The final chapter offers a few conclusions based on my years of living with this topic. The first identifies typologies of possession that are correlated with language use in order to elucidate the semantics, constituted within the sociolinguistics, of possession. Then follows a discussion of the influence of possession on notions of corporality and personal identity. Essentially, I conclude that possession was both a cause and a result of the generally accepted South Asian notion of a permeable embodiment. This notion, derived from a study of practice, is somewhat at odds with notions of selfhood developed in philosophical texts that have been adopted as canonical from the time of the Upaniṣads to postcolonial India. Perhaps not incidentally it is exhibited more consistently among women or at least applied more generally to women, in accordance with anthropological findings.+++(4)+++ However, our evidence demonstrates that such permeability is equally applicable to men, though in rather different configurations.
Finally, I return to the Mahābhārata for an examination of the diachronic aspects of possession. We see in this paramount epic prototypes and patterns of possession that recur throughout Indian history, not just in performance and philosophical construction but in basic problems of self-definition that lie at the root of human multivocality.
Finally, I should say something about Sanskrit text passages in the book, which may appear to be irregular. Because of the length of the book I had to be selective in my choices of transliterated Sanskrit text passages. I include text of the Ṛgveda in Chapter 5 and of passages that are of particular lexical or philological importance scattered elsewhere throughout this work. I have usually omitted the text of passages I have translated of Sanskrit works that are generally available—such as the Upaniṣads, the Mahābhārata, and the published āyurvedic texts—and those that have been translated by others. I hope these decisions do not prove to inconvenience the reader excessively. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.