ABSTRACT
The narratives of persons arrested in witchcraft cases and their relatives show an unwillingness to talk about the events and use a lexicon of disruption, absence, and irreversible loss. Accused women mostly draw on emotional and physical reserves to simply endure living. The remaking of social worlds evolves through deliberate acts of forgetting and silencing, the search for alternative explanations for her predicament by the accused witch and denying active participation and blaming others on the part of perpetrators. One way accused witches comprehend and remake their worlds is to use what Veena Das (1991) calls ‘organising images’ to redirect the accusation narrative. Women are socialised to conform to the ideological norms of the Indian family, and the accused woman draws on familial relationships as a primary organising image, yet these same norms ensure her subordination. As long as the Indian family is held together at all costs then women accused as witches will always be expected to place the preservation of the family above their lives.
