The Yakshi syndrome in Indian popular culture: representation of possessed female bodies in Indian cinema
Faculty Advisor
Date
2023
Keywords
Yakshi syndrome, Indian popular culture, mass media and culture, mental illness in mass media
Abstract (summary)
Yakshi (यक्षिणी in Hindi) spirit possession is a unique culture-bound syndrome rooted in Indian popular imagination where a possessed female body is perceived as a manifestation of desires and fears associated with communities defined by local myths, religious superstitions, and regional fantasies. This chapter uses the popular folklorist cultural text of yakshi in Indian cinema to analyze how the visual representation of possessed bodies reinforces culturally specific pathological conditions of female subjugation. It specifically focuses on the cultural text of yakshi in Malayalam cinema, a South Indian regional film industry where stories visualize the female body within a morally conservative cultural past and patriarchal structure that use the phenomenon of spirit possession to mask somatic and psychological symptoms related to the mental health of women. The yakshi possession is symptomatic of a folk illness and collective hysteria that destroys identity and agency by entrapping the female self in cultural imagination where she is reduced to a deviant stock figure. Superstitious cultural practices of exorcism and black magic are performed by men to ritualistically redeem the corrupted soul of the yakshi-woman to make the female body human again.
Publication Information
Raj, S. J. & Suresh, A. K. (2023). The Yakshi syndrome in Indian popular culture: Representation of possessed female bodies in Indian cinema. In C. I. Pelea (Ed.), Culture-bound syndromes in popular culture (pp. 106-123). Routledge.
DOI
Notes
Item Type
Book Chapter
Language
Rights
All Rights Reserved