Possession of individuals by a God/ Goddess, a ghost, or the spirit of a late ancestor or neighbour is a commonly reported phenomenon in India. Women have a very specific experience of the ritual of possession often reflecting unequal power relations within family or society. The power relation analysis can be extended to understand possession among not just women but any vulnerable group, caste or class. Anthropologists have explained potential causes, effects and the functions that possession plays in the lives of the people and some ethnographic studies have also produced broadly functionalist understandings of possession in frameworks of power, resistance, or as cathartic release.
Sometimes these stories of possession where death has occurred trickle into courts as cases of murder. Spirit possession, here, could be attributed to the killer or the killed. This paper will demonstrate that cultural explanations are often given psychological or practical foundations in courts – insanity, incapacity, madness or mental breakdown, or illiteracy and superstition. The presence of the supernatural in courts carries a particular and peculiar invocation of the trope of tradition versus modernity where the ‘rational’ law is being administered against ‘believing’ citizens. The presentation of incidents of spirit possession as ‘unconscious crimes’ where motives are harder to establish affects both conviction and sentencing. This article analyses cases where evidence of the supernatural is presented before Indian courts to understand attitudes of the administration and the judiciary in dealing with ghosts, gods and spirits.