We thought education would end this. Once a generation grew up with textbooks and smartphones, the old fears would die of embarrassment. But look around you. The engineer checks rahu kaal (an inauspicious period of time) before signing her loan papers. A new SUV drives out of the showroom with stringed lemon and chilies swinging from the bumper. A newborn’s first photo is displayed on the family WhatsApp group with a black dot behind its ear and a nazar emoji in the caption. Superstition in India did not die. It got a data plan.
Superstition is not only ignorance. It’s also love that doesn’t know how to deal with fear.
The Fears That Survived Modernity
Be honest about your own household. The haircut that can’t happen on a particular day of the week. A wedding date that waited for the priest’s calculations. Curd and sugar the morning of an exam. What about the compliment that must immediately be followed by the words “nazar na lage“. Even families who are offended to be called superstitious, discreetly compare horoscopes when a marriage is being considered.
These rituals have survived because many Indians place fear above logic. They survived because superstition in India is about protecting yourself from loss by indulging in baseless remedies. It’s about avoidance and the inability to solve difficult real-life problems. And the false promise of preventing future disturbances.
Why Education Could Not Kill It
Textbook knowledge is incapable of dismissing fear. Here is the uncomfortable truth. Love creates fear. Fear demands action. When the thing you fear: illnesses, accidents, failure, a child’s future—offers you nothing to actually do, ritual steps in and offers its services. Tie the black thread. Feed a cow. Fast every Tuesday.
The universe is not listening, but the ritual is not for the universe. It’s for the person performing it. It converts helplessness and fear into a task that has steps. This task is achievable.
The thread is tied on the child’s wrist. The relief is felt in the mother’s chest.
This is why the most superstitious person in any Indian family is almost never the most ignorant one. It is the one who wishes to love and control but has the least say in both. An individual who readily offers a bargaining chip to some invisible power.
When Protection Becomes A Prison
There is a line that should never be crossed, and my novel Cobra Orchard lives on the wrong side of it. In the book, a guru pronounces a young girl as cursed, and her mother, out of pure terror, spends years trying to cure her daughter. Mantras. Charms. Black threads.
The mother believes she is protecting her daughter. The daughter grows up believing she is a disease that requires treatment.
That is the true cost of superstition in India. Not the money spent on rituals, but the identities quietly assigned by them. Every ritual performed for a person tells them something about themselves. Perform enough rituals and the person will learn a heartbreaking lesson: something is wrong with you, and we have to fix it.
Love that cannot separate itself from fear does not protect. It damages.
If you have ever been the performer or sufferer of such rituals, explore Cobra Orchard. Its honesty will move you.
Why are mental health conversations getting louder but faker? There’s nothing pretty about them.
Which superstitions have you been exposed to, and who told you about them? Tell me below.
Three women. Two timelines. One curse that refuses to die. Set in the shadow-drenched villages of Uttar Pradesh, India — across the 1970s and the early 2000s.
Cobra Orchard is a psychological thriller about secrets buried so deep, even the earth forgot them. Read Cobra Orchard on Amazon Kindle and Amazon Prime Paperback.
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Terveen Gill is a writer who has always been drawn to the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath ordinary lives. A Times of India and Chandigarh Literary Society award-winning short story writer, she is also a graphic novel script writer, indie filmmaker, and a former engineer.
Her debut psychological thriller Cobra Orchard is the culmination of that instinct: a dark, immersive novel about three women, a sinister guru, and secrets buried so deep they have begun to rot.
You hit the nail on the head. I see this all the time. People buy the most advanced luxury SUVs, only to immediately tie a lemon and chilies to them to ward off the evil eye. Education and tech gave us logic, but it seems like our cultural fears are just too deeply rooted to be wiped out by a screen. Very relatable read.
Thanks for your thoughts. I agree, fear has no head or tail and many find breaking from convention (no matter how silly) a difficult task.
Terveen I fully agree with you . Probably it started when Society in the earlier times was divided into four castes- Brahmins , Kshatriyas , Vaish and shudra.
Probably Brahmins were the educated and they started all the entanglements.
They were doing puja and did most of the things to their advantage. Probably it filtered down from there.