Vetala

Smoke lay in a low sheet across the burning ground, and the body hanging from the tree at its far edge had not been touched by birds. King Trivikramasena cut it down, took the weight across his shoulder, and started back through the ash. Somewhere past the first scatter of bones the corpse opened its eyes and asked, quite courteously, whether he would like a story to shorten the walk.

He had got there the way kings usually do, by accepting a gift. For years a mendicant named Kshantishila had come to the audience hall each morning, bowed, and handed over a single piece of fruit. The king passed each one to his storeroom without looking at it, because that is what you do with a daily fruit. Then a fruit split open on the floor and a jewel rolled out of the pulp, and the whole polite decade of them turned out to have been payment in advance. The mendicant named his fee. On the fourteenth night of the dark fortnight, alone, the king was to walk into the cremation ground and bring him the body from the tree.

The thing in the body set its own terms. It would tell a tale, and the tale would end in a question. If the king knew the answer and kept quiet, his head would burst apart. If he spoke, the vetala would slip loose and be back in the branches before the echo died. So the king answered, and walked back, and cut the corpse down again, and answered again. Twenty-four times. Sanskrit story-collections rarely make their heroes look this tired.

The twenty-fifth question has no clean answer, and the king’s silence is finally honest, which is the point the whole exercise has been building toward. The vetala rewards it with information. The mendicant, he explains, intends to have the king bow before the corpse in the ritual, and to take his head off while it is lowered, and to trade that head for sovereignty over the spirits. He also supplies the counter. Ask the man to demonstrate the prostration first. Kshantishila knelt on the warm ash to show him how, and Trivikramasena killed him there. The corpse was the only honest party in the transaction.

That story is Book Twelve of Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagara, put together in eleventh-century Kashmir out of older material that no longer survives. It is not the only version. Kshemendra worked the same cycle into his Brihatkathamanjari, Shivadasa produced a Sanskrit recension of his own, and Jambhaladatta’s version was edited and translated by M. B. Emeneau for the American Oriental Society in 1934. The tales travelled onward into the Hindi Baital Pachisi and from there into every Indian childhood with a television in it.

They also travelled badly into English. Richard Burton published Vikram and the Vampire, or Tales of Hindu Devilry, in 1870, kept eleven of the twenty-five stories, rewrote them freely, and hung the word vampire on a creature that does not drink blood. The label stuck so hard that it is now the first thing said about the vetala in most languages. It is wrong. A vetala takes a corpse the way a rider takes a horse, and the corpse is a vehicle rather than a meal; what it wants from the living is not blood but the chance to keep talking.

Where it comes from depends on which shelf you take it off. In folk reckoning a vetala is one of the unquiet dead, a person whose funeral rites were never completed and who therefore has nowhere to go and nothing to do but interfere. The Puranas give it a grander parentage. The Shiva Purana has Bhairava, posted as doorkeeper while Shiva and Parvati were undisturbed, look at the goddess as a man looks at a woman, and be cursed to be born on earth as Vetala. The Kalika Purana builds the same episode into something much larger and stranger, with two dark gatekeepers born from spilled seed, a queen shut in a tower to outrun a sage’s curse, and twin monkey-faced sons named Bhairava and Vetala who end up gods anyway. Both accounts agree on the essential relation: the vetala belongs to Shiva’s retinue, and it is kin to Bhairava.

Along the Konkan coast that relation is not literary. In Goa, in Sindhudurg, in Kolhapur and down as far as Karwar, Vetal or Betal or Vetoba is a working village god, a gramadevata and a kshetrapala, the guardian of the boundary. The historian V. R. Mitragotri found him in pre-Portuguese Goa as a deity of the masses, housed in small thatched shrines rather than proper temples, his image nude and fierce and larger than life with a sword and a bowl. He rarely appears in royal inscriptions, because kings were not his constituency. I. P. Prabhushastri counted forty-nine Betal shrines in Goa, nineteen of them destroyed under Portuguese rule, and dated the surviving Nagdo Betal sculpture at Loliem to the twelfth century. The same study separates a fierce Betal, who once received liquor and animal offerings, from a mild one, who receives betel leaves, cloth and sandals.

The sandals are the detail that lasts. At Poinguinim, when a wish is granted, the devotee brings the god a pair of leather chappals, because Betal walks the village all night and wears them out. On the morning after a festival there is stiff new leather stacked at the feet of a black stone figure, and the priests will tell you it will be scuffed soon enough. A god who needs footwear is a god who is understood to be actually out there in the dark, past the last house, where the road stops being anyone’s responsibility.

Its powers follow from what it is. Being loose from the ordinary sequence of things, it knows the past and the future and reads people accurately enough to be dangerous, which is exactly why tantric practitioners went to cremation grounds to try to bind one: the vetala-sadhana sought to animate a corpse and compel it to hand over supernatural power. In the Marathi Nath literature Vetoba commands whole armies of bhutas and pretas. The limits follow just as directly. Mantra holds it off, completed funeral rites dissolve its reason for existing, and a disciplined ascetic can simply out-master it, as Matsyendranath is said to have done before handing the defeated Vetoba over to Shiva to work as a watchman. Its deepest weakness is temperamental rather than magical. A vetala cannot stop telling stories, and it cannot bear an unanswered question, and both of those compulsions are handles. Trivikramasena won by using them for twenty-four nights running.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a vetala?

A vetala is a spirit in Hindu folklore that takes possession of a dead body and uses it as a vehicle. It dwells in cremation and charnel grounds, prevents the corpse it occupies from decaying, and can leave the body whenever it chooses. Because it stands outside ordinary time it is credited with knowledge of the past, present and future.

Is a vetala a vampire?

No. The vampire label comes from Richard Burton’s 1870 English adaptation Vikram and the Vampire, which kept eleven of the twenty-five original tales and rewrote them freely. A vetala rides a corpse rather than feeding on the living, and blood-drinking is not part of its Sanskrit description.

What are the twenty-five tales of the vetala?

The Vetala Panchavimshati is a cycle of twenty-five riddling stories, best known from Book Twelve of Somadeva’s eleventh-century Kathasaritsagara. A king carries a vetala-possessed corpse out of a cremation ground for a mendicant, and the vetala tells a story ending in a question. If the king answers, the spirit escapes back to its tree, so the journey has to be made again and again.

How do you get rid of a vetala?

Mantras repel a vetala, and completing the funeral rites that were never performed for the dead person releases it from its stranded state. A sufficiently disciplined ascetic can also subdue one outright, which is what Marathi Nath tradition says Matsyendranath did to Vetoba before he was set to work as a village guardian.

Who is Vetoba?

Vetoba, also called Vetal or Betal, is the same being worshipped as a living village god along the Konkan coast of Goa, Maharashtra and Karnataka. He is a guardian of village boundaries, associated with Bhairava and Shiva’s retinue, and is carved as a fierce black figure holding a sword and a bowl. Devotees at Poinguinim offer him leather sandals because he is believed to walk the village every night.

Related Entries

Pishacha, Preta, Rakshasa, Churel, Yaksha, Yakshi, Kaal Bhairav, Shiva, Rudra, Yama, Dakini, Vampire, Jiangshi, Draugr, Vrykolakas