Rani Kisku told The Wire, ‘Now we are scared that they might kill us too.’ Kisku said this shortly after her mother, Lodgi, was beaten to death by neighbours in West Bengal’s Harisara village after being accused of being a witch.
Witch-hunting is a form of gender-based violence. Women, often those from marginalised communities, are falsely branded as ‘daains’ (witches) and violently attacked following instances of misfortune in the community, such as diseases or poor crops. However, witch-hunting isn’t just rooted in superstition. It is a tool used by men to deliberately strip women of their lands, their dignity, and their lives.
In Rani’s case, the family was far too afraid of retaliation and further violence to grieve. Instead of processing the loss of Lodgi, they had to contend with who the mob intends to target next. The details of the crime are well documented. Lodgi Kisku, 54, and Dolly Soren, 40, were killed on September 13, 2024, just before the Karam Puja festival. A local mob dragged them out, tied them up, and murdered them over suspicions of witchcraft before dumping their bodies into a canal.
Uttering her mother’s name publicly in the village square would have invited immediate and violent retaliation, making her grief a liability.
Law enforcement eventually arrested fifteen individuals. However, the legal paperwork misses one of the many devastating consequences of the crime: Rani was entirely barred from conducting a funeral. Uttering her mother’s name publicly in the village square would have invited immediate and violent retaliation, making her grief a liability.
When grief is silenced
The pattern repeats continuously across the region. Consider the violence in Purilia’s Chapuri village on the night of the Kali Puja. Padabi Tudu, a 37-year-old woman — and the only educated female member of her marital household — was hacked to death by her own relatives in front of her thirteen-year-old daughter. The extended family had spent five years labelling her a daain, simply because a brother-in-law had passed away from an undiagnosed neurological condition.
However, her daughter cannot speak about her trauma. Tudu’s husband cannot publicly defend or acknowledge his wife’s murder, knowing that doing so would be read by the village as an admission of his own complicity in the witchcraft she was accused of.
Official figures show a grim reality. According to the latest data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), India recorded 85 witchcraft-motivated murders in 2022 and 74 the following year. While states like Jharkhand and Odisha see some of the highest instances of witch-hunting, West Bengal has also witnessed numerous such cases.
But when the state only records the murders, the psychological aftermath is completely overlooked. Denying families the right to grieve isn’t a secondary effect of the violence; it is one of the primary objectives. The first step is the murder. The second step is destroying the memory of the victim’s social existence entirely by forcing their families into silence and hiding their grief.
Divergent erasure
The methods of enforcing this silence depend heavily on demographic lines. The tactics deployed against a Dalit victim’s family contrast sharply with those used against the families of Adivasi survivors. In Dalit communities across Bengal, a quiet, implicit boycott of the victim’s family takes place. A panchayat rarely issues a formal decree against mourning. Instead, neighbours simply vanish and turn their backs. Anyone bringing up the dead woman’s name is met with the subject being changed instantly.
Women, especially widows, are often branded as ‘witches’ by male relatives as a method of violent land-grab.
Surviving relatives quickly learn that grieving must occur indoors, behind closed doors. Further, women, especially widows, are often branded as ‘witches’ by male relatives as a method of violent land-grab. In such instances, the silence imposed on families ensures that the perpetrators can secure the stolen property without any further opposition from the traumatised families.
Adivasi women face a different reality. The largest tribal community in West Bengal are the Santals. Among them, mourning is communal and involves specific communal ritualistic practices. An accusation of witchcraft disrupts this cultural practice entirely. Once a woman who is branded a witch is murdered, the ‘witch’ label ensures she is permanently excluded from being remembered.
Ultimately, whether through social boycott or ritual exclusion, families of Dalit and Adivasi women murdered over accusations of witchcraft carry emotional burdens they cannot publicly express. While recent sociological literature successfully identifies the patriarchal structures and healthcare deficits surrounding these crimes, they consistently overlook the profound psychological impact of denied and silenced grief.
A phenomenon overlooked by the state
The state apparatus provides no remedy for this specific form of psychological violence. In fact, West Bengal still lacks a dedicated law against witch-hunting. Because law enforcement agencies cannot tackle forced social silence, they only address the murders and leave the families to deal with the impacts of the policing of their grief and the silence enforced on them all by themselves.
The quiet machinery of a witch-hunt, the rumour-mill, the absolute destruction of a woman’s social standing, and forcing her family into silence, is not seen or recognised by the law.
The quiet machinery of a witch-hunt, the rumour-mill, the absolute destruction of a woman’s social standing, and forcing her family into silence, is not seen or recognised by the law. However, while Bengal has no specific laws against witch-hunting, even when there are specific laws, such as the one in Assam, outlawing witch-hunting and making it a non-bailable offence can only do so much.
This approach, which purely focuses on punishment, cannot address the psychological and emotional violence inflicted on victims and their families. A law cannot force a village to show up to a funeral. And it cannot change the fact that a daughter isn’t allowed to cry about her mother’s brutal murder publicly.
A politics of grief
In her literary exploration of witchcraft, Mahasweta Devi focuses on the intersection of caste, gender, and superstition in witch-hunting. The violence isn’t just physical or limited to the murder of the victim; it extends to the social death of the victim — the way the village erases everything the woman ever was, reducing her to the label of a ‘witch’.
The grief of the families in Harisara and Chapuri goes unheard. Broader feminist discourse on witch-hunting often talks about justice and compensation, but rarely talks about the devastating impact of being denied the right to mourn. Centring Dalit and Adivasi lives in our feminism requires that mourning not be reduced to a footnote.
When a mob takes away the fundamental and deeply human right to cry, to perform funeral rituals, to prevent the erasure of the deceased, they steal something no law or court is ever going to be able to return. Rani Kisku wasn’t allowed to grieve for her mother’s brutal murder, and for her life that was violently cut short. Without acknowledging the violence of this particular type of coerced silence and denied grief, any understanding of the violence underlying a witch-hunt is incomplete. After a witch-hunt, the violence doesn’t end for the families of the dead; it just mutates into something quieter.
About the author(s)
Roshan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His doctoral research examines witch-hunting as a form of gendered violence in West Bengal, with research interests spanning gendered violence, ritual economy, caste-gender intersectionality, and legal impunity. A recipient of the National Youth Icon Award 2025 in the field of theatre and performance, he has spent over a decade engaging with performance as a site of political and cultural inquiry.
