experiencing the world from body to ĀTMAN 145
my informants’ propensity to talk about their problems in mentalistic and
non-tangible terms. Although I modifi ed my questions and advised my
research assistants, who had some training in psychology, to veer away from
questions that I thought might contain assumptions of mind-body dualism, I
could not get informants to stop talking about their manas (mind) and their
bōdham (consciousness). Finally, I conceded that something must be wrong
with my theoretical orientations and the academic assumptions about the
embodied Other on which they were based. Certainly some patients used
embodied idioms or expressed their distress somatically, and it was sometimes
apparent that informants’ ways of speaking about their experience were condi-
tioned by their embodied state. However, not one of the 38 patients for whom
I have verbatim transcripts of interviews described their problems predom-
inantly in somatic idioms or without referring to concerns about “conscious-
ness,” ātman, the mind or other non-tangible modes of experience. In fact, the
elaborate nature of the mental and “consciousness”-oriented, perhaps meta-
mental, terms patients used to describe their experience was striking to one
accustomed to the vocabulary of Western mind-body dualism.
Treating Problems of the Mind
Several patients we interviewed described the explicitly mental nature of their
suff ering and how this related to the treatment they pursued. Two people we
spoke with who were being treated at allopathic psychiatric hospitals explained
that they sought help from a psychiatric hospital rather than from magic or
sorcery because their particular problem came from “thinking.” A 30-year-old
male Muslim inpatient I call Hamid met with my assistant Kavitha and me
at a private psychiatric hospital in Trivandrum. Hamid had been working, like
many Malayalis, as a laborer in the United Arab Emirates before he returned
home to seek relief for his problems, which included outbursts of anger, hal-
lucinations and paranoia about his food being poisoned. His brother, who was
present at our interview, explained that they fi rst tried consulting ritual spe-
cialists, but then sought treatment at an allopathic psychiatric facility because
of the mental nature of the problem:
Brother of Hamid: After we came here [after his brother returned to Kerala], we
took him to two or three places for māntrika chikitsa [black magic treatment].Kavitha: Where? In Beemapalli?Brother: No, near Beemapalli there is a place where we did māntrika chikitsa.