Ghosts and ghost stories: India
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Ghosts (reported sightings)
Rakesh Khanna’s work
Jairaj Singh, April 1, 2021: The Times of India
Ghosts exist. Whether people claim to have seen them, or not, they’ve persevered for hundreds of years in myths, folklore and epics. They are as real to us in the stories of them as they are in our fears, experiences and imagination. As Neil Gaiman writes, “People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.”
My most favourite ghost story from India is, ironically, not from a book of supernatural tales. It is an episode that creeps into a story by Jim Corbett, who wrote the most thrilling tales of hunting maneating tigers and leopards in Kumaon in the first half of the 20th century.
Once when Corbett was on the trail of the Champawat maneater, he reached a dak bungalow in an area where the tigress had last been spotted. That evening, the tehsildar, who was guiding the famous huntsman, insisted on heading back to his village, through the dangerous jungle in the dark, than risk spending the night at the rest house. The night proved to be rather eerie for Corbett. So much so that he made the rare exception of revealing how a tale of “beyond the laws of nature” almost overlapped with his jungle story. The beauty of this chilling encounter with the supernatural, for me, is that it leaves a lot to the imagination.
India's most famous ghost story writer is of course Ruskin Bond. The well-loved storyteller says that long before he had his first brush with the supernatural, he encountered them in stories, which he began to avidly collect from a young age. According to Bond, it is Rudyard Kipling who pioneered the genre of the ghost story in India, and whose best two tales of the supernatural, include 'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes' and 'The Mark of the Beast'. In fact, he claims he once saw the apparition of Kipling appear in front of him at a book launch of his in a five-star hotel in New Delhi in the ’90s. “Having seen so many portraits of him, I could hardly mistake him for anyone else,” Bond writes. “Was he annoyed because of something I had said or written?”
For anyone interested in spooky creatures, especially those from closer to home, Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India, recently published by Blaft, an independent publishing house based in Chennai, is an exceptional find. The book carries an exhaustive A to Z list of (almost all) supernatural creatures known to us.
Not all ghosts, demons and monsters featured in the book, however, have been passed down from one generation to another as legends. You'll find contemporary ones here too, like the tale of the ‘Bullet Baba’ about a crashed Enfield motorcycle in Rajasthan that would mysteriously ride on its own in the middle of the night, or the famous story of a call centre employee in Gurgaon, who would still report to work long after her death.
The book also dedicates space to the ghost stories that centre around the Indian Railways and the spirits of British colonials that have been recorded. You’ll find myriad definitions of ‘bhoot’, which is not to be confused with the ‘bhoota’, a set of menacing ‘devils’ and ‘demons’ that populate the folklore of the Tulu-speaking communities around Mangalore.
What is fascinating about the book is that it attempts to capture supernatural elements that originate from the wide expanse of the country – some even extend beyond the borders into parts of Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Myanmar. From Bastan, the warrior demons of Ladakh and Tibet, to Elmakaltai, the ghost of a mother seeking justice for her son who was sacrificed to appease a rakshasa in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district; Farvashi (a personal spirit in the Zoroastrian faith); Hmuithla, a ghost in Mizo folklore whose mere sighting foretells death; and the Pavagada wolves, that draws upon a grizzly crime to suggest the existence of werewolves in Karnataka – there’s a trove here to understand how the supernatural world imbues our history as a people.
What the book isn’t – the authors insist – is a work of anthropology. In an email interview with TOI, Rakesh Khanna, the founder of Blaft Publications, talks about how he and J Furcifer Bhairav put Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India together.
Tell us a bit about your fascination with ghosts and demons. Where did the idea for the book come from? We've always loved horror, and we've always loved folklore. Blaft has brought out a couple of other books of Indian folktales, one from Tamil – Where Are You Going, You Monkeys? Folktales from Tamil Nadu, by Ki Rajanarayanan, translated by Pritham K Chakravarthy, and The Blaft Book of Mizo Myths by Cherrie Chhangte. Both those books have some extremely cool – and extremely different – undead creatures in them. So we were kind of like kids with Hot Wheels cars... we got obsessed with growing the collection.
There seems to be ghosts and monsters in every nook and cranny of the country. How did you go about hunting for them? We had amassed a pretty solid collection of books on folklore by Indian authors. For instance, Kynpham Sing Nonkynrih's Around the Hearth, is a fabulous collection of Khasi tales. The Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg helped a lot for older books by anthropologists during the Colonial times. And then JSTOR for more recent articles, and dozens of friendly amateur folklorists on Twitter and at ComicCon. Friends and family contributed local stories too.
Did the process of authoring this book change the way you think about spirits? Did you feel haunted at any point? I'm not sure about haunted, exactly, but I did start wondering about the similarities and threads that connect the myths from so many far-flung tribes and cultures. The idea that the ghost of someone who dies of natural causes is less dangerous than the ghost of someone who dies by accident or by violence – that's almost ubiquitous. Or the use of iron to repel malevolent spirits. Or the idea of the weretigerman, the dreaming skinwalkers, found in Northeastern mythology as well as among the Kondh people of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. These are very old symbols and fears, and I think they're hardwired in our brains somehow.
A lot of the stories, especially the ones that draw on folklore, seem less scary and more cautionary. Do you feel a part of our ghost stories also come from a place where people in positions of power used fear of the unknown against the uneducated? It's a common thing in this country (and in many others) for people to be accused of witchcraft. More often than not, this is an excuse to cheat a vulnerable old lady of her land or money. So fear can definitely be weaponised. There's a range of ways to approach a myth about a ghost or demon. Some people are completely credulous and superstitious (and that happens even among the educated!) Others enjoy the thrill of a spooky story, even if they don't believe it. Some people are believers and enjoy the spooky thrill.
The Northeast seems to boast a pantheon of spirits and demons...
The mythologies and folk religions of the Northeast have an absolutely astounding range of supernatural creatures, and they deserve to be much more famous than they are. Nongkynrih's book, mentioned above, was one of earliest introductions. Later, I got introduced to Mizo and Kuki folklore, to the underworld guardian Pu Pawla and the shapeshifting Lhangnel. I should tip the hat here to Cherrie Chhangte, Margaret Ch. Zama, and other contributors to the Mizo Writing in English blog. Then we dove into Donyi-Poloism, which is a religion from Arunachal, and the folklore of various Naga tribes, Garo, Karbi, Kokborok folk stories... There are a lot of great books and blogs out there.
We see plenty of similarities in the book between spirits of one part of the country and another – some even internationally. Which are the ones that struck you and what do they tell us about our beliefs, folklore and superstition?
One of my favourite common threads are the giant dragon monsters who force a whole area to feed them regular human sacrifice, until a hero comes along to vanquish them. In Khasi mythology it's U Thlen; in Mizo lore it's Rulpui; in Garo mythology it's Wakmangganchi Aragondi, the seven-headed boar demon.
Which, in your opinion, is the most terrifying ghost in India that one should hopefully never have to encounter?
I'll probably answer this one differently any day you ask me, but the Odiyan of Kerala is pretty terrifying. He's not actually a ghost; he's an assassin with supernatural, shapeshifting powers. The method by which he obtains these powers is pretty disturbing – you probably don't want to print them in the paper.
How are modern ghosts different from the ones of an earlier age? Before modern medicine and the germ theory, people explained many diseases as the attack of evil and spirit, so older myths have fever demons – demons of leprosy, demons of heartburn, demons of epilepsy. Those stories are getting rarer now. Some modern stories have spirits interacting with technology. There's a surprising number of stories about certain types of djinn being involved in cyber warfare and sextortion rackets.
In large parts of the country, superstitions and the practice of black magic continue to flourish. What are the dangers of believing in the supernatural in a 'post-truth' world?
Witch hunting kills far more people in India than terrorism. There are still human sacrifices, too, performed by people trying to gain supernatural power. That's horrifying and terrible, of course; but then there are plenty of rational and scientifically-minded people who are serial killers, or who devote their lives to producing VX gas or selling nuclear missiles. I tend towards a rationalist/atheist worldview myself, but honestly, I'd rather meet a superstitious psychopath than a rationalist one.
Ghost stories (fiction)
Tagore, Tarashankar Bandopdhyay
Indrajit Hazra | Why a good ghost story goes beyond `darr' |Oct 29 2017 : The Times of India (Delhi)
With bhoot chaturdashi behind us and Halloween before us, a look at the strange and primal pull of the genre
The ghost story, as any bona fide dead person knows, is one device by which we con front that uncomfortable certainty, death.
Take Rabindranath Tagore's chilling 1898 story `Manihara' (The Lost Jewels). On a dark and stormy night, a mysterious stranger tells the narrator sitting at a ghat about the one-time residents of the nearby dilapidated house, Phanibhushan Saha and his wife Manimalika, or Mani.Mani loves her jewellery , to the point of obsession, and Phanibhushan, who adores his wife, happily feeds her desire for jewellery .
That is, until Phanibhushan's business goes under. Mani fears that her husband will now sell her precious jewels and gathers all her jewellery , wearing as much of them on her body to proceed towards her parents' home.She had secretly asked a cousin to come and accompany her.
Phanibhushan returns home to find Manimala and her jewels (mani) gone. He makes enquiries, but Mani has disappeared from the face of the Earth. Without Mani, Phanibhushan descends into a dark, listless zone. Until one night, he is terror-stricken by a spectral figure bedecked in jewellery who comes to pick up one item of jewellery that Mani had forgotten to take.
The stranger's story ends there but not Tagore's. The writer has the stranger tell his listener, the narrator, that it seems he doesn't believe his story. The listener responds by asking him whether he believed his own story . “In the first place, Dame Nature does not write stories, her hands are already full with --.“ Before the stranger can finish his sentence, Tagore's narrator interrupts and tells the man the other reason for believing in his story: he is the man who [presumably with Manimala] was drowned.
Even as a period story , `Manihara' is `believable' with its familiar themes -lust for wealth and greed leading to tragedy . `Tragedies' in the real world that we regularly encounter are in the form of `crimes' and `accidents', news items on the nation pages of newspapers and on news TV . The lurid pull of these real-life deaths or `incidents' holding our attention before we move to `another story' is far more uncomfortable (and therefore `inconsequential) than ghost stories with their craft, and atmosphere.
The image of two young women left hanging on a tree in Baduan, Uttar Pradesh, in 2014 shares the same twilight light as Tarashankar Bandopdhyay's 1940 story , `Daini' (Witch). An old wizened woman lives alone, away from the nearby village. This `witch', with an “old wrinkled face, flaxen hair, toothless mouth, but eyes with the glint of a knife“ was once a young woman. Sitting at the steps leading to a pond, she had once “suddenly heard someone rushing down the steps and saw Haru Sarkar. He dragged her by the hair and flung her down on the old brick steps. His shout still rings in her ears, “Witch! You dared to cast your evil look on my son. I'll kill you.“
The low-caste old woman, unlike the young girls at Badaun who hang for eternity , survives the threat and many more over the years from the upper caste's fear of the `dayin'. She herself believes in her terrible powers and the ruin she brings on others who have strayed their way to her blasted heath on the village's edge.
Fear is only one of the primal emotions sought by the reader of the ghost story . There is also its `poetics', best understood in the context of a `haunting' tune or passage.
