ABSTRACT
It is not possible to do anthropology in South Asia without attending to the relationship with colonial history and the specific forms of modernity it generated. Part 3 draws on three months of archival research conducted in the India Office Collection of the British Library in London. It examines witchcraft and witches as they were perceived through a colonial written discourse of judicial and police annual reports. It would be wrong to talk about colonialism as monolithic and unchanging through history, or ascribe systemic intentionality to its activities; however, these records have real integrity in that they sometimes speak against the authors. Colonial perceptions saw Chhattisgarh as a peaceful and crime-free region, yet the repugnant underbelly was the murder of ‘innocent’ women as witches by the hands of cowardly men. A catalyst for many attacks on witches came from cholera epidemics that sweep across the country. The ‘cholera witch’ or ‘witch riot’ were metaphors that served the goals of Central Provinces’ police and judiciary in their reporting obligations to the British Raj. Paradoxically, these goals expose the idea of controllability and its lack thereof.
