THE LEGEND OF ODIYAN
India is a beautiful country that is full of cultures and traditions that even people from one part of the country won't understand the culture of another. The Indian muggle society are full of tales that describes people doing all kinds of strange magic ranging from sultans and Rajas having a magician as a member of court to people killing their enemies using black magic. The wizards and witches of India were one of the least secretive of all. The muggle landlords used the help of them whenever they needed.
One such legend was that of the Odiyan. In the remote villages of Palakkad District of Kerala state, there was a belief that an Odiyan is a person that can transform into any desired animal of the person's need and attack people in the middle of night. They were believed to be employed by the high caste families who wanted to kill their rivals for acquiring land, settle a dispute or to get revenge. The people believed that, the Odiyan got his powers using black magic and rituals. One of the stages of the ritual being kidnapping a pregnant woman and taking out the unborn child and killing it. Then take a piece of meat of the child and place it in the ear.
The truth about this whole myth was that, there was a clan of dark wizards in the area who enjoyed doing these rituals and started to make money out of it. They took a darker path in the animagus ritual which would grand them the power to turn into an animal they wish to. They had the power to turn into any number of animals, but most of the wizards chose to turn into animals such as Bull, dog, snake, goat etc.
It was said that, the dark ritual that was performed had a small limitation. When the transformation is over, the resulting animal will have one its body parts missing like its ear, tail or even its horn if it was a bull or a goat. An experienced elder of a family could distinguish a real and a fake animal and warn others of the dark wizard's presence. There was no proper ministry of magic in India till 1950. There was only a group of clans who were scattered in nearly every part of the country operating without any law or authority controlling them. Wizards of a particular village came together and made laws that were applicable to them and the laws were different from village to village.
The statue of secrecy were not taken seriously by many of those village clans, and none of the other wizarding countries knew what was happening in India. Even the British ministry of magic had no interest in making India as their colony and decided to leave them alone. In the village of Thenkurissi in Palakkad an Odiyan named Manikyan was assigned to kill a British official that was stationed there and killed him by turning himself into a snake and biting him. The death of the official attracted the attention of the district collector and when an enquiry was made, the officials learned about the legend of Odiyan. The word somehow reached the ears of the British ministry of magic and they sent a spy to see what was happening. This was in the year 1942.
When the British ministry of magic discovered the lawlessness in India and found that wizards were exposing their world, they tried to make a unified government in India by inviting all the powerful wizards of each region. Leonard Spencer Moon the minister of magic himself had come to India to supervise the meeting. The wizards kept an muggleborn as their interpretor and after a lot of debate and discussion agreed to come together and make a country with the borders of British India. This was considered as an Independent country and not a colony. They started making laws that prohibited any kind of magical interaction between muggles and wizards and killing of muggles.
The Indian ministry of magic then sent officials to each and every part of the country so that they could enforce the law and educate the common wizards and witches about it. They also established magical public schools in every region of the country. The magical education was done by village elders prior to this arrangement, and they also identified the muggleborns that were born. All these functions were now transferred to the authorities and the village elders were given pensions as their work was gone now.
As the wizards were not allowed to use any kind of magic in front of muggles, the Odiyan clan began to decline. Authorities arrested anyone who was suspected as being an Odiyan. Many of them worked illegally and worked anonymously for 2 more decades. The last Odiyan was caught in 1974 by the authorities in the village of Pathamkulam in Palakkad district near a local temple trying to scare a muggle. From then on no wizard or witch took the job of Odiyan and Odiyan became something obscure in the muggle folklore of the region. Some muggles assume that, Odiyans are nothing but ordinary people who disguised themselves as animals using masks and props, but the muggle elders still speak of the days where there was no electricity and they were afraid to go out on a new moon night