 "Born to be wild")
Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll: My Early Years
Author: Romulus Whitaker with Janaki Lenin
Publisher: Harper Collins
Pages: Paperback, 357 pages
Price: Rs 699
Romulus Whitaker is a legend, as the young people of today might put it, in the world of wildlife conservation. This memoir — hopefully instalment because we haven’t got to the conservation part yet — is a refreshingly honest recounting of a youthful wild life.
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The title —Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll — is not just an artistic stretch of a much-overused phrase. It is what it says.
Written with his wife, Janaki Lenin, a wildlife writer, Mr Whitaker starts with his connection to India, which began for him because his mother’s sister Elly, to whom he was very close, was married to an Indian, Abdul Razzack. As close, and then all-consuming, is the other love for which he is known — snakes, reptiles, nature, being out in the wild.
Mr Whitaker’s somewhat unconventional upbringing in the 1940s — he was born in 1943 — also added to the spirit he was born with. Luckily for him, his spirit was allowed to run free, not repressed into expected little boxes as has happened to so many children.
So we run and swim and hike and explore the countryside of New York State, as Mr Whitaker’s parents negotiate their marriage, divorce, marriage. His father moves away. His mother meets and falls in love with Rama, son of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and Hardindranath Chattopadhyaya. Mr Whitaker’s introduction to India is at the high end of the social scale of India’s Independence movement.
And an eight-year-old boy moves to Bombay and throws himself enthusiastically into life in a new country. Mr Whitaker is always curious, always adventurous, willing to try anything new. From an early age, he is a survivor, able to rough it out and improvise. It is this curiosity and passion that allows him to listen to his own drummer. The beaches of Juhu, the lives of fisherfolk, the upper strata of life at the “No Indians and Dogs” Breach Candy Club, he soaks it all in. The attraction is always towards the wild, though. Hunting, shooting and fishing attract him. But always snakes. From a young age, he showed an uncanny knack of being able to catch, examine and keep snakes. There are stories of how he made friends with snake charmers — cliched but delightful — and learnt a few tricks from them.
Mr Whitaker’s first encounter with Indian formal education was at Lovedale, which was still a military school. He hated it although he would later discover his short encounter with mindless discipline was useful when he was drafted into the US Army. From Lovedale to a missionary boarding school in Kodaikanal.
It should not sound from this that the telling of Mr Whitaker’s early years is a linear progression. Breaking rules and getting up to crazy stuff is a major part of it. Mr Whitaker comes across as a sort of free child — part Mowgli, part Tom Sawyer-Huckleberry Finn. As he grows older, he is part of the hippie, free world zeitgeist — but even that is fraught with contradictions when he is drafted. In many ways, it’s hard to believe that one person could have so many fascinating and extreme experiences, especially when you consider that this memoir ends when he’s in his 20s!
What of the Whitaker that he became, the conservationist that was part of the movement that began the journey to save India’s wildlife from itself? That person is always part of the story. In fact, if you’re just interested in life stories in general, then those details of snake-finding and catching and biting might get too much, because they are there in abundance. If you want a life of drugs and rock and roll, that’s in abundance too!
We see the beginning of the transition, from the hunter and killer, to the conservationist. Like so many of the type, Mr Whitaker began as a killer of animals, not a saviour. That came with later realisation and comprehension that humans were destroying the planet and its worth. We have yet to meet that Whitaker in toto, but we see glimpses of his future self.
Meanwhile, the tumultuous passage continues. To college in America, to tedium, to poverty and making do, to trying every drug available, to listening to David Crosby play live at a bar, to dropping out, making a living from catching snakes and reptiles to selling cutlery to becoming a shippie. It’s exhausting just reading about it!
If there is any criticism, it is that sometimes the recounting is too much. To read about the minutiae of catching one snake is exciting, the second exciting, the third scary, the fourth, well… So with the frisson of meeting the first girl he finds attractive, the second, by third… by the first sexual encounter and the next lady of the night and the next and the next, yawn. The first high, the second high, the endless pink elephants and psychedelic colours of the next high, well, thanks for all the fish.
Don’t take this as a turn off. In between this life of adventure, there are many valuable insights, from understanding racism to negotiating adulthood. Of immense courage and chutzpah and the right amount of dumb luck, which fills the reader with admiration, wonder and a smidgen of envy.
As with Oliver Goldsmith’s village, where he wonders “how one small head could carry all he knew”, you are amazed with the quantity of life Whitaker crammed into his early years.
The reviewer is an independent journalist who writes on the media, politics and social issues