Malevolence and Modernity in the Psychiatric Clinic and Indigenous Worlds of South India

Taken from my two-part ethnographic book project, I offer two vantages: one from a rural and Adivasi (indigenous) area within the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve; and the other, within a major research hospital, the National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), that treats hundreds of patients each day in Bangalore from all over the country.  The comparison, I argue, illuminates a larger canvas of malevolence shaped by politics and modernity, though important distinctions between the two sites also reveals local and regional variation; and, with this, a need to oscillate between macro- and micro-perspectives in addressing a purported mental health crisis at the national level.  

The term malevolence, as used by me, points to several overlapping dimensions of experience.  In this talk I focus on one aspect of malevolence that relates to projects of modernity, statecraft, and identity politics, where othering, themes of betrayal and fantasies of the other are taking hold of fragile subjects in clinical and non-clinical cases, exacerbating pre-existing insecurities and bio-social traumas, now figured by the malevolent traits of cultural others, oftentimes symbolized in religious terms.  This disentangling of more protean and fluid cultural words within political imaginaries makes impossible demands upon subjects already experiencing precarity and vulnerability.  That is, being forced into modern identity categories around language, ethnicity, and religion produces feelings of inward betrayal manifesting in othering and hauntings generative of hardened boundaries between inner and outer worlds that belie the folds of history, cultural intimacy, and experience.