three therapies of south india 73
Rajan spends most of his days in and around the temple and the lodge, and
gets to know many of the affl icted devotees. He explained to us that possession
begins with a “shock:” “we see someone and suddenly get a fright, it [the spirit]
will come inside the body, just like that.” He later compared the onset of pos-
session to the experience of “when someone scares us from behind,” but “[t]
hen what ‘depression’ [the English term was used] we would feel. Th at is, that
‘depression’ is the fi rst thing we will feel.” Th e experience of possession then
brings a sense of weightlessness and tiredness after which “[i]t will shake the
whole body. Your head will completely thrash about.” He added that one loses
complete control over the body and consciousness, although one retains some
awareness—about ten percent, he specifi ed—of what is going on.
Although Rajan recalled a cathartic possession experience and Nabokov
observed “passionate enthusiasm and ecstatic self-absorption” in the Tamil
exorcism ritual, it was the female possessees who danced about the most
and were more active and demonstrative during possession ceremonies at
Chottanikkara. Th is reinforces studies in various cultural settings that reveal
that women more often become possessed or they act out and make their
possession more visible.^26 Th ere is no completely satisfying explanation as to
why this is so. It is possible that possession constitutes a space of protest or an
opportunity to complain about marital, family or social problems in a socially
sanctioned idiom. It is true that this is one public realm in Kerala society
where women are more active and men more passive, but there are a variety of
other ways in which women assert their positions and empower themselves,
ranging from the domestic setting to work relations to electoral politics. It may
also be that in the ceremony at the kizhakke kavu, women feel some affi nity
with Kali, the fi erce, protective, female deity who presides over the ritual and
responds to the needs of the affl icted.
In the kizhakke kavu ceremony, the participants appeal to a fi erce, aggres-
sive incarnation of the divine, known as Kali. Although she is powerful and
destructive, she uses her power to protect people from malign forces, and thus
the possessed invoke Kali to come down and (wo)manhandle their spirits, to
scare them and chase them from their bodies.
My assistant Biju asked Rajan, the lodge worker who was formerly possessed
at Chottanikkara, “How does it change [mārunnathu]?” (using a Malayalam
idiom mārunnathu/māruka, “change,” to describe a positive eff ect of therapy
that can imply an improvement or resolution) meaning something like “How
does it end?” or “How does the possession episode resolve?” Rajan responded:
It changes “automatically.” After a while, we will collapse, we will fall down. [.. .]
We will be really tired, really tired for ten minutes. Th en we will become “fresh.”