The worship of nature has been a practice in India since ancient times. Our ancestors without making a big show out of it were more aware of the environment than we are today. It would be quite hard to find anything that they did not worship. Fire, air, water, trees, animals, birds –they revered everything. Today we too worship all of these but we restrict ourselves to homas and pujas. Most of us have absolutely no qualms about environment pollution, are not concerned about preservation of trees and have no sense of ecological balance.
Be that as it may, one of the many gods worshipped in India is the powerful and much feared Naga Devata – the cobra. This god’s curse was and still is considered as the cause of many a woe and misery. If one doesn’t get married, doesn’t have children, contracts an incurable disease – all are attributed to ‘naga-dosha’. It is considered that the person has done something to incur the wrath of the Snake-God. Amends have then to be made by some elaborate ritual or puja to appease the god.
One day is specifically assigned to the worship of the Naga. This is the fifth day in the month of Shravana and is known as Naga Panchami. This festival is supposedly to commemorate Lord Krishna’s victory over a serpent called Kalia but it is the serpent god who is worshipped on this day. The story goes like this.
Kalia was a dreaded snake which had made the river Yamuna his home. His poison had spread all over the river making life difficult for the people there. The child Krishna took upon himself to get rid of Kalia. He danced upon the multi-hooded Kalia and the serpent was forced to leave the place and take refuge elsewhere.
A strange custom is offering milk which is not a snake’s natural food. This is probably because the Naga is considered a god and the milk is an offering to the deity. In temples there is usually a separate enclosure for the nagas, and the naga idols there are bathed with milk on this day.
Anantha, Vasuki, Takshaka, Karkotaka and Pingala are the five snakes that are worshipped on the day of Naga Panchami. The regard for the snake is so high in Hindu tradition that it is associated with prominent deities. Lord Vishnu rests on a snake, Adishesha also known as Anantha. Lord Shiva has a snake coiled around his neck and Lord Ganesha has a serpent tied to his waist. Vasuki let himself be coiled around the Mandara Mountain so that the devas and asuras could churn the ‘Ocean of Milk’ to collect Amruth, the nectar of immortality.
A deplorable practice around the time of this festival is snake-charming. Though the Indian Wildlife Act, 1972 prohibits this activity, it is actively practised even today. A snake is kept in a basket and when the charmer starts playing a flute-like instrument, it raises its hood and starts making movements resembling a dance. Snakes cannot hear the way humans do and they are actually responding to the charmer’s movements. The fangs of such snakes are usually removed which makes it hard to kill prey; or their mouths are sewed which makes eating difficult.
When we literally worship the snake, shouldn’t we be equally considerate to the living snake and care more about it? Shouldn’t we preserve the forests, the habitat of the snakes and let these reptiles and all wildlife dwell in peace? Surely a thought worth pondering over, on the occasion of Naga Panchami.
Author: Pratibha Shenoy (Bangaluru)
