The bird-human Mānasā and regional serpent cult literature

Record summary

Mānasā is a major serpent goddess of Bengal, represented in songs, ritual narratives, scroll painting and printed folklore collections. Some regional imagery and stories place serpentine beings in supernatural or celestial settings, making the tradition relevant to comparisons involving winged or aerial snakes without implying that such animals were observed. Early twentieth-century Bengali ethnography and folklore scholarship can identify the transmission history. The unresolved issue is how much a published account reflects rural performance, elite literary shaping or colonial classification.