There is an African legend that elephants know exactly when they are going to die. When the time comes, they go to a place called the Elephant Graveyard where they quietly wait for death. Though no such elephant graveyard has ever been found, the emotional manner in which elephants fondle bones and particularly skulls of dead elephants they come across may have given birth to the myth that they have communion with the dead. In India too, there is a mythical aura surrounding the elephant in a tradition where the God of Wisdom is endowed with an elephant's head and auspicious ceremonies begin with an invocation to Him. However, if elephants actually had the kind of prescience they are said to have, the existential predicament now confronting them could perhaps have been less real.

An extract from an award-winning writer's autobiographical work has been included in the introductory chapter of this book where the capture of wild elephants in the jungles of Odisha's princely state of Kalahandi in the 1920s is recounted. Interestingly, when a particular herd was taken out of the forest, other elephants left. How these other herds knew of what had happened without coming in contact with those who were captured can only be surmised. Elephants are believed to communicate through low frequency sounds inaudible to human ears which, unlike their high pitch trumpeting that we hear, carry long distances. Apparently, they communicate through ground vibrations, as the soles of their feet pick up signals from the stomping of elephants elsewhere, conveying the state of agitation or otherwise they are in. However, unlike earlier times when herds could back off to the safety of contiguous forests even far away, there are not many forests left these days for them to move away to. Despite their naturally endowed ability and instinct for survival, elephants today are dying in large numbers because of their frailty against the devious ingenuity of humans and the incapability of other humans to do enough to protect them.

The study makes an effort to examine the causes of elephant death and the ramifications of deliberate killings, preventable deaths having become an increasing cause for concern.

The earliest forms of simple cellular life, prokaryotes, began on earth about 3.6 billion years ago, the earth itself being 4.6 billion years old. Some 1.6 billion years later, complex cellular life, eukaryotes, came into existence and multi-cellular organisms a billion years thence. Simple animals came around 600 million years back, fish and protoamphibians around 500 million years ago, amphibians around 360 million years ago, and reptiles 300 million years back.

Mammals, the category to which both man and elephant belong, came into existence some 200 million years back. Of the ancestry of these two species, the mammoth—from which the elephant has directly descended—appeared 4.8 million years back, while humans—as they anatomically and physically appear—came only 2,00,000 years ago.

In this constant process of evolution, different species have evolved over time through more specialised and efficient bodily attributes to adapt better to their living environment. In the struggle for survival, those species that could not adapt or were slow in adapting to their changing environment were marked out by nature for extinction, sometimes sooner and at times later.

The early forms of life began in water and in course of time developed features that made them more adaptable to their environment. When some moved over to land in due course, the gills or equivalent organs that they used for drawing dissolved oxygen from water gradually transformed into lungs to enable them to breathe directly from the atmosphere. Likewise, when living on land became difficult for some species, sometimes on account of excessive body weight that was difficult to carry around, they moved into water, where its buoyancy helped their mobility. Not surprisingly, the blue whale, the biggest mammal on earth that needs to breathe directly from the atmosphere, is an aquatic animal.

As the need for limbs, like hands and feet or forelegs and hind legs, was not felt in water as it was on land, such limbs gradually disappeared or were modified to form flippers and fins to help in the new living environment. While the internal system of some animals like sharks and crocodiles was already so efficient that there was little need for further evolution, others needed time—thousands of years—to evolve in order to survive in and adapt to the slowly changing environment.

According to Megasthenes, ambassador from the Seleucid Empire to the Mauryan court in the third century BC, Chandragupta Maurya's army of 30,000 cavalry and 6,00,000 infantry included 9,000 war elephants. Elephantry in the military was first practised in India, spread to southeast Asia and then went west on to the Mediterranean, as Greek king Pyrrhus and Hannibal of Carthage were among those who engaged them. As mentioned earlier, Kautilya's Arthashastra mentions that elephants found in the forests of present-day Odisha were best suited for war. Interestingly, Alexander's Admiral Onescritus is on record for having said that the elephants of Taprobane, known as Sinhala thereafter and Ceylon later, were ‘bigger, more fierce, and furious for war service than those of India's’, a statement corroborated by Megasthenes. Greek writer Aelian mentions export of Sinhala elephants from around 200 BC to Kalinga—the place in India where the best elephants came from.

During the reign of Sinhalese kings, it was a major crime in Sri Lanka to kill elephants, the punishment for which was death. Elephants were thereby well protected. With the onset of colonialism, however, elephants came to be declared as an agricultural vermin and there was a bounty for those who killed them. Needless to say, tuskers were killed in great numbers for sport. Unlike India, that had vast forests for elephants to retreat to, Sri Lanka did not give them the chance and they were decimated to the extent that tuskers were more or less completely liquidated. Today, in the land which produced the best male war elephants, the vast majority of whom bore tusks, the percentage of ivory-bearing elephants in the male elephant population is just 7 per cent, and in the total elephant population, an insignificant 2 per cent. Ironically, it is because male elephants in Sri Lanka today are almost entirely tuskless makhnas that poaching for ivory has ceased to be an issue of concern.

There is an important lesson here. Of the three sub-species of the Asian elephant, it is the Sri Lankan, aptly named Elephas maximus maximus, that is the largest. The Sri Lankan elephants of today are, however, believed to be smaller than those that are depicted in pictures to have been exported back in 200 BC, or for that matter those photographed in the nineteenth century

One Sunday afternoon in 1928, Raymond Poincaré, the Président du Conseil des Ministres (Prime Minister), returned from a weekend at his property at Sampigny in the Lorraine region. The weather was beautiful and the trip was going smoothly until he arrived at Chelles, on the eastern outskirts of Paris. There, he found himself behind a long line of cars. An automobile accident ahead had closed a portion of the highway and Poincaré, unable to move, encountered first-hand the realities of unregulated Parisian sprawl. From his car window, he witnessed, ‘une banlieue interminable, sans ossature, où le hasard seul semblait offrir un passage, [avec des] habitations noyées dans un indescriptible chaos’ (Remaury 146). The narrow streets and substandard construction, reminiscent of pre-Haussmann Paris, seemed to startle him. Once back in the city, moved by what he saw, Poincaré suggested a formal region-wide planning authority to normalize not only suburban housing construction, but also the increasingly over-burdened road network outside Paris's city limits.

Six years later, on 14 May 1934, French urbanist Henri Prost presented Albert Sarraut, Minister of the Interior, with his ‘grand album contenant le projet d'aménagement de la région parisienne (Plan Prost),’ a dossier with his detailed plan for Paris's future (Remaury 152).

As Paris entered the twentieth century, politicians and leaders from suburban communities increasingly articulated their dislike of the Paris-centric administration of the Seine department. Albert Thomas, former Undersecretary of War and mayor of Champigny from 1912 to 1919, perhaps best articulated the growing city-suburb divide. In his preface to a 1920 government report, Thomas spoke out against the economic segregation between the two sides. While the suburbs gained many new residents from rural France, they also accumulated costs associated with housing, caring for, and educating them. The factories, workshops, and stores that employed the newcomers, however, sent their taxes to Paris, where they usually remained (5). He called for more attention and development across the entire department, especially in suburban communities that experienced the most growth. In many respects, Thomas was right. Between 1872 and 1911, the city and adjacent Seine department gained over a million new residents (Wolf 17). Neighbouring departments also grew considerably in the first four decades of the Third Republic. In the 1911 census, the Seine-et-Oise claimed over 818,000 residents and the once-rural neighbouring Seine-et-Marne to Paris's east was home to 364,000 people. Now suburban communities needed to cooperate with Paris, boxed in by an outdated wall, to look for efficient and effective ways to administer, control, and plan for the region.

As the Paris Basin become more crowded, changing ideas of urban environments, championed by the Musée social movement plus the creation of the Société française des Urbanistes along with the subsequent École des hautes études urbaines, altered how government officials viewed the region.

After Louis Napoleon's term as president and his 1851 coup d’état, Paris needed his attention. The city had undergone little significant renovation in the years since the 1789 Revolution. The narrow, unlit streets as described above by Baron Haussmann were a breeding ground for crime and disease. Bourgeois Parisians had grown weary of the uprisings that prematurely terminated the Bourbon restoration and the subsequent July Monarchy, bringing in the short-lived Second Republic. By mid-century, tired of crime and revolution, the Parisian bourgeoisie pinned their hopes on Napoleon III. His promises to restore order and become ‘l’élu du commerce, de l'industrie, de la propriété’ were just what they wanted to hear. Many were tired of fearing not only for their wallets but their lives as well as they ventured into the night.

The large concentration of unhappy working-class residents in the centre of the city worried both businessman and those in power. Yet beyond crime, early Second Empire Paris had other problems. Multiple cholera epidemics hit the city in 1832 and 1849. Although primarily concentrated in the dense urban core, this disease struck everyone and everywhere, alerting Parisians of the dangers of overcrowding. The first major outbreak killed 20,000 Parisians out of a population of 861,400 (Jordan 96). In addition to crime and disease, nineteenthcentury Paris was known for having residents pour into the streets, erect barricades, and topple governments with authorities lacking the means to control them. Unable to suppress this population, leaders needed new methods for demonstrating their ability to rule over the urban space.

In the Third Republic history and geography text Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, famous child adventurers André and Julien hope to cross into France from their native Lorraine in search of their lost uncle, an adult who could help them obtain their French citizenship after the annexation to Germany. As the two orphans prepare to traverse the new border, their guide is injured and the boys worry about how they will proceed. At the last minute André, the ingenious older brother, turns to a wall-mounted Carte d’état-major, an official army map in order to navigate across the border.

It is ironic that the French army, so cartographically deficient and easily defeated in 1870 by the same Prussians the youths wish to flee, now provides their eventual means of escape. The self-proclaimed ‘meilleur élève’ in German-occupied Phalsbourg eagerly employs his map-reading skills to traverse unfamiliar territory and enter ‘la France glorieuse.’ The geography inside post-1884 Le Tour de la France par deux enfants suggests that leaders recognized its cartographic deficit and wished to rectify this shortfall at a time when soul-searching and sober examination of France's recent military defeat called for a change in how they understood and portrayed the nation. The expanding use of maps in the French educational system played a pivotal role in helping the Third Republic get to know its territory better and allowed its citizens to understand the maps they saw in the real world. The ability to identify and view a territory mentally became more widespread in the general population, epitomized here by André and Julien's use of the departmental Carte d’état major to find their way into France from German-controlled Lorraine.

There are both challenges and insights to be gained from working with maps. To begin with, maps are a form of communication, yet each individual reads them in accordance with his or her existing, socially and culturally defined, geographical conceptions (Edney, ‘Harley’ 48). Therefore, deciphering a map-maker's message and determining his or her audience represents a fundamental task before proceeding with any cartographic investigation. For a nation such as France, with inadequate access to education prior to the Third Republic, establishing who would see and understand a published map marks an important first step in any such investigation. Until Jules Ferry's educational reforms and Vidal de la Blache's efforts added geography to the national curriculum, most citizens had little or no access to – or familiarity with – cartography. The small public who could read and understand maps restricted the medium's reach and effectiveness. Yet, once the French map-reading public started to grow, so did cartography's influence.

Limited map contact mirrored a general lack of national or regional mobility. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, only a very small percentage of the population had the means to board a train and visit Paris. Even short trips were difficult and expensive undertakings (Weber, Peasants 198). Factors such as these restricted the formation of a common French identity and slowed any potential effectiveness of national maps, along with any need or expectation to ‘see’ what France, or any particular region, looked like on a map. Once the Third Republic improved exposure to cartography, however, it could begin to appropriate the medium into its mission of creating citizens and use the science to learn more about itself. This newly acquired knowledge will also provide the necessary tools to view and understand the national terrain.

After considerable retrospection, politicians and military officials came to believe that France had lost the disastrous Franco-Prussian war in part due to the inability of French soldiers and commanders to perform such simple tasks such as read a map. Through providing insufficient support for education, industry, and science, they believed that Napoleon III had not prepared the nation for the confrontation, and that the rapid, humiliating defeat caused by ‘l'ignorance des officiers français qui auraient été incapables à lire une carte d’étatmajor’ (Fierro, Dictionnaire 222). Regaining the nation's lost prestige required a critical self-examination and a change in how it viewed and understood itself. One way to address these weaknesses was to improve and reform education. The current system's creation of ‘dilettantes’ and ‘penseurs de salon’ did little to help the military defeat of its neighbour rival, so France needed to incorporate more science into its national curriculum. As part of this drive, geography, once marginalized as a subset of history, became a vital component to improving national security and throughout the Third Republic the nation introduced the discipline to school children on an unprecedented scale. Once very rare, by the start of the First World War maps appeared more frequently in textbooks, travel guides, newspapers, and official government documents.

It is under these circumstances that France witnessed the birth of the French map reader, whose rise can be attributed to many factors. First, the average Frenchman became better educated. As education minister from 1879 to 1881 and again from 1882 to 1883, Jules Ferry instituted major educational reforms.

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 precluded any urban reform for Paris, or the rest of France. The Nazi occupation of the capital and northern half of the country the next year meant that the Vichy government, not republican politicians, would now decide Paris's future and it did not take long for the new regime to assert its control. On 14 October 1940, the government suspended the Conseils généraux. In doing so, it removed elected officials from the department-level governing process. The loi du 16 novembre that same year gave Vichy officials the power to name mayors and municipal council members in communes with more than 10,000 residents. On 2 February 1941, the government suspended the 1932 Comité supérieur d'aménagement et d'embellissement et d'extension de Paris and created the Comité d'aménagement de la région parisienne (CARP) under the direction of the Délégation générale à l'Equipement National (DGEN). As part of this new mandate for Parisian administration, the Seine préfet, named by Vichy, had the power to ‘proposer toutes les modifications qu'il jugera nécessaires d'apporter aux plans des communes de banlieue, pour les subordonner à celui de Paris’ (Cohen 236–37). With this decree, the Vichy regime returned to a Haussmann-style executive, whereby one man had the means and power to decide what was best for Paris. Over the next four years, Vichy hoped to ‘reimagine the decaying monster of Paris as a capital worthy of French greatness’ (Wakeman 297). In order to achieve this sought-after prominence, the préfet would have to fix many perennial problems. One primary concern was new construction to house internal migrants who had arrived during the Third Republic. However, under the German occupation, a skyscraper-centric New York or Chicago-style skyline, the antithesis of French modernism and home to the declared enemies of the Vichy authorities, would not find a favourable reception in the French capital. The June 1944 Allied landings on the Normandy beaches terminated any chance of Vichy officials or their German counterparts influencing Paris urbanism for the long term.

With the end of the German occupation and the need to rebuild not only Greater Paris but much of the northern and eastern sectors of France, it fell to the national government to dictate the path forward. Reconstruction occupied the bulk of the French urban discussion in the first few years after the war.

The centennial of the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 marked a significant milestone for the French republic. The subsequent hundred years had brought to France a return of the Bourbons, the Orleanists’ July Monarchy, Napoleon Bonaparte and his nephew, and the Second and Third Republics. Unfortunately, most of these regime changes resulted from rebellion, revolution, or coup d’état. Needless to say, the chaotic nineteenth century did little to instil in the average Frenchman faith in the government's ability to remain in power for the long term. Yet, as the symbolic anniversary approached, there was a sense of optimism in the French capital for the last two decades had passed relatively violence free. Memories of the military defeat and the Commune remained fresh in many people's minds, but the ensuing two decades had confirmed the Republic's supremacy.

Even as the city prepared to celebrate, the Republic that existed in 1889 overcame many obstacles. The royalist Comte de Chambord's official rejection of the tricolour flag in 1871 effectively ended any hope of the Bourbons’ return to power in France. Even as late as 1888, General Boulanger's political ascent briefly threatened the nascent democracy. In the city, the Third Republic experienced obstacles to taming Paris, as demonstrated by the anxiety preceding the funerals of Adolphe Thiers and Léon Gambetta. Early on, these events tested the government's ability to control Parisian crowds. Disruptions reminded the regime of the many revolts and revolutions throughout the nineteenth century and its perceived inability to govern Paris, and that major events could be either good or bad for the city. Even the selection, after much debate, of 14 July as the officially designated fête nationale in 1880 proved the difficulty of deciding how to recognize and acknowledge the Republic. Yet, as little as five years later, in 18851 Victor Hugo's trouble-free funeral procession and subsequent induction into the Panthéon would eventually demonstrate France's ability to manage its capital city.