156 chapter
current literacy rate can certainly be attributed to grassroots and government
literacy programs that have been implemented in the last few decades, literacy
has historically been a distinguishing feature of Kerala/Malayali society. Gough
(1968) cites examples of the local consumption of elite Sanskritic sources and
literacy in Malayalam from the ninth, sixteenth and other centuries. What we
may be seeing in Kerala is the popular consumption of what, in other parts of
India, would be elite phenomenological discourses. Th e philosophical views I
have presented represent high, literate culture in various parts of India, but
in Kerala they are also popularly engaged to a signifi cant degree. Today in
Kerala, literacy enables the consumption of biomedical psychiatric and med-
ical discourse through popular media, such as psychological advice columns in
magazines such as Mangalam and Manorama and television shows that feature
biomedical experts. Again the picture is complex: while biomedical views receive
more coverage, ayurvedic doctors and other healers also appear in the popular
media and have a role in shaping popular illness discourses. Popular magazines
also occasionally feature columnists and essayists who present concepts that
stem from Indian philosophy in writing about the self and “psychological” top-
ics (topics related to understanding the self and the emotions, although not
necessarily engaging Western psychological discourse).
Mind-body dualism has added another set of idioms for articulating distress
that many in Kerala have mixed in to their local phenomenological orientation.
It is ironic that, vis-a-vis contemporary academic studies of the body, mind-body
dualism has provided a more embodied phenomenological language to describe
and perhaps experience states of distress. I suggest that English metaphors of
“psychological” distress that have been adopted in Kerala belie a greater attention
to embodied experience than metaphors of distress that are used in Malayalam.
Malayalam idioms (usually Sanskritic words borrowed into Malayalam)
indicating various non-bodily states exist in Kerala discourse alongside a
variety of English language terms for distress. For example, in Chapter 3 we
saw both Mary and Hanifa describe their problems using the word “tension.”
Meanwhile, Rajan, who had sought treatment at Chottanikkara temple, spoke
of “depression” in describing the experience of possession:
Biju: Can you talk about how it “feels” when we get “possessed?”Rajan: I will tell you. We know suddenly when someone scares us from behind
we get frightened, right? Th en what “depression” we would feel. Th at is, that
“depression” is the “fi rst” thing we will feel.Th e English idioms of distress “tension,” “depression” and “stress” are meta-
phors that are kinetic or convey a sense of physical torsion—they suggest a