Where Anklets Still Nights

It was a storm-struck night 30 years ago. Boteshwar Thakur, who was 52 years old then, had gone to his village in Uttar Pradesh along with his two daughters. His wife was alone at home, which was on the ground floor of an ancient palace of the former king of Andul, in West Bengal’s Howrah district. “Suddenly, she heard an ear-splitting crash,” Thakur says, recalling what his wife told him later. The terrace had caved in, along with the floor of the ‘naach mahal’ on the level just below, exposing a black sky lacerated with thunder and lightening. And there were voices from within. It was eerie. “It could have been a coincidence,” Thakur says, trying not to believe rumours he hears about his home being haunted. “After all, this is a very old and crumbling haveli and it was raining heavily.”

But locals insist that “the ghosts that haunt Andul Rajbari” pick out people when they are alone. “In all these years, why did the roof of this rajbari fall on the one night when everyone was gone?” Say­antan Mukherjee (22), who lives close by, asks. “I come here with friends, especially on hot summer nights because the windsw­ept open space around the mansion is soo­thing. We often stay past midnight. But it is only on the night I came alone that I heard ‘it’,” he adds. Referred to euphemistically as a disembodied ‘it’, Sayantan is talking about “the sound of ghungroos and the wail of children” emanating from inside the UNI­­nhabited sections of the mansion. Oth­­ers say that they have “felt sudden, une­xplained drafts of cold wind” and “seen sha­­­dowy figures” sweep past towards the rajbari.

Is Andul Rajbari haunted? Or, for that matter, a large number of spaces across Bengal—from rotting royal palaces to decaying mansions, from subway stations to river ports, crematoriums and cemeteries—that are rumoured to be? Or is it just Bengalis’ everlasting fascination with eve­rything remotely spectral?

Subhas Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, a res­earcher of the supernatural, points out that the idea of a ghost is not limited to the vis­ual, but includes a strong sense of a presence. Inexplicable sounds, smells and sen­­sations are deemed ‘ghostly’, he says.

The debate over whether ghosts exist or not is a cliched one. Bengal, run for over three decades by a Communist regime, and known for its secular, progressive, liberal ideology, has, for the most part, walked a curious tightrope over anything supernatural. While ‘spiritual’ practices, including astrology, tantra and black magic have con­­tinued on a secret course, a rank-­sme­lling stigma had attached to them, with the educated bhadralok deriding and lampooning them openly. At the same time, ‘ghost stories’ have been wildly popular with readers, with almost all leading authors over the past 150 years having dipped their nibs in the obscure charms of the supernatural. The preponderance of bestselling, motley volumes of ‘ghost stories’ (many of indifferent quality) prove the hold of the otherworldly on the Bengali psyche.

Lately, however, the matter is slipping beyond the merely literary. A trend has emerged in Bengal wherein more people are openly expressing their belief in the ‘occult’—black magic and witchcraft, of which ghosts and spirits are an integral part. Recently, a city bookstore hosted a festival dedicated to the supernatural, and has devoted a section to the topic. “The supernatural needs to be given due imp­ortance. There is a great deal of ignorance about it. I felt that through my bookstore I could disseminate proper information,” says the owner who, perhaps appropriately, opted to remain nameless.

Bengal is now host to several societies which practice witchcraft and black magic. Self-declared ‘witch’ Ipshita Roy Chakra­verty’s Wicca Brigade has gained considerable recognition, with a following all over the world. Indeed, according to Bandyo­padhyay, the growing acceptance of the idea of the supernatural is a global trend. “There are numerous famous instances of people relating tales of out-body-experien­ces,” he observes. “This has led the medical and scientific world in the west to no longer negate the existence of spirits. Our problem is that we look down on the religious, spi­ritual or supernatural without adequate research. In the West, nothing is accepted as established truth without evidential proof, but they don’t dismiss it out of hand. Their research is already beginning to yield results of the existence of other realities.”

Members of these secretive groups, many of whom are researchers of the occult, spend years pursuing the wraithlike, elusive subject. “It’s like doing a doctorate. To know the subject fully you have to devote time to it. If you begin with an attitude of ‘disbelief’ you will never find the truth,” said a Wicca Brigade member. Part of the group’s dedicated activities include visits to ‘disturbed’ areas, including houses reputed to be ‘haunted’. Most members have experienced otherworldly pre­­sence; they have seen, heard, smelt, even felt, ghosts. Of course, not everyone who’s had a brush with the uncanny is a Wiccan or a ghost-hunter. Personalities who have declared that they have seen ghosts include author Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, actor-politician Moon Moon Sen, actress Rituparna Sengupta and even chief minister Mamata Banerjee. While Mukho­padhyay (many of whose stories for adolescents feature clu­­msily inept ghosts in a comic setting) had seen a shadowy figure walking past him at his old residence in Calcutta’s Lake Gar­dens one afternoon, Sen and Sengupta enc­­o­untered spirits in their hotel rooms while on shoots. “I felt someone was throttling me and I had to struggle to free myself,” says Rituparna. “I was numb with fear.” In her memoirs, Mamata wrote about seeing her father in her Kalighat house after he had died.

Such stories abound. At the 250-year-old Itachuna Rajbari in Hooghly district,   known to be among Bengal’s most haunted houses, a guest (the palace has been turned into a homestay) recalls, “I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night shivering. Suddenly, the room had turned freezing cold. A pair of eyes was staring at me. I froze. Then I saw a figure of a sari-clad woman, her head covered in a pallu, directly in front of me, standing beside the bed. Then she disappeared.” Itachuna’s owner Briti Kundu says she has long heard about the resident spirits, though she has never spotted one. “When I got married and came to this house villagers told me of an incident. Apparently, thieves had broken in and entered the naanch ghar. There, in the middle of the night, they saw some headless torsos dancing around and the heads floating separately. They fled of course.”

Can it be that these stories have been bruited about to dissuade thieves and intruders? There are medical theories to explain away ‘visions’ (one suggests that the build-up of carbon monoxide in a closed room causes the brain to hallucinate in a certain pattern, including seeing shadowy figures.). Clinical psychiatrist Debashis Ray speaks of extreme fear as a psychological condition which can bring on hallucinations.

Rationalists may laugh it off, but for many visitors to Andul or Itachuna it is not too difficult to hear footsteps from the past. After all, so many memories are tra­pped within these peeling walls, under its high ceilings and through their cold passages. Majestic chandeliers dangle like oddly strung pieces of a cracked mirror. Sunlight half illuminates motes of swirling dust. And moonlight, spreading shadows, claims the vaulting spaces for the others.

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The Hungry Stones

• Royal Calcutta Turf Club and its race course are said to haunted by the ghost of a white race horse

• Mullick Ghat, on the Hooghly in Calcutta:  At dawn each day, bathers at the river below Howrah Bridge have for years spotted shadowy human hands and fingers flapping around in the water. Legend has it that these are ghosts of those who drowned/committed suicide

• Putulbari, or the House of Dolls, the ruins of a zamindar palace, is said to be haunted by the unhappy souls of harem women

• South Park Street and Lower Circular Road Cemetery Sir W.H. Macnaghten’s ghost is said to hover over his grave here; legend has it that a tree over it shivers violently when the facts of his brutal murder in Afghanistan are narrated

• Andul Rajbari Noctural visitors speak of sounds of ghungroos emerging from the former naach mahal

• Rabindra Sarobar Metro Station Commuters claim to have seen shadowy human figures jumping onto the railway tracks at specific times; many suicides have taken place on this particular spot

• National Library Former residence of Warren Hastings, it is rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of a white woman; legend has it that Lady Metcalfe was obsessed with neatness; scholars who keep their desks messy have felt someone breathing down their necks until they tidy up

• Itachuna Rajbari Owned by the Kundus, it is rumoured to be one of the most haunted palaces in West Bengal

• Burdwan Rajbari Bodies of the king’s murdered rivals were said to be buried in the compound; locals say their ghosts roam the area