74 chapter
Th e body will not be weak. Th e body will get something. Th en we will become
“fresh.” It’s diffi cult to withstand [referring to the experience of possession, the
experience of suff ering affl iction], but after that, we will not know what hap-
pened in our body. We will be very “fresh.” (Translated from Malayalam, but
words in quotes were said in English.)Rajan’s explanation depicts a very sensory, visceral transition from the
suff ering of possession illness to a freshness in the body that comes with the
resolution of the possession experience. But then Rajan explains the import-
ance of the role of the spiritual and religious force (chaitanya, the power and
benevolence of the deity that supplicants often refer to might be the best term
for this), activated by all the pujas and ceremonies at the main temple and the
kizhakke kavu, to transform the affl iction:
Th at itself [doing the pujas at the temple and chanting the names of the gods]
will make us “pure automatically.” Th en when the body gets “purifi ed,” the “spirit”
inside the body will “spread” and come outside “automatically.” Th en they cannot
survive outside. When we pray like this, they cannot withstand it. Th en, what
happens is, one way or another, they will have to leave.Th is is what happens if all goes well following the regular routine of devo-
tion and healing. In some cases where spirits are more intractable, a spirit will
demand that a nail be pounded into the tree at the kizhakke kavu before they
will leave. Th e spirit will speak through the person it is possessing and specify
the length of the nail that should be used. Th e affl icted person is then taken to
the tree and a nail of the specifi ed length is positioned with the patient hold-
ing the fl at end of the nail to his or her forehead. Th us, symbolically, the nail is
pounded into the tree with the forehead, although in practice, the nail is placed
with the forehead and then pounded in with a coconut.
Some people I spoke to in Kerala, including some allopathic doctors, reported
that they heard of an “inhumane,” “barbaric” practice at Chottanikkara where
people who are ill are supposedly forced to pound nails into a tree until their
foreheads bleed. Similarly, some allopathic and ayurvedic doctors claimed that
at Beemapalli mosque the possessed are whipped and fl ogged to get the spirits
to leave their bodies. Some of these things may have occurred, or these may be
apocryphal stories used to discredit these places as healing centers. No one who
reported these practices had actually visited Chottanikkara or Beemapalli, and
I neither saw nor heard any evidence of such beatings or abuses in my obser-
vations of practices and interviews with ill people at these sites. Ironically, the
only complaints I did hear regarding what one might consider “violent” thera-
peutic practices related to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which is used at