My Christian-Indian cultural imagination in clinical practice
By Shalini Masih
I grew up between English hymns and the soundworlds of Hindi bhajans, Urdu/Punjabi qawwali, and Punjabi/Urdu zaboors. In a predominantly Hindu India, I was also formed by interfaith life—watching Hindu mythic stories with fascination, celebrating Eid with Muslim friends (and learning to be mindful of halal when they came for Christmas dinners), lighting diyas at Diwali, and being gently instructed by Sikh friends in the grammar of respect at the gurdwara: cover your head, bow with grace, receive kadhaa prasad as blessing.
A conch-call at dawn, a choir at church, an azaan from the mosque, and a temple gong at dusk tuned my ear long before clinical training did. Those sounds taught me something about the self: that it is porous, apprenticed to plurality. Alongside the richness were shards of prejudice—sometimes inside the most familiar spaces—that pressed me toward a single story. From early on, I learned to hold reverence and disquiet together. In the clinic, that formation returns as a stance: a willing receptivity, a patient waiting for plurality to emerge, trusting that it carries transformative potential.
Let me take you to my classroom when I was six. I was the only Christian in the class. My surname—Masih, “Messiah/Christ”—made my religious identity legible before I could choose how to name myself. In India, one’s surname often discloses religious and caste location; my name placed me as “other.” My peers, sincerely trying to connect, asked questions that left me disoriented: “In your home everyone must drink wine at dinner, right?” “Does your mother wear short dresses at home?” “You must know only English songs?”
We did not drink wine. We dressed like others around us. And music—music was my earliest language. As a child I trained in Hindustani vocal music. Yet at school I was slotted as the Christian who sang only in English.
At home and at church, we worshipped in bhajans in Awadhi and Maithili, hymns that carried Urdu words over Anglican melodies, zaboors in Punjabi, and worship songs that borrowed qawwali’s tempo of call-and-response. My soul stirred equally to bhajans, to Sufi song, to qawwali, and to English gospel. I still remember the warmth of being greeted in other places of worship—quiet smiles, a small tilt of the head acknowledging my respect—hospitality and reverence breathing in the same room.
Only later did I understand how my peers’ imagination had been fed: by popular Indian cinema that portrayed “Christian” characters through a caricature of Westernness—women in short dresses, English names like Julie/Ruby as cabaret dancers, Peter/Michael as villains, Christians as drinkers and sexually immodest. That limited cultural imagination made me feel misunderstood—missed—as if I could not enter their mind’s eye. That childhood experience of being mis-seen became a lifelong clinical question: in any relational field, what is perceived, and what is projected?
Over time, spaces once marked by easy interfaith hospitality grew contorted by political hostility. Warm discourse was replaced by casual slurs. I became watchful in formerly comfortable rooms. One profound expression of that change arrived in a conversation with my spouse about naming our child—whether we should choose something “safer,” more “neutral.” I once called this feeling a sustained note of disquiet: as if the room had gone dark and blows might come from any side. That note tuned me, but it did not define the whole song.
Sudhir Kakar notes how Tagore held sympathy as a civilizational ideal—a kinship that stretches beyond one’s own, forming a widened sense of we. Prejudice thins sympathy; it shrinks us into impoverished versions of ourselves. In my clinical work, part of the task feels like restoring a wider we-ness in the room: keeping an alive concern for how multiple psychic truths can breathe in one self, in one relationship, without being forced into a single, tidy story.
Music sharpened these practices before I knew they were “technique.” A qawwali taught me collaboration: the power of call-and-response to turn fragile words into durable truths. A bhajan trained me in intimacy—the warmth that gathers when a room surrenders to a shared pulse. The zaboor’s arc—from lament to petition to a sure note of praise—taught me how to hold sorrow and hope together without rushing either.
Even rhythm became instruction. Kaharvā’s steady eight-beat warmth inviting community; Dadrā’s six-beat sway rocking hearts closer. In session, this attunes me to tempo: the pace of speech when aliveness rises and falls, the refrain a patient returns to, the length and quality of silence, the moment a narrative speeds up to escape feeling or slows down to finally arrive.
I often imagine therapy as a kind of jugalbandi: first, joining the cadence of the patient’s psychic music—listening for its tāl—before offering, subtly, a pause here, a phrase there. Not to overwrite their song, but to help it become more hearable.
Language—its idioms and dialects—became another instrument. Moving between Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, and English taught me to notice how emotional experiences shifts in energy and intensity as we move between language. I could arrive at psychoanalysis already appreciating that psyche speaks in the language, accent, dialects available to it. When words go missing, daily life turns into image, fable, tone. This has facilitated drawing from the person’s own canon, letting their idioms and stories become the chisel that opens emotional experience.
My hybrid identity, alongside psychoanalytic training, shaped a stance of a sort of spiritual humility: comfort sitting with atheists, devout believers, fundamentalists, and the spiritually ambivalent alike. The ethic that is upheld is that of remaining ever curious, not proselytizing, or rushing to pathologize, always submitting assumptions to scrutiny and welcoming correction from the patient. Our curiosity and willingness to be corrected by the patient enlivens the analytic space.
But this humility was learned through injury. I remember being told off as a child for arranging pebbles in a circle—my play stamped as “idolatry.” (Masih, 2020) In Winnicott’s terms, prejudice wounded play. Years later I watched a woman’s body become a battleground for an exorcism and witnessed religion used as a weapon. (Masih, 2023) I had to learn to respect the creative, destructive and other functions that reside in the same element—inside people, inside communities. In practice, this has translated in facilitating an evolution of an inner room where pebbles can be arranged and appreciated as play—without ideology storming in to fuel shame.
I also want to name a limit. I cannot speak for caste; I cannot write the experience I have not borne. In my younger years, my Christ-shaped impulse to “erase” boundaries sometimes took the form of gestures meant as solidarity—sitting on the floor to eat with workers in school and later at my workplace. I later learned how such actions can land as violent inclusion: collapsing protective distance, exposing people to scrutiny, recruiting them into my righteousness. When I met hostility, I could finally pause and reflect on impact. Clinically, this has translated into giving central place to consent and context: follow the other’s lead; walk behind the patient; accept refusal without injury.
As I dig deeper into my hybrid identity and reflect especially on how elusive the sense of belonging. As a minority I did not really belong socially but also as a Christian I was raised with the idea that we did not belong spiritually to this world, that we were not of this world but the world that awaits with Christ. Never here or there – somewhere in between, in a third space. Homi Bhabha writes about the “Third Space” as a site where culture’s meanings are continually negotiated, translated, and made new. To be Christian and Indian, therapist and spiritual, sceptic and of-faith, is to inhabit an unstable threshold: identity as ongoing negotiation rather than settled essence, to thrive in unsteadiness for that where newer meanings are found/created. So, this third space is also an internal third space—where contradictions reside and refuse premature synthesis. This is the psychic zone I have learned to keep open in clinical practice: a place where neither the patient nor I must choose one pure lineage, but can let something hybrid, unexpected, and more truthful emerge between us.
This is where paradox is held (Winnicott) or ambiguity is tolerated (Meltzer). However, my first stint with this realisation about paradox was not through Psychoanalysis or through Advaitic philosophy but through the figure of Jesus Christ – fully human and fully divine; lamb and lion; crucified and resurrected. As a twelve-year-old I thought of him, frankly, as a rockstar of contradiction! He was full of compassion, sat and feasted with the most marginalised persons of the society. And he had a fit of rage and challenged authority when he saw capitalistic mindset defiling sacred spaces. But what shaped me most was his relationality—his refusal to let hierarchy decide who is worthy of presence. In contrast to a metaphysical non-duality that dissolves difference, Christ’s non-duality (as I received it) is incarnational: crossing divisions through love, not erasing them by abstraction. A communion without denial—dwelling within suffering rather than retreating above it. For me, in clinical work, this has translated into a politics of welcome: all parts are welcome, especially the most marginalised ones, most unwanted, unloved, and forsaken parts of self. To remain in relationship with it, painfully so, until its inherent value in grand scheme of things becomes known.
My research into spirit possession and its healing in Hindu tradition (Masih, 2023) did not feel like entering a foreign language so much as hearing an expanded register of surrender and transformation. In those spaces, I glimpsed the necessity of a different psychoanalytic stance—one that upholds attunement as paramount over meaning-making.
Here I borrow from a language I grew up listening from my father and later found in writing of the Christian mystic, Cynthia Bourgeault (2004) – the mystical language of kenosis: self-emptying, becoming spacious enough to receive the other more fully. Later I found this stance in psychoanalysis, especially in Bion’s counsel to cultivate negative capability: the disciplined capacity to sit with not-knowing, resisting premature interpretation. When the unconscious arrives in uncanny, dreamlike, or numinous forms, the therapist’s task is less to domesticate the experience than to hold it with reverence for its inherent intelligence until meaning emerges on its own terms.
So, bringing together my upbringing and training in psychoanalysis has evolved how I imagine the therapist – not only as a sense making mind, but as a surround: an environment—psychic, cultural, and sometimes spiritual—in which experience can unfold, be held, and gradually become thinkable.
To live as Christian-Indian has meant belonging everywhere and nowhere at once—carrying the weight of projections while also inheriting a deep training in plurality. That inheritance shapes a clinical stance of paced listening, cultural/spiritual humility, and faith that transformation is just on the horizon even in the bleakest of darkness.
I return to my earliest metaphor: the therapist as both conch and choir—at once a hollow reed through which a patient’s truth can resound, and a fellow singer in a co-created music of psyche and soul. In that music, one may rediscover a wider we: a kinship that survives difference, calling us back to the voices we had forgotten how to hear.
References:
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and interpretation: A scientific approach to insight in psycho-analysis and groups. Tavistock Publications.
Bourgeault, C. (2004). Centering prayer and inner awakening. Cowley Publications.
Kakar, S. (2014). Young Tagore: The makings of a genius. Penguin Books India.
Masih, S. (2020). A sustained note of disquiet: On being a Christian in a predominantly Hindu India. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 25(2), 254–262.
Masih, S. (2023). Psychoanalytic conversations with states of spirit possession: Beauty in brokenness. Lexington Books.
Meltzer, D., & Harris Williams, M. (1988). The apprehension of beauty: The role of aesthetic conflict in development, violence and art. Clunie Press for the Roland Harris Trust.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.
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