Governing the Unseen: Witches and Landed Power in Early Modern India

Join the Asia Center in Tempe or via zoom for the lecture by Associate Professor, Divya Cherian, Department of History, Princeton University. 

Abstract

Histories of the occult sciences and their relationship to courtly power in the early modern world are today burgeoning areas of scholarship. How did this investment in managing the occult play out beyond courts and in the villages of South Asia before the colonial period? Focusing on the eighteenth century and on the western Indian kingdom of Marwar, this paper will home in on one aspect of this question: the specific associations made in this time and place between women and certain forms of malevolent supernatural power. What were the regimes of power that both generated the specter of the maleficent woman--a dakan (loosely, witch)-and rested upon the construction of her ubiquity? How did the customs of place and caste interact with kinalv law to condition her fate? Most centrally, how did a woman who found herself faced with the allegation of being a witch navigate this grave danger in the eighteenth century? What does this history tell us about locality as a political resource in early modern South Asia?