Adivasi Women

This article aims to study how a movement aimed at the assertion of indigenous religiosity in India has resulted in the empowerment of the women who participate in it. As part of the movement, devotees of the indigenous Earth Goddess, who are mostly indigenous women, experience possession trances in sacred natural sites which they have started visiting regularly. The movement aims to assert indigenous religiosity in India and to emphasize how it is different from Hinduism—as a result the ecological articulations of indigenous religiosity have intensified. The movement has a strong political character and it explicitly demands that indigenous Indian religiosity should be officially recognized by the inclusion of a new category for it in the Indian census. By way of their participation in this movement, indigenous Indian women are becoming figures of religious authority, overturning cultural taboos pertaining to their societal and religious roles, and are also becoming empowered to initiate ecological conservation and restoration efforts.

This article examines a new religious movement with strong ecological articulations that is gaining ground among the indigenous or Adivasi1 people of east-central India. The movement accords a uniquely pivotal role to women—as legitimately channeling the Earth Goddess via possession trances. As a result of this movement the sacred groves in which the Earth Goddess is believed to reside are being rejuvenated, the Adivasi women who function as her mediums are being given a new and elevated status, and Adivasi religiosity as a whole is gaining a platform from which it can voice demands for politico-legal recognition. For clarification, a sacred grove is a small patch of forest that is protected for the reason that it is believed to be sacred (see Gadgil and Vartak 1975) and it is often a site of ancestral or deity worship (see Ramakrishnan et al. 1998). This article will examine the various elements of this movement in detail. It contends that the movement intersects with the important political issues of the day—be it environmental conservation, women’s empowerment, or the recognition of indigenous people’s rights, demands, and ecological agency. The movement is aimed at internal and external reform—external reform is solicited by the voicing of demands for rights and recognition, and internal reform is facilitated by overturning taboos related to the role of women in Adivasi society, spearheading small-scale, socio-economic development in villages, and by sensitizing the Adivasi population in general to the dangers of ecological destruction. The linking of different issue areas has been noted in other social movements involving indigenous people—for example, linkages of this kind are reported to have taken the form of the “ethnicization of ecological destruction’ as well as the ‘ecologization of ethnic subordination”.

In India, the role of women in environmental conservation movements is well established, and was first legitimized by way of the Chipko Movement in which many rural women famously protected trees from being felled in Himalayan forests (see Jain 1984). However, within Adivasi society, traditionally, political roles for women have been delegitimized, and this has been coupled with a suspicion of women’s ethno-botanical knowledge, for the reason that it is understood to be superior to that possessed by men. The article contends that the legitimization of the new roles for Adivasi women as legitimately channeling the Earth Goddess, and as spearheading an ecological movement, is the result of an act of geographic imagination. It will examine this act of imagination in the context of the emphasis that scholars of Adivasi mobilizations have placed on the application of non-rationalistic interpretative frameworks to arrive at an understanding of Adivasi social movements—for example, in many of the Adivasi peasant insurgencies against British rule, the insurgents expressed that they felt motivated by a God (see Chaudhuri 2010). Ranajit Guha, an important postcolonial studies scholar, cautions against ignoring ways of understanding the self and the world that may not necessarily fit into rational discourse (see Guha 1988).

The fieldwork for the exploration of women’s issues in this movement, which combined participant observation and interviews, has been conducted intermittently for over a decade since 2008 primarily in the Indian state of Jharkhand in east-central India—and the article will relate its arguments and empirical findings mostly to this geographical context. It was possible for the researcher to conduct research that spanned such a long period of time for the reason that the researcher grew up in a rural area in the state of Jharkhand and returns to the area on a regular basis. This, as well as the fact that the researcher maintains close contacts with participants in the Sarna Movement, has facilitated the study that this article presents. In every instance of an individual movement participant or supporter being cited, names have been changed, except for those cases in which the speaker held or has sought public office.

Within Indian religious traditions such as Hinduism, there are numerous examples of women exercising authority as female gurus—these women are often from social backgrounds that would not ordinarily accept a woman in an authoritative role (see Charpentier 2010). In Adivasi society, women occupy an ambivalent position. On the one hand Adivasi women are accorded status—and several examples of this have been documented. For example, as per tradition, which is still in place in some areas, when Mundas go from one village to another, their wives lead them.

The knowledge of the admixture of the roots used to brew rice beer, which is a sacred drink, is kept by women, and a woman’s ethno-botanical knowledge, particularly as pertaining to healing, is highly valued, and yet simultaneously suspect (Mullick 2000, p. 344). In case of the Saoras, Verrier Elwin describes the legitimized, indeed valued healing role of the female Saora shaman—a role, however, that is prohibited for women by most other Adivasi groups: . . . it is in the treatment of the sick that the shamanin, or the female shaman finds her greatest scope and fulfilment. Her methods of diagnosis and cure are varied and ingenious—she uses the fan and the lamp, the bow and the sword, handfuls of rice and pots of wine. Now she dances in ecstasy, now lies lost to the world in trance. When she has found the cause of disease or tragedy, she is at infinite pains to heal the wounds; she sucks infection from her patient’s body, burns it with flashes of gunpowder, bites and kisses it, massages it to expel the evil, orders the sacrifice of goat or buffalo, speaks healing and consoling words.

At the same time, any discussion of Adivasi women’s religiosity cannot be de-linked from the issue of witchcraft beliefs and related accusations that are prevalent in Adivasi society. Belief in witchcraft is currently widespread in Jharkhand—a report suggests that it is as high as 75% in the state’s population (Sahu 2018, p. 86). Crimes derived from the belief that a certain woman is a witch are also not uncommon. Jharkhand is reported to have witnessed 414 murders of suspected witches from 2001 to October 2013 (Sahu 2018, p. 85). Addressing the widespread belief in witchcraft among the Adivasis of Jharkhand, Madhuparna Chakraborty has argued that it is derived from the relatively high status that women are accorded in Adivasi society, and that in relation to women, belief in witchcraft is an “acknowledgement of their power and a reflection on the fundamental illegitimacy of that power” (Chakraborty 2014, p. 81). She goes on to argue that Adivasi culture, with a particular emphasis on Oraon society, evinces a firm belief in the dichotomy between black and white magic—witchcraft is associated with black magic, whereas white magic is associated with shamanism. Nevertheless, practitioners of white magic, i.e., shamans, are understood to be exclusively male (see Chakraborty 2014).

According to Samar Bosu Mullick, belief in witchcraft is derived from a fear of the female principle. He also argues that belief in witchcraft is a new phenomenon in Adivasi societies and that it is derived from Hinduized ideas of female spiritual power, overlaid with a fear of this very same power (see Mullick 2000). A Santhal folktale describes a gendered spiritual contest, whereby knowledge of witchcraft was supposed to have been transmitted from the Adivasi supreme being to men, but by way of trickery women managed to learn it instead (see Bodding 1948). W. G. Archer described how Santhal women were excluded from the sacred grove (jaher than) and were prohibited from being present when sacrifices were offered there (see Archer 1974)—this is still the case today in several Adivasi groups, as per orthodox norms (Mullick 2000, p. 353). The widespread perception of witchcraft in Jharkhand is particularly striking in the context of the Adivasi religious-political movement which this article will go on to describe. By their participation in this movement, Adivasi women overturn many of the taboos instituted to exclude women from an active religious/spiritual role—ordinarily this would have earned them charges of witchcraft (see Mullick 2000). Furthermore, the women who participate in the movement are outspoken, as Adivasi women who are branded as witches are reported to be (see Skaria 1997). In fact, an important aim of this movement seems to be a facilitation of this outspokenness. In relation to the movement, many of the participating women function as shamanesses—a role that is prohibited for women among all Adivasi groups except for the Saoras, Koyas and Kondhs (see Chakraborty 2014). Perhaps most interestingly, they conduct regular worship ceremonies in sacred groves, where, as mentioned earlier, their presence is prohibited, and claim to be possessed by a goddess who is known as Chala Pachcho among the Oraons and Jaher Era among the Santhals. In popular depictions of the goddess in poster art she appears as an old woman wrapped in a white cloth. Finally, this movement is explicitly political and by participating in it as religious authority figures, women are playing a legitimized political role.