SOMA CHAUDHURI
|
JANE WARD
|
Why Witches?
Soma Chaudhuri spent more than a decade in the 2000s studying how witchcraft accusations are leveraged to legitimize violence against women. Documenting the rise of witch hunts among some adivasi tea plantation labor communities in northern Bengal, India, she found a complex set of gendered and political-economic factors tied to colonial roots of plantation economy that led to adivasi women becoming credible targets during witch hunts. Growing up with urban class and caste privileges, Soma imagined tea plantations as sites of luxurious vacations among the lovely tea bushes sprinkled with sights of tea leaf pickers with their bamboo baskets, afternoons spent sipping the first flush tea while relaxing on rattan furniture at the planter’s bungalow-turned-tourist hotel. Perfect for holiday postcards of yesteryears or selfies for Instagram posts in today’s world. This is the popular image promised by the “tea resorts” where city dwellers get to enjoy proximity to nature, have adventures in the forests, and feast on local and colonial era-inspired delicacies. Welcome to the glamor of plantation life, where witches or dain in the local Sadri language are erased from the carefully reconstructed pictures of life on the plantation.
Instead, Soma’s first trip to the field site gave her a glimpse of the oppressive labor, dismal work conditions, and abject poverty that are part of tea plantation life. At the bottom of the plantation class hierarchy are the adivasi labor community, who were lured to the area with the promise of better lives when the colonial plantations were set up almost 150 years ago. Isolated through oppressive and violent policies that went behind the foundations of the plantations, today the tea estates are an image of “ailing industry.” While the brown upper caste planters have replaced the white owners, frequent closure of the plantations, inconsistent wages, starvation and malnutrition are the material realities that visitors encounter if they cross the paths from the colonial bungalows towards the labor lines, the areas where the workers live. Adivasi women suffer the most due to their intersectional identities (as women, migrant workers, and as members of the indigenous groups occupying the lowest paying jobs in the plantation economy), and become targets of their community’s anger and frustrations. As Soma’s 2016 book Tempest in a Teapot: Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India closely examines, this scapegoating of women takes the form of witch hunts that often end with violent public deaths. Violence against women, both as metaphors and real/physical, is present everywhere in the plantation, where women are raped, tortured, and murdered all in the name of being labelled a daini, a wild, evil, sexually perverted, ugly woman who must be controlled and killed to end the community’s suffering. Plantation management and the local police have always ignored the killings, as something that the incurable adivasi engage in as their favorite pastime. Witch hunts are not good for tourism!
Thus for Soma, the witch became a symbol of a devastating curse, a stigma, that has destroyed many women and their families. It became almost impossible for her to envision an alternative, where the identity of a witch and the practice of witchcraft could be reclaimed, filled with feminist empowerment and healing. In India, there is a small witchyworld that exists in the urban, English-language preferred and privileged homes in Kolkata, safekeepers of the colonial charm. These witches are Wiccans, led by the self-declared high priestess Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, the darling of the rich, who studied Wicca in Canada and returned to India to teach about Wiccan healing in old country clubs and hotels. Speaking in a carefully anglicized English accent, dressed in mostly western clothing, this exclusive group of Indian witches came with the baggage of homophobia and elitist class exclusiveness, not to mention being strikingly disconnected from the precarity facing adivasi women accused of witchcraft. Between the emotional overwhelm of studying the extreme violence perpetrated against migrant women laborers accused of witchcraft, and the disgust elicited by that of the anglicized pagan witch that promised empowered healing through a mix of crystal gazing accompanied by a “healthy” dose of homophobia, Soma was pretty much done with witches.
But then Jane reached out. Jane, a white American professor of feminist and queer studies, became enchanted with pagan forms of witchcraft in the late 2010s as part of a search for healing and spiritual practices not anchored in white people’s racist appropriation of indigenous and global South traditions. Driven by a desire to relate differently to the natural world and to her own anxiety—both a lifelong anxiety disorder and a newer sense of existential crisis animated by rising fascism and environmental crisis—she dove into her ancestral records and began studying the seasonal rituals and plant-based medicinal practices that structured life for centuries in the parts of Northern Europe where her ancestors lived. She learned about the stories, symbols, foods, crafts, and planting and harvesting activities associated with the pagan holidays. She took classes in herbal medicine and made teas from the mugwort, yarrow, nettle, and calendula she grew in her backyard. For Jane, this return to ancestral healing wasn’t initially about witchcraft at all; it was an expression of white antiracist values, a refusal of the kind of sage-burning and mantra-chanting that many white people take up in order to connect with nature or spirit. But she soon discovered that many of the best resources on European paganism and herbalism were produced by women who identified as witches and who understood their work as witchcraft. For Jane—living as a white woman settler in the United States, and having long been drawn to the nebulous queerness of Hollywood’s vengeful crones, wicked stepsisters, and black-clad spinsters—to be a witch carried little risk. Jane hit her mid-40s and embraced her silver hair, dreamed of a house deep in the woods with a potbelly pig as her animal familiar. To be an aging and perverse witch felt, in this context, like a fuck-you to patriarchy, like a reclaiming of the way the world already views queer feminist women. But this defiance was, of course, a chosen identification forged in many kinds of privilege and not an accusation that carried the risk of rape and death faced by the adivasi women at the heart of Soma’s research. Jane’s embrace of witchcraft, as for many white women in the global North drawn to reconnecting with traditional healing practices, was haunted by histories of horrific violence against women of European descent, but it was also enabled by the colonial, white supremacist, and patriarchal histories that undergird all commodified “freedoms” in the United States.
In 2018, Jane began teaching a course at UC Riverside on gender and witchcraft, originally created by her colleague Sherine Hafez. It was this course that led her to pull together, as best she could, a decolonial feminist witchcraft studies syllabus that would decenter European-derived paganism and trace the relationship between witchcraft, the transatlantic slave trade, and settler colonial violence across the global South and North. In sections on witchcraft in the Americas, the course shifted attention away from the white feminist witchcraft practices that had received ample coverage in the mainstream media, instead focusing on Black witches and brujas engaged in African-derived and indigenous spiritual practices inseparable from healing violent histories of colonization. The course also included feminist research, like Soma’s, on contemporary anti-witch violence, witch camps, and witch hunting laws in South Asia and Africa, leading the students in the course, mostly women and LGBTQ people of color, to ask why they had previously no idea that women accused of witchcraft were currently targets of mass violence. These conversations, along with Jane’s Instagram feed filled with high-profile white, Black, and Latinx witches (mostly from the U.S.) who commonly referenced historical violence but never discussed the witch hunts happening in the present, led Jane to reach out to Soma, thank her for her book, and ask how she made sense of this striking gap in knowledge.
Jane’s questions intrigued Soma, who was familiar with some global North academics’ reactions of horror and disbelief towards witch hunts that were still happening in some parts of the world, but had not been tracking the uptick of witch identification in the United States or its cultural expressions on social media. While the field of anthropology had initially popularized the study of witchcraft, the problematic racial undertones by mostly white men academics studying indigenous communities and their practices, had isolated the study of witches to a small field within the discipline. This had led to a decline in its academic popularity in recent years, leading perhaps to a false assumption that incidents of witch-hunting are historical problems (even as, or perhaps especially as, the popular witchcraft-as-feminist-empowerment trend was again on the rise in the global North). This book arises, in part, from a need to address the global North’s erasure of women for whom the label of witch remains dangerous and devastating. We envision a reimagining of witch studies not only as a practice of decolonial feminist theorizing, but of intersectional healing and solidarity that flows multi-directionally, from south to north, and north to south.
Instead, Soma’s first trip to the field site gave her a glimpse of the oppressive labor, dismal work conditions, and abject poverty that are part of tea plantation life. At the bottom of the plantation class hierarchy are the adivasi labor community, who were lured to the area with the promise of better lives when the colonial plantations were set up almost 150 years ago. Isolated through oppressive and violent policies that went behind the foundations of the plantations, today the tea estates are an image of “ailing industry.” While the brown upper caste planters have replaced the white owners, frequent closure of the plantations, inconsistent wages, starvation and malnutrition are the material realities that visitors encounter if they cross the paths from the colonial bungalows towards the labor lines, the areas where the workers live. Adivasi women suffer the most due to their intersectional identities (as women, migrant workers, and as members of the indigenous groups occupying the lowest paying jobs in the plantation economy), and become targets of their community’s anger and frustrations. As Soma’s 2016 book Tempest in a Teapot: Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India closely examines, this scapegoating of women takes the form of witch hunts that often end with violent public deaths. Violence against women, both as metaphors and real/physical, is present everywhere in the plantation, where women are raped, tortured, and murdered all in the name of being labelled a daini, a wild, evil, sexually perverted, ugly woman who must be controlled and killed to end the community’s suffering. Plantation management and the local police have always ignored the killings, as something that the incurable adivasi engage in as their favorite pastime. Witch hunts are not good for tourism!
Thus for Soma, the witch became a symbol of a devastating curse, a stigma, that has destroyed many women and their families. It became almost impossible for her to envision an alternative, where the identity of a witch and the practice of witchcraft could be reclaimed, filled with feminist empowerment and healing. In India, there is a small witchyworld that exists in the urban, English-language preferred and privileged homes in Kolkata, safekeepers of the colonial charm. These witches are Wiccans, led by the self-declared high priestess Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, the darling of the rich, who studied Wicca in Canada and returned to India to teach about Wiccan healing in old country clubs and hotels. Speaking in a carefully anglicized English accent, dressed in mostly western clothing, this exclusive group of Indian witches came with the baggage of homophobia and elitist class exclusiveness, not to mention being strikingly disconnected from the precarity facing adivasi women accused of witchcraft. Between the emotional overwhelm of studying the extreme violence perpetrated against migrant women laborers accused of witchcraft, and the disgust elicited by that of the anglicized pagan witch that promised empowered healing through a mix of crystal gazing accompanied by a “healthy” dose of homophobia, Soma was pretty much done with witches.
But then Jane reached out. Jane, a white American professor of feminist and queer studies, became enchanted with pagan forms of witchcraft in the late 2010s as part of a search for healing and spiritual practices not anchored in white people’s racist appropriation of indigenous and global South traditions. Driven by a desire to relate differently to the natural world and to her own anxiety—both a lifelong anxiety disorder and a newer sense of existential crisis animated by rising fascism and environmental crisis—she dove into her ancestral records and began studying the seasonal rituals and plant-based medicinal practices that structured life for centuries in the parts of Northern Europe where her ancestors lived. She learned about the stories, symbols, foods, crafts, and planting and harvesting activities associated with the pagan holidays. She took classes in herbal medicine and made teas from the mugwort, yarrow, nettle, and calendula she grew in her backyard. For Jane, this return to ancestral healing wasn’t initially about witchcraft at all; it was an expression of white antiracist values, a refusal of the kind of sage-burning and mantra-chanting that many white people take up in order to connect with nature or spirit. But she soon discovered that many of the best resources on European paganism and herbalism were produced by women who identified as witches and who understood their work as witchcraft. For Jane—living as a white woman settler in the United States, and having long been drawn to the nebulous queerness of Hollywood’s vengeful crones, wicked stepsisters, and black-clad spinsters—to be a witch carried little risk. Jane hit her mid-40s and embraced her silver hair, dreamed of a house deep in the woods with a potbelly pig as her animal familiar. To be an aging and perverse witch felt, in this context, like a fuck-you to patriarchy, like a reclaiming of the way the world already views queer feminist women. But this defiance was, of course, a chosen identification forged in many kinds of privilege and not an accusation that carried the risk of rape and death faced by the adivasi women at the heart of Soma’s research. Jane’s embrace of witchcraft, as for many white women in the global North drawn to reconnecting with traditional healing practices, was haunted by histories of horrific violence against women of European descent, but it was also enabled by the colonial, white supremacist, and patriarchal histories that undergird all commodified “freedoms” in the United States.
In 2018, Jane began teaching a course at UC Riverside on gender and witchcraft, originally created by her colleague Sherine Hafez. It was this course that led her to pull together, as best she could, a decolonial feminist witchcraft studies syllabus that would decenter European-derived paganism and trace the relationship between witchcraft, the transatlantic slave trade, and settler colonial violence across the global South and North. In sections on witchcraft in the Americas, the course shifted attention away from the white feminist witchcraft practices that had received ample coverage in the mainstream media, instead focusing on Black witches and brujas engaged in African-derived and indigenous spiritual practices inseparable from healing violent histories of colonization. The course also included feminist research, like Soma’s, on contemporary anti-witch violence, witch camps, and witch hunting laws in South Asia and Africa, leading the students in the course, mostly women and LGBTQ people of color, to ask why they had previously no idea that women accused of witchcraft were currently targets of mass violence. These conversations, along with Jane’s Instagram feed filled with high-profile white, Black, and Latinx witches (mostly from the U.S.) who commonly referenced historical violence but never discussed the witch hunts happening in the present, led Jane to reach out to Soma, thank her for her book, and ask how she made sense of this striking gap in knowledge.
Jane’s questions intrigued Soma, who was familiar with some global North academics’ reactions of horror and disbelief towards witch hunts that were still happening in some parts of the world, but had not been tracking the uptick of witch identification in the United States or its cultural expressions on social media. While the field of anthropology had initially popularized the study of witchcraft, the problematic racial undertones by mostly white men academics studying indigenous communities and their practices, had isolated the study of witches to a small field within the discipline. This had led to a decline in its academic popularity in recent years, leading perhaps to a false assumption that incidents of witch-hunting are historical problems (even as, or perhaps especially as, the popular witchcraft-as-feminist-empowerment trend was again on the rise in the global North). This book arises, in part, from a need to address the global North’s erasure of women for whom the label of witch remains dangerous and devastating. We envision a reimagining of witch studies not only as a practice of decolonial feminist theorizing, but of intersectional healing and solidarity that flows multi-directionally, from south to north, and north to south.
