Image 2: The Exorcism

This artwork belongs to a collection of paintings telling the story of Maya (pseudonym), a Nepali woman who, following domestic mistreatment in the joint family, experienced a mental health crisis leading to accusations of ghost possession. Her struggle continued until when she underwent a ritual of exorcism, which opened her eyes to the need to change her destiny and to escape from that situation together with her husband. In this painting, Maya has their hands tied and is beaten with a stick. This story is discussed in chapter 5 of Modern Dharma: Seeking Family Well-Being in Middle-Class Nepal and in the paper ‘Maya’s story spirit possession, gender, and the making of the self in a painted anthropological account’ (Tiné, 2021) published in Current Anthropology, 62(4), 498-504 (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/716551).