephants to be transferred for “religious or any other purpose.” Whether they were right is a question the paperwork cannot settle.
Asian elephants in the wild live in family groups led by older females, and the young learn from those herds over many years. A calf sent across the country to a temple compound, where it may spend its life apart from other elephants, is being honoured on our terms, as a symbol and an offering, and very little on its own.
The freckles on its trunk are the same ones it would have carried in a forest in Assam. They mark it as an ordinary wild elephant, with the same skin and the same needs as the herds it was taken from, and respecting it might begin with seeing it that way.
Sources: Vidya, Prasad and Ghosh, Gajah (2014) · FAO and Forest Industry Organization, Elephant care manual for mahouts and camp managers · Global Sanctuary for Elephants · Wikipedia: Asian elephant · Wikipedia: Airavata · Wikipedia: White elephant · Bangkok Post · Wisdom Library, study of the Matangalila · Devdutt Pattanaik · Raman Sukumar, Seminar · ScienceDaily / University of Sheffield · ANI · Climate Fact Checks
India Wildlife News aggregates wildlife stories from across Indian media to bring the latest from the field to enthusiasts, conservationists, and curious readers — all in one place. Full credit and links to original sources are provided. We encourage readers to visit and support the original publishers.