Year after year, we
hear about someone somewhere in India being hounded, beaten, tortured
or killed — because she’s been accused of being a witch. Naming,
hounding and punishing witches involve acts ranging from the
humiliating to the brutal. The alleged witch may be stripped and
paraded naked in public. She may be tonsured. Her face may be
blackened. She may be forced to eat shit. She may be beaten. She may be
slashed with knives or other sharp instruments. She may be burnt. Or
she may be buried alive.
I use ‘she’ and ‘her’ because most witch-hunts seem to be directed at
women.
We hear about these women-turned-witches through the print, television
or online media. Foreign news services pick up such news items with
enthusiasm, and the reports often exude a whiff of Orientalist horror
and fascination. Our own media reports, and the reactions of the
middle-class consumers of these reports, are not all that different.
The Indian middle class loves to divide the world into the ‘educated’
and the ‘uneducated’, or us and them. So what can another witch-hunt
mean but one more instance of tribal or village backwardness? Perhaps
these ‘educated’ beings worry: if this sort of a ‘medieval practice’
recurs with monotonous regularity, what will happen to our date with
the global powers? Backwardness, ignorance, most of all, superstition —
these are the easiest assumptions to fall back on.
That superstition is a vital ingredient in these incidents is
undeniable. There is superstition, though it thrives in both city and
village, and across caste, tribe and class. And the more helpless and
marginalized people are, the more vulnerable they are to manipulation
by those who use superstition, power and religion. People leading lives
of deprivation need to feel there’s a solution to their problems; they
need to feel they can do something. The cruel irony is that their
hopelessness can be exploited. They can be encouraged to believe that
the misery of their lives — a bad crop, a dry well, an illness or a
death in the family — can be relieved by identifying the witch
responsible for their misery and by punishing her.
But just beneath the easily identifiable surface of superstition lie
other motives explaining the accusation of witchcraft. Women’s
organizations, activists and researchers have produced considerable
evidence of these other motives. They have shown that property and
power — various manifestations of a power tussle — sum up the real
reasons for a witch-hunt.
In a substantial number of reported cases, witch-hunting aims to rob
the woman of her property. Those who seek to rob the woman may be her
own family. But in situations where the woman is unprotected — if she
is a widow or a single woman, for instance — there’s no shortage of
people eyeing her land. Whether the witch-hunters (or property-hunters)
are family members or not, they tend to use the services of the ojhas
or ‘witch-doctors’. In many rural communities with limited or no access
to health care, these ojhas can be powerful figures. Police
investigation has found, in many cases, that the local ojha has
accepted a bribe to name a woman as a witch.
And these ojhas are, often, women.
Consider the story of Khemi Balia from a village near Bhilwara. She
owned an acre of farmland, her only source of livelihood. Her own
family branded her a witch, and incited villagers to join them in
building a pyre to burn Khemi. Khemi escaped a fiery death by running
away; but getting ‘witches’ like Khemi to run away is also an effective
way to drive a woman from her land.
Khemi is an individual victim; but there are property-motivated cases
where entire families — often Dalit or tribal families — are accused of
witchcraft to help the upper castes grab their land. Sometimes, whole
families are declared witches and eliminated. In other cases,
individual financial disputes can be the reason for witch-naming.
The deep fear of witches is, evidently, most commonly whipped up to
grab a woman’s land, settle financial disputes or old family scores.
But making a witch of a woman can also be a ploy to punish her for
turning down sexual advances. Or the witch label can be used against
women as a general weapon of control.
One easy way to break a strong woman is to call her a witch and punish
her. Lata Sahu, a Dalit woman in Raipur, Madhya Pradesh, contested the
polls against the wishes of landowning castes. She was condemned as a
witch, stripped and beaten. Subhadra in the Goalpara district of Assam
challenged the obscurantist practices of the local ojhas; she also
compounded her ‘crime’ by seeking a share of her dead father’s
property. Her stepbrother and the ojhas got together, found three sick
village children, and claimed someone had cast a spell on them.
Subhadra was then declared a witch by a female witch-doctor.
The perception of what constitutes a ‘strong’ female, or ‘a female
challenge’ could be less obvious than in the cases of Lata and
Subhadra. Kalo Devi of a village in Jharkhand repeatedly asked her
neighbour not to graze his cattle on her land. In response, he branded
Kalo a witch, accusing her of causing the death of his newborn baby.
The important point is that there were no men in Kalo’s house; she was
an easy target for the neighbour. And although the neighbour was
arrested and charged, he was granted bail. With no police protection,
Kalo felt she had no choice but to abandon her home and land, and she
moved in with her daughter who lived 20 kilometres away.
The chastisement reserved for individual women can be scaled up, and
generalized to an entire caste or class. Identifying Dalit women as
witches helps preserve caste structures or maintain upper-caste
hegemony. And as is often the case, the instrument used to name the
witch may herself be a member of the victim’s caste. Witch-branding is
also a useful tool for political lobbies that use the obscurantist
ojhas to influence the community — since these lobbies have their own
contemporary brand of obscurantism to push. The usual suspect provides
the best illustration. In Gujarat, the witch-doctors in the adivasi
community are ardently wooed by Hindutva organizations. The irony here
is that these same ojhas are encouraged to introduce Hindu rituals
among the adivasis — so that glorifying sati and witch-hunting can live
happily together.
It’s in such a context that witch-hunting appears to have increased,
not decreased, as the country aspires to become a ‘global player’.
The conventional reaction of branding witch-hunts an adivasi or Dalit
problem, or a problem of ‘backwardness’, persists despite the apparent
links between the appearance of witch-hunting in adivasi communities
and the colonial ‘civilizing’ project. But even without such historical
backing on the origin of witch-hunting, contemporary evidence — the
continuing incidents, possibly the increasing number of incidents —
suggests that the practice is propped up by powers and structures
located outside the communities in which they occur. And the victims of
witch-hunting are by no means only adivasi or tribal — any poor and
powerless woman is potential witch material today.
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