Faith Healing in India: An Ancient Way of Tending to Madness

A small village in one of India’s southern states woke up to a tragic fire 23 years ago. Little did it know that this incident would alter the course of the nation’s approach to mental health care.

Erwadi in Tamil Nadu was no ordinary place. After all, this village housed the revered dargah (shrine) of Hazrat Sultan Syed Ibrahim Shaheed Badusha, along with other saints who are buried in the dargah’s premises.

For centuries, this dargah had attracted pilgrims from diverse faiths, all drawn by the belief in the shrine’s miraculous powers to cure mental ailments brought on by evil spirits, djinns, and black magic.

Its very essence—the water, the oil from the sacred lamps, even the sand beneath one’s feet—was believed to hold healing powers.

However, on August 6, 2001, a fire tore through a makeshift faith-based mental home—a type of paid accommodation prevalent in Erwadi—where families could stay with their mentally ill relatives.

Out of the 43 people inside the home, 25 who were shackled died in the immediate aftermath of the fire. Fifteen who were not shackled managed to escape, but three among them later succumbed to burn injuries, taking the total death toll to 28.

This shocked the country and the Supreme Court swiftly intervened.

Authorities shut down all unlicensed mental homes in Erwadi. Over 500 inmates found themselves uprooted, some returned to families, others to state-run hospitals.

Yet, something perplexing happened.

The patients, now in modern facilities, began trickling back to the dargah. “Nobody wanted to be in the hospitals anymore, so they all came back and began to live here again,” Syed Ruknudeen Ibrahim, a shrine trustee, told Scroll.

I heard something similar when I visited two faith healing sites in India this year. People told me they had tried doctors, therapists, and medicines. When nothing worked, they turned to these sites.

It did not make sense. Despite the alleged “dangers,” why were people fleeing modern psychiatric care for faith healing? 

The Colonization of Indian Psychiatry

Over the past few decades, Indian psychiatry has undergone a significant transformation, largely shaped by the introduction and adoption of Western psychiatric practices.

This shift began with the influence of the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III), published in 1980. This manual marked a turning point in how psychiatric disorders were understood, defining them as diseases of the brain that could be effectively treated with psychiatric drugs. As these ideas took hold, they began to reshape mental health practices in India, moving away from traditional approaches that had long been part of the country’s cultural fabric.

Historically, Indian approaches to mental illness were deeply connected to spiritual and emotional well-being, with treatments often focusing on holistic methods.

However, British colonial rule introduced a different perspective. Behaviors that were traditionally seen as part of an ascetic lifestyle—such as wandering—were reinterpreted as symptoms of mental illness. This shift led to the establishment of the first lunatic asylum in Mumbai in the 1740s, with similar institutions spreading across India by the 1800s.

Records in India show British officials using psychoanalysis to “cure” Indians of their Indianness since they “found” that the Hindu population has “has all the disadvantageous traits of an anal-erotic personality, such as irritability, bad-temper, unhappiness, hypochondria, miserliness, meanness, pettiness, slow-mindedness, a tendency to bore, a bent for tyrannizing and dictating, and obstinacy.”

The legacy of these colonial practices is still evident today, as Western psychiatric models continue to dominate the field in India. Yet, experts have found that this dominance may not always lead to the best outcomes.

Tanya Luhrmann, Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford, has observed in her work that in the United States, people are often highly aware of diagnostic terms and categories, particularly regarding mental health, which can carry a heavy, almost fatalistic connotation.

In contrast, during her work in Ghana and India, she found that people in these regions, despite living in modern urban environments, did not think in diagnostic terms for conditions like schizophrenia. This absence of strict diagnostic labels offer a less stigmatized and more fluid understanding of mental health in those cultures.

“I think these diagnostic categories, particularly for psychotic disorders, carry a quality of the diagnosis of death. In our country (United States), they evoke a sense that one is crazy, that the craziness is permanent and involves a broken brain, something central to our understanding of selfhood and identity in the United States. That was just a lot less salient abroad,” she pointed out in an interview.

Meanwhile, in two landmark studies conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO)—one in 1969 and another in 1978—researchers examined the long-term outcomes of schizophrenia treatment across different countries, including India. 

The findings were striking: in developing countries like India, Nigeria, and Colombia, where there was minimal use of antipsychotic drugs as ongoing therapy, patients had significantly better outcomes compared to those in developed countries where such medications were more commonly used.

In Agra, India, for instance, only about 3 percent of patients were regularly maintained on antipsychotic medications, yet their recovery rates were among the best across all the sites studied. The WHO investigators concluded that patients in developing countries experienced a “considerably better course and outcome” in managing schizophrenia. 

They also noted that these patients enjoyed an “exceptionally good social outcome,” largely due to their reintegration into their communities and families, which played a crucial role in their recovery.

How Can “Mental Illness” Be Treated Through Community and Family?

While there are no standard indigenous healing practices across the world, these approaches often rely on the power of community, family, and spiritual beliefs to address mental and physical distress. Indigenous and faith healing methods typically emphasize the interconnectedness of the mind, body, and spirit, using rituals, storytelling, and communal support to create a holistic healing environment.

Take Sharada’s case, a 35-year-old woman from India, who has been visiting a Mahanubhav temple regularly for the past decade. She told Dr Shubha Ranganathan that she first turned to the temple seeking relief from persistent physical symptoms like pain, fever, and vomiting that conventional medical treatment could not resolve.

The Mahanubhav sect in India offers a unique approach to healing. Their temples, scattered across Maharashtra, provide a refuge for those seeking relief from mental and spiritual afflictions. Emphasizing direct devotional worship to one God, Parameshwar, the sect practices strict monotheism, vegetarianism, and teetotalism.

At the temple, Sharada would enter into trances, and afterwards, she continued to visit regularly. Over time, she began to interpret more of her problems as “possession.” On days when family friction overwhelmed her, she would flee to the temple, knowing she would find refuge there.

For her, the temple was a sanctuary, a space that allowed her to navigate the intersections of physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

In another faith healing site in India, Rajasthan’s Balaji Temple, visitors deprive themselves of sleep, eat tasteless or bitter food, restrain themselves in chains, hit their bodies against the walls or move their head in repeated, circular motion for long periods of time to heal.

Distressed people experiencing peshi, a trance-like state, on the road leading up to the Balaji Temple.

Meanwhile in New Zealand, Diana Kopua uses her role as the head of psychiatry in Gisborne to incorporate indigenous perspectives into mental health care. She developed Mahi a Atua, a unique approach that utilizes Maori creation stories to understand and treat mental distress among the Maori community.

Similarly, in Singapore, dang-ki healing offers another powerful form of indigenous mental health care. Dang-ki healers, or spirit mediums, enter trance states to communicate with deities and spirits. They then help others with their problems.

Faith healing centers and healers operate outside the conventional medical framework, so there isn’t a traditional “evidence base” to validate their outcomes.

However, during my visits to the remaining faith healing centers in India, I encountered a different kind of evidence: the steady stream of people who continue to seek these centers out and the numerous stories of recovery they share.

Inside India’s Balaji Temple

“It was like something was dragging me, forcing my head towards the wall, and I couldn’t stop it,” Sunita Saini said, her voice trembling slightly.

“There was nothing I could do but bang my head against the wall over and over, until everything went dark,” Saini added.

For years, the 40-year-old from India’s Panipat lived in fear—she was convinced that a spirit had taken control of her.

It urged her to end her life and forced her to harm herself.

I met Sunita on a warm afternoon in March, as I walked down the road leading to the Balaji Temple in the village of Mehandipur, nestled in Rajasthan, a state in western India. This thousand-year-old faith healing site, dedicated to the Hindu deity Hanuman, is known across India for its power to cure those afflicted by spirits and supernatural forces.

“After coming to Balaji, the spirit eventually disappeared,” she told me. 

How did Sunita get better?

When Sunita first arrived at the temple, she participated in a ritual called peshi—a practice where individuals believed to be possessed by spirits enter a trance-like state in the main hall (durbar) of the temple. Those who undergo this process, like Sunita, are called sankatwalas—people experiencing profound distress.

The temple’s approach involves a series of intense rituals designed to expel these spirits. These often include sleep deprivation, eating bitter food, hard physical labor, and sometimes even physical restraint. 

In Sunita’s case, she was instructed to sit in a small room designated for those possessed by “difficult spirits” and strike herself against the walls.

When I asked if this caused her pain, she calmly explained, “I don’t recall feeling any pain. Throughout the possession, I felt like an outsider in my own body. So, no, I felt nothing until I realized the spirit was gone. I knew I had to do this to get better. After a few days, it had left me,” she said.

Before coming to Balaji, Sunita had consulted doctors and tried medicines.

“I disliked it when doctors told me there was something wrong with my mind,” she said, a hint of frustration in her voice.

“The medicines they prescribed made me feel similar to when I was possessed—while they didn’t cause violent behavior, I still felt disconnected from myself. It was as if I was always… absent,” she added.

Faith Healing & Psychiatry

The “symptoms” that bring people to faith healing sites like the Balaji temple often resemble various psychiatric conditions, Anubha Sood, a researcher, notes in her paper.

The sankatwalas—those seeking help at Balaji—present symptom complexes that in psychiatric terms might be categorized as psychosomatic, dissociative, affective, or sometimes even psychotic disorders, Sood explains.

Sankatwalas experiencing peshi on the road leading up to the temple.

However, it’s important to note that these medical labels don’t align with how the faith healer views these conditions. 

This difference in perspective lies at the heart of why many like Sunita turn to faith healing. Where psychology and psychiatry tend to locate problems within an individual’s mind, faith healing takes a different approach.

According to researcher Sabah Siddiqui, who also works as a psychotherapist, faith healers interpret these issues not as psychological problems, but as spiritual disturbances existing outside the person.

“Faith healing views it as something external—a disruption in the environment surrounding the person,” Siddiqui explains.

For instance, symptoms that a psychiatrist or a therapist might attribute to a specific illness could be seen by a faith healer as the result of buri nazar, or the evil eye.

The healer’s focus, then, is not on treating the body or mind directly, but on removing the negative spiritual influence believed to be affecting the person.

Interestingly, since the problem is seen as an external disturbance, the affliction often shifts between people, particularly within families or communities. Siddiqui refers to this phenomenon as the “shuffling symptom.”

When I spoke to Uma Shankar Mishra, a 62-year-old farmer from Madhya Pradesh, he told me something similar.

The Spirit Would Make Fun of Us

A spirit, Mishra explained, had possessed his entire family—his two sons, his wife, and himself.

While his sons eventually recovered, he and his wife remained under the spirit’s control. The spirit, he said, would speak through them, and tell them that it had been sent by someone using jadu tona (black magic) to destroy their family.

“The spirit talks to us, makes fun of us. It tells us why it’s here—to ruin our family,” Mishra said.

He described the torment they endured: relentless full-body aches, sores that felt as if salt was being rubbed onto them, crippling anxiety, and a demonic voice that would mock their desperate attempts to find peace.

For over 30 years, Mishra sought help from doctors, moving from one to another. But despite years of treatment, relief remained elusive.

Then, he heard about the Mehandipur Balaji Temple from a doctor whose son had been driven “mad” by a similar affliction. The doctor had brought his son to the temple, and after performing the rituals, the boy was cured.

“It comes and goes… but it never fully leaves,” Mishra told me. “When I come here to Balaji, everything gets better. I stay for months, and Balaji (god) lets me know when it’s time to leave.”

Inside Another Faith Healing Temple in West Bengal

Just as the Balaji Temple in Rajasthan draws thousands seeking relief from afflictions, the Nischintapur Kabibabar Mandir (which roughly translates to “worry-free poet’s temple”) in Pujali, a small town in India’s eastern state of West Bengal, offers its own unique healing to those in distress.

This is where I met Shakuntala Devi as she lay on a mat at the entrance of the temple on a humid afternoon in July. Occasionally, she complained of pain to her daughter, who was sitting next to her. Other times, she stared at the sky and muttered softly.

“She is asking God why she has to put up with so much pain. She gets like this once or twice a year—she loses her willingness to get out of bed, experiences a lot of body pain, feels weak and dizzy and talks a lot to herself,” her daughter Shampa said.

There were around thirty people waiting in line at the temple, which is dedicated to the Hindu Goddess Kali—a fierce and powerful deity often associated with destruction, transformation, and the vanquishing of evil forces. They came with their set of problems—aches and pains, nightmares, inability to give birth—problems they claim doctors have been unable to solve.

Shakuntala too had visited several doctors, undergone a series of tests to find out what was wrong. 

“We had tests done on her liver, kidneys, and for diabetes,” her daughter explained. “We spent Rs 7000 (around 84 USD) on tests and went to three different doctors, but they couldn’t find anything wrong,” she added.

Finally, when one of their neighbors suggested that they visit the temple, they decided to give it a try.

“When she comes here and does what baba (the healer) says, she gets better. So, whenever she falls sick, I get her here,” Shampa said.

A Temple Unlike Any Other

This temple is unlike any other Hindu place of worship.

On entering, the first thing one notices is the baba sprawled across a wooden charpai (cot)—smoking a cigarette, drinking chai, and reading. Next to him, is a black cat resting quietly—a surprising sight in a culture where black cats are often considered inauspicious.

Skulls are a constant presence—from sculptures to tiny plaster skulls in an aquarium filled with fish. Where most Hindu temples are clean and orderly, this one isn’t. Flowers lie scattered across the floor, water seeps from cracks, and pigeon droppings line the walls.

A notice board informs visitors that all treatments cost Rs 5 (approximately 0.06 USD).

The temple is a two-story building, and what makes it unique is the presence of animals—dogs, turkeys, cats, and pigeons—roaming freely inside.

“From the moment I stepped into the temple, something inside me just… settled. Before that, my life felt like one endless nightmare,” Mohsin Ismail, a 35-year-old Muslim man, told me.

About a year ago, he began experiencing terrifying episodes that tore his life apart.

“It always started at night,” he recalled. “I’d shake so violently, cry out uncontrollably, and feel this overwhelming urge to lash out at everyone around me. I couldn’t understand it—it was like I was losing my mind,” Ismail said.

Sleep became elusive. And when he did manage to drift off, the nightmares came—vivid, terrifying visions filled with blood. “All I could see was blood,” he whispered.

“One night, I almost hurt my own child. That was when I knew I needed help,” he said.

Like most other visitors, he too had sought help from a  psychiatrist. He had been prescribed medicines but nothing seemed to work.

Desperate, he decided to come here.

“Baba placed a glass beaker filled with water and a tree root on my stomach,” Ismail explained. “Then, he gave me bel flowers and leaves to rub in my hand in a circular motion. It was strange, but I did what he asked.”

To his astonishment, the rituals worked. “The shaking just… stopped. The nightmares faded away. And for the first time in so long, I could actually sleep,” he said.

“I don’t know how it happened, but something inside me changed. Now, I come here every year, just to say thank you,” he added.

Mohsin’s story is unique, not only because of his healing but also because he is a Muslim visiting a Hindu temple.

A Place for All

“This temple is for everyone—see, I think Kali (the goddess the temple is dedicated to) is a Dalit, so she never shuts her doors to anyone—irrespective of their religion or caste,” the baba told me when I finally got the chance to speak to him.

“Someone like me (also a Dalit) found a space here,” he added.

India’s caste system was officially abolished in 1950, but this 2,000-year-old social hierarchy continues to influence many aspects of life. The caste system assigns people a place in society from birth, determining their social status, the kinds of jobs they can pursue, and even who they can marry.

Those who fall outside the four main categories—Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (traders and merchants), and Shudras (laborers)—are known as Dalits, (historically called “untouchables”) and have been subjected to severe discrimination and exclusion.

Although the Constitution grants Dalits the right to access public spaces, including temples, there have been several incidents where they have faced violence, and even death, for exercising this right. “Many people who come here have no place in society; they know they are not equals,” the baba went on to explain.

According to him, a lot of their problems stem from socio-economic factors.

“Nothing is independent of the other—the mind is not independent of the body, and both are not independent of the environment and the people around us,” he said.

“Here, they know their problems will be heard, and they will be treated with respect. That does 90% of my job. And this is my secret,” he laughed.

Understanding the Afflicted

Puja Bagchi, a 28-year-old woman, had been trying to have a child for two years but to no avail.

“We tried everything,” she said.

Her husband, who works as an electrician, stood by her through many medical appointments and even agreed to try IVF, a costly procedure that used up their savings.

“We spent Rs 3.5 lakhs on healthcare,” she explained.

But after a series of treatments, tests, and disappointment, Pooja began to lose hope. “I felt like a failure,” she admitted. “Every month that passed without a positive result was like a blow to my heart.”

A neighbor, who had also struggled with infertility, had visited the temple and soon after gave birth to a healthy child. With renewed hope, Pooja decided to visit.

“How can you explain women being able to give birth after visiting this temple? Other problems—nightmares, breakdowns—being solved make sense. But how can this place help with this?” I asked the baba.

“It’s faith—they wholeheartedly believe in this place because of which they do what I ask them to do,” he said.

He explained that many women who visit the temple are involved in hard physical labor and have poor diets due to poverty and patriarchy, which often means they receive the least nutritious meals. When they come to him, he advises their families to let them rest and eat better food.

“More often than not, this helps them give birth. It really is that simple,” he said.

In other words, the baba believes that by giving these women the care and nourishment they’ve been deprived of, their bodies are better able to heal and, in many cases, conceive.

“The thing is, I listen and understand—understanding where the afflicted person is coming from is important,” he added.

As I walked out of the temple, the line of people waiting to see the baba stretched along into the afternoon. Each had their own reasons for being there—reasons that doctors, hospitals, and the outside world hadn’t quite been able to address.

For them, the temple was where they hoped to find some relief, however unconventional the means might be.

The Seven Stages of Belief

After spending time at these faith healing sites, I found myself on a deeply personal journey through what I now call “The Seven Stages of Belief.”

Before I get into it, what you should know about me is that I don’t believe in much. But when I do, it’s only after it’s delivered. Love, because I’m with someone who makes life seem a little less absurd.

Science, because it keeps the world turning, keeps us breathing. Religion? No—it’s never done much for me. I’m not one for blind faith. I’ve always preferred the kind of belief that comes with a receipt.

“Why” is my best friend—always there, nudging me to probe, to seek out the rationale behind every conviction.

So you can imagine my surprise when I wandered through these sites. These places were as far from my comfort zone as I could get. 

But it wasn’t until I found myself at the Nischintapur Kabibabar Mandir that I really started to question the nature of belief—what I believed, how I believed, and why.

They asked me to perform the rituals, just like everyone else. Stand in line, pray to Goddess Kali, tell the baba what was ailing me, and then follow his instructions. This sent my mind reeling—What if this harms me? What if it’s all nonsense? My head spun with “what ifs,” and in that moment, I felt more like an outsider than ever, surrounded by people with unwavering belief.

It’s strange, because belief had never been something I questioned in the past—at least not in the same way. It took time for me to understand that my disbelief (in faith healing) too was just another form of belief.

I believed in mental health, in the neat categories of diagnoses, in the small white pills that promised to make everything right. I never asked why. Never thought to question the system that held it all together, the system that told me this was the only way to feel better. It was all just part of the world as I understood it, unquestioned, unexamined.

I remember when I first went to college—it was almost fashionable to have a diagnosis. Depression and anxiety were proof that you had a mind deep and dark enough to need pharmaceuticals to keep the demons at bay.

The Paradox of Openness

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that this belief too came with its own paradoxes. We wore our diagnoses openly, but there was still an unspoken rule: if you were really struggling, you kept quiet. We talked about mental health constantly, we shared memes and reels. But the minute it got real, we shut up.

That’s what struck me the most when I visited these faith healing sites—the openness. People here spoke about their symptoms, their struggles, with a kind of ease that I hadn’t encountered before. There was no shame, no stigma. They weren’t interested in diagnoses or labels; they just wanted to get better. They didn’t care whether their healer wore a white coat or a tattered robe, as long as they could sleep at night without being haunted by demons, real or imagined.

Survival Over Skepticism

Sunita Saini’s story stayed with me long after I left the Mehandipur Balaji temple. She believed a spirit had taken control of her life, and the only way to get it out was to bang her head against the wall. I listened to her with the same skepticism I reserve for ghost stories, but there was something in her eyes that made me pause. This was survival.

There was a time when I might have dismissed all of this as superstition, pure and simple. But after talking to the people there,  I realized that they weren’t choosing faith healing over science—they were choosing it because science had nothing left to offer them. They had tried the pills, the therapy, the endless doctor’s visits. And when that didn’t work, they turned to something rooted in a different kind of logic.

In this, they were ahead of me. They didn’t stop at what they thought would work; they went further, doing what needed to be done.

And that’s when it hit me: I wasn’t just there to document these places—I was on my own twisted journey through the seven stages of belief. It’s not so different from the stages of grief, really.

I’m not writing this because I think belief or grief follows a neat, linear path. It doesn’t.
I’m writing this in the hope of providing some sort of a framework. So, here goes:

The Seven Stages 

1. Skepticism was my starting point, the armor I wore as I entered temples where people sought the miraculous because the ordinary had failed them. It was easy, almost reflexive, to doubt.
2. Disbelief came next. Disbelief is what happens when the stories you hear begin to conflict with the neatly organized world in your head. I didn’t expect to be moved by Sunita’s desperation or to feel a pang of empathy for Uma Shankar Mishra, who had spent 30 years battling spirits with no relief from modern medicine. Disbelief is where you start to see the cracks in your own certainty, where the things you thought impossible start to demand your attention.
3. Curiosity followed. It’s the stage where you stop just listening and start asking questions. What if? What if these people, who have been through so much, have found something real in their rituals and prayers? I found myself wondering about Shakuntala Devi, who, after exhausting every possible medical option, found herself here, seeking solace in rituals that had no place in my world of logic. Curiosity is dangerous because it means opening up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there’s more to the world than what we can measure or quantify.
4. Resistance was inevitable. The rational part of me pushed back hard. How could I, someone who prides herself on logic and reason, entertain the idea that banging yourself against a wall could drive out a spirit? Resistance is the last line of defense, the stage where you cling to what you know because the alternative is too unsettling.
5. Engagement was the turning point. This is when you stop being a detached observer and start engaging with the people and their stories. It’s when I sat with Shakuntala Devi, listening to her daughter recount how doctors had found nothing wrong, and yet here she was. Engagement is where belief becomes less abstract and more tangible.
6. Reckoning was the hardest stage, the one where I had to confront the fact that my neatly ordered world didn’t have all the answers. Reckoning is realizing that for someone like Uma Shankar Mishra, it doesn’t matter whether science can explain his suffering—what matters is that he’s found something that eases it. Reckoning is where you come face-to-face with the limits of your own understanding, where you have to admit that your skepticism isn’t as airtight as you thought.
7. Integration is where I find myself now. Integration isn’t about becoming a believer. Rather, it’s about making space for the things you can’t explain, about accepting that belief and reason aren’t always at odds.

When I asked Sabah Siddiqui, a psychotherapist who has also extensively researched faith healing sites in India, what she would say to people like me—those who hold tight to science and dismiss faith healing as superstition—she didn’t hesitate:



“I would call that a very unscientific approach,” she said. “Because science teaches us to explore the mysteries of the world… to test different ideas and extract what can be used to create something that works for our world.”

And so, here I am, at the end of these seven stages of belief, still skeptical, still resistant in some ways, but with a new understanding.

Belief, I’ve learned, isn’t just about what you think is true. It’s about what you need to survive. And maybe, just maybe, there’s more science in that than we’d like to admit.

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This MIA Report was a collaboration between Mad in America and our affiliate, Mad in South Asia. MIA Reports are supported by a grant from Open Excellence, and by donations from MIA readers. This particular MIA Report was funded through a dedicated fund at Mad in America, the Lucas James  Finnegan fund. To donate, visit: https://www.madinamerica.com/donate/