When the Body Speaks: Caste, Possession, and the Gendered Politics of Ritual Authority

In September 2024, I trekked to Johar Valley, an alpine region tucked deep within the Kumaon Himalayas of Uttarakhand, India. Each summer, Shauka tribal families – my primary interlocutors in my doctoral fieldwork – migrate uphill to tend ancestral lands, livestock, and spiritual obligations. After two days of trekking, navigating landslides, swollen rivers, and broken bridges, I reached my destination, a village of about 20 households, to witness Nandashtami, a festival marking the end of the seasonal stay in Johar. The festival offers a reunion and collective farewell before families descend to lower altitudes for the winter, as the once important corridor of Indo-Tibetan trade is now inhabited only seasonally.  

Image 1: Women gathered in the village temple to pray.  

Loud drumming pierced the silence of the mountains. The drummers, three Dalit men, a historically oppressed caste in India, played with precision and intensity. Their rhythms rose and fell with the Chachari, old folk songs sung by women and men. The Dhami, a ritual priest from the Shauka tribal community, lit oil lamps and walked in slow circles around the fire. The atmosphere shifted, with everyone waiting for the deity to arrive in the body of a medium. 

Suddenly, a woman began to tremble. Her hair was loosened by other women sitting close to her, a symbolic gesture of surrender. She rose and began to sway and dance with the rhythm of drums. The villagers recognised the signs: the goddess had entered her body.  

But then, the ritual was interrupted. A drunk man stepped forward, shouting: “Yeh Nanda nahi hai! Nanda iss tarah thodi naachti hai! -This is not Nanda! Nanda doesn’t dance like this!” In that moment, the collective energy was disrupted. This man wasn’t merely expressing disbelief; he was questioning the woman’s body as a site of sacred legitimacy.  

This disruption revealed the layered politics embedded in spiritual life. Who is allowed to host the divine? Who determines the "correct" way for a goddess to move? And what happens when a woman’s body becomes the site of that contestation? 

Across the Indian Himalayas, deity possession is a central part of ritual healing.  These rituals, deeply spiritual, also serve as social infrastructures of care in regions with limited access to formal mental health or medical services. But they are not immune to social hierarchies.  

The drummers, vital to the invocation, are almost always Dalit—a group historically excluded, and still experiencing exclusion from temple spaces in some places in India. Without their rhythm, no deity arrives. Yet outside the ritual, their social standing remains precarious. 

Even within the Shauka tribal community, which holds a complex social position - not quite upper-caste, but not among the most marginalised caste - ritual roles mirror larger caste dynamics. The Dhami, a healer-priest, performs roles typically reserved for Brahmin men, like conducting ceremonies, interpreting possession and offering sacred food. Yet he is not a Brahmin, and his authority is recognised mainly within his tribal context. 

And then there is gender. Women often become vessels for divine possession, but their agency within ritual space is fragile. The man’s public questioning of the possessed woman was not just an insult to the goddess, but a challenge to her authority and a reminder that the female body, even in a trance state, remains subject to male evaluation. 

Retorting to the disruptor, another woman shouted “Bhagwan ko gussa mat dila! - Don’t anger the gods!”. But the ritual had already lost its coherence. Later, when a male medium rose, looking as if the deity within him grew restless, his anger was visible. His authority was immediate and uncontested. He reprimanded the disruptive man and threatened to bring chaos. He ordered the drummers to beat the drums faster and possession spread like wildfire. The same people who had doubted the woman’s possession now bowed their heads before him. That moment made something clear: ritual authority is gendered. The male medium’s body was received as legitimate, coherent, and authoritative. The woman’s body, by contrast, was read as unruly, excessive and suspect. This may not be the case every time, but it was that day.  

In that chaotic moment, I noticed a woman quietly withdrawing from the crowd. She had recently begun experiencing episodes of possession herself. I was told that deity possession left her exhausted, disoriented and fearful. Unlike others who embraced their role as medium, she was actively seeking release, she had even visited several other, more popular, mediums to ask the deity to leave her alone. In that moment, I also realised: possession is not always power. For many women, it becomes another form of invisible, unpaid labour; something they must carry alongside their everyday responsibilities. The line between trance and trauma, devotion and distress, often blurs. Two women mediums I spoke to during my fieldwork shared the same feeling. While they saw deity possession as a blessing, it didn’t free them from their gendered roles. Even after intense rituals that left them physically exhausted, they still had to cook, clean, and care for their families. They carried the gods and the burdens of daily life at the same time. 

Even the divine, it seems, is asked to conform. In societies stratified by caste and gender, the sacred is not exempt. The deity must speak through the “right” kind of body, with the “right” gestures. Deviations are policed, even when they come bearing God. That night in Johar, the gods may have arrived through many bodies—but only a few were truly heard. It was a quiet reminder of how ritual authority is not equally shared, even in sacred spaces. 

Author Bio

Meenal Rawat is an interdisciplinary researcher and PhD candidate in South Asian Studies at University of Edinburgh. Her work explores the intersection of ritual healing, mental health, and social identities. Her research is based in Uttarakhand, a western Himalayan state in India, where she is from, and involves working closely with people from the same region and tribal community. Beyond her doctoral work, she is also focused on strengthening community mental health systems in India.