I want to include every detail: Romulus Whitaker on his upcoming autobiography

These are the kinds of memories the 79-year-old American-born herpetologist and conservationist has been revisiting over the past two years, as he and his wife — conservationist and writer Janaki Lenin, 52 — put together a three-volume autobiography.

Volume 1, tentatively titled Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (after the three obsessions of his youth), has just been submitted to the publisher, HarperCollins, and is due for release in 2024. It traces Whitaker’s story from the 1950s, when he first arrived in India with his family as a child, through the late 1960s.

The next two volumes will cover his pioneering work in setting up the Chennai Snake Park in 1969 and initiating the captive breeding of crocodiles at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust, as well as his award-winning documentaries and his role in establishing research stations in Agumbe, Karnataka, and in the Andaman Islands.

Over the years, Whitaker has been the recipient of numerous conservation awards, multiple National Film Awards, and the Padma Shri. His primary mission, through it all, has been to change how people view reptiles in general and snakes in particular.

As he looks back, he’s leaning on scribbled notes and field notebooks. He’d love to have every scrap of memory included, but Lenin won’t let him, he says laughing. Excerpts from an interview.

What’s been the biggest challenge in this project so far?

Janaki Lenin (JL): I think the trouble for Rom is, he doesn’t want to leave anything out.

Romulus Whitaker (RW): Luckily Janaki trained as a film editor… she kicks all the crap out and just focuses on the good stuff.

JL: He’ll say, here I have this memory, you’ve got to put that in. One particular year, he made all these explosives in school. He wanted to share every single recipe for an explosive, and it just became really tedious, so I had to throw most of it out.

What kind of documentation exists to help you map this journey?

RW: I’ve always scribbled stuff down. I can pull it out of my pocket right now, this is the kind of stuff I do (pulling a folded piece of paper out of his pocket). I am an inveterate writer of what I’ve been doing and what I have to do.

JL: He also has field notebooks. There are volumes of diaries that include how much he paid for a boat trip from A to B, or how much someone’s salary was.

Can you tell us about the “Rock ‘n’ Roll” part of the title?

RW: I’ve got a lousy memory, and I’ve got to keep making these notes. But I’ve got a strange memory for song. If you name a song from the ’60s…

JL: Or even the ’40s…

RW: Yes, sometimes even the ’40s because my mother had a big collection of records, I can rap out not just the tune, but the words… to literally thousands of songs. She goes crazy… Not only rock ‘n’ roll, but also advertisement ditties.

JL: They’re terrible!

RW: “Pepsi-Cola, hits the spot; 12 full ounces, that’s a lot. Twice as much, for a nickel or two; Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you!” Great!

One of your greatest achievements has been roping in the Irula tribals to use their traditional snake-catching skills to harvest snake venom for anti-venom production…

RW: The work that I’ve done with the Irula tribe started out in the same way my work with snakes did. They weren’t a despised people, but they were totally marginalised, and still are. It was (an attempt) to get people to understand that these people have incredible knowledge.

Luckily the Irulas have this thing with snakes, whereas many other tribals may have totally different skills. They are catching snakes and extracting venom. The venom is turned into anti-venom and is saving thousands of lives.

If this same sort of system or idea could be used for tribal people through the rest of India… it is being done in small ways, with art and crafts but not to the degree to which it should be done.

What, in your opinion, is India’s biggest success story when it comes to conservation?

RW: Conservation consciousness and the expansion of it has been the biggest thing that’s happened. Looking back, it seems to have happened very fast. In the late 1960s, Zafar Futehally (my former father-in-law) and several other people brought the World Wildlife Fund to India. That was a very key moment, because that was also the time that Indira Gandhi was PM and she was also interested. Suddenly conservation hit India in a huge way.

The late ’60s and early ’70s is when it was all happening, and it was coincidental that I was part of that. I didn’t consider myself a conservationist. I was just doing what I always did. I was very defensive, and still am, about the horrible rap that snakes get. I liked snakes and I wanted to make a snake park, because I wanted people to know about snakes. People called it conservation and I said, oh, is that what it is?! Is that what I’m doing?

What’s been our biggest hurdle, in the conservation journey?

RW: The government (laughs). I am a proponent of the sustainable use of wildlife. I’ve worked in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere on United Nations projects along these lines. There are poor, marginalised people living there who are now part of the million-dollar crocodile-skin industry. But in India, we do have a different ethic. The common idea is that we should be sympathetic to animals, and we should protect them and nurture them.

And we have had some conservation achievements, with the increase in number of tigers and rhinos, and crocodiles to a great degree. Crocodiles now are reaching a point where there are so many of them that we have conflict situations. It’s almost like successful conservation equals conflict. What do we do? How do we deal with that?

Our original idea at the Madras Crocodile Bank, which we gave up long ago thanks to public opinion, was that the Irulas would start farming crocodiles. By catching rats from farmers’ rice fields and feeding them to the crocodiles, they would play a role in saving rice. Annually, some 20% of rice yield is lost to rodents. They would eventually farm the crocodiles, export the skins and eat the meat. This was the original idea going back 30 years and it still kind of lingers in my skull. But it doesn’t seem to have a place here, and there’s nobody standing behind it.

Meanwhile, we have governments that allow rampant development activity, allow highways to go through national parks without looking at the alternative possibilities. There are certainly ways to do things with care for the natural world, and our government is not listening. This is probably the biggest problem.