Chapter 8 explores possession in Sanskrit and other classical Indic fiction, drama, and aesthetic theory. In the same way that the 1973 film The Exorcist and Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw influenced (and were influenced by) the Western—particularly the Anglophone—imaginaire in its views and experience of possession as a nasty and terrifying phenomenon (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3), stories of possession in India influenced its experience and occupied a major place in the Indian imaginaire. The evidence from Chapters 4 and 12, discussing the language of possession and extensive demonologies, testifies to this. But the influence and experience was not all of a “negative” sort, as tales of possession—especially from the Mahābhārata, the text with the greatest influence of all—did not simply create a psychic locale for dumping one’s worst fears and (one hopes) imprisoning one’s most terrifying ghosts. In addition, these tales opened the psychic doors to possibilities of oracular, divine possession, which is subsequently taken up by different genres of Sanskrit, Middle Indic and modern Indian literature; the tales are a major reason why possession is the most common and, at the grass roots, most valued form of spiritual expression in India.(4)
Possession as a motif in Sanskrit fiction was initially addressed by the American Sanskritist Maurice Bloomfield in 1917. However, he covered only a few of the important texts and examined possession more as a curiosity than as a cultural phenomenon or the reflection of a widespread experience.
The most important texts in this category are the well-known vampire (vetāla) stories and the massive Kathāsaritsāgara.
Possession is also referred to in Sanskrit and other classical dramas, including the Bhagavadajjukā-prahasana, a comedy by the seventh-century Pallava king Mahendravarman in which it is the primary theme; indeed, that possession is presented as social satire is itself telling. Perhaps more than elsewhere, in fiction and drama possession is revealed as a well-known (though not particularly well-respected) feature of popular religion (at least among the literati).(5) It is also appropriate in Chapter 8 to attempt to derive a formal aesthetics of possession by examining theories of mood and emotional construction, as well as audience response, in the works of Bharata (Nāṭyaśāstra) and Abhinavagupta (Dhvanyālokalocana), then to locate resonances of this in modern popular culture.