Strange, True, Unbelievable?

BIRTH OF A SNAKE IN A HUMAN BODY
--Kanchi Paramacharya’s Views.

Sometime in 1958 there was a newspaper report that a Marwari woman in Rajasthan gave birth to a snake. On reading this, many dismissed the report as just sensational while some others remembered the Mahabharata where in the Adi Parva we hear about such an incident. According to the Mahabharata, Rishi Kashyapa had a wife by name Kadru who gave birth to several snakes like Vasuki, Dhananjaya, Karkotaka, Takshaka, Sesha etc. When some devotees of the Paramacharya came to Kanchi to have his darshan many years back, this point surfaced as a side issue during his talks with them. Paramacharya made the following interesting observations on ‘the birth of a snake in a human body’ which have been recorded in his magnum opus “HINDU DHARMA”.
I quote the relevant paragraphs in his own words:

“We distrust the Puranic story, according to which, Kashyapa had a wife called Kadru who gave birth to snakes. But many of you must have read a newspaper report last year [1958] of a snake born to a Marwari woman. When I read it I was reminded of another story.

It refers to a family I had heard about before I became a Swamigal. In that family neither the daughters nor the daughters-in-law wore screw pine flowers [which is called Ketaki in Sanskrit, Taale in Kannada and Tazhambu in Tamil] on their hair. When asked the reason for it, they told a ‘story’—but by story is not meant anything made-up

“Ten or fifteen years ago” one of the family members, a woman, said “a snake was born in our family. The family was ashamed of its birth and concealed the fact from others. But, all the same, it was brought up in the home, fed milk etc. This wonder child could not be taken out. The mother went out only when she had some work of utmost importance. There is a saying: If you are married to a stone, well, the stone is your husband. Likewise, if a snake is born to you, the snake is your child. One day the mother had to go to the wedding of a close relative.

There was an old woman in the house. We do not know who she was, whether she was the grandmother of the snake child. In those days the family cared for even distant relatives who were otherwise helpless. Nowadays children are over-anxious to leave their parents to set up their own households. The joint family was then still a strong institution. The old woman in our family was blind. The mother of the snake child left it to the care of this woman when she went to the wedding.

Before leaving for the wedding, the mother gave the following instructions to the old woman as to how to take care of the child:” There is no need to bathe the child or do up its hair. There is no need to dress it up or to carry it in your arms. All you have to do is to feed it regularly. Feed it with boiled milk. Boil the milk and put it in the cavity of the stone mortar. The snake will feed on it”. Probably the mother had trained the snake to be fed like this.
For a day or two, the old woman did as she had been told. But one day she probably over-slept and it was past the time to feed the snake. When the snake crept up to the mortar, it did not find any milk in it. It waited for sometime but soon fell asleep crouching in the mortar itself. It was then that the old woman brought the boiling milk. It had not been cooled and was piping hot. She could not naturally see the snake lying coiled in the mortar, as she poured the hot milk into it. The milk was too hot for the snake and it died in the mortar.

At the same time, the mother who had gone to attend the wedding had a dream in which the snake child appeared and said to her ‘Mother, I am dead. You come and cremate me amid the clump of screw pine. Hereafter no daughter or daughter-in-law in your family shall wear screw pine flowers on their hair’. From that day onwards, no one in our family has worn screw pine flowers” the woman said, concluding her story.

When I heard this account first I was astounded and wondered whether such things really happened. Many years later, after I had taken up Sanyasa, people belonging to that family in which the snake child was born came to see me. They did not come to speak about the snake child of the past. There was an old copper- plate inscription in their family. They had come to know about my interest in old inscriptions and they brought the copper-plate inscription for me to see. The inscription on it belonged to the time of King Achyutaraya of the Vijayanagar Empire who ruled the kingdom after Krishnadevaraya.

According to the copper plate-inscription, a Brahmin had distributed the land received from Achyutaraya among 108 fellow Brahmins. All the names and gotras are mentioned it, together with the subjects in which they were proficient. Among them figures the name of the ancestor of the people who came to see me, people descended from the family in which the snake child was born. The copper plate had come as a family heirloom through as many generations. An interesting fact emerging from the inscription was that the name of the ancestor mentioned on the copper plate was Nageshvara. I was told by my visitors that the family had a Nageshvara every successive generation.

I could guess at once that the name was associated with the snake child. It seemed to answer my doubts about its story. When I heard the newspaper last year of the birth of a snake to a woman, I had more reasons to believe the earlier story of the snake child”


B.M.N. Murthy



Article No. 468--Birth of a Snake in a Human Body
Created: Friday, October 17, 2008 10:53 PM