It was at a conference dinner in Rome in November 2022 that I quite surreptitiously stumbled upon the idea for a postdoctoral project. It had been two years since I had successfully defended a doctoral thesis which had looked at the literary evolution of the figure generally known as the Fairy King (or perhaps as Oberon, especially for those fed on a diet of Shakespeare and Anglophone literature), and although I had had vague ideas about how to continue the project, the pressures of a global pandemic, caregiving responsibilities, and the rigours of full-time teaching had ensured that each idea eventually died of asphyxiation. During my research for the thesis, I had discovered that in the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fairies often appeared in connection with witch trials, particularly in Scotland where suspected ‘witches’ often claimed during interrogation that they had been led astray by fairy men.[1] Although the study of witch trials featuring fairies was beyond the scope of my thesis, I had argued that fairies had lost their fearsome aspect and dread potential precisely because the Protestant Reformation had led to a recalibration of cultural values whereby the fear of the supernatural had been offset from creations of the imagination—such as fairies—to tangible terrestrial beings—such as the figure of the witch, who came to be regarded as the Devil’s human ally and earthly agent. As my interest in early modern English witchcraft peaked, a concomitant question arose in my mind: given that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw both the augmenting of the witch craze and the first European experiments with colonial expansion, could the two have informed each other? Specifically, I wanted to explore if the social, cultural, legal, and religious attitudes towards witchcraft concurrent in seventeenth-century England could have possibly been transmitted to India through the voyages of the East India Company and, if yes, to what extent they influenced the field of witchcraft in India. As I shared these ideas with Natacha Klein Käfer inside a trattoria in the Piazza del Popolo, I was strongly encouraged by her to develop the idea into a project which could potentially be hosted by the Centre for Privacy Studies and funded through a Marie Skłodowska Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Through the summer of 2023, I worked on what would eventually culminate as a project tentatively entitled “Witchcraft and Dakini-Tantra: A Post/Colonial History of Witchcraft in West Bengal.” For this project, I chose to do a two-pronged study of the discursive field of witchcraft in the Indian state of West Bengal (which also happens to be my home state) by first looking at the development of the field under the experience of British colonialism and subsequently at the way in which the field has proliferated in the shadowy interstices between official (‘public’) sanction and informal (‘private’) belief in the decades following India’s independence from British rule in 1947. This project was intended to break new ground in multiple ways: first, it would bring the field of witchcraft in India within the purview of witchcraft studies which is still characterised by an overwhelmingly Eurocentric focus, thus participating in prescient conversations about the need to decolonise entrenched disciplinary perspectives; second, it would use the theoretical lens of historical privacy studies to analyse witchcraft not as a fossilised remnant of a remote past but as a contemporary cultural concern by bringing present-day practitioners of witchcraft in Bengal within its ambit to investigate the ways in which they function in the contested arena between balancing private praxis and public regulation; third, and most importantly, it would offer a corrective to the traditional view of witchcraft as only an instrument of caste and gender oppression by redefining witchcraft as a semiotic field of transgressive femininity, a space of resistance used by many Indian women—especially lower-caste women—to wrest for themselves a measure of agency by their decision to choose witchcraft as both economic vocation and societal problem-solving. Although I submitted the project for evaluation for the MSCA fellowship rounds in both 2023 and 2024, I was unfortunately unsuccessful in securing a grant. However, the lack of success ironically turned out to be the trigger for a related albeit very different trajectory: a critical focus on the appropriation and use of indigenous healing knowledges in India.
One of the ways in which witchcraft practitioners advertise their services is to offer their clients the use of their expertise in the ingredients, practices, and methodologies of bodily healing as a way to offset problems such as lack of fertility or sexual incontinence (usually glossed as “conjugal problems”). While the typical solution is to claim mastery over supernatural means (such as spirit possession and/or summoning, voodoo, and black magic), the utilisation of indigenous zoological and botanical material is occasionally recommended, especially when the issue in question has a biological/physiological provenance. While this would have been just one of the aspects I would have delved in to as part of the MSCA project, the two disparate parts of the project—the colonial context of witchcraft and indigenous healing knowledges in present-day witchcraft practice—dovetailed in the project entitled “Secrets to Patents: Trans-Imperial Strategies for Keeping Medicines as Private Assets from 1500 to 1900,” a collaborative research project between Lund University, Sweden, the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen, and the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil led by Dr Klein Käfer herself. This project aims to offer a historical understanding of how colonial regimes in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds appropriated indigenous medicinal and pharmacological knowledges and repackaged them in ways that laid the foundations for the pharmaceutical and healthcare-for-profit industries.
Roughly structured in a tripartite form (the secrecy claim, which relied on gatekeeping/restricting access to knowledge as a means of wielding power by exclusivity; the discovery claim, which relied on claiming ownership of knowledge via the primacy of innovation and novelty; and the Intellectual Property Rights claim, which relied on legal and administrative safeguards to simultaneously assert ownership and exclude access by other parties), the project will investigate how clandestine resource extraction in territories occupied by colonial powers gradually gave way to systematic expropriation and eventually to the establishment of an industrial complex which excluded the very demographics and populations that it profited off. As a postdoctoral researcher, my task will be to focus on British-occupied India as a test case, exploring ways in which indigenous healing knowledges were understood, (mis)appropriated, and utilised under colonial administration and the ways in which such knowledges were imbricated in the global flow of medicinal knowledge under the experience of imperialism. However, my intention is not so much to focus on the British colonial administration as to understand how indigenous actors formed a crucial part of this knowledge network under British colonial rule. For instance, during the preliminary research for this field, I have discovered a compendious volume entitled Bhaishajya Ratnavali, a work on the materia medica of India written in Bengali which had been compiled by Durgadas Kar and posthumously published by his son Radhagobinda Kar. Durgadas had been a physician and teacher at the Calcutta Medical College and had authored one of the first medical textbooks in Bengali. His son followed in his footsteps, augmenting his training in medicine with a stint in Edinburgh and establishing the Calcutta School of Medicine in 1886.[2] By focusing on texts such as the Bhaishajya Ratnavali (on which scholarship has been conspicuously missing), I intend to shed light on how individuals such as Radhagobinda formed a conduit between indigenous iterations of medicinal knowledge and the British colonial administration at the turn of the nineteenth century. Doing so will hopefully decentre the primacy of the colonialist regime, relegating colonial players to one of the nodes of the trans-imperial knowledge network while underscoring how the robustness of this network was maintained by the indigenous sources and their native users. Therefore, by a fortuitous configuration of events, I have returned to geographic and cultural roots which, although planted during an unsuccessful harvest cycle a few years ago, have finally begun to bud.
[1] See Diane Purkiss, “Birth and Death: Fairies in Scottish Witch-trials,” in At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 85–115.
[2] https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2024/08/24/dr-rg-kar-the-mastermind-who-established-asias-first-private-medical-college-and-hospital.html