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Shades of Wildness Tribe, Caste, and Gender in Western India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2024

Ajay Skaria
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Extract

In his Quirky First novel, The Prevalence of Witches, originally published in 1947, Aubrey Menen tells the story of an Education Officer posted to Limbo, “six hundred and fifty miles of clumsy hills and jungle” in British India. Here, “for a thousand years the inhabitants had shot at everybody who came into it with arrows and their aim was usually adequate to their purpose of keeping people out; where the bowmen failed to get home, the mosquitoes did not” (Menen 1989,1). Soon after the Education Officer's arrival, the village chief kills his wife's paramour. The chief does not consider himself responsible for the act; he feels that he has been pushed into it by a witch. The rest of the story skittles around the funny and increasingly improbable efforts of the Political Agent (Catallus), the Education Officer, and two others to save the chief, awaiting trial in prison, from being sentenced for this crime. They arrange a miracle to convince the Judge that what the Limbodians practice is a religion and that the chief should be let off since he was only practicing his religion. But the Judge, a Mr. Chandra Bose, is a member of the Rationalist Press Association and treats the miracle merely as an interesting case of mass hysteria. Eventually, Catallus slips the key to the jail to the chief, who then escapes from prison.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , August 1997 , pp. 726 - 745
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1997

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