Journey to Naagnuru Village

Monday morning, on 21 July, 2008, I went to Naagnuru village along with Triveni (my classmate) for our village study program. This was one of the new villages for us. We have reached at the bus station before 20min. of time which has been given by our program officer but we couldn’t found any bus which goes to Naagnuru village. We had tried to ask about the bus which goes to the village but no one knows this particular village. Finally, we have decided to go to Varur and Varur to Naagnuru after some information about the location of village.

 Before living to this place, I was thinking about the name of the village (Naagnuru) which means “place of snakes or village of snakes”. I was excited to get the new stories or tales about the snakes.

The name was excited me to gathered the information about the history of the village. One of the old women said, because somebody has found “Naaga Linga” in the village long time back that is why naming of the village is Naaganuru. I was not expected the simple answer about the name of the village rather eager to know some stories about the snakes or any evidence which says that this was the village of snakes.

Finally, I found one of the evidence which says silent stories about the existence of the snakes in the village. I discovered the statue of the three snakes at the bottom of 300 years old Banyan tree adjacent to the statue of lord Ganesha. This was enough to know about some existence of the snakes here in olden days.

I and Triveni have done one of the PRA exercise with few youths of the village on small piece of the paper to know the available resource in the villages or to know the settlement of the village. Once the map has been drawn by the youths of the villages, I was surprised to see the shape of

Map of the Naagnuru village

the Naagnuru village, which is almost look like a Snake. Because of this I thought might be shape of village could be one of the reasons for naming the Village Naaganuru.