AIF Fellow Kevin Cremin came to Madurai with his wife, Michele. They're both lawyers (she graduated from NYU in 2000) and he works for mental health advocacy NGO in Pune, which is near Mumbai. Anyway, there’s this small town called Erwadi with a famous Muslim shrine in about 3.5 hrs from Madurai and for a long time, people have brought their mentally ill family members their for healing--the shrine is supposed to facilitate miraculous cures for people of all castes, classes and religious persuasions.
And i guess a cottage industry of homes had sprung up around the shrine, or "dargha." Then back in 2001 there was a fire, and a lot of people were chained to beds, posts, etc, and about 25 people died. Subsequently the gov't forced all the homes to close, and said that nobody should leave people at the shrine anymore.
So Kevin wanted to go check it out, and see whether people are still being brought there, etc. I went with them as their local guide, and also because I thought it would be an interesting field trip. It was.
The travel was fun- I could hardly find Erwadi a map, and figured I’d just have to wing it with my rudimentary Tamil and general knowledge of the local bus systems in the state. Also, we had no idea what we’d find when we got there. We’d canvassed some of the folks at People’s Watch and got mixed responses. Despite the fact that PW had worked on a case stemming from the fire, no one could really tell us with reliable certainty what was going on there at present, nor did they have any contacts we could be put in touch with at the dargha. Mostly though, we heard that the private homes had been closed and nobody brings their family members there anymore. But still we went, because well, how else were we going to find out?
Anyway, people definitly still go there. Many seemed to have just been left by their families. They we’re sitting around the sandbox courtyard on plastic tarps and sheets under the shade trees. Some talking amicably, others staring blankly, and a few conversing with or even yelling at nobody in particular. Several people were tied loosely, almost carelessly, to gates or trees. One image that particularly struck me was seeing a few women (or was it one woman who changed spots over the course of the day while my back was turned) clad head-to-toe in black burquas lying prone, perfectly still, face down in the sand. I couldn’t tell whether they were passed-out or merely engaging in some form of penitence ritual, but something about them seemed very 'not right'. It was easy to understand how the local language of possession and faith healing considered these people possessed by ‘demons’ or ‘satan.’
We arrived on a hot Thursday afternoon and there were maybe 200 people at the shrine. Although it was sometimes hard to distinguish the genuinely disturbed from the those who might had just come to worship and pass the afternoon, it seemed as if about least 30-40% of the people were ‘patients.’ Of course families could have come with, or else just to pray for, their physically or mentally disabled relatives. It was also at times difficult to distinguish the ill from the mere beggar. All of which underscores the sometimes fuzzy relationship and exterior similarity, between mental illness, religious experience, and extreme poverty.
The dargha administration ppl take care of them a little bit. private individuals come and bring food, sometimes they make donations to the dargha, which then provides meals.
In the evening we got to speak to the head of the dargha exec committee. it was sort of amazing how open he was. basically, he said, yeah, the govt says we cant house ppl here, but we do. we don't want to chain them up, but sometimes we have to cause they can be violent to themselves or others. The guy showed us a register and claimed that there were about 100 mentally ill, most of them from poor families, people staying permanently on the dargha grounds. Individuals from wealthier backgrounds, usually accompanied by their families, stayed at lodges in the surrounding area. The dargha executive estimated that about 1000 people resided outside of the dargha, but came regularly to benefit from its healing powers.
During the same meeting, the Secretary of the dargha committee – who also owned the largest hotel in town – told us that two weeks prior to the 2001 fire they had received warnings that it would happen. Yet when they took the information to the Chief Inspector of the local police station he did nothing.
Shortly after our arrival earlier in the afternoon, two men attached themselves to us and served as our guides around the shrine and surrounding area for the rest of the day. One man was originally from Sri Lanka, and spoke very little English. Although he explained to me in Tamil that he did house painting and other odd-jobs around Erwadi, I suspected that he might also have been a high-functioning dargha patient. Our second guide was from Palakhad in Kerala. Well-educated, and with great English skills, he told us he had suffered from ‘demons’ several years prior and had come to the dargha and been cured. Now he had returned just for a brief visit.
Our guides arranged for a auto-rick and took us on tour around the area. We stopped at a nearby shrine and participated in what was essentially an Islamic-inspired faith-healing ceremony for one of Kevin’s relatives. This involved several circumambulations around the coffin of a deceased imam/saint and then placing a blessed, rectangular piece of fabric over the coffin. Finally, Kevin received some oil and sandalwood paste for his relative to rub into her hair and scalp. Also, and quite conveniently, Erwadi was only about 2km from the sea. so we went to the beach, got our feet wet in the waves, and visited the spot where the Baba who founded the Dargha made landfall on the sub-continent after his journey from Arabia.
Leaving Erwadi at about 8pm on Thursday night, we traveled two hours to the island of Rameshwaram, a famous pilgrimage site in South India. On Friday morning we visited the Ramanathaswamy Temple, and then took an auto 20km down a lonely road on a long spit of beach land. The road dead ends into deep sand, a thatched fishing community being the last outpost. The low level of development was sort of amazing. I only saw one structure made of concrete, and the inside of the huts all had sandy floors.
This is basically the end of India – 4km of beach extends past the fishing village, and then ‘Rama’s Bridge’, the stepping-stone islands which go for 18 km, and then sri lanka. It is the place where the Bay of Bengal (Palk’s Straight) meets the Indian ocean (the Gulf of Mannar), sandwiched between sri lanka and the subcontinent.
A truck filled with friendly, while-lungi clad, Tamil men, tourists from Chennai, suddenly appeared, and rode in the back down the final last stretch of sand. and then went swimming in some of the nicest, aquamarine water i've ever seen.
it was awesome, and completely unplanned.
just one of those trips where you go with no sense of what's going to happen, and things work out better than you could have ever imagined.
click here for more photos.
