Paper short abstract:

Scientific medicine and modern Hinduism tend to contest possession and healing as irrational. This paper discusses practical transformations and rationalisations of controlling occult madness in the context of the Swaminarayan panth in Gujarat.

Paper long abstract:

Mental illness and possession provide foci of contention in current discourses of modernity and tradition in regard to both religion and psychiatry in contemporary India. Based on fieldwork, this paper examines how the "reformed Hinduism" of the Swaminarayan panth includes the rationalization of the expulsion of ghosts and spirits causing behavioral and emotional trouble in people by possessing them. It looks at the ritual procedures of healing practiced in the name of Hanuman Kastbhanjan at a Swaminarayan monastery and pilgrimage place attracting "patients" from the region as well as from the global Gujarati diaspora. By providing a ritual-bureaucratic frame of order resembling a modern clinic, it will be argued, the religious site allows for "heteroglossialising" a code of mental suffering/madness whereby the dichotomous opposition between psychiatry and faith healing becomes decentered and transcended.