The Witch of the Palwârs

The Palwâr Râjputs of Oudh have a witch ancestress. Soon after the birth of her son she was engaged in baking cakes. Her infant began to cry, and she was obliged to perform a double duty. At this juncture her husband arrived just in time to see his demon wife assume gigantic and supernatural proportions, so as to allow both the baking and nursing to go on at the same time. But finding her secret discovered, the witch disappeared, leaving her son as a legacy to her astonished husband. Here, though the story is incomplete, we have almost certainly, as in the case of Nonâ Chamârin, one of the Melusina type of legend, where the supernatural wife leaves her husband and children, because he violated some taboo, by which he is forbidden to see her in a state of nudity, or the like.

The history of witchcraft in India, as in Europe, is one of the saddest pages in the annals of the people. Nowadays, the power of British law has almost entirely suppressed the horrible outrages which, under the native administration, were habitually practised. But particularly in the more remote and uncivilized parts of the country, this superstition still exists in the minds of the people, and occasional indications of it, which appear in our criminal records, are quite sufficient to show that any relaxation of the activity of our magistrates and police would undoubtedly lead to its revival in some of its more shocking forms.