Mehandipur Balaji Exorcism and Possession Rituals

Record summary

Mehandipur Balaji Temple is a major pilgrimage center associated with Hanuman and with rituals intended to address spirit affliction, possession and other forms of distress. Visitors, temple workers and observers have described intense bodily behavior, chanting, offerings and prescribed devotional practices, but interpretations differ among devotees, clinicians, journalists and anthropologists. The site is valuable for comparing culturally organized possession frameworks with psychiatric or neurological explanations and with the economics of pilgrimage. Its long-term history and institutional development should be reconstructed from temple records, regional histories and ethnographic work rather than viral videos.