“Is it true that you don’t believe in magic?” asked Seema the other day. She’d been telling my children a story about this wicked witch in her village. Some years ago, her neighbour quarrelled with the witch so she’d given him a magic potion, and he died without seeing the next sunrise…“Her cooking must have been terrible!” laughed my son, “or maybe she fed him poison….I hope the police caught her?” Seema retorted angrily: “Of course she wasn’t caught! Who’d be mad enough to give evidence against a powerful witch?” My daughter, younger and more fanciful, looked nervous: “My mother says there are no witches!” And so, of course, Seema came to me to convince me of their existence.
“Black magic is a powerful and dangerous force,” said she, “whether you believe in it or not.” Back home in her village in Jharkhand, said she, everything from illness, crop failure and death, to love, marriage and childbirth is believed to be governed by magic and witchcraft. Women who are suspected to be witches are naturally feared. “As a child, I remember running helter skelter when any of them tried to come near!” said she, “and my mother always managed to find out who was practicing magic in the neighbourhood.”
“You’ll be amazed,” said Seema, “I’ve seen people cured of fatal illnesses thanks to witchcraft — and I’ve seen healthy people die overnight because of it!” Then she told me the story of a friend from her village. She was educated up to class ten and belonged to a well-to-do family. A man, not as educated as she was, wanted to marry her. “So he asked a witch to make a potion which made the girl lose her mind. Behaving like one drunk, she went to that man’s house and began living with him,” said she. By the time the girl returned to her senses, she’d been living with that man as his wife for three weeks. “She cried and cried, for she had been a victim of trickery. But it was too late for her…” said Seema.
In the case of illness or unexplained deaths, I gathered, it was the village doctor who usually declared that the patient was a victim of witchcraft. Like in the story she’d scared my kids with, it turned out that after the neighbour died without any apparent cause, the village doctor surmised that this was a case of black magic. And the woman next door with whom he’d recently quarrelled, was an easy scapegoat.
What did the villagers do, I asked, to people suspected of witchcraft? Actually, said Seema, most were too scared to do anything. “They’re so powerful that even if someone complains secretly, they’d get to know,” said Seema. But at times, when the villagers choose to retaliate against suspected witches, the results are usually bloody. I saw a gruesome video on the web about a youth who beheaded a woman early this year, who he suspected, was a witch and responsible for his brother’s and father’s deaths. The worst thing is that many villagers believe that bloody retaliation is actually justice…
Was the gruesome video real or not? I can’t tell, though I hope it is not. But the crux of the matter is that even though people like Seema have lived outside their village milieu for years, they continue to hold on to their beliefs about black magic. Jharkhand is one of the two Indian states that’s outlawed witch-hunting, the other’s Bihar. But in these economically backward and underdeveloped parts of the country, people tend to believe in black magic a lot more than they believe in the law…
