LEAVING ASIDE THE TECHNICAL ARGUMENT THAT literature requires knowledge of the written word, Indian literature may be said to begin with the Vedas. Among the topics given priority in the Vedas is, by no accident, beginnings, and, as we explore below, possession was the means by which the gap between spirit and matter was, in the beginning, closed. From the earliest explorations of the nature of essence, substance, volition, movement, and their interactions, to more concretized and localized concerns that were not just contiguous and stratified but integrated and sedimented as well, the Vedas recognized the fact of linkages or interpenetrations. These were often conceived poetically, through the operation of word, speech, Vāc, the motile force of the gods replicated in the sacred song of the sages. This was the richness of their world. It was an assemblage and interpenetration of all of these forces—essences, substances, volitions, movements—which lay at the basis of multiplicity and, as more commonly envisioned, possession. These were also, again by no accident, the earliest forays into the nature of person, personality, and selfhood, the mechanics of entanglement and disentanglement. Thus the Vedas explore possession as an ontological necessity, as an experience of the sages in the consumption of their sacred soma, ritually produced and imbibed. It is also deployed in a more general sense of entrance, pervasion, and occupation, and finally as the possession of one whole integrated being by another, such as a woman by a gandharva, granting an oracular experience, or anyone by a grhī, which could produce death, disease, or fainting.
From here we move to the Sanskrit epics, particularly the Mahābhārata (MBh), which undoubtedly reflect prevailing attitudes toward and practices of possession, many of which are only dimly visible in the Vedas and which decisively set the agendas for possession in South Asia for the next two millennia. This is a strong statement, but the MBh has been the most fundamental and influential text in Indian history, a remark that hardly requires defense in the present context. The MBh explores several kinds of possession and brings an array of emotional and energetic forces to bear on the topic.
We move from the epics to Sanskrit philosophy, classical literature, and devotional movements, which comprise vast segments of the Indic literary record. The discourses on possession in these texts is as varied as the texts themselves, ranging from yoga, Jainism, and Vedānta, to didactic tales, such as those found in the Kathāsaritsāgara, pure but socially observant entertainment, such as the Bhagavadajjukāprahasana, hagiographic texts such as the many biographies of Śaṇkarācārya, and the texts written by some of the founders of the bhakti schools of north India, including Jīva Gosvāmī and Vallabhācārya, as well as many of the saints of South India, some of them written in classical Tamil.