India's Very Own Version of Halloween and Día de Muertos Is Fading
In a rapidly westernizing country, this piece is a call for action. A call to remember and tell these slowly disappearing tales and keep lighting those lamps. So the spirits AND our culture, even though invisible and formless, can be content, that they haven’t been forgotten.
As a Bengali who grew up in the early 2000s — perhaps the last pre-internet generation — I grew up with ghosts.
And October meant huddling with my dadu under a blanket on the terrace of my ancestral home in rural Bengal. Under the mosquito net, with a dim lantern flickering beside us, thammiwould tell us ghost stories from Thakurmar Jhuli — about Mecho Bhoot who loved fish, Bramhadaitya who guarded banyan trees, and Shakchunni, the spirit of a married woman who never stopped wearing her red bangles.
These ghosts were never monsters. They all felt like mischievous and oddly comforting friends. Ones who belong to the darkness so as to guide us towards light.
From Ray's Bhooter Raja to Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's Gosaibaganer Bhoot and Leela Majumdar’s mischievous spirits — ghosts have been spun into the very weave of Bengal’s social fabric.
But today, when I scroll through social media, I see children dressed as witches and skeletons, and adults hosting Halloween parties with pumpkin spice lattes and fake cobwebs. It’s sweet, but it also makes me wonder — how many of us know that Bengal had its own Halloween long before the world taught us what "trick or treat" meant?
The night before Kali Pujo — the fourteenth night of the lunar fortnight — we celebrate Bhoot Choturdoshi. Our version of Halloween. Our own Día de Muertos.
The word bhoot (ghost) meets choturdoshi (fourteenth), creating a night where the living remember the dead. Families light fourteen oil lamps — choddo prodip — and place them in the darkest corners of the house: under staircases, near the tulsi plant, at the threshold. This light, it is said, helps ancestors find their way back home for the night.
Alongside, there’s choddo shaak: fourteen kinds of leafy greens cooked together. In older times, people believed the greens protected the body from disease as seasons changed — a super cool merging of myth and microbiology.
Today, we adore the aesthetics of Mexico’s Día de Muertos, we hum to Coco’s soundtrack, we carve pumpkins and host themed parties. But in our own courtyards, the lamps flicker lower each year.
Bhoot Choturdoshi is fading. Not because it was ever less beautiful. But because we stopped... remembering.
Maybe that’s why I keep returning to these rituals. And so should all of us. To remember that every culture once had its own language for loss. And wherever there is death, there is the need to speak to it.
Implied in this slowly disappearing ritual is a feeling of reassurance... the reassurance of being alive. And also, the quiet hope that one day, lamps will be lit for those who are lighting them now when they too disappear into the void.
That’s how memory survives. That’s how tradition flows... from one trembling flame to another.
Dadu: Grandfather
Thammi: Grandmother
Thakurmar Jhuli: A collection of Bengali folk tales
Written by Aishwarya Roy
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