Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s “Kapalakundala”

Record summary

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Kapalakundala incorporates ascetic, tantric and uncanny motifs, including settings and practices that can be read alongside nineteenth-century Bengali ideas about spirits, possession and dangerous sacred spaces. It matters as a textual record of how supernatural belief was represented in colonial Bengali fiction rather than as a case report. Researchers can compare its narrative treatment with ethnographic descriptions of local spirit traditions and with later adaptations. The work’s genre, plot and symbolic use of occult material should remain distinct from claims that it documents actual apparitions.