Birubala Rabha, an Indian social activist who fought the practice of branding women as witches in the country’s remote northeast, died on May 13 in Guwahati, the capital of Assam State in that region. She was 75.
Her death, in a hospital, was caused by cancer, her assistant, Usha Rabha, said in an interview. (They were not related.)
So-called witch hunting has been a scourge throughout India, preying on mostly village women who are often single, widowed or otherwise isolated and involved in property or marital disputes. Accused of being witches, they have been tortured and in many cases murdered; from 2010 to 2021, more than 1,500 were killed in India, according to the country’s National Crime Records Bureau.
Ms. Rabha, a slight, bespectacled woman who was born poor in an Assam village, faced down mobs for her work, badgered the police and pushed for legal protection for women. Her efforts were rewarded when legislation outlawing witch hunting was passed in Assam State in 2015. Cases there have dropped sharply, to a few per year from the several a month that were being reported when she began her campaign in the early 2000s, said Usha Rabha, who worked at Mission Birubala, the nongovernmental organization that Birubala Rabha founded.
The victims of witch hunts face gruesome punishments, according to “Contemporary Practices of Witch Hunting,” a 2015 report by the Indian legal nonprofit Partners for Law in Development. They can be subjected to “forcible stripping,” the report said, “being paraded naked in public, cutting or tonsuring of the hair, blackening of the face, cutting off of the nose, pulling of the teeth to ‘defang’, gouging out the eye, whipping, gang rape, forcible consumption of human excreta, cow dung” or “killing by hanging, hacking, lynching or burying alive.”
Ms. Rabha traveled from village to village in Assam to speak out against the practice and declared that there was no such thing as “daini,” or witches. She had long been suspicious of folk superstitions and of medicine men who chanted incantations over young women to drive out what they believed were evil spirits. As a young mother, Ms. Rabha was told by a local medicine man that her mentally ill son would soon die; he didn’t. That false prediction, in the 1980s, was the seed for her advocacy work, which she began in earnest around 2000.
That year, she stood up in a meeting in the village of Lakhipur, also in Assam, to support five women accused of being witches; she didn’t back down when hundreds of villagers surrounded her house the next day.
Usha Rabha recalled her first rescue mission with Ms. Rabha, in 2006, when a stick-bearing mob encircled them in a neighboring state. “I was terrified,” she said. But Birubala was “completely unfazed,” Ms. Rabha said. When the police came to rescue the two women, she said, Birubala “reprimanded the cops, saying, ‘I will not stop until I finish the work that I do.’”
In Assam, in the 2000s, Birubala Rabha became allied with the state’s former police director general, Kuladhar Saikia. “She would come to me, meet me and discuss these issues,” Mr. Saikia recalled in an interview, adding, “She told me she was standing up against social injustice.”
“She was a courageous lady,” he said. “When I was looking for someone to stand up against injustice, they were few. What she accomplished, this village lady, it was quite praiseworthy.”
But when she began her campaign, she was quite isolated, as she recalled in a 2016 interview for a New York Times video about her work. “When I started fighting against witch hunts, villagers came in packs to beat me up and kill me,” she told the filmmaker and journalist Vikram Singh, who made the video. “The police did not help us earlier.”
She added, “My own relatives called me a witch after my husband died of cancer.”
Birubala Rabha was born on Feb. 5, 1949, in the village of Thakurvila, in Assam’s Goalpara district. Her father, Kaliya Rabha, a farmer, died when she was 6. Her mother, Sagarbala Rabha, was a farmworker. Birubala, who had only a grade-school education, married a farmer at 15.
She is survived by three sons, Dharmeshwar, Bishnu Prasad and Dayalu, and a daughter, Kumuli Rabha.
In 2021, Ms. Rabha was given the Padma Shri, a civilian award, by the Indian government. She was buried with state honors in her village in Goalpara. Over her career, she rescued 90 women both personally and through her organization, Mission Birubala.
“Her legacy of scientific principles and progressive societal contributions will serve as a beacon, inspiring future generations to fearlessly combat injustice,” Assam’s minister for public health engineering, Jayanta Mallabaruah, wrote on X.
Ms. Rabha had seen too much suffering by women to be impressed by the accolades and awards she received late in her life. “It feels better to save lives than to win awards,” she told Mr. Singh in the 2016 video.
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