Snakes, song, sensuality: Tales of the jungle
Editor’s note: When we lose forests, we don’t just lose trees but a compendium of folklore and tribal traditions—that include the culinary, musical, medicinal and sartorial. Naturalist Stephen Alter offers a glimpse of the riches of India's forests—sexy poetry included. This excerpt has been published with permission from ‘The Cobra’s Gaze: Exploring India’s Wild Heritage’ by Stephen Alter, published by Aleph Book Company.
In many cultures, the forest is seen as a place of romance and lovemaking, where a couple finds privacy behind curtains of leaves. The wildness of this natural setting also suggests an escape from the constraints and conventions of society. The fecundity of the forest, with its foliated shadows, entangled vines, and fragrant flowers, elicits an erotic allure. The jungle harbours many hidden places—caves, waterfalls, and sheltered glens—where lovers can meet in secret, surrounded by flora and fauna that symbolise emotional and physical aspects of human sensuality and desire.
Folk tales and folk songs often use this imagery in subtle and suggestive ways to tell different stories of love. Verrier Elwin came to India in 1927 as a Christian missionary and then, after briefly becoming a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, gave up on prudish pieties and immersed himself in tribal society.
He fell in love with a young Gond woman, Kosi, whom he married. Some years later, after they divorced, he was married again, to Lila, also a Gond. A proponent of indigenous culture, Elwin compiled several volumes of folklore from different regions of the country. One of these is Folk Songs of the Maikal Hills, a compendium of lyrics from the Baiga and Gond communities in Central India, translated by Elwin and Shamrao Hivale.
The majority of these songs are about love—its lusty passions, physical pleasures, unrequited yearnings, cruel infidelities, and tragic betrayals. In all of these songs we find simple and frank depictions of sexual relations as well as deeply felt emotional bonds, most of which play out against or within a forested landscape. Here, we find expressions of love in its most innocent, ardent form.
Look at me with the strong eyes of youth
In the cold days the trees are flowering
The wind blows among the hills
Bending the tree-tops
Take my hand, come with me
For you have conquered me
With the strong eyes of youth.
Elwin tells us that most of these songs accompanied folk dances performed during festivals and celebrations. The voices are both male and female, often calling back and forth to each other. They move in rhythm to the ecstatic tempo of drums that animate the dancers and arouse their passions.
Raja, my heart is mad for you
I have gone mad for you
But you have left the warm bed in my house
Where will you find such warmth outside?
You have left me all alone
You would eat roots and fruit outside
Come, my madman, let us go together to the forest.
Green is the green hill
Yellow are the bamboos
Green is the kalindar creeper
Karanda flowers are in my hair
Where in the forest will I find my Raja?
My heart burns for him
Where in the forest will I find my madman?
Some of the folk songs contain explicit references to specific birds, mammals, and insects associated with lovemaking. Impotent husbands are compared to a lamp without a wick that attracts no moths. Hunters with bows and arrows stalk deer just as lovers pursue their sexual partners. Within the jungle, human beings copulate with the same unrestrained instincts and impulses of wild creatures.
Play without fear
Play, dwellers in the jungle
Over you the sun passes like a wave
In the forest the clitoris-bird is feeding
The herdsman drives out his cow
There the deer are grazing
The herdsman’s girl drives out her cow
There the deer are grazing
As fresh as new leaves of ganja
Like a wave the sunlight bathes you.
Elwin annotates his translations when the meaning or context is unclear. ‘The titi or clitoris-bird (probably the red-wattled lapwing),’ he explains, ‘is the subject of several folk tales generally on the lines of a human girl who, finding herself without adequate sexual equipment, persuades the bird to lend her its clitoris and never returns it.’
While snakes are usually considered symbols of male sexuality in most cultures, within the folklore of Gond and Baiga communities, they are often associated with female beauty and desire.
Lying on their bed the two embrace
The girl is lovely as a cobra...
The girl with cobra eyes
Drew him after her
Do not bite him, girl
I will wait, I will wait
By the river.
While there is something dangerous, perhaps even fatal, in the cobra’s gaze, the besotted lover cannot resist. He is entranced and calls to her again and again, anxiously awaiting the serpent’s arrival.
You are coming very slowly, why do you delay
O my black cobra?
I have brought you anklets, measured to your feet
Why do you delay, O my black cobra?
I have brought you a sari, measured to your body
Why do you delay, O my black cobra?
I have brought you armlets, measured to your arms
Why do you delay, O my black cobra?
You are coming very slowly, why do you delay
O my black cobra?
These folk songs were recorded more than sixty years ago, when the forests of India were far more extensive and considerably less disturbed than they are today. Adivasi cultures have also undergone drastic changes since the time when Elwin and Hivale collected these songs. And yet, as we read the lyrics and imagine the pulsing rhythms of dancing feet, lithe figures swaying in the firelight, we can appreciate the raw passions that echo in these songs. With the destruction of forests, we have lost more than just wild habitats for threatened species, but also the lovescapes of our primal yearnings.
