I LOVE ANIMALS AND I LOVE HISTORY. SO IN A SENSE, THIS book combines everything I find interesting and worth fighting for. We often treat animals so badly and seldom stop to think what it is like to live in a world controlled by a species as selfish and...well, inhuman as human beings. Wild animals are routinely killed by trophy hunters or poachers despite laws that make hunting illegal both in India and in most countries across the world or they die in man-animal conflicts. Pets are starved or abandoned when they get old and sick, cattle are neglected and brutalized.
This book is an effort to look at the world from an animal's point of view. Most of these stories involve heroes we've all heard of, like Shivaji, Rana Pratap, Rani Durgavati, Alexander the Great and so on. We know all about their exploits, but the animals who helped them in their most decisive battles have typically remained in the background a cursory mention is all we get from history texts. This book is an effort to correct that historical wrong.
There are so many amazing animal stories in history that it would take Scheherazade's 1001 nights to chronicle all of them. What I have done is pick a few stories from Indian history that I personally found interesting. I have left out some famous examples - like Rani Lakshmibai's wonder horse, Badal - because they are too well known. Others made the grade because I wanted more than dogs, horses and elephants to crowd these pages. In some cases like Shivaji's dog, Waghya, and Rana Pratap's horse, Chetak - I picked the stories because they are backed by actual memorials that you can visit to this day.
If you're wondering what Alexander is doing in this collection, his dog and horse, Peritas and Bucephalus respectively, died in India and the cities named after them are located somewhere along the banks of the Jhelum and Ravi rivers. You might also wonder why so many of these stories conclude with the animals meeting a sad or violent end. That's because legends usually remember heroic animals, and heroism often comes at a great cost. Chetak has become a fabled mount because he died such a noble death. If he had simply grown old and died in his stable, he wouldn't be the blue horse that bards sing about to this day in Rajasthan.
Most of what I have written in this book is pure history. That's why each story has its historical source and context mentioned at the end. However, when you describe a battle you need to imagine how it must have looked to those who were actually fighting in it. So there are some elements of imagination as well, but the structure and main components of the stories are all grounded in historical fact.
And now, a confession. I had great fun writing this book because I have always wanted to burrow myself inside an animal's head to figure out what it's thinking. I do that with my dogs, but they are the world's biggest and most genial idiots, so their thoughts seldom go beyond, 'Chews! Biscuits! Walks! Play!' But to experience the rough and tumble of history, I needed to get inside the heads of some of its most well-remembered animals - fearsome war elephants, vicious hunting dogs, well-trained and battle-hardened horses, pampered royal pooches and parrots that held conversations with kings. In a sense it has given me a fresh vantage point to understand what happened not only to the human heroes who have driven the course of history but also to the animals who went along with them without having a say in any of it.
But now they do. I hope you enjoy their version of how things turned out.
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