If you do not, your head will explode in a million pieces.”
#Vikram aur betaal story tv#
In the TV show version, at the end of his tale, after stating the riddle, the baital would suddenly add the life-death threat, laughing demonically, “If you know, you must answer. I don’t remember any of the stories, but I remember being fascinated by the bloody-minded philosophizing. The stories themselves ranged from silly riddles to philosophical and moral dilemmas to questions of royal judgment. The stories themselves were not scary, but the start and end always were. He would then hike back, and the baital would tell the story. In each story, the King hikes alone through the grim forest, gets to a spooky graveyard and grabs the manic-scary baital off the tree.
The magazine stories used to scare me, since I was very young when I first encountered them, and they were always illustrated with a picture of the doughty king grimly marching through a dark forest, with the baital on his shoulders, with skeletons grinning from the trees. One, in a popular children’s magazine, and another in a popular TV show in the eighties. I remember two versions of the Bikram-Baital stories. Random piece of pop-culture trivia: the Hindi translation of the American Phantomcomics (which for some obscure reasons are way more popular in India than they ever were in America) use the word betaal as the translation for phantom. The creature though, is more like a mix of zombie, Harry-Potteresque inferi and regular graveyard ghoul. It is interesting to note that the English translators seem to turn baital into vampire. Satisfied, the vetala allows himself to be taken to the tantric.Ĭurious, the imponderable twenty-fifth story being so similar to redneck humor in America. The vetala asks what the relation between the two newborn children is. Eventually, the son and the queen have a son, and the father and the princess have a daughter.
In due time, the son marries the queen and the father marries the princess. They find the queen and the princess alive in the chaos, and decide the take them home. On the twenty-fifth attempt, the baital tells the story of a father and a son in the aftermath of a devastating war. Regardless of the reason, he knows the answer to every question therefore the cycle of catching and releasing the vampire continues twenty-four times. In other versions, the king is unable to hold his tongue if he knows the answer, due to his ego. In some variations, the king is required to speak if he knows the answer, or else his head will burst.
If the king answers the question correctly, the vampire escapes and returns to his tree. If Vikram cannot answer the question correctly, the vampire consents to remain in captivity. Each time Vikram tries to capture the baital, it tells a story that ends with a riddle. King Vikram faces many difficulties in bringing the vetala to the tantric. King Bikram promises a vamachara (a tantric sorcerer) that he will capture a vetala (or baital), a vampire spirit who hangs from a tree and inhabits and animates dead bodies. Since the Wikipedia synopsis is pretty compact, I’ll just use an edited version of that: The stories are curiously interesting because they set philosophical, moral and ethical conundrums in the context of a life-or-death struggle between Bikram and the baital. Here is a depiction of the core premise of the folktale by Harshad Dhavale (public domain):
I have no clue about its historical origins, but Wikipedia attributes the tales to the 8th century poet Bhavabhuti, and identifies the hero, the fictional King Bikram, with the real King Vikramaditya of Ujjain (102 BC to 15 AD). It concerns the wise King Bikram and a rather strange philosopher ghoul-vampire, a Baital (sometimes spelled Betaal or Vetal). This is the traditional Indian meta-folktale, Baital Pachisi(The Twenty Five Tales of Baital). Pondering the glut of vampire fiction and television dramas this Halloween, I thought I’d share a fun-scary piece of my childhood.
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