Choorile

There was a right way to bury a woman who died carrying, and it did not look like kindness. In the hill districts of northern India her fingernails were pinned with small iron spikes and her thumbs and great toes bound together with iron rings. Elsewhere the grave was filled with thorns and weighted down with heavy stones. In some places mustard seed was scattered along the entire road her body had travelled to the burial ground. None of this was punishment. All of it was arithmetic against what she might otherwise become.

A churel is the ghost of a woman who died while pregnant, or on the day of her child’s birth, or inside the run of ritually unclean days that follow a birth. In Guyana and Trinidad, where the name is more often written Choorile, her whole existence rests on one grim piece of accounting. The mother went into the ground. The child did not go with her.

She crossed the Atlantic in the same ships as the people who feared her. Indentured labourers out of northern India carried her into the sugar colonies along with their gods, their festivals and their language, and over a few generations the many scattered local versions of the churel settled in the Caribbean into one comparatively uniform figure, standing in a crowded field of jumbies alongside the soucouyant, the lagahoo and the baccoo.

In the districts where William Crooke was collecting in the 1890s, the churel was reckoned more dreaded than the ghost of a man taken by a tiger. Her name has been linked, tentatively, to that of the Chuhra sweeper caste, and the belief underneath her was the horror attached to a woman dead while ceremonially impure. Different peoples drew the line in different places. The Korwas of Mirzapur held that any woman who died in the delivery room became one, and admitted they had no idea what finally became of her. The Patharis and Majhwars extended it to any death within pregnancy or uncleanness. The Bhuiyars went further still and said that baby girls dead before their twentieth day became churels, living afterwards inside stones on the hillsides. In some villages she ended up quietly enrolled among the ordinary local godlings, sharing the common shrine and taking her portion of the periodical offerings.

The record is unusually precise about which part of her is wrong. Crooke’s informants said she was sometimes fair in front and black behind, but that she invariably had her feet turned round, heels in front and toes pointing back down the road she had come. The Caribbean accounts that reached print linger instead on the hair and the arms: hair long, unbound and dishevelled, streaming down over her face, a white dress, and the dead infant carried against her chest, crying thinly for milk while she wails over it in the small hours.

Crooke had a young butler at Etah who told him about his own narrow escape. A churel was living in a pipal tree beside the cemetery. He saw her sitting on the wall at dusk, and he stopped, and they got into conversation. Then he looked down at her feet. He got away, and he would never use that road again without an escort.

That was the older shape of her, and it was predatory in a specific direction. In northern India she generally took the form of a lovely young woman and worked at night on young men, the good-looking ones by preference, carrying them off to a country of her own. Any man who ate the food offered to him there stayed until his beauty was used up, and was sent back to the world grey-haired, to find everyone he knew long dead. Simply seeing a churel could bring on a wasting illness. Answering when she called in the night was fatal.

The Caribbean churile kept the death and let most of the seduction go. The shapeshifting faded. Instead of hunting men on the road she turned toward pregnant women, following them and possessing them out of envy for the thing that killed her, and the whole miserable catalogue of stillbirths, miscarriages, dead newborns and troubled pregnancies was laid at her door. Some churiles are said not to know they are dead at all. They go looking for their own children and take other women’s babies instead, out of confusion or out of spite, and it is not always clear which.

Her second target is domestic and exact. She goes after her former husband, not with violence but with sickness, and the reasons given are specific: because he abused her while she was alive, or because he has neglected the children she left him. The women of her old household are not safe from her either. Whatever else she is, she is not indiscriminate.

Her weaknesses are the weaknesses of the body she left behind. The reversed feet betray her every time, which is why they are the first thing anyone looks for and why she was so often caught at the last possible moment. She moves at night, and the cock ends her. That is the reasoning behind the mustard: a churel rising at dusk would stoop to gather the scattered grains, lose herself in counting them, and still be counting when the light came, unable to reach the house she wanted. For a person she has already fastened on, the cure is a specialist. A Baiga is called in to sacrifice a goat, or the afflicted man puts rice and barley on his head, turns about two or three times and shakes the grain off toward the jungle, and she lets him go. She keeps coming back, though, and has to be paid.

She is largely written off as superstition now, which has not stopped Indian Caribbean artists reaching for her. Vanessa Godden made a performance film of her in 2016. Kevin Jared Hosein wrote her the same year as a pregnant woman murdered and dumped in the mud. Ryan Persadie put her on stage in drag. Sabiyha Rasheed recorded ‘Choorile’ in 2020, taking the word as it gets thrown at living women, for being too much in their bodies and too loud in their manner, and singing it back as a boast. Too sharp, too loud, she’s a churile.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Choorile?

A Choorile is a jumbie of Guyana and Trinidad, the spirit of a woman who died while pregnant or in childbirth. She is held in the world by her separation from her child. The figure came to the Caribbean from northern India with indentured labourers, where she is known as the churel.

What does a Choorile do to pregnant women?

The Choorile follows pregnant women out of envy and possesses them, and she is blamed for miscarriages, stillbirths, newborn deaths and other complications of pregnancy. Some Choorile spirits are said not to realise they have died, and to take other women’s babies while searching for their own. Her former household is not exempt from this.

How do you recognise a Choorile?

In the Caribbean accounts she appears as a woman in a white dress with long unbound hair falling over her face, carrying a dead infant in her arms and wailing at night while the child cries for milk. The North Indian tellings of the churel add the detail people look for first: her feet are turned round, with the heels in front and the toes pointing behind her.

Why does a Choorile attack her husband?

A Choorile attacks her former husband with sickness rather than violence, and the reasons are specific rather than random. She returns for a man who abused her while she was alive, or who has neglected the children she bore him before she died.

How were people protected from a Choorile?

The precautions were mostly applied to the body rather than to the ghost. In northern India a woman who died pregnant might be buried instead of cremated with thorns and heavy stones piled on the grave, have iron spikes driven into her fingernails and iron rings tying her thumbs and great toes, or have mustard seed sown along the road her corpse had travelled, since a churel who stops to count the grains is still counting at daybreak. Someone she had already fastened on was treated by a Baiga, who sacrificed a goat, and she then had to be propitiated regularly.

Related Entries

Jumbee, Baccoo, Massacooraman, Moongazer, Douen, Lagahoo, Soucouyant, Loogaroo, Churel, Pishacha, Rakshasa, Preta, Pontianak, Langsuir, La Llorona