Spectral Ties: Hospital Hauntings Across the Line of Control

Abstract

In this article, we trace encounters between humans and phantasmic entities in hospitals in Indian-occupied and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In Pakistan, the presence of spectral beings (jinni) in hospitals is linked to state and sectarian violence, which precipitates ruptures between jinni and human worlds. Such breaches permit jinni to manifest in the medical present, where insecure actors harness them to ventriloquize unspoken anxieties. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, jinn-like, chronically mentally ill patients haunt psychiatric modernization projects. In embracing a jinneaological approach to medical crises, we theorize hospitals as multi-temporal and multi-dimensional spaces called "tesseracts," in which human-nonhuman encounters serve existential and political purposes.