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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography at a Sufi dargah in Delhi, this paper examines sacral healing as non-state governance amid institutional uncertainty. it shows how care, justice, and authority are reimagined through everyday religious practices beyond the state.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how non-state religious institutions emerge as sites of governance, care, and legitimacy under conditions of institutional uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the Hazrat Mai Sahiba dargah in Delhi, it explores apotropaic healing practices related to spirit possession as a form of everyday governance that operates beyond the state.

The paper conceptualizes the figure of the Hazrat Mai Sahiba, a venerated women saint as as a sacral sovereign—a non-state authority that performs juridical, therapeutic, and moral functions simultaneously. For devotees navigating suffering, illness, and social precarity, the dargah functions as an adalat (court), sarkar (government), and healing institution, offering modes of justice and care unavailable through formal systems such as hospitals, police, or courts. Rather than merely responding to state failure, these practices actively produce alternative social orders through ritual discipline, dreams, ethical obedience, and affective relations.

Engaging with scholarship on political theology, governmentality, and everyday ethics, the paper shows how sacral authority regulates conduct, shapes subjectivities, and reorganizes social life under conditions of uncertainty. healing here is not an isolated therapeutic act but a prolonged process through which governance is embedded in the ordinary.

By foregrounding lives experiences of care and authority in a religious non-state space through interviews and participatory observation, the paper unsettles state-centred frameworks in development studies and contributes to debates on how non-state actors imagine and enact alternative futures. It argues for understanding development not only through institutions and policy but through grounded, relational, and affective forms of governance emerging from below.