Witchcraft Accusations from Central India

The Fragmented Urn

Helen Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000225792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book unravels the institutions surrounding witchcraft in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh through theoretical and empirical research on witchcraft, violence and modernity in contemporary times. The author pieces together 'fragments' of stories gathered utilising ethnographic methods to examine the meanings associated with witches and witchcraft, and how they connect with social relations, gender, notions of agency, law, media and the state.

The volume uses the metaphor of the shattered urn to tell the story of the accusations, punishment, rescue and the aftermath of the events of the trial of women accused of being witches. It situates the ? onh? or witch as a key elaborating symbol that orders behaviour to determine who the socially included and excluded are in communities. Through the personal interviews and other ethnographic methods conducted over the course of many years, the author delves into the stories and practices related to witchcraft, its relations with modernity, and the relationship between violence and ideological norms in society.

Insightful and detailed, this book will be of great interest to academics and researchers of anthropology, development studies, sociology, history, violence, gender studies, tribal studies and psychology. It will also be useful for readers in both historic and contemporary witchcraft practices as well as policy makers.

1 Scattered fragments

An introduction of sorts

This book is about public witchcraft accusations in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. What holds this book together is the accusation of Santhi Bai,¹ an ordinary rural woman, who was accused of causing her nephew’s illness and then making him disappear into thin air. Relatives, including her sons, and villagers turned on her and tortured her. Sensing her life was at stake she confessed her crimes and sought to disperse the outcome by naming another woman as an accomplice. I have chosen to write this book in short stories—110 fragments—of approximately 1,000 words using the metaphor of a shattered urn. Each fragment both unravels and pieces together Santhi Bai’s story of the metaphoric urn. The book dips in and out of fragments that add context and flesh to the fullness of Santhi Bai’s story and the stories of other accused women, those that accuse them, those that rescue them, those that report their stories, those that legislate and prosecute on their behalf and that of the ethnographer who researches them. Part one sets the scene by introducing the reader to Santhi Bai, the rationale for writing her story in fragments, Chhattisgarhi witches and their meanings in popular usage, language and the research process.

Fragment 1: Recollections

‘Yes, I did say that I could return the missing boy. But I am not God. I cannot do these things’, whispered the trembling woman crouched in front of me. She searched carefully for credible answers to satisfy the demanding journalists and their probing questions. Wiping tears and mucus with the corner of her sari, the weeping woman continued:

I am not responsible for all these things. They blamed me for it. I am not responsible for Mehen’s death and I don’t know witchcraft. When Mehen’s family was starving, I helped them, giving his family food and things from my house. If I have done these good things, how can I be responsible for these bad things?

I was ten days into fieldwork, and this small timid woman cowering in front of journalists, the police, village elders, gathered villagers and the foreign ethnographer was recollecting the terrible night when her relatives accused her of witchcraft: of causing her nephew’s debilitating illness before finally vanishing him into thin air. The troubling situation peaked four days after Mehen’s disappearance, and following four days of rumours, speculation and canvassing village support. Johar, the missing boy’s brother, called for a village meeting and one night during August 2000, over 2,000 people gathered in the village plaza to decide what should be done. Beaten by relatives, threatened with fire-heated iron rods and denounced by her husband and sons, Santhi Bai’s resolve abandoned her and she admitted causing Mehen’s illness and disappearance. Her confession fanned the flames. Here stood a witch, confirming for villagers the misdeeds they had long suspected her of doing.

When Santhi Bai’s efforts to return Mehen were unsuccessful, villagers called for more exacting violence. Fearing for her life, Santhi Bai named an accomplice, Bhati Bai,² who found herself dragged into the ordeal. In the early hours of the morning, a compromise was reached where both women agreed to perform rituals at the site of Mehen’s actual disappearance in Baloda Bazaar—a town approximately 30 km from Ballabgarra village (a pseudonym). By mid-afternoon the next day, the police had been notified and the two women were rescued from the thousands who had gathered to watch the spectacle, jeer at the women, throw stones, and beat them. The next morning, the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh woke to newspaper headlines detailing the happenings.

Rewind a month, and the ethnographer had just arrived in Raipur City from London with her approved doctoral research, study visa issued by the Indian government, rudimentary Hindi, and the name of a social activist recommended by Delhi feminist anthropologists who suggested that ‘Chhattisgarh was a place to find witches’. Ten days after arriving, I was meeting Santhi Bai for the first time. My visit to Ballabgarra was arranged by my newly acquired ‘sister’ Didi, a senior editor for a large Hindi newspaper, following an invitation to live with her and her teenage daughter. Didi and her journalist colleague stopped at the local police station for case details, directions to Ballabgarra and a police escort. Early fieldwork days, anxieties of how to do fieldwork, language barriers, and uncertainties relating to local etiquette left me ignorant of my surroundings and what was happening.

Excited to return to her journalistic roots, Didi took over the questioning and declared, ‘We must get to the bottom of this’. Villagers clamoured to gain a glimpse of the foreigner, irritating our police escort who periodically scared them off by brandishing his police baton. The methodical sound of the well hand-pump can be heard clearly on the tape recordings, interrupted by admonitions from the policeman and the discussion of Didi and her colleague plotting their interview tactics. I did not have a handle on my own predicament, let alone begin to make sense of Santhi Bai’s difficulty.

This book is about public witchcraft accusations in Chhattisgarh, a state located in central India, a state that is understood to be ādivāsī or tribal.³ By the very nature of their being public, witchcraft accusations traverse family, community, healers, police, administration, courts of law, media, and the state. I have chosen to write this book in short stories—fragments—of approximately 1,000 words having been motivated by Susan Levine’s application of flash fiction to ethnography (2013). Each fragment unravels a portion of the confusing muddle that Santhi Bai and I experienced on that day in 2000, as each of us attempted to make sense of our individual worlds and the atrocity that had brought our worlds into contact. Santhi Bai wanted to understand why the reciprocity so intimately tied to kinship (the giving of food to a starving family) could be rejected so easily. My questions were decidedly more simplistic: Why was a man of 32 years (as reported in the newspaper) regarded a ‘boy’? If Mehen was missing, why did Santhi Bai refer to him as dead? Was it coincidence that men were accusers and women the accused? Why did the village headman stress that there was no violence done to Santhi Bai when everyone agreed that her family beat her? If witchcraft could produce sickness and disappearing bodies, just how far could its powerful effects extend?

Public accusations must be understood as events that are brought into being in a moment. It is a complex and timely process—often beginning with the behaviour of the suspected woman, developing as a slow buildup of incidents, suspicions and informal accusations over many years possibly culminating in a public accusation of witchcraft, from which justice stretches long into the future. My entry into this process was when the accusation came to the attention of authorities after an assault or murder, that is, it escaped the boundaries of the village. The advantage of writing in fragments is that accusations are not restricted to being told in a linear fashion (from start to finish), rather they allow for reading the public accusation backwards—a process of recollections—and forwards to the accusation’s afterlife simultaneously.

Fragment 2: Urn fragments

I once asked accused Bhati Bai if her everyday life had returned to normal. She replied ‘If an urn breaks and you want to patch it up, it will still always have cracks in it’. I devoted a substantial portion of my doctoral thesis to the witch accusation that involved her and Santhi Bai, their accusers, their fellow villagers and other actors who came to be involved post event. The ‘micro-narratives’ of participant-observers involved in the unfolding accusation can be, and should be, distinguished from the ‘macro-narratives’ of the observer-interpreters (police, judiciary, administration, media, NGOs and the ethnographer). Detached from the synchronicity of participant observer, I too, was not able to observe witch accusations or the violence that often accompanied them. I was and continue to be, limited to studying the shadows, reflections or impressions of that intense moment as they echo in the narratives of those directly involved and those who exercise the right to become involved in its aftermath. Each actor shapes, filters, denies or deletes their reflection to produce a reality. Writing on war, Croatian novelist Dubravka Ugresic (cited in Schröder and Schmidt 2001:5) strikes a chord with my experience of researching witch accusations.

War is like a delicious piece of cake that everybody wants a piece of: politicians, criminals and speculators, profiteers and murderers, sadists and masochists, the faithful and the charitable, historians and philosophers and journalists.

It took me some time to realise that every actor told a version of reality as they grasped it. The head of the Ballabgarra village council drew on a vocabulary of chronology and conjunction, making it easy to privilege his narrative as he attempted to protect his village from penalties and arrests. The police officer framed his narrative in legalistic terms, crafting certain words as criminal acts of hate speech. The accusers recounted a litany of grievances—complex evil doings by witches—scattered over time yet gathered in a moment to bear on the accused and to sway the opinions of onlookers.

In contrast, Santhi Bai used a lexicon of disruption, absence, and irreversible loss that did not transform easily over time. Her narrative broke all rules of syntax in presentation and as such, her story was rendered largely incomprehensible. The years of rumours, never-ending scrutiny and the public accusation in August 2000 had left a mark on Santhi Bai’s personality and her capability to tell her story. Timid and softly spoken, she struggled to relate anything to me without tears and a trembling voice. Questions were left unanswered and answers were blurred by weeping or conspiratorial whispering. She was hesitant to identify her accusers and as the months passed, she stopped giving names altogether, referring to ‘that man’. There were times when her story sounded like the concocted ravings of a mad woman and other times when her actions and words were those of someone strategically remaking her world.

During our second interview, Santhi Bai reached a stage that Lawrence Langer (1991), writing on Holocaust narratives, calls ‘deep memory’, where language fails, and emotions take over. Asked if my questions were too distressing to continue, she replied, ‘I am willing and waiting for you for a long time. My heart is full of grief and I couldn’t express this grief to anybody. After saying all of this to you, I find great relief in my mind and heart’. Following the witchcraft accusation, Santhi Bai was searching for meanings in the social relations available to her to reconstruct her life. As Veena Das’ work on violence has shown, Santhi Bai’s narrative was neither crystallised nor the event domesticated (1995). Similar to Holocaust survivors, her voice accessed a less than ‘secure present and the devastating past’ simultaneously (Langer 1991). For Das (1995) violence ‘mutilates’ or ‘annihilates’ language whereby the terror experienced cannot be brought into the ‘realm of the utterable’—language is struck dumb. Laurence Kirmayer (1996:175) suggests that these stories sit at the edge of one’s consciousness to be ‘worked around or told in fragments’.

In summary I have found it difficult to narrate Santhi Bai’s story and give privilege to her voice. It is too easy to privilege the language of professionals—the police through Santhi Bai’s police statement, the media and the administration in their neatly summarised form laying bare the ‘facts’. Despite speaking on behalf of the victim, the discourse of the professional robs the victim of her voice and distances us from the immediacy of her experience. Ethical concerns around the politics of representation have forced me to search for an alternative way of recovering the voices of Santhi Bai and the many other women who find themselves accused as witches. Inspired by my colleague’s ethnography Children of a Bitter Harvest (Levine 2013), I too have chosen to tell the stories of Indian (in particular Chhattisgarhi) witchcraft accusations in flashes. More specifically, I draw on Bhati Bai’s metaphor of the broken urn, with its fragments scattered and spread on the ground.

This book is made up of 110 fragments from almost two decades of researching witchcraft accusations in Chhattisgarh. At its core is Santhi Bai. She is the adhesive that glues these broken fragments together. Santhi Bai hopefully remains the narrator of her own story as she interacts with me, a foreign researcher. The overall effect affords the reader the experience of collusion in seeking out, and hiding from memory, the events that unfold for so many accused women. I have attempted something similar in an article on Chhattisgarhi healers and a healing technique they employed, where I wrote, ‘If the article feels at times like a slow process of revelation then I acknowledge its intentionality. … I position the reader intermittently within the aesthetics of revelation paradigm and as evidence of its resolve in guiding knowledge production of all sorts’ (Macdonald 2015:487). By writing in fragments, the reader is drawn into the often-incomprehensible world of the witch accusation, whereby they must sift through fragments until the broken edges align and Santhi’s Bai story can be glued together. I do not intend to suggest that THE TRUTH will emerge, but rather a ‘good enough’ account that can, like an urn, contain experience and account adequately for it.

Fragment 3: Reaching people who are not already in the conversation

I was second-guessing my decision to write in fragments, when a Canadian friend told me that her supervisor had advised her that ‘bullshit baffles brains’. She went on to explain her supervisor’s rationale: ‘the more jargon you use, the better you sound, the more your audience will be forced to accept what you say’. She was alluding to the global politics of both authorship and of readership for academics and/or those beyond the ivory tower of the University. So, who do academics write for?

The widely influential book Writing Culture: The Poeti...