Abstract
This paper explores women’s experiences of marriage, stress, and spirit possession in the context of healing shrines. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork in three Mahanubhav temples in Maharashtra (western India). Women’s narratives emphasized the tensions and conflicts they experience in relation to marriage. These accounts about family stress were not just empirical accounts of stress but narrative devices that legitimize women’s stay in the temple. Thus, in referring to the temple as the “natal home”, women seek to access their privilege to periodically visit the temple “just as” they would visit the natal home. By making available to women alternative spaces and subject positions, these narratives of spirit possession and marriage emerge as powerful expressions of women’s agency.
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Notes
This ubiquity of possession is also related to cultural beliefs about the permeability of the body to invasion by ghost entities widespread in many cultures. As Geertz has famously pointed out, the Western construction of the person and self as “[a] bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe” (Geertz 1984: 126) is far from universal. In many non-Western cultures, bodies are seen as fluid and physically permeable to spirits.
Some researchers have pointed out that men are also vulnerable to possession under stress (e.g., Lewis 1989 [1971]; Ram 2001; Freed and Freed 1964). Possession has also been related to the stresses of modern urban living, such as migration (e.g. Sharp 1995).
In fact, Sax (1991) has pointed out that the notion that women’s relations with the natal home are severed after their marriage is a male perspective. His study of the cult of Nandadevi in the Central Himalayas found that married women often spoke of their lasting ties with the natal family, even while the men in his study attempted to portray women as having no such links with the natal family after marriage.
The Mahanubhav sect lays considerable emphasis on ahimsa (non-violence) and vegetarianism, to the point of exhorting disciples to strain their drinking water with cloth so as to not kill microbes in the water (Feldhaus 1988; Raeside 1976). Many followers of the Mahanubhav sect take up vegetarianism. This practice of vegetarianism along with spirit possession is interesting for a heterodox sect that opposed ritualistic Brahmanism. For more on “subaltern vegetarianism” see Desai (2008).
Sharada is here referring to Mahanubhav temples located in the villages of Gangapur and Aadgaon in Nashik district, Maharashtra (western India).
In a different context, Addlakha’s (2008) study of women in-patients in a psychiatric ward of a government hospital in New Delhi found that the stay in the psychiatric ward could either serve as a refuge from the domestic sphere, or as a period of painful confinement, depending on women’s position in the family. While some women looked at the ward as a restrictive place, others regarded the ward stay as a ‘holiday’. Some women referred to the ward as their natal home.
No doubt, local cultural notions about women’s inherent vulnerability to spirit attacks are also related to the preponderance of women in cases of possession.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation done under the supervision of Dr. D. Parthasarathy and Dr. Meenakshi Gupta at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. I would like to thank all the participants in the Mahanubhav temples for their gracious involvement in the study. I am also indebted to Dr. Parthasarathy, Dr. Meenakshi Gupta, and Dr. Ramesh Bairy for their insightful comments and suggestions. Finally, the comments of the anonymous reviewers have added substantially to the paper.
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Ranganathan, S. “This Temple is Our Natal Home!”: Women’s Experiences of Marriage and Possession in Maharashtra. Psychol Stud 58, 437–445 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-013-0231-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-013-0231-9