Full of Charm

Dear dedicated reader,

The staff of AIIS, the institute at which I’m studying, work exceedingly hard to keep us on our toes. While we routinely leave at 3 or 4, they stay until 7 at night, diligently preparing for the next day. Yesterday for my weekly “lecture” I talked about Margaret Atwood, my favorite author, and was struggling for the word for fiction. This morning, the teacher who was presiding over that class came and found me as I drank my morning chai and told me the correct word.

“It was bothering me all night,” she told me in Hindi.

When I say they keep us on our toes, I also mean literally. Every other week, we have a “monolingual” guest who comes to be interviewed by our class. Our first week, it was an autorickshaw-wala who recounted to us the irritations of taking around foreigners who aren’t able to speak in Hindi and who gave us advice on the best places to catch a rick in Jaipur.
This week, our guest was a snake charmer, in Hindi a “sapera”, who politely answered our questions about the perils and intricacies of snake-keeping. His story was an interesting one: He was raised in the snake-charming tradition and lives in an area of Jaipur where many folk artists stay – not only snake-charmers (though he says there are many others) but also folk dancers and artisans.

Most interestingly, according to his guru, snake charmers from his tradition only keep the snakes for a month because he believes it will bring bad luck to keep them for longer. This is one of the reasons that they don’t defang the snakes – they are going to release them into the wild again so they need to keep their teeth.

He discussed the way in which the venom is extracted from the snake’s fangs by means of a balloon attached to a small vial. The snake, biting the balloon, releases venom into the vial since it believes itself to be biting a small animal. He told us that from then on, they can only feed the snake cooked or raw meat – to feed it a live animal will cause it to release venom again.

Despite these precautions, we asked him if he’d ever been bitten when the snake was poisonous and he said that he had been taught to make a special medicine for when that happened. They apply a tourniquet to wherever the bite has occurred, most likely the hand or the foot, and then he takes this medicine which, in his description, sounded a lot like an ipecac made of herbs and tobacco. It causes him to throw up repeatedly, and in this way, they are able to avoid being killed by snake poison.

He talked a little bit about working the “tourist line” as he called it here in Jaipur. Snake charmers, we came to understand, used to exist primarily in the villages, going from house to house to collect donations from villagers who, in their devotion to Lord Shiva (whose animal is the snake), would support the craft of the saperas. These days, however, it’s not like that anymore and most snake charmers have shifted to the cities to work in tourist areas.

While summer is not the tourist season (due, as you may have guessed, to the extreme heat), he said that in winter he’ll see anywhere between 500 and 1500 tourists in a day. This, of course, is not limited to foreign tourists though obviously there are many – people come from all over India to see the City Palace which is where he usually sits. I asked him if he needed a license to secure a place, but he said no: overtime, if you go to the same place enough, other people will simply move away from you, and since he’d been going for the last 15 years, that was what had happened. Furthermore, he said, there is no license; however, occasionally a policeman would come and he’d have to pay them a bribe to continue to sit there without being harassed.

Finally, we asked him if he was teaching anyone else his craft. He said without much emotion that no, he wasn’t. He’d taught people to handle snakes but teaching them to catch them was tricky because they had to be very fast. One girl in our class asked if his children would become saperas like he had but he said that nowadays fewer people are becoming snake charmers, maybe only 10% of those who were before, and that his children were reading and studying for other professions.

When his interview was finished, he slowly took a basket from his plastic bag and placed it on the floor. We all leaned forward at our desks to see as he uncovered the basket and two large cobras emerged, hissing and striking at him, showing what seemed to me to be their extreme displeasure at being forced to lie on top of one another in this tiny basket.

He brought out his peculiar looking instrument made of a hollowed out gourd and began to play, swaying the end in time to his music. The snakes stood at attention, following the ends of the instrument with their eyes and enormous hooded heads and every so often striking out at it with a loud “hissssssssss”.

A crowd gathered as students from other classes came in to watch the tamasha (spectacle) before us. Everyone was possessed with a wary kind of excitement, bubbling up from their nervousness at the idea of two live cobras in the room!

When he had finished, he allowed a few students to come and touch the cobras. As one of our group put it “When else will be I be able to touch a cobra and live?”

Best,
Cat