INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

was the shadow of a Muslim girl, a daughter to a butcher, who committed suicide by
drowning herself in the well. Selma possessed Aman because she was insulted by the
tasted leaf plate thrown on her. Objects touched by human saliva are believed to
contract pollution and unintentionally Aman exposed Selma to an impurity by means
of a leaf-plate. This is an insult, even to ghosts.
Eventually the healer and the spirit will reach an agreement: the spirit promises
to leave the troubled person in exchange of certain demands. It may require some
offerings or performances of certain rituals over an extended period. In return, the
spirit promises to make a gentle departure, which otherwise can be a painful experience
for the afflicted, and not cause any trouble again. Selma’s spirit could not find
peace because she died a bad death by committing suicide. She longed for release of
her ghostly existence and this was also her condition for leaving Aman. The family
therefore went to one of the gurdwaras in Varanasi to give the offering Selma required.
Prashad of twenty-one rupees was offered to Guru Granth Sahib, while the
granthi performed an Ardas in which he wished for the peace of Selma’s spirit and
relief to Aman’s sufferings. According to the family the prayer was made “in the
name of Selma” and thus worked as a post-cremation ritual to release the spirit from
her bondage to the world and attain peace. By then Selma was no longer an ethereal
and elusive shadow but had come to assume a rather personal character in the discourses
of Aman’s family members. Although the prior motive was to help their
daughter and sister, the family organized the offering and the prayer in the gurdwara
to liberate the spirit of the Muslim girl.
As Selma had promised she signed her withdrawal. In the moment the spirit
left, Aman lost consciousness and regained it when Mata ji and her father sprinkled
water on her. But she repeatedly complained about pain, and when they examined
her body they found a bite-mark on her foot. The pain passed but, as her mother
interposed in one conversation, “the mark stayed for a long time and still she has blue
marks on her body.” For Aman the experience of exorcism was accompanied with
amnesia; she had been in a state of trance and did not remember what happened to
her.
Spirit possession, especially among women, has been a popular theme of study
among anthropologists, who have interpreted the notion of a person being “possessed”
and exorcism from the theoretical frameworks of psychology and phenomenology.
For quite some time scholars approached possession as an expression of mental
diseases and stress, and focused primarily on the psychological condition or the
social position of the suffering person. Women manifest and enact spirit affliction
when they experience situations that cause mental disturbances and use it as a strategy
to counteract oppression and their subordinate position in a male-dominant society.
694 The framework of possession legitimizes behaviors which under normal conditions
are considered socially disruptive, and simultaneosuly give women voices to
694
See Freed & Freed 1990, Kakar 1983, Lewis 1989.
437
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008