Healing Temples, the Anti-Superstition Discourse and Global Mental Health: Some Questions from Mahanubhav Temples in India

The recent murder of anti-superstition crusader Narendra Dabholkar highlighted competing discourses on the place of local healing shrines in contemporary India. While healing shrines are dismissed as regressive and exploitative sites by the rationalist movement, mental health discourses seek to either abolish them or utilise them in community psychiatry initiatives. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mahanubhav temples in western India, this paper argues that healing shrines are better seen as spaces of refuge for those in distress. Such a position moves away from the rationalist perspective, while also questioning the incorporation of such shrines in the (global) mental health agenda