“Undisciplined, playful and yet Bhadra”: Old ghosts and their Advocates in an Age of Enlightenment
The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book on the Colonial Uncanny.
Now that the book is finished, I know that this was not a hallucination, a sort of professional malady, but the confirmation of something I already suspected—folktales (fiabe) are real.—Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, xviii.
The bhoot was a member of the family in rural Bengal…I was young and visiting my grandfather in our village when a neighbor came to see him. After chatting for a while, the gentleman remarked “a petni is really irritating (tyakto) us”. The method of this irritation was that whenever fish was fried in the kitchen, the petni would appear and in her nasal voice beg for fish. The funny thing was that no one listening was surprised by this neighbor’s story. Everyone assumed it to be very natural: bhuts loved fried fish, so of course they would irritate and demand their share. —Humayun Ahmed, Amar Priyo Bhuter Galpo, Introduction.
An illustration from the classic Bengali folk-lore collection Thakurmar Jhuli (1907) by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder.
In the spring 1857, as Calcutta prepared for the impending threat of a mutiny, the noted intellectual Rajendralal Mitra (1822-1891) published an excellent study of ghosts, titled “Bhoutik Byapar” or “Ghostly Matters”, in his journal, the Bibidartha Ṣangraha. Rajendralal’s career as a man of letters was stellar even for his times which had produced a multitude of such men. He had a law degree and was fluent in several languages including, Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu and of course his native, Bengali. An enthusiastic and well-respected participant in the educational and cultural projects of the times, Rajendralal was also active politically, having served for several years as the President of the British India Association, the precursor to the Indian National Congress.
He was, by modern standards, a highly unusual source of intelligence about ghosts and their activities. And in this regard Rajendralal does not disappoint us. The short essay is a wonderful tongue-in-cheek comment on ghosts in particular, and belief in the supernatural in general. It is of interest not only for its dry wit about the so-called irrationalities of life but also for its effective disordering of the usual categories of rationality and faith in political terms. A colourful “historical” account of ghosts is employed by Rajendralal to make an inimitable argument about nationalism and British colonial rule.
It is perfectly clear, Rajendralal informs us at the outset, as to how ghosts come into being. Accidental or untimely death gives birth to a ghost, and this rule is valid for all ghosts internationally. But despite their universalism, ghosts do have certain particularities. They are, for instance, partial to women and children. According to Rajendralal, in all nations of the world ghosts are never far from the hearts and minds of this chosen demographic. He then provides us with a list of activities that we can reasonably expect of ghosts:
They are by nature undisciplined, playful and yet bhadra [polite]. Their activities include throwing a few stones in the dark, making some needless noises, opening closed doors without any apparent purpose, manifesting in horrible forms and sometimes possessing the simpleminded young wife of the family; besides the above they are not known to harm humans in any particular way. However, they are likely to carry out their own form of justice if they are wronged.
Rajendralal’s ghosts are marked by their near-genial relationship to the human world. Their spectrality is almost mitigated by their traceable predictability: we are made aware of their functions and hence their limitations. Most importantly, we feel the uncomfortable imminence of their nature to our own, captured intensely in Rajendralal’s deliberate use of the word bhadra.
The word carries a history of its own, too elaborate to reproduce here. Suffice to say that it is a very specific designation meant for a distinct social group in colonial Bengal, the bhadralok, whose social identity was to a large extent predicated upon caste, class, English education and concomitant perceptions of Enlightenment rationality, making them close historical relatives of the Victorian gentleman. The inclusion of ghosts by Rajendralal within the hallowed circle of bhadra-hood explicitly establishes their kinship. Although part of this ironic discourse, the word actually overflows with cultural insinuations about affinity; and rightly so, for the ghosts of nineteenth century, in perception and representation, often unsettlingly dissolved the distinction between the world of the dead and that of the living.
Who were these “traditional” ghosts that Rajendralal was ready to include in the hallowed circle of the bhadra or cultural gentility? Some clues to their distinguishing characteristics are provided for us in his essay. Let us remind ourselves of what he saw as essential attributes of ghosts: indiscipline and playfulness but with a touch of innate politeness. Their deeds, we noted, were making disembodied noises, appearing in fearsome forms and possession usually of the young and the female of the human species. On a more disturbing note, Rajendralal had cautioned us about their predilection for purveying “their own form of justice”.
Rajendralal’s description might serve as a basis for exploring the lineage of what I call, the “traditional” or pre-modern ghosts. His sketch is demonstrably not fabricated by him for the sake of literary effect for there exists a remarkable uniformity in the descriptive pedigree for a pre-colonial ghost.
In 1874, the native Christian missionary and scholar Reverend Lal Behari Day published a detailed ethnographic novel about rural Bengal titled Govinda Samanta or the History of a Bengali Raiyat. Later in this section we shall have occasion to discuss this unique text in detail. Here, let me reproduce in its entirety, the exceptional genealogy that Day presented for traditional ghosts:
Of Bengali ghosts, that is the spirits of Bengali men and women, there is a great variety; but there are five classes that generally make their appearance…the first and most honourable class of ghosts are those which pass by the name of Brahmadaitya, or the spirit of departed Brahmans…unlike other ghosts, they do not eat all sorts of food, but only those which are considered religiously clean…They are for the most part inoffensive, never doing harm to benighted travellers. Another class of ghosts, and they are by far the most numerous class, are simply called Bhutas, that is spirits. They are the spirits of departed Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Sudras…The Bhutas are all male ghosts. There are two classes of female ghosts, called Petnis and Sankhchunnis. Petnis are terribly dirty…they are [also] very lascivious, trying to waylay benighted passengers for the gratification of their lusts…Sankhchunnis, or Sankhachurnis, so called in the opinion of some demonologists, because they put on clothes as white as sankha (conch-shells)…they are not so filthy as Petnis, but equally dangerous. Another class of ghosts are the Skandhakata, so called from the circumstance that their heads have been cut off from above their shoulders. These headless ghosts are probably the most terrible of the whole set, as they have never been known to spare any human being…Muhmedan ghosts, usually called Mamdos…are regarded as infinitely more mischievous than Hindu ghosts.
Day here produces for us a testimony of folk belief in which both ghosts and their behavior are carefully mapped to steer clear of them. It is noteworthy how Rajendralal’s essay and Day’s account both underscore the safeness of these Beings, “inoffensive” and “harmless” are terms that are repeated as descriptions.
If Day provided a format for model behavior for traditional ghosts, during the same period Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay published an entire collection of ghost stories, Bhut Petni, which catalogued the pursuits of such creatures.[1] This collection of established fables about traditional ghosts proved to be immensely successful. Originally intended for children, the book was approved by the Director of Public Instructions as a suitable book for school-awards and libraries in 1939 and it earned several “gold and silver medals and First-Class Certificates” from various exhibitions and nationalist enterprises. It had not lost its popularity even by the 1950s, its impressive twelfth edition being published in 1955.
There are nineteen stories in the collection each in its way fulfilling a requirement for what we may regard as being standard behavior for pre-modern ghosts. Of the nineteen tales only one has a Prince as its protagonist, the rest consistently have as heroes and central characters various members of the lower classes. The word that describes almost all human characters is garib or poor. The poor laugh, suffer, love, often cheat and connive to better their lot. Sometimes they win and do end up marrying the fabled princess, but often they do not. But even as they lose in life they are never patronized or belittled in the narrative mode, thereby conclusively betraying the social origin of these tales.
From Lal Behari Day’s Folk-Tales of Bengal Illustrator: Warwick Goble ( 1862 – 1943).
Ghosts R Us: “Traditional” Ghosts and their Worldview
The Bengali urban intellectual of the nineteenth century, for a variety of reasons, very literally went into the depths of rural existence in their ethnographic search of ghosts, talking beasts and beautiful princesses. The moment these unsuspecting creatures were located they were promptly bagged and incorporated into collections, journals, and meticulously researched books. The ghosts, on their part, were not wholly unfamiliar with this behavior. The tales in Mukhopadhyay’s collection demonstrate that this tradition of the dead being duped by the living was particularly strong.
Of the recurrent themes, captivity narratives form the most pervasive of these tale-types. The basic format is as follows: a human encounters a ghost and is initially frightened by them. Then, by a sleight of hand the human captures the ghost or threatens them into perpetual bondage. The ghost either ends up being sealed away in a place of confinement or is indentured into servitude to enhance the material prosperity of the mortal. In the tale “Kalshir Bhut” (“The Ghost in the Urn”), for instance, a poor fisherman (jele) nets a little copper urn. Thinking it to be full of gold he unscrews the lid only to reveal a terrifying ghost that emerges out of the urn and threatens to kill the poor jele. The jele quickly thinks on his feet and asks the ghost how he managed to fit his enormous body into such a tiny vessel. The unsuspecting ghost boasts of his demonic powers to shrink himself at will- and as the jele insists on a demonstration - puts himself back into the urn. The jele of course tightens the lid back on and throws the whole thing back into the sea. Similarly, in “Bhuter Bichar” (The Judgment of the Ghost), the ghost ends up in a little tube and is confined there forever.
The more common form of captivity is, however, where the ghost is enslaved to serve the needs of the mortal. In “Bhutmedh Yajna” (The Ghost Sacrifice) for instance, an indigent barber or napit encounters a fearsome ghost in a forest. The ghost, delighted to have found dinner at last, starts to dance. The shrewd napit, not to be outdone, also begins dancing and tells the ghost that it he who was delighted to have found the ghost. The king of the realm, the napit continues, was about to perform the bhutmedh yajna which required a hundred ghosts to be sacrificed. The napit had already captured ninety-nine of them and this ghost would complete his collection. Upon being asked to furnish proof of his captives, the napit brandishes his mirror. The ghost takes his own image to be evidence of other ghosts being held prisoner in this object. He begs the napit not to capture him and ends up as the napit’s slave for the rest of his life keeping the napit and his family in luxury by supplying them with riches.
Let us review in this light the frequent descriptions about the ghosts being harmless or inoffensive. When the dead come across the living in these tales, the modern reader is thus more alarmed for the fate of the former than the latter given the nature of outcomes of such encounters.
What is the lesson here that these tales embody? For ghosts: clearly, that they should stay well away from humans. For historians however what emerges distinctly out of these stories is the close resemblance the world of the ghosts bore to that of the rural poor. Coerced, unpaid labor, begar or beth-begar, existed in many forms throughout the Bengal presidency, its effects especially pernicious on lower castes and indigenous peoples. Similarly, extraction of “gifts” and taxes from the peasant as nazranas (gift), abwabs (extra tax), and other forms of arbitrarily imposed dues by the rural elites was a common occurrence. While brutalized by these violent relations of land and labor in the real world, in the tales, the poor reverse roles and exact their vengeance on ghosts. Or perhaps the ghosts mirror their own condition and enrich the bonds of kinship and solidarity between the worlds. Storytelling, Walter Benjamin has pointed out, is intimately connected to labor. Boredom, that envelops the worker during the labor process, was for Benjamin the “dream bird” that hatched stories. As weavers and spinners worked their looms, the peasant worked the field, as the “rhythm of work” “seized” the worker, s/he listened “to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them…[came to them] all by itself. This… is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.”
These relations of extended kinship between ghosts and humans, “cradled” in work rhythms and life, were part of the warp and weft of precolonial storytelling and stories.
From Thakurdadar Jhuli. Reproduced in Kathakali Mukherjee’s blog.
As far back as in the sixteenth-century we have an excellent description of a “unique bazaar for ghosts” (“aparup preter bajar”) in the lyric ballad, Chandimangal . In the ballad, after a particularly bloody battle between the king of Ceylone and an army led by the goddess Chandi, the humans lose the war and the battlefield is strewn with mortal corpses. The ghosts and demons then descend upon the scene and start up a market to deal in the dead bodies:
A unique market for ghosts
Some dice and some slice some weigh and some dispense
Some just deal and trade in meat
The flesh is sold raw and cooking some even buy it by hocking
Human heads, like so many coconuts
Besides being adroit businesspeople, pre-modern ghosts also had other social skills which mirrored the world of the living. They married other ghosts- as evidenced in the case of the petni and her episode with the alta-and even gave birth to baby ghosts, defying any brahmanical notions of their genesis. For instance, a commonly told tale in the nineteenth century was of the two sister petnis, Kuni and Buni. The former lived in houses while the latter lived in the wild. One day a poor Brahmin on his way home through a forest encounters the towering Buni. But instead of the usual threats of dinner and neck snapping, Buni asks him, rather shyly, to carry a message for her sister, Kuni, that she had just given birth to a beautiful baby boy. The Brahmin, not overtly pleased to have met Buni in the dark runs home as fast as he could. Once home he recounts this odd experience to his wife, and as he was narrating the alarming tale, a similarly huge and terrifying creature, Kuni, rushes out of the interior of the Brahmin’s home and asks him delightedly about news of her new nephew.
A distinct pattern then emerges about this spectral world of the “traditional” ghosts: it is very much like our own. The claims of kinship that we sensed from Rajendralal Mitra’s account now rings ominously true. They demonstrably suffered from hunger, physical pain, and social vanities as much as the next living person.
The hallmark of a modern ghost story is that we start off with an elaboration of the death that will become central to the rest of the narrative; it will “explain” the presence of the ghost, overlay even the preliminary proceedings (i.e. before the appearance of the ghost) with an sense of intense unease and usually as the deaths are frequently accidental or untimely, hauntingly bring home for us the needlessness of the end of life. Simply put, they are about death and the terrorizing concept of life ending.
This modern mode of narrativizing the dead is markedly different from that of our traditional ghosts. The most remarkable feature of these beings, also their chief difference with their modern counterparts, is that we are narrative participants in their lives, not their deaths. The older ghosts, as we saw, lead regular “lives” and were collective social beings. Their deaths were incidental to the plot, most often unreferenced. It is their lives that we hear about, their social norms are described, their trials and tribulations documented. The stories were embedded in and arose from a society where such Beings were inextricably woven into ritual life of the subaltern. The immensely popular festival of charak, so abhorred by British to merit its outlawing, for instance, consisted of the important ritual of dāno bārāno, or resuscitation of the dead. The chief devotee propitiated the village ghosts by taking food “to a tree standing in some lonely meadow, and the food [was] poured on a plantain leaf and left for the ghosts to devour”, while others impersonated the ghosts themselves, donning masks, and reciting verses, “My name is Ram Sol, I shall be burnt and resuscitated again.”
These Beings were autochthonous citizens of a familiar landscape, equal to humans in all their formal activities; and to paraphrase a classical mode of understanding the “other”, when you tickled the “traditional” ghost s/he too laughed, if you poisoned him, he too died and if you wronged her, she too sought revenge.
From “Ghosts of Bengal” by Debojyoti Das
[1] Sukumar Sen speculates that it was first published in 1895, See Sen, Galper Bhut (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1982), 67.