Salt, Dried Chilis, and Camphor

Title: Salt, Dried Chilis, Camphor

General Information about Item:

Informant Data:

Vandana V. is a female student in her senior year of high school at John Cooper. She was born in Temple, Texas in 2001, but has lived in Houston for much of her life. In her free time, she enjoys playing the flute in the Wind Ensemble and competing with her Varsity Tennis team. She plans to attend Dartmouth College in the fall, where she will study pre-med and economics.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: A central aspect of Indian culture is based upon the idea of the evil eye – a look/glance rooted in jealousy that is associated with malevolent spirits and believed to bring about bad luck. Numerous superstitions, as such, act to inhibit, or prevent the effects of the evil eye.

Social Context: Despite being brought up in American society, the informant’s cultural origins are primarily Hindu. Her grandparents and extended family all lived in India, and as such, she visits every summer. There, she has learned of the various Hindu superstitions, rituals, beliefs, etc. The informant in fact first saw this superstition in practice at a young age, during a summer visit to India. She had fallen sick following the wedding ceremony of her aunt. So, her grandmother circled the plate of camphor, salt, and chilis around her head three times. Within a few days, she had begun to feel better.

Item:

This particular superstition attempts to cure someone infected by the evil eye. Here, an elder takes a plate of salt, dried red chilis, and camphor in their right palm and circles it around the infected individual’s head 3, 5, or 7 times depending on the severity of the misfortune. Such an action is believed to remove the drishti.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript:

“If you go to a special function and you come back with vomiting or a headache, then it’s said that you have the evil eye. So an elder must take salt, chilis, and camphor in their right palm and circle it around your head and then throw it out.”

Informant’s Comments:

According to the informant, this superstition has been strongly conserved/practiced in her family, and passed down from generation to generation.

Collector’s Comments:

This is a concrete example of a Magic Superstition, as it follows the form of “If you do A, Then B”. After all, if a plate of salt, chilis, and camphor is circled around one’s head by an elder, then the sickness brought upon by the evil eye will be cured.
Further, this superstition seems to have originated to make sense of the world – to explain and cure sickness

Collector’s Name: Sanjena Venkatesh

Tags/Keywords:

Dartmouth Folklore Archive