Magic Broomsticks

Archana Mishra’s Casting the Evil Eye records the stories of women who have been beaten, tortured, raped, paraded naked and ostracised for being witches in the tribal heartland of Jharkhand. She shows us the faces behind the headlines that appear occasionally in newspapers. She records the horrors of being a woman one day, witch another.

Concentrating on west and east Singhbhum, Mishra has spoken extensively to ojhas, or witch doctors, so called ‘‘witches’’, village heads and villagers. She has linked the witch-hunts to the near absence of health care in these areas. Malnutrition is common in these belts and children often succumb to diarrhoea and malaria. There being very few functional health care centres, the villagers turn to the ojha, who with his knowledge of herbs, also doubles as a doctor. If the patient recovers, he claims the credit. And if he fails, then he looks around for a scapegoat, and what better scapegoat than a witch?

Property is another motive that has kept the witch myth alive. Malabika Das Gupta’s Status of Tribal Women in Tripura is another book that concludes that there is definite link between ownership of land and persecution of women.

In Casting the Evil Eye, Mishra explains that very often villagers or family members target widows in the hope of appropriating their property. Women whose husbands or sons live in the city and send them money are marked too. If someone in the woman’s neighbourhood falls ill or a tree stops bearing fruits, rumours brand her a witch.

Once a woman is accused, she has to spend money to extricate herself. Villagers join the hunt so that they are invited to a banquet. The feast is at the cost of the woman and, of course, she is not invited.

The people who visit the ojha for cure are dictated a long list of things to be bought to defeat the evil charm. Very often, these can be bought at the ojha’s house or complex itself. Spreading the witch myth then is sound economics.

And it’s not only men who are ojhas. Sapooran Bibi was declared a witch by a woman. ‘‘Have you ever heard a woman labelling another woman a witch?’’ she asks. And Sarti Devi of western Singhbhum is a 25-year-old ojhain.

Though Mishra frequently adopts a didactic tone, she does speak to various government officials and NGOs working in the field and offers a few solutions. Better health care is just one of them. An interesting one is to train ojhas more in herbal medicines so that they can effectively treat the rural population and are weaned away from being witch doctors.

Mishra’s account is a poignant one of neighbours turning enemies and in many instances husbands and families transforming overnight from saviours into predators. But she has left out an important question: do these women who deny being witches believe in witchcraft or the existence of witches themselves? That would have shown the extent of the myth that is the Land of the Witches.