At 81, Romulus Whitaker’s still that wild thing

A peculiar pendant dangles from a chain around veteran herpetologist Romulus Whitaker’s neck like a talisman. Curious onlookers have been baffled by its appearance, which resembles a cross between a frog and a lizard. The pendant, moulded in the shape of an axolotl, was once part of the many treasures unearthed by tomb raiders. Its provenance, Whitaker informs, is cushioned in Aztec Empire, gesturing towards the mythological god of fire and lightning, who metamorphosed into a salamander to evade death.

Whitaker has a warm, down-to-earth personality and likes to sport his silver hair loose these days. The Padma Shri awardee gave the country its first snake park in 1969, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. At a time when wildlife conservation in India was in a nascent stage, and snakes carried a negative perception among the masses, setting up a snake park included battling many challenges. “I learned how to drink many cups of tea and be very polite with the government officials, even when they thought I was crazy,” recalls the 81-year-old. “I think being a white man who was living in India and was interested in snakes helped, because I was obviously a nutcase to begin with. There were some lucky breaks too: some of the Forest Department officials were extremely helpful; they gave me a piece of land in Guindy Park on lease.” In its first year alone, the Chennai Snake Park (formerly known as the Madras Snake Park) attracted almost a million visitors.

There is an archival photograph of Whitaker, taken by his sister, Nina Menon, during the early days of setting up the snake park. He’s barefoot, squatting before a quiver of cobras on brown earth, with a pillowcase slung around his shoulders. The pillowcase, as one finds out in his 2024 book, Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: My Early Years (co-authored with reputed journalist-wife Janaki Lenin), was famously used by him to store snakes.

This, of course, was not an unusual sight in the extraordinary life led by Whitaker. Stories have been traded of how he once discreetly carried a pair of king cobras in a third-class sleeper train from Agumbe, Karnataka to Chennai, hiding them in vegetable baskets and sliding them under the seat; or how he rode his motorcycle with a sand boa’s noodling body coiffed in his wild set of hair; or his uncanny ability to mimic the sound of crocodiles.

Born to be wild

Whitaker grew up in the small town of Hoosick, in north New York state, where he spent his childhood watching butterflies flit by, shoving his tiny hands into tree holes, getting sprayed by a skunk, trapping spiders, being attacked by bees and bitten by ants. When he was four, he brought home his first snake. To his surprise, his mother, Doris, took a photograph of him with the milk snake for posterity. “I had a very different kind of mother,” he admits, “She knew there were no venomous snakes in Hoosick, and so, her reaction was not negative at all. She thought the milk snake was gorgeous. I think that was the turning point for me.”

It set him off on an unbelievable journey. While kids his age carried marbles and cents in their pockets, Whitaker carried snakes that were hand-raised on a diet of grasshoppers and small frogs.

In 1951, after his mother married Rama Chattopadhyay, son of the illustrious couple, poet Harindranath and freedom fighter Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, they moved to Bombay. Whitaker was just eight years old then and at Juhu beach, he passed his time stalking crows and garden lizards, occasionally wielding his BB gun. He became a “self-styled pest controller” in his neighbourhood, where he was hired to impede the colonisation of sparrows and rats. “I charged four annas per sparrow and eight annas for rats, which I caught using traps,” he writes in his book. “In the currency of those days…16 annas made a rupee.” Later on, word got around that young Whitaker had a predilection for catching snakes, and it wasn’t long before he was hired to rescue snakes from his neighbours’ homes and gardens too.

While at boarding school in Kodaikanal, Whitaker befriended a Jesuit monk and the curator of Shembaganur Museum of Natural History, Brother Daniel, who taught him how to skin and stuff deceased birds, which instinctually drew the teenager to skin other species too. Eventually, his dorm room looked “like a taxidermy museum”, he notes in his book. It was a strange menagerie of oddities: cured pelts belonging to Nilgiri langurs, flying squirrel, a snow leopard (gifted to him on his 12^th birthday by Chattopadhyay) became wall-drapings, while iridescent feathers of birds like the coppersmith hung from his dorm window. “As teenagers, a lot of the boarding students had various portraits of their heroes on their walls—motorcycle or car racers, or special kinds of cars. My heroes were wild animals,” Whitaker tells me. “If I found a dead snake on the road, as long as it was fresh, I’d quickly take it back, skin it and carefully tan it so that it wouldn’t stink anymore. Luckily, the various roommates I had over the years put up with me.”

His fascination for wild creatures never ebbed. In fact, over the years, he adopted several of them, including a pet python and a tarantula. One wonders what captivated Whitaker about certain species that others are so fiercely averse to? “People are fascinated by birds and butterflies for their distinct colours, but snakes are equally beautiful,” says Whitaker. “I’m not sure what it is, but I’ve had a natural tendency to defend creatures that people generally don’t like. Whether they are toads, spiders, bats, or other creatures that carry a negative association. As a little kid, I sort of felt like I was their champion. I had to defend them.”

The snakeman who was allergic to antivenom

In 1963, Whitaker landed a job as a tour guide at the famous Miami Serpentarium, where its founder, Bill Haast (who later became Whitaker’s “guru”), performed live venom extractions in front of a captivated audience. Haast, eccentric and always in white scrubs, had been bitten over 80 times when Whitaker first met him. He would inject himself with a diluted concoction of snake venom for years, thereby building immunity to lethal snake bites.

Whitaker, however, wasn’t as lucky. In fact, he developed an allergy to antivenom in 1966 when he was bitten by a prairie rattlesnake. “That was a fairly serious bite,” recalls Whitaker. “My arm swelled all the way to my shoulder, and the doctors were pretty frantic about making sure I didn’t die. They gave me five ampoules of antivenom, and I almost immediately reacted—breaking out in hives. So, they had to give me antihistamines and a couple of steroids to prevent it from getting serious.”

Working with Haast sowed the seeds of replicating a venom production lab in India. “I knew I had to make a living somehow, and I wanted to do my own thing,” Whitaker says. “Once I learned how to extract venom and take care of snakes, I knew I could set up a venom lab in India, which I did, and that evolved into what became the Madras Snake Park several years later.”

In 1976, Whitaker was instrumental in founding the Madras Crocodile Bank along with his former wife, Zai Whitaker. It was a pioneering sanctuary dedicated to saving some of the most endangered reptile species. With saltwater crocodiles, mugger crocodiles and gharials facing a threat of extinction due to habitat loss and poaching, the Bank became a lifeline. Today, it’s home to 15 species of crocodiles, and is one of the largest reptile zoos in the world. It continues to be a prominent hub for the protection of reptiles and amphibians in India.

From poachers to protectors

When the Wildlife Protection Act came into being in 1972, it left the Irula tribe in Tamil Nadu—known for its inimitable snake tracking and hunting skills—out of work. Their livelihood depended on snakeskin trading. Whitaker had met the tribe in 1968-69, and though he didn’t condone their work, he had returned impressed by their skills and knowledge about snakes. “It’s the tribal knowledge that is usually very underestimated or underappreciated,” he notes.

To help the Irulas, Whitaker and his colleagues set up the Irula Snake Catchers’ Co-operative (operational since 1982), which employed them to catch snakes for their venom (used to create antivenom) and later release them back into the wild.

Establishing the cooperative, however, didn’t come without its share of naysayers. “It took us four years to convince the Forest Department that the Irulas, whom they considered ‘poachers’, could actually be doing something legitimate,” explains Whitaker. “It was a lifesaving activity because the venom they collected would be sold to the pharmaceutical companies.” India has the highest rate of deaths due to snakebites in the world, with over 58,000 people succumbing to it every year. Today, the Irulas are responsible for extracting more than 80 percent of the venom needed to “produce millions of antivenom vials in India, which treat lakhs of snake bites every year,” remarks Whitaker.

The Irula Snake Catchers’ Co-operative won him his first Rolex Award for Enterprise in 1984, a prestigious honour that recognises extraordinary individuals (innovator Sonam Wangchuk and conservation scientist Dr Krithi Karanth are some other Indians to receive the honour) who’ve worked on exceptional, solution-oriented projects.

Shortly after, in 1985, Whitaker met his soon-to-be wife, Lenin, who shared his passion for the great outdoors. “At that time, Madras was like a large village. Everyone knew everyone,” Lenin recounts. “It wasn’t a cosmopolitan city, and so, there weren’t that many weekend places to get away. The Madras Croc Bank was the only place one could go to.” On an outing with a few friends to the Croc Bank, Lenin, who was 15 at the time and had her finger stuck into a lemon orb, recalls seeing Whitaker walking towards them. “I had a whitlow on my finger—I still have the scar,” she says. Lenin was sporting a lemon on the advice of a doctor. “And Rom swears that he remembers meeting me because of it!” she laughs. “I was in 10^th standard at that time, so obviously we went our ways after that.”

Years later, Lenin became an established filmmaker, and met Whitaker professionally on a few different occasions, before co-founding Draco Films, a wildlife film production company, with him in the 1990s. Together, they collaborated on numerous documentary projects, including National Geographic’s King Cobra (1997), which won them an Emmy.

In 2005, Whitaker was honoured with the reputed Whitley Award (also known as the Green Oscars) for his remarkable work in nature conservation. It financially encouraged him to set up the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station in Karnataka, a centre for documenting the rainforest ecosystems and sharing those insights with the world. Whitaker earned his second Rolex Award in 2008 with a grant that propelled the establishment of similar research stations across India.

Two snake species have also been named after him—an Indian boa called Eryx whitakeri, and a krait called Bungarus romulusi—but Whitaker downplays the honours, arguing that the newly discovered snakes should be named after their traits, patterns or habitats. “Of course, it does swell my ego a bit, I have to admit that,” he chuckles.

He is currently immersed in finishing the second and third volumes to Snakes, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll alongside Lenin, which chronicle his life 1967 onwards. The second book delineates his journey, from founding the Madras Snake Park and the Croc Bank to travelling the world on reptilian assignments. “It ends in 1985, when Rom loses the snake park,” says Lenin. The third volume shifts gears, following Whitaker’s pivot to filmmaking, where he teams up with two school friends to start a film company, and later collaborates with Lenin. The co-writing process involves rummaging through a cupboard packed with dozens of notebooks. “It’s a lot of work,” he confesses, “to interpret some of my notes, which were probably written in pitch darkness and aren’t very legible. Some of them even have their pages stuck together by dead mosquitoes.”

The pair now resides in Rathnapuri, a bucolic village near Mysore, Karnataka. Their home borders lush coconut and banana plantations and a serene lake, occasionally visited by jungle cats and black-naped hares. “In fact, a leopard appeared on Rom’s camera trap within a week or two of our move here,” recalls 54-year-old Lenin, who spends her mornings practising yoga, feeding and walking their dogs, and then dedicating herself to research and writing. This includes poring over her husband’s field notes, as well as articles and news clippings written about him. Her earlier books, My Husband and Other Animals (2012), My Husband and Other Animals 2: The Wildlife Adventure Continues (2014), and Every Creature Has A Story (2020), which chronicle her extraordinary—often humorous—experiences with wild creatures and her husband, also provide valuable supporting material.

Whitaker’s work is emblematic of what is possible to protect if one is committed; he was instrumental in outlining a path for several marine biologists and wildlife conservationists, including Satish Bhaskar, a champion of turtle conservation, and J Vijaya, India’s first woman herpetologist. For him, one of the challenges in conservation today is raising awareness and ensuring that modern development is done with habitat consciousness. “We have to do it in such a way that it doesn’t put pressure on the ecology. Take the rivers, for example. We’ve got these high-tech ideas of river-linking and building more dams, but they are all disastrous for fishermen, as well as the gharials and river dolphins. We are destroying their habitat and not protecting them.”

In contrast to the heavy challenges he addresses, Whitaker finds solace in quieter moments of connection with nature. Our conversation concludes with him mimicking birdsong, leading a bird to twitter in response. “When you’re able to communicate with birds and animals, when you’re able to get a reaction, it makes you feel really good,” he admits. “I’m still a kid at heart, I guess.”