Present Past

Everybody loved her, it was hard to let her go, but when 72-year-old Ambika’s osteoarthritis got so bad that she became practically untreatable, they had to put her to sleep. For 59 years, Ambika, an Asian elephant, had been a rare treat for visitors at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington. She was born in India around 1948, captured in Coorg’s forests when she was eight and sent off across the oceans in 1961 as a “gift from the children of India”. But Ambika is not the only jumbo to make a journey as a diplomatic overture. In 1949, Nehru sent Indira—a baby pachyderm named after his daughter—as a gift to Japan.