Witch Haunts.
“In any country an isolated or outlying race, the lingering survivors of an older nationality, is liable to the imputation of sorcery.”[68] This is exactly true of Asia. Marco Polo makes the same assertion about Pachai in Badakhshân. He says the people of Kashmîr “have extraordinary acquaintance with the devilries of enchantment, insomuch that they can make their idols to speak. They can also by their sorceries bring on changes of weather, and produce darkness, and do a number of things so extraordinary, that without seeing them no one would believe them. Indeed this country is the very original source from which idolatry has spread abroad.” In Tibet, he says, “are the best enchanters and astrologers that exist in that part of the world; they perform such extraordinary marvels and sorceries by diabolical art, that it astounds one to see or even hear of them.”[69] So in European folk-lore the north was considered the home of witches, and in Shakespeare La Pucelle invokes the aid of the spirit under the “lordly monarch of the north.”
In India, the same is the case with the Konkan in Bombay.[70] The semi-aboriginal Thârus of the Himâlayan Tarâî are supposed to possess special powers of this kind, and Thâruhat, or “the land of the Thârus,” is a common synonym for “Witchland.” At Bhâgalpur, Dr. Buchanan was told that twenty-five children died annually through the malevolence of witches. These reputed witches used to drive a roaring trade, as women would conceal their children on their approach and bribe them to go away. In Gorakhpur, he says, the Tonahis or witches were very numerous, “but some Judge sent an order that no one should presume to injure another by enchantment. It is supposed that the order has been obeyed, and no one has since imagined himself injured, a sign of the people being remarkably easy to govern,”[71] and it may be added of the patriarchal style of government in those early days. Nowadays the accusation of witchcraft is practically confined to the menial tribes. The wandering, half-gipsy Banjâras, or grain-carriers, are notoriously witch-ridden, and the same is the case with the Dom, Sânsiya, Hâbûra, and other vagrants of their kin.