In her role as devoted wife, the Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in this visceral ethnography. Daughters of Parvati centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.

"In the Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh, an agricultural region with high rates of infant mortality, maternal health services are poor while family planning efforts are intensive. By following the daily lives of women in this setting, the author considers the women's own experiences of birth and infant death, their ways of making-do, and the hierarchies they create and contend with. This book develops an approach to the care that focuses on emotion, domestic spaces, illicit and extra-institutional biomedicine, and household and neighborly relations that these women are able to access. It shows that, as part of the concatenation of affect and access, globalized moralities about reproduction are dependent on ambiguous ideas about caste. Through the unfolding of birth and death, a new vision of "untouchability" emerges that is integral to visions of progress."--Jacket.

In The Occupied Clinic, Saiba Varma explores the psychological, ontological, and political entanglements between medicine and violence in Indian-controlled Kashmir—the world's most densely militarized place. Into a long history of occupations, insurgencies, suppressions, natural disasters, and a crisis of public health infrastructure come interventions in human distress, especially those of doctors and humanitarians, who struggle against an epidemic: more than sixty percent of the civilian population suffers from depression, anxiety, PTSD, or acute stress. Drawing on encounters between medical providers and patients in an array of settings, Varma reveals how colonization is embodied and how overlapping state practices of care and violence create disorienting worlds for doctors and patients alike. Varma shows how occupation creates worlds of disrupted meaning in which clinical life is connected to political disorder, subverting biomedical neutrality, ethics, and processes of care in profound ways. By highlighting the imbrications between humanitarianism and militarism and between care and violence, Varma theorizes care not as a redemptive practice, but as a fraught sphere of action that is never quite what it seems.

The magical story of how the princess Parvati opens the heart of her eternal husband Shiva • The courtship story of one of the central couples in Indian lore, Parvati and Shiva, made accessible for Western children • Illustrated throughout with paintings from the classic Indian tradition In the Hindu pantheon the great mother goddess Adishakti is the heavenly wife of Shiva, Lord of All Gods. Whenever Shiva or Adishakti come to Earth in human form, they are fated to marry each other again--but that’s no guarantee that all will go smoothly with their courtship. In this story Adishakti comes to Earth as the mountain princess Parvati, who has her work cut out for her when she tries to win the affections of Shiva. Shiva spends all his time meditating on a remote mountainside in the Himalayas and has no interest in marriage. Parvati washes his feet, wipes his brow, and lays sixteen offerings before him, but he won’t even look at her. Sage Narada advises her to invoke Shiva’s name--Om Namah Shivaya--over and over again as a mantra. So in the heat of the sun, in the driving rain, in snow up to her neck Parvati sits and repeats her beloved’s name until the focused power of her intent opens his heart and persuades him to ask for her hand in marriage. Parvati’s timeless story teaches children that with enough love and perseverance even the seemingly impossible can be achieved. Accompanied by rich, color illustrations prepared according to the traditional Hindu canon, How Parvati Won the Heart of Shiva will transport children to a magical world filled with ancient wisdom.

Set in modern India, Chchanda, 18, tells of her household of 3 generations of self-sufficient women and how love, lust, betrayal, and loyalty change them.

"A formidable achievement. . . . Mitter spans almost the entire spectrum of the 'woman's question' providing both information and insight into the complex patterns that determine the image, self-image, and status of women in contemporary India." -- Manini Chatterjee, The Hindu (India). -- Book cover.

Shalini Masih grew up in a stimulating environment of priests and healers, witnessing firsthand states of spirit possession and exorcism. In adulthood, she revisited these experiences, motivating her to extend psychoanalysis outside the clinic's realms into spaces of traditional healing. The outcome of her detailed exploration acknowledges the hugely productive interface between cultural manifestations and concerns of psychoanalysis without reducing the phenomenon of spirit possession to something formulaic. Instead, Psychoanalytic Conversations with States of Spirit Possession: Beauty in Brokenness highlights the intrinsic beauty of this complex experience, illustrating relevant themes through culturally sensitive psychoanalytic conversations with participants who felt haunted and possessed by ghosts. The author's journey reveals the ghosts of her own inner world. She draws upon her reveries, dreams, and nightmares to make sense of the unconscious processes in her informant's testimonies, journeys that are so often undertaken from one grotesque ghost to another until these ghastly beings reappear as broken part-selves in search of the glue of spiritual meaning.