A reputation for jadu

‘That used to be a famous village’: these words were spoken in 2009 by a Kangra taxi driver—and he meant ‘infamous’. He was speaking of K, which was some 50 kilometres from his own home and a place he had apparently never visited. I asked him why, though I could guess the answer. He started with a disclaimer, keen to stress that things must be very different now, not least I think because assertions or accusations of witchcraft are serious matters in India (to accuse a person of witchcraft is a criminal offence), and he wanted to emphasize that he was speaking of the past. ‘But in earlier times, 40, 50, 60 years ago, K was known for some people who knew tantra. . . many people would avoid going there, they feared to go there.’ I asked if he was referring to jadu, a word familiar across much of northern India, and he replied that he was. He did not know of any particular instances of jadu there: what he knew of was this village's past reputation. The taxi driver was himself a Gaddi. So even though he lived on the other side of the district, it was perhaps not so surprising that he should be familiar with Gaddi gossip. I doubt if someone who was not a Gaddi, living a similar distance from K, would even have heard of the village. I was especially intrigued by this spontaneous reference to K's past because it echoed an earlier conversation, a fortnight before, with an elderly man named Dilip,Footnote ⁶ who spoke of his one and only visit to K as a boy back in the late 1930s when he said that no-one wanted to go there because of its frightening reputation for jadu. Dilip, like the taxi driver, had also used the word tantra Footnote ⁷ to indicate the form of occult knowledge jadu entailed. The young, in particular, he said were fearful of it then, 70 years back, though what exactly was feared was rather vague. Dilip was not a Gaddi, but he lived much closer to K than the taxi driver, so his local knowledge was not surprising. In fact, as a keen local historian, he knew a good deal. Among various stories was one recounting a confrontation between the malign power of a ‘witch’ in K and the worshippers of Gugga, a popular Kangra deity, at some point in a hazy past. This ‘mythic’ account evoked the taming of uncontrolled occult power for collective benefit, and spoke by implication of the domestication of a whole village, brought with a struggle into the ‘civilized’ fold of Kangra ritual orthodoxy.

Dilip, the local historian, had started this conversation in 2009 by asking me why I had chosen to do fieldwork in this particular village, and whether I had been aware at the time of doing my fieldwork of its singular reputation. Certainly I had soon become aware of it, although, as I mentioned earlier, I had not known about it when first selecting it as a place to live in. Although I have started this section with these two outsiders’ views of K's notoriety, it was definitely not a matter of a highly stigmatizing reputation held by outsiders which was unacknowledged or denied within the village itself. On the contrary, this was a reputation which few, if any, within K ever sought to reject or minimize, even if in the past they were rarely keen to talk about it. Most recently, the topic cropped up unsolicited one day during my visit in 2011, as I sat in my old courtyard with my daughter, talking with three young men who spoke regretfully but matter-of-factly of how fear of jadu had in the not-so-distant past pushed a number of households to leave the village for good. One of these young men, moreover, also made a point of saying how very well known in the area K had been for jadu.

To be sure there were differences between the views of those within and those outside the village. Within the village, in the recent past jadu was regarded as a disturbing and potentially dangerous—but hardly daily—reality to negotiate; from outside the village, by contrast, the enormity of living with jadu could be painted in more lurid colours. Moreover, if jadu is taken as an idiom of ‘othering’, then we might distinguish the view of those outside K, for whom the village as a whole was a tainted ‘other’, from the view of those within the village, for whom the tainted ‘others’ were more specifically identifiable, sometimes neighbours, sometimes associated with another part of the village. Despite these small differences in emphasis, however, the conversation I referred to at the end of the previous paragraph indicates that external stereotypes about K feed into residents’ own perceptions, for residents know all too well how their village was and still is seen by others.Footnote ^8, Footnote ⁹

In my experience, while 30 years ago few adults in K would volunteer much information on the subject (I recall only two adult informants who were willing to talk in more than asides), the children I knew then were more talkative, albeit still wary and careful to choose their moment. Many a rather furtive conversation about jadu had taken place with children around our hearth as my wife and I cooked or tried to keep warm in winter, and my field-notes are filled with my accounts of these conversations. These took place with the children who lived in the same part of the village as our house, and invariably they would be preceded by a quick check outside to make sure nobody was listening. Even reassured that nobody was overhearing us, none of the children dared refer to those individuals supposed to be ‘witches’ by name, and would direct me geographically by location—up, down, beyond, next to, yes there—using the names of ‘innocent’ individuals to assist their directions. Nor did they want me to name names either, even when I had acquired them from other sources. Jadu was about suspicions, never open accusations. So I had much of my early education about jadu and its dangers from children. I learned that in practice those suspected—called dain—were always women, that they were said nearly always to harm near-neighbours (who may or may not have been kin, but in K usually were), and that, while their methods were unknown, their effects were always intentional and malign, driven by envy (there was no benign or unwitting jadu). The evil eye (najar) was just one part of their repertoire. Jadu practitioners, I learned, could be of any caste and were said to cause illness in their victims, or often, in the case of women, infertility; another common target was reputed to be a family's livestock, causing illness, infertility or death. Suspicion was a matter of hindsight when there was something untoward to be explained. Finally, apparently on one night a year a spectacular mountaintop battle took place between witches and local deities in the neighbouring district of Mandi, invisible, of course, to the innocent. In this battle K's dains were said to be prominent (a story which, to my surprise, I heard repeated in 2009 by my historian acquaintance, Dilip).

I do not want to suggest there were no sources other than these children. First and foremost, there was the notably public occasion of a regular village-wide ceremony (known as jagra) when the village medium (chela or gur) would become possessed by all six of the village's deities in turn, uttering exhortations, judgements, and predictions. On one occasion, Ajiapal, the foremost of these local deities and generally the least benign, railed at ‘his’ subjects in K through his medium, condemning them for harbouring witches in their midst and tolerating the amount of jadu practised in the village. To villagers’ evident astonishment, Ajiapal asserted that there were no fewer than 32 dains in the village, though he did not name any, and he expected them to desist, implying dire consequences for village flocks otherwise.

Moreover, and more unnerving for the family concerned, a young man named Madan with whom I was friendly had a breakdown, leading his family to consult a traditional healer-diviner (also called chela) about the underlying cause of his affliction. However, he and others in his family told me when this was unfolding that the chela they had approached was too frightened to visit K because of its reputation for jadu, insisting that the exorcism rituals should take place in a nearby village out of the reach of such troubling mystical power—and that is what duly happened after various postponements. It might be one thing to have jadu diagnosed as the cause of an individual's suffering during such a ritual; to have a general fear of jadu in this village invoked in advance, as the justification for holding it elsewhere, seemed a powerful statement to make about its reputation.

Despite these instances and my various conversations, I hesitated to make much use of this material. Because so much of my ethnography about witchcraft came from children, I was uneasy about relying on it, thinking at the time that I was at the very least open to the charge that I had been taken in by embellished childhood imagination. I knew also as I wrote up my thesis that there were many gaps in my knowledge. For example, I could not attempt, as Alan Macfarlane had done in Nepal,Footnote ¹⁰ a rough classification of symptoms or diseases with different sources of ‘mystical’ action—say by ‘ghost’, ‘witch’ or aggrieved ancestor—just one detail in my ignorance about the process by which suspicions came to point towards jadu rather than some other possible cause. Furthermore, despite the large anthropological literature on ‘witchcraft’ in Africa, there was then rather a meagre literature relating to ‘witchcraft’ in India, which in itself served to reduce my confidence to pursue the topic. Moreover, and as big a factor as any, I was keen to resist the familiar anthropological temptation at the time to dwell on the supposedly exotic. To write about jadu in K seemed to perpetuate those stereotypes we claimed we wished to dispel. Although the deconstructive moment when anthropology first began to examine its own tendency to exoticize and essentialize had still not quite gathered momentum, the early signs were there nonetheless. In consequence, I avoided writing about jadu, unsure what significance to give it.

The subject of jadu has cropped up in conversation only sporadically in subsequent visits. Nevertheless, on each visit it has arisen. Wary of exaggerating its importance, and conscious that this might still be a sensitive topic, I have waited for others to initiate discussion of jadu, only then pursuing it with some fascination. Most commonly the topic has arisen with those I had first known as children, or with their children, now themselves young adults. When talk has turned to jadu, I have felt obliged to think again about my own earlier ambivalence surrounding the importance of the subject. The most striking difference from the time when I first lived in K was that the conversations of the last few years have largely looked back at something that was now seen as belonging to the past. The two conversations with outsiders in 2009, with which I started this section, in a sense reflect this allusion to the past. Yet more telling, of course, are the impressions of K's own residents or former residents. I mentioned my conversation with the local historian, Dilip, to a friend from K named Mahesh. He had been one of those children from whom I had learned much many years before, and he agreed with the ‘back in the old days’ or ‘in times gone by’ emphasis of Dilip's story. Things had moved on now, was the tenor of Mahesh's judgement in 2009, shared by others also, and K had changed.

Even so, I am conscious that as recently as a visit in 2002 the subject of jadu had cropped up as a current anxiety in the course of one long and animated conversation with this same friend, Mahesh. It is worth reflecting on the evolution in his views about jadu over the relatively short period since then, as revealed in the ensuing anecdote. In 2002 he had been talking about the new house he and his wife had had built a few years earlier, not in K but an hour's walk away down in the valley below. There were plenty of attractions to the new location: it was beside a metalled road (K was not at that point connected by road), surrounded by better land, and closer to the local town and its facilities, including the English-medium school their children were attending. Another big attraction, however, was that it took his new family out of K, away from what he saw as the jealousies, anxieties, and suspicions associated with jadu. Why, he asked, did I think his family had moved? Why did I think his brother Badri was in the process of moving away? Why had Madan's family (the young man I mentioned who was taken to consult a chela) also eventually moved away and relocated in the valley below? The answer, Mahesh insisted, was because of jadu. Did I remember how his own mother had been very anxious when we had taken our eldest son as a toddler to a part of the village where she believed several dains lived? Another striking detail in that conversation—striking because it related to the recent past—came when Mahesh said that several members of his family were uneasy about the cause of his elderly father's death in K the previous year. He was inclined to attribute it to jadu, and connected it to one or two other mysterious happenings (notably, and very puzzlingly, the tail being cut off one of their cows after her death). He readily conceded that this was no more than an uneasy suspicion, but wanted me to know that his unease was shared by others within the wider family still living in K. This admission was all the more arresting, coming as it did after our conversation had switched abruptly from an excited discussion of Mahesh's recent posting in the heart of one of India's major commercial centres.

It is hard to know how to much weight to give the juxtaposition of these contrasting views, voiced a few years apart, by one articulate individual: animated anxiety about a still credible threat of jadu in 2002, and a more relaxed readiness to conclude a few years’ later in 2009 that jadu was now a thing of the past. I am struck also by another contradiction between what I heard from Mahesh in 2002 and what he said in 2009. During the earlier visit, he had speculated that ‘modern life’ may have been intensifying the urge to use the malign powers of jadu, rather than acting to dilute such forces. He said this while reflecting on why his father might have been a victim of jadu. In earlier times, so his argument went, jadu was seen as a last resort and, he suggested, even those with the power to harm (the dains) were inclined to be cautious in exercising those powers. But modern life is about instant results, immediate gratification, and such caution was one casualty. Perhaps he was thinking aloud, searching speculatively for a pattern to troubling events, but I had been intrigued at the time to hear jadu counter intuitively associated with the language of consumerist desire.Footnote ¹¹ That occasion in 2002 has proved, in fact, to be the last time I heard jadu spoken of as a current threat. Even on that visit, and certainly subsequently, it has been countered by a much more consistently heard view to the effect that modern life was finally weakening the grip of jadu in K. The rapidity of change in modern life left no time for jadu, or so I was told on several occasions. Time was the key, a point I shall return to later.

The wider context

At this point, I turn to recent writing on ‘witchcraft’ or ‘sorcery’ in India, both journalistic and ethnographic, to place the example of K in a wider context. In Indian politics and news media, witchcraft generally surfaces as ‘witch-hunting’. This is portrayed, often by NGOs campaigning to raise public awareness, as a severe recurrent problem in certain parts of the country, notably in the far northeast, as well as extending from parts of Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha west to Rajasthan and Maharashtra.Footnote ¹² It is typically presented as a problem of poverty most acute in ‘tribal’ (adivasi) communities where, despite national legislation that criminalizes accusations of witchcraft, beatings, rape, and murder are inflicted on individuals who are almost always women and, more often than not, widowed or elderly. This is far from being simply a commonplace media depiction. The same portrayal is evident in the deliberations of the Planning Commission on the Scheduled Tribes, for instance.Footnote ¹³ Thus, in public discourse witchcraft has a primary reference to groups either characterized as adivasi or as marginalized, or both, coupled to highly gendered violence against those accused of witchcraft.Footnote ¹⁴ So serious has witchcraft-related violence been in a few of these areas that in 2008 there were even suggestions that education about witchcraft should be introduced in Assam's primary school curriculum.Footnote ¹⁵

The ethnographic literature is not extensive. It both lends support to, but also complicates, this public rhetorical association of witchcraft or sorcery with groups outside or on the margins of the Hindu world. The majority of such studies do indeed concern largely adivasi localities. Frederick Bailey's account of witch-hunting in Orissa is a case in point.Footnote ¹⁶ Nandini Sundar's data from Chhattisgarh also come from adivasi communities.Footnote ¹⁷ Helen Macdonald, on the other hand, expressly sought to ‘address the dearth of research [on witchcraft] conducted in non-adivasi areas’ of the same state.Footnote ¹⁸ From further west, Amit Desai's recent ethnographic analyses of responses to witchcraft beliefs in eastern Maharashtra and Ajay Skaria's historical account of anti-witch violence in the late nineteenth century in two areas of what are now Rajasthan and Gujarat, both concern adivasis.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet two accounts from opposite ends of the country have no such adivasi associations: William Sax's discussion of rituals of aggression, including sorcery, in Garhwal, and Isabelle Nabokov's paper on sorcery in Tamilnadu.Footnote ²⁰

Two additional points from this literature are worth highlighting. The first concerns the role of the state in assertively countering occult beliefs and practices, through the law and the media, in areas where ‘witch-hunting’ and ‘witch-killings’ are identified as major public issues.Footnote ²¹ These are contexts in which agents of the state make considerable rhetorical use of the idea of modernity and what being modern entails to assert that witchcraft beliefs have no place in the ‘modern’ world. The second point relates to the ontology of occult activity. There is a distinct contrast between those writers who emphasize the constitutive or restorative potentiality of such practices (like Sax) and those who emphasize the destructive, exclusionary force of occult affliction (like Nabokov). Nabokov's argument is in part a dialogue with Bruce Kapferer,Footnote ²² summarized in her statement that ‘Kapferer's idea that people actively strive to regenerate or reconstitute themselves does not account for the complex relations and situations of disempowerment that, for Tamil sufferers, constitutes much of the experienced pain of sorcery victimization.’Footnote ²³ It is her emphasis on the sense of pain felt by those who believe themselves to be afflicted that chimes with my own data on people's responses to fears of jadu attack in K.

A word is salient here about recent anthropological theorising of witchcraft generally, looking beyond India. For anthropologists today, writing about witchcraft raises questions which go to the heart of the post-colonial critique of the discipline's history. In a nutshell, is the very attention anthropology still gives to what we label ‘witchcraft’ a failure to escape the thoughtless reproduction of the discipline's old obsession with the alien and exotic?Footnote ²⁴ Alternatively, would the failure be not to attend to the relevance and subtle transformations of ‘witchcraft’ manifest in some parts of the world, as if in thrall to a kind of ethnocentrism that cannot look beyond witchcraft's label as ‘exotic’? The wave of writing on the subject over the last two decades suggests that anthropologists generally incline to the latter view. Most ethnographic writing on ‘witchcraft’, both recent as well as in the past, has focused on sub-Saharan Africa or New Guinea. The literature on Africa has been particularly notable for suggesting the salience of witchcraft to modernity. The sheer ubiquity of witchcraft beliefs in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa has invited reassessment of the earlier assumption that witchcraft and modernity would be incompatible and this, in turn, has led a number of anthropologists to argue that modernity has opened up new possibilities and arenas in which witchcraft beliefs can flourish.Footnote ²⁵ Some have argued that the politics of the post-colonial state has in itself fostered the conditions for witchcraft to flourish.Footnote ²⁶ Certainly not all anthropologists writing on witchcraft and sorcery in Africa share these views.Footnote ²⁷ However, I refer to this substantial body of literature here to throw into relief that this example from northern India does not support such a general argument. It would, I contend, be very hard to argue for the ‘modernity’ of jadu in the context of this particular Kangra village.

A singular village?

It is fairly common in Kangra, as elsewhere, for individuals to have a reputation for possessing some kind of spiritual or occult power.Footnote ²⁸ What is unusual in this case is that it is the village that has had the reputation, and its own residents commonly acknowledged this collective identification. I never heard any suggestion that there were one or two particularly renowned individual dains in K; it was their collective presence that was emphasized. This state of affairs not only points to questions about the distinctiveness of place and village identity, but also invites us to reflect on the epistemological status of the ‘village’ in anthropology. My initial fieldwork took place at the end of the era when working in a village was still a commonplace in anthropology. Even if the artificiality of ‘the village study’ of late functionalism's heyday was being increasingly exposed at the time (in an Indian context, by Louis Dumont above all), a good many anthropologists still gravitated towards rural settings for their fieldwork, even as they imagined that they would themselves avoid the supposed intellectual blinkers which had come to be associated with such a location. The notion of multi-sited ethnography—which was to promise one escape route—was then still in the future. Today, multi-sited ethnography is sufficiently established that both its potential advantages and its possible limitations are better recognized. Multi-sited ethnography has not, of course, put an end to ethnography in rural settings, nor was it ever envisaged as likely to do so. Nevertheless, it was presented as a more open framing of the complexity of ‘the field’ than could be achieved in a single setting. Its advocates, above all George Marcus,Footnote ²⁹ saw it assisting recognition of mobile lives harnessing fluid networks across an ever-extending geographical range. As a corollary, it led ethnographers further away from the notion of ‘the village’ as a social entity at a time when many had already started to theorize the relationships between village, region, and state.Footnote ³⁰ Moreover, multi-sited ethnography fitted alongside the shift from earlier thinking of social relations as structured, to a newer appreciation of social relations as continuously emergent. And it offered one answer to the methodological challenge implicit in novel conceptions at the time such as ‘space-time compression’.Footnote ³¹ More colloquially, multi-sited ethnography was seen as an urgently needed attempt to catch up with the world as it was portrayed in the media, popular culture, and other academic disciplines—as a world in motion, even in rural contexts. Along the way, ‘the village’ in a sense became a redundant anthropological category.

Interestingly, however, a number of writers have recently reassessed the analytical potential of the village. India's villages have been one important spur to this reconsideration.Footnote ³² One of the most penetrating contributions has come from Matei Candea, whose qualified defence of the village setting also involves critiquing what he sees as the unacknowledged holism implicit in multi-sited ethnography, the very accusation that was made against the village study.Footnote ³³ It is against this background that Candea restates the case for working in a single setting, exploring this through his own Corsican fieldwork and what he admits is ‘the hackneyed image of the “village ethnography”’.Footnote ³⁴ He does so as a way towards what he sees as a more realistic epistemological modesty of aspiration, arguing for the ‘bounded field-site’ as a deliberate ‘self-imposed limitation’, one which obliges us to see where we do fieldwork as an analytically ‘arbitrary location’ in which the very ‘incompleteness and contingency of our chosen setting itself helps us to challenge those totalizing assumptions implicit in the promise of multi-sitedness’.Footnote ³⁵ Nonetheless, so dated has the idea of ‘the village’ become in anthropology's own imaginary that Candea approaches the topic of his village setting in Corsica with, to use his own words, ‘calculated irony’.Footnote ³⁶

Yet even while accepting that analytically the notion of the self-contained village is an anachronistic fiction, it would be hard to deny villages do exist that local judgement depicts as unusual, idiosyncratic or unusually self-contained.Footnote ³⁷ Candea's argument has particular interest in relation to a village such as K, which is both self-defined and externally imagined as an inward-looking place, set apart from its neighbours by topography and social outlook. For, as he acknowledges, mountain villages are especially easy to represent in terms that reinforce old stereotypes. He has Corsica in mind when he alludes to ‘the classic image of the high-perched mountain village. . . both warm, intimate community and forbidding rocky stronghold’,Footnote ³⁸ but this is also a reasonable depiction of K's setting.

Reputation, modernity, and time

To be a place where jadu is part of a common explanatory currency hints at tensions which, at times, become oppressive—but it is a currency of whispers, of unspoken suspicion, anxiety, and, I believe, avoidance. These suspicions are so difficult to voice outside a small circle of trusted kin, one wonders how they are transmitted. It is important to note in this connection that there is no significant ritual economy built around jadu and the suspicions it arouses. Astrologer-diviners may be relatively plentiful in the area, but it would be hard to argue that there are ritual specialists whose livelihoods depend on dealing with jadu and who could, in a sense, give voice to it.Footnote ³⁹ By their nature, suspicions alone do not create a ritual apparatus of the kind that outright accusations would necessitate. Thus there is not a great deal for the ethnographer to get hold of by way of ritual practice, any more than there is much to get hold of for those who believe they are possible victims.

Nevertheless, I turn now to consider why K should have sustained its association with, and reputation for, jadu for so long, before moving on to address the factors that signify why jadu's hold over people's consciousness now appears to be waning. One factor that has, I think, been important within K is its layout. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that K's congested physical layout has played a part in fuelling tensions and intensifying jealousies or suspicions. In the same way, there are acute difficulties around avoidance when relationships break down. These are precisely the circumstances which a jadu discourse fosters and upon which it feeds. No reminder is needed that petty jealousies and friction are the bread-and-butter of village life the world over, but physical proximity often makes matters worse. K's cheek-by-jowl compactness is highly unusual in an area where settlements are typically much more dispersed, with small hamlets dotted about, and with some distance between neighbours beyond one's closest kin. Perched on its steep mountainside, no other village in the area had such a large population living so compactly or, one might say, so claustrophobically. The word ‘claustrophobic’ is mine, but the sentiment was quite commonly voiced that people lived too much on top of one another, making this one reason why some families sought to move down to the valley below (though it was rarely the only reason).Footnote ⁴⁰

Two other factors reinforce a sense of K's distinctiveness when viewed from within, and its separateness when viewed from without. First, K has been highly unusual in the degree to which its families have sought marriage partners from within the village in the past. For a bride to be married within her natal village used to attract considerable opprobrium in Kangra and is still generally frowned upon as less than ideal, principally because it subverts the logic of inequality between the two sides to the marriage embedded in hypergamy.Footnote ⁴¹ A tolerance of village endogamy, by contrast, is linked to consciously held egalitarian values which were—and still are—expressed in Gaddi marriage choices.Footnote ⁴² Even so, K was clearly a local anomaly in the extent to which marriages were arranged between partners who had grown up in the same village. I can only speculate whether this unusual state of affairs might have been a form of inadvertent closure created by a degree of reluctance on the part of families in other villages either to contemplate allowing their daughters to marry husbands in K, or consenting to brides from there for their sons, due to its unsavoury reputation. Nevertheless, the long-term effect was to reinforce the village's position as a place apart, one which did things in its own way. A further factor also deserves mention here: K's identity, both within and outside, as an archetypal Gaddi shepherding village. Gaddis have been known in the region as migratory shepherds, as I said earlier, even if flock ownership has declined in many Kangra villages.Footnote ⁴³ But K has had—at least until recently—a particularly strong association with a livelihood and way of life seen by the wider Kangra population as, at best, quaintly traditional and, more judgementally, as out-of-date and even backward.

Thus, I suggest that K's reputation in the area for disvalued traits rested on more than jadu, even if jadu was its most emblematic characteristic. In a perhaps subliminal manner, K's physical separateness, the economic and spatial separateness of the shepherding way of life, and the social separateness reflected in the unusual willingness to find marriage partners within the village, all reinforced a sense that this was a village unlike others. From outside, jadu was what made this ‘otherness’ notorious.Footnote ⁴⁴

Seeking explanations for K's long-held reputation for jadu—lasting over many decades—is necessarily somewhat speculative, and not a circumstance where there are local explanations to draw upon. Within K or outside it, the association with jadu was simply a given and not something that might be explained. By contrast, there is more to go on when considering the changes that are the focus of this paper, conveyed by the past tense in the title, for there are at least some local views put forward as reasons why jadu is now seen to be a discourse on the wane, despite a general sense of reluctance to talk about such a topic.

I was told on several occasions that modern life was simply too fast for people to have time for jadu, which was considered to take time and demand patience. It meant learning particular kinds of mantra, so it was said, and nobody—least of all the young—now had the time to spend learning the skills of such ambiguous arts. If children today wanted to learn about jadu they would watch a film on DVD, so I was told; they are unlikely to start learning mantras.Footnote ⁴⁵ A changed experience of time was repeatedly adduced to make sense of the declining, or indeed defunct, place of beliefs about jadu in people's lives in K. Modern life was described in familiar images of speed or haste, of pressing demands, of family life as attenuated by distance, with certain members of many families living away in cities or posted to other parts of the country. Thirty years ago, the main occupation to take men away from their locality (shepherding apart) was the army. While that remains a popular option, there are now numerous ways in which men are finding work in Delhi or other cities in the northwest and, moreover, taking their families with them more often than before. It is no longer so unusual for weddings in K to reunite families dispersed across different cities. The children of these families come back to their roots in the village with the experience of city schooling and with city outlooks and stories and, while some of them clearly find the experience of returning uncomfortable and disorienting, such occasions also extend the web of connections linking K to a sense of a larger India, to the nation as a whole. My point is not that this is novel in itself, only that what has been typical across much of India is at last occurring in this formerly atypical village.Footnote ⁴⁶

The changed valuation of education in K is a key part of many narratives I heard. One of the reasons why jadu is increasingly regarded as a thing of the past among those I spoke to was that universal education is believed to be weakening such ‘backward’ fantasies. It is a familiar trope around the world, with ‘modern’ knowledge seen as supplanting ignorance and superstition.Footnote ⁴⁷ Recent articles by Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery on the hopes invested in education by Dalit and Muslim young men in Uttar Pradesh paint a picture of both its enormous attractions—‘the iconic significance of “being educated”’—and considerable disappointments when it proved hard to convert this into secure employment opportunities.Footnote ⁴⁸ In K, it is too early in the process for disillusionment to be widespread. Moreover, while the young men of the lowest caste share a comparable disadvantage to those in Uttar Pradesh, the majority of Gaddi young men do not. An equally important part of the enthusiasm for education in K, as in its environs, relates to the opportunities that have opened up for girls, an example of a larger success in Himachal Pradesh.

Thirty years ago, most boys in K attended school to matriculation, though attendance could become very erratic as they grew up, while a number went with the flocks from a young age, thereby missing school altogether. At that time, few girls were permitted to stay at school through to matriculation and, typically, school attendance fizzled out during the high school years. Over the last generation or so all that has changed. All children in K attend school through to matriculation and, increasingly, both sexes are then going on to college to secure BA degrees and recently even MAs. The era of couples who both possess postgraduate qualifications has arrived in this village, which not so long ago was a local byword for the supposedly ‘backward’ or ‘traditional’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this, K is following the trajectory of developments in literacy and education within the larger Gaddi community, as well as across the district and the state.Footnote ⁵⁰

It has been striking to witness what these wider social and demographic trends mean when translated into family choices and expectations. Those who I had known once as children, who were often given little encouragement to bother with schooling, now attached great importance to the schooling of their own children and its continuation to a college education. The rare adults who, a generation ago, had imagined that education was a path to new opportunities for their children now felt vindicated at last. One woman in particular, Koshalya, who lived across the courtyard from the house we rented, is an ideal exemplar. Her husband was a shepherd and little concerned with schooling his children. But she herself had moved up the mountain slope at marriage from a hamlet in the valley below, bringing her natal family's much greater expectations about the importance of education. On one occasion in 1977 she had in exasperation dumped her second son in my arms and asked me to take him to the village's primary school, when for the umpteenth time he had wriggled out of attending and turned up to hang around our house instead. She had been adamant that since our presence was the distraction, it had to be my responsibility to ensure he got to school.Footnote ⁵¹ I cannot think of many other women in K at that time who shared her views and hopes. The eldest of five sisters, she was followed into K in due course by two younger sisters marrying in, who held, I think, broadly similar values (if not as insistently as their elder sister). Over subsequent years, two of them have moved back down the mountainside from whence they came, taking their families with them. But along the way together they nurtured, in what was then rather unpromising ground, a new set of expectations about the value of education. Thus between them these sisters have contributed to the larger shifts in outlook reflected in Himachal Pradesh's rapid rise in female literacy. Those three sisters have had 11 children: eight have so far gone on to a college education, and of the three remaining, two are still at school. Only the eldest, a daughter, did not, and she, probably the most academically inclined in the family, was I think born just too early to be allowed to take up the opportunity.

I would not want to suggest that this is entirely a consensual process. In one of the lulls which punctuate wedding ceremonies I listened in 2009 to a matriarch named Brahmi, from the same kin group as the three sisters mentioned above, rehearse her well-known views about the behaviour of her grandchildren. This was an animated conversation among a forceful group of women, all closely related, but the floor belonged to this particular woman, in her eighties and none too well at the time. This did not stop her berating one grandson in particular, who was in the army, though he stood for others, not least two of his three brothers. The bone of contention was a familiar one far beyond this locality: about the way in which education and new kinds of work seemed to detach children from their cultural roots and, with it, from their elders’ oversight and guidance. Of her four grandsons, two were in the army, one was a pharmaceutical rep, and only one, who had never bothered with school or been pressed to bother, had followed his father into the shepherding life which had, until recently, been the mainstay of the family economy (and was still highly lucrative). The grandson who inspired particularly strong feelings spoke good English, and his grandmother disliked it when he used his English in the village or on family occasions. He had already spoken to me of his desire to apply for promotion to become an officer, for which he said he would need better English (and we were talking mainly in English) and he admitted that this was a bone of contention with his forthright grandmother.Footnote ⁵² The gap between the two was all too plain, and this proud matriarch now found herself evidently bewildered by her grandchildren's lives in a way that she had probably never been by her own children's. Not that Brahmi was bewildered into silence—far from it. Nonetheless, as in so many other parts of the world, education and new kinds of employment opportunity had brought misgivings as well as enthusiasm, as old and young found themselves strange to one another in ways that probably were not so manifest in previous generations.

Two aspects of ‘modern’ life—the impact of education and the pressures of time created by its ‘speed’—were thus explicitly invoked by friends and informants as factors that contributed to the decline of jadu in K today. Yet these local causal explanations stress a basically rationalist case against jadu—greater education means that fewer people ‘believe in’ it as an idea or have the time for it. This still begs questions about the experiential reaction to profound social change and how that impacts on the idea of jadu. Here that familiar imagery of the ‘speed’ of modern life is crucial.Footnote ⁵³ For it seems to me that the ways in which change is experienced as ubiquitous and intense has helped to overwhelm jadu as an explanatory idiom. There is today so much to question and explain in a world where change is experience-near—even in a once-remote village like K—that jadu is being swept aside, becoming less and less imaginable as a useful potential explanation. Even comparatively recently, during my own fieldwork at the end of the 1970s, change was, relatively speaking, that much more experience-distant, still sufficiently separate from (and not disruptive to) the intimacies of daily life such that the language of accountability for illness or loss could meaningfully make use of the concept of jadu.Footnote ⁵⁴ By contrast, the last decade or so has seen a host of visible emblems of social and economic incorporation into the wider social milieu from which, for so long, K seemed to stand apart: the new road which at last links to K (after years of half-hearted attempts thwarted by monsoon landslides), the mobile phone masts standing at both ends of the village and the rapid familiarity of mobile phones themselves in virtually every household,Footnote ⁵⁵ and the various school uniforms of the children, once a rare sight indeed.