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The form and the proportions of that gizmo are those of a garden variety ankus. Nothing else.
Any discussions of a pangolin , whether it was or is a sacred animal in India miss the point. Nobody rides a pangolin.
Similarly, the question whether it is big enough to inflict some pain to an elephant is mistaken: trained elephant responds to the slightest cues from the mahout and pain is carefully avoided, otherwise it will only provoke the creature. In Thailand we had elephant ride near Chiang Mai, I spoke with the mahout and he showed me how he guided the creature with very slight touches. The spear at the end is for killing the elephant if it goes berserk for some reason: a stab just below ( or more precisely, caudally) the skull transsects the spinal cord and causes immediate paralysis. My mahout knew it theoretically, but he never heard of such occurences.
The size of this ankus in question may ( not will !) provide some ideas about the origin. African elephant is the biggest , at ~10 feet tall at the shoulders, Asian ( Indian), ~9 feet tall, Borneo ~8 feet , and the smallest Sumatran one between 7-8 feet tall. There used to be pygmy elephants on smaller islans ( Malta, Crete etc.) and the most recent one on Flores island (<6 feet, and Flores humans <5 feet tall) but they are all extinct. This is a very well known to any educated biologist phenomenon of “island dwarfism” due to restricted habitat and limited food resources.
One can scour the internet and check sizes of ankuses in India and compare them with the current one : if the latter is obviously smaller , one can have a point for its Indonesian origin. I am not very optimistic about this approach: the size of the ankus likely depends more on the size of the mahout:-), but this ankus is so simple and village-made, that there are no ethnic cues as to its origin.
Just an ankus, recent or contemporary
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