Waltzing with the wicked witch

Posted: Sunday, Apr 01, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST
Updated: Sunday, Apr 01, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST

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: A waltz with me? I’m sure men would kill for that. But why the stampede? Would it be because I’m gorgeous and witty or could it be because I’m a life-line to personal power and magic? Difficult question. But nothing’s too difficult for India’s beloved witch. How do most people react to me — I mean apart from overawed men? They’re amazed at my guts, curious about my amazing youthfulness, (you know that line, about ‘her loveliness goes on and on’), and yes, I’ll be frank, most wives are a tad envious. In fact, sometimes terribly resentful. Specially since my autobiography Beloved Witch zoomed in and up and refused to come down from the top.

But fascinating though the subject is, let’s stop talking about me for a while. What is ‘Wicca’? It comes from the old English ‘Wicce’ meaning the craft of the wise. An ancient branch of wisdom, going back, some historians believe, nearly 25,000 years.

The first ‘witch’ was the Mother Goddess. Wicca came from a time when man first personalised and deified the forces of nature. It is a superior knowledge from which arose the concept of the Sacred Feminine, the Wiccan, the Witch. But perhaps because of that very reason — the emphasis on Feminine Power — it has faced inconceivable persecution and distortion down the centuries. In India, the persecution continues, and strangely enough is often fanned by distortions in the media. And we, being a very imaginative and credulous nation, swallow the stuff (of course, most of us are so hungry for a bit of sensation, we’ll swallow anything to break the boredom). For instance, remember Vishal Bharadwaj’s film Makdee where Shabana Azmi played a witch? From news reports, it seems they spent hours experimenting with that weird make-up they put on her. Blue-grey skin, horrendous hair, talons and a different coloured lens for each eye! And to top it all, at the end it turned out that the witch didn’t really believe in magic but was actually a ‘baddie’ with very worldly, commercial motives. Tell me, how low can you go? What I can’t understand is why women’s activist Shabana Azmi agreed to do this role at all. I believe (from these same reports) that at one point, while this bizarre make-up was being plastered on her, her husband Javed Akhtar commented in jest (one hopes), that the kind of make-up was...

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