9.8 Why Delhi Never Sleeps (It’s the Ghosts) ft. Eric Chopra

Wait… ghosts were people once too!

In this episode of Books & Beyond, Tara Khandelwal speaks with historian and writer Eric Chopra about his book Ghosted, which explores the haunted monuments of Delhi. But this episode isn’t just about spooky stories. Eric looks at the histories behind these legends, from the Lathwale Baba believed to inhabit the arches of Feroz Shah Kotla to the mysterious second grave inside the tomb of Jamali Kamali.

Together, Tara and Eric wander through some of Delhi’s most fascinating monuments and the stories people continue to tell about them. They also talk about queer histories, forgotten royal claimants, the politics of heritage, and why people still leave letters for jinn when life’s problems feel too big.

Rather than trying to prove whether ghosts are real, Eric looks at what these stories reveal about history and how people remember it.

Press play, the ghosts of Delhi have stories to tell.

Books and TV Shows Mentioned in the Episode:

1. Fear Files (2012)
2. Goosebumps (Novel Series)
3. Vikram and Vetal

‘Books and Beyond with Bound’ is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D’costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India’s finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms.

Transcript

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There are these flower sellers who sit outside the lane of Mehrauli Archaeological Park in Qutub Minar and these flower sellers once told me to tie my hair, to remove my perfume because if I were to go to Jamali Kamali after a certain time then the jinn, these entities made of smokeless fire, will either fall in love with me and marry me or they will slap me if I am notorious. Hi everyone, welcome back to Books and Beyond. So before we get started I have a small confession to make, I am terrified of anything remotely haunted and while preparing for this episode, I'm reading the book and I realised something interesting, ghosts were also once people too, right? They were historical, some of them were historical figures, they had lives, ambitions, rivalries, maybe even bad fashion choices and speaking of ghosts with origin stories, today I'm joined by Eric Chopra, he's a writer, researcher and he's someone deeply interested in the histories of art, sexuality and the supernatural, also the founder of ethosology. His book Ghosted takes us through the haunted monuments of Delhi but it's not just a collection of spooky stories, what I really liked about this book is that Eric shows us a city that exists between these worlds, you know, a city where Sufi saints bless kings, jinns listen to grievances, forgotten begums occupy crumbling hunting lodges and it doesn't just treat these ghost stories as just entertainment, right? We're looking at the history that has produced these legends and how these monuments are seen today, they're sometimes sacred, they're sometimes spooky and they're part of everyday life and I've also lived in Delhi and you know, these monuments are just everywhere and they're part of our daily lives and it was wonderful to see them in this light, so welcome to the show Eric. Thank you Tara, it's a pleasure to be here and I'll just tell you even if you're scared of ghosts, nothing in this conversation is going to terrify you, I'm sure it'll be amusing and perhaps at times more entertaining than you think but I'll tell you I love ghosts, I love horror so let's see how this pans out. Good, I'm happy. Okay, I want to start with your relationship to Delhi itself, right? A lot of people are drawn to haunted places for the thrill like let's go here because it has this creepy energy and your approach is very different, you're a historian, you're a history student and the ghost story is the last layer of a much deeper historical narrative for you, so I'm curious what first pulled you towards Delhi's haunted monuments and their histories? You know, because of my family's background, we've moved across India and I know for a fact that my love for horror predated my love for history as I even say it in the book. I remember growing up with American Horror Story, my first taste of horror may have been Michael Jackson's Thriller when he turns into a werecat and then of course we all watched, I don't know if you all watched but I surely did, Fear Files and you know all sorts of morbid wicked shows and Goosebumps and Vikram and Vital, so all of that was growing up for me a very fascinating realm to just engage with and I'm a Dindiwala though, so when we finally did move to Delhi after my dad was posted here and I've been here ever since, I realised that in a city like this it is impossible to not encounter both history and its ghosts and I've always wanted to write but when I began my public history work especially with the Thiasology, I wanted to take history to the people by bringing them to heritage sites, to monuments across the city and as we started moving around, I realised that people oftentimes had this question, why is this place haunted or is this place haunted, is it a ghost or a jinn here, wherever we would take them be it Jamali Kamali in Mehrauli Archaeological Park or even Humayun's tomb at times which I say in my book is actually not haunted but as we went to these places this curiosity that people had peaked mine and then as I started to look at it more deeply, I realised that it's not only this exoticized version that we may sometimes come across right, we come across most haunted monuments in India all the time and every monument is most haunted, so to quantify it became very amusing for me but then as I looked at the ghost stories, I realised that they had something deeper, they were going back to traumas both personal and ones that we think are close to us even though they happened long long long ago and they linked themselves to moments like the uprising of 1857, to the partition, to emergency and I realised that these ghosts are also a lot of times just unresolved questions and feelings that people have and I think that was the beginning of it. I really liked that historical context and then Leo that you brought in and also what I loved is why some monuments become haunted sites and some don't and yeah you exactly mentioned the Qutub Minar which has its own share of this tragic history right and it has the stampede, it has the suicide of Maharaj Jagatjit Singh's wife and then that eventually led to the monument being closed to the public because of the 1981 stampede but yet because of all of these events, it isn't considered haunted right but places like Feroz Shah Kotla are considered haunted but they both have you know interesting histories and things happening from those monuments at those monuments so what makes a monument a haunted place like what makes it become this haunted place in the public imagination? You know the Qutub Minar story was very interesting for me because in many ways that's where it all begins. Architecturally you see the Delhi Sultanate establishing itself by quite literally laying blocks of time because Qutub Minar was not built in one go and succeeding sultans kept adding to it, kept you know making it pretty in their own imagination and the fact that it goes back to that time you know we're looking at the end of the 12th century and yet it doesn't seem to have this haunting attached to it just because of how popular it is and how well preserved it is. It is one of the most visited monuments in India if not the world and we do have the overall upkeep of it. We see it constantly, it's well maintained and yet in its backyard where the Mehrauli Archaeological Park is, that is supposedly this space of jinn and ghosts and possessions and so on and so forth where my investigation really began because there are these flower sellers who sit outside the lane of Mehrauli Archaeological Park in Qutub Minar and these flower sellers once told me to tie my hair, to remove my perfume because if I were to go to Jamali Kamali after a certain time then the jinn, these entities made of smokeless fire, will either fall in love with me and marry me or they will slap me if I am notorious and it was an interesting dichotomy to be in and you know you often wondered how would you know if you got married to them and you know they said that well when you have another lover they'll get slapped so you'll know you got married and I just wondered why is it that right behind the Qutub Minar or how you look at it you know it could be behind or in front, why is this space so haunted and the Qutub Minar is not? So my first assumption was obviously abandonment and that sites that are not as well preserved lend themselves to these hauntings which is definitely a major reason too but the monuments that have been looked at too Jamali Kamali and Feroz Shah Kotla as you said had more complicated histories it just so happened that these sites are enigmatic and not only because of how they look but also because of what kind of stories the lands that they are built on registered right and I think it was always that for example Feroz Shah Kotla goes back in many ways to the period of Ashoka because the Sultan Feroz Shah Tughlaq lugged out an Ashokan pillar which is 2,000 years old and brought it over here so he brought antiquity to a mediaeval site and then over the years you see it becoming a site of murders there was a murder of a Mughal king inside over there you also see it becoming a space for refuge for all the people who were exiled out of old Delhi or Shahjahanabad after the uprising of 1857 and you also then see it as a place for partition survivors when they moved the camps were set up in places like Feroz Shah Kotla the grounds could accommodate that and so you're seeing those layers accumulating over time and I think parallelly then the other world also came so more than abandonment and more than just not preserving these sites it is also this it's just interesting that when people think of the other world they don't think of these stories which come to you when you really start researching the monuments I really like sort of how you take us through these layers at each site one of the most fascinating parts of the book for me actually was your discussion of Jamali Kamali and how it's become a gathering place for members of the LGBTQ plus community and inside because inside Jamali's tomb and he's a 16th century Swati saint poet and traveller there is another male burial believed to be that of Kamali and over time people have interpreted this relationship in different ways right like the site carries many different meanings for visitors so how does such representation in literature and history lend a hand in including the community and can you tell our listeners a bit more about Jamali Kamali? You know I clearly have a bias here because even though a historian should not say what is their favourite monument I my favourite monument is Jamali Kamali and it's there are multiple reasons to this you know I am of course lured by the enigma as you said that there is this other person buried with Jamali who we call Kamali we do not know what his name actually was it is simply given by the community and we know that this term has been in vogue since the late 1800s because when British surveyors would go around areas they would write in their diaries and notes that there is a tomb of a Jamali and then next to Jamali is this man who people call Kamali and the first you know whiff of let's say multi-faceted history in Delhi you can get at so I'll give you a brief background first and then we can go into who Kamali is and how it's become a space for a lot of communities. One is Jamali as you said is a Sufi, a poet, a globetrotter, a diplomat. He was besties with this man called Sikandar Lodhi. Sikandar made him the poet laureate. Sikandar used to you know who this was the last Sultanate of the Delhi Sultanate and Sikandar Lodhi who was a poet himself would go to Jamali and ask him for opinions on his poetry. Jamali was also a well-travelled man. He went to Persia, he went to Sri Lanka, Yemen. There was a well-travelled, well-known because in Persian texts too you come across his name and he loses favour when Sikandar's successor comes to the throne, Ibrahim and court politics led to Jamali falling out but he was lucky because the winds were changing and they were bringing with them Babur. Babur would challenge the Lodhis and when Babur defeats Ibrahim, Jamali does what a poet can do, write a poem for Babur or a Qasida, a laudatory poem and Babur is swayed and he then becomes a part of the Mughals. He's a very smart man and when Babur is throwing this party in Agra at the end of the 1520s, beginning of 1530s, before that actually, you see Jamali contemplating death and I think that it's because it's around that time when he comes back to Delhi and he commissions the building of this little tomb where he would be buried himself and the mosque outside. Now this mosque for people who have been to Delhi or are familiar with Mughal architecture, they would notice that it employs those techniques that would lay the foundations in many ways for what a Humayun's tomb would look like because you see red sandstone, white marble, these arches, these inscriptions, geometry and symmetry in a way that we weren't really seeing before and then you see this little square-like tomb which we call the gem box of Delhi. It's like a gem box. It's always kept locked as well because it's like a precious secret and you have jalis on this, you know, those lattice screens. You have again red, blue and white tiles used on this tomb and before he died, he used it as his dwelling cell. Now when he gets buried in a marble grave inside this particular tomb that he built for himself, you will see on the ceiling that there are these inscriptions. It's his poetry. It is his own words, Jamali's own words and if you peek inside from the jalis, you would notice that there is a grave right next to him but much like Taj Mahal where the only thing disrupting the symmetry of Taj Mahal is Shah Jahan, the guy who commissioned it. At Jamali Kamali too, the only thing disrupting the symmetry is this person next to Jamali. So clearly this was meant to be a tomb for one man but there's another one buried. We know he's a man because there are two pen boxes atop both of these graves, a kalamdaan we call it and that connotes the grave of a man but we know Jamali had a wife. We also know Jamali had two sons and we know that one of the sons had control over this graveyard years after because he got his best friend Bairam Khan, the famous regent of Akbar, he got him buried in this vicinity and then his body was taken out and sent to Persia but the fact that his son had control over the graveyard perhaps makes me believe that it was him or somebody in the family who got this mysterious man buried next to Jamali and of course historians do what they do best at least in the earlier years of historiography when they see two males or two anybody of the same sex buried together they would say oh they were best friends or they were brothers or they were you know again they were just friends however you're looking at a time which cannot be superimposed with our notions of love and I am of the belief that just how we do not know what Jamali's identity was whether he was another poet whether he was another disciple whether he was just a friend I think all of that can exist and with it can also coexist the idea of him being in love with him or him even being another poet and being in love with him or them being friends and being in love with each other and I think we sometimes restrict ourselves with that identity and for historiography which has largely been heteronormative and seen through a certain lens it is stories like these that we have to find wiggle room in and just try and figure it out so yes it's been a space for queer heritage walks it's been a space for reclaiming a sense of history because one of the ways in which bigotry sort of just spreads itself is by saying that this is not our culture or yet colonialism or this is something that was brought in by something else right it sort of just goes on to show that no our histories have been a bit more inclusive and that's one way of looking at it and the other way of looking at it is of course these jinn entities made of smokeless fire who slap you if you go here after 6 p.m after sunset basically I remember you said that you had a little bit of an encounter I don't know if it was an encounter but you said you had a sense you had some sort of sensation can you describe that okay there were two incidents actually and again I as I say I would like the readers to also find this out but I am still trying to figure out with what my relationship with the ghosts is I mean I have a relationship with ghost stories but the first time when I saw the tomb from the inside it was after sunset and Delhi has this very particular there's this particular scent in Delhi and it must be in other places too where you see a lot of greenery especially the Aravalli side and there all these you know where you can see the Aravalli range right there so around October back when you could actually smell the air in Delhi this is there was this scent of the devil's tree called Shabta Purni it's very intense and if you're walking around you just know if you're a Delhiwala you know okay Diwali is about to come winter is about to come it's that scent I could smell that very intensely and I walked inside and there was one lone guard in the monument thankfully I was with a friend Sameer Seshadri who's done the photographs for the book and it is his photo that's also on the cover Jamali Kamali when he went inside this guard came to me and I think he could assume that I'm eccentric and I would want to see the tomb I'd never seen that before and we were talking and he just asked me if I could smell the Agarbatti and I you know I said yes we could smell the Agarbatti there was this intense aroma and then he asked me if I could see the Agarbatti and I said no I can't you couldn't see the Agarbatti anywhere around and it's disbelieved that you would start if there is another worldly presence around I think other people who have seen ghosts like Sean Joy Roy would be able to reaffirm that there is a something like a scent that comes about and so I got a bit curious and no matter how sceptical you are you just sometimes do not know what to do but when the gates finally opened up the graveyard and we went and saw this particular tomb I walked back to the Jalis and there was an Agarbatti there and I said you know this is where it's coming from but I asked him I said why is this here and he said that there is this lawyer who comes here and every time he goes for a case a very important case he comes and prays to the tomb of Jamali Kamali which is again very fascinating because a lot of places in Delhi share this sacred and the supernatural space and there is no dilemma it coexists right but the second time which I mentioned in the book is actually not a thing that happened over there I'd done a heritage walk in the afternoon at Jamali Kamali and it's always happened for some reason but I've come back from afternoon walks and I've had lucid dreams and I was told once that I could be locked in a dream and I would not know what that means and I really wondered what that means basically you wake up you go about your day everything seems completely normal you're literally existing you're doing everything that you would do in a normal day you're talking to people your family's there and then suddenly you may think something is off and if you look at the clock the numbers won't be numbers or they would be melting if you look at your phone the interface would be unrecognisable and you would suddenly realise that all these hours that feel like ours but may have just been a few minutes you realise you're in a dream and you have to really shake yourself out of it and I've had that experience twice actually after coming back from Jamali Kamali that I felt like I was locked in a dream I did not however see an entity that was different than a sleep paralysis where you feel like there is an entity or something like a demon that's coming in your room or lurking in the background but I did I think I was locked in a dream yeah that did happen that that is crazy so what is your relationship to ghosts after having these encounters I sometimes think I maybe don't think about it because I really want to believe that I am okay in the sense that even if I do have a relationship with them they probably don't hate me now here's the thing I as I said I have loved horror ever since I was a child and perhaps I don't have that factor of fear associated with them but amusement and I think my relationship with ghosts is the same relationship I would have with somebody who talks to me about religion and their religious beliefs we learn as a civil society and I hope everyone believes this even though we are seeing traces of this not being the case anymore but people have coexisted with different religious beliefs throughout millennia and the idea that somebody comes to you and says that listen I believe in this religion and I practise it as a human being you say okay I really respect your beliefs in your religion and I would not do anything ever to question you and I would expect the same from you and I think it's the same case with ghosts from me I feel like when somebody tells you a ghost story the first reaction people may have is either to be scared or to make fun of somebody and I think that if somebody's vulnerable enough you know to say to you that listen I went through this it could be a vision it could be hallucination it could be something that your mind played a trick on your mind plays tricks on us all the time but why won't you deal with that story sensitively because as humans we just pretend we know it all and I think this thing about saying that ghosts are real or not real is taking too much responsibility of knowing the other world because if we were so certain why are we so scared of death or why do we wonder what happens after death so the human mind is in constant a dilemma of not at one end being rational and saying that no this is the ghosts are not real but these things are but also in death I want to be buried here or I want to be you know submerged in this particular river and yet we can live in a world where we say no we want to be completely rational but at the same time as a historian I think it's my responsibility to also go to some of these places and see why they're haunted I literally have just come back from Bhangarh which is supposed to be India's most haunted monument again this word was to use for every monument so don't take that quantity seriously but it was the most stunning sight I have been to and I went up all the way to the top nothing was happening except there was this one room where this fire was burning and the tour guide I was with told me you know I've taken you to every place just don't go inside here and I said why and he said well you know I also don't believe in ghosts but this is the only room that's still left in this particular photo which is used for exorcisms and I could see fire burning inside I could also see a woman inside I did not go inside I respected that boundary but you see it continues to happen people continue to believe in this so I think as historians you have a responsibility to engage with it and as a person and a human I think I have to be sensitive towards them and just be curious that's my relationship actually I really love that because we really don't know right so just to treat it as something that's frivolous doesn't really make sense because as you said it you know there's so much spirituality also around this what happens after we die etc so I like what you said about treating it sensitivity and after you know spending so much time studying these monuments reading the records tracing the histories do you do you feel like understanding the historical background of these places for people make these ghost stories feel less believable because these ghost stories are very potent for the audience you've described you know how the British soldier at Pune Darwaza people have reported seeing him so obviously these stories are really really potent so do you think that when they understand sort of why these stories have come to be based on certain traumas or certain contexts the ghost stories become less believable it depends on honestly where you are geographically I've realised geography plays such a big role in how people think about ghost stories as well currently as you know Mumbai is going through that huge I mean I would call it an excavation of sorts right and everything is dug out and the questions that we were asked there was well when a monument or a place that's near a monument gets dug out does that disrupt the ghosts or does that disrupt the household ghost I've always believed lived here since the beginning of time similarly when the partition happened my nanny's family moved to this village over there there was a peepal tree which is always supposed to be this place of ghosts and if you're growing up as a Hindu Punjabi you would hear that this is a witch who will live under a peepal tree or if you sleep under the peepal tree you would wake up possessed now very out of context I asked my nanny once what's in a peepal tree I gave her no context of the book of what I was doing and in the most nonchalant way possible she said jinn there are jinn in a peepal tree and now I got very logistical with I said how can that be possible you are a Hindu Punjabi how is there a jinn in your peepal tree there should be the witch with the twisted feet she said that you know I'm very silly because this tree which was there always pre-partition post-partition it did not change its geography and when they moved their neighbours or Muslims they were Hindu Punjabis they were living in this particular village and every night at 3 a.m they could hear this melodious tune coming from the tree and it was the most beautiful song they would hear night after night and anybody that you ask in the village who lives in this tree and where are the sounds coming from they would say that there is a family of jinn and they're celebrating a wedding and they're very good jinn and that's who they live that's the family that lives in this tree and that was just believed there was no changing of this and partition did not move the ghosts away they stayed there geographically and similarly then I think with Delhi it's both historical and geography that determines how potent and how how durable and how long-lasting if you go to old Delhi there are still houses that keep their niches in their house empty they do not put candles in it in order to put agarbattis in it because they believe that the jinn who have been here since forever since 1857 since Shahjahanabad was built or since even Mehrauli came into the picture in the 12th century they believe that those jinns still live in those niches at the same time when somebody gets to know of the story like Khuni Darwaza you mentioned right or let's take the story of Mutiny Memorial where the British ghost is so Mutiny Memorial is Delhi's most gothic looking tower it was built by the British to basically as a sign of respect for the British soldiers and the Sepahis who fought on the side of the East India Company during what we call the uprising of 1857 or the first war of independence and once independent India came into the picture and Indira Gandhi was the prime minister she changed this memorial to Ajitgarh and they started to then remember all of those who died fighting on the side of the Indians however news documentaries remember something entirely different over here they say that if you go here again after sunset because everything happens after sunset there is the ghost of a British soldier who wears a khaki uniform in some versions he's headless and then this headless ghost who you know walks around this area he comes and he asks you for a light for a cigarette but then as the guard at Mutiny Memorial told me he said but if he doesn't have a head how the hell does he smoke that's a way of looking at it but I think people believe if they live in that area I think psychologically it has a role to play too right because you grow up with a story like this so even if you tell them the history they'll say yes but the ghost exists because of this story and we have always seen this ghost it's similar to what happened in Delhi many years ago with the bandar there was this monkey that everybody thought they saw a monkey man and I think he also figured in the movie Delhi 6 everybody kept saying they saw the monkey man and even though there is no proof till today whether a man who looked like a monkey was haunting that area it still lived in people's imagination so I do not really think that even as a historian when I take people and I tell them you know this is the entire story for some people it coexists they'll say okay this is as this is the rich history of the site and that's what led it to it being haunted whereas other people will say okay this is how intense it is in history which is why people think it's haunted but seldom do the ghost stories go away because I have just been living with them too as much as anybody else has been what I also found interesting was you write about access to monuments like Feroz Shah Kotla where people gathering for religious practises they sometimes face restrictions and at the same time there's this growing political narrative about the it's Mughal past and about whether these monuments represent heritage or invasion and you know as politics of the country change obviously the way that these narratives are spun about these monuments will also change so you know you spend years visiting and researching these places so have you seen public attitudes towards monuments change over time yes Tara both attitude and also restrictions just keep on increasing you know we're living and it seems to not only be monuments it seems to be now a case with almost everything this seems to be a time when there is a restriction or a question on most of our ways of cultural thinking and I sometimes really detest words like a certain past right like a Mughal past or a Sultanate past these were not living in silos the Mughal past was not just a past where the Mughals lived it was in conversation and in collaboration and in coexistence with other pasts too and I think they formed the larger canvas of a very checkered mediaeval world which of course is sometimes going to be great and glamorous but sometimes deeply violent and dangerous but that's all of history that is how the past is made up and that is how even the world today shapes itself we see it happening all the time we do not live in times where right now we say this is a time of just violence and danger which you're seeing globally that's what's happening right but when it comes to history sometimes I think it becomes easier for people to just make boxes out of it and with regards to Delhi which is a city that goes back to well I would say when you look at the Aravallis and this is what I think about the Aravalli range which goes back billions of years is surreal to just look at I can sometimes see parts of it just you know 10 kilometres from my house I'll move past Mehrauli I'll see the Qutb Minar and in front of it I would see the Aravalli and you would realise that this is billions of years ago that's deep time I mean imagine those just have been here since then then you have our prehistoric ancestors coming during the stone age then you have you know the various cities that were built you have the Tomars, the Chauhans, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the East India Company, then the British Crown, then New Delhi, then post-independence Delhi all of this is what Delhi is now so to even think that there was a certain past that dominated a certain epoch is a misunderstanding now when I began my work and I sometimes think I was just supposed to do this at the time I started doing it because now it would be impossible at many of these monuments. Feroz Shah Kotla for example where this monument as we talked about before was a fortress that was built by Sultan Feroz Shah Tughlaq, the successor of that infamous Muhammad bin Tughlaq who shifted the capital to the Deccan. Now Feroz was a man of aesthetics and he brought in this Ashokan pillar 2000 years old to this fortress. Why, how, when can be found out in my book but what happens to this pillar over the course of time is that currently it is seen as the Lathwale Baba or the saint of the pillar. He is the chief of the jinn saints that live in the niches and arches of Feroz Shah Kotla. People could go to this monument with their Aadhaar cards with their letters with what we call Gilesh Shikwe, grievances, your problems, your issues with the knots and with Agarbatti, with rose petals, with green chadars, both Hindu and Muslim families, newly married couples and people with very domestic problems, you know, problems with violence at home, problems with unemployment. You saw a large set of a marginalised population come into this site and they would go and appeal to this pillar and then they would stand in front and then if you ask them, what are you waiting for, they would say, well, we are waiting to hear back from Lathwale Baba because he will assign our problem to another jinn. It works like an administration of the jinn. They call it the Darbar of the jinn, right, the court of the jinn and then they say, okay, Lathwale Baba has told me to go to Nanne Mia, Bade Mia, Chote Mia, who are these officers of the Baba and they could tie a knot and then they would untie it only when their problem is resolved, much like you do in a Sufi site. Now, historically and sociologically speaking, the work of Anand Vivek Taneja, who did study Feroz Shah Kotla first and did on-site studying of this, he was the one who revealed that this was all after, most of it came up after the emergency. When you gave up hopes in a bureaucratic procedure of appealing, you went to sites which were supposed to be sacred and Feroz Shah Kotla became something like that, but we've talked about its earlier history before. However, in the recent years, the problems of accessing have only increased. The pillar which could first be accessed to the top was cordoned off a long time ago, so you can't really, you could just be at the very bottom. It's built on top of a pyramidal structure, you can't even access that pyramid anymore. Next to it is where there is a mosque, Jami Masjid, it's still a functional mosque, and below the mosque are these arches with cave-like rooms inside. You could go inside these rooms at one point of time, you can't do that anymore. All of that stopped. There were some real problems too, when agarbattis and candles were lit up inside the caves, it would cause suffocation. Also, a lot of times the place was being misused, you know, there would be some people who would take advantage of other people who they thought were possessed or they would say that they're possessed and there would be violence, there would be extortion, all of that was also happening. But now if you go to Feroz Shah Kotla on a Thursday, the restrictions are so intense that even when people take letters, guards will respect it from what I've seen, but immediately somebody puts a letter, the guard would see it for a few minutes, but they would come pick up the letter and throw it away. And one of the biggest problems that the guards would tell you, which is of course is not them making this up, it's coming from the higher ups. And they would say, you know, huge problem is lovers. There are so many lovers who would come and escape at these monuments. But then there is a larger ending also of a tradition that, well, people created and they could really think of it as a shrine of the jinn. And I think, again, you find yourself in a very complicated space as a historian, as a human. Historians, I mean, including me, go about talking about how a site should be viewed and accessed. But at the same time, when a site is given such a deep meaning, I sometimes really wonder, would Feroz Shah Kotla be as important in our memory, if not for the jinn, if not for the Lathwale Baba? What would have happened to it? It would have just been remembered as the monument next to the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium, which is what people remember it more for, you know, especially those who watch cricket. So yeah, it's becoming a bit difficult to go to these sites now. I think these ghost stories and these legends make these monuments come alive for the general public and keep the monument alive in their heads. Otherwise, I agree, you know, people sort of don't pay any attention. You pass by it. It's in your head a ruin or a relic. You see it every day. So you take it for granted as well. You would not give it that importance and you would not bother to find out about the history behind it, which is something that you are doing, you know, that you are sort of bringing this history alive for younger generations as well and helping them engage with it, which I think is very, very powerful. Otherwise, I think it'll just sort of get lost. And what I liked about the book is that each chapter tackles a different monument. So you have Feroz Shah Kotla, you have the Khuni Darwaza. What I really loved was the story of Begum Vilayat Mahal because I remember when it came out and it was such a big thing because, you know, she just made up that she's, you know, the descendant of Wajid Ali Shah. Yeah, exactly. The descendant of Wajid Ali Shah. And she just made it up, which I found insane. And then the government actually sort of gave her this place in the middle of Hozkaz to live in for so many years. And there were so many stories around it. So I like that you've structured the book in this way. Can you tell me sort of, you know, you must have done a lot of research for this. So was there a monument or a haunting that really fascinated you, but didn't make it into the final book? Thank you, Tara, for what you were saying, what you said about the work that we do. I think it's not only me, it's this larger group of public historians now, especially, you know, everybody who works with me in the Theasology do. I think one of the things that we're really concerned with is not only bringing history out of textbooks, but once you bring out it from the textbook, what do you do with it? You can't just engage with it yourself. We have all been academically trained as historians. But for me, academia provides me the backbone. But I want to escape its ivory tower too, to really bring in the people who make history, right. And I think a monument is only as important as the meaning and the stories we give to it. And as historians, we need to recognise that. And Malchamel, yes, fascinating story. And, you know, I would not say completely made up because as this recent study, this book House of Awadhs, which came out, you know, their argument was that there are thousands of people across India who claim ancestry. How do you say that this one is right and this one's wrong? Because quite honestly, the princely states as they were and as widespread they were, they have left behind quite a few descendants and all of us can find some connection somehow with some, I mean, we after all have edited a very long history. So, you know, who knows what part of the Mughal past or Sultanate past or Nawabi past do we go back to? So, yes. And that was a story that was very interesting because again, as I said with Feroz Shah Kotla, Malchamel, when I was finishing the book, I don't know if it's serendipity or if it's a ghost helping me out here again, right when I was about to submit the book a few months before my manuscript was going after multiple calls from my editor, I finally heard that the Delhi tourism department is doing official horror tours at the monument. This was gold for somebody who's writing something on this subject. And I thought, oh my God, this is the right thing. And we went to these, I went to two of them. I write about them in the book. It's very different to ghost tourism though, which is popular, you know, in London where you recreate the ghost and all of that and you move chairs about and all. This was far scarier because there were lots of monkeys and bats inside and you know, you were just in this lodge, windowless, electricity less, waterless. But now this monument is also, you can't go in there anymore. I think the last time we all went in was together on this haunted tour. So even that stopped. So there was a lot of stopping, which makes me wonder why did I write this book at that time? Because now all of these monuments are just changing right in front of my eyes, right? A monument that didn't make it when I began the book, I had listed, I think about 15 to 20 monuments. And I realised though that there was no structure to that. It was just I would hear, okay, somebody saying that this monument is haunted in this geography. So put it down, do some groundwork, do interviews, do research. But when I began to look at the five monuments that made it to the list, I realised that I could tell the entire history of Delhi through these ghost stories, because they're chronologically placed. Mehrauli is where it all begins. And I end with the Malchah Mahal story, which is in New Delhi, which and then in the middle of that you see Firozabad, you see Shahjahanabad, you see all of these different other cities, right? And then within chapters, I brought in other monuments that I could relate to through the monument. I do not personally regret keeping something out. But one monument that I've been asked about multiple times from Delhi Walas is why did I leave out Agra Sen Ki Bawli? Because Agra Sen Ki Bawli is again, and by now it's become the recurring theme in this conversation is Delhi's most haunted monument. Now, I could not unfortunately fit it into the larger narratives of stories that I wanted to tell. But then recently, when I was around Bhangarh and Ajabgarh in Alwar, a lot of the ghost stories that were emerging were from the Bawlis and the stepwells, right? And then I began to think that, you know, one day perhaps I could do a dedicated list of not monuments, but structures that could like fortresses and then fortresses across and Bawlis and what structures do when a haunting takes over it and why do structures get haunted rather than just, you know, a larger story around a specific monument. So I don't regret any because as a writer, I think now I have realised and this was something I talked to my editor about, you can always write it in another book or another tweet or another post. Everything does not have to go in one book. So no, no regrets for this one, thankfully. You have so many stories within you and I'm always very fascinated with historians because they contain so much in their heads. Like even you have so many stories, facts because I always as a student found it very difficult to sort of retain it all but it gets easier if you put a layer of storytelling around it. So I would actually really want to know more about Itihasology because I absolutely love the initiative. I love what you're doing about it. It's a platform for Indian history. Could you tell me what inspired you to start it and what was the journey and what are you trying to achieve through it? Thank you Tara. So Itihasology began right literally on the day I came back after giving my board exam on history. I was not supposed to be a student of history so it wasn't that I wasn't curious about stories but from a very young age I used to think that I am supposed to do English literature because it was believed that if you were not a studious kid you would do English literature. It's only when you realise how difficult it is to get into English literature course that you think to yourself why you've been so silly all along. But I remember that when I came back after this exam a week before I'd already started to fall in love with the subject. I quite literally digested all of it in the few days before the exam and I remember reading Nehru's objective resolution speech on the constitution basically saying that if you want to look ahead you want to pave a future you have to look back. You can look at histories across the world. You can look at your own history and realise you have to always look back to move forward. So I came back home and I told my dad that okay this is what I'm going to do. I'm not going to do English literature. I'm going to do history. It was he who suggested why don't you also start something online because you've always been a digital person. I've always been a person on the internet and he said that if you want to talk about these stories that you seem to be fascinated by you would perhaps also find more encouragement if you have a portal. And in a second it was he who said start something called a Theosology. It began as this Instagram page and then over the years it's developed for us into a quite honestly a philosophy for us. We think of history through the lens of what a Theosology provides us because a Theosology is a community-based portal. We are completely, we completely owe it to the people who have been supporting this journey since 2019 because it began as just a page for I would go to a monument. I would click a photo and I would write about it and slowly I realised that people were sending me their stories, what they like, how they went to a monument because they saw a post. Then I decided okay let's take it forward. When COVID restrictions became less we started to do heritage walks and museum walks. Then it developed into that. Now it's developed into a space where we do an annual journal. We do musicals. I of course have been trying to expand out of Delhi. We have been now travelling courtesy to wonderful curators like you and others we meet across the country and we're able to take a Theosology to quite very different geographies. And the purpose of it is it's mainly dedicated to making people realise that we are a part of history. We're not away from it. We play a role in shaping it. The way we think about it is the way the past is for many of us. And so for us to not feel like we're important is misinformation and it is to pull people into the canvas of history to not intimidate them. You know people do not know where to start but there is no starting point. Because if there was a starting point there has to be an ending point. But if there is no full stops to history why are we looking about where to start. And I always say that a Theosology for people can be a corridor. If you're interested in art, you're interested in social histories, you're interested in emotions, you're interested in anything under the canvas of the past. I mean come to us. We'll make you find a door. Enter it and ultimately you will find a lot within the canvas of history. Wow. I absolutely love that journey and I love how you're building this out you know. And I do hope that you expand the tours and the walking tours and all of that to Mumbai as well because I'd be the first to sign up. Thank you, Sara. So what are you planning to write next? Well you know I have just quite literally and I think even now with this book I have been travelling so much that I haven't returned to my writing desk. But I am planning to do that very soon. Hopefully right after this podcast I should start planning. But I'm supposed to be now writing something on art. And what I can tell you for now is that it has to do with a lot of romance that art encapsulates across geographies in India, across centuries and across objects, across visual objects. So that's what I'm looking at. Oh that is something that I'm really excited about. I just completed a Gyan Pravas course. They have a one-year course in Indian art and aesthetics which is really fabulous and highly recommend anyone who's interested in Indian art history to do it because it gives you a full overview right from sort of like the prehistoric times to contemporary. So I would love to sort of very much looking forward to that book of yours. Okay so now we have the last section of this conversation which is a rapid-fire round where I'll ask you a few questions and you can reply in one word or one sentence. What would a millennial ghost look like 50 years from now? Probably trying to still get an Instagram story right so won't be able to haunt. Your favourite horror book? Vikram Vethal stories always. If you were a ghost which place would you want? Jamali Kamali only to figure out who Kamali was quite literally. Yeah I mean I'm so curious after all the stories. If you could have dinner with one historical figure who would it be? Currently it's Noor Jeha because I want to ask her how she feels about Margot Robbie wearing her necklace and it being called Elizabeth Taylor's necklace. So I think for now it's her. Thank you so much. This is really been a very interesting conversation. It's always such a pleasure to hear you speak because you're full of stories and I just love your passion for bringing these stories alive to audiences. Thank you Tara. It's been such a pleasure because this is a podcast I've listened to for years and I go on my daily run with one of these episodes. Oh I'm so glad. So I think the next run I'm going to be hearing my own voice. And to my listeners I have a question for you. What is one scary story that you've heard that you just cannot get out of your mind? Tell me in the comments and if you have a friend who loves history or ghost stories send this episode to them. Hope you enjoyed this episode of Books and Beyond with Bound. This podcast is created by Bound, a company that helps you grow through stories. Find us at Bound India on all social media platforms. Tune in every Wednesday as we peek into the lives and minds of some brilliant authors from India and South Asia.