Fright club

What is your favourite ghost story? Now look closer: What does it say about the community in which it sprung up, and survived? A new archive aims to bring India’s wide array of tales about spooks and spirits onto one platform, and examine what they tell us about fear, power, anger

- Sukanya Datta

Imost everyone has a ghost story to share in India, based on something they heard or saw, fear or believe.

In these shadow worlds dwell jealous djinns; hungry chudails (always, for some reason, with their feet turned backwards); manipulative nishi daks, calling out to people in the voice of a loved one; powerful brahmarakshasas, the restless spirits of deviant priests or scholars.

These are only the most familiar tropes. Every city and community evolves its own.

“There is something deeply social about ghost stories, even in the sharing and borrowing of them,” says Azania Patel, 26, a researcher with a Master's in public policy and South Asian studies from Oxford University, who is also a research fellow with the Chicago-based innovation lab Equitech Futures.

Why do our ghosts look the way they do? What determines which ones live on? What do they reveal about us? For five years, Patel has been studying the politics of fear, power and identity embedded in stories of the supernatural.

She and Diwakar Kishore, 36, a PhD scholar at London School of Economics, have now co-founded India Ghost Project (indiaghostproject.com), a research initiative that aims to create India’s first open-access digital archive of paranormal narratives.

Their website aims to feature tales from across the country, interviews with the people who contributed them, and research material that represents the context in which each story emerged.

The project was born of a ghost-story-swapping session too.