The Burari Deaths and Sacred Horrors

Time: Early morning of 1 July 2018.

Place: Burari, North Delhi.

Case: 11 Members of a family were found dead inside their house at Burari. Ten of them were hanging from a mesh on the ceiling, and one was lying dead in another room.

Closure: Ritual death of all family members by shared psychosis.

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In June 2024 a new web series was launched on the Burari deaths, churning out a crime investigation thriller. It gained neither critical nor commercial acclaim. But it rekindled our interest and made us revisit the Burari horrors from our recent past.

We watched the 2021 Netflix documentary on the Burari deaths, titled The House of Secrets and also Disney+ Hotstar web series titled Akhri Sach which was a crime thriller. We became cognizant of the tremendous public curiosity that the Burari incident generated, and the prolific audio-visual media contents on the same, including a Crime Patrol episode. Some of us ended up watching the rare video footage of the family members hanging inside their Burari home, which was shot by a neighbor who was among the first to have entered the premises after the discovery of the gruesome incident, before the police came. It was never aired by any media house, as this was a very disturbing content.

Let us carry out here briefly what the experts in the acclaimed Netflix documentary termed “psychological autopsy” of the dead of Burari.

Psychological Autopsy

11 members of the Chnudawat/Bhatia family of Burari were found dead. Among them, ten were hanging from the ceiling of a single room and one elderly woman aged 80 years was lying dead in another room of their family home.

Their hands and legs were tied, their eyes were blindfolded, mouths were gagged and ears were plugged.

But they were not murdered, as there were no signs of struggle as per post-mortem. No foul play or no outsiders were involved, which could be corroborated from the CCTV footage. It seemed like a collective suicide of all those who were found hanging from the ceiling. The aged lady was strangled though.

Certain objects indicated that occult practices were being performed inside the house. Tantra, synonymous in public imagination with black magic suddenly came up as a strong contender for the cause of the deaths! It even led to the arrest of a supposedly Tantric Mataji who was the daughter of a contractor who carried out some construction works for the family. The poor arrested lady vehemently denied any association with the family, and police found her to be innocent.

The deaths were a puzzle till 11 diaries were found inside the house, which were diligently kept by the family members for 11 years, 2007 to 2018.  In fact, the number 11 kept recurring in this case through a number of paraphernalia in the Burari house, as if with a numerological significance.

There was a haunting appearance of the eleven pipe-mouths jutting out of one of the outer walls of the Burari house. Eleven outlets for eleven souls, that was one of the most sensational suggestions by the media.

Death by Diary

These eleven diaries not just confirmed the occult angle, but showed us what went on inside the Burari house, and how those eleven people died. In fact they met their deaths by precisely following the manners and methods described in the final diary.

The diaries started in 2007.

That year the family lost its patriarch, the aged father Bhopal Singh Chundawat, who died due to natural causes.

The Youngest son, Lalit, who already had a troubled past and suffered two near-death accidents, the last of which seemingly deprived him of his ability of speech, soon after the death of his father claimed to have been possessed by the ghost of his father.

The dead father left important instructions in the meticulously kept diaries to be followed by the living family members. These happened through the medium of Lalit.

This strange and secret phenomenon continued for eleven years. The family members started following these instructions recorded in the diary, including the performance of certain ritual chants and practices, and during one such session of chanting, Lalit regained his voice.

The beliefs grew deeper.

The family businesses also grew, as they followed the instructions from the dead. This also reinforced Lalit’s standing in the family as the physical voice of the disembodied soul of the late patriarch.

The diaries also frequently admonished the family members for their sins and deviations. There were strict instructions from the dead that Lalit and his wife Tina were to be obeyed. The elder son, Bhuvnesh/Bhavnesh, and his wife, the elder daughter-in-law of the joint family, Savita were reduced to junior members in this cultic practice. Savita was  instructed to be a dutiful lady of the house, to take care of the elderly mother-in-law, 80 year old Narayani Devi, the wife of the dead patriarch. Savita was also to take care of the elder daughter of Narayani Devi, Pratibha, who was a widow and lived with her mother’s family.

The shadow of the dead patriarch loomed large over the younger generation of the family, the only offspring of Pratibha, named Priyanka (33 years), the three kids of Bhuvnesh and Savita, Nitu (25), Menaka alias Monu (23), Dhruv (15), and the only child of Lalit and Tina, Shivam (15).

The ghostly instructions became more stern and rigid with the passage of time, the need for difficult rituals grew, control over the actions of the living was tightened by greater impositions from the dead.

It all culminated when the entire family died in the act of performing a ritual mirroring the hanging of the branches of the fig tree. They called it the Badh Tapasya or Badh Puja. The term suggests a worship of the fig tree, but actually it was supposed to be an evocation of the dead father.

The members were supposed to hang by their neck from the ceiling in a particular manner specified in the last diary entry. They would hang, following which the colour of the water kept in a certain container would change, and the dead patriarch would appear, who would then save them all.

As the elderly Narayani Devi would not be able to hang herself in that manner, the specific actions which were to be carried out to her were also mentioned in the diary entry.

And they all died in the exact same manner.

Shared Psychosis

Experts suggested that this was an act of shared psychosis, where a similar delusion is shared by many people.

In a way, it was a ritual suicide by the family. But it was not quite a suicide, at the same time. The last diary entry suggested that the compliant family members would not only be resurrected after following the successful completion of the Badh Tapasya ritual, but it would make their lives better than before, as the dead patriarch will be reunited with the living.

Non-compliance was out of question.

They did not have any ultimate intention of dying, while they willingly carried out the gruesome ritual of hanging by neck. Though the dead lady showed signs of strangulation, but even that followed the specific instructions from the diary.  They embraced these fatal risks, because they thought the rewards of this penance would far outweigh the risks.

However, a podcast by pinkvilla suggests that not everyone in that family willingly embraced ritual death, and out of the eleven, three members might have been forcefully murdered, as claimed to have been confirmed by autopsy.

Is Tantra to Blame?

The answer should be an unequivocal No. The rituals followed by the family of Burari were not Tantric. They worshipped no Tantric Goddesses and did not perform any Tantric rites. Lalit and his other family members had no Tantric orientations. They had no Tantric mentor and did not undergo any Tantric initiation, which are essential and distinguishing features of Tantra.

Lalit’s father, when he was alive, and the ghost of him conjured by Lalit after his death are a far cry from any sort of specific Tantric manifestation. Tantra texts from Kashmir, Bengal, Kerala (three most powerful centers of Tantra in India) or Nepal do not even mention any ritual like a Badh Tapasya to the best of our knowledge.

The family started by Bhopal Singh Chundawat and Narayani Devi Bhatia was yet another standard, usual, ordinary, regular north Indian family, which at some point of time started performing certain rituals, some of which went out of the ordinary.

For example, Lalit or his father’s ghost instructed the family to chant Hanuman Chalisa. During one such chanting session, Lalit is reputed to have regained his lost voice.

Interestingly, here the Netflix documentary interviews a doctor, who scrutinizes the second traumatic accident that Lalit suffered, points out that Lalit could not possibly have lost his voice because of that accident (fire and smoke, buried under piles of plywood), as that could not affect his vocal cord or larynx.

But his ‘regaining’ of voice appeared to have reinforced his family’s beliefs, and enhanced his cultic status as the leader.

Their final, fatal ritual of Badh Tapasya or Badh Puja (Fig tree penance or fig tree worship) was an act where the family members by hanging themselves from a mesh of the ceiling were going to mimic the branches of a fig tree.   This has no known parallel from the realms of Tantra, needless to say.

What the family did was also a form of ancestor worship or ghost worship, trying to establish contact with a dead ancestor, seeking instructions from the dead, recording the instructions diligently through the diary entries.

Lalit was not just a possessed medium, he increasingly became one and indistinguishable with his dead father and even started to address Narayani Devi by her name.

Psychosis Is Common

This will sound strange, but shared psychosis seems to be a pretty common phenomenon behind family deaths all over India as per the aforementioned podcast from pinkvilla, where it is pointed out that such shared psychosis is often seen, and families die because of this. But because the Burari case took place in Delhi, it generated a lot of media hype. Otherwise, such shared psychosis cases mostly go unnoticed.

Indeed, psychosis is not a rare or exceptional human disease. It is a common psychological disorder throughout humanity, primarily because of the tremendous depths of the human mind to conjure images, create stories and fantasies and perceive entities around them through acts of hyper-awareness.

Hyper-awareness is an evolutionary trait of humans that has helped us to steer clear of possible dangers lurking around us, but it has also allowed us to perceive ghosts, demons, spirits and entities.

Our cultures and our everyday religious practices do share some common features with neurosis and psychosis. Freud desisted from directly relating religion to psychosis, but he did connect religion to neurosis, or certain forms of illusion, delusion, and imaginary experiences.

This might have been a point of contention between Freud and Jung, a debate about which we should not bother here, because that would require a separate treatment.

Many religions may have certain illusions, fantasies, or even delusions at its core, which transcend the boundaries of the laws of nature. They arise out of the tremendous depths and expanses of the human mind.

Resurrection of the dead: it might be scandalous or blasphemous to dub the central tenet of Christianity (Resurrection of Jesus after Crucifixion) as a shared psychosis. Some religions might not be as lenient as Christianity to invite such psychological criticism of their religious experiences, and some may even issue death threats, if they are told that Freud said that their religious texts might involve neurotic illusions!

Our point here is this: neurosis, milder form of delusions, and psychosis, severe form of delusions, are not abnormal, and they are a usual, average form of the sensory experiences of the human animal, because of the extremely rich nature of our consciousness and sense perceptions. They are probably as usual in terms of occurrence as the bacteria attached to our body.

Deconstructing the Sensational Other

Neurosis and Psychosis are not just abnormal aberrations, and often appear in mainstream religious narratives. The hagiography of a number of Indian saints would abound in stories which are outright manifestations of the supernatural, in which occult and non-human features appear frequently, the dead communicate with the living, the spirits of the ancestors come to visit the descendants, performance of severe acts of life-threatening penance meet with rich spiritual and material rewards.

The Burari deaths, do they ring a bell here?

Let us not carry out an act of othering the Burari deaths. This family was not abnormal. Many families indulge in ancestor worship to varying degrees. Many families may be haunted by a recently deceased member. Many families might perform religious rituals with various degrees of difficulties which may include dangerous perils.

The Burari family did not do a single thing which makes them abnormal, but they just did it to the extreme.

Lalit was the origin of this psychosis as per the diaries, and it remained undiagnosed, undetected. It might have started as a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following the accidents he suffered, and it might have been aggravated after the death of his father. As the family benefited by listening to the ghostly instructions, this only increased the strength of their shared delusion.

One user in Quora, who claims some acquaintance with the diaries, points out that the Burari family performed similar rituals even earlier, which just became more stringent this time. In the absence of the full transcripts and translations of the diaries, it is difficult to ascertain the truth of the claim. The Netflix documentary did not dwell with the diaries in any detail, and only some sketchy information was provided.

Secret Rituals of a Family

The two other siblings who did not stay with the family in Burari, the eldest son of late Bhopal Singh, Dinesh, who lived in Rajasthan, and a daughter, Sujata who was married and lived with her in-laws, completely denied the psychosis angle. They did not have the foggiest idea about the occult happenings inside the family for last eleven years, and were ignorant of the diaries.

Dinesh and Sujata insisted that these are murders, and not acts of ritual death.

One explanation might be that there were acts of secrecy followed by the family which excluded anybody who did not live under the same roof, who did not participate in the same family businesses carried out from the same house premises, or simply anybody who would not believe in the same stories of ghostly manifestations.

Families keep secrets. We call them skeletons in the cupboard. Rituals, or stylized, repetitive, rhythmic human behavior which attempt to communicate with the mysterious aspects of the universe are sometimes secretly confined to clans, groups, cabals and small patrilineal groups.

Ancestor worshipping cults often have such exclusive rites, rituals and secret instructions which are not revealed to the un-initiated, to the outsiders.

We generally look at the anatomy of religion and the evolution of cults using macro-perspectives. We do this, because there can be a mind-boggling variety of micro-perspectives, which may be difficult to systematize. Also, we generally think of religion as the maker and marker of large communities of shared belief. We do not usually consider religion as a group indulging in eccentric, secret and exclusive practices. We forget that there can also be secretive, exclusive and exclusionary cultic practices inside a family, involving a select few, involving secret rituals.

Is Neurosis In-Built?

Here is an anecdote which I came across when I started to study psychoanalysis, as a part of literary theory. The story went like this. A man pissed inside a pub. He was sent for psychoanalytic counseling. After a few months of counseling this person comes back and pisses inside the pub again. To a shocked bartender, this person replies that as a result of counseling, he now knows why he did that earlier, so he is doing it again! Surely this is an anarchist joke.

But the idea behind this psychoanalytic joke is that there is no cure for the human condition, and that neurosis is in-built into our humanity.

Poetry too can be a form of neurosis, so can be religion. Neurosis is not outlandish and abnormal. We create stories because of a certain benign neurosis.

Cell growth is normal. Not only normal, it is essential for life. But there is this extreme and malignant form of cell growth which we know as cancer.

Sarvam Ayantam Garhitam, as a Sanskrit adage goes. All extremes are bad.

Holy Terror

There is an eponymous book by Terry Eagleton, which argues that sacred terror is one of the most important foundations of human civilization, and this runs as a constant motif throughout the history of the evolution of religions, which Eagleton establishes by discussing examples mainly from classical Greek tragedy and Judeo-Christian theology.

Indian religions need not be any different. The Badh Puja of the Burari family might even recall Yaksha worship from ancient India, which often involved elements of terror centered on trees which are the favorite habitats of Yakshas, a sort of ambivalent entities, who can grant us boons, but can also punish us to death.

In Mahabharata, there is a riddle-loving Yaksha who kills the four Pandava brothers and then after being propitiated by Yudhisthira revives the dead brothers back to life.

Holy terror is frequently encountered in primitive religious practices where even bodily harms are welcome to satisfy a supernatural force, where the force miraculously intervenes to save one from ultimate doom just before death, or sometimes resurrects somebody even after death.

Death and destructions are hurdles which one bravely overcomes to propitiate a powerful force.

Urban Legends: Do the Rich and Powerful Indulge in Black Magic?

As I was researching recently on the audio-visual contents on horror including facebook reels and youtube podcasts, I realized that there are some widespread beliefs that the rich and powerful in India as well as elsewhere in the world indulge in black magic practices. Reportedly the film stars and politicians do it the most, and businesspeople also do it as per a podcast from beerbiceps that has millions of views, which is claimed by a so-called black magic specialist.

Did the Burari deaths happen because of a desire to succeed in business?

Black magic for wealth and power are purely urban legends, and no proper survey has been done till date by collecting and analyzing data samples. Probably because of the secretive nature of such practices, carrying out actual surveys would be difficult and no such attempts for surveying the prevalence of such secretive practices have come to our knowledge so far.

Ecological Horror

We associate tree worship with ecological dimensions of religion and generally do not associate horror with such practices. But trees often evoke sacred horror. In ancient India, trees are strongly associated with Vetala, a sort of possessed dead body (not like a zombie, but more like a demonized dead). Different types of ghosts inhabit different trees. The fig trees are known for a holy terror as the fig trees are also inhabited by deities.

In a seal from Harappan civilization we get to see a goat being sacrificed to propitiate a deity on a tree. In Mahabharata there is an episode involving a Shami tree where a decomposing dead body acts as a camouflage for the secret reservoir of the weapons of the Pandavas.

The tree is ambivalent. It can be sacred and it can also be a site of horror.

The Dead Can Be Stronger than the Living

A strange fact is that the Burari family’s business thrived more, when the ghost of the father started possessing Lalit, rather than when the father was alive. During the lifetime of Bhopal Singh Chundawat (himself a gharjamai, literally  a resident son-in-law, who either lives on the land of his in-laws, or works in the business of his in-laws; as he married Narayani Devi Bhatia, most of the people in the Burari neighborhood knew the family as Bhatia, and not as Chundawat), they were not doing financially well, a fact made pretty obvious in the Netflix documentary, though the full implications of that were not made clear.

Almost all possession stories indicate that the possessed person comes to occupy super-human powers and abilities. There are certain rational explanations behind such phenomenon. We can try to explain why a hysteric person can become physically very strong, or why a possessed person can suddenly display uncanny mental abilities.

Lalit suffered from PTSD in his youth, and as the youngest son of the family he might have remained under the shadow of the elders of the family. In his youth, he faced many challenges, personal and professional.

But after his father’s death, the sudden vacuum as well as the sudden responsibility might have been overwhelming together, and the powerful unconscious forces of his mind might have crafted the ghost of his father par excellence.

This not only gave Lalit an authority, this allowed him to re-create his father to perfection. The ghostly instructions improved the family business in a way that the living alone never could have done, because the living are always limited by their conscious boundaries, while the dead have a limitless authority.

An Atheist Reading of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam

This reminds us of a famous painting by Michelangelo, creation of Adam, as we conclude this article. Look carefully at this fresco painting. This is how God created Adam in his image.

But it has been argued by some commentators that the painting also indicates that this is how Adam created God! Because of the bilateral symmetry of the painting, it can be read in both ways.

If the creation process starts from right, and then culminates to the left: God is creating Adam. If the creation process starts from left, and then culminates to right: Adam is creating God.

Further, in this painting, God exists inside a heaven that looks tantalizingly like the human brain, the anatomy of which was well known in Renaissance Italy!

In this painting, Adam might be creating God as a wiser, nobler and more authoritative image of himself. God might be that very powerful hyper-awareness within Adam’s head, which allows Adam to transcend the ordinary boundaries and limitations of human existence.

But this article is not about God. It is about Ghosts. And this article is about a son who probably created a perfect ghost of his father.

Did Lalit also cry during his final moments, ‘father, why have you forsaken me?’

Did we create our ghosts, and then were killed by our creations? That would be a testimony to the horrors that the human mind is capable of conjuring.