Execution by elephant, or Gunga Rao, was a method of capital punishment in South and Southeast Asia, particularly in India, where Asian elephants were used to crush, dismember, or torture captives during public executions. The animals were trained to kill victims immediately or to torture them slowly over a prolonged period. Most commonly employed by royalty, the elephants were used to signify both the ruler's power of life and death over his subjects and his ability to control wild animals.
The sight of elephants executing captives was recorded in contemporary journals and accounts of life in Asia by European travellers. The practice was eventually suppressed by the European colonial powers that colonised the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. While primarily confined to Asia, the practice was occasionally used by European and African powers, such as ancient Rome and ancient Carthage, particularly to deal with mutinous soldiers.
Cultural aspects Historically, the elephants were under the constant control of a driver or mahout, thus enabling a ruler to grant a last-minute reprieve and display merciful qualities. Several such exercises of mercy are recorded in various Asian kingdoms. The kings of Siam trained their elephants to roll the convicted person "about the ground rather slowly so that he is not badly hurt". The Mughal Emperor Akbar is said to have "used this technique to chastise 'rebels' and then in the end the prisoners, presumably much chastened, were given their lives". On one occasion, Akbar was recorded to have had a man thrown to the elephants to suffer five days of such treatment before pardoning him. Elephants were occasionally used in trial by ordeal in which the condemned prisoner was released if he managed to fend off the elephant.
The use of elephants in such fashion went beyond the common royal power to dispense life and death. Elephants have long been used as symbols of royal authority (and still are in some places, such as Thailand, where white elephants are held in reverence). Their use as instruments of state power sent the message that the ruler was able to preside over very powerful creatures who were under total command. The ruler was thus seen as maintaining a moral and spiritual domination over wild beasts, adding to their authority and mystique among subjects.
Geographical scope
Asia
Southeast Asia Elephants were used for execution in Burma (now Myanmar), the Malay Peninsula, and Brunei in the pre-modern period as well as in the kingdom of Champa.Schafer, Edward H. "The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics". University of California Press, 1985. p. 80. ASIN: B0000CLTET In Siam, elephants were trained to throw the condemned into the air before trampling them to death. There exists an account in the 1560s of men being trampled to death by elephants in Ayutthaya due to their unruly behaviour.
The use of elephants for execution was reported in Aceh by a French merchant, François Martin. Under the rule of Sultan Alauddin Ri'ayat Syah Sayyid al-Mukammal (r. 1589–1604), an adulterous couple was thrown to the elephant and stomped to death. This custom also existed in Aceh, a mercenary in 1648 noted in his account that the Queen of Aceh Taj ul-Alam placed sentenced on a Dutch ambassador to die by elephant execution as he demanded to see the Queen's face, which was against the rule of the land; it was common for the elephant to throw the criminal in the air, land him on its trunks and shake him until he is dead.
Alexander Hamilton provides the following account from late 17th/early 18th century Siam:
The journal of John Crawfurd records another method of execution by elephant in the kingdom of Cochinchina (modern south Vietnam), where he served as a British envoy in 1821. Crawfurd recalls an event where "the criminal is tied to a stake, and [Excellency's favourite] elephant runs down upon him and crushes him to death."Crawfurd, John. "Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-general of India to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China". H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830. p. 419.
South Asia
India
Hindu and Muslim rulers in India executed tax evaders, rebels and enemy soldiers alike "under the feet of elephants". The Hindu Manu Smriti or Laws of Manu, written sometime between 200 BCE and 200 CE, prescribed execution by elephants for a number of offences. If property was stolen, for instance, "the king should have any thieves caught in connection with its disappearance executed by an elephant." For example, in 1305, the Sultan of Delhi turned the deaths of Mongol prisoners into public entertainment by having them crushed by elephants.Jack Weatherford-Genghis Khan, p.116
During the Mughal era, "it was a common mode of execution in those days to have the offender trampled underfoot by an elephant."Natesan, G.A. The Indian Review, p. 160 Captain Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1727, described how the Mughal ruler Shah Jahan ordered an offending military commander to be carried "to the Elephant Garden, and there to be executed by an Elephant, which is reckoned to be a shameful and terrible Death".Hamilton, p. 170. The Mughal Emperor Humayun ordered the crushing by elephant of an imam he mistakenly believed to be critical of his reign.Eraly, p. 45. Some monarchs also adopted this form of execution for their own entertainment. The emperor Jahangir, another Mughal emperor, is said to have ordered a huge number of criminals to be crushed for his amusement. The French traveler François Bernier, who witnessed such executions, recorded his dismay at the pleasure that the emperor derived from this cruel punishment. Nor was crushing the only method used by execution elephants; in the pre-Mughal Sultanate of Delhi, elephants were trained to slice prisoners to pieces "with pointed blades fitted to their tusks". The Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta, visiting Delhi in the 1330s, has left the following eyewitness account of this particular type of execution by elephants:Battuta, "The travels of Ibn Battuta", transl. Lee, S, London 1829, pp. 146-47
Other Indian polities also carried out executions by elephant. The Maratha Chatrapati Sambhaji ordered this form of death for a number of conspirators, including the Maratha official Anaji Datto in the late seventeenth century.Eraly, p. 479. Another Maratha leader, the general Santaji, inflicted the punishment for breaches in military discipline. The contemporary historian Khafi Khan reported that "for a trifling offense he [Santaji] would cast a man under the feet of an elephant."Eraly, p. 498
The early-19th-century writer Robert Kerr relates how the king of Goa "keeps certain elephants for the execution of malefactors. When one of these is brought forth to dispatch a criminal, if his keeper desires that the offender be destroyed speedily, this vast creature will instantly crush him to atoms under his foot; but if desired to torture him, will break his limbs successively, as men are broken on the wheel."Kerr, p. 395. The naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon cited this flexibility of purpose as evidence that elephants were capable of "human reasoning, [rather] than a simple, natural instinct".Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc. "Natural history of man, the globe, and of quadrupeds". vol. 1. Leavitt & Allen, 1857. p. 113.
Such executions were often held in public as a warning to any who may transgress. To that end, many of the elephants were especially large, often weighing in excess of nine tons. The executions were intended to be, and often were, gruesome. They were sometimes preceded by torture publicly inflicted by the same elephant used for the execution. An account of one such torture-and-execution at Baroda in 1814 has been preserved in The Percy Anecdotes:
The use of elephants as executioners continued well into the latter half of the 19th century. During an expedition to central India in 1868, Louis Rousselet described the execution of a criminal by an elephant. A sketch depicting the execution showed the condemned being forced to place his head upon a pedestal, and then being held there while an elephant crushed his head underfoot. The sketch was made into a woodcut and printed in "Le Tour du Monde", a widely circulated French journal of travel and adventure, as well as foreign journals such as Harper's Weekly.Harper's Weekly, February 3, 1872
The growing power of the British Empire led to the decline and eventual end of elephant executions in India. Writing in 1914, Eleanor Maddock noted that in Kashmir, since the arrival of Europeans, "many of the old customs are disappearing – and one of these is the dreadful custom of the execution of criminals by an elephant trained for the purpose and which was known by the hereditary name of 'Gunga Rao'."Maddock, Eleanor. "What the Crystal Revealed". American Theosophist Magazine, April to September 1914. p. 859.
Sri Lanka
Elephants were widely used across the Indian subcontinent and South Asia as a method of execution. The English sailor Robert Knox, writing in 1681, described a method of execution by elephant which he had witnessed while being held captive in Sri Lanka. Knox says the elephants he witnessed had their tusks fitted with "sharp Iron with a socket with three edges". After impaling the victim's body with its tusks, the elephant would "then tear it in pieces, and throw it limb from limb".Knox, Robert. "An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon". London, 1681.
The 19th-century traveler James Emerson Tennent comments that "a Kandyan [Sri Lankan] chief, who was witness to such scenes, has assured us that the elephant never once applied his tusks, but, placing his foot on the prostrate victim, plucked off his limbs in succession by a sudden movement of his trunk."Tennent, p. 281. Knox's book depicts exactly this method of execution in a famous drawing, An Execution by an Eliphant.
Writing in 1850, the British diplomat Henry Charles Sirr described a visit to one of the elephants that had been used by Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, the last king of Kandy, to execute criminals. Crushing by elephant had been abolished by the British after they annexed the Kingdom of Kandy in 1815 but the king's execution elephant was still alive and evidently remembered its former duties. Sirr comments:Sirr, Sir Charles Henry, quoted in Barrow, George. "Ceylon: Past and Present". John Murray, 1857. pp. 135–6.
West Asia During the medieval period, executions by elephants were used by several West Asian imperial powers, including the Byzantine, Sassanid, Seljuk, and Timurid empires. When the Sassanid king Khosrau II, who had a harem of 3,000 wives and 12,000 female slaves, demanded as a wife Hadiqah, the daughter of the Lakhmid king Na'aman, Na'aman refused to permit his Christian daughter to enter the harem of a Zoroastrian; for this refusal, he was trampled to death by an elephant.
The practice appears to have been adopted in parts of the Muslim Middle East. Rabbi Petachiah of Ratisbon, a 12th-century Jewish traveler, reported an execution by this means during his stay in Seljuk-ruled northern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq):Benisch, A. (trans). "Travels of Petachia of Ratisbon". London, 1856.
Europe Perdiccas, who became regent of Macedon on the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, had mutineers from the faction of Meleager thrown to the elephants to be crushed in the city of Babylon.Fox, Robin Lane. "Alexander the Great". Penguin, 2004. p. 474. The Roman writer Quintus Curtius Rufus relates the story in his Historiae Alexandri Magni: