snake & mongoose in ancient India

[Birgit Kellner]

Dear list-members,

I am looking for further information about how the relation between
snakes and mongoose was conceived of by ancient Indian writers, as well
as perhaps - though this is not strictly speaking "INDOLOGY-stuff" - the
distribution of mongoose in (ancient) India.
My starting-point is the famous list of seven inferential connections,
attested for the ancient SAMkhya treatise "SaSTitantra", which features
a "relation between killer and killed" (vadhyaghAtakabhAva), said to
obtain between a snake and a mongoose. To the best of my knowledge, it
is not specified in older sources what an inference based on such a
relation might look like. Much later sources (VAcaspatimizra's
NyAyavArttikatAtparyaTIkA or Udayana's KiraNAvalI) seem to assume that
when a snake (ahi) emits a certain sound (visphUrjanazabda - a hissing
sound?), one infers that a mongoose (nakula) is present in proximity. I
would interpret this as indicating that this particular sound of a snake
is caused by the presence of the mongoose as its enemy.
It is obvious that snake and mongoose were thought of as mutual enemies,
though the few available descriptions that provide more details on the
consequences of their mutual hostility vary: In a passage in the
NyAyavArttikatAtparyaTIkA, the snake (sarpa) is described as
"victorious" (jaya) and the mongoose (nakula) as the one who is defeated
(parAjaya); in a much earlier passage in DignAga's
PramANasamuccayavRtti, the snake (*ahi) is described as defeated and the
mongoose (*nakula) as victorious.
> From my little knowledge about mongoose, the latter strikes me as more
plausible, since mongoose are known to attack and kill certain kinds of
poisonous snakes, for instance cobras. I am wondering however whether
the behaviour of the different subspecies of mongoose (herpestidae) that
were, or are, at home on the Indian sub-continent varies significantly
in this respect.

Thus my questions:
(1) Does anyone know of further passages in ancient Sanskrit literature
- by which I don't mean exclusively philosophical literature - which
shed more light on how the relation between snake and mongoose was
understood?
(2) Is anything known about the distribution of different kinds of
mongoose on the Indian sub-continent, esp. significant changes during
and since the first millenium C.E., and whether they differ at all
regarding their behaviour towards snakes?

Any help will be greatly appreciated,

Birgit Kellner
Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies
Vienna University