Accusing Women as Witches: A Gendered Outlook

Abstract

A woman is an integral part of all public affairs of the society, from rituals and festivals to a community meeting. But then, she is tactfully debarred from taking leadership, making decisions, or from the liberty of choosing an unconventional lifestyle for herself. Witch-hunting is one of those numerous ways and means of keeping women within the periphery well defined for them in patriarchal societies. Accusations of varying kinds are leveled, and suspected persons are targeted. Even if she survives after the accusation, she lives in constant fear with the trauma of nonacceptance in the society. She is denied access to public resources as well as economic activities in and around the village. The violation of rights in witch-hunting takes its root in the gendered roles of individuals, set by tradition. These roles and the subsequent subordinate position of women are considered normal and generally a woman is not expected to question the patriarchal authority. The current study attempts to compare four individual case studies of witch-hunting of women from Goalpara and West Karbi Anglong Districts of Assam and West Garo Hills District of Meghalaya. Case study method has been explicitly used to find out how it became easy for the instigators to get mass support in targeting each of these four women, and how they were dehumanized, and eventually were banished from their villages or murdered. The article attempts to showcase witch-hunting as one of the strategies used for continuation of the patriarchal control over the ordinary women to obstruct their rise in rural remote areas of Meghalaya and Assam. Here superstition is the larger backdrop within which factors such as jealousy, enmity and nonacceptance get legitimized in a patriarchal setting.