by Daizi Hazarika, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology 

During the winter of 2023, with the help of a CSWS graduate student research award, I had an opportunity to visit Assam, India, for two months to conduct dissertation research on witch-hunting and witch-killing. During my field trip to Assam, I conducted research in Guwahati (the capital city of Assam) and a village called Dabli, among the Rabha community (a tribal community of Assam) in the Goalpara subdivision of this region. In Guwahati, I interacted with several government officials regarding their perceptions of the current-day witch-hunting in Assam and the steps taken by the Assamese government to combat this practice. In Dabli, Goalpara, I interacted with and interviewed victims and their families from the Rabha community regarding their experiences with witch-hunting and the obstacles (social and religious) they had faced while coping with the trauma. The methods I applied include methods of ethnographic data collection, mainly participant observation and open-ended interviews. 

Assam, a region in northeastern India, has been one of the hotbeds of witch-hunting and witch-killing targeting tribal women in contemporary times. From my previous work, including archival and ethnographic work on witch-hunting and witch-killing in Assam, I found that this practice hardly existed in pre-colonial Assam due to the revered position of tribal women within their societies. During pre-colonial times, tribal Assamese women were respected in their communities for possessing cosmo-religious powers. In the colonial period, only one case of witch-killing was recorded in 1845 by the colonizers when a tribal Singpho (another tribal community of Assam) chief was accused of witch-hunting another Singpho man. But toward the post-colonial times, especially since the 1980s, there has been a sudden increase in witch-hunting in Assam.

While interacting with the subject population, I found that one of the root causes driving the rise of witch-hunting in Assam is patriarchy. The Rabha community, a matrilineal community since the classical times, adopted a patrilineal lineage during the colonial period, which gathered momentum in the post-colonial, mainly after the 1980s, through garnering right-wing Hindu voices from mainland India. Hence, women who were property owners, financially independent, and educated became victims of witch-hunting as they were believed to threaten the patriarchal system in the community. I came across many women accused of practicing witchcraft because they had some financial independence, like owning a small business that made them rely less on their men for livelihood. Such accusations were mainly driven by men. 

Another cause of the rise of witch-hunting that I found during my research period was jealousy. Although jealousy as a cause seems an isolated issue at first, when it comes to accusations of tribal women as “witches,” I argue that jealousy, too, arises because of patriarchy. For example, within the Rabha community in Dabli, the relationship between spouses is mostly one of distrust. While women are severely restricted within their households and farms, men are free to indulge in activities like local alcohol consumption and even extramarital affairs. Hence, contrary to this situation, when a woman shares a mutual relationship of respect and fidelity with her husband, she becomes vulnerable to witch-hunting attacks by those women who do not share such relationships with their husbands. Hence, women are the ones who mainly make such accusations. During my fieldwork and while living with the Rabha community, I encountered many victims who were accused of witchcraft by other women in the village because they share good and cordial relationships with their husbands. In one of the cases, a woman named Babita Rabha (name changed) was accused of being a witch by her sister-in-law, who had an abusive husband and was jealous of Babita’s good and romantic relationship with her husband. To convince the village community to believe the alleged witchcraft accusation, the sister-in-law accused Babita of being a witch by going into a state of trance (or “jokoni”) during a community religious event. 

My research also clarifies that, though witch-hunting and witch-killing are more concentrated on women, men are not spared. During my fieldwork, I came across a few cases where men were accused of practicing witchcraft. The only difference between women and men accused of witchcraft is that, when a man is accused of practicing witchcraft, his wife is also implicated in the accusation. But when a woman is accused of witchcraft, in all the cases I studied, the husbands were never blamed for their wives’ actions. 

—Daizi Hazarika, Anthropology, received a 2022 CSWS Graduate Student Research Grant for this project.