A fair bit has already been written (including this recent article) and said about the savarna gaze of the makers of the video in the song Enjoy Enjaami — that as on this moment has more than 78 million views on Youtube! The aesthetics of the video drawn heavily from African influences are unsettling enough, but right now I am thinking about a completely different aspect of the song — relating to the lyrics. More specifically, the lines — “vaango vaango onnaagi, Amma yi ambaari” — “Come as one, Riding on Elephants”
In my previous post, I had quoted these lines from “The Dravidian Languages” — “there is no evidence that the Indus valley people (like the Dravidians) knew of the lion and the horse; for the Aryans, the knowledge of the tiger and the elephant came much later”. It was not just the Tiger! The Aryans had no knowledge of the elephant either when they arrived. That knowledge too belonged to the Proto Dravidian Harappans! (Elephant seal from the Indus Valley Below)
‘The elephant occurs on 15 of the seals and in fact may be said to rank next in order of popularity to the bull’. We have also found elephant figurines with painted stripes mirroring some of the ritual customs to even this day.
The elephant symbolism can be related to the Sankissa Pillar of the Buddhist King Ashoka as well. Wikipedia describes it as an ancient city, that came into prominence at the time of the Buddha. It was at Sankissa, according to the stories, that Buddha returned to the earth. In the Jataka Tales too, it seems the Buddha appears as an elephant in at least one of the stories. And one can’t forget what Dr Ambedkar said — ‘The history of India, is a history of mortal conflict between Buddhism and Brahmanism’
And of course, the only political party that has as its core idealogy the “Social Transformation and Economic Emancipation” of the majority — the Bahujan Samaj Party, has as its symbol the glorious elephant!
Of course, the makers of the video probably thought it was about the African elephant *Eye Roll*. And of course, I would not be so reckless to claim that I know what Arivu was thinking about when he wrote those lines.
But they remain if nothing else, my favourite lines from the song — “Come as One, Riding on Elephants!”
