Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India

Daughters of Parvati explores the contradictions of love, family, and mental health in northern India, challenging dominant frameworks for addressing crises and urging us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 296 pages
Publication date: 12 July 2022
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

The Hindu goddess Parvati is the divine embodiment of viraha, the agony of separation from one's beloved, a form of love that is also intense suffering. These contradictory emotions reflect the overlapping dissolutions of love, family, and mental health explored by Sarah Pinto in her visceral ethnography, Daughters of Parvati. The book centers on the lives of women in different settings of psychiatric care in northern India, particularly the contrasting environments of a private mental health clinic and a wing of a government hospital. Through an anthropological consideration of modern medicine in a nonwestern setting, Pinto challenges the dominant framework for addressing crises such as long-term involuntary commitment, poor treatment in homes, scarcity of licensed practitioners, heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and the ways psychiatry may reproduce constraining social conditions. Inflected by the author's own experience of separation and single motherhood during her fieldwork, Daughters of Parvati urges us to think about the ways women bear the consequences of the vulnerabilities of love and family in their minds, bodies, and social worlds.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781512823745