India’s ‘Snake Man’ Handling One of Its Most Feared Creatures

At first glance, the photograph feels disarming. An elderly man, calm and assured, holds a snake with the ease of someone greeting an old friend. There is no bravado here, no spectacle. Just familiarity. The man is Romulus Whitaker, and this image carries decades of a relationship that changed how India understands snakes.

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Whitaker’s story begins far from research stations and reptile parks. As a child, he spent hours watching ants through a magnifying glass, fascinated by their tiny disputes and alliances. That early curiosity grew into a lifelong pull towards the wild, and eventually towards creatures most people feared. A single moment shaped it all: his mother asking him never to kill a snake, then helping him turn an old aquarium into a terrarium. Respect came before expertise.

This photograph captures the result of that upbringing. Whitaker did not try to conquer fear. He chose to replace it with understanding. In 1969, that belief took physical form in the Madras Snake Park, a space designed to bring people face to face with snakes and learn rather than recoil. It was a radical idea for its time, and it worked. Visitors arrived afraid. Many left curious.

His work kept widening in scope. Conservation, for Whitaker, always included people. When the Wildlife Protection Act shut down the snakeskin trade, the Irula community lost its livelihood overnight. Whitaker had grown close to them, admiring their deep knowledge of snakes. The solution became the Irula Snake Catchers’ Co-operative, a model that allowed venom extraction for antivenom production while protecting both human lives and the snakes themselves. Today, this work underpins most of India’s antivenom supply.

The photograph also hints at contradiction. Whitaker has handled venomous snakes, slept with a python under his bed as a student, and travelled the world studying reptiles. Yet he resists labels. Conservationist, snakeman, expert. He sees himself as someone who followed fascination wherever it led.

This week’s Photo of the Week invites you to pause with that gaze. To see a snake not as menace, but as a neighbour in a shared landscape.

And to step into the full story of the man who made that shift possible.