Arun Kolatkar’s Sarpa Satra takes the Mahabharata’s snake-sacrifice episode and turns it into a study of how a grievance becomes a campaign of destruction, and of how the institutions around a violent project give it respectability and profit. Critics read the poem as a critique of the language of sacrifice: the words that make mass killing sound like ritual duty. The poem is a long sequence, not a straightforward retelling, and its force lies in what it does with the epic’s machinery.
What the poem retells
The Mahabharata’s snake sacrifice is built around revenge. In the epic, King Janamejaya performs a sacrifice to avenge his father’s death, with the aim of destroying the serpents. Kolatkar keeps this frame and draws out its consequences. In Sarpa Satra, a father’s death leads to Janamejaya’s indiscriminate revenge against snakes, so that a personal wound becomes a project aimed at an entire category of living things. The move from grief to campaign is the poem’s central dramatic movement, and it is the point where readers first see the gap between a private injury and a public undertaking.
The sacrifice as an apparatus
What distinguishes Kolatkar’s version is its attention to the people around the king. Critics who discuss the poem point to the way it satirises the social machinery surrounding the sacrifice, including its political and security apparatus and the people who seek contracts or priestly roles in the enterprise. The sacrifice is not only the king’s wish; it is a set of roles that different people want to occupy.
Nachiket Joshi, writing in a 2019 essay for Scroll.in, describes officials who applaud and fuel the project, and contract-seeking and priestly ambition entering the sacrificial enterprise. Read this way, the poem offers a grounded account of complicity. The question is not only who wants the killing, but who benefits from its organisation and who lends it legitimacy.
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The table below sets the epic’s ritual frame beside the features critics identify in Kolatkar’s retelling.
| Axis | Epic’s ritual frame | Kolatkar’s retelling, as critics describe it |
|---|---|---|
| Source of the violence | A king’s vengeance for his father’s death | The same vengeance, widened into an indiscriminate campaign against snakes |
| Who acts | The king and the sacrifice he commissions | The king together with officials, contractors and would-be officiants |
| What the sacrifice is | A ritual performed to achieve an end | A ritual language that can disguise or legitimise violence, and a set of opportunities |
| Scale of concern | A personal and dynastic injury | The escalation of retaliation as a social process |
Revenge as a cycle
The poem’s interest in revenge is not confined to Janamejaya’s motive. Joshi’s essay quotes a single sentence from the poem’s critical reading that sums up this concern:
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“It is perhaps in the nature of violence to be cyclical, to cast itself as retribution for past grievances.”
That sentence is the critic’s, not a line from Kolatkar, and it should be credited to Nachiket Joshi’s Scroll essay. What it captures is the reason the poem keeps returning to retaliation: each act of revenge produces a new grievance, and the logic of the sacrifice keeps the cycle running. A reader who wants to quote Kolatkar himself should work from an authorised edition, because short excerpts quoted within criticism are not a reliable basis for exact wording or lineation.
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Irony and humour as tools
A 2018 article by Ujala Shamnani, published in the International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities (IJELLH), treats irony and humour as central to the poem’s subversion. The article’s abstract also places the poem in conversation with the Khandava forest myth, the episode in which a forest is burned and its inhabitants killed. For readers, this matters because the poem’s tone is not uniformly grave. Its satire of officials and officiants depends on a kind of deflating wit, and that wit makes the violence easier to see as something arranged by people rather than something decreed by fate.
Contextual readings and their limits
Joshi’s essay links the poem’s writing to the period after the Babri Masjid riots of 1992, and its publication in 2004 to two years after the Gujarat riots of 2002. This is a critic’s contextual account, and it is a useful way to read the poem’s attention to sanctioned violence. It is not evidence of what Kolatkar intended. Nothing in the material establishes a one-to-one correspondence between the mythic campaign and any specific event, and treating the poem as a coded report on modern riots would flatten its structure. The stronger claim is that the poem makes its Mahabharata frame available for political reading, and that critics have found it so.
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A non-anthropocentric reading
A 2024 session abstract for the American Academy of Religion takes a different angle. It asks whether the poem suggests a non-anthropocentric understanding of dharma, defined there as sustaining life and the earth, and it discusses both the snake sacrifice and the Khandava forest episode. On this reading, the poem’s concern extends beyond human politics to the position of nonhuman life within a moral order.
This is an interpretive argument outlined in a conference abstract. It is not a scholarly consensus, and readers should weigh it as one lens among others. It sits alongside the human-centred reading of institutional complicity without replacing it: the same snakes that suffer in the sacrifice are also the figures through which the poem asks who counts as a victim.
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Editions and versions
The English Sarpa Satra appeared as a standalone book in 2004, a few months before Kolatkar’s death, according to Joshi’s Scroll essay. A scholarly reference gives the print edition as Mumbai: Pras Prakashan. The English book should be distinguished from the Marathi poem in Bhijaki Vahi, which a University of California dissertation excerpt on eScholarship relates to it. Later criticism discusses both the Marathi and English forms.
Verify edition details before citing them. Pagination, ISBN and current availability were not established in the sources reviewed for this article, so check a library catalogue or the book itself before relying on them.
Further reading
- Arun Kolatkar, Sarpa Satra (English, Mumbai: Pras Prakashan, 2004). Read the poem itself before the criticism; the sequence’s effect depends on its pacing.
- Nachiket Joshi, essay on Sarpa Satra, Scroll.in, 2019: the source of the contextual reading and the quoted sentence above.
- Ujala Shamnani, article on Sarpa Satra, IJELLH, 2018: a study of irony and humour as subversive tools.
- American Academy of Religion session abstract, 2024: a non-anthropocentric reading of dharma through the snake sacrifice and Khandava forest.
Readers who want to see how Kolatkar’s work fits within other documentary and literary treatments of the Mahabharata can browse the archive at documentarytube.com.
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