In a pivotal scene from Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), the protagonists Goopy and Bagha run into a haunting of ghosts while singing and dancing in a forest. In the several minutes long psychedelic sequence that follows, the ghosts re-enact the battles that presumably killed them, and dance to the beats of Goopy and Bagha’s music. At the end of the sequence, pleased with Goopy and Bagha’s performance, Bhooter Raja, the King of Ghosts, blesses them with three magical boons that allow them to conjure up all the food and drinks they want with a clap of their hands, magical shoes that will take them anywhere they can imagine, and the ability to mesmerise people with their music.
From popular culture — films, literature, and folklore — to esoteric occult ritual practices, ghosts are spun into the very weave of Bengal’s social fabric. Before the proliferation of the internet and the widespread popularity of viral short-form videos, sharing ghost stories over cups of cha and chop — Bengal’s take on spicy, savoury vadas — were one of the most popular nighttime pastimes in Bengal. No one was immune to the allure of the supernatural and the intrigue of the paranormal. In fact, even Rabindranath Tagore once indulged in planchettes — a 19th-century French term which became a colloquialism for séances, particularly of the kind involving an ouija board, in colonial Bengal.
It is not surprising then that Bengal has its very own Halloween-slash-Day-of-The-Dead. Observed on the 14th day of the Krishna Paksha (‘the dark fortnight’), the night before Diwali — which also happens to be when Bengalis celebrate Kali Puja — Bhoot Chaturdashi is when Bengalis believe the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead becomes permeable, and the ghosts of 14 generations of one’s ancestors (‘chowddo gooshti-r bhoot’) descend upon earth. On this night, Bengalis light 14 earthen oil lamps across their homes to guide these ancestral spirits home while also warding off evil spirits from harming them. According to another lore, it is Chamunda — a fearsome form of goddess Chandi, closely associated with Kali, and her 14 ghostly acolytes — who protects people from the evil spirits.
As a Bengali who grew up in the late-90s and early-2000s — perhaps the last pre-internet generation of Bengalis — some of my fondest childhood memories revolve around huddling together with my cousins under a blanket on the terrace of my mother’s ancestral home in rural Bengal and listening to my maternal grandmother or uncle tell us ghost stories that kept us awake all night. While some of these stories came from horror anthologies written by stalwarts of Bengali literature like Lal Behari Dey’s ‘Folk-Tales of Bengal’, and Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Omnibus, or Leela Majumdar’s ‘Sob Bhuture’ (All Things Ghostly), some were purportedly true stories from the time my chhotomama (mother’s younger brother) lived in a hostel which was supposedly haunted when he was in college.
Although Bhoot Chaturdashi is no longer as widely celebrated in Bengal as it once was, the Bengali obsession with all things supernatural and paranormal remains as strong as ever. While some of us may have stopped lighting fourteen candles for the ghosts of our fourteen forefathers on the night before Kali Pujo, we still celebrate Bhoot Chaturdashi by tuning into the radio to listen to ghost stories with family and friends — while making sure a cup of steaming hot cha and spicy, savoury chop are well within reach.
Oh, and did I mention Bhoot Chaturdashi falls on the same day as Halloween this year? Well, it does. Spooky, huh?
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