Economic and Political Weekly
December 27, 2003
Recognition to Witchcraft
Illegal and Ill-Founded
The history of India is one of inchoate assimilation of disparate tribes – their respective myths, customs and cults left fairly intact, only incoherently unified in a hierarchical order. This process of absorption was relatively humane by international standards, but it became the precursor of a swamp of superstitions. Placating these superstitions – as evidenced most recently by the felicitation of witch doctors, shamans and sorcerers – might momentarily bring votes to the politician in election times, but it will only exacerbate the deeper fissures.
Ranjit Sau
On September 22, 2003, at a function in Patna, Sanjay Paswan, union minister of state for human resource development, felicitated 51 witch doctors, shamans, and sorcerers. The Bihar unit of the International Association of People’s Lawyers had asked the police to stop the function on the ground that it amounted to a gross violation of Bihar’s Prevention of Witch Practices Act, 1999. The Patna-based Mahila Samajik Sansthan has filed a public interest suit against Paswan in the Patna High Court, and has demanded his arrest. Social activists and researchers have accused Paswan of encouraging superstition for the purpose of gaining votes in election for political office.
The very fact that as late as 1999 an act had to be passed to outlaw the practice of witchcraft in Bihar is itself eloquent enough. The malady is deep-rooted and widespread. One is reminded here of an observation by Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi: “Ideas (including superstition) become a force, once they have gripped the masses”. Apparently, the spell of witchcraft had once swayed the masses, and it has continued ever since.
Paswan said he was “seriously thinking of introducing a new course in school syllabus on the basis of experiences of witchcraft practitioners, including ojhas (witch doctors), gunis (shamans, practitioners of occult), and bhagats (sorcerers)”. The neglect of these people, he added, had made villages vulnerable to natural and other calamities. “It is they who protected villages from evil spirits.”
We have got two kinds of evil spirits to contend with – one roaming villages, the other circling the towns. Thus arises in India a dual system of superstitions. The entire course of ancient Indian history shows tribal elements being fused into a general society. This development was in its own way much more humane than in other countries. The older cults and forms were not demolished by force, but assimilated with great ingenuity. Superstition reduced the need for violence. The main work of brahmanism has been to gather the disparate tribal myths together, to display them as unified cycles of stories, and to set them in a better-articulated social framework. Brahmanism thus gave some unity to what would have been social fragments without a common bond. The process was of crucial importance in the history of India, first in developing the country from tribe to society and then holding it back, bogged down in a swamp of superstition. Much more brutality would have been necessary had Indian history developed along the same lines as that of Europe or the Americas.
Kosambi labels one set of beliefs, rituals, practice as ‘priestly superstition’. In decrying the role of superstition when it kept India backward, he says, it must never be forgotten that priestly ritual and magic also helped bring civilisation to various localities in ancient India. Such beliefs turned into fetters when the class-structure hardened. Mere superstition cannot arise unless it has some deep productive roots, though it might survive by inertia.
The priestly class must have had some peculiar function in the early means of production, some outstanding success that gave it a hold upon society. One of those contributions was a good calendar. It does not suffice here, unlike in Europe, for the farmer to note the end of winter by natural signs. Here the sequence of activities has to be timely. Land has to be prepared before the monsoon sets in; sowing can be done only after the proper rainy season has begun, or the sprouts will die. The fields are best weeded during the mid-monsoon break. The real difficulty lay in telling the time of the year accurately. The moon with its phases sufficed for primitive man’s simple ritual; and the birds, beasts and plants themselves furnished all necessary information to food-gatherers. This left an enduring heritage of the lunar month, and prognostication by omens.
But the food-producer’s year is solar, which requires constant adjustment of lunar months. The urgent need for a working almanac lay at the root of astronomy, algebra, the theory of numbers, all of which were conspicuous achievements of the priestly class. The season can then be foretold even when the sun and the moon obliterated their starry background, or were invisible because of clouds.
Primitive reasoning led inevitably to the conclusion that the heavenly bodies not merely predict but form all-important weather; the word “meteorology” still implies that. Therefore, the stars and planets foreshadow and control all of human life. Thus the horoscope (which even Galileo drew up in his day), astrology, mantras, and rituals to placate or influence the heavenly spirits were natural concomitants to the indispensable priestly calendar. It cannot be without significance that Aryabhatta (who was the first to suggest that the earth rotates about its axis) and Varahamihira (better known for his astrology, iconography, prognostication and allied ‘sciences’) were among the nine jewels of the Gupta court in the late fifth century.
A great separating line appeared in the course of transition from tribe to society. Those who refused to take to food production and plough agriculture fell behind in social and economic status, along with their totems, taboos and fearsome spirits. Meanwhile, the deities worshipped by farmers reside high above the sky in mountain tops, stars and planets, but those propitiated by hunters and food-gatherers are to be found at a much lower level on earth in trees, stones or animals. The altitude of the abode is a measure of the prestige of the occupant spirits.
Caste is class on a primitive level of production. The class structure hardened by the fifth century, as a serious shortage of coins of precious metals led to the organised formation of self-sufficient villages, requiring least amount of cash transaction, each village having been provided with precisely twelve artisans to serve the gentry in exchange of subsistence in kind. Then the doctrine of ancestral-commodity fetishism came to prevent social mobility. At this point the divine spirits along with the associated superstitions got partitioned neatly between the artisans on the one hand and the upper classes on the other. It so happens that the present ministry of human resource development in Delhi is fortunate to have spokesmen for both parties. If the minister of state is a champion of one group, the cabinet minister is a strong protagonist of the other. If the former is bent on putting witchcraft in schools, the latter keeps pushing astrology into colleges and universities.
Once it was thought that economic development is a solvent into which all ignorance melts. And education is the most potent antidote of all. But the two ministers do not seem economically underdeveloped, nor do they look lacking in education. Both are said to have the highest academic degree in physics, and they were lecturers. To relieve our anxiety on this count, Paswan has issued a statement: “I strongly believe that whatever they [witch doctors] practice is pure science.” But this has put us in a quandary. For science is a terrible thing, without even a shred of proof.
The demarcation between science and pseudo-science is not merely a problem of armchair philosophy; it is of vital relevance for society. Many philosophers have tried to resolve the problem of demarcation in the following terms: a statement constitutes knowledge if many people believe it sufficiently strongly. But the history of thought shows that many people were totally committed to absurd beliefs. If the strength of beliefs were a hallmark of knowledge, we should have to rank some tales about demons, angels, devil and of heaven and hell as knowledge.
Scientists, on the other hand, are very sceptical of their best theories. Newton’s is the most powerful theory science has yet produced, but Newton himself never believed that bodies attract each other at a distance. So no degree of commitments to beliefs make them knowledge. The cognitive value of a theory has nothing to do with its psychological influence on people’s minds. Belief, commitment, understanding are states of human mind. But the objective, scientific value of a theory is independent of the human mind which creates it or understands it.
But, we know, all scientific theories are equally unprovable; for every theory in turn depends upon another theory. For example, Galileo claimed that he could observe mountains on the moon and spots on the sun, and that these observations refuted the time-honoured Aristotelian theory that celestial bodies are faultless crystal balls. But his observations were not observed by unaided senses: their reliability depended upon the reliability of his telescope – and of the optical theory of the telescope – which was violently questioned by his contemporaries. It was not Galileo’s pure, untheoretical observations that confronted Aristotelian theory; but rather Galileo’s observations in the light of his optical theory that confronted the Aristotelians’ observations in the light of their theory of the heavens. It is all circular reasoning.
Recourse to the probability of occurrence does not help much either. For the mathematical probability of all theories, given any amount of evidence, is zero. We do not know, for sure, how long the series of experiments has to be in order to yield the correct estimate of probabilities; nor shall we ever know. “When is a series of experiments to be called long [enough]?”, asks Karl Popper. “We cannot know when, or whether, we have reached an approximation to the probability. How can we know that the desired approximation has in fact been reached?” Thus reckoned, scientific theories are not only equally unprovable, but also equally improbable.
So, science proceeds by trial and error, taking risk on the way. Theories in science live in a world of Darwinian struggle; the fittest survive, for a while. There is no perfect theory, only better theory, for the time being. Newton was challenged by Einstein; so is Einstein by a host of others. That is how knowledge advances.
In respect of society and spirituality there is even less scope for experimentation or proof by other means. But that does not mean we cannot discriminate between beliefs. Mahatma Gandhi had characterised the devastating earthquake of January 1934 in Bihar as “a divine chastisement sent by God for our sins” – in particular the sin of practising untouchability. “For me”, he said, “there is a vital connection between the Bihar calamity and the [custom of] untouchability.” Rabindranath Tagore was equally against that social scourge. Yet he was constrained to distance himself from Gandhiji’s judgment that related a natural disaster such as earthquake to some extraterrestrial dispensation of justice. “It is”, Tagore wrote, “all the more unfortunate because this kind of unscientific view of phenomena is too easily accepted by a large section of our countrymen.”
Once upon a time man had claimed himself to be the sole cosmic purpose. He placed himself at the centre of the universe, leaving all heavenly bodies to rotate about his home-planet, the earth. But, then the successive discoveries of the solar system, the Milky Way, the existence of innumerable galaxies, and so on had the effect of dethroning him from the pinnacle of creation. Similarly, he had to give up the prejudice that diseases were a retribution for our ethical failure. Comets are no longer looked upon as an advance warning of an impending catastrophe attracted by his sin.
On social and spiritual matters, we can, much like Galileo, observe other communities, especially their rituals, customs and beliefs, and compare them with ours. Much like the theories of science, there may be no perfect belief about society and spirituality, but there could be better ones by some measure. To put it in more concrete terms, Paswan may like to compare the performance of the ojhas with that of the doctors at the New Moon Hospital, at Chichra, for instance. To take another example, rural electrification and provision of good schools, drinkable water and efficient medical service may be a better way of keeping the evil spirits at bay than by, say, appointing 50 witch doctors, shamans and gunis.
Of course, a politician need not always actually believe in what he says or does. His metric is how to face the ballot box within a year or two. He dares not perturb the age-old social prejudice. He would rather titillate than challenge the ruling regime of silent exploitation. Such politics only goes to undermine the very basis of democracy. In 1938, Rabindranath wrote: “We who often glorify our tendency to ignore reason, installing in its place blind faith, valuing it as spiritual, are ever paying for its cost with obscuration of our mind and destiny. ...This irrational force of credulity in our people ... might have had a quick result [of building] a superstructure, while sapping the foundation.”
Placed by the side of comparable countries like China, Russia and the US, or the smaller countries like England, France and Germany, India has the dubious distinction of recording by far the largest volume of dissent, disturbance and insurgency within its border. India does not seem to have crossed the stage of being an uneasy complex of disparate tribes. The prevailing politics is exacerbating the tribal divisions and subdivisions without providing the canopy of a collective identity. Promotion of witchcraft, shamanism and sorcery is not to be conflated with renaissance. It is a crash obscurantism that gnaws at the very foundation of a rational society of justice and democracy, while deceptively supporting a broad superstructure of toleration and generosity.
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