War Against Women

I was hanged for living alone
for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin,
tattered skirts, few buttons,
a weedy farm in my own name,
and a surefire cure for warts;
Oh yes, and breasts,
and a sweet pear hidden in my body.
Whenever there’s talk of demons
these come in handy.

***

You were my friend, you too.
I cured your baby, Mrs.,
and flushed yours out of you,
Non-wife, to save your life.
Help me down? You don’t dare.
I might rub off on you,
like soot or gossip. Birds
of a feather burn together,
though as a rule ravens are singular.

—Fragments from a poem called ‘Half-Hanged Mary’ by Margaret Atwood that first appeared in her 1995 collection Morning in the Burned House

In this poem, inspired by her ancestor Mary Webster, branded a witch in the 17th century and who survived the hanging in Puritan Massachusetts, Atwood deconstructs the myth or a prior history and creates a new one in the tradition of feminist revision. Mary was innocent and in this monologue, she narrates her own plight. Testimonies of women persecuted as witches are hard to come by. In this poem, Atwood recasts Mary as a countervoice.

Witch hunting continues to be a social, religious and political issue, an issue that has been under-studied and under-reported. Witch hunting, which mostly targets women, is not a new story in India. But its continuity demands that stories of persecution and torture be told and retold. Thousands of women, who belong to indigenous and rural societies in India, have been killed over the years after being marked as witches. Many more have been tortured in unimaginable and undignified ways.

On that particular afternoon last September, the skies had turned dark and it had begun to rain. The hut and the bold green letters on its muddy walls stood out. The house had been marked.

“Yahan dayan rehti hai” (A witch lives here)

It was in Bishnupur block in Jharkhand, a state that continues to report high numbers of witch murders even now despite having a law that criminalises such persecutions. I have often wondered about the writing on the wall of that hut. Who is it that lives there? I use the present tense in the hope that the witch hasn’t been lynched yet.

Later that evening, a local police official narrated incidents of witch hunting in the state. He talked about the brutal killings of five women on August 7, 2015, in Mandar. These women were marked as witches by the ojha (witch doctor) and 50 people were arrested. All have been released or are out on bail now. He talked about the prevalence of witch hunting in remote parts of Chaibasa region, where villagers would walk up to the police station holding the severed head of a marked woman saying they killed a woman who brought misfortune to them. Superstition supersedes everything here, he said.

“It is a different world, a different time,” he said.

We returned to Jharkhand to look for the witches, their stories and to revisit cases like that of Mandar to consolidate them all in an issue in the hope that something might change.

A story like this has no beginning or end but a moment of experience. The sighting of that hut was that moment.

Around 45,000 people were executed for witch craft in Early Modern Europe and questions about the heavy representation of women in such persecutions continue to haunt us even today. What are the reasons for witch hunting? While historians have argued that they are the result of socio-economic inequalities or were triggered by religious and political conflicts that include development politics, these persecutions and the ostracisations must be looked at in conjunction with gender inequalities in order to find answers. There has been other pertinent research work that link witch hunts to the contact between indigenous societies and capitalist modernism that argue that capitalism and patriarchy produced witches. Silvia Federici’s Witches, Witch Hunting and Women (2018) notes that women’s bodies were turned into a fundamental platform of exploitation and their traditional knowledge were suppressed to create ‘subjugated women’.

“Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power. The world has to be ‘disenchanted’ in order to be dominated,” writes Federici, a feminist scholar, in a book that looks at the phenomenon of witch hunting across the world.

The deforestation and development in the post colonial era led to the disenfranchisement of impoverished tribals and the worst affected were women and children. The subalternisation of nature is also the story of the oppression of women and as the indigenous people lost their land, there was a collapse in the collective identities of women that were rooted in mundane social customs that faced extinction because of displacement. Witch hunting is always politically motivated and finds roots in patriarchy that vests the ojha or the pahan (priest) with the powers of branding someone a witch.

Then, there is the argument that analyses culture and patriarchy and relates witch persecution to processes of political and economic change and looks at the creation and strengthening of patriarchy within indigenous and rural communities where men consolidated their ownership of land in addition to ritual knowledge. It is also the limited inheritance rights of women on ancestral property that makes them vulnerable.

There is no central law yet to criminalise witch hunting. A few states like Bihar and Jharkhand have passed laws to rein in such persecutions, but the quantum of punishment isn’t enough to deter such killings and torture. In 2016, the Prevention of Witch-Hunting Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha. It wasn’t passed.

Even in folk lore, mythology and popular culture that shape our understanding of the world, the figure of the witch is cast in order to establish cultural contexts and legitimate hegemonies.

Beyond the headlines, the tickers, the trends and the question of topicality, there are stories that hold far more consequence like the ongoing witch hunts. Outlook looks at the phenomenon. Abhik Bhattacharya, Swati Shikha and Asghar Khan have tirelessly reported from the frontlines and collected testimonies. This issue is dedicated to the women who were killed and to those who survived. Like Mary.