Hyderabad: Visitors at the Hyderabad Literary Festival were in for a surprise on Sunday when the tall, fair-skinned man carrying a backpack they mistook for a tourist, turned out to be wildlife champion and ‘Snake Man’ Romulus Whitaker.
In a fun session on the environment, Whitaker, a Padma Shri awardee, described himself as a hunter-turned-wildlife conservationist. He opened the talk with a song that featured names of several Indian cities, ‘Rail Gaadi’ by Harindranath Chattopadhyay. The song was used in the film ‘Ashirwad’.
Whitaker, accompanied by his wife Janaki Lenin, explained the couple’s deep connection with nature.
Whitaker moved at a young age from the US to Mumbai, India, where he attended a British academic school.
“From a sleepy village in northern New York state to Bombay; it was so wild and crazy. In America, kids couldn’t cross the street without holding their daddy’s hand. In India, you’d race across with no traffic — just cows, goats, sheep, and donkeys. It was an exciting experience for a kid,” the 81-year-old recalled, reflecting on his arrival in India in 1951.
:It felt like pure freedom. That’s when I learned to swim, dive, catch fish, work with fishermen and their children, and even learned to swear in Hindi and Marathi.”
Whitaker in a sense has a Hyderabad connection. He is the step-grandson of Harindranath Chattopadhyay, the brother of freedom fighter and former Governor Sarojini Naidu, and the doyenne of Indian handicrafts Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay.
Whitaker’s early interest in snakes was evident when he had a six-foot python living under his boarding school bed. “It was a strange school that allowed you to keep snakes under your bed! To be honest, I didn’t exactly tell them about it. I’d take it out now and then when no one was around to feed it; I quickly learned how to catch rats. Just outside the kitchen, there was a garbage dump, so I set a rattrap there — plenty of rats to catch,” he said.
Janaki Lenin spoke about the wealth of traditional knowledge, particularly that of the Irulas, a snake-catching community in Tamil Nadu.
“They’re known for their expertise in catching rats and snakes, but they also possess deep knowledge about termites, white-spotted mounds, lizards, mongooses, medicinal and edible plants. Sadly, this knowledge is now outlawed and dismissed,” Lenin said. “Indigenous communities across the country have an intuitive understanding of the natural world, but scientists only arrive later and publish their findings as if they’re discovering them for the first time,” said Janaki Lenin, who is an author and documentary filmmaker .
The couple also read out some portions from Whitaker’s book, ‘Snakes, Drugs and Rock N Roll’.
Fondly called ‘the snake man of India’, Whitaker has founded the Madras Snake Park, the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Trust and the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust.
