Brahmadaitya

On the edge of the village there is a banyan nobody goes near after dark. Everyone who tried had his neck wrung. A little way off stands another tree, a vakula, with small pale flowers that smell sweet at night, and in that one lives a different sort of ghost. He does not wring necks. He watches a thin, frightened man come stumbling up in the dark, and he asks him, quite politely, whether he is afraid.

That is a brahmadaitya. In Bengal the dead are sorted much as the living were, and he is what a Brahmin becomes when he dies and does not move on. Lal Behari Day, a Bengali clergyman who wrote down the beliefs of his home district of Burdwan in 1874, called the brahmadaityas the first and most honourable class of ghosts. They are for the most part inoffensive, he says, and never harm a traveller overtaken by night. Unlike other ghosts, they will not eat just anything. They take only food that is ritually clean.

How one comes to be is told two ways. In that first account any departed Brahmin may turn into one. Nine years later, in a note to his Folk-Tales of Bengal, Day narrowed it: a brahmadaitya is the ghost of a Brahmin who dies unmarried. The two statements sit side by side and nobody has settled them.

What he looks like is harder. The other ghosts of the countryside are described without mercy, tall as palmyra palms, very thin and very black. The brahmadaitya gets no such portrait in the old record. He is a voice, a presence in the branches, a command that is obeyed. The picture comes later and from living tellers. In Bengal and Bangladesh today he wears a white dhoti and the sacred thread, and he is tall and fair. The tree has shifted as well. Day’s ghost keeps to a vakula. Later tellers put him in a banyan or a peepul.

On an ordinary night he does very little. He sits in his tree in the warm dark and keeps himself to himself. He is too pure to share a meal with the things in the banyan and too dead to share one with the village. He lets the late traveller pass.

The story that made his name is the one Day printed in 1883, as he had heard it from the old women who told tales in Bengal. A Brahmin and his wife are so poor that they live on begged rice and wild greens. A new landlord takes over the village and makes an offer: a hundred bighas of land, rent free for ever, to any man who will go at night to the haunted banyan and cut off a branch. The Brahmin reckons he is nearly dead of hunger already and takes the wager. On the way he stops under the vakula tree. “Are you afraid, Brahman?” says the ghost who lives there. “Tell me what you wish to do, and I’ll help you.”

They walk to the banyan together. The ghosts come rushing at the man, and the brahmadaitya speaks one order. They stop where they are. Then they cut the branch for him themselves, in a moment. The landlord checks the bough against the tree in the morning and signs over the land.

The help does not end there. The paddy ripens and the Brahmin has no money for reapers, so he borrows a hundred sickles and leaves them under the vakula at dusk. The brahmadaitya calls up a hundred ghosts and gives each of them one bigha. By morning the whole crop is cut, threshed and stored. When the Brahmin wants to feast a thousand Brahmins in thanks, the ghost supplies the kitchen: a hundred jars of ghee, a hundred jars of sugar and a hill of flour.

Then the feast is ready, and he cannot eat it. His allotted time as a ghost has run out. A flying chariot comes down for him, the pushpaka, the car of the god of wealth, and carries him up to heaven. The Brahmin lives rich for the rest of his days.

His power is rank. Every other ghost obeys him at a word, the way a village once made way for a living Brahmin, and through them he can do the work of a hundred men in a night and find stores no market could supply. He keeps his learning and his habits in death. He is still a ghost.

The limits come from the same place. He is tied to his tree and to a fixed term, and he does not choose when it ends. The rules of purity that set him above the others also shut him out of every table but his own. Nothing is recorded about how to drive one away, and the tellers never seem to have needed to. The sensible course has always been the Brahmin’s: stop under the tree, answer the question honestly, and say what you need.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Brahmadaitya?

A Brahmadaitya is the ghost of a Brahmin in the folklore of Bengal. Lal Behari Day, writing in 1874, called Brahmadaityas the first and most honourable class of ghosts. A Brahmadaitya lives in a tree, eats only ritually clean food and is mostly harmless to people.

Is a Brahmadaitya dangerous?

A Brahmadaitya is usually not dangerous. Day’s 1874 account says Brahmadaityas are for the most part inoffensive and never harm travellers caught out at night. In the best-known tale a Brahmadaitya protects a poor Brahmin from other ghosts and makes him rich.

How does someone become a Brahmadaitya?

There are two answers. Lal Behari Day’s 1874 account says Brahmadaityas are the spirits of departed Brahmins in general. His 1883 Folk-Tales of Bengal says a Brahmadaitya is the ghost of a Brahmin who dies unmarried.

What happens in the Story of a Brahmadaitya?

A starving Brahmin accepts a landlord’s offer of a hundred bighas of land if he will cut a branch from a haunted banyan tree at night. A Brahmadaitya living in a nearby vakula tree goes with him and orders the other ghosts to cut the branch. The Brahmadaitya later has a hundred ghosts harvest the Brahmin’s crop in one night and supplies a feast for a thousand Brahmins, then rises to heaven in the pushpaka chariot.

What does a Brahmadaitya look like?

The oldest written accounts do not describe the Brahmadaitya’s body. Present-day Bengali tellers describe a Brahmadaitya as tall and fair, dressed in a white dhoti with the sacred thread of a Brahmin.

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