Magic and Witchcraft in Santal Culture: A Double-Edged Sword

The Santal people – one of the largest tribal communities in India, primarily settled across Bihar, West Bengal, and Odisha – have a spiritual life that is both rich and complex. At the heart of this spiritual world lies a belief system where the seen and unseen are inseparable, and where magic and witchcraft occupy a very real and consequential place. These practices are not relics of a distant past; they continue to shape relationships, social hierarchies, and justice within Santal communities. Understanding them requires looking honestly at both their cultural meaning and their human cost.

The spiritual foundation: bongas and the invisible world 🔗

To understand witchcraft in Santal culture, you first have to understand how the Santals see the world. Their traditional religion – known as Sarna or bongaism – centers on a vast pantheon of supernatural beings called bongas. Many Santals believe in over 150 bonga spirits, each governing different aspects of life – some residing in the sacred grove near the village, others lurking in the forest. Benevolent bongas protect households and ensure agricultural prosperity; malevolent ones, particularly those inhabiting forests, are associated with disease, death, and chaos.

At the top of this spiritual hierarchy sits Thakur Jiu, the supreme creator, while Maran Buru (the Great Mountain) serves as the most invoked spirit at festivals and offerings. Forest bongas are considered malevolent and include the souls of people who died an unnatural death, which explains why sudden or unexplained deaths are so readily attributed to supernatural interference. Within this cosmology, illness, failed crops, and misfortune are rarely seen as random accidents – they are signs that something in the spiritual order has gone wrong.

This worldview creates the context in which magic and witchcraft make complete sense. When disease defies ordinary treatment, the cause must lie elsewhere. When a child dies without explanation, a spiritual agent must be responsible. Religion and magic are both used in the Santal attempt to cope with the mysterious supernatural world, and the two cannot be cleanly separated.

Healers, priests, and the role of the ojha 🔗

The Santal religious world is maintained by specific ritual specialists. The naeke (village priest) presides over community festivals, consecrates offerings, and performs sacrifices at the sacred grove known as the jaherthan. But it is the ojha – the medicine man or shaman – who deals most directly with the darker forces at play.

The ojha drives away malevolent spirits, diagnoses and cures diseases through magical incantations, exorcism, or herbal medicines, and also identifies which evil force is responsible when illness cannot otherwise be explained. He is trained in mantras (magical formulas), often learned from a master and supplemented through his own experience. Importantly, the ojha also incorporates elements of Hindu religious symbolism – the trident, for instance – reflecting centuries of cultural exchange between Santal communities and the wider Hindu world around them.

Separate from the ojha is the janguru or witch-finder – a figure whose role is specifically to divine which bonga or human witch is responsible for diseases and deaths that defy normal treatment. The witch-finder divines which evil bonga or witch is responsible for diseases that no one else can cure, making this figure both deeply valued and deeply feared within the community.

Magic as medicine and protection 🔗

Not all magic in Santal culture is threatening. In fact, the original purpose of magical practice is protective and healing in nature. Magic is integral to Santal healing, supported by the belief that it alleviates emotional stress and promotes recovery, and their practices often combine magical rituals with herbal treatments. For a community with limited access to modern healthcare, these practices historically provided not only physical treatment but also psychological reassurance and a sense of communal solidarity in the face of illness.

The Santal relationship with their bongas is reciprocal. Rituals, sacrifices, and offerings are regularly made to ensure that the spirits remain appeased and that their protective power continues to flow to the village. Every ritual, from grand sacrifices to secretive blood offerings, is a reaffirmation of the delicate balance between the living and the spirit world. In this sense, magic is not superstition – it is the technology of maintaining cosmic order within a worldview where spirits are as real as neighbors.

Witchcraft: the dark side of spiritual belief 🔗

The same framework that empowers healing also enables the fear of harmful magic. In Santal belief, a dain (female witch) or dan (male witch) is a person believed to possess the ability to cause illness, ruin harvests, or bring death through supernatural means. A witch is understood as a person with a conscious tendency to kill or disable others by magical means, and in Santal communities, such individuals are believed to meet secretly – often in sacred groves or at crossroads – to practice their craft using secret songs and mantras.

All untimely deaths and illnesses that do not yield to treatment are attributed to the machinations of witches, according to colonial-era accounts of Santal folklore collected by Cecil Henry Bompas in 1909 – a pattern that persists in various forms today. Disease and misfortune are often blamed on sorcery, and accusations of witchcraft are fairly common among the Santals. Critically, the fate of the individual and the community at large is believed to depend upon the practices followed by them, which gives witchcraft accusations an urgency and collective weight that extends well beyond individual grievances.

The witch-finder and the process of accusation 🔗

When a crisis strikes – an unexplained death, a prolonged illness, a series of crop failures – the community turns to the ojha or janguru to identify the cause. The witch-finder employs ritualistic methods such as divination, the reading of omens, and trance-like states to determine responsibility. Despite the presence and implementation of local laws, the village ojha continues to play a critical role in identifying a person as a witch, usually targeting an elderly or unsupported woman believed to have caused harm to a family or the wider community.

This is where the system becomes dangerous. The witch-finder’s identification is rarely questioned. The combination of community fear, spiritual authority, and the perceived urgency of stopping harm gives the ojha’s declaration enormous social weight. Witnesses often do not come forward to testify as they fear distress in their lives based on social beliefs and the power of the ojhas within the community. Accusations are also far from random – research consistently shows that those accused tend to be socially vulnerable: widows, elderly women, those without male protection, or individuals involved in property disputes.

Who gets accused? 🔗

The pattern of accusation reveals the structural inequalities embedded within witchcraft beliefs. Victims of witch-hunting are usually old or widowed women, who are victimized for their property or due to family conflicts. Single women and those without strong community ties are disproportionately targeted. Accused women are ostracized, forced into seclusion, and stripped of their livelihoods, and the violence they face – both physical and psychological – often results in irreversible damage or death. In this way, witchcraft accusations frequently function as a mechanism of social control, particularly over women who fall outside the protected circles of family and community.

Consequences of being branded a witch 🔗

The consequences for someone accused of witchcraft in a Santal or wider tribal context are severe – and have been for centuries. In the old days, people accused of witchcraft were often killed; today they are frequently forced into a settlement decided by a village council. But even non-lethal outcomes carry devastating social consequences – public humiliation, forced confessions, ostracism, and the destruction of family reputation.

The violence extends well beyond isolated incidents. The first recorded instance of witch-hunting among the Santals by the British dates to 1792, and approximately 2,300 murders of so-called witches were committed across India between 1999 and 2013. States like Jharkhand – where Santal communities are concentrated – have seen particularly high rates. In 2013, 54 witchcraft-accused women were killed in Jharkhand alone, the highest rate in the country at the time. The extreme forms of punishment for the accused include death by stoning, burning, or other violent means, and in many instances the victim’s family members are also targeted.

Legal responses and their limits 🔗

Indian states have attempted to address these abuses through legislation. Bihar enacted its Prevention of Witch (Daain) Practices Act in 1999, with Jharkhand following in 2001, outlining penalties for false accusations, harmful “cures,” and violence against the accused. Several other states – including Odisha, Assam, and Chhattisgarh – have since passed similar laws.

However, current laws, including state-level anti-superstition laws, do not provide an effective way for victims to recover from the consequences of witch branding, such as expulsion from a village, physical violence, and displacement. Studies show that police generally only intervene when murder is involved, leaving victims of non-lethal persecution without adequate recourse. The persistence of the ojha’s social authority means that legal frameworks alone cannot dismantle the belief system that sustains these accusations.

Magic and witchcraft in Santal folktales 🔗

The depth of these beliefs is also visible in Santal oral tradition. Folktales collected as early as 1909 by Cecil Henry Bompas in Folklore of the Santal Parganas contain extensive sections dedicated to witchcraft – stories of dains and ojhas, initiation into witchcraft, and encounters between humans and the spirit world. The Santhali belief in the invisible world makes the community understand that the fate of the individual and community at large depends upon the practices followed by them, and this belief is woven through generations of storytelling. These folktales serve both as cultural memory and as a means of transmitting values about what is sacred, what is feared, and how social boundaries are maintained.

The tension between tradition and modernity 🔗

In contemporary Santal communities, witchcraft beliefs persist alongside expanding access to modern education, healthcare, and legal systems. The tension is real. On one side, these beliefs form a coherent spiritual framework that has held communities together for centuries, providing explanations for suffering and frameworks for communal action. On the other, they have enabled – and continue to enable – serious human rights abuses, particularly against women and the socially marginalized.

Research shows that out of 102 cases of witch branding studied, 41 involved women accused of causing illness and deaths, indicating that inadequate access to healthcare remains one of the central drivers of accusation. Improving healthcare access in tribal areas is therefore not merely a public health issue – it is directly linked to reducing the power of the ojha over life-and-death decisions in communities where modern medicine is still largely unavailable or unaffordable.

Magic and witchcraft in Santal culture are, as the phrase goes, a double-edged sword. They are genuine expressions of a spiritual worldview that sees human beings as embedded in a web of relationships with the natural and supernatural world. But that same framework, when turned toward fear and accusation, has caused – and continues to cause – profound harm. Addressing this requires more than passing laws. It requires understanding the beliefs, challenging the structural vulnerabilities that make certain people targets, and ensuring that communities have real alternatives to the ojha when illness or misfortune strikes.

What do you think? Can a spiritual belief system that provides genuine community cohesion and healing also be reformed to eliminate the violence it enables – or does addressing witch-hunting necessarily require dismantling the broader belief structure? And what responsibility do states and policymakers have when cultural practices cross into human rights violations?

References

1. https://factsanddetails.com/india/Religion_Caste_Folk_Beliefs_Death/sub7_2g/entry-4148.html
2. https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/santals
3. https://srpbypst.blogspot.com/2010/06/santal-religion-and-expressive-culture.html
4. https://www.exoticindiaart.com/book/details/tribal-religion-religious-beliefs-and-practices-among-santals-naw726/
5. https://www.academia.edu/114550149/Santals_traditional_healing_practices_and_use_of_modern_medicines_A_sociological_study
6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399154614_The_Diversity_of_Village_Deities_in_Santhal_An_Anthropological_Study_of_Bonga
7. https://thecho.in/files/21.-Bishnupada-Malik.pdf
8. https://www.surlalunefairytales.com/book.php?id=132&tale=4477
9. https://www.academia.edu/122166973/Witchcraft_and_Magic_in_Santhali_Folktales_A_Post_colonial_Study
10. https://thediplomat.com/2023/03/the-deep-roots-of-witch-branding-in-india/
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayan_(witch)
12. https://ymerdigital.com/uploads/YMER2405N1.pdf
13. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/india/witches.htm
14. https://www.dailypioneer.com/2021/state-editions/odisha-accounts-for-2nd-highest-witch-hunt-cases.html