This work examines a common folk illness, "clenched teeth" ( daant lag gaya), in urban Uttar Pradesh, India. Based on two years of ethnographic research, I explore the illness experience, family dynamics that contribute to the illness, and its treatment. Clenched teeth illness afflicts young, subordinate middle-class women and is characterized by fits of unresponsiveness or seizure-like behavior that local psychiatrists diagnose as conversion hysteria. An overarching concern of my work is to demonstrate the impact of conflict between liberal and neo-traditional values on the well-being of North Indians. Global, liberal values privilege egalitarianism and individual autonomy. "Hindu" and "Indian" values, on the other hand, articulate conservative roles for women centered on feminine purity, sacrifice, family honor, and paternalism. I argue that the hyperbolic articulation of imagined lives based on either set of values in middle-class Indian society contributes to the distress of adolescent and young women when they confront the impossibility of realizing their expectations.

Clenched teeth illness behavior covertly expresses angry withdrawal over thwarted individual desires congruent with entrenched cultural ideas regarding the legitimacy of suffering caused by separation from, or loss of, a loved person. While the illness behavior fulfills the expectation that subordinate women refrain from complaining and displaying negative emotions in order to uphold the honor of the family collective, it covertly asserts their individuality and autonomy. It suggests that their desires transgress those of family and lineage, and that they imagine liberal household environments in which choice and personal proclivities will be honored.

At the same time, the illness event causes the household to exert efforts to pull the sufferer back into transaction with the family through the ubiquitous treatment of prying apart her jaws and pouring household water into her mouth. I argue that the performance of clenched teeth illness is an attempt to activate and then wrench elders' love and blessings (sneha), goodness, and omnipotence through the power of suffering. It is an attempt to force elders to be empathic and whole—not only to command and guide—but to incorporate the distressed family member into communion with the lineage's desirable qualities.