What counts as scientific knowledge and how best to evaluate culturally diverse forms of expert knowledge practice are issues that have generated contentious yet productive debate. Arguing for a plural and inclusive understanding of science unconstrained by the colonising, historical prototype emerging from the European Enlightenment, this paper considers the status of knowledge about elephants in Sanskrit literature. Explored in the course of the author’s ethnographic research on captive elephant management in Nepal, this paper challenges the views of some scholars who have dismissed this literature as mere folklore and rhetorical fancy. Noting continuities and convergences with contemporary knowledge and practice, I draw on the work of Sanskrit literature specialists and elephant ecologists to assert the significance of a tradition of applied, systematized knowledge about elephants that fits well with current behavioural and physiological understanding. Finally then, I ask if we should consider the knowledge contained in this literature as scientific, and why it might matter if we do?