Birubala Rabha fought to end the stigmatisation of women
Summary
- The intrepid campaigner against witch-hunting died on May 13th, aged 75
Slowly, limping and swaying with a sort of palsy, a young woman was led across the grass. Her name was Jarmila. She was 27, but had the body of a wasted child. Rain was pouring down; two women sheltered her with an umbrella. She had come to see Birubala Rabha because her sister-in-law beat her, and called her a witch. But all she really wanted was a room of her own in her brother’s house. Inside the hall where Birubala was she went to sit alone, a child-woman with a reedy voice and huge pleading eyes. But Birubala made a compromise between her and her brother. At the end Jarmila crumpled to the ground, crying, to seek her brother’s blessing. He had agreed that he would give her a room and never call her a witch again. As he left, he touched the feet of Birubala and, with a namaste, thanked her.
Those feet were hard with constant travelling on unmade hill roads between the villages of Assam. Birubala was no more than a peasant herself, a tribal woman, simple and uneducated beyond class five; a farmer’s daughter, married at 15, who had grown crops and reared poultry to bring in little bits of money, as most did in this remote north-eastern corner. Her house, like theirs, had a tin roof and woven bamboo walls, with little furniture except her mosquito-netted bed and a tin trunk for papers. Her dialect was so particular to her home village, Thakurbila, that other Assamese struggled to understand it. But one hateful word had motivated her life and driven her travels: daini, a witch.
Between 1991 and 2010, more than 1,700 women in rural India were killed for being witches. They were declared so by tribal bej or medicine men, and also by their own communities. When crops failed or people fell ill for no apparent reason, the blame was almost always placed on women, usually the single, widowed or old. They were said to use the evil eye, or spells and amulets, to wither stems or stop hearts. If they were not lynched, they were tortured by being burned, tonsured, stripped, beaten and expelled from their villages. The police were loth to penalise a tradition that ran deep. Besides, many believed in it themselves.
It was all nonsense, nothing but superstition, as she told everyone who would listen. The bej were quacks and frauds. The real reason for this treatment was probably to let relatives grab the victim’s property, express some bitter resentment, or end an argument. Sometimes, sheer ignorance was the cause. Over the years she gathered a small team, 19-20 victims and sympathisers, to put pressure on the police and state government to stop it. From 2011 her Mission Birubala purposely set out to rescue women; by her reckoning she saved around 90 lives, 35 of them personally. In 2018 came her best victory: the implementation of a law in Assam, said to be the strictest in India, which would send a person to prison for up to seven years for calling someone a witch.
She had been called one herself. In 1985, when he was 15, her eldest son Dharmeswar began to become mad. In despair, and because she had not yet abandoned the old beliefs, she and her husband went to the local quack, who told them, for a handful of betel nuts and leaves, that their son was in thrall to an evil spirit. That spirit was now pregnant; in three days the child would be born and their son would die. She was stricken, but of course he did not die; he lived for years, though his madness did not go away. Then, in 1996, her husband died of throat cancer. At that point even her close relatives declared her a witch and shunned her.
In 2001 her battle against witch-hunting resumed in force. Fearlessly she told a meeting in Goalpara, the nearest town, that five or six women who had been thrown out were not witches. There were no witches in this world. When the village men ordered her to recant or be thrashed, and she refused, hundreds came to attack her house. Was she with the dainis, or with the public? Though she was tiny, wiry and wore glasses, she stood her ground. Death did not bother her. For three years she was totally ostracised; she took it in her stride. At one night rescue she hugged the wounded woman, Sunila, and shouted to the violent crowd, “If she is a witch, why does she bleed? She feels the hunger that you do, the cold, the heat, sadness and joy...You fools, Sunila is one of you." She would fight this battle to the end.
Though she often blamed men and the patriarchy for witch-hunting, she knew it was not so simple. Women were just as ready to call another woman a witch. They could often be their own worst enemy. But as for the men, those she knew best had not been troublesome. Her father had died when she was six and her mother, a midwife, was often away, leaving her in charge. Her elder brother Rana, who was scared of being left in the house alone, came to depend on her. She was not scared. Her husband, though much older than she was, never criticised her campaigning, even cooking his own meals when she was out. Her brother-in-law helped set up her first village group, in 1985, to call for better roads and to stop the men drinking. Eventually she made fine allies of the police superintendents of Goalpara and Kokrajhar, as well as the politicians who drove the witch law through.
The state was proud of its law, and of her. Her work was recognised, too, by the Indian government, and she was nominated for the Nobel peace prize. That was all very well. But witch-hunting still went on in India’s most backward parts, and her team was so small. What she needed were more resources, especially to build an ashram for persecuted women.
In her house, where light filtered through the bamboo walls, she searched in her tin trunk. It was full of her awards, framed or loose, in carrier bags. She arranged some along the floor for the visiting government reporter, but they were not what she was looking for. She wanted to show him the tiny ID photos of nine women. They had been tonsured and exiled, and she had rescued them. Saving lives was the important thing.
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