[caption id="attachment_130712" align="aligncenter" width="565"]
A woman shows the chopped braids of a family member in Faridabad on Thursday as such cases are being reported from the area. PTI Photo[/caption]
New Delhi, August 4 (PTI): Deserted roads, empty classrooms and shuttered doors behind which hide women and children too scared to step out. Kanganheri is a village spooked after three of its women reported that their braids had been chopped while they were sleeping.
The village on the edge of southwest Delhi - separated by not just a few kilometres but an entire world from the plush malls and much vaunted higher educational institutes of the national capital - is not alone in its panic.
It started off with isolated reports of women’s hair, particularly braids, being chopped while they were sleeping or unconscious. But the numbers are increasing each day with some 30 odd cases being reported, mostly from villages in Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi and western Uttar Pradesh.
Bogeyman, black magic or good ol’ thievery..the theories are many as the hysteria spreads, blurring the boundaries between superstition and crime in a largely rural belt.
In Kanganheri, like in other villages, the discourse centres around black magic and sorcery after three women became unconscious following a splitting headache and woke up with their braids on the floor.
Suspense and fear hang heavy in the air with most villagers not sending their kids to school and women confined to their homes.
Manoj, whose 55-year-old mother Sridevi, lost her hair, is convinced the police is simply trying to put the blame on a person while it is in fact “Bengali black magic” in play.
“Bhagat ji”, an astrologer, was the go-to man. He told Manoj that a tantric from Bengal had sent his followers to “bind the village inside a magical circle”.
“My mother, who is active usually, is feeling so weak now. The tantric has stolen her strength from her body through her braid,” Manoj, who runs an electrical repair shop in the village, told PTI.
Most villagers have covered the outside walls of their homes with henna handprints, along with the lime, chillies and neem leaves to ward off evil spirits.
Fantastical stories -- including one of a woman seeing a cat turning into a person before she lost consciousness and another seeing a man in red-yellow clothes carrying a trident - have been doing the rounds in the belt.
As the delirium spreads with the supernatural dominating the discussion, police and psychologists are weighing in with their theories.
The theft theory doesn’t seem to work because family members of the victims said nothing had been stolen from their houses - not even the hair - admitted a police official.
With more such incidents being reported every day, officials said they are still searching for clues and awaiting results from forensic experts.
A team from the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences (IHBAS) visited Kanganheri village on Wednesday.
According to IHBAS director Nimesh Desai, it is “too early to have an opinion, but one of the many possibilities could be factitious disorder”, a condition where a person fabricates or exaggerates physical or psychological symptoms.
“Diagnosis or impressions like factitious disorder should be made very carefully.
“But it becomes more complicated and delicate when my belief system or behaviour is rooted in something my community and/or my subculture believes,” Desai said, doubting the possibility of factitious disorder at a mass level.
It is possible theoretically that “an individual starts believing in a fictional scenario, but mass hysteria in factitious disorder is very uncommon if not rare”.
