Ghost elephants and the archive: Towards nonhuman histories beyond linear time

This paper examines a colonial-era memorial in Perak, British Malaya, commemorating a wild elephant killed in a collision with a train. Surviving archival records present a historical puzzle: a linear reading suggests the memorial likely conflates two separate elephant-train incidents in different times. The paper then asks what becomes visible when the same material is read through the Malay frontier's multi-temporal belief systems – one where the elephant is regarded as a richly temporal subject, a being whose significance could organise landscape and memory beyond its death. Drawing on pre-Islamic Malaya's syncretic belief systems and conceptions of time, chiefly the logic of kramat and the figure of the ghost elephant, the paper argues that the memorial's temporal disjuncture, rather than remaining contradictory, becomes historically coherent when read through this framework rather than linear historiography alone. Taking local logics seriously as a historiographical method can recover a historical intelligibility otherwise foreclosed – offering one approach to history that exceeds the empirical reach of the material archive.