ABSTRACT
The village of Mehndipur was initially brought to my attention through the work of Sudhir Kakar (1982), the Indian psychoanalyst whose writings on spirit possession and exorcism are well known in the West. He was one of the first researchers to go to Mehndipur. Together with Ashok Nagpal, a lecturer in the department of psychology at Delhi University, Kakar conducted a study in the village for a period of two months in the late 1970s (at a time when Satija and the team of psychiatrists who worked with him [see Satija et al. 1981] also did a short study there). Kakar’s study, however, was not extensive; on the contrary, it was small-scale, not only in terms of the brief period of time he spent in Mehndipur, but also from the point of view of the subjects who agreed to take part in it: only twenty-eight pilgrims were interviewed (cf. Kakar 1982: 281 n. 6). More recently, Jens Seeberg (1992), an anthropologist from Aarhus University in Moesgard, Denmark, did fieldwork in Mehndipur. This was a more comprehensive investigation. Seeberg spent five months in the village, beginning in December 1989. His work provides important ethnographic and anthropological data on Mehndipur itself and on the pilgrims who journey to it. More recently still, another key study was carried out in Mehndipur by Antti Pakaslahti (1998). This particular study has an explicit psychiatric focus (as in the work of Satija et al. 1981) and is primarily concerned with family-centred therapy on offer in the village; nonetheless, it has major ethnographic and anthropological value too, as does the film Pakaslahti made in Mehndipur in 1996. Indeed, Pakaslahti’s work is particularly noteworthy because it is based on extensive research in Mehndipur, research which the Finnish psychiatrist began in 1992 and which is still on-going.
