196 chapter
but in Hanifa and his wife’s narratives, “tension” is the key term around which
discussions of his problems revolve. In one of his fi rst attempts to articulate his
distress, Hanifa declared that “Something like a ‘tension’ has come.” His wife
added, “Th is ‘tension’ began when he was working in the Gulf. So he resigned
from the job and came back.” She also recalled that allopathic medicine caused
him “memory problems and a lot of ‘tension.’” Mary, the woman who wanted
to become a nun and was being treated at the Government Ayurveda Mental
Hospital after attempting suicide, also characterized her distress as involving
“tension.” In her fi rst attempt to articulate her problems, Mary recalled “I got
some mental ‘tension’” (“Enikku manassinu tension vannu”).
Rajan, the Chottanikkara guest lodge employee who was formerly possessed
at the temple, used an English-language idiom to describe the experience of
possession. When a spirit enters the body or becomes active, one experiences
fear, and “[t]hen what ‘depression’ we feel,” he recalled. When asked how to tell
when a possessing spirit has left, Rajan explained, “Problems like ‘depression,’
we are no longer getting anything like that.”
Th e English term “stress” also arises in everyday conversation in Malayalam
in Kerala, and handling “stress” has been the topic of psychological and psy-
chiatric columns in popular magazines. Numerous conferences and workshops
on stress management have been held in the state, including one organized
by the University of Kerala Psychology Department in which I was asked to
present a cultural anthropological account of stress. I chose to depict stress as
an idiom that emerged in reaction to increased time pressure and accelerated
time demands (Halliburton 1997).
Th e terms “tension,” “depression” and “stress” evoke tactile, visceral images
of physical pressure or torsion. “Stress” and “tension” also denote a sense of
time pressure, a feature of contemporary life in Kerala that appears to relate to
the popularity of allopathic therapy. Implicit in the concern for a pleasant pro-
cess of therapy is an awareness of the unfolding, or the moment of passing (the
“middest,” in Kermode’s terms [1967]), of time while the therapy is moving
toward a goal of relief or transformation. But this way of viewing time erodes
as people feel that they are constantly short of time. Sensing that life has sped
up, they often turn to allopathic therapy when they are ill because, even if they
do not like the process, the treatment does not require as great an investment
of time as other options.
Reports of “stress” and time pressure are multiple and diff use. Healers and
friends in Kerala told me they lack suffi cient time as they try to juggle the
demands of work, school, family and social life. Keralites spend a signifi cant
portion of their early lives in school. Many pursue advanced degrees or special
certifi cate programs and scramble for a better job. With the highest average