The Exorcist

The dark art of healing is thriving in Kerala. We meet those who promise freedom from death, disease, demons, enemies—and their victims

This is how 26-year-old Haseena died: one day last month, she was forced to lie down on her stomach, her body bent backwards to make her toes touch the back of her head, and then kicked on her spine—which broke, leading to internal bleeding. The man who did this to her was invited by her family into their home. He had promised to exorcise the djinn that they thought had gotten into Haseena’s body.

The exorcist, Mohammed Sirajudeen, a native of Alappuzha, has been in the profession of casting out spirits for over a decade. He has since been arrested, as have two touts who used to help Sirajudeen find clients. But what the family is still grappling with is that Haseena’s father, Hassan Kunju, is also in police custody. All he was trying to do was get his daughter cured, they say; he intended no harm, and obeyed Sirajudeen blindly only because he wanted his daughter healed.

It was a gloomy Sunday, five days after Haseena’s demise in mid July, when I visited her former home. There were a number of frightened veiled women who all went inside upon seeing me. The only reason I was not asked to get out was because I was a woman. (The local journalist who took me to Haseena’s house in Thazhava, Kollam district chose to stay in the car, because this was a highly conservative Muslim household where women seldom stepped out.) Neighbours said that they had not seen Haseena for a long time, prior to her death.

The family is yet to emerge from the shock of the murder. Rahmath, Haseena’s elder sister, agreed to tell me their story and it was as heartwrenching as anything anyone could imagine. Haseena had stopped going to regular school at 13, though she continued attending the madrassa. When she was 14, her teacher there raped her and it marked the beginning of the end of her life. She gradually sank into depression. “In the beginning we were not able to notice the changes in her behaviour. She slowly stopped talking after the incident in the madrassa. She started showing increasing signs of abnormality. We took her to several hospitals, met many doctors, but she showed no signs of improvement,” says Rahmath.

This was when her father’s friend, an Arabic teacher, introduced him to the exorcist Mohammed Sirajudeen. “We believed him because he appeared to be an Islamic scholar. He promised to cure her completely by a month-long treatment. We all, especially our father, trusted him blindly. The women in the house were not allowed to witness the rituals performed by him. So, I don’t know what exactly he had been doing. But he was in a closed room with Haseena and we could hear her crying. He told us that she was crying because the spirits were being pushed out of her body,” says Rahmath.

Sajida, Haseena’s younger sister, is 17 years old and studies the Koran at a religious institution. She says she knew that Islam does not promote exorcism. “Initially I was against it, but he brainwashed our father. At some point of time, I too started believing him hoping that I would get my sister back,” she says.

According to the police and local journalists, there are around ten such exorcists—both men and women— in Kollam claiming supernatural powers to cure diseases, bring welfare and annihilate enemies. This is a phenomena spread across Kerala.

Stories of demonic possession and rituals to drive out evil spirits have long spread across religion, caste and class. The rituals often involve physical torture, and while death is an exception, the fallout can often result in serious trauma to the victim; who might, like Haseena, already be suffering from a mental ailment. There are hundreds of exorcists in Kerala with roots in Hindu, Christian and Muslim communities.

When I met George Kutty of Ayur in Kollam district, he claimed to be the last prophet referred to in the Holy Bible. He averred that Judgment Day is not very far away, quoting the Gospels of Mathew and Luke as evidence. The last refuge for good men on that day, he said, would be the Jerusalem Devalayam (Jerusalem Church), being built by him. He claimed to be able to do everything from casting away evil spirits to curing physical and psychological problems, and spoke about a majority of physical and mental ailments originating from the Satan within each person.

It was raining heavily when I reached his Jerusalem Devalayam, and because of this George Kutty had no clients and was sitting lazily in a chair. There were huge lamps in the church; everyone going there is asked to light one to keep evil spirits away from the premises. I too lit one.

I told him I was a journalist, and that I had come not only to write about his miracles but to seek a remedy for a family problem; that I had no children despite having been married for more than 10 years. (I am actually the mother of an eight-year-old.) George Kutty, who calls himself Father George, said he had had prior knowledge that I would come on that day. He made some predictions about me, which were all false. He said that my husband is a drunkard, and that this was the reason for my not having a baby. He asked me to come here with my husband and promised to make him a teetotaller. He also said I would soon be blessed with a baby, but that I would have to spend Rs 10,000 to 15,000 for the ‘treatment’. Moreover, he claimed that he had once made a deaf and dumb person speak; a slightly modified version of the incident in which Jesus Christ is supposed to have cured a demon-possessed man of blindness and muteness.

I asked him for the contact details of the patient, but he evaded me, continuing to quote the Bible instead. As it turned out, Kutty was not able to even foresee his own future; I learnt, later, that he had died of a heart attack a month later, on 14 August. Judgment Day arrived, but only for him.

Niyas, known as Kalavoor Baba, comes from Alappuzha and has hundreds of clients. He ‘cures’ all mental and physical problems, including infertility, and specialises in driving out evil spirits. People even go to the Baba to locate missing persons and he will predict their approximate locations, it is said. Nobody can actually see Kalavoor Baba, of course, because he sits behind a curtain.

Who is he? He is just 22 years old, married and has a daughter. His father Khaleel, who was a fisherman, claims that the boy was possessed by a Holy Spirit at the age of 13 and had a divine revelation. For those who come to his ashram seeking solutions, this is sufficient proof of his efficacy—rationality is alien to those who fall at his feet.

Kerala’s northern districts hold the most exorcists. Kannur, for example, has a number of them despite it being the nerve centre of CPM in the state. Manimalarkkavilamma is one of them. She uses Hindu rituals to cast away demons, though it is not necessary that you be possessed to meet her; any person with any kind of problem can go and she has readymade solutions. Her ashram is located in Thalassery, within two kilometres of the town, a tiled house in the middle of a paddy field. When I arrived, she was sitting in a huge chair, wearing a bright peach-colored saree. It was remarkable how she aped Mata Amrithanandamayi, the famous godwoman of Kerala, in both body language and delivery.

This time, I cooked up a story in which my husband was being solicited by another woman. I told Manimalarkkavilamma that he had stopped caring for me and my children, and that I wanted him back. Typical of all those in this business, she had some understanding of human psychology and knew how to offer hope without specific commitment. After consoling me, she promised that all my problems would come to an end in five years. She promised to remove the concubine from my husband’s life completely, prescribing regular poojas to get things right, and saying that my husband was having a bad time which would continue for five more years. This, of course, also meant that I would have to keep paying her for the pooja for five years: I was being made a captive customer.

Not every such godman or godwoman is out to con; some may have their supernatural abilities thrust on them by desperate believers. Thalassery Amma, aka Swamini Amma, is one of them. A nomadic woman wandering in and out of the town, she actually does nothing, but people believe that her very presence brings prosperity and helps drive out evil forces. She has been in Thalassery for 20 years. Nobody knows her name or where she has come from.

When I was in town, I learned that she was staying with Beena Kondoth, a devotee who invited us to her home to wait for Amma to return. I decided to do one more round in town, and at one corner, the auto driver suddenly shouted with joy. I saw a very old woman in a brown, black- bordered saree, worn without a blouse, walking slowly towards us from the other end of the road. The driver stopped the vehicle and, rushing towards her, fell at her feet. Her face remained expressionless and she walked ahead. We followed her for some time and I witnessed many people similarly falling down at her feet.

The driver told me people often took her home, because it brought them good fortune. “She is very divine and has extraordinary powers. It is not very easy for ordinary human beings like us to understand her divine strength,” says Kandoth, who has written poems about Amma and her miracles.

But such benignity is rare. Across districts like Malappuram, Kozhikode and Wayanad, the norm is people like George Kutty and Manimalarkkavilamma, who prey on the insecurities of people. Dr RVG Menon, a political thinker and social activist, thinks that exorcist practices have always had a wide market in Kerala. “Blind faith in supernatural powers and exorcism had been very much there in our culture and tradition. The only difference is that we are being more informed over the past couple of decades. Also, resistance against such practices has become feeble. One reason is that atheists who challenged superstitions behaved like fundamentalists and showed little tolerance [to believers]. It only helped to make people run away from them.”

In fact, in Kerala a Muslim exorcist has no scarcity of Hindu or Christian devotees, and vice versa. Exorcism is a terrain in which all religions coexist peacefully and harmoniously, it would seem.

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