The Churel: The Wronged Woman Who Returns With Her Feet Turned Backward
Across the whole vast reach of South Asia — northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and the diaspora that carried the belief to the Caribbean and Africa — the most feared of the returning dead is a woman, and the tradition is unusually precise and unusually damning about why she returns. The churel (churail, chudail) is the vengeful revenant of a woman who died wronged — and the catalogue of the wrongs that make her is the legend's whole indictment: a woman who died in childbirth or pregnancy; a woman who died in the "impure" days after a birth, unpurified and unmourned; a woman mistreated, starved, humiliated, or killed by her own family — the neglected daughter-in-law, the abused wife, the widow cast out; a woman who died with her desires and her dignity denied, carrying into death a burden of unaddressed grievance. Such a woman, the tradition holds, does not rest; she rises as a churel — and she rises angry , and she rises to collect . The Backward Feet Her s...