Bak

The water gives it away before anything else does. A tank that has begun to sink back into the ground goes quiet and green, the banks slump, weed closes over the surface like a lid, and the air above it turns faintly foul, old fish and stagnancy and something that has been wet far too long. Benudhar Rajkhowa, who set the Assamese spirits down in writing in 1905, was blunt about the cause. The bak’s body emits an offensive smell, and that smell passes into the very water he wanders over.

He gave the creature four sentences and a proverb, and the proverb has outlasted almost everything else. Hahar oparat siyal raja, pota pukhurit bak raja. A jackal is the lord of poultry; a bak is supreme in a deserted tank. It is a small kingdom and a precise one. Rajkhowa filed the bak first among the aqueous spirits of Assam, ahead of the dot, the jakh, the datial, the jalshai and the jalnarayan, and the ranking has stuck. Where there is old water going bad, there is a bak in it.

What he looks like is a harder question than it ought to be, because the oldest account does not say. Rajkhowa lingers over the dot, eighteen feet of jet-black slime with fingers like spikes, and then gives the bak nothing but a stink and an appetite. Later tellings from the fishing country fill the gap only slightly: a clucking noise out on the water, and feet that point backwards, so a line of prints in the mud of a beel runs away from the place the walker actually went. That is the whole of it. A smell, a sound, and a track that cannot be read. No account says where a bak comes from either. He is not born, not cursed, not the leftover of any particular death. He is simply what an old pond has instead of a landlord.

The appetite is the constant. He is fond of fish and he catches them by netting, which is a strangely domestic detail for a demon, and he is not above letting other men do the work first. Rajkhowa noted that the bak and the dot go quietly to the fish traps set in the channels and eat whatever has swum in overnight. They will eat shells. They have been known to eat silk cocoons out of a bag while a man is still carrying it. A fisherman hauls his trap at first light and finds it clean, the withies still tied, the water rings still spreading, nothing inside.

The night version is worse. Fishermen on the Kolong and the Kopili have long held that a man who goes out after dark can be pressed face down into the mud of the beel and left there, and that a man fishing in open river can simply be drowned. The advice that follows is practical rather than pious. Do not carry fish home at night. The smell of a full basket is an invitation.

Somewhere in the telling the bak acquired a pouch. It hangs from his shoulder, the people who tell the story call it the bakor julunga, and everything he can do lives inside it. Whoever takes it from him and shuts it in a bamboo basket of mustard seed has him. He puts on a man’s shape and stays, and he works. He fetches, he cleans, he does the household chores of the family that holds the bag, and he does them well. The older record gives that same spectral bag to the dot instead, which is either a slippage between two spirits who share a pond or a sign that the bak grew into the role later. Nobody sorted it out at the time, and the pond spirits of Assam have never been tidy about their borders.

The famous encounter runs through a killing. A man goes out on the water and comes back not himself. In the version that reached print through the Assamese writer Imran Hussain, whose story of the water spirit was published in 2003, two cousins row out to a lake near a cremation ground below an old Ow tree, and one of them looks up to find the other eating raw fish in the moonlight, working through it fast and wetly. He understands what is sitting in the boat with him, gets to the bank, seizes the pouch and throws it into a casket of mustard in the granary. Through a slit in the bamboo wall he watches the spirit weep and beg for it. It does not get it back. Unable to shed the dead man’s shape, it stays on in the house for six months, and a child is born there afterwards.

That child is the point. In Assam a boy can be called bakor putek, the bak’s son, and the name follows him. A 2012 Assamese film took its title from exactly that phrase and built its plot on what the accusation does to an ordinary village marriage. The supernatural half of the story is the entertaining half. The damage is entirely human.

His powers all follow from the water he keeps. He can pass for a man closely enough to be fed at a family table. He can hold that borrowed face for months. He can strip a season’s fishing without leaving a mark on a single trap, and the voice that calls a sleeper to the door in the small hours may be his rather than a husband’s or a mother’s. Against all that, he is easy to strand. Everything he is depends on a bag he cannot afford to set down, and a basket of mustard seed will hold it. Rajkhowa recorded one further limit that the modern retellings have quietly dropped: the bak, like the dot, does not generally kill a man. He beats him senseless and leaves him to get home as best he can.

His real weakness is not folkloric. A bak needs a tank going bad, a bamboo grove, a beel with nobody on it after sunset, and those are being drained, filled and lit. The stories now arrive with dates attached, something a grandfather saw in the forties, told in towns where the nearest water comes out of a pipe. Take away the deserted tank and the lord of it has nowhere left to be supreme.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Bak in Assamese folklore?

The bak is a water spirit of Assam that lives in deserted ponds, old sinking tanks and beels. Benudhar Rajkhowa’s 1905 survey of Assamese spirits classifies it as the first of the terrestrial aqueous spirits, describes it as fond of fish, and says its body gives off an offensive smell that passes into the water it moves through. In the living tradition it also drowns fishermen and takes their shape.

How does the Bak kill people?

The bak targets people on the water after dark. Accounts from the fishing communities of the Kolong and Kopili rivers describe it pushing a night fisherman face down into the mud of a beel and leaving him there, or drowning a man outright in open river. Rajkhowa’s earlier account is milder and says the bak usually beats a man senseless rather than killing him.

What is the Bak’s pouch and why does it matter?

The bak is said to carry a pouch on its shoulder called the bakor julunga, and its powers are held inside it. If someone snatches the pouch and shuts it inside a bamboo basket of mustard seed, the bak is left powerless, takes human form and works as a servant in that household. Rajkhowa’s 1905 book assigns a very similar spectral bag to a different Assamese spirit, the dot.

Why is someone called bakor putek in Assam?

Bakor putek means the bak’s son, and it is an accusation aimed at a child whose paternity is in doubt. It comes from the belief that a bak can kill a fisherman, wear his face and go on living in his house with his wife. A 2012 Assamese film of that name is built around the social ruin the label causes.

How do you avoid a Bak?

The standard precaution is to stay off old, isolated water after dark and not to carry fish home at night, since the smell of a full basket draws it. Beyond that, the bak is bound to its pouch, so anyone who takes and hides the bag controls it completely.

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