The Self Possessed

Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization

Frederick M. Smith

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780231510653
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

The Self Possessed is a multifaceted, diachronic study reconsidering the very nature of religion in South Asia, the culmination of years of intensive research. Frederick M. Smith proposes that positive oracular or ecstatic possession is the most common form of spiritual expression in India, and that it has been linguistically distinguished from negative, disease-producing possession for thousands of years.

In South Asia possession has always been broader and more diverse than in the West, where it has been almost entirely characterized as "demonic." At best, spirit possession has been regarded as a medically treatable psychological ailment and at worst, as a condition that requires exorcism or punishment. In South (and East) Asia, ecstatic or oracular possession has been widely practiced throughout history, occupying a position of respect in early and recent Hinduism and in certain forms of Buddhism.

Smith analyzes Indic literature from all ages-the earliest Vedic texts; the Mahabharata; Buddhist, Jain, Yogic, Ayurvedic, and Tantric texts; Hindu devotional literature; Sanskrit drama and narrative literature; and more than a hundred ethnographies. He identifies several forms of possession, including festival, initiatory, oracular, and devotional, and demonstrates their multivocality within a wide range of sects and religious identities.

Possession is common among both men and women and is practiced by members of all social and caste strata. Smith theorizes on notions of embodiment, disembodiment, selfhood, personal identity, and other key issues through the prism of possession, redefining the relationship between Sanskritic and vernacular culture and between elite and popular religion. Smith's study is also comparative, introducing considerable material from Tibet, classical China, modern America, and elsewhere.

Brilliant and persuasive, The Self Possessed provides careful new translations of rare material and is the most comprehensive study in any language on this subject.

I

Orthodoxies, Madness, and Method

CHAPTER 1

Academic and Brahmanical Orthodoxies

I am large, I contain multitudes.
—WALT WHITMAN, Song of Myself, v. 51

Sanskritic Culture and the Culture of Possession

Ethnographic work at the beginning of the twentieth century, which has been supplemented and revitalized during the past forty years, shows that spirit or deity possession is a widespread epstēmē—a historically situated discourse, phenomenon, and practice—in Indian thought, culture, religion, and medicine.¹ However, if our knowledge of the subject were limited to the accounts of classical Indologists and others who have privileged the “high” intellectual and religious traditions while eschewing the history of actual religious practice, we would scarcely know of the existence of this phenomenon, much less its pervasiveness. One might say that it is the “ism” of Hinduism, the Hinduism essentialized by its most literate propagators and translators that has nullified and delegitimized its breathtakingly broad spectrum of popular practice, including possession.² More specifically, non- or scant recognition of possession in premodern India has been due to a longstanding aversion among educated Judeo-Christians as well as educated Hindus, for whom possession has fallen outside the realm of both reason and social accountability.³ Perhaps the most common perception—and consequent stigmatization—of possession among both academic and indigenous orthodoxies is that it is a nettlesome aberration, a blemish on the face of epistemological order, a phenomenon subject to benign neglect, or, at most, sanitized into nonrecognition. To whatever degree this perception is borne out by taxonomies in both Sanskrit and regional languages that distinguish various loci and states of possession (a topic dealt with extensively below), the more important point is that possession and, indeed, emotion itself, the kinder, gentler ancestor of possession, have been considered to bear the stigma of primitivism:⁴ they are associated with people of lower social rank, including low castes, tribals, and women,⁵ or more generally with those lacking literacy, the great (and, before modern times, extremely rare) tool generally believed capable of bestowing introspection, self-knowledge, and control.⁶ Therefore, discussion of it has been avoided or denounced by the self-conceived (and, by no accident, highly literate) orthodox among both scholars and indigenous practitioners. And among scholars, even when this stigma has not been inflicted, possession as the exclusive property of lower-ranking individuals has been assumed so casually as to preclude a search for it among other groups and individuals. Even the eminent sociologist Louis Dumont declares possession a “mystic ecstasy … which so far we have not encountered at a learned level.”⁷ The present study aims to rectify these shortcomings.

In this study, I press two overriding contentions, both of which not only are paramount for the present study but have implications for the methodology of future scholarship. The first is that the force of the ethnographic accounts should elicit a re-examination of classical texts for evidence of possession. The second is that possession as described by anthropologists and other ethnographers, and as understood by native and scholastic orthodoxies, does not represent the full spectrum of possession as revealed in Sanskrit texts. No doubt, such possession is described in or assumed by certain Sanskrit texts, and the bulk of the present project is dedicated to the exploration of Sanskritic possession. However, as shown below, the category of possession as understood in Sanskrit literature must be expanded beyond the parameters assigned to it by previous scholarship, which is largely drawn from prevailing Western notions. As an indigenous category in ancient and classical India, possession is not a single, simple, reducible category that describes a single, simple, reducible experience or practice, but is distinguished by extreme multivocality, involving fundamental issues of emotion, aesthetics, language, and personal identity.

Both of these contentions contribute to my principal project here, which is to retrieve, as far as possible from texts, an understudied aspect of ancient and classical Indian cultural practice, religious experience,⁸ and disease production. I become suspicious of the apparent nonexistence of possession in antiquity when we read present accounts, such as that of David Knipe, who states, based on fieldwork in East Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh, “it appears that the number of householders subject to possession states is astonishingly high, and the phenomenon occurs within families of all communities as a central component of religious life.”⁹ This suspicion is verified, at least for non-Sanskritic classical culture, when we read David Shulman’s reports on “Tamil Hinduism.” Beginning in the Pallava-Pāṇṭiya period in the sixth century C.E., writes Shulman, “The focus is entirely on the interaction between the devotee and the god who has entered him, mastered or ‘possessed’ him without destroying his empirical, sensually motivated, autarchic being.”¹⁰

Despite vivid descriptions of possession in Tamil texts of the first millennium C.E., which on the whole bear out the contemporary ethnographies, as lucidly discussed by Glenn Yocum,¹¹ most Sanskrit texts, conspicuously “canonical” religious texts, entirely neglect—or, perhaps, avoid—discussing what people actually do or experience. The reason for this is well known: The major commentaries on the philosophical darśanas and primary texts of aesthetic theory set the epistemological agendas for the remainder of religious discourse in Sanskrit. The principal epistemological feature of these primary texts and commentaries is a quest for programmatic perfection, with unwritten rules that discourage discussion of personal experience except as a mythical, fictional, or paradigmatic figure might have a paradigmatic experience. These texts clearly are mindful of the requirements of canon, which, as mentioned, privilege theory over experience.¹² Thus Sanskrit texts are almost always oriented uncompromisingly toward concepts, prescriptions, and mythology—what their authors understood to be “true”—but rarely toward “human” concern (except insofar as theorizing is a human concern)—what we (and probably they) deemed to be “real.”¹³ However, with persistent searching—a task doomed to incompleteness—perhaps we can begin to retrieve descriptions of this “deemed reality” from texts that both approximate those found in ethnographic literature and shed light on the parallel issues of emotional construction and personal identity in India.

The problem of retrieval, however, is not just one of oppositional texts; equally problematic is scholarly re-engineering of possession states, a problem that continues to the present day, albeit rather reduced from that of previous decades or centuries. It is well known by now that the academic agendas of respectable Indological scholarship were set in the middle of the nineteenth century by Europeans who cast a long shadow of doubt on the “authenticity,” hence validity, of a number of subjects.¹⁴ The important subjects, which quickly became canonical, which is to say orthodox, in Indology, following to some extent a sanitized brahmanical presentation, were the Vedas, Sanskrit grammar (vyākaraṇa), the “six systems” of Indian philosophy (ṣaḍdarśana), Buddhism and Jainism, law (dharmaśāstra), epic poetry (kāvya), and, to a lesser extent, poetic theory (alaṃkāraśāstra). Among the subjects neglected by respectable scholars were Tantra, bhakti, and astrology (jyotiṣa), the texts of which, interestingly, are included in disproportionately high numbers in manuscript collections throughout India, but were cast into disfavor by the orientalism of the day.¹⁵ Factors weighing against these latter texts were their relative modernity, their popularity, and their intellectual movement away from the more classical texts, which, following the orientalist prerogative (consonant with their nostalgia for classical Greece and the Renaissance), expressed in general the ascendancy of reason. Thus certain topics and texts were destined for neglect because they participated in and typified a perceived intellectual and cultural malaise that rendered the defeated, superstitious, caste-ridden, economically straitened, and technologically underdeveloped India the natural subjects of the European Enlightenment. In other words, not only were most of these texts composed after the close of the first millennium C.E., which is to say on the wrong side of the tracks, temporally, to count as true or ideal representatives of ancient India, but their very subject matter was beneath the intellectual and cultural prestige or dignity of contemporary European scholarship.¹⁶

If the brahmanical orthodoxies engineered popular and experiential content out of their texts, if they cavalierly shredded context and imposed an artificial and hegemonic discursive order, as standard Indology suspects—and this is a big “if”—it becomes immediately necessary to pose a question that will inevitably bear on everything dealt with here: Are Sanskrit (and other classical Indic) texts appropriate sources for our inquiry? More precisely, is Sanskrit literature or Sanskritic culture capable of representing the interests of a clientele more broadly based than a brahmanical elite that is usually characterized (and caricatured) as unregenerate and epistemologically prejudiced? At this point, which is to say until we have recounted and taken stock of the evidence—or its absence—we must be content with the unsatisfying observation that this question is fraught with ideological considerations and is thus unanswerable.

Nevertheless, a preliminary inquiry into this question is possible through a consideration of two opposing viewpoints on the capabilities of Sanskrit literature. In one corner is the eminent historian and Sanskritist D. D. Kosambi, who does not mince his words in the introduction to his critical edition of a collection of Sanskrit court poetry and miscellanea, the Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, compiled in the eleventh or twelfth century C.E. in Bengal by one Vidyāpati. Kosambi observes that the life depicted in such poetry “was not shared by most Indians of the poet’s or of any other time; in essence, not even by the poet himself.”¹⁷ According to Kosambi, Sanskrit poetry, as well as classical Sanskritic culture, was the shared property—as well as the shared fantasy (Kosambi would likely regard it as a shared conceit)—of a brahman/ ruler class collusion.¹⁸ The end product was “the empty bombast of a Rājaśekhara,” thoroughly detached from the lives and livelihoods of the majority.¹⁹ In the other corner is the Sanskritist Richard Lariviere, who parries “criticisms of Sanskrit philology” in a wonderfully contentious article entitled “Protestants, Orientalists, and Brāhmaṇas: Reconstructing Indian Social History.”²⁰ It is Lariviere’s view that “if we return to the philologic...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph and Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Orthodoxies, Madness, and Method
• Part II. Ethnography, Modernity, and the Languages of Possession
• Part III. Classical Literature
• Part IV. Worldly and Otherworldly Ruptures: Possession as a Healing Modality
• Bibliography
• Index