Serpents, and serpentine creatures with a human-like sentience, have long been a part of world mythologies. In Asia, widespread Hindu and Buddhist influences introduced a category of beings known as “naga” to many cultures millennia ago. Nagas are still prominent at the source of their origins: venerated in the Indian canon, and pervasive in folklore and practice as beings to both worship and to fear. So when a young woman in the village of Auraiya, Uttar Pradesh, disappeared from her bed one recent night and a long, dry snakeskin was found in the linens the next day, alongside her clothing and jewellery, it was understandable that some felt that she had merely shapeshifted — perhaps into her true form.
Days later, following police investigations, the woman — identified as Reena — has emerged and admitted that she staged the incident in order to escape an arranged marriage. She has eloped instead. The stunt had been months in the works, and reportedly included elements like claiming to dream of snakes, buying a snake idol and so on.
The case is amusing for the woman’s ingenuity — using tradition to powerful effect, in a way that alludes to how certain folktales may have originated to begin with. The layers of oppression that preceded it, however, are sobering. I imagine an alternate culmination: one in which Reena is never found (she would, of course, be thriving happily elsewhere) but all over India and everywhere else where the need for such emancipation exists, a new phenomenon arises. A flurry of snakeskins are discovered in beds, as women disappear into lives of their choosing overnight, with very few of their families even wondering if there could be a reason more mundane than mystical.
There are many stories around the world about women with a contained wildness in them, such as selkies who live as wives until the day they retrieve their sealskins and flee back into the deep. These are stories fundamentally about the anxieties of domesticity. In the collective psyche, they operate as instructional tales about the “need” for patriarchal restriction. They also remind women to follow their hearts or least not to forget their true natures — and if they can, to reconnect with and live in praise of these.
The year of the snake in the Chinese lunisolar calendar has just come to a close, and this astrological event has for some reason gained widespread recognition online as a watershed moment. Themes of shedding that which no longer serves, disillusionment in favour of clarity and deep transformation are being discussed even by those with little prior awareness of this cultural context. The symbolism is one that clearly speaks to many, and that this season of release and detachment is succeeded by the year of the fire horse — freedom to run, and to blaze ahead, oh! — is just as attractive.
Reena of Auraiya may have borrowed from the stuff of legend in order to stake out her freedom — a freedom I dearly hope she and everyone who seeks their own will be able to retain — and she herself ought to become legendary. How cleverly she cast it off: the leathery weight of limitations.