Witchcraft

Abstract

Witchcraft accusation is an issue beyond historical recollection and yet it does not figure in the public sphere. Branding a woman Daayan or Chodail has been a common practice in rural India. This article’s engagement with Mahasweta Devi’s play, Bayen, intends to provide a searching analysis of the mechanism of witchcraft accusations in India. How the accused is seen in possession of an uncanny gaze by which she bewitches her unfortunate victim, how the mob violence condemning her is seen in terms of popular justice, how literate or illiterate people seek a scapegoat in the accused; someone they could blame for their misfortune. The fact that it also gets the sanction of women along with men belonging to the same community does not rule out that it is gendered since most accused are women. Invoking several narratives of violence and torture upon the body of women accused of practicing witchcraft and in closely analysing Bayen, the article probes the way spectacle of torture and exclusion is performed as the ceremony of punishment recalling Arendt’s and Foucault’s understanding of the psychology of crowd power and the relationship between power and surveillance. In this context, it also goes on to debate the identity categories in which subaltern and gendered subjectivity are assumed to speak and discovers in the postcolonial feminist frame of reference the psychic identity of the gendered subaltern as varied, contingent, and capable of showing modes of resistance. In spite of deranged illusions, and dehumanisation, Mahasweta Devi’s Chandidasi survives emotional and physical devastation and renders claims of power and control, discipline and punishment doubtful.