Rabindranath Tagore’s “Kshudhita Pashan”

Record summary

Tagore’s “Kshudhita Pashan,” usually translated as “The Hungry Stones,” describes a civil servant who believes an old palace exerts a seductive, possibly haunted influence. The framing narrator introduces skepticism and competing explanations, making the work particularly useful for comparing psychological, environmental and supernatural readings of apparition-like experience. It is not a documented haunting, but a major Bengali literary text from the nineteenth century that engages with colonial administration, historical ruins and unreliable testimony. Edition dates and English titles vary, so the original Bengali text should be consulted.