As you enter the main hall of the State Museum in Kerala’s Thrissur district, you see a mounted skeleton of an elephant with the sign: ‘Anayude Asthi’ (elephant’s skeleton). For a regular visitor, it may seem like just another exhibit, but this was no ordinary tusker. An information box kept below the skeleton names the elephant — Chengalloor Ranganathan. Although there is hardly any credible information on the animal, a new Malayalam documentary suggests Ranganathan may well have been the tallest tamed elephant in Asia.
Ranganthan carried the main thidambu (idol) during Thrissur’s Arattupuzha Pooram from 1906 to 1914, until he was attacked by Akavoor Govindan, another elephant. While filming Ranganathan: Search for the Height — An Art Documentary, its creators Sooraj Nambiat and Sony Narayanan visited the house where the tusker succumbed to his wounds in 1917. “A scion in the family showed us the chains that were used to tie Ranganathan. They still preserve it as a tribute to the great elephant,” says Narayanan, the director.
