there was a King, Janamejaya, and his father was Parikshit. A snake king bit King Parikshit. So his son went to Sukhdev Muni and asked him to find some pitiless land, where he could hold a sacrifice.
He wanted all the sinful souls [that is, snakes] to come into this sacrificial fire.
So, King Janamejaya came wandering this way with his companions. Near Jahazpur is Nagola and a man there was irrigating with leather buckets, and in his wife’s arms was a six-month-old child. So the water kept overflowing and she thought, “The water is overflowing and the child is crying,” so she thrust her child in the place where the water came flowing through.5
King Janamejaya thought there could not be any place on earth with less compassion than this—if a mother could do such a thing. So this is the place where they held the snake sacrifice.
And nine lineages of snakes were wiped out in the sacrificial fire (havan). In that place is a stone image [of a snake].
We elicited and recorded another telling from a retired teacher who reported his age as seventy-six. Asked what he did, the man replied with much dignity: “I am old, I sit and sleep.” His father had been a fourth-class peon for the Jahazpur court before Independence; he himself had been posted as a teacher four times inside the town of Jahazpur. I asked about the transformation of the town’s name, “I heard it was Yagyapur—how did it become Jahazpur?” He did not answer the question even in a cursory way but simply launched into the heart of the “pitiless land,” skipping over even the epic king and his father:
It is said that some people wanted to do a sacrifice (yagya) and they thought, “where is this pitiless land where we can do a sacrifice?”
Thus wandering on their quest, they came to a place, [now called] Nagola. At this place, the people who were looking for a pitiless land, saw a man who was irrigating his field; his oxen were pulling the water from the well in leather buckets and his wife was building mud barricades to channel the water.
But the water kept breaking through her mud barrier and flowing into the beds [instead of through the irrigation channels as desired]. It just wasn’t stopping. When she saw that the water wouldn’t stop, she picked up her baby and thrust him into the gap, to block the water.
The people decided this had to be the pitiless place. Everyone thought, “How could a mother use her child to block the water? There couldn’t be any land more pitiless!”
Figure 3. Snake shrine in Nagola said to be site of King Janamejaya’s sacrifice.
In this sacrifice, they recited spells (mantras), and from the power of the mantras, all nine lineages of snakes arrived and dropped into the pit of their own accord, into the sacrificial pit. This place’s name was Nag Havan [Snake Oblations], and from that came the place name Nagola, and also Nagdi, the name of the river today.
This version omits all epic references but provides more detail about the agricultural laborer’s work and her extreme frustration. It charters not only the town’s name but the name of Jahazpur’s river, the Nagdi (Chapter 6).
The problematic attempt to exterminate snakes (normally revered if also healthily feared by rural Hindus) seems a fertile generator of additional stories set in the recent past. These stories might be categorized by folklorists as a Rajasthani version of “urban legends.” I found compelling an insistence on redress for the ancient violence perpetrated against snakes. We gathered several tales about a regional taboo on preparing the soil with a cultivating blade called kuli (which I’m told is particularly dangerous to snakes). In the stories, snakes themselves enforce the taboo, with sanctions ranging from fear to death.
An elderly Mina man in Borani, one of the outlying hamlets that belong to Jahazpur municipality, related the main tale and concluded: “This is why they used to call Jahazpur Yagyapur.” Bhoju Ram asked him if there existed any “proof” that the ancient sacrifice took place right here.
Here is how the old man answered that challenge: “Right now, even today, at Sarsia village, whenever the people were plowing their fields with a kuli, and not with a plow, snakes obstructed their kuli. The snakes do not bite, but they don’t let farmers use the kuli. So the farmers got together and made a golden kuli and did a sacrifice (yagya), and after that they were able to use kuli in their field. This is proof.” This puts a satisfying “nature bats last” coda to the snake sacrifice tale, allowing us to see it as ecological parable. It shows that humans ought to negotiate rather than exterminate, even to negotiate with a compensatory sacrifice. Note this is a sacrifice offered to snakes, a complete reversal of the prior sacrifice of snakes.
In the heart of Jahazpur qasba we interviewed a very old Vaishnavite priest, Mohandas Vairagi, and his grandson Ram Charan, who looked to be in his twenties. I began by asking about the origin legend of the Nagdi River, telling them I heard it was created “from the blood of snakes.” Ram Charan agreed to the truth of this. He went on to speak of current problems with snakes in the fields. This urban priestly family still cultivates farmland just outside Jahazpur town. “We don’t plow our fields with the kuli; if we do, then we have trouble and see lots of snakes…. One year I used the kuli, and I saw snakes every day. The next year, I stopped using it and we didn’t see nearly so many snakes.” I asked if this problem with the use of the kuli was true only in the area around the Nagdi Dam, but Ram Charan said it applied to the whole region.
Ann: So, is the kuli “forbidden?” [I employ the word pratibandh, which I learned when researching the prohibitions kings put on peasants such as “don’t wear gold” or “don’t eat white sugar.”]
Ram Charan: No, this [taboo] is something we embrace as moral duty (dharmik maneta).
Bhoju: Was there some event when someone tried to use the kuli?
Ram Charan: Yes, yes! There was someone who died! He was bit by a snake and died. And maybe five or seven years ago I tried myself to use the kuli and so many snakes appeared, beyond counting! I saw a black snake this thick [he demonstrates expansively with his fingers] after plowing with the kuli.
Bhoju: So after that you stopped using the kuli?
Ram Charan [an excitable fellow]: No, no, no! We don’t even say the word kuli!”
Bhoju [always persistent]: So now you never see any snakes?
Ram Charan: Well, yes, sometimes we see one; but at that time [when he had dared to employ a kuli] we sighted a snake every single day, one at least. I’ve seen these things with my own eyes.
The second tale in the pitiless land cycle has nothing to do with snakes or farming. It propels us directly into the urban realm of the market, by definition a realm of monetary transactions. This story draws on one figure, the well-known Shravan Kumar, who appears briefly in Hinduism’s other major epic, the Ramayana. Shravan Kumar’s story was often told immediately after the snake sacrifice story.6
In the classic Ramayana epic, Shravan Kumar’s story constitutes a fatal intervention in the plot. His figure remains revered as a model for filial service. He is known as the devoted son who carried his blind parents on pilgrimage and who was accidentally killed—mistaken for an elephant—by Lord Rama’s father King Dasaratha while on a youthful hunting excursion. Shravan’s parents curse Dasaratha to die in sorrow separated from his own beloved son—the same unhappy fate the young king’s
