- Witchcraft continues to happen nearly eight decades after independence underscores the persistence of deeply rooted patriarchy, ignorance, and fear that still plague parts of our country.
- Outlook highlighted how violence against, and the murder of, women deemed witches is a regular part of life in various parts of India.
- Women's empowerment in the land where every woman is a witch and every man is a witch detector might prove to be a tricky phenomenon.
As the promise of a Viksit Bharat takes centre stage, the age-old shackles of witchcraft still grip sections of our society. A 52-year-old woman was recently killed and her husband seriously injured in Parsoyi village in Uttar Pradesh by villagers who attacked them with sharp-edged weapons on suspicion of witchcraft. Such incidents serve as a stark reminder that actual progress requires not only economic development but also a profound social awakening.
Nationally, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), more than 2,500 women have been killed on charges of witchcraft since 2000. That this continues to happen nearly eight decades after independence underscores the persistence of deeply rooted patriarchy, ignorance, and fear that still plague parts of our country.
In Outlook Magazine’s March 11, 2023 issue “Every Woman Is A Potential Witch”, we highlighted how violence against, and the murder of, women deemed witches is a regular part of life in various parts of India. Abhik Bhattacharya and Md Asghar Khan shed light on the deep roots of misogyny that still persist in our society. They share the story of Holo Devi, 65, who was found in a sack at the foothill of Dhardhariya pahad (hill)—located between the Lohardaga and Gumla districts of Jharkhand—on June 10, 2022, brutally murdered.
It was the pahan (chief priest of the village) who alleged that Holo Devi’s sorcery led to the death of Maniaro’s husband and branded her a dayan (witch). On the morning of June 9, the villagers, with drums and dhols, gathered at the centre of the village. They summoned the old and frail woman. “Tune mara Maniaro ke pati ko? Bol Chudail!” (Did you kill Manioaro’s husband? Tell us witch!), they demanded. The meek, old woman with visible stretch marks on her skin, screamed “Nahin mara” (I didn’t kill). They started hitting her with sticks. After half an hour, when the arms that bore the sticks were tired, a bruised and battered Holo Devi pleaded for some food. She was forced to eat pesticides instead. She started vomiting and, within minutes, lost her senses. The villagers put Holo Devi, still breathing, into a sack, carried her to the top of Dhardharia hill and threw her from the hilltop.
Headlines like ‘Woman branded as witch, burnt alive’ or ‘Woman forced to eat excreta, paraded naked’ are common in Jharkhand, as well as in other parts of the country. Most of these stories don’t make it to the mainstream media. But data on witch hunting show that this is a consistent under-the-radar part of a genocidal culture against women.
Sunny Sharad narrates the Mandar killing of women in Jharkhand, where the silence that fell on the night of August 7, 2015, in the Kanjiya-Maraitoli settlement of Mandar still echoed outside almost every house of the colony seven years later. Behind the silence was the story of five women murdered here on that day, after being accused of being dayan/bisahi (witches). Even then, the locals are hesitant to talk about the incident.
In the middle of the colony, on the right, he saw Dhumkudiya. In this house, the Adivasi community gathers for meetings and public events. This is where the five women were dragged to from their homes, one by one, on that fateful night, and mercilessly attacked with sticks, stones and axes until they died.
Joseph Premchand is the mukhiya (head) of the Kanjiya panchayat, having been elected for the third consecutive term. He was informed of the lynching incident by the administration at midnight. He reached Maraitoli immediately. Premchand claims that the women were killed between nine and 10 pm, but the murders were planned in the evening itself. The spot where the women were killed is merely 1.5 km away from the police station, and patrols often pass through the area. It remains a mystery how the police had no inkling of the plot. The Mandar incident garnered headlines not just in Jharkhand but also at the national and international levels, raising serious questions about the government’s claims of women’s empowerment.
Women's empowerment in the land where every woman is a witch and every man is a witch detector might prove to be a tricky phenomenon. S. Bosu Mallick explains that in the 1990s, when he visited Chhattisgarh, he encountered a new form of witch assertion. Some people in the interior of the state took him to a Gond village, where they promised to arrange for him to meet a dayan. In the middle of the night, he was introduced to three swaddhis with dreadlocks who claimed to be tonhis (witches). Upon enquiry, he discovered that they practised some secret rituals known only to the witches.
To search for the roots of this self-proclamation, he started talking to people. He learnt of the ritual of witch finding. Every year, the villagers gather at a designated place, and from there, four people carry a mancha (a rectangular structure with projected poles) on their shoulders and ask it to lead them to the dayan. These four people, accompanied by the mancha, arrive at a house where a woman is identified as a witch.
Continuing his search for the dayan, he found her. As he was about to start the conversation, an old man, sitting beside the demarcated witch, told him, “Why are you searching for dayan? Har Kanchuli tonhi, aur har pagdi Ojha (Every woman is a witch and every man is a witch finder)”. The girl children who are still not morphologically developed enough, nevertheless, were not termed dayan. But those who have already grown up are witches. While the women are inevitably considered witches, the men who traditionally wear the headgear known as a pagdi are often referred to as witch finders. The same thing he witnessed across Maharashtra, Assam, southern India and other places.
With witch hunting holding relevance across India, even in the 21st century, understanding the social basis of witch hunting is key to ending it. Govind Kelkar and Dev Nathan outline the strategies for raising awareness about the negative aspects of culture and the lasting impact of witch-hunting.
In their book Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Structural Transformation, they analysed the factors leading to witch hunts. The first factor is cultural, in the form of a belief that some humans (primarily women) acquire supernatural powers and use those powers to cause harm to others. The harm may be material, such as poor crops or the death of animals, or it may be caused by disease. In fact, disease, particularly unexplained disease, is the immediate provocation for accusations of witchcraft. As Helen Macdonald points out in her book Witchcraft Accusations in Central India: The Fragmented Urn, in the 19th century, when cholera was a mysterious and deadly infection, women were often accused of being ‘cholera witches’. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, there have been reports of women accused of being ‘COVID witches’. The cultural belief in the existence of witches goes along with the assumption that it is women who acquire these supernatural powers and cause evil. This is part of the struggle of men to establish their domination or patriarchal control within society. By categorising women as potential witches, they are excluded from forms of spiritual knowledge and even from participation in political affairs. They cannot own land, which must be inherited in the patrilineal line.
Despite these oppressions, some projects in the country attempt to tackle this malpractice of witch-hunting. Launched in Jharkhand in April 2020, the Garima project aims to erase the malpractice of witch hunting in the state by March 2023 and restore the garima (dignity) of women who are branded “witches”. Outlook visited a few remote villages in Jharkhand to know the present status of the project and understand how effective it has proved, considering the state is still reporting new cases of witch hunting every single day. According to the NCRB 2019 report, Jharkhand ranks third in witch-hunting instances in India, with an average of at least three women branded as dayans or ‘bisahis’ (witches) every day in some parts of the state.
Project Garima was launched by the central government at an estimated budget of Rs 15 crore to eradicate witch-hunting and branding practices in Jharkhand. The state government has been running the programme through the Jharkhand State Livelihood Promotion Society (JSLPS). The Garima project conducts awareness programmes, identifies survivors and victims, maps the vulnerability of witch hunt survivors and helps in making them independent. In the first phase, the project aimed to cover 342 gram panchayats (village councils) covering up to 2,068 revenue villages in 25 blocks of seven districts of Jharkhand.