The Ghost VIllage

Why would I want to restart travel stories with a haunted village?

Because it is one of the most unique places I have visited.

Built of the same golden sandstone as the city of Jaisalmer, the abandoned village of Kuldhara is only a few hours drive away. I wish Ray had visited this hamlet too-he might have found a more interesting story than he found in the Shonar Kella.

The Place:
It doesn’t look like a village from present times-more like a planned township. The houses are not very different from those in many small towns or ‘villas’ of current metros, apart from the golden sandstone.

Straight, parallel and perpendicular streets, plots of almost equal sizes, could not see any evidence of streetlights or parking (or posts to tie animals), but there were drains. The temples are the most well preserved, except that there is no deity inside and bells never ring.

The houses had 2-3 rooms on the ground floor, kitchens with stone shelves and notches for utensils and stairs leading up to the terrace. A few had broken town 2^nd storeys but mostly they had a flat terrace with boundary walls. The kind where families dry the laundry, spread out the fruit before pickling, and stretch out on charpoys under the winter sun or fly kites.

The only difference is there is nobody here.

The entire town was abandoned overnight three hundred years ago, and nobody wanted to live here again.

The History:

The town is full of stone inscriptions. (No risk of hard drives crashing and google threatening your online storage). 

This area has the Mughal practice of building ‘chatris’ (cenotaphs) and along with the inscriptions they tell the stories of the village-the people were like those in any other Indian village of those times. Mostly farmers, some traders, musicians and craftsmen.

According to the inscriptions-Brahmin families from Pali migrated here in the early 1300s.  They wore clothes similar to those worn in other villages of Rajasthan even today. They carried daggers with them.

They scrimped and scavenged for water. They built stepwells and mudbanks, but the water just wasn’t enough. They started dwindling in number and then they vanished.

The Legend:

Even though crops were suffering their taxes kept rising. (Sounds familiar?)

Then Salim Singh (helpfully pronounced Zalim Singh by the local storytellers), the minister of Jaisalmer claimed a girl from the village.

Her family begged him to wait for one night. By morning, 1500 people had disappeared leaving behind no clue, just a curse that none will be able to survive in the homes they were leaving behind.

In a country, where everything from palaces and pavements are encroached upon, nobody lives in these houses even now.

The government has built roads and is trying to build cottages to entice tourists with the novelty of spending a night with the ghosts. The villagers add more spice to the stories to keep the travellers coming.

As to the people who disappeared; historians point to dying water resources and probably an earthquake. But no one can say for sure.