Dear colleagues,
We would like to warmly invite you to the third lecture of the series “More-than-Human South Asia: Ecologies, Knowledge, Bodies, and Senses.”
The lecture will take place in a hybrid format (in person and online) at 4:00 pm CET on Wednesday, April 1st, 2026.
On-campus venue: Room 2.21, Blandijn.
More information can be found in the attached document, and you can register here for online participation.
Title: A Family Meeting with Nagini Mata: Establishing Relations with the Serpent World, Trees, Grasses and Rivers in a Himalayan Valley
Speaker: Gerrit Lange (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Abstract: Nine snake goddesses, collectively called Naiṇī or Nāginā mātā (Cobra Mother), rule over the valley of the Pindar river
in the Garhwal Himalayas of Uttarakhand, India. Each of them has her own village, to which she is bound by strong
sensual and emotional ties of kinship and belonging. These ties extend to the women who have married into
other villages, her dhyāṇīs. To visit these women, seven of the Naiṇī sisters go on journeys from village to village that
last for six months, the dhyāṇī milan dhyorā jāt. Embodied in a bamboo pole, she is carried around to refresh their
intimate relations not only to their human sisters, but also to other local deities, rocks, rivers, Pipal and cherry trees
and even a kind of grass called babulū. Like other nāgas, the Naiṇīs have a close connection to springs and irrigation
channels, to the underworld, to the god Krishna and to the Himalayan cherry tree (payyā), which are all interwoven
into stories about and rituals performed for the cobra mothers. During the six months in which the goddess is present
on Earth, the landscape she walks through truly becomes “a world full of persons, only some of which are human”, to
cite Graham Harveys definition of Animism.