Enchantingly Modern: Whispers of the Occult in Popular Psychic Healing Practices of Early 20th-century Bengal

Abstract

Early 20th-century Bengal witnessed the budding of a constituency of spiritually inclined psychic healers who provided miraculous treatment to ailing patients through practices widely referred to as sammohan. Practicing healers seemed to recklessly borrow from Western healing therapies of mesmerism and hypnotism, on the one hand, and simultaneously appear, on the other, to vigorously harp, albeit covertly on the mystical kernel of indigenous occult tantric knowledge. This, I argue, had the marks of an unsure modernity, which produced its own enchantment ironically in the public discourse by retaining the mystical essence of occultism under the shell of popular healing. This article explores whether practices of sammohan placed between the medically sober and the erotically intoxicated provide a way to unravel the complexities of the “Bengali modern.” It also investigates whether the occult turn of psychic healing constituted an enormous, complex, and internally complicated phenomenon yet posited simultaneously a coherent response to the dilemmas of modernity.