Picturing the Snakes

This paper explores the ways in which Indian snakes were represented through natural history paintings along with textual taxonomic descriptions—a principal means of modern “exploratory experimentation” in early British India. It specifically examines Patrick Russell’s scientific engagement with the subcontinental snakes (a “new” branch of natural history of snakes fashioned by him) and the nature of “local” involvements in his undertaking. While considering the crucial role of colonial natural history in knowing and making visible the “terror” of Indian snakes to manage the snakebite-laden landscape, this paper elucidates how both the Western inferiorisation of non-Western perspective and the non-European indifference towards the European planetary vision disrupted the heterogeneous network of “knowledge making” in late eighteenth-century British India. Thus, this paper questions the recent historiography that projected a seamless “collaboration” or “hybridisation” in the formation of scientific knowledge across the globalised space of empire.