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We inhabit a moment in human history when the progress of science and technology has marginalised ghosts from our everyday life much more than ever before. After all, dark nights and deserted houses are ideal settings for being in close proximity with spectral beings and uninterrupted electricity and internet connectivity is not exactly ghost-friendly! It is also in this very moment that the neologism ‘ghosting’ has become such a crucial part of the millennial vocabulary. Perhaps this is not as contradictory as it seemingly appears because, haven’t we always relegated the inexplicable, the irrational, the unperceivable, to the realm of the ghosts?
The Birth Of A Genre
In Sanskrit, and subsequently in vernaculars such as Hindi and Bengali, the equivalent of ghosts is ‘bhoot’.‘Bhoot’ in Sanskrit simultaneously means the past, and being. As an adjective, it delineates the past, but as a noun, it is an indicator of one’s existence, during and afterlife on earth. Therefore, its equivalence with ghost stands at the intersection of its two meanings: ghosts are incarnations of those who have passed, but they are also embodiments of existence after death. From Nikolai Gogol in Russia to Washington Irving in America, from Sheridan Le Fanu in Ireland to Koizumi Yakumo in Japan — over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, ghost stories emerged as a well-defined genre of modern literature, globally. In a world ravaged by colonialism and world wars, characterised by the worst instances of violence humans inflicted on one another, ghost stories as a genre of fiction attempted to explain the seemingly inexplicable trauma caused by these inhuman acts.
This is not to say that the presence of ghosts in literature was new in the 19th century. Their role in the fictional narrative as a mouthpiece for individual humane affective registers associated with violence can be traced back to ancient Greek tragedies. In the famous play, ‘The Persians’ by Aeschylus, the ghost of the old Persian king Darius appears as a voice of conscience. They have also appeared as royal advisors in the famous Sanskrit collection of stories Betal Pachisi (c.11th century) by Somdev Bhatt. In the famous medieval Bengali epic poem Mangal Kavya, ghosts appear in the entourage of the deities and were employed often as comic relief devices in the narrative. In the context of the genre, what marks a departure from this long tradition is a sense of unease with the irrational and inexplicable which manifested through the element of ‘fear’ that now characterises modern ghost fiction.
Ghosts in Colonial Bengal
In colonial Bengal, the popularity of ghost fiction coincided with a moment in history when cholera, malaria, and plague epidemics wreaked havoc in villages and cities, wiping out more than half of the population in the early nineteenth century. As the number of discarded and diseased corpses increased, ghosts found a place in the Indian psyche facing the realities of death in their everyday worlds. In this scenario, the discourses of science and medicine failed to provide respite to overwhelming grief. Ghost stories attempted to address this affective crisis in many ways. Whilst some provided didactic lessons as seen in Thakumar Jhuli (1907), other stories addressed the uncertainties of life after death, by describing a lively and fulfilling spectral afterlife, as seen in Peary Chand Mitra’s stories like ‘Jat-Kinchit’. The category of ‘ghost’ remained fluid: in some stories, they were seen, while in some their presence was only felt, but they were always feared.
Ghosts Like Humans
In a Bengali proverb from Comilla (Bangladesh), roughly translated as “ghosts inhabit a broken-down house,” the house signified the human body crumbling under various incurable ailments, which attracted ghosts to make the ailing human one of their own. Local legends from Rangpur (Bangladesh) dating back to the 19th century described the habitats of different types of ghosts in various kinds of trees, namely Palmyra, Tamarind, and Madar. The allocation of habitats in the spectral world mirrored anthropocentric normativities associated with gender roles. For example, the male Brahmin bachelor ghost, namely the Brahmadaitya, usually inhabited tall evergreen trees like Peepul maintaining his social superiority over others even after death. Female ghosts inhabited smaller shorter bushes and shrubs. The Brahmadaitya’s habitat in comparison with the female ghosts’ habitats illustrated not only his primacy on the social ladder, but also the gender normativities permeating into the spectral world from the human world. Moreover, while ordinary ghosts, both male and female, were described as dark-skinned, the Brahmin male ghost was portrayed as fair-skinned, tall, exhibiting saint-like feet, and wearing sandalwood sandals.
These tales often addressed unfulfilled earthly desires by perpetuating human gender roles onto the female ghosts. Female ghosts like the widowed Petni were portrayed as attracted to fish, given the nineteenth-century Indian tradition of widows living an ascetic life with dietary regulations. With the criminalisation of Sati (widow burning) and the legalization of widow remarriage by the colonial government, women became sites of conflict for redefining ‘tradition’. Women responded diversely, and whilst Petni did emerge as a critique of policing widowed women’s dietary choices, there were counter-narratives which critiqued the practice of widow remarriage. Most notably, this can be seen in Kanchanmala Debi’s short story from 1914, which narrates the story of a widower remarrying, which causes immense pain for the ghost of his first wife. As the newly-wedded couple returns to the village, their boat overturns and the second wife drowns. However, the ghost of the loving first wife rescues the man, reminding him of their shared life and love, and he remains a bachelor till his death.
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s short story titled Oshoriri reveals how a Bengali middle-class man from Calcutta mistook his low caste dark-skinned servant in Ranchi for a ‘ghost.’ The tale ends with a strong note on the social constructions of the aesthetic facade of a man, in contradistinction to a ghost, and how this dichotomy was balanced on an understanding of Victorian notions of outward appearance. Hence, specific categories of low caste ghosts were marginalised even in their death as an expression of the powerful afterlife of the stringent specificities of caste and religion that even death could not transcend. Thus, the socio-economic and political impact of colonial dominance was translated into the languages of the spectral world through the idioms of religious, social, and gender discrimination, and racial hierarchies.
In some tales like the Jola ar Sat Bhoot (The Muslim Weaver and Seven Ghosts), they emerged as benevolent figures helping poor peasants out of financial misery, while also representing the spirit of resistance against the oppressive British regime. However, the figure of the benevolent ghost was essentially limited to the sphere of rural narratives, since urban miseries appeared to be apparently incurable even by ghostly benevolence. In the urban narratives, the ghosts appeared more as a threat to the luxuries and comforts, such as electricity, enjoyed by the city dwellers. Socially constructed notions of hygiene associated with poverty, such as bodily stink and dirty fingernails, were regarded as aversive even to ghosts, let alone humans! The poor were outcast even in the domain of enjoying the privilege of ghostly attention in the fiction generated in elite and gentrified urban spaces.
What’s haunting us in 2020?
As Halloween and Diwali season comes around and we plan our physically distanced and sanitised holidays, it is almost imperative to ask what’s haunting us this year. The obvious answer is, of course, the coronavirus, accurately depicted by Lilly Singh in her latest video which says ‘nothing is scarier than 2020’. The plotline of apocalyptic science-fiction based on biological warfare has become our lived reality overnight, and by this point, it is not even the ‘new’ normal anymore. What scares me the most is the dehumanising impact the virus has had on a vast section of humanity. It has held up a mirror for reflecting the injustices and oppression prevalent in society, lurking under the surface of Netflix and Chill nights, Instagram hashtags, and Twitter trends. The virus has brought out the inhumanity of humanity more than ever before. And this is what is really scary! Our true ghost is not so much an unknown virus, as it is the knowledge that whilst we sit comfortably in our homes, more and more people become homeless, subjected to ruthless exploitation, or worse, death due to inability to afford healthcare.
How can we turn the light on then, to scare these ghosts away? For me, the answer lies in recognising the violence caused by universal abstractions like capital and the forces of the free market, which solidify diverse oppressive hierarchies such as race, gender, nationality, and ethnicity. I tend to think of this year as a moment of labour pain which humanity has to endure for a brave and more humane world to be born. After all, it was the disillusionment of an industrialised world which produced a Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, it was the need to challenge patriarchal models of democracy which spawned the Suffrage movement, and it was in the tumultuous world of 2020 in which we witnessed the fall of Rhodes. Therefore, in history and ghost stories both, I find hope. Hope for a radically egalitarian future, where we can all look past the fear of these ghosts, turn on the light, see them for what they are, and through a powerful politics of empathy form fraternities and alliances which would birth a brave new world. It is then that we can once again enjoy good horror fiction while keeping the horrors safely at bay in historical archives, and hence, far away from our lifeworlds.
Shuvatri Dasgupta is a graduate student in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. When she is not in libraries and archives, she goes for walks in picturesque villages, and daydreams of anti-capitalist futures. She can be reached at sd781@cam.ac.uk.
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