When Mughal general Raja Ram Singh was ordered by Aurangzeb to take an army to Assam and subdue the Ahoms in 1667, he picked up the assignment with trepidation. He didn’t fear the Ahom military might, but Assam’s fearsome reputation as a land of black magic . Mayong , a village some 40 km from Guwahati, was the deemed capital of occult.

Ram Singh took along ninth Sikh guru Teg Bahadur to ward off evil. Teg Bahadur inadvertently introduced the Sikh faith in Assam, but couldn’t save the Mughal generalissimo from defeat. The Mughals were routed in the Battle of Saraighat in 1671 and Ram Singh beat a hasty retreat, never to return. He was lucky; a few others before him did not come back alive. Ikhtiyaruddin Yuzbuk Tughril Khan, a sultan of Bengal invaded Assam in 1256-57 and perished with his army there. Alamgir Nama of Mirza Muhammad Kazim, a chronicle of the first 10 years of Emperor Aurangzeb’s reign, while talking about an invasion by Muhammad Shah in 1332 with one lakh horsemen, says, “The whole army perished in that land of witchcraft, and not a trace was left”.

Other Mughal texts too talk about sorcery in Assam and its seemingly unlimited powers. Was it a true assessment?

Award-winning film critic-turned-filmmaker Utpal Borpujari says the myth of Mayong needs to be studied from a scientific point of view. “Isn’t it amazing that a bez (witch doctor) casts a spell and a bell-metal dish sticks to the back of a man sitting upright, defying the law of gravity? I saw this with my own eyes.” This former journalist has now decided to put Mayong on celluloid in a film called ‘Mayong: Myth/Reality’.

“When ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2’ was released in India on July 15, 2011, we conducted an informal survey among 200 people in Guwahati about whether they had heard about Mayong,” Borpujari says. “The results were surprising. Many hadn’t heard about it, while those who had, didn’t know where it was located. While they knew everything about Harry Potter , they were largely unaware that in Mayong, the practice of magic has been a way of life. The irony is that many had travelled to Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary, famed for its one-horned rhino population, without knowing they had passed through Mayong,” he says.

Incidentally, Assamese author Sushil Rajkhowa’s book, ‘Rinkur Rajsabha Part I’, too is inspired by the magic practised in Mayong. Rajkhowa says there is a mine of historical texts in Mayong that has not been tapped. Borpujari too confirms this.

“I saw many texts, written on paper or bark, in a museum in Mayong and in the homes of villagers. Almost every family has inherited texts on magic from their ancestors, which they have either preserved or destroyed out of fear of these falling into wrong hands. Most people here are very secretive about their art and don’t reveal it to strangers. Many spells have passed down generations orally and not in the written form. Now, the National Mission for Manuscripts, a wing of the Union ministry of culture, has undertaken a project in association with Srimanta Sankardev Kalakshetra, Guwahati, to preserve manuscripts dealing with magic and the history of Mayong,” Borpujari says.

Fortunately, there’s been no instance of witch hunting or any form of persecution here, unlike other places in India. Andhra Pradesh, for instance, has districts where occult is practiced; Rangareddi district in Telengana is one. In Maharashtra, banamati (sorcery) is feared by people. There are stories about Anandi Bai, wife of Raghunath Rao, killing her brother-in-law, Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao, with the help of a voodoo doll.

A Delhi-based psychologist, who has been part of a few myth-busting missions for the government and who didn’t want to be identified, says, “Various district administrations keep forming myth-busting teams to educate the masses, but often, even lower rung policemen are incapable of handling the problem. In one village, a witch doctor cuts off a patient’s tongue in the name of treatment, while in another, villagers chop off the nose of a sorcerer and castrate him before killing him. Occultism should be made a proper subject of study in Indian universities so that its scientific part can be better understood.”

However, Kishore Bhattacharya of the department of folklore in Gauhati University believes Mayong has no parallels in the country. “Mayong’s magic is used both for destructive and palliative purposes. Agrarian disputes force people to visit a bez who sometimes uses a spell to settle it amicably, and sometimes kills the other party. In Garo Hills, too, we have come across many claims of a man being transformed into a wild beast, or a man made to bleat like a goat. Science cannot explain everything. Not all of us have the capacity to assess the power of the unknown,” he says.

manimugdha.sharma@timesgroup.com