Malevolence and Modernity in the Psychiatric Clinic and Indigenous Worlds of South
India
Taken from my two-part ethnographic book project, I offer two perspectives: one from a
rural and Adivasi (indigenous) area within the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve; and the other, within a
major research hospital, the National Institute for Mental Health and Neurosciences
(NIMHANS), that treats hundreds of patients each day in Bangalore from all over the country.
The comparison, I argue, illuminates a larger canvas of malevolence shaped by politics and
modernity, though important distinctions between the two sites also reveals local and regional
variation; and, with this, a need to oscillate between macro- and micro-perspectives in addressing
a purported mental health crisis at the national level.
The term malevolence, as used by me, points to several overlapping dimensions of
experience. In this talk I focus on one aspect of malevolence that relates to projects of
modernity, statecraft, and identity politics, where othering, themes of betrayal and fantasies of
the other are taking hold of fragile subjects in clinical and non-clinical cases, exacerbating pre-
existing insecurities and bio-social traumas, now figured by the malevolent traits of cultural
others, oftentimes symbolized in religious terms. This disentangling of more protean and fluid
cultural words within political imaginaries makes impossible demands upon subjects already
experiencing precarity and vulnerability. That is, being forced into modern identity categories
around language, ethnicity, and religion produces feelings of inward betrayal manifesting in
othering and hauntings generative of hardened boundaries between inner and outer worlds that
belie the folds of history, cultural intimacy, and experience.
Andrew Willford is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Willford's work characteristically explores psychological and phenomenological aspects of selfhood, identity, and subjectivity within matrices of power and statecraft. His previous research has focused upon Tamil displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia and India. His latest two-part book project, Modernity and Malevolence in the Psychiatric Clinic: Anxious Selves in Urban and Rural South India (University of Hawaii Press 2025) and Modernity and Malevolence in Rural India: Indigenous Hauntings and Community Healing in the Nilgiris (currently under review) examines mental healthcare and illness presentation in the context of a psychiatric hospital at a leading research and treatment center in the first volume; and, in the second volume, the emergence of an innovative community-based care model, creating a bridge between traditional and biomedical interventions in an indigenous area underserved by biomedicine. Willford’s other publications include The Future of Bangalore’s Cosmopolitan Pasts: Civility and Difference in a Global City (University of Hawaii, 2018), Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia’s Plantations (University of Hawaii Press/Singapore University Press, 2014), Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia (University of Michigan Press, 2006; Singapore University Press, 2007). He is also co-editor of Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia, Andrew Willford and Kenneth George, eds. (Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2005), and Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between History and Anthropology, Andrew Willford and Eric Tagliacozzo, eds. (Stanford University Press, 2009).
