The Land Where Every Woman Is A Witch And Every Man Is A Witch Finder

It was in the late 1980s. I will not say that we were not aware of witch hunts and the witchcraft practices. But, truly, till then, I had never met anyone who had been marked as a witch. Along with Father Alex and two others, I went to Khuntpani, a remote village in Chaibasa district where, for the first time, I encountered what they call dayan.

In Khuntpani, we saw a very strange phenomenon. Though water was kept in tubs with mugs in front of the mud houses, nobody would agree to serve you a glass of water. It was self-service. However, the reason for it was definitely not the adoption of a western, modernist approach; rather it was the belief in the existence of evil powers that led to such practices. When I asked them the reason, I was told, “If someone gives you water and you fall ill, who will take the responsibility? You will definitely mark that person a ‘witch’. So, everyone is fearful of giving you water.”

As we insisted, a woman in her mid 30s brought in a glass of water for us. Her eyes were not submissive—they were bold and assertive— clearly non-conforming. Sarcastically, I told Alex, “Look, she might be the witch.” He asked me, “Should I take a photo of her?” It was believed that cameras can’t take photos of the witches. Alex took her consent and clicked a photo. We also got to know that she was not only the one. Across the village, there were several women termed dayan and the village was known as dayan gaon or ‘witch village’.  Alex went back to Delhi and called me after a few days. “Sanjay, you were right. cameras can’t capture the photos of witches! My reels were blank!” I was also astounded! There must be some technical fault. But the very connection that was made with the blank reel and the woman is what is known as ‘myth-making’. First, you believe in something and then if, coincidentally, it is realised, some way or the other, you make a myth of it. The same happened here. Alex’s camera must have had some fault but what it led to was the belief that the woman who gave us water in the Munda village was actually a witch.

In the 1990s, when I went to Chhattisgarh, I encountered a new form of witch assertion. Some people in the interior of the state took me to a Gond village where they promised to make us meet a dayan. In the middle of the night, I was introduced to three swaddhi with dreadlocks who claimed to be tonhis (witches). On enquiry, we got to know that they practice some secret rituals only known to the witches.

To search for the roots of this self-proclamation, we started talking to people. We learnt of the ritual of witch finding. Every year, the villagers meet at a designated place and from there four people take a mancha (a rectangular structure with projected poles carried by four men) on their shoulders and ask it to lead them to the dayan. These four people with the mancha reach a house where a woman is identified as witch.

Continuing our search for the dayan, we found her. As we were about to start our conversation, an old man, sitting beside the demarcated witch, told us, “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 considered, inevitably, witches, the men who traditionally wear the headgear known as pagdi are witch finders. The same thing I witnessed across Maharashtra, Assam, southern India and other places.

In Adivasi villages in Jharkhand, where I did fieldwork, I found another interesting phenomenon. Though their residing deity was a woman known as Jaeer Era, women were never allowed to worship her. One couldn’t find women accompanying the pahans (chief priests) at Sarna, the place where they worship the bonga (gods). All of these things made us think of what Engels called gender struggle. It was far before class struggle took shape.

In the Palaeolithic age, women and men together used to search for the food. Nobody knew who was the father of the child but the mother was known to them. Mothers had the responsibilities not only to store food for their children but also to nurse them with proper medicine, if needed. Through the Neolithic age, women identified how to sow seeds; they found out the plants that could be used for medicinal purposes. So, men started staying at the mercy of the women both for good food and health. On the basis of knowledge, society was divided in two genders—male and female. Earlier, there was only one gender—human. With knowledge, came power. Whereas men continued foraging, women got engaged in cultivation. This division of labour now instigated the gender struggle.

I remember the work of a woman anthropologist in South America, who in her research at Tierra Del Fuego, found how men snatched the power of decision-making from women. Earlier, the story goes, women used to have the authority over the villages and men used to be scared of them. Suddenly, on a full moon night, an old man heard a few women discussing how they have made fools of the men propagating that they have some superpower whereas, in reality, they didn’t have any. The old men then gathered other men and attacked the women, who consequently accepted that they didn’t have any mysterious power to rule over men. Since then, the anthropologist notes, men started controlling political and economic power. This cultural residue of the Neolithic age has stayed with us. One can see from sati to dayan, how women have throughout been marked and killed. Karl Marx calls it the historical defeat of women.

Most analysis of the harassment and murder of women as witches focuses on an economistic perspective and tries to attribute it to political economy; the cultural origins of it are undermined. To my mind, it was the transition from a gynocentric world to a patriarchal one that changed the worldview and marked the women as witches with mysterious powers. If one traces back the meaning of dayan or dakini, the way witches are termed colloquially, one would find, it means knowledgeable and powerful women. Dan and lali languages have their roots in the Indo-Aryan word dakini. Even the word witch actually comes from the Anglo-Saxon word wicca meaning the ‘wise one’ or ‘magician’.

In Buddhist society, women were considered epistemically superior to men. Who gave the name ‘Buddha’ to Gautam? It was Sujatha. As per Tantric Buddhism, dakini is the female personification of a stage of wisdom. Once I read a book on how to become a Lama and, interestingly, I found that to become a Lama, one had to wear headgear made of a dakini’s hair. If you go by the sects of Buddhism, you can find in the Vajrayana tradition, that dakinis are considered supreme knowledge-holders who show you the path to become ‘Buddha’. But, with time, the development of Puranic Hinduism brought in the idea of Brahminical patriarchy and took away the position women used to enjoy.

This epistemic supremacy of women is what made the Puranic Hindus anxious and tense. Notably, this fear of knowledge or the special power became the ground for branding women as witches to be tamed to save patriarchal society. In different contexts, one can find how assertive women actually are termed witches and are subdued.

Though it is a matter of gender struggle and the efforts of men to take over women, one can’t say that there is no male witch. It is important to note that when men rebelled against the power of the women, not all men were unsupportive. Some stood by women. They gradually were termed bisai. In Jharkhand, there are several instances where we can find the male member of the family victimised, along with the woman member already branded dayan. So, while it is a matter of contest over political economy, one can’t deny its cultural roots.

I can’t forget Khuntpani ever. The woman was a dayan, a witch for all those who wanted her perhaps to be submissive and conforming to the patriarchal order.

(This appeared in the print edition as "A Genealogy of The Witch")

(As told to Abhik Bhattacharya and Md. Asghar Khan)

S. Bosu Mullick is a researcher of adivasi identity in eastern india since the late 60s