A Banquet Of Spectres

The ghost story is essentially a folk form, usually better told than written. We know this, having listened to so many ourselves - punctuated by the swatting of mosquitoes during power cuts, and in train journeys, after which the long blue-lit corridor to the toilet was impregnated with silent menace. At some time or other we have all shot that slightly shame-faced look over the shoulder after a hair-raising story-telling session. This oxymoronic spin - the pleasing terror, the delicious fright - is fundamental to our enjoyment of tales of the spectral. Paradoxically, the more terrified we are, the better the story.

All of India has its ghosts, and stories are told about them. In Bengal, the bhoot has been made respectable: it is written about. The annual 'Puja' numbers of Bengali periodicals often have sections dedicated to the genre. Writers of eminence, Tagore and Mahasweta Devi included, have done their haunted-house numbers with originality and style, elevating an evening's tale to a literary artifact. Even Satyajit Ray wrote excellent ghost stories. Amitav Ghosh pays homage to this tradition in The Calcutta Chromosome, slipping in a chilling set piece - haunted station, ghost train and all.

In her Introduction to Twelve Irish Ghost Stories, Patricia Craig claims with bland certitude that the "obvious reason" why the English made a literary form out of ghost stories, while the Irish displayed a curious lack of interest in the genre, was that after the 1890s the increasingly rational English needed "compensation". The Irish had the supernatural lurking in every cupboard: proximity bred indifference.

The limitations of this argument are obvious if one looks at the richness of Bengal's 'ghost-writing' tradition. Bengal is as pervaded by the supernatural as the rest of India, yet it has made an accepted genre of the ghost story. The playfulness that makes Bengali writers discard their High Literary mantles and write nonsensical stories for children seems to feed into their interest in the numinous, the Out There. The ghost story becomes a vehicle for light-hearted speculations about the limitations of rationality, the transformation of the loved living into the feared dead, the everyday into the menacing.

Of traditional Bengali ghosts, there is a taxonomy, outlined in the Introduction to Hauntings; not only are they divided into male and female spirits, there are about 12 or 13 kinds of ghosts with specific attributes, from the nishibhoot to the petni. Because this anthology traverses a century, it demonstrates the disintegration of these old taxonomies as the bhoot moves from abandoned ruins and deserted ponds to familiar bedroom skylights.

Being a cultural anthropologist, the editor also seeks to offer an "insight into the gendered aspect of the supernatural", selecting stories in which women finally "break their silence". Some of the stories do speak of women betrayed, neglected, avaricious, lonely. In a wonderfully subtle story by Lila Majumdar, a beautiful, unloved and long-dead woman communicates her grief to another woman; in another story, a paralysed woman hungry for sexual gratification usurps the body of her young nurse; and in a disastrous attempt by Banaphool, the ghost of a raped woman thunders out from a haunted radio a speech on exploited womankind. But "gendering" the selection is unsatisfying: included here, for example, are conservation tales by Mahasweta Devi and Bibhutibhusan with forests that mysteriously gobble up those who seek to destroy them. Tarashankar Bandopadhyaya's The Witch, told by an old sorceress fighting her own malevolence, transcends gender boundaries to become a gripping meditation on the nature of evil.

The power and stark imagery of The Witch are not lost in translation. This cannot be said for all the stories. Literalness plagues several. Characters use "side-pillows" and "partake of refreshments". Comparing Suchitra Samanta's translation of Tagore's The Hungering Stones with Amitav Ghosh's translation of it as The Hunger of Stones in Civil Lines 2 could be a set exercise for would-be translators. Both follow the text closely, line for line. But line for line, Ghosh's translation is a creative coup, while Samanta's is often stilted. It seems invidious, however, to pit Samanta against Amitav Ghosh. Her translations are usually readable enough and, through her, the spirit of the Bengali ghost manages to cackle on, even in English.