Possession: The Ghost, The Priest & The Asylum

About the Lecture

We understand illness through a familiar triangle: the body, the mind, and society. Medicine, psychology, and social work divide it between themselves. But this framework, however useful, has always struggled to account for what happens when a community understands suffering not as malfunction, but as divine visitation — when ghosts replace hormones and deities replace doctors.

This lecture moves through three distinct territories. First, the sociology of illness — how suffering is experienced, symbolised, and socially perceived. Then, the power embedded in medical knowledge itself, through Foucault and contemporary political discourse. And finally, into the Jagar ritual tradition, where spirit possession fractures the clean line between health and unhealth, and suffering becomes something altogether more complicated than a problem to be solved.

This is not a lecture about superstition versus science. It is about whose knowledge counts, who gets to define suffering, and what gets lost when we insist on only one answer.

The session explores:

The sociology of illness: how suffering is experienced, symbolised, and socially perceived
The power embedded in medical knowledge, through Foucault and contemporary political discourse
The Jagar ritual tradition and what spirit possession reveals about the limits of clinical frameworks
Whose knowledge counts when two systems of understanding collide
About the Speaker
Shambhavi Tiwari is a doctoral research scholar at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU, and a Political Research Associate at Think Small, Connaught Place. She writes poetry and short fiction in Hindi, with publications in Hindwi and Sadaneera. She is motivated by her passion for ghosts, gods, dogs, cats, and a thorough hatred for anything premised on individualisation, obedience, or violence.