Why so many ghosts?

All old cities have their tales of ghosts, djinns and the so-called paranormal activities and Delhi, a city that has been in existence for more then a thousand years or so, has its fair share. One has heard all kinds of stories of sightings, of strange goings on, of headless horsemen rushing out of thick fog and riding through solid masonry and similar tales of the macabre and morbid. The funny thing about all these tales is that they are never first person accounts; they are narrations of things that happened to close relatives or next door neighbours but rarely to the narrator.

The narrators vouch for the truthfulness of the account since the raconteur was an elderly relative who had no reason to lie to them. People accept these declarations of truthfulness despite knowing how easily all of us lie to each other and to gullible kids who love and trust us.

The debate on the existence or absence of ghosts, ghouls and spirits can be postponed for another occasion but let us, through an exploration of Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, which was believed to be crawling with ghosts till a few decades ago, try to understand the possible reasons why certain places acquire the reputation of being haunted.

To understand the reason for the high density of ghosts in this territory one needs to go back 160 years to 1857. Delhi was liberated from the control of the British on May 9, 1857 and was retaken by the British Forces of the East India Company on September 16, 1857.

Once the British forces entered the city they unleashed a ruthless massacre. Tens of thousands were killed and there are numerous documents, far too many to be listed, that have recorded the barbarity of those who had come to civilise us.

The interviews conducted by Khwaja Hasan Nizami, with the survivors of 1857, the letters of Ghalib and the meticulously researched Delhi Between the Two Empires by Prof. Narayani Gupta, OUP 1997, are just a few of these records.

Hundreds were driven out of the city; many with no resources were forced to camp on the road outside Dehli Darwaza leading to the shrine of Nizam ud Din. The same road is now known as Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg. Many died of hunger and disease. On September 22, 1857, two sons and a grandson of Bahadur Shah Zafar were shot dead in front of the Khooni Darwaza by a mercenary called Hodson. It is said that many of the rebels were hung from the top of the gate.

It is a popular belief that those who die unnatural deaths turn into ghosts and are trapped in this world as ghosts till their natural death arrives. The large number of unnatural deaths caused by the executions and the massacre combined with this belief produced a harvest of ghosts. What added colour to the mixture of fact and faith were the atmospherics of the locale.

The area outside Delhi Gate was a wilderness. This included two graveyards, opposite each other — the Sarai of Fareed Khan, that had become the prison and where scores of executions had taken place (the present site of the Maulana Azad Medical College), and the ruins of Ferozeshah Kotla, which were a popular hideout of robbers and thugs. There was also the looming presence of Khooni Darwaza and the then abandoned mosque built by a courtier of Akbar Abdún Nabi, (now the headquarters of Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind at ITO). The path was overgrown with weeds and one had to cross a tributary of the Jamna before proceeding towards Nizamuddin.

None of the newspaper offices, the buildings of the UGC, the INSA building, the ITO complex, the Police Headquarters and the Institution of Engineers existed. Right outside the Dehli Darwaza and all the way to the prison were huge peepal trees, popularly believed to be the abode of ghosts; all this was ideally suited to sightings of ghosts.

Gradually offices, the medical college and newspaper offices that worked through the night came up and suddenly the ghosts disappeared. We are told that a few are still around, lurking in dark crumbling recesses of the 14th century city of Kotla of Ferozeshah, but what about the others? Are they afraid of those who are not afraid of them? Or is it that they have spent their time in this world of the mortals and have no need to hang around any longer.

The author is a historian and organises the Delhi Heritage Walk for children and adults.