Review: Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll by Romulus Whitaker with Janaki Lenin
An intimate account of Romulus Whitaker’s childhood and youth, Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll is brutally honest about everything from his his affair with psychedelic drugs to his entanglements with half-a-dozen girls
When Romulus Whitaker, aged four, came home with a dead snake, his mother made him promise that he would never kill one, even though this particular snake – “a harmless garter” – was killed by his friends, and not Breezy, as his mother called him. A few days later, he came home with a live milk snake and his mother photographed him with it. Thus began his fixation with snakes.
Now 80, Whitaker is known for establishing the Madras Snake Park, the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and for conserving India’s rainforests, the habitat of many endangered species.
In the introduction to his autobiography, he writes, “As long as I can remember, snakes have been the focus of my fascination and love. I was so lucky to grow up in the northern New York countryside, where harmless snakes were common.”
He wasn’t the first one in the family to catch snakes. His aunt Violet would come home with her pockets stuffed with them. His mother Doris Norden reinforced his curiosity by presenting him the Boy’s Book of Snakes by Percy Morris as a Christmas gift when he was five years old. Years later, when he asked if his “dangerous passsion” had worried her, she said she had believed he would eventually outgrow this passion.
Whitaker’s parents divorced and in 1949, Norden married Rama Chattopadhyaya, the son of Kamaladevi (freedom fighter and comrade of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi) and Harindranath (poet, actor, politician). The family moved to Bombay two years later, where Rama dreamt of setting up a motion-picture colour processing lab. Before the big move, the thought on everyone’s mind was: how would a snake-smitten eight-year-old survive in the Land of Snakes?
In Bombay, Whitaker didn’t wait for his stepfather to keep his promise of bringing home a snake charmer; he befriended them on his own. He was baffled to see snakes dancing to the movement of the “been” (musical instrument) and wondered how they could hear musical notes when they have no ears and are hence deaf. Soon enough, he was putting his mother’s pillowcases to good use by catching snakes in them. His first pillowcase catch was a rat snake, but on his mother’s insistence he set it free. By then word had spread in the neighbourhood that Whitaker could be called to catch not only sparrows and rats but also snakes! This was his way of making a little pocket money on the side.
At boarding school in Kodaikanal, “the snake boy” struggled to cope with lessons, being one of the “slowest pupils in class”. However, he was very good at smuggling animals such as a mouse or a six-foot cobra into the dormitory or fielding questions from other kids about snakes. Once, he rescued a tiny kitten from a railway platform in Trichy and carried it all the way to Bombay to gift it to his cat-loving mother. The scrawny kitten was named Trichy and she turned out to be a gorgeous tortoiseshell Persian cat. When she was being introduced to the pet cobra, he almost swallowed her mistaking her for food. Later, the two became best friends.
By his fourteenth birthday, Whitaker was six feet tall, a pro at fishing, and dreamt of owning a motorcycle and conquering girls’ hearts. He also began to see the world through the eyes of animals, and while friends discussed their future plans of becoming pilots and joining the army, he was clear that he wanted to be a zoo curator or an extractor of snake venom. He enrolled at the University of Wyoming to pursue a course in wildlife management. By then, the indiscriminate killing of animals made him sick.
“I had thought of hunting as a noble endeavour, as a way of feeding people or eliminating a dangerous predator. This slaughter was unconscionable. For the first time, it occurred to me that jacklighting was unsporting and didn’t give animals a fair chance,” he writes.
When he landed in America in July 1961 to pursue college, he felt he didn’t belong. “I was more an Indian at heart than a Whitey. This cognitive dissonance has lasted all my life,” he confesses. Whitaker was homesick for India but had no money to buy a ticket back. He dropped out of college and took up the oddest of jobs – catching snakes, becoming a seaman, joining the army - to save up enough for his return trip.
During his adventurous journey, he encountered eastern diamondbacks, one of the heaviest venomous snakes in the world, indigo, America’s most aristocratic and non-venomous snake, and got bitten by an anaconda, the largest snake in the world, and a moccasin, America’s only venomous water snake.
He recalls, “…(moccasin) sank two white needle fangs into my right thumb… I didn’t even dare moan when my arm throbbed. On the way, I began to think of my first venomous snakebite as a rite of passage. Now I was a professional snake hunter…”
Unsurprisingly, the only job he truly enjoyed was with the famous snakeman, Bill Haast, at the Miami Serpentarium. Haast had survived 80 snakebites by then. When Whitaker was allowed to extract venom in the Miami serpentarium, he decided that he wanted to replicate this in India, the land of cobras. But before all that could happen, in 1965, he was inducted into the armed forces. Not wanting to kill people or get blown up in Vietnam, he procured a fake medical certificate in an attempt to wriggle out. He even rehearsed his talk before the committee about how valuable his work with snake venoms was and how this might help find a cure for cancer. The committee, however, saw through his fraud and Whitaker was eventually posted in the medical pathology department of a hospital in Texas. This was especially challenging as he is colour-blind – but he didn’t let anyone know this for fear of being sent to the battlefront.
An intimate account of his growing years, this book is brutally honest. It doesn’t leave out anything – his love for rock ‘n’ roll, his affair with psychedelic drugs or with half-a-dozen girls.
In his introductory note, Whitaker admits: “Many conservation pioneers started their careers as ardent hunters…this isn’t an anomaly. The world over, conservation has its roots in hunting. I’m perhaps the last of the dying generation of converts…”
Sixty years ago, he came closest to killing a leopard. Today, he is happy it was a failed attempt. “It would be dishonest to chronicle the awards and applause, and airbrush my bloodthirsty past… This is who I was, and still am to a large extent – contradictions, complexities and all,” he writes.
After six long years and a sea journey that lasted 54 days, in 1967, Whitaker returned to Bombay and to an apartment where famous actors Nargis and Sunil Dutt were his upstairs neighbours. He was home at last. “Every muscle relaxed in a way it hadn’t in the country of my birth...,” he says.
Whitaker’s autobiography was written with the help of his wife Janaki Lenin, author of My Husband and Other Animals and Every Creature has a Story. This page-turner which covers 24 years of the life of the Snakeman of India is an excellent read. Part 2 is eagerly awaited.
Lamat R Hasan is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.