Disciplining Dakans: Witchcraft,law and everyday lives in eighteenth-century Marwar

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, numerous legal appeals concerning witchcraft, either by women labelled as dakans (roughly translated as ‘witches’) or by their accusers, were brought to the attention of the Marwar state for adjudication. Through an examination of these legal petitions, this article contributes to the scholarship on witchcraft in the subcontinent and other regions. Though speaking to this literature, this article will diverge from it in two ways. First, the article will shift the gaze from tribes to castes in precolonial India and, thereby, question the deep-seated assumption that the belief in witchcraft and other superstitions was confined to the former. Second, moving away from an imagination of witchcraft as being marked by incredible violence emanating from public spectacles of pain and torture, this article will make a case for reconceptualising witchcraft in the Marwar region as a phenomenon in which the occult coexisted with surprising ordinariness in the everyday lives of people.