Nāgas are snake-like creatures that exhibit a complex and dynamic combination of cobra, human, divine, and other characteristics. They are foundational to South Asian traditions, appearing in stories, images, and practices across the region’s diverse religious communities for over two millennia.
This panel presents an edited book project bringing together stories, images and performances which enable us to catch glimpses of how nāgas live, look and feel in the manifold worlds, religious traditions and cultures they inhabit. The time and area that will be covered in our book ranges from the earliest textual and visual traces of nāgas to the spread of their iconography and mythology across different parts of South Asia, where, in some cases, they blend with other water and serpent beings already present there.
Naiṇī or Nāginā devī is the name of nine mythical serpent sisters who rule as goddesses and mothers over the Pindar river valley in Uttarakhand, India. They establish their rule and their kinship ties to the human people through half-year long journeys, during which they take the shape of bamboo poles clothed with saris. Their serpenthood sets the Naiṇīs into a relation to other serpent deities and spirits called nāg all over South Asia (and far beyond). In this paper, I aim to figure out the place of these local deities within a larger nāgasphere, exploring what they have in common with other nāginīs and nāgas, and what distinguishes them. Especially important are their relation to the Earth and to an Underworld, their connection to fresh water resources and to trees, their enmity to the Garuḍa bird, and their relation to widely known nāga kings such as Kāliya and Vāsuki.
Nāgas are imaged as goddesses in South Indian Hinduism, where they enjoy enormous popularity due to their connection with fertility, healing, and auspiciousness. Nāga worship is also prescribed by astrologers to relieve nāga dōṣam, the astrological “blemish” caused by harming/killing snakes. Linked with late marriage and infertility, nāga dōṣam manifests in ill-fated configurations of the planetary deities Rahu and Ketu in one’s horoscope. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on nāga traditions in South India, this paper describes the multiple manifestations that nāgas may take and analyzes the rich repertoire of their worship. It also considers the tiered, ticketed pūjās to pacify Rahu and Ketu offered at the Srikalahasti temple. While these “one and done” rituals have emerged as attractive alternatives to more complex and time-intensive redressals for dōṣam, this paper suggests that shifting devotional tastes and consumption practices have contributed to decentering snakes in contemporary rituals to relieve this condition.
In previous translations of Buddhist stories, the Buddha is sometimes described as having “tamed” various nāgas, whose capacity for awakening in that lifetime is prevented by their animal birth. Yet visual narratives seem to show that artists carved such interactions with more nuance. Across early Buddhist sculptures, ancient artists represented the different bodily form of nāgas in visual narratives through their unique ability to maintain cobra form and take the form of a human body. In one Sanchi pillar scene, the artist has represented the Buddha’s encounter with a nāga as the head of a majestic and fearsome cobra peering out from behind a stone shrine representing the Buddha. Rather than “taming” the nāga there, the Buddha is written to have met the heat of the nāga’s fire, emblematic of his inability to restrain his anger, with his iddhi, matching "fire with fire".
This presentation draws on published scholarship and fieldwork in Vidarbha, central India, to consider the transformation of how Ambedkarite Indians have understood nāga figures in the past seventy years. In The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables (1948), B.R. Ambedkar offered a self-consciously speculative reconstruction of Nagas as an ancient group of humans in central India, as part of an effort to establish ancient Buddhist roots for Dalits or so-called Untouchables who would eventually convert (reconvert, in Ambedkar’s view) to Buddhism in 1956. Since then, Ambedkar’s reading of naga history has been widely adopted by Ambedkarites as a disenchanted view of nāgas that also functions mythically (as a use of a historically unverifiable past) to enable Ambedkarites to offset Hindu nationalist historiography. These views of nagas are further complicated when interacting with Japanese Buddhist collaborators whose interpretations of nagas are very different.