By Anirban Bhattacharya
It’s been close to a century since light, laughter and life graced a small patch of land in Rajasthan. And barring divine intervention it looked to stay that way forever. The village of Ajabgarh near Ajabgarh fort in Rajasthan was abandoned by its residents nearly a hundred years ago out of fears that the locale was “haunted“. And twenty years ago a visit to the area would no doubt have elicited the same thought- that a village with carved arches and ornate albeit locked doors, clearly had no one in sight. What then, could have driven the people of Ajabgarh out overnight?
Witchhunting and its history
The village lies close to the seventeenth century Ajabgarh fort, widely considered to be the most haunted fort of India and which tourists are restricted from entering after sunset. The story about the fort goes thus – long ago there was a princess named Ratnavati who “bewitched” a sorcerer with her beauty. This enterprising individual, clearly unversed in the arts of wooing decided to ensnare the princess with dark magic. His plan rebounded catastrophically when his plans were ferreted out. The villagers killed him, thus damning him and themselves or so it goes, for in his final moments the dark practitioner is said to have “cursed” the village.
How much truth is there to witchcraft and the history behind it? The most famous witch-hunts of any era were said to have been orchestrated by the Papal Inquisition. Freethinkers, societies preaching alternate dictums, free-spoken women with ideas (which the Church actually considered witchcraft), royals wishing to break free of the Papal yoke, and anyone who was an enemy or rival of the established order was a heretic, waiting to be branded and executed. Wellsprings of free thought would be mercilessly crushed under the Catholic church’s tyranny- the very fact that such an institution would be countered by one of its own – Martin Luther. The series of academic dissertations and the sheer widespread popularity of Protestantism immediately after its inception speaks volumes as to the masses’ disillusionment with the Papal decree.
One last horrifying episode remained to be played out. The Salem witch trials between February 1692 and May 1693 would see twenty people executed, fourteen of them women. A series of sham hearings and prosecutions in colonial Massachusetts in which person or persons who had failed to uphold community values and were thus susceptible to the Devil’s ministrations were put on trial for unorthodoxy by an overwhelmingly Puritan judiciary. The episode is one of Colonial America’s most notorious cases of mass hysteria. It has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process.
Witchhunting in modern India
The modern practice of witch hunting in India which includes violence has led invariably to the torture and murder of alleged witches. State governments and rationalist groups are trying desperately to address the problem but face big obstacles, the most insurmountable of them being ignorance. Elderly widows live in fear of being killed as ‘witches’ when a neighbour falls ill or his cow dies. The urge to blame someone, anyone, for one’s misfortune and mistaken beliefs and customs carried over from an age of superstition and myth makes this evil eye all too real to these women. According to the Indian government’s data, at least 119 women were killed as ‘witches’ in 2012. And that sadly is just the ones we know about.
India is a mystery in this regard, the largest democracy in the world with world-class metropolises and sparkling new airports and an all-too growing economy backed by a military and government looking to the future. And yet it is incapable or unwilling even to reach into its darkest corners to confront the demons of its past. A deplorable state of affairs indeed that a country which lauded its heroines like Rani Lakshmibai and Maharani Jind Kaur (both who ruled effectively as regents for their sons) to relegate its women thus to a second class status. Accusations having roots in something as routine as property disputes, illnesses or deaths can force women to move out of an area with no resources – if she’s lucky. The alternative is far more gruesome – they are either raped, tortured or beaten and then invariably killed. Dire consequences portend if this is not corrected- a country which allows such mistreatment of effectively half its population to persist will see its population halved.
People moving back to Ajabgarh
If the supernatural was indeed to blame for Ajabgarh’s plight, what then has sparked the mass exodus back? After all, ghosts don’t die. Ramdhan Meena, retired government employee and village sarpanch had this to say-“Until around a century ago, Ajabgarh was a haven for sorcerers. They specialised in black magic and witchcraft. They cursed the village and everyone fled in fear. Farmers abandoned their fields and homes and moved to Jaipur, Delhi, Mumbai and Surat, where they found daily-wage work. But now something akin to a miracle is starting to happen – people are moving back. A thriving new Ajabgarh is emerging from the ashes of the old and it is because something is available in this parched community that wasn’t for the past hundred years of drought- water. Drought is no less deadly a killer than ghosts. The film Kadhvi Hawa, a hidden gem, promises to change your mind if you can sit though its gritty premise – climate change and the vanishing villages of coastal Odisha and Chambal region of Dholpur, Rajasthan.
Yes, water. A traditional, decentralised water conservation project initiated 35 years ago has yielded its desired crop: it has recharged aquifers, created ponds and rainwater storage tanks, increasing agricultural yield and hope in an agrarian community that saw their lives and livelihood crash and burn with the drought. So what started as a small group of people who settled in this relocated village four decades ago, is now a bustling farming community of about 2,500 households. Earlier we struggled to grow just one crop but now we grow three crops, says Suresh Raikwar, a farmer and water conservationist.
Ultimately it was the Magsaysay award winner “Water Man” Rajendra Singh who proved to be the demon slayer in this instance. Over four decades of tireless work to make Ajabgarh’s water supply self-sustaining with a series of rainwater storage tanks he brought life back to a community without hope. “The real sorcerer was the drought. People attributed the lack of rain to sorcery”, says Singh. And he may be right. What he has done has brought people back to Ajabgarh- back to their homes. People have started trickling back in over a period of ten years. Trucks carrying wheat, brinjal, ladies finger, mustard, coriander, green peas to cities as far as Delhi and Jaipur, houses and homes with lilac and green facades, bikes by the cattle cart load, government schools and shops selling clothes and groceries- this time Ajabgarh looks to be daring it all. Sporadic claims of ghost-sightings aside, this time, returning villagers are taking chances, with the magic called water.