Ghosts thrived in the age of leisure: The snoozy afternoons, lengthening dusks and whispering nights. Just as you cannot enjoy the music of Bade Ghulam Ali Khan in a hurry, you could not hope to spot a ghost in haste. It was an aesthetic experience choreographed with operatic virtuosity. It required a patient mind, a fertile imagination and, above all, an uncanny ability to be alive to the surroundings. The ghost usually staged its entry with an acoustic overture. The wind sighed, sibilant echoes followed your footsteps and the door creaked with a lacerated cry. Or was it just a fearful you curating a soundscape out of sundry noises? You could never tell. Soon, the drama began. The leaves which were cheerfully waving in the wind started gesticulating wildly. Was that a white saree behind that pillar or just a splinter of light from the faraway road? That doubt fled as the ghost began unpacking its repertoire of dramatic acts. It could access your deepest fears and take on an appearance that spoke to them: an old ghoul, a pretty girl in wedding finery, a witch with white hair or a bloody-eyed vampire.
The pride of place the ghost had in our daily life was a pointer to our limitless capacity to imagine. More than a haunted house, it was the story, which beautifully swelled with each telling, that the ghost inhabited. The death of the ghost indicates our growing inability to imagine. We have ceded imagination to technology, which is getting smarter by the day. It is taking away from us our art of telling stories. It has made us passive consumers. Cinema details the story down to the tiniest pixel and leaves nothing to imagination. Earlier, we co-created every novel. The writer made broad strokes, which were cues for us to fill in our own colour, put together our own setting and flesh out our own characters. In the age of cinema and TV, we are no longer the active stakeholders in the creative process.
Our belief in ghosts marked us out as creative people who could piece together from random data a spectral presence. As our imagination dulls, we are less likely to create our own gestalt of the world — we miss the man in the moon, the woman in the cigarette smoke and the hooded figure left on the crumbling wall by peeling plaster. We have killed the ghost as we knew it for thousands of years.
The ghost was the tip of our submerged social unconscious, and also the valve for our collective guilt over an innocent murdered or a woman violated. It was the necessary double of the civilisational order, like the jungle the city carried on its fringes or the ruins hidden in the deep folds of
Even as storytelling, the haunt of ghosts, peters out in the crowd of information and news, we are also wiping out the landscape from which they emerged: the desolate and the unclaimed. That babool round the corner, the narrow street that slithered through tall, damp buildings, and the abandoned houses that looked like forlorn mausoleums. Ghosts are definitely the oustees of development. As we grow in number, we crowd them out by reclaiming land from the wilderness. Straight roads that cut at right angles offer no drama of the scary chase one imagined in curling streets. There is no space for ghosts in our floodlit lives under CCTV cameras. The State and market control space and colonise time. There are very few places that remain cut off from cities, and with your smartphone you are never alone or fully available.
As science disenchanted the world by exorcising the ghost, it not only left us less human but also created a new enchanted, magical world: The button on your phone throbs and lights up when you press it, Google eerily completes your half-formed sentences, and the ex from a long-lost past inexplicably pops up on your Facebook among People You May Know.
The belief in ghosts is a belief that nothing ever dies. Every deletion of life lingers as a spectral trace in some nano corner of the hard disk of the universe. When it’s aware of its unfulfilment, it returns to bang on the doors of the RAM that runs the visible world. Ghosts were part of a culture which believed people come from somewhere and go somewhere. It was a continuous world. Science offers a truncated reality of beginnings and endings. The so-called scientific temper denudes us of our vital irrationality and denies us our fancies, impressions and subjective truths.
Science has spread a culture of sanity that pathologises the beautiful mind.
Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist