India, Hinduism, and psychedelics: 5 Questions for scholar Swayam Bagaria

Bagaria discusses the role Hinduism has played in the modern psychedelics resurgence and how culture shapes the psychedelic sciences.

Swayam Bagaria is a scholar studying mental health and psychiatry, particularly in modern India. Bagaria earned a PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins in 2020, and is now an assistant professor of Hindu Studies at Harvard Divinity School. His courses at Harvard touch on everything from comparative constitutional law, to the ethics and economics of caste to the history of psychotherapy and psychiatry in India.

The Microdose met up with Bagaria in Boston to chat about psychedelics in India, what role Hinduism has played in the modern psychedelics resurgence, and how culture shapes the psychedelic sciences.

Psychedelics are increasingly being talked about and studied in the U.S. as a mental health tool. What is the scene like in India for mental health and how are psychedelics received?

Psychedelic use is mostly happening in the party scene. I don't know of anything equivalent to psychedelic churches and there definitely are not clinical trials. I think you’d have trouble even finding volunteers for a clinical trial in India. India is at a very basic stage in psychiatry; psychedelics are a non-existent conversation.

The Indian government does not like to spend money on mental health. They would prefer to spend that money on other things, like infrastructure and agriculture. It's still a fairly emerging market economy. They want to see a return on their treatments; if I spend $8, I want to see $8 emerge. That only happens with the most scalable and least controversial treatments; there’s not room to introduce anything truly novel.

Psychiatry is prized here in the U.S., in India, it isn’t. It’s down on the ladder of medical subspecialties. And the nature of a relationship between a patient and doctor is just very different from what you’d see in a psychotherapy relationship. A patient in India often sees the doctor as a source of wisdom, as opposed to someone who is trying to correct your behavior; they’re like, “tell me what you think I’m doing wrong and I’ll do it.” That’s not really how therapeutic alliance in therapy works. People are also like, “If what you’re telling me qualitatively is not very different from what a guru would tell me, and I can get that for free, why would I pay you for treatment?”

Many world religions seem to include lore related to psychedelics. What links does Hinduism have to psychoactive drugs?

There are many mentions of Soma, an Indian intoxicant that people have started reading as an entheogen, in Hinduism. Scholars have speculated whether it might be a psychedelic mushroom, but nobody in India thinks it’s a mushroom. The texts that mention it are from Vedic Hinduism, a tradition from thousands of years ago. Contemporary Hinduism is a far call from that, and while in some ways, modern Hinduism originated in Vedic Hinduism, there is amnesia about the archaic parts of that ancient tradition.

If you look at the history of psychedelics, there are certain roles Hinduism has played. One was that Gordon Wasson wrote a book on soma, where his argument was that Hinduism progressively became a tradition that suppressed its own origins in soma. Another was through W.T. Stace, whose book on mysticism has the most references to Hinduism - more than Christianity or Buddhist mystics. And another way Hinduism is connected to psychedelics: all of the early psychedelics figures in the 50s and 60s studied with Hindu gurus like Ram Dass or Neem Karoli Baba. As a result, some people have made the argument — which I don’t agree with — that Hinduism is more centrally embedded within the psychedelic sciences than other traditions might have been.

Where do you see Hinduism show up in psychedelic sciences, and why don’t you agree it’s “centrally embedded”?

When Stace wrote his book, he got the idea of ineffability from William James, but he cites a lot of examples from mysticism and Hinduism. In Sanskrit philosophy, there's a very long-standing debate on what “ineffable” means; do you mean that some part of that experience is ineffable, or that the experience in its entirety is ineffable? People tend to talk about the former; there is often some content of a mystical experience which is ineffable; even when you dream, there are parts you can't quite account for. In other experiences, too, even the ones that are not mystical, can have parts that don’t make sense. So maybe we have to think about degrees of ineffability, but many philosophers don't go that far because they don't want to quantify a threshold. Ineffability has become this weird word which has a hugely rich archive in philosophy, but when it gets translated into psychedelic sciences, it becomes way too simple.

The language people have to describe these experiences is limited, too, by the cultural vocabulary that is most familiar to you. Somebody might say that they see angels, but if you were to ask another person who has perhaps seen the same thing, they might say something different. You use cultural references to anchor an experience, and many of the references happen to be Christian.

I don’t know how mystical experiences would look like in Hinduism, for example, because in Hinduism, non-psychedelic mystical experiences have been described as “pure awareness.” They’re supposed to be empty of content; it just becomes a flow. But psychedelic experiences are typically focused on content, or sensory input. People usually narrativize their experience. But that is not necessarily the way in which experiences of mysticism are present in other parts of the world, and the way in which psychonauts and researchers document these things — like through verbal self reports, or questions like “do you feel connected to nature” — make certain assumptions. Like, if I were to take the questions on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire to a person in India, and I asked them what they thought a question meant, my guess is that would not match with what researchers had in mind when writing the question. Many people in India don’t think about naturalism or awe in the same way.

What other background assumptions do you think psychedelics researchers are taking for granted?

Even when we look at non-WEIRD — western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — countries’ use of psychedelics, the existing data generally comes from a very few select Indigenous communities in the Amazon. Ninety percent of the world is absent from this conversation.

Many people assume that this experience is so fantastic that, of course, you just need a person to have one psychedelic trip to realize how life changing it is — and that everyone is coming to it for the same reasons, that their experiences might be the same. But if you’re running a clinical trial in say, China, where some people are using psychedelics to be more effective at work, your research questions might be different entirely, because the aims and uses are different there. In that case, instead of comparing psychedelics’ efficacy to an SSRI, maybe you compare the use of psychedelics to coffee. I think you have to understand what significance people place on their psychedelic experience due to their culture – and through that, you might realize that while people in America are hungry for non-ordinary states of existence, people in other parts of the world might have different expectations of those experiences. And that in itself can change the significance they attribute to the experience overall.

Given these different expectations and potential experiences, do you think psychedelics will become more popular in India or other parts of the world where they aren’t yet widespread?

I recently read about an idea from the philosopher Thomas Metzinger which he describes as the problem of enculturation — the idea that you cannot have widespread use of psychedelics without building it into your culture in some way. He presents a thought experiment where for the next 10 years, everyone over 18 in a country is given two doses of psychedelics annually. They don’t have to take them if they don’t want to, but the idea is that if enough adults have that experience over a decade, there could be widespread acceptance of it. It’s a thought experiment so there are a lot of details that are deliberately unspecified, but the idea is that culture is fluid, and widespread dissemination could lead to psychedelics becoming a part of cultural common knowledge. His point is that culture is largely the problem for societal acceptance.

I want to see how people use these drugs five years after FDA approval, once you have Hollywood making films about it — what happens after all the cultural producers are participating, after we have a critical mass of people interested in or using them.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.