THE EVALUATION OF THE EVIDENCE FOR DEITY AND spirit possession in South Asia, in both classical texts and modern practice, is framed by prevailing characterizations of such gravity that only with great effort is it possible to escape from beneath their weight—and in doing so it is still impossible to escape their shadow. These characterizations are literary, marked by vocabulary, images, and themes distinguished from an array of related phenomena. They are recognized because of a rich history of scholarship on the general subject of possession. Most such studies, whether Indological or anthropological—or even brahmanical, if we consider the long history of Sanskritic and other indigenous Indic scholarship—have commenced with the necessary chore of phenomenological categorizing and entertaining a potpourri of theoretical approaches. Just as brahmanical and Indological scholarship have set certain limits and challenges on the subject, thereby creating orthodoxies, so have the shifting grounds of anthropological studies, thereby creating mini-orthodoxies of their own. Although the word “orthodoxy” may sound harsh and unjust to some, scattered in this study is an accounting of methodological approaches to and models of possession employed by Indic authors and scholars throughout the millennia, by anthropologists and other ethnographers, as well as psychologists, in the latter cases reflecting Western academic deployment and establishing for them new dimensions. The approaches, addressed in Chapter 2, range from outright condemnation (by apologists for religious orthodoxies) to sophisticated psychoanalytic interpretations, sociopolitical views, notions of possession as a facet of shamanism, and last (and probably least) an increased acceptance, with certain qualifications, by ethnographers, of emic viewpoints regarding the existential reality of spirit and deity possession.(4)
Both separable and inseparable from these approaches are other general issues, including those of gender and illness. Why, in popular culture, are women subject to possession more regularly than men? Do we find the same gender configuration in possession described in Indic literature? To what extent or under what circumstances does possession signal disease, particularly mental illness? These questions are addressed in due course, and answers to them must consider the purport and environment of the Sanskrit texts as well as their contents. In order to more clearly envision the Sanskritic and classical contexts, it will also be necessary to view the subject from the top down, that is, to discuss the vocabulary and linguistic characterizations of possession in postclassical and modern South Asia. To this end, I explore the semantics of possession and their significations in several South Asian languages (Chapter 4). This discussion begs a consideration of the relationship between “folk possession” and “classical possession,” a topic that is frequently revisited in this study.