ABSTRACT
A ṭonhī (witch) needs to be crafted into being before one can attack her/him. Witch-crafting takes time, often many years whereby certain people gradually gain the witch-image and find their everyday behaviour interpreted through a lens of antisocial or abnormal cultural constructs. This part pays attention to age, gender, marital status and caste to explain why accusations can, or do not, lead to murder, revealing far more complexity to witches and their accusations. However, these findings are complicated by three caste anomalies—the Brahmin, Satnami and Rawat communities. Part 5 provides a kaleidoscopic view of the multiple ways in which state agencies, NGOs, media reports and individual agents produce a discourse of witchcraft as ‘Adivasi tradition’ set against modernity which at the same time becomes unsettled by witchcraft accusations and violence happening at sites ‘that do not fit’ such as non-Adivasi castes and urban centres. For a witchcraft accusation to turn into a violent action is indicative of the degree of social connectedness of a person.
