The Uncharming Truth About Dancing Snakes

(Content note - animal cruelty)

I ought to be ashamed to admit (but am not really, because who doesn't find a stupid idea in their own head occasionally?) that I have a very Bollywood-influenced idea of snake charming, or had until very recently.

There was a spate of very late 80s/early 90s Hindi movies about snakes and people who could charm them; there are earlier examples too, but it seems to me to have been a bit of a trend about that time. The snake is generally a shapeshifter on a revenge mission against somebody who has killed their child and/or partner, and this may or may not be treated sympathetically - ie., the snake can be an innocent victim of evil humans, or it can be cruelly destroying the lives of innocent humans for things that aren't really their fault. You can read about a few of these movies here, amongst other things tagged 'snakes', which I know nothing about.

My favourite movie of this - is it stretching it to say genre? - is Tum Mere Ho (You Are Mine), starring my indisputably favourite actress of all time, Juhi Chawla, and her frequent co-star, Aamir Khan. In this movie, the snake-lady is kind of understandable, but ultimately Mean and Evil, and the snake charmers are heroes. This definitely...influenced me somewhat.

A small share of the blame must also go to one of my favourite shows as a child, The Herbs, which predated me by decades but was available on VHS and played a thousand times in my house. It featured a snake-charmer character who I adored, and so probably planted a seed of admiration for their activities early on.

So you can imagine my excitement to see a REAL! Snake Charmer in Jaipur. With an actual snake in a basket! He played a tune on his pungi and the surprisingly cute snake ventured its head out of the basket and weaved around a little. We were on our way somewhere else (one of the disadvantages of taking a group tour is that you are always highly regimented and on your way somewhere else), so it wasn't a long performance, but our tour guide gave him several hundred rupees and then destroyed my naive image of his activities by saying: "They remove the poison from the snakes and it makes them [docile]." (I am not completely sure about the last word, hence the square brackets.)

Don't ask me what I thought was going on before - the snake charmer was...charming the snake? To be honest, I think I had some vague idea that the snakes responded to the vibrations produced by the music or something. I didn't think it was actually magical, but I did think there was some scientific coincidence to explain it without too much horror.

What actually happens is usually that the snake has had its venom or fangs or both removed, before being trapped in a box or basket, which is not exactly its ideal environment. It may be starved or dehydrated to ensure its further reluctance to attack. However, it does see the snake charmer as a threat (wouldn't you, if someone had ripped out your teeth and locked you in a basket?) so its "dance" is actually defensive posturing, presumably an attempt to protect itself from yet more harm. The whole process is already illegal in India, and has been since 1991, though it remains legal in several other countries.

The other side of this, of course, is that snake "charming" is a traditional, hereditary occupation associated with certain castes, who are now marginalised due to the sidelining of their former occupation. They have other skills, not least their music and traditional medicine, but still struggle with the loss of the ability to practice their art.

I don't have any suggestions for what to "do" about snake charming. It's already on its way out, and, while the internet is full of articles encouraging tourists not to engage or take photographs, I'd be a bit of a hypocrite to demand that you follow that advice, given that I was doing just that a week ago. Also, it seems like snake charmers do not have an easy life, and in the absence of anything I can do to improve their lot, I don't particularly want to advocate for increasing their poverty, either. I'm just here to tell you the snakes aren't charmed, and you shouldn't be, either.

Sources:

(Warning - disturbing pictures in this one.)