Abstract
Soma Chaudhuri has written an important book on witch hunting among indigent tea plantation workers in West Bengal. In this well-researched book, the author shows how the scourge of witchcraft allegations, trials, and lynchings is produced by the powerlessness and precarious employment of the workers, and the political, economic, and sexual exploitation of indigenous groups in India’s social history. In the lack of avenues of protest and substantive social change, the migrant workers deal with financial duress, ill health and physical suffering, emotional instability, and everyday humiliation by displacing their resentment onto a vulnerable neighbor, frequently a widowed or elderly woman. Chaudhuri shows that this is partly because their unfortunate condition appears to be a bad omen in these communities surviving in stressful health and material conditions, and often families truly reckon an evil eye or a witch’s spell as the likely source of yet another run of misfortune. These delusions can be so gripping that sometimes people will even murder their loved ones on suspicions of witchcraft, or turn themselves in to the police after professedly “meting justice” to the witch presumed responsible for their pain and loss. Such accusations, however, no less serve as opportunities for involved parties to pursue vested interests, such as to encroach on land and usurp property, renege on debts, or to settle scores—whether (self-)acknowledged or not—with intimate enemies.
The book explicates the convolution of social and economic despondency, the far-reaching excesses of profit-driven, patriarchal social structures, and the continuing ramifications of colonialism—all in the cruel, often fatal, assault on a helpless person by equally desperate group members. Chaudhuri’s methods are evidently thorough and painstaking. They include in-depth interviews with victims, their relatives, as well as with the accused and the local medicine man (ojha or janguru). In addition, the author analyzes media reporting of witch hunts, conducts surveys, and converses with NGOs active in the area. The methodology is thus sound and multidimensional.
Much as I admired Chaudhuri’s meticulous research and the sociohistorical and scholarly importance of these representations of life (and death) in the tea estates of India’s North-East, I did experience some uneasiness. For one, the author reiterates all too often what felt like a (somewhat simplistic) thesis statement that witch hunting involved a displacement of grievances borne off the management–worker relationship onto a vulnerable member of the in-group. While that may be true, Chaudhuri’s own research shows that the story is far more complex, and is as much about global capitalism, postcoloniality, gender, and an internal colonialism to the Indian State’s treatment of minority groups, such as the “adivasis.” Such assertion of the binary also speaks to my occasional discomfort with the narrative when it encourages rigid categorizations of, for example, types of witch hunting based on persecutor’s motivations, to the detriment of the author’s own nuanced ethnographic findings.
These conceptual or stylistic concerns aside, Chaudhury has written a very important book on the plight, simultaneously, of the millions of tea plantation workers in India and of “indigenous” groups. The work illustrates as much the symbolic and political violence against the “indigenous” built into the historical development and extant popular practices of India’s national consciousness, as it expresses the everyday suffering of a hyper-exploited and stigmatized population. Where these workers are chastised by the state apparatus and the plantation management alike as “wild” and primitive,” incidents of witchcraft, the author demonstrates, offer a powerful, tragic dramatization of the oppression and destitution of these social groups.
The book is a significant contribution to the scholarship on popular cultural and religious performances in South Asia. Chaudhuri’s book, and such ethnographic understandings in general, are a must-read for state administrators whose knowledge and interpretations continue to bear significantly and directly on the subjects’ lives and circumstances. It will be a valuable resource for scholars studying the tribulations of “indigenous” workers in postcolonial nation-state setups; for students of gendered sufferings in precarious living conditions; and, of course, for comparative understanding of tea plantation workers and modern witchcraft practices. It should be standard reading for themes of gender, indigeneity, development, and rituals in graduate courses on contemporary South Asia. Additionally, Chaudhuri provides a welcome peek into the paradoxes and problems facing NGOs intervening in such visceral social conflicts, which will benefit both graduate and undergraduate students of rural and community development.