000			01567nam a22001457a 4500
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100			_aMathew, Akhila _957506
245			_aDisciplining Dakans: Witchcraft, law and everyday lives in eighteenth-century Marwar
260			_bThe Indian Economic and Social History Review
300			_a63(3), July-Sept 2025
520			_aIn the eighteenth century, numerous legal appeals concerning witchcraft, either by women labelled as dakans (roughly translated as ‘witches’) or by their accusers, were brought to the attention of the Marwar state for adjudication. Through an examination of these legal petitions, this article contributes to the scholarship on witchcraft in the subcontinent and other regions. Though speaking to this literature, this article will diverge from it in two ways. First, the article will shift the gaze from tribes to castes in precolonial India and, thereby, question the deep-seated assumption that the belief in witchcraft and other superstitions was confined to the former. Second, moving away from an imagination of witchcraft as being marked by incredible violence emanating from public spectacles of pain and torture, this article will make a case for reconceptualising witchcraft in the Marwar region as a phenomenon in which the occult coexisted with surprising ordinariness in the everyday lives of people. - Reproduced https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00194646251350789
773			_aThe Indian Economic and Social History Review
906			_aHISTORY
942			_cAR