Who The Nagas is
The Nagas are the serpent people. They are not gods exactly, and not animals; they are a race of beings who live beneath the earth and in the waters, who can take the form of a cobra or of a man or woman, and who guard treasure, springs and the rain.
The Mahabharata gives their story. Kadru, a wife of the sage Kashyapa, asked for a thousand sons, and laid a thousand eggs, and after five hundred years serpents hatched from them. The greatest are their kings: Shesha, the endless one, who holds up the earth; Vasuki, who was the rope at the churning of the ocean; Takshaka, who killed a king. They live in Patala, the world under ours, in a city of jewels called Bhogavati.
Anantam Vasukim Shesham Padmanabham cha Kambalam, Shankhapalam Dhritarashtram Takshakam Kaliyam tatha: the prayer that names the nine great serpents.
They were Garuda's enemies from birth, and they nearly perished in King Janamejaya's snake sacrifice. But they married into human families too. Arjuna married a naga princess, Ulupi, and Balarama, the epics say, was Shesha himself.
In the villages of India the Nagas are near at hand. People pour milk at anthills on Nag Panchami. In Kerala, old houses keep a sarpa kavu, a grove left wild for the serpents, and in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu carved snake stones, nagakal, stand under the trees, where women pray for children.
