Even as Hindutva garners support through popular history and the modern idea of religion, it encounters its fiercest opposition from another religious language—that of spirit possession. Hindutva activists dismiss ideas relating to spirits as ‘superstition’. But among both Hindus and Muslims are beliefs and practices relating to spirits as inhabiting the cosmos and porous bodies. These constitute shared mythic spaces and, as I have argued elsewhere, are the basis of living together amid conflict, a humbler translation of cosmopolitanism. Sushila Rawat, healer of Husain Tekri, represents a larger phenomenon involving both multiple shamanisms and also medical pluralism.

Strangely enough Sudhir Kakar identified a Hindu–Muslim divide in the discourse of possession and argued that a Hindu is usually possessed by a Muslim bhūt, or malignant spirit. This is ironic as it was his seminal work on India's healing traditions that brought out diverse meanings and expressions of possession and exorcism. Kakar writes:

In one of Kakar's case studies, a Brahman priest demanded to eat kababs during his trance. Kakar grants these the status of preconscious attitudes of Hindus towards Muslims. The communal imagination is well entrenched in childhood, he argues, although the drives continue to be suppressed. ‘Bhutna seems less an individual childhood anxiety than a collective fear of Indian Muslims.’

For me the following questions were salient. Are Hindus possessed predominantly by Muslim spirits? Do Hindu women betray sexual anxieties with respect to Muslim men? Does the discourse of spirit possession and exorcism suggest the otherness of the Muslim for the Hindu?