INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

But Mata ji’s death was not definite. My experience from conversations with
different Sikh interlocutors in Varanasi reveals that many maintain a relationship
with Mata ji and consider her very much alive, as an active agent still intervening in
the daily life of people. Even after her death she continued to give darshan; she appeared
in dreams and guided people to the healing practice at Paharia. Kuku ji said
he often felt her presence and before any task always took permission from her.
Whether local Sikhs believed in Mata ji’s ability to heal or not, most of my informants
had a story to tell about her, as in the case when she exorcised a female “shadow
spirit” who possessed a young Sikh woman named Aman.
THE CASE OF AMAN
At the age of twenty-one Aman, a student at a college in Varanasi, became afflicted
by a Muslim spirit. One day, as she and her friends were eating snacks in the playground,
Aman threw the small leaf-plates in a nearby well and immediately felt as if
she was pushed back by something. Shortly thereafter her family started to notice a
change in her behaviour. She began to lose her voice, had hiccups, felt constantly ill,
and sometimes screamed hysterically while pressing her neck. At first her parents did
not consider the possibility of spirit possession but suspected physical or mental
illness and therefore consulted different doctors and psychiatrists, but without any
positive result. 693 When the wearing conditions extended over more than a year it was
a neighbor who suspected affliction by a supernatural being and advised the family
to visit an exorcist. On the advice of a friend they first went to the Sitala temple in
Adhalhart outside Benares. Although Sitala Ma is consulted when people contract
chickenpox or smallpox, the family was told that the Sitala mother provides “coolness”
and their daughter would get well if they made a wish at her place. Accordingly
Aman’s mother made a promise to bring her daughter for darshan of Sitala if the
conditions would change. At the same time Aman’s father brought her to Mata ji in
Paharia.
The healing power of Mata ji was exercised through a divinatory session, where
the problem was diagnosed, and then exorcisism rituals to rectify the problem. At the
very first visit Mata ji made the diagnosis: Aman was afflicted by an opri chaya, a
“shadow”, often used for a more benign form of spirit affliction. She gave amrit prepared
with gurbani to Aman’s father and instructed him to medicate his daughter
daily in the morning and evening. Whenever the symptoms appeared he should
sprinkle the water-nectar on her. This was the first measure to “cast out the spirit”
(jharna phukna). Irrespective of the cause and mode of affliction, spirits and ghosts do
communicate with humans and in order to be able to cure the afflicted the healer
should identify the ghost by making it play (khelna), speak (bolna) or shake (hilna)
693
Kapferer (1991), for instance, illustrates how different diagnoses of the symptoms of afflicted
young women are at first exposed to a discursive process of negotiation and interpretation
among people in the nearest surroundings of the afflicted. During this process the women may
be given different types of treatment before the demonic is slowly shaped in discourses.
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Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008