Berlinski on "Woman Marries Snake"

I recently found myself entranced by an article by Mischa Berlinski, a 34-year-old novelist who traveled to India with his fiancé last year and ended up in a gripping adventure following Bimbala Das, a woman in a remote village who had married a snake because she thought she was cursed. The result, a thoughtful take on a much publicized, greatly misunderstood event, is “Woman marries snake: A peculiar Indian love story,” published in the November 2007 issue of Harper’s. Bimbala, who changed her caste in order to marry the reclusive reptile, became one of those strange news items that fade quicker than you can say “snakes on a plane.” But Berlinski had different ideas. He had just penned his first novel, Fieldwork, (which was a finalist for the National Book Award) and had notions of becoming a cultural anthropologist. So he hired a translator, and drove into a place so humid that his glasses fogged over. He answered a few of our questions about his adventure:

Why did you seek out Bimbala Das after reading her story in the news?

I think part of traveling in India is being confronted every single day with so many mysterious things. You're always asking yourself: Why does he dress like that or act like that? I wanted to try and get to the bottom of just one strange Indian story. That this story caught on in the West made the story even more interesting.

Where is Atala and how did you get there?

Atala village is about 15 kilometers from Bhubaneshwar, the capital of Orissa State. We came by train from Tamil Nadu, in the deep south. I don't know if you've ever taken an Indian train, but it's a wonderful experience. We rode second-class AC, and shared a compartment with a Mr. Aggarwal, Mr. Aggarwal's old college friend, and their families. (It was Mr. Aggarwal's theory that Bimbala married the snake "just to be famous," which as it turns out wasn't so far from the truth.) The children, as I recall, were very noisy, and like to jump from bunk to bunk. Outside the window, there were low flat rice paddies and sometimes a glimpse of the sea and little villages and always another crossing, with motorized rickshaws and motorcycles and bullock carts lined up waiting for us to go by.

Did you tell the people in the village that you were a writer? An anthropologist?

I told them I was a journalist. But I'm not sure that the distinctions between a writer, a journalist, and an anthropologist would have been meaningful at all to the people in Atala, and certainly not to Bimbala or her Guru. The thing that the people of Atala understood chiefly about me was that I was a foreigner, and white, and outside of the caste system. They organized me mentally first by this fact, then by my religion, and then by my marital status, far more than my profession.

How, as travelers do we become cultural anthropologists and does this give us certain responsibilities?

I think the most important thing one can do is simply talking with people about their lives – and chiefly those people who don't speak your language, who are furthest from you in every way.

Some of the techniques of the anthropologist can be very helpful in understanding people and place. I sometimes like to make genealogical charts, which is just a fancy way of talking to people about their families: how many children do they have; where are their brothers and sisters; have they always lived in the same place, or did they migrate there. This is something anybody can do, even somebody on vacation, and the results are often surprising: when I learned how many people in Bimbala Das' family had died prematurely, it began to make sense why the villagers thought she was cursed. Any willingness to do what local people do, rather than isolate oneself in a resort or hotel or package tour, is a step in the right direction.

There is a large debate within the anthropological world about the ethics of the profession. I understand that there are package tours to New Guinea that promise "first contact" with an hitherto untouched people. This is not anthropology in any sense of the word, just a kind of strange, masochistic (and sadistic) tourism. But not all foreign peoples live in fragile, easily disturbed societies–Bimbala Das didn't, for example–and it's a form of chauvinism to suppose that the arrival of foreigners such as ourselves could easily cause her little village or way of life to collapse.

After your trip to visit Bimbala, what do you think was generally misunderstood about her story?

Most everything. The most interesting aspect of the story, to me, was the one never reported anywhere: that nobody in India, or even in Atala village, had ever heard of a woman marrying a snake. The story was generally presented to the world as another case of those wacky Indians doing wacky things, but this marriage was as strange and unusual to almost every Hindu I met as it would be to the average American. The story was far stranger, but far more interesting than generally presented.

Photo: Louis Monier

Comments

[Gary]

Snake/human unions are destroying the sanctity of marriage!