Bodies on Trial: Ordeal by Fire and the Political Economy of Justice

 

Hello, everyone! Imagine for a moment that we are standing in a parched village in the Punjab during the scorching summer of 1883. The monsoon has failed. The earth is cracked, the grain bins are empty, and the cattle are dying. In this atmosphere of suffocating anxiety, a theft is reported. A young man from a lower caste is accused. There are no witnesses, no fingerprints, no CCTV footage. Instead, there is a ditch filled with burning embers.

The village council, the panchayat, gathers. The accused is asked to walk on fire. He is told that if he is innocent, the fire will not harm him; if he is guilty, his flesh will betray his sin.

Now, I must ask you: In that moment, are we witnessing a primitive religious ritual? Is this simply "oriental barbarism," or is there a deeper, more calculated machinery of power at work?

Today, we are going to dismantle the traditional narrative that views the ordeal by fire—the agnipariksha—merely as a relic of "superstitious" religious texts. Drawing on the sources, I want to argue that the ordeal was, in fact, a sophisticated technology of power. It was an instrument forged not just in the fires of theology, but in the material conditions of the environment, the brutal realities of the agricultural economy, and the intricate hierarchies of caste and gender.

 

The Soil and the Scarcity: Environmental Foundations

We often treat legal history as a series of texts, but legal practice often begins in the soil. The territories of modern Pakistan—the Indus River system and its tributaries—have always been at the mercy of the monsoon. When the rain fails, social tensions do not just rise; they explode.

Historical data suggests that during periods of environmental stress, such as the medieval drought cycles, accusations of witchcraft and demands for ordeals skyrocketed. Why? Because when a crop fails or an epidemic hits, a community seeks a human agent to blame. It is far easier to accuse a marginal widow of "evil eye" than it is to accept the indifferent cruelty of a drought. A study of Bengal famine patterns and witchcraft accusations found strong correlations between subsistence crises and accusations against marginal women, particularly widows who consumed resources without contributing agricultural labour. In Punjab and Sindh, where irrigation required collective labour, disputes over water rights created the very conflicts that the ordeal was designed to "resolve."

Ordeal types themselves were environmentally determined. You found water ordeals in the riverine regions and fire ordeals where fuel was abundant, and communities were sedentary enough to maintain ritual specialists. It wasn't just "culture"—it was ecological pragmatism.

 

The Machinery of the Panchayat: Who Really Holds the Iron?

We often hear romanticized tales of "village republics" and the panchayat as a bastion of indigenous justice. But let’s look at the "materialist" reality. Who sat on these councils? It was the chaudhris, Khans, Sardars, Maliks, etc.

Consider this: Can justice ever be neutral when the judge, the accuser, and the landlord are the same person?

The sources tell us that the ordeal was rarely a quest for abstract truth; it was an exercise of dominant group authority over subordinate populations. If a creditor accused a bonded labourer of theft, the ordeal provided a ritualized way to seize the labourer’s remaining assets or justify further bondage. The "religious" framework of the ordeal often served as a convenient mask for a very material calculation of debt and property.

 

The Caste Differential: Ordeals as Embodied Hierarchy

This brings us to one of the most jarring aspects of South Asian legal history: the Brahmin-Shudra differential. The Manusmriti and other Dharmashastras were quite explicit—Brahmins were often weighed on a balance (a relatively harmless test), while lower castes faced fire, hot water, or poison.

How do we explain this? Theologically, the texts claimed that the Brahmin’s body was "pure" and did not need the "purifying" test of fire. But as social scientists, we see the structural shield. This exemption protected the very ritual specialists who supervised the ordeals.

But here is the gripping question: Why did the lower castes participate in a system so clearly rigged against them?

James Scott’s concept of "public" versus "hidden" transcripts offers an answer. In a world where upper castes controlled the land, the water, and the physical violence, "acceptance" of the ordeal was often a strategic choice between two evils. If the alternative was summary execution by a landlord's goons, the ordeal—with its ritual requirements and public witnesses—offered at least a slim, procedural chance of survival.

There is a fascinating case from 1858 in Multan where a man from the Chuhra (scavenger) caste demanded a fire ordeal. Colonial officials called it "superstition," but perhaps he was making a brilliant, desperate calculation that a public ritual offered him better odds than the private judgment of his social superiors.

 

The Islamic Layer: Persistence and Transformation

When Islam arrived in South Asia, it brought a sophisticated, rationalist jurisprudence—the Shari'a—which fundamentally rejected supernatural truth-testing. The Hanafi school, dominant in the region, emphasized witness testimony and judicial reasoning.

So, why did the ordeal persist among Muslim populations for centuries?

Some scholars believe the answer lies in class and conversion. Mass conversions to Islam in Punjab and Sindh often occurred among lower-caste groups seeking an escape from caste oppression. These communities brought their customary practices with them. While the urban elites in Lahore or Multan might have followed the qazi’s court, rural converts often looked to such ordeals. Consider this case from 1619, recorded in the memoirs of Emperor Jahangir. A village in Punjab saw a man demand a fire ordeal to settle a theft charge. The local magistrate allowed it. The man was burned and then executed. When Jahangir heard of this, he was furious. He reprimanded the official, stating: "Such practices belong to the age of ignorance."

Note Jahangir's framing. He didn't just attack it on religious grounds; he attacked it on rationalist grounds, arguing that justice requires investigation, not "cruel tests." Despite this imperial disapproval, we know from European travelers like Peter Mundy that village councils, or panchayats, continued to oversee these ordeals far from the reach of the Mughal court.

One particularly striking account from Niccolao Manucci describes a Muslim community in Sindh where an accused man might carry hot coals from the mosque to his house. If he was unhurt, it was seen as proof that Allah protected him. Here, we see the fire ordeal being reframed within an Islamic idiom—it was no longer a mechanical test but a test of faith.

Even with legal prohibitions, the ordeal didn't disappear; it transformed. The fire of the temple was replaced by the oath at the shrine. Oath-taking at a dargah (shrine), with the belief that a false swearer would be struck down by divine wrath, functioned exactly like the ordeal—it was still supernatural truth-testing, just dressed in Islamic terminology. Even the Emperor Jahangir noted with a hint of elite disdain that villagers were settling property disputes by swearing oaths at tombs rather than using "proper measurement and witness testimony."

 

The Colonial Mirror: Constructing "Tradition"

In the 19th century, the British entered the scene with a dual mission: to civilize and to codify. They prohibited the ordeal in the 1820s, using it as proof of their own "civilizational superiority."

However, did the British actually record "tradition," or did they invent it?

As Bernard Cohn famously argued, colonial documentation—the census, the survey, the legal manual—actively constituted the categories it claimed to find. When British officials like H.H. Risley recorded "customary law," they often consulted only the village headmen. The result was a version of "tradition" that looked suspiciously like the interests of the landed elite.

Furthermore, prohibition didn't end the practice; it merely drove it underground. Village chaudhris, who served as colonial informants by day and traditional authorities by night, often concealed these trials from their British superiors. The colonial archive is thus a "distorting mirror"—it shows us the decline of the ordeal in official reports while the practice continued to thrive in the "hidden transcripts" of the village.

 

The Political Economy of the "Witch" and the "Adulteress"

We cannot speak of the ordeal without speaking of gender. Women were disproportionately the targets of these accusations, particularly regarding witchcraft and adultery.

Why was the "witch" almost always a widow?

In the agrarian patriarchal systems of Punjab and Sindh, land typically passed through male lineages. A widow, however, often held "usufruct" rights—meaning she could live off the land until she died. To her brothers-in-law, she was a "resource consumer" who occupied valuable acreage.

Look at the 1867 case from Gujranwala. A widow named Pyari Devi inherited seven acres. Her brother-in-law, Ranjit Singh, accused her of killing his son through witchcraft. The panchayat ordered a fire ordeal, her hands were burned, she was expelled, and Ranjit Singh "appropriated" the land. The "supernatural" was merely a convenient tool for a land grab.

Similarly, adultery accusations against wives often had an economic motive. In a dowry-based system, an accusation of adultery could allow a husband to divorce without returning the bride-price or dowry, clearing the path for a new marriage and a new dowry.

But women were not merely victims.

In 1859, a woman named Jamuna Bai was accused of adultery in Sialkot. Instead of fleeing, she demanded the fire ordeal. She survived with minimal burns, was declared innocent, and immediately used her "divine vindication" to counter-accuse her mother-in-law of a false report motivated by jewelry theft. The panchayat was forced to restore her position. This is a strategic agency in its most raw, dangerous form.

 

A Global Tapestry: Ordeals Beyond the Indus

To my fellow social scientists, I must emphasize that this was not a "South Asian pathology". The ordeal is a global phenomenon.

• Medieval Europe: Before the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, European priests were blessing the very same red-hot irons used in the Carolingian Empire. The practice only declined when the Church withdrew its "clerical performance".
• Africa: Poison ordeals among groups like the Azande served the same function—identifying "witches" during times of economic transformation or environmental stress.
• Southeast Asia: In Java and Sumatra, fire and water ordeals derived from Indian models survived long after Islamization by transforming into oath-taking rituals at holy sites.

What connects these disparate regions? Weak state capacity and the absence of accessible, "rational" legal systems. When the state cannot provide justice, the community turns to the divine.

 

The Theoretical Integration: Base, Superstructure, and Intersectionality

How do we synthesize all of this? We must move beyond "vulgar materialism." The ordeal wasn't just about money, but it wasn't just about religion either.

It was a hegemonic system in the Gramscian sense. The Brahminical or patriarchal ideology made these hierarchies feel "natural" and "cosmically ordained" through the performance of the ritual.

But we also need intersectionality. A Dalit woman facing a fire ordeal in 19th-century Sindh was not just facing "casteism" or "sexism." She was caught in a specific, interlocking trap where her labour was exploited, her body was policed, and her lack of a "male protector" made her the perfect scapegoat for a community's misfortune.

 

The Living Legacy: Ordeals in the 21st Century

So, we must ask: Is the ordeal truly dead?

Literal fire ordeals have largely vanished, but the epistemology—the way of thinking—remains. We see it in the persistence of the jirga system in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, where collective oaths and patriarchal customary norms still override statutory law.

We see it in the horrifying 2014 Kot Radha Kishan case, where a Christian couple was burned alive by a mob following a blasphemy accusation. There was no trial, no evidence—just the accusation, the community’s "divine" judgment, and the "purifying" fire. This is ordeal logic resurfacing in its most violent, vigilante form.

What is the lesson for us today?

1. Justice is Material: Legal reform is useless if we don't address the economic dependence of women and the landlessness of lower castes or marginalized groups
2. Beware the "Rational" Binary: We must not smugly assume our modern courts are perfectly "rational". Our systems also exclude the illiterate, privilege the wealthy, and rest on their own "non-rational" secular or theological assumptions.
3. Center Subaltern Voices: We must stop letting the "elite male archive" tell the whole story. We must look for the "hidden transcripts" in vernacular poetry and oral traditions to find the voices of those who actually held the red-hot iron.

To understand the ordeal is to understand the very scaffolding of power itself.

Let us remember that truth, justice, and evidence are not universal constants. They are fought for, constructed, and often inscribed on the bodies of the most vulnerable. Our task as social scientists is to keep questioning who holds the iron, and who is being told to walk through the fire.