New Delhi, April 23 -- Imagine a marketplace for domesticated animals. Over the decades, two dominant merchant groups have come to rule it. Call them X, those who grew up with these animals and understand their temperament and seasonal moods, and Y, a group of shrewd outsiders who spotted the market's potential early, brought capital from distant lands and learnt the trade well enough to profit off it. Both have accumulated what the market prizes most: elephants and horses.

Elephants have dominated the profit pool league. The finest among them, the tuskers, fetched premiums that other animals could only dream of. Owning these meant owning the market itself. Horses were the other great bet-faster but more volatile. And horses occasionally...