Romulus Whitaker recalls a rather imprudent experiment he often conducted at school, which involved mixing ammonia water and iodine crystals. “While it is still wet, it is fine. As soon as it dries out, however, it will explode,” he says at the Bengaluru release of his book Snakes, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll, a hilarious, enthralling account of his rather eventful early life.
Thankfully, his explosive-making career ended while he was still at school, the only major ramification being the singeing of his eyebrows and hair during one of these experimentation sessions. “I was lucky not to have been blinded. That God of Idiots still smiled upon me,” he writes in the book, the first volume of his autobiography.
The munificence of this preposterous divine power comes up again in the laughter-filled event at Champaca Bookstore in Vasanth Nagar, Bengaluru, where the book was launched. “You must have prayed a lot to that god. At least in those first 24 years,” says ecologist Suhel Quader, whom Whitaker and his co-author (and wife) Janaki Lenin were in conversation with at the session. “I still do,” responds Whitaker with a guffaw.
Romulus Whitaker, Janaki Lenin with Suhel Quader on SNAKES, DRUGS AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL. | Photo Credit: MURALI KUMAR K
An exciting life
As a young man, Whitaker seemed to have a habit of getting himself in trouble. Some were even life-threatening – from shooting himself while hunting cottontail rabbits to trying out peyote cacti, getting snagged by a fishhook and carrying a snake on a flight in a paper bag. “There are a lot of adventures, things that are not advisable for you to try at home,” agrees Quader, summarising the book, which captures Whitaker’s life from his exploits as a child to his early twenties.
Whitaker’s book sheds light on his early years growing up in the U.S., his later childhood and schooldays spent in India and his brief attempt at college in the U.S. “Just like high school on a bigger scale. It was so boring,” he recalls
He soon dropped out of college and embarked on a series of eclectic jobs over the next few years, including a two-week-long career as a travelling salesman, an even-briefer stint at a catering company, some adventures at sea, a rather enjoyable job at the Miami Serpentarium and a reluctant enlistment in the army, all the while dreaming of returning to India. “This book ends when he returns to India at the age of 24,” says Quader, adding that Snake, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll is not easy to put down once you pick it up.
Crocodiles resting in their enclosure at the Madras Crocodile Bank. | Photo Credit: P. RAVIKUMAR
In love with creepy-crawlies
The year was 1947. Whitaker, who lived in the tiny village of Hoosick in northern New York state near the Vermont border back then, was all of four when he brought home his first live snake, a milk snake, in a jelly jar. “I was a creepy-crawly maniac, bringing home ants, cockroaches, beetles and anything I could find.”
Fortunately for him, he had a cheerleader for his hobby in his mother. “She has been that fantastic support for me,” he says. When he brought home that milk snake, for instance, instead of panicking, she simply photographed him holding the reptile. “It was a magic moment that turned me onto snakes like nothing else,” says Whitaker, adding that his mother also introduced him to photography. “She always had a dark room, and she taught me the ins and outs of it.” Seeing the photographs come to life was just as magical, he recollects.
Romulus Earl Whitaker at the Madras Crocodile Bank. | Photo Credit: RAVINDRAN R
Despite being today known as the snakeman of India, for establishing the Madras Snake Park, the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and the Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team, Whitaker does not think of himself as a conservationist. In the preface of his book, something Quader brings up at the event, he even admits to having been an ardent hunter, killing and skinning birds, shooting spotted deer and blackbuck, stalking leopards and guarding crops from elephants. “In Wyoming, I spent more time hunting and fishing than getting a college education,” writes Whitaker, pointing out that it would be dishonest of him only to chronicle the awards and applause and airbrush his bloodthirsty past off the record. “I make no apologies since I don’t view myself as a conservationist—that’s a label others have bestowed on me,” writes Whitaker.
Instead, he simply thinks of himself as someone who loves creepy crawlies, especially snakes. “They (snakes) are so mysterious...the way they move, their beautiful colours, their gracefulness, the fact that they are living their entire life and finding everything around them with their forked tongue.” Unlike most people, who seem to recoil at the mere mention of snakes, he remembers finding out very young that he wanted to protect these animals. “That has guided me all my life,” he says. “It has extended to crocodiles and all those other reptiles, the cold-blooded creatures I love.”
A life in letters
Quader also tells Lenin, who co-wrote the book, about how he was struck by the minute details of Whitaker’s experiences and conversations that made their way into the book. “Was it all dredged up from Rom’s photographic memory, or was it made up? How did you get all those details?” he asks.
Lenin admits that while her husband does have a good memory, something they constantly dug deep into, much of this information came from family sources, especially the many letters that her husband’s mother saved. “We also have Rom’s two sisters and brother as a source, so we could always call them,” says Lenin, adding that the biggest challenge was the section about Whitaker’s time spent in the Lawrence School in India “because he was there for a short period of time and he didn’t have a great memory of the details there.” She says that she turned to Twitter (now X) to solve this issue, asking for anyone who went to the school that year,1953, and managed to get a response from a few people. “(This way), I was able to corroborate things Rom was saying,” says Lenin.
Longing to return
During the conversation, Quader also mentions Whitaker’s desperate longing to return to India, asking him why he feels such a strong pull to the country. “I felt like a stranger there (in the U.S.)…didn’t feel like I had a place there for some reason. And I yearned to come back,” Whitaker responds. Also, the last job that he had in the U.S. was working at the Miami Serpentarium, the largest venom production centre in the world, and he was already thinking of setting up something like that in India. “India is the land of snakes. And yet there was no place that people could really come and learn about them and feel that sort of empathy, sympathy that I had for them,” he says. “I think I already had the germ of that.”
And since the book was a collaborative effort, what did the two disagree on, asks Quader. “I wanted many more stories. We got rid of (some) groovy stuff,” says Whitaker with a grin. His wife elaborates on what he is referring to. “He wanted to describe every explosive he made. I thought it wouldn’t hold the reader’s interest,” she says, listing out some of the other bits that were culled out of the final manuscript: a big, long rant on religion, a mention of all the famous people he knew in his life which did nothing for the larger narrative and intimate details about Whitaker’s love life because “we didn’t want the book to be X-rated,” she laughs.
