Granddaughters of the Witches #1

Magic, Misogyny, and the Mechanisms of Separation

We carry witchcraft in our bones
whilst magic still sings
inside our heads.

When the witch hunters
imprisoned our ancestors
when they tried to burn the magic away.

Someone should have
warned them
that magic cannot be tamed.

Because you cannot burn away
what has always
been aflame.

― Nikita Gill

Namaste Friends,

Across the world, a quiet storm is brewing, one that carries with it the weight of history and the echoes of age-old fear. Women's rights, hard-won through centuries of struggle, are shrinking back into the shadows. From the violent erasure of reproductive autonomy in many parts of the United States to the suffocating silence imposed on girls barred from education in Afghanistan, the patterns of control and suppression are becoming disturbingly clear. In Iran, women who dare to raise their voices for freedom are met with unrelenting brutality. In the Global South, traditions wrapped in violence—child marriage, genital mutilation—persist like ghosts of another time, refusing to let go of the present. Even in the so-called enlightened corners of the world, women face barriers that quietly but firmly remind them of their place.

This isn’t new. It’s a retelling of an old story—a story of witch hunts. Then, women were hunted for stepping outside the lines, for daring to exist as more than what they were allowed to be. Knowledge, defiance, even independence—they were all crimes punishable by fear, isolation, and death. Today, the flames don’t burn at the stake, but the fire hasn’t gone out. It smolders in the restrictions imposed on women's bodies, in the silencing of their voices, in the deliberate marginalization of their existence. The language of control is subtler now, but its effect is the same: the erasure of autonomy, the branding of dissent, the demonization of the feminine.

In this two-part series of essays, I want to walk with you through this history as it unfolds into our present. I want to ask you what we have learned—if we have learned anything at all. As women’s rights disappear under laws, customs, and politics, I can’t help but see the shadows of the witch hunts that came before. The mechanisms of fear remain unchanged, but so does the resilience of those who refuse to be silenced.

---

Brahmanical Patriarchy

“Women have no religion or caste of their own”, I often heard my mother bite this phrase under her teeth as she tread the tabooed subject of inter-caste and inter-religion marriages. We Indians have an inherited habit of disparaging almost anything that can be individualized, especially when the individual in question is assigned female at birth. When someone is denied an identity, they are relegated to the "otherness" of existence. This otherness, of course, is defined by the default norms of a given society. In any significant culture of the world, as we know it, these default "norms" are patriarchal. Within mainstream patriarchal norms, otherness becomes an undefined realm of strangeness—often feared, misunderstood, and ultimately banished. This perspective also sheds light on the struggles faced by people who exist beyond the binary of both gender and sexuality, in a world that relentlessly stacks identities under the rigid labels of race, gender, and class. However, here the narrative is specifically centred around experiences of femininity.

In the Indian subcontinent, it is widely accepted that a woman’s actions holds little significance, as she is seen as occupying subservient roles in relation to the patriarch. The relationships she forms are viewed as a direct consequence of her birth or marriage within a system that dictates her class and social status. While this narrative is prevalent across most cultures and religions throughout planetary history, I harbor a fundamental doubt that it was universal; there might have been many obscure cultures in history where this was not the case. Here, I must mention my friend,

15thCenturyFeminist

, whose work courageously revives these obscured women and their non-patriarchal traditions from medieval times—like Lazarus awakened from death slumber.

In this part of the world, the beast has been Brahminical patriarchy¹—an entity with an insatiable appetite for power and an enormous belly to consume it. Historically, the women who have borne the brunt of this oppressive system, facing its most dangerous edges, are those from the Dalit community.

The Dalit woman is particularly the most vulnerable in the caste-gender hierarchy ladder. She has to face discrimination based on caste, class and gender, within her caste and outside. Dalit women face innumerable acts of violence; witch-hunting is one such form in which they suffer physically, psychologically, and economically.

Writes research scholar Tanvi Yadav².

---

The emergence of the archetypal witch is a testament of times women have been branded in order to be oppressed, violated, and incarcerated for posing a challenge to the existing social and traditional hierarchies. The witch becomes a symbolic repository of societal anxieties about female agency, representing an uncontrollable force that must be ritualistically contained and eliminated. The witch-hunting is a three-stage process of accusation, declaration, and persecution— a ritualized mechanism of social control that strikes at the very core of female autonomy constituting of economic independence and social mobility. As per National Crime Records Bureau approximately 2,937 women were killed in India from 2001 to 2019 on alleged charges of practicing witchcraft, with 102 killings in 2019 alone. These numbers are not just statistics, but a testament to a deeply entrenched system of violence that targets women, particularly those from marginalized communities.

As a part of strategic resistance women's networks have risen up to transform these stories of individual traumas into stories of collective resilience. In states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, where witch-hunting has been particularly prevalent, women's collectives have emerged as critical intervention spaces. These groups, often led by Dalit and Adivasi women, have implemented comprehensive strategies that combine legal advocacy, community education, and direct confrontation of patriarchal norms. They conduct awareness campaigns that deconstruct the mythology surrounding witchcraft, expose the economic and political motivations behind witch accusations, and provide legal support to women facing persecution. Women's organizations have actively pushed for legislative reforms, leading to the implementation of specific anti-witch-hunting laws in states like Jharkhand. These laws not only criminalize witch-hunting but also provide mechanisms for protecting accused women and prosecuting perpetrators. The collective mobilization of women has been instrumental in shifting both legal frameworks and social perceptions, challenging the deeply entrenched patriarchal structures that enable witch-hunting.

However, I sought evidence of sisterhood in more ancient and ritualistic spaces, hoping to use the same crooked key to dismantle the Brahminical power structures that originally locked these ideas into a box of toxic social stigmas. In other words, I am searching for testaments of rebellion and resistance against the patriarchal narrative of witch-branding from medieval and pre-medieval times.

---

Potrait of an Indian gypsy woman. Those stunning eyes! Source: Pinterest, both subject and photographer unkown

---

Disproportionate Privilege - A Hurdle to Sisterhood

Stories not only about the sorrows and tears of Dalit women, but also about their lively and rebellious culture, their eagerness not to let life crush or shatter them, but to swim vigorously against the tide.

This is a preface to Bama Faustina Soosairaj’s³, paradigm shifting book Sangati.

Bama’s work, especially in Sangati, vividly portrays the lived realities of Dalit women who face dual oppression: from upper-caste hegemony and from their own communities' patriarchal structures. This dual marginalization creates a stark contrast with the struggles of upper-caste women, whose challenges are often limited to gender-based oppression. As Bama asserts, Dalit women bear the compounded weight of caste and gender discrimination, which makes their experiences fundamentally different from those of women in more privileged positions.

By spotlighting the resilience of Dalit women who continue to resist these intersecting oppressions, Bama challenges feminist movements to address the complexities of caste and class alongside gender. Her work calls for a reframing of solidarity—one that acknowledges these differences while uniting women in their shared struggle against systemic injustice.

Bama’s work resonates deeply with my own experience as a minority writer on Substack, navigating a space largely dominated by voices from the global north. While raising critical questions about empathy and solidarity, I often find myself confronted by an intellectual rupture that undermines my authority to challenge systemic injustices beyond my immediate sphere. I frequently question whether I have the agency to critique systems that do not directly affect my existence.

Even if there seems to be no explicit malice on Substack's part, the exclusion of writers from outside the global north in prominent series like Substack Reads feels deliberate. This lack of global acknowledgment, on what claims to be a global platform, is far from an isolated incident. I’ve encountered numerous female and non-binary writers from other regions who have voiced similar concerns about Substack’s apparent indifference to their niche and marginalized body of work.

This systemic marginalization and "othering" remains a significant issue, even in seemingly progressive spaces, proving that the problems we seek to address in this series are as relevant and pervasive today as they have ever been.

Marginalization is often not an overt process of persecution but a subtler form of ostracization. Our prejudices against particular groups are frequently embedded within the collective ancestral psyche, passed down unconsciously over generations. The wisdom to perceive beyond the identity of a person has been obscured by time and the pseudo-modernization of our self-metabolizing, organismic world.

I am searching for that Pandora’s box—the possibility of uncovering what true connection meant in the ritualistic worship of the archetypal feminine. While Brahminical patriarchy is a well-established yet relatively modern system that confines women to roles of servitude, I am tracing obscure histories—delving into pre-religion, tribal customs—to uncover instances of resistance and reverence. These traces are often recorded in archaeological artifacts and linguistic remnants from a time when the divine feminine was celebrated, mostly in essence and practice of active sisterhood—womanhood.

---

I am currently working on the second part of this research series. In the meantime, I’d like to share a poem I wrote a few years ago during a burst of creative frenzy.

Audio version of the recitation.
Piano - Perpetual by Yannick Lowack

Wild Woman

I pray to no God, I bow to no man.
I carry my head high, never crouching or slouching.
I sniff out hints of trouble from a million miles away.
I have a hungry heart and survival instinct of a wolf.
I beam silver and gold, changing forms overnight—
metamorphosis of the soul through the darkest times.

I howl and run on feet studded with sorrows of my sisters,
my dreams often haunted by my mother’s anxious cries.
I don’t pray to Gods who have no wombs to carry life,
who cannot create from their bodies the dreams and destiny of a child.
I don’t kneel to God-the-Father,
whose million sons have raped my gentle sisters and mothers
in a million ways, throughout a million years—
endlessly, mercilessly—
defiling and disgracing their pristine souls.
As the Father peeked through heaven’s doors,
the world fell into a backward spiral.

I don’t pray for mercy or redemption to such a God.
I stand upright, my spine bearing the weight of my grief,
to mock his valiance and authority
I laugh at the heavens, my fingers curled into a fist—
a hand he never held when I was desolate for help.

I bow instead to God-the-Mother,
whose curves cradled my soul in a sweet embrace
when I passed out from spasms of pain.
With every cycle of the moon, as I wane and my body changes course,
she offered me the sacred knowledge of anatomy and the gift of intuition.
She who creates the form of another from her own body, I bow to thee.
She who cracks her pelvis to create a doorway to existence, I pray to thee.
She is a fierce mother, with a death snare for anything that threatens her sanctity.
She is a caregiver, not a privileged, bejewelled goddess sitting in heaven.

She has labored, covered in blood and sweat,
birthing this universe as a whole.
Her essence is present in every living being on the planet.
She is the planet.
She does not cower or hide behind scriptures
or demand prayers.
She, whose naked fury fills every void of the universe.
She, who heals the wounded and cradles the dead.
She, who breathes into me the strength to bear this dubious world.
I bow to thee.

1. The term was coined by Uma Chakravarti in her 1993 article, Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State. The article argues that caste and gender hierarchies worked together to create a Brahmanical social order in ancient India. Some elements of this social structure include: patrilineal succession, restricted female mobility, gender hierarchy, female reproductive labor, lower-caste manual labor, ritual/caste purity

2. Source: Witch Hunting: A Form of Violence against Dalit Women in India

3. Bama Faustina Soosairaj is a prominent Tamil Dalit feminist, teacher and novelist.