Our attempt in this chapter is to bring history into the understanding of the creation of patriarchal relations among indigenous peoples. Comaroff and Comaroff (1999: xviii) acknowledge the prior or pre-modern existence of witch persecutions but do not give it any historical importance. From these materials, however, we would like to understand the character of witch struggles and their relation with patriarchal structures in indigenous societies. This, of course, does not mean that the indigenous peoples were not in contact with the larger religio-cultural societies around them, nor that their economies were self-contained without any trading relations with statist and other communities around them. The region of central India, including Jharkhand, supplied elephants that were used for both war and ceremonial purposes by more complex societies around them (K. S. Singh 1987). In the nineteenth century, at the time of the Munda revolt led by Birsa Munda, the Mundas as well as other indigenous peoples of central India were suppliers of lac to the British Empire.

The indigenous peoples were not isolated from the dominant sociocultural systems in the subcontinent, even to the extent that some of these communities lost their own original language. Verrier Elwin pointed out that the Baigas of Chhattisgarh, India, had lost all traces of their Austro-Asiatic language and spoke the languages of their neighbours (Elwin 1991). As Aloka Parasher points out in general about the indigenous societies in India in the period up to 600 CE, ‘those who were called the mlechha [the barbarian or indigenous peoples] groups lived in relative, but not absolute isolation from the dominant culture of the Indian sub-continent’ (Parasher 1991). So too the indigenous peoples of Yunnan and the Chinese northwest who to the Han Chinese were either ‘black barbarians’ or ‘white barbarians’, but were in contact with.

What difference does the acknowledgement of contact between indigenous peoples and the dominant cultures around them make to the analysis of witch hunts? For one, it points to the possibility of some ideas about evil humans having been introduced from outside the indigenous culture, and not just a result of internal changes. With regard to the Muria of central India, Verrier Elwin pointed out that in the original Muria tradition, the enemy of mankind is usually a man and that the belief in female witches was a later introduction from Hindu beliefs (Elwin 1991; Sundar 2001).