Madwomen And Witches

The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same origin. The layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellowmen .
SIGMUND FREUD, "THE 'UNCANNY' "

Stolen dung, the voices of old women, and the movements of children mattered differently in Varanasi's rural hinterland. On the rare occasions when such things happened, suspected witches or lakarsunghvas were attacked less as strangers whose voices could not be heard as meaningful other than indexing menace, and more as neighbors or relatives whose voices made demands that challenged shifting configurations of land, capital, and Seva .

Martha Chen and Jean Drèze's work on the survival and quality of life of Indian widows and Bina Agarwal's examination of the relation between land ownership and the survival and quality of life of women more generally have drawn attention to the correlation of witchcraft accusations and the contested ownership of land by unmarried, separated and widowed women.^[5] Witchcraft has flourished in areas that have been rendered marginal through the intensification of a cash economy, the Sanskritization of practices of land tenure and patriarchal authority, and the delegitimation of women's rights in land. Earlier ethnographic work on rural witchcraft accusation and death in north India, such as Carstairs's Death of a Witch , has been reread by Chen in terms of the contested land ownership of the suspected witch.^[6]

Such economic interpretations of witchcraft accusation have been lacking and are critical. Broader socioeconomic reasoning may also be useful to analyze why periodic intensifications of witchcraft and child-stealing accusation—as in 1996—occur when they do. Several social facts may lie some distance behind the lakarsunghva rumors: the everyday violence, to use Nancy Scheper-Hughes's phrase,^[7] when parents and other family members feel they are forced to bond or sell not only their children's labor but the rights to their bodies; the widespread knowledge, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, that there were brokers to whom one could sell one of one's kidneys for a relatively high price, thus the knowledge that the global market had an interest in separating one into salable parts; and the recent rise in the cost of numerous basic commodities with the decline in government controls and subsidies in the wake of neoliberal "structural adjustment," and its potential effect on people's sense of vulnerability within a growing space of marginality.

The question for us here is why and how certain old people become representative of the forces that seem to impinge upon households and communities, in

both the normalized theodicy of everyday misfortune and violence and the extraordinary theodicy of social panics. How witchcraft may work as a way to confront misfortune has been one of the central themes in the anthropology of suffering.^[8] My approach here will be to ask what is it that in extraordinary times makes the voice and appearance of certain persons not humorously or abjectly witchlike but frighteningly and uncannily so, and, moving in the other direction, to ask how the possibility or social memory of the uncanny may structure the everyday abjection of the interstitial dying space. How does the repetitive request of the elder for support become heard as a dangerous curse, and how do memories of the curse structure more everyday hearings?

In his essay on the experience of the "unheimlich " or "uncanny," Freud begins with two observations. First, after the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, he describes the class of things that tend to provoke an uncanny feeling in us as follows: "Everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light." Second, he notes that the word's contrary heimlich (and the same is true in different ways for "canny" and the more literal translation "homely"), can suggest not only the comfortable, trusted, and familiar but also the secretive and unpleasant, "so that 'heimlich' comes to have the meaning usually ascribed to 'unheimlich .' "^[9] The familiar is suddenly strange: a rupture appears in the taken-for-grantedness of things. The old woman's everyday bakbak is suddenly weird and threatening.

This return of the repressed works on the usual two levels for Freud, suggesting both an earlier developmental stage of infantile narcissism and an earlier societal stage of primitive animism. Freud goes on to question why "the phenomenon of the 'double' "—the perceived repetition of events, likenesses, and experiences—often generates an uncanny feeling. For readers of Freud less committed to his specific narratives of child development and cultural evolution, the experience of the uncanny and particularly of the uncanny double has come to suggest a rupture in the symbolic order and a conflict between the meaning of a sign and its materiality.

The unexpected strangeness of the old body is rooted in the disruption of its familial significance. The familial body of the old person, whether literally displaced from its expected charpoy or hearth into the liminal space between households or discursively displaced from its familial context into a new administrative science of old age, regains a voice and is no longer the unhearable inhabitant of a dying space. For the urban middle class, over the past century, this displaced and suffering elder has periodically embodied a colonial and postcolonial predicament of culture in which the familiar and foreign form shifting hybrids.

For the rural and urban poor, we have seen how the politics and phenomenology of everyday weakness diminishes the unique significance of the old body. If the rupture of the familial itself is to an extent normalized, suffering old bodies may have less apocalyptic significance for the poor than for the bhadralok and structurally similar groups. Old bodies that bespeak millenarian promise—such as, perhaps, the old woman of the Balua affair who took no food for five days and

nights—seem to do so by radically renouncing any familial dependency. Within the transactional networks sustaining persons and families in communities like Nagwa, the bodies of vulnerable children more than those of vulnerable elders may become metonyms of family and ghar and of their transactional health. For Siranji's family, the old woman was a far more ambivalent vehicle of the adequacy of their gifts than was her grandson Raju. Throughout Nagwa, old people were at risk for being perceived as useless mouths continually demanding chapatis destined for the equally vulnerable but far more promising young. When as in 1996 the relation between a marginalized community's health and the well-being and survival of its children appears radically threatened, particularly given the chapati counts that frame the young and old as contestants for survival, old persons may be at greater risk of becoming strange threats: witches, lakarsunghvas .

In gerontopolitan Varanasi, the ubiquity and ideological centrality of interstitial old bodies and voices renders them part of the normalized topography of the urban exterior: rand , sand , sirhi , sannyasi. Like cows and steps, widows and babas are familiar and only occasionally irksome features of the landscape. Interstitial old voices in the city do not threaten any but the youngest children. These are often teased by their older playmates—see the old woman, she's a witch, a dain —and are shushed into bed by the admonitions of mothers and aunts: hush, or the lakarsunghva will get you. Such scary tales might be seen to evoke and rehearse the crises of child development, after Freud, but in the context of everyday and extraordinary concerns surrounding child survival their ubiquity takes on a different cast.

The figure of the old baba or witch of play and bedtime fantasy, ready to devour or steal young children, recalls an uncanny circulation between the very old and very young, offering a grammar for a different sort of intimate enemy than the alienated familial bodies of Ghar Kali. In everyday play, the monstrous elderly are invoked to stabilize differences of age: the old but not very old tell of them to their children; the young but not very young tell of them to their younger siblings: young is to old as innocence and vulnerability are to knowledge and danger. But witches recall the fragility of the familial. At critical moments when the hegemonic obviousness and necessity of the social order threaten to collapse—when the strangeness of the order of things overwhelms its functional content—the order of generation itself is rendered unstable and opaque.

Michael Taussig in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America described how Bolivian peasants in the context of the introduction of tin mining, the intensification of wage labor, and the commodification of body, time, land, relationships, and life, "captured" the transformations of commodity fetishization by "subjecting [them] to a paganism." The devil in peasant narrative is monstrous but not terrifying, an ambivalent figure reflecting the conflicted yet critical consciousness of peasants regarding the source of their growing affliction.^[10] Witches and dangerous old babas are ambivalent in a different sense, humorous figures of everyday generational difference periodically transformed into monstrous figures

of emergency. The oscillation between these may reflect an effort to capture a set of social processes by which both rural peasants and urban slum-dwellers are constituted as subjects through intensifying forms of commodification—of one's children, of one's body parts—that explode the borders of both the family and the body.

In the everyday play of children as well as in the literature of affliction of the region around Varanasi and more generally in north India, the relation between terror and abjection circles around the female witch,^[11] Old men as babas, as I will discuss below, draw upon the dense field of the renunciate and the rishi. The ambiguity of the doubled figure of widow-witch specifically indexes the ambiguity of mother-aunt in the narrative of the Bad Family. Dogs, ghouls, and Bhairava are joined on their cremation ghat perambulations in urban folklore by the figures of dains and curail -like vampiresses; the old woman as dog and madwoman draws upon the stock figure of the dain .

The psychoanalytic readings of Carstairs and Kakar identify the ubiquity of witches and demonesses in north Indian folklore and mythology in terms of the bad mother so central to their analyses: the demonic or witchlike bad mother is an oedipal archetype of the Indian child's perceived rejection by his inconstant mother when extended family pressure forces her to relinquish him to his father and uncles.^[12] Such bad-mother explanations are impoverished, ignoring the experience of girls and women, the cross-societal frequency of witches and their historical transformations, the relation of witch accusations to land disputes, and the oscillation between the everyday and the monstrous. Even from within a psychodynamic framework—one attentive to the relation of sociocultural dimensions of child-rearing to the constitution of local worlds, to what Gananath Obeysekere has called deep structure^[13] —the bad mother narrative avoids more interesting questions. Old witches are grandmothers or aunts far more than mothers. To exhaust their meaning within the framework of kinship in terms of the mother or her transformations is to elide the importance of other kin in family structure and particularly in the raising of children.^[14]

In his discussion of the accused "witch" Dhapu in a Rajasthani village, Carstairs attempted to suggest that the old woman's aggressively angry voice—of which other villagers had long been resentful and sometimes afraid—laid the seeds for her eventual accusation as having caused various severe illnesses and misfortunes and her being hacked to death. Dhapu looked out for her own family's interests to an extreme; she was resented by all the other women and men of the village. Dhapu may have been at risk because she had "acted in such a manly fashion" throughout a series of land disputes. Chen has reinterpreted this material, showing the centrality of these land disputes to Dhapu's accusation and death.^[15]

The relation between the exploitation of interstitial old women and the contested hearing of their voice emerges sharply in a 1911 short story by the Hindi writer Premchand, Garib ki hai , "The Lament of the Poor." Premchand often

wrote of life in the villages near Varanasi where he grew up. Manga, a Brahman widow like Mashima and Koki, entrusts her late husband's pension to the wealthy village advocate, Munshi Ramsevak, for safekeeping. She discovers only too late that he has spent much of it and has no intention of returning any Manga goes to the village council for justice, "but a poor widow's anger is just the sound of a blank bullet that may scare a child but has no real effect at all." Manga stops working, stops keeping house, and devotes herself single-mindedly to her hatred of Munshi Ramsevak. Her progress from anger to bakbak to silence, culminating in her death, is narrated by Premchand as a chronicle of the metonymic voice.

This voice is at first barely present: there is no one, Premchand reminds us, who will listen to the voice of an old and poor widow. But her obsession transforms Manga dramatically, from a weak and unheard body into one increasingly identified entirely with her voice: "All day and all night, walking or sitting, she had only one idea: to inveigh against Munshi Ramsevak. Seated day and night at the door of her hut she fervently cursed him. For the most part in her pronouncements she employed poetic speech and metaphors so that people who heard her were astonished." Manga's voice moves from a direct language of complaint, which cannot be heard, to a rich and bloody use of metaphor, which is. As she shifts into a metalanguage in which she conveys her anger through the poetry of madness, Manga as voice finally gains an audience. There is, however, a price in becoming just a voice. Adults are astonished, children make fun of her, and "gradually her mind gave way. Bare-headed, bare-bodied, with a little hatchet in her hand, she would sit in desolate places. She abandoned her hut and was seen wandering around the ruins in a cremation ghat along the river—disheveled, red-eyed, grimacing crazily, her arms and legs emaciated."

The repetitive voice is located within the social marginality of the interstice, and precedes the fact of madness. As she becomes increasingly demonic, Manga moves from object of derision to one of fear: "When they saw her like this people were frightened. Now no one teased her even for fun." Manga becomes like a female ascetic, immersed in the signs of death; she is like a bitch, scrounging around the cremation ghat. And these transformations are expressed through her voice: "She had earned the title of the local mad woman [pagli ]. She would sit alone, talking to herself for hours, expressing her intense desire to eat, smash, pinch and tear Ramsevak's flesh, bones, eyes, liver and the like, and when her hatred reached its climax she would turn her face toward Ramsevak's house and shriek the terrible words, 'I'll drink your blood!' "

Manga's voice is now that of the vampire witch. It is no longer the old person's lament for food: like the old woman of Balua, Manga refuses all transaction. "Manga ate nothing. . . . Even after a barrage of threats and abuse she refused to eat." All that remains is the primal voice—as witch, as beast, and as that epitome of inauspiciousness and danger, the owl: "More terrible than her words was her wild laughter. In the imagined pleasure of drinking Munshiji's blood she would burst into laughter that resounded with such demoniacal violence, such

bestial ferocity that when people heard it in the night their blood was chilled. It seemed as though hundreds of owls were hooting together."

Manga lies on Munshi Ramsevak's threshold. Only one child—Ramsevak's own wayward son Ramgulam—continues to torment her. Eventually her cry subsides, she retreats into the last, silent voice of old age, and she dies on Ramsevak's doorstep. The advocate is ostracized for the murder of a Brahman, but for him and his wife a greater torment than the now-angry villagers is Manga herself, bodiless but still present as a voice. "Several times a low voice reached them from within the earth: "I'll drink your blood. . . ."^[16] Ramsevak's wife dies of fright, Ramsevak ultimately immolates himself, taking on the classic fate of the abject widow, and Ramgulam, the mocker of old paglis , winds up in the reformatory.

Premchand as social critic transforms the pagli from object of derision into agent of retributive justice. He does so through her voice, drawing on a heteroglot complex of interstitial voices contained in the lament of the pagli : dog, owl, fearsome ascetic witch. Yet Manga's victory requires her death: only the killing of a Brahman on his doorstep explodes the fiction of Munshi's reputation for Seva , the source of his moral standing. His family unravels. Manga's voice, previously discountable as that of the interstitial old woman and then bewildering as the curse of the madwoman, is ultimately located on the threshold of a bad family—which explains and redeems it. Again, Ghar Kali.

The old woman of Ghar Kali is bare-breasted, a complex sign of her disengagement from material concerns and of her degraded treatment. The sexually explicit old widow also draws upon the erotic connotations of the widow as the unhusbanded woman and as the prostitute. A common word for "widow" also connotes whore. Saraswati, in his study of kasivasi widows, noted the association frequently made by his Varanasi informants between widows and prostitutes. Young widows in particular were seen as having few other sources for meeting their economic needs and sensual cravings.^[17]

The threat of both the young widow's body and the old widow's voice was mediated through its institutionalization in bhajan. Bhajan was central to middle-class piety in the colonies. Amita Mukherjee and many of her neighbors attended groups of older women and sometimes men who sang hymns together, daily or weekly. For indigent widows, bhajan was not only a site of community but a source of livelihood.

On Mir Ghat, not far from the cremation pyres of Manikarnika Ghat, a beautiful old red brick building that had seen finer days housed one such bhajan ashram. Here both young and old widows stayed in exchange for their voices. They sang bhajans throughout the day, financed by patrons who accumulated merit through both the gift itself and the praises of God sung. The threat of the widow's body was inverted: in the ashram, nonwidows threatened. The building was well-guarded by neighbors and the widows themselves. On an early visit, a widow who decided that I was up to no good chased me up the steps of the ghat with a stick. The separation of the bhajan ashram from the dangers of the interstice was aggressively maintained.

The production of bhajan transformed the repetitious voice from bakbak to divine rhythm, and offered a space to contain the simultaneously dangerous and endangered body. The voice of the body—the complaint of the destitute or uncared for or sexually ambiguous widow—is silenced; it becomes the voice without a body, or rather, is given a new body, the divine body of Krishna. But constant disembodiment was a burden for most of the ashram widows; they tended to grind through their bhajans soullessly. Their rather mournful noise, early in the morning on Mir Ghat, was occasionally punctuated by the voices of women on pilgrimage—as the boats of the latter drifted by the windows of the room—chanting bhajans joyously. For its hearers, there was irony in the institutionalized bhajan; it could not but point elsewhere. "How is their health?" I asked a young man who lives behind the Mir Ghat Bhajan Ashram, about the widows. He shrugged, "They are old." "And how are their minds?" I continued. He shrugged again, "They sing bhajans." Safe from being heard as doglike or witchlike, these voices of God still spoke to the absence of family and to the unhappy mind of the interstitial old woman.