Saving “Tribal” Women: Witch Swinging and Colonial Rule in 19th-Century India

The English East India Company’s defeat of Maratha forces in 1818 opened western India to colonial annexation and administrative intervention. In its expansion, the Company ran up against the thickly forested upland tracts of such hill formations as the Western Ghats and the Aravallis in western India. In the pre-colonial period, the inhabitants of these hills were linked to plains dwellers through webs of marriage, trade, and military service. As they came to know the region, Company officers expressed horror at the practice of witch persecution, which they called witch swinging, prevalent there. Pre- and early colonial records suggest that local society in western India associated women with the ability to cause illness as well as recovery through spells and contact with bodily fluids. From the 1820s until the 1880s, the Company launched an effort to put an end to this belief in witchcraft and the practice of witch swinging, deploying law, pressure on local kings and chiefs, governmental employment, and missionary activity.

Alongside, from the 1840s, the Company began to frame ‘witch swinging’ as a problem unique to these hill-dwelling communities, particularly the Bhils, alone. These were the very decades in which colonial governance and social science combined to create the category ‘tribe.’ This presentation will explore how gender was a key site for the recasting of hill-dwelling groups in western India into ‘tribal’ Others standing at a remove from ‘society.’ In examining yet another manifestation of white officers and missionaries seeking to ‘save brown women from brown men’ as a justification for colonial rule and interventions, the paper will ask what was different in the dynamics at play when the women concerned belonged not to high-caste Indian communities (as with sati) but rather to those far lower down in regional social orders.