TV REVIEWS : ‘Queen of Elephants’ Awash in Conflict

Last month brought that admirable documentary “Reflections on Elephants” on PBS. And at 12:30 p.m. Friday, CNN devotes a half hour to the desperate survival struggle of the African elephant. Yet casual viewers along with die-hard elephant-philes may find fault with tonight’s “Queen of the Elephants.”

This beautifully photographed, two-hour ride with English adventurer Mark Shand gives you a sense of the life-and-death conflict between the endangered Asian elephant and its modern environment in India. The elephant is now a symbol of devastation to Indians who once regarded it as a symbol of virtue.

But elephants almost become second bananas here to Shand himself and to Indian driver-trainer Parbati Barua, as she teachers her British guest how to ride these huge, graceful animals, which for thousands of years, she says, were this land’s “supreme work force.”

“Queen of the Elephants” impales itself on its own contradictions. On the one hand, Barua laments the demise of the elephants, as their traditional natural habitats increasingly become tea farms. You don’t doubt her sincerity or compassion. But on the other hand, as someone who learned from her father the art of capturing and training elephants to serve humans virtually as machines, she has contributed to their ruination in the wild, a conflict the program does not address.

It does relentlessly address Shand’s own feelings (“Gradually, I was slowing down, slowing down to the pace of the country. . . .”). But who cares? His journey across India by elephant takes three months. This program seems to take almost as long.