ABSTRACT
The principal argument made in this chapter is that gendered inequality is scripted through unequal property laws and exacerbated by development. Sited in Jharkhand, a state with a high proportion of tribal population, the author argues how transformations in natural resource production systems have proven disadvantageous and disempowering for women in general and tribal women in particular. This has caused both tribal and non-tribal women to move away from central roles of decision makers to peripheral roles of labourers in this region. Other community-based power struggles in property inheritance coalesce within this local context to script inequality and further marginalize women by denying them the agency to exercise their property rights. The practice of branding women as witches appears in these discussions as only another strategy that is used to curtail women’s property rights. Discussions of the incidence of witchcraft practices in the village studied by the author emerge, along with narratives of the violence faced by the women being designated as witches when they tried asserting their property rights or resisted exploitation and sexual advances.
