Sarpa Satra or Snake Sacrifice

The sarpa-satra was undertaken by emperor Janamejaya—who can be seen dressed in regal yellow robes in the painting—to slaughter all serpents on the planet after a snakebite killed his father Parikshita, who was the son of Arjuna. The sacrifice was only stopped when the young sage Astika, born to the snake goddess Manasa and Brahmin sage Jaratkaru, pleaded for mercy to the emperor, bringing an end to the enmity between humans and nagas. The yajna in the painting is attended by sages and gods including Indra, who is surrounded by deities pleading with him to intervene. To authenticate the legend, the figures are placed within a believable environment with contemporary nineteenth-century architecture. The sacrifice ground is cordoned by a masonry wall with a sentry at the ornamented gate carrying the imperial lion or Medici lion holding the earth underneath its paw (seen on the gates of Calcutta’s Raj Bhavan, the erstwhile Government House), while the building is reminiscent of double-storied Dutch mansions with latticed windows. The Mahabharata narrates some of the foundational myths of ancient Hindu India. Practising in colonial Calcutta, this local artist visualised such a myth in terms of his contemporary surroundings. This is a form anthropology identifies as bricolage: the skill of creating new cultural forms by recombining elements from diverse sets of available existing forms. The opportunity to do this is an aspect of the ‘modernity’ of the Calcutta artist in the late 18th and 19th centuries.