Madness and Gender in Bangladesh:

Schizophrenia and Other Forms of "Paglami"

ABSTRACT

The label paglami in West Bengal and Bangladesh denotes a range of states of "madness," from divinely inspired ecstasy to "secular" insanity. Even the latter forms of madness are understood to vary in their causation (Bhattacharryya 1986). During my 1991-2 fieldwork in Bangladesh I made audio and video recordings of five persons labeled "mad," consisting of conversations between them, their family members, and myself, as well as lament performances by two of them. During a visit to my field site by a Bangladeshi psychiatrist, two of the five cases— the 22 year old woman Rani (the only Hindu among the five) and Hamid, a 30 year old man— were diagnosed as having had schizophrenic breaks from which only the man had recovered. Selim, The third of the five, an eighteen year old youth, was diagnosed manic-depressive.

It is significant that their kin applied a single emic diagnostic category, paglami, to all five cases. Furthermore, in all five cases, bouts with paglami were entwined with challenges to gendered role performances. Rani now refuses to bathe because she says she sees snakes not visible to her mother and sister who would bathe with her in the river. Yet she will not dress according to the full local requirements of modesty. Significantly, she also eats voraciously, a trait which associated, especially in women, with madness (women are expected to eat last and least in male-dominated households).

Hamid’s parents have ridiculed him for not performing according to male role expectations by entering into productive economic activity outside the home. No home observations of his family were possible.

Selim’s rural family believes he must have unwittingly offended some elder Pir-Awliya (a holy man deserving great respect but in this case, presumably, incognito as a customer of the sweet-shop in the capital city where he must have encountere the youth during his days earning wages to repatriate to his village family). The Pir-Awliya must then have cursed the jubak (unmarried but sexually mature young male). Selim’s resulting madness manifests in behavior that is not only so unpredictable and dangerous as to force his family to restrain him with chains but also constitutes a stylized violence following (the Hindi counterparts of) Kung Fu movies. His kicks evoke scenes in those movies in which such tactics are prototypically deployed against [corrupt] elder males. As Derné (1992) argues for younger men in North India, an identification with these themes (common in Hindi films) indexes a resistance to the traditional norms of filial piety to which young men are expected to conform.

My fourth and fifth cases were not seen by my psychiatrist colleague. The fourth is Suleyman’s, the fifth Latifa’s (Wilce 1998). Jubaks brought Suleyman, probably manic-depressive, to my attention after a "hypermasculine" power grab paralleling the previous case.

Latifa, age 24 when I met her, was labeled pagal ("mad"— the adjective from which paglami is derived) by her family. However, her ability to converse coherently much of the time bespeaks— even, at those times, to her family— a great deal of sanity. Still she is mad, they say, as a result of her ex-husband having placed love charms somehwere on their property. Her offenses against norms of sanity are primarily gender role violations, particularly moving about rather freely in public and verbally challenging her brothers’ domination (acting in lieu of her deceased father). Her challenge is shaped by the genre of bilap (lament), whose classical expressions celebrated male heroism (Das 1996). Whereas even the Punjabi victims of commual violence whom Das interviewed "conform" to this indexical significance of lament by responding to their victimization by men with silence rather than lament or any other form of verbalization, Latifa is deemed mad in part because she openly challenges her brothers’ violent interventions in her life.

My paper addresses the universals and cultural particulars of schizophrenia. My psychiatrist colleague administered antipsychotics by injection to Rani during Rani’s visits to an urban hospital after their initial meeting in Rani’s village home. Rani’s positive response is evidence of the underlying neurochemical processes common to schizophrenia throughout the world. Still, the symptomology of schizophrenia receives a particular kind of noticing and marking in Rani’s Bangladeshi context. The symptoms of paglami, even more significantly, entail an engagement with that context. The construction of madness as label and the performance of madness as behavior are both crucially affected by and entail dialogues with rural Bangladeshi norms of gendered speech and behavior. The forms of subjectivity associated with and influenced by the label paglami, and the gendered tensions besetting these five lives, are profoundly shaped by the discourses and images (Muslim saints, Hindi films, and the serpents and other phallic imagery in Rani’s family’s Hindu devotional surroundings) peculiar to them and their families as Bangladeshis. Finally, I will explore the possibility that the very tendency of Suleyman and Latifa to focus on their experience per se brings negative attention objectified in Bangladeshi discourses about madness as bilashita, the luxury of self-indulgence.

Das, Veena. 1996. Language and the body: Transactions in the construction of pain. Daedalus 125(1): 67–91.