Interview

Interview - Riksundar Banerjee, Author - Haunted Places of India

- Riksundar Banerjee

What inspired you to explore the haunted places of India and write a book about them?

Haunted a term is linked mostly with horror. Horror rather than fear is a basic emotion of the human mind. Everybody’s fear is unique and they react differently in each situation. When I started researching the genre of horror, I found that haunted places or the horror associated with haunted places stands as a collective emotion. The stories of these places somewhere are orally narrated, found mishaps in some places, some are rumors. The incidents or myths are deep reflections of society. There are basic differences between horror when an individual commits suicide in a mansion and a mass death of labor in mines. So haunted places attracted me to explore more social truths and the class characters in the mirror of horror.

Could you share one particularly chilling or memorable experience you had while visiting one of these haunted locations?

Frankly speaking, I don’t believe in ghosts but I do believe in ghostliness. I enjoy the echo of voidness. The empty silent classroom or laboratories, historical places with the shadow of bloodbaths, and the old constructions at night all have silent languages. I felt that eeriness. Somebody was there and nobody is there - this gap of non-existence is something I tried to find. So I had a different experience of eeriness related to sound and vision while traveling to these places.

How did you go about collecting the legends, facts, and oral tales from various sources? Did you encounter any challenges during the research process?