Oscar win for ‘The Elephant Whisperers’

Oscar win for ‘The Elephant Whisperers’

Subject :Environment

Section: Species in news

Context: Indian documentary The Elephant Whisperers emerged as the winner in the Best Documentary Short category at the 95th Academy Awards, among the five films nominated.

More on the News:

• The documentary shows the lives of Bomman and Bellie, two Indigenous people entrusted with the care of two orphaned baby elephants, Raghu and Ammu. It portrays the bond between the elephants and the couple as they nurture the calves.
• The film also highlights the stunning beauty of Tamil Nadu’s Mudumalai National Park and gives a peek into the lives of the Kattunayakan, an indigenous community that inhabits parts of South India.
• It also emphasises the importance of involving indigenous communities in the process of conservation.
• The documentary also sheds light on the incessant human-animal conflict, with Raghu losing his mother to electrocution and Bellie losing her partner to a tiger attack.
• The film is also the first Indian production that has won an Academy Award for the Documentary Short category.

Kattunayakan tribes:

• Kattunayakan is one of the tribes who had been the true inhabitants of forest. As the name indicates they were once the kings of jungles. They rarely mix with other tribes and still follow black magic and sorcery.
• They are completely dependent on forest and forest products and subsist on honey, roots and barks of plants and what small animals that they trap or fell with their bows and arrows. They are also known as Then Kurumas as they collect honey from the forest.
• They follow a religion which is strongly rooted in their culture and worship animals, birds, trees, rocks and snakes and almost everything natural. They also worship their ancestors.
• The physical features of hill-tribes are very obvious in them and their language is a mixture of all Dravidian languages.
• The Kattunayakan community is found nowadays in Wayanad, Kozhikode and Malappuram districts. While they are called Kattunayakan in Wayanad, those belonging to interiors of Nilambur of Malappuram district are called Cholanaickan and those who live in the plains of Malappuram district are called Pathinaickans.

For Mudumalai Tiger Reserve refer https://optimizeias.com/mudumalai-tiger-reserve-2/