Ghost or detection, what do the readers want?

The three-day Bengali literary festival hosted by Tanmoy Roychowdhury saw Mir Afsar Ali, Indranil Sanyal, Dwaita Hazra Goswami, and Aparajita Dasgupta as speakers for the session on “Mysteries have eradicated the ghosts”. Conducting the session was Bhaskar Let, journalist and writer.

The session hosted at the Oxford Bookstore on Park Street, focused on the nuances and the dialectic hegemony of thrillers, murder mysteries, and detective fiction, and how the ghost story is being affected by it or not. Let started the session with, “We might have read about Julio Cortazar from Argentina, and his story House Taken Over. We see a brother and sister in an old inherited house. They are always afraid that some people might come inside the house. Some people really do move in. but as the story evolves, the readers speculate maybe the siblings are the ghosts. Maybe the spirit of inclusive nationalism of Juan Peron was creeping into the house. With this tone, we will start the session.”

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Indranil Sanyal, writer and novelist, answered on this subject, “I would not go into the polarity. There is a vast genre of literature outside the parameters of thriller and horror. I have written both thriller and horror, yet I would vote for horror. We live in a very strange time. Today, there is no truth left anymore. Whether the sun rises in the east or west has been redundant. This is the post-truth era. There is nothing called the truth anymore. I don’t know if there is a need for thrillers anymore, but there is a very pertinent need for horrors. People essentially want to be scared.”

The session progressed with dialogues about what society needs today, what avid readers want from the authors. Bhashkar Let goes on to ask about whether an author is asked to write more about horror, and if the author likes writing such stories. Aparajita Dasgupta, Prof. of history, Director of Bengal Book Parishad, answered, “There was an ambience of ghosts in Bengal when we had lanterns and no electricity. There was a lot of darkness in our daily lives, and ghosts would flutter about in those nooks and crannies. But after electricity, the times have changed, the context has changed. We have lopsided our lives. We have come into OTT. With all these changes, I don’t think ghosts are there anymore. For the last 500 years, the core of the mysteries has been the same. Technology has changed. We hear about digital arrest, cybercrime. We had never heard of such things.”

Let mentions the last of the great novelists in Bengal, Shirshendu, and how his ghosts are friendly. He asks if the international sphere attracts ghost stories or are the international audience diverted from such things. Dwaita Hazra Goswami, Member of the Writer’s Room Hamburg, said, “We have fun events at the Writer’s Room. One such event was Nacht Active. We would go to the writer’s room and write for a whole night, anything we liked. We would then collect at one place and discuss our writings. So I asked my manager, How crazy are the Germans about ghost stories? Hartmut, my manager, said he had received the Hamburg Literary prize for a ghost story. So, it is very relevant in that part of the world as well.”

The ultimate question came for Mir Afsar Ali, a former radio host for 28 years, a stalwart audio story narrator. Let asked, “Today is a Sunday, and with Mir Sunday Suspense has been intrinsically joined. I would like to know which genre has been loved more: thriller or horror?”

Mir started, “When I was a founder member for Sunday Suspense, I was never involved with curation until 23 January 2023, when I left radio. It was solely because I was scared for myself that I was getting stagnant, and I had to do something for myself. I had no other reason to leave the radio. Then I started my audio story channel as a culmination, which completed three years this year. This is when I started knowing how to direct a story. Just like a product salesperson gives their opinion on which is better, we too give suggestions to the readers. This is just a reference marker. It’s a very fun process because the listeners are never satisfied. Be it Tagore, Manik Bandopadhyay, we find gems of the literary world, but the listeners always want something more. It is like feeding a hungry monster. Personally, I love horror stories, but I am too scared to enjoy them alone. This especially happens on Friday nights when I have to preview the story to be published on Saturday. I make sure I am not alone in the studio. People want to be scared, tell ghost stories, and be scared a little.”

The session ended with insightful questions from the audience, and the panelists very aptly answered as much as time permitted. The arguments of thriller or horror must persist, and there are a plethora of ideologies that will arise from such debates.