Snake Charmers in India Lament Loss of Culture Following Outlawing of Their Practice

At the Surajkund Craft Fair on the outskirts of Delhi, a group of snake charmers plays for visitors between sets from local folk musicians — one of the few remaining, legally gray spaces left for a tradition that Indian law effectively made illegal decades ago.

A Tradition Cut Off at the Root

“Snakes and snake charmers have been together from time immemorial. This is the only thing we and our ancestors have known and lived on for centuries. Now it has been taken away from us. We have not only lost our livelihood, we have been cut off from our roots,” says Badri, one of the charmers performing at the fair. “These performances here can sustain a few of us for a few days, but what after that? And what about the rest of the community?”

Snake charming, a practice woven into Indian cultural life since ancient times and the primary livelihood for hundreds of thousands of practitioners, became illegal under an amendment to the Wildlife Protection Act. The law prohibits catching, owning, or performing with snakes at all, treating what had been a centuries-old occupation as a form of wildlife trafficking and animal cruelty rather than a protected cultural tradition.

A Ban Enforced Only Gradually

For a period after the law changed, authorities largely didn’t enforce it, and snake charmers continued their traditional work with little interruption. That changed as animal welfare activists pressed authorities to take the law seriously, prompting a genuine crackdown that has steadily pushed the practice toward extinction over the years since. The scale of the community affected is considerable — the ban touched an estimated 800,000 snake charmers across India, the overwhelming majority of whom, according to their own union, remain without steady work even years after being forced to abandon their traditional occupation. Some have moved into rickshaw pulling, street vending, construction, or agricultural labor; many others have simply struggled.

Two Sides of the Same Snake

Wildlife conservationists have pushed back firmly against any romanticizing of the tradition, arguing what looks like cultural heritage from the outside amounts, in practice, to systematic animal abuse. Kartik Satyanarayan of the conservation group Wildlife SOS didn’t soften his assessment: “They basically dehydrate them, they stick them in a box and forget about them, use them whenever they want to make a performance or beg some money from people.” Snakes used in charming performances, conservationists say, frequently have their fangs removed or venom glands damaged to protect the handler — mutilations that leave the animal unable to hunt or defend itself, often leading to a slow death by starvation over the following weeks, since a defanged, devenomized snake can no longer feed itself in captivity or if released.

Snake charmers themselves have consistently and strongly denied these cruelty allegations, framing their relationship with the snakes they handle as one built on generations of specialized knowledge and genuine care, not the exploitative abuse conservationists describe — a fundamental disagreement about the same set of practices that has never been fully resolved between the two sides.

A Younger Generation Looking Elsewhere

Back at the craft fair, the generational divide within the community is visible even among those still performing. Shankar, 21, represents a younger cohort within snake charmer families who see limited future in a trade that’s not just economically precarious but legally prohibited. He and others his age increasingly want work more attuned to modern life — steady, legal employment that doesn’t require navigating around a decades-old ban every time they want to practice the only skill their families have historically passed down.

That generational shift may ultimately do what enforcement alone hasn’t fully accomplished: as older charmers age out of the trade and younger family members decline to take it up, a practice that Indian law prohibited decades ago but never entirely eliminated in reality may simply fade away on its own, less through the force of the ban itself than through a younger generation quietly choosing not to inherit a tradition that offers them no legal path forward, and increasingly no economic one either.

For related coverage of cultural heritage and displacement, see our piece on ecological recovery in Haiti’s rebuilding efforts, or browse our full International archive.