And then sometimes, for some people, something strange happens.. they begin to “feel” something. Sublime messages, inconspicuous patterns or even an outright call from a power they don’t fully understand. Everything feels mystical, the temples begin to “awe-inspire”, when just a few years ago they were just pieces of.. well, architecture.

I think India as an entity (that contains its people, its soil, its substrate, its mountains and rivers, metallic objects, its ancient medical practices, and historic architecture all have a memory. a memory that remembers and continuously absorbs the veneration. A lot of it can be explained with science. For example, Ganga river’s self-purifying property that is written about in ancient Indian texts, without a “peer-reviewed study” but believed and respected by the people since centuries. In 1896, British bacteriologist Ernest Hanbury Hankin documented that cholera bacteria died faster in Ganga water than in other water sources and later research attributed this to bacteriophages (viruses that eat bacteria) present in the river partly due to high sulphur/mineral content and the river’s interaction with Himalayan rock!! This is a genuine case where centuries of “Ganga is purifying” veneration had a real microbiological basis (though pollution today has overwhelmed this natural mechanism almost completely, so it’s not a free pass for drinking from it now).

Another example is that of turmeric and neem both treated as sacred or purifying in rituals- eg turmeric in weddings, neem leaves at thresholds during illness and to keep away insects. Curcumin (turmeric) and neem extracts both have documented anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties in peer-reviewed research. then there is Tulsi or holy basil that is worshipped, often kept in household courtyards. Has documented antimicrobial and insect-repellent properties, partially explaining the folk practice of growing it right outside the home. there’s also copper vessels for storing water- now we know that copper has measurable antimicrobial effects on water-borne bacteria and this has decent scientific backing. We can’t forget to include fasting practices during for eg, Ekadashi, Navratri- modern intermittent fasting research does show metabolic benefits, lending some support to old cyclical fasting traditions.

Of course there is a lot more that science has not been able to prove, and the purpose of this article is not to prove or disprove these “rituals” or beliefs. I want to talk about how our belief in the power of the sun, the moon, the waves, the seasons, the animals that come with the seasons, the metals we eat from and put on our skin slowly translated into “rituals”, that then formed the “tradition” that then became a part of the “culture of this civilisation”

Please note that this is not a religion-focused or to be precise, a “Hindu-culture-focused” exploration. it is an “Indian-subcontinent”-focused exploration. Considering that the subcontinent has been the birthplace/cradle'/adoptive mother of so many cultures owing to the history of nomadic travel, land and sea trade and exchange of art and ideas - between the subcontinent and Eastern Asia, Western Asia, south east Asia (and claims of contact with the mayans), a lot of the individual and unique practices of each of these civilisations inspired and transformed each other. And I will not indulge in ethnocentrism and say that the world only learned from India. India, too, grew and learned alongside the others. Some examples are- the samosa for eg traces back to Persia- the persian word “sambusag” means “triangular pastry,” and its oldest mentions appear in the work of a 9th-century poet Ishaq al-Mawsili, with the 11th-century Persian historian Abu-al-fazl Behaqi describing it as a delicacy in the Ghaznavid royal courts. Traders and travellers from Persia and Central Asia introduced it to India through trade routes during the Delhi sultanate period, roughly the 13th-14th century. The transformation is actually the MOST interesting part- the original samosa was meat-filled but the spiced potato-and-pea version we know today couldn’t have existed until potatoes themselves arrived! And they weren’t native to India and were brought by Portuguese traders only in the 17th century after our dude Da Gama “found” India… so the samosa is actually a layered story of two separate waves of foreign contact ie Persian pastry technique, then a new world vegetable via European trade -both absorbed and “Indianised” into something now considered quintessentially Indian. Then there is the famous enamelling technique called “meenakari” that came to India with Persian artisans during the Mughal period (commonly associated with the Mughal court particularly under Akbar). The base technique of fusing coloured glass/enamel onto metal was Persian. But Indian artisans, especially in Jaipur, transformed it by adding distinctly Indian motifs (peacocks, lotuses, mango patterns) pairing it with kundan-set stones and creating a hybrid jewelry tradition that is now considered a signature Indian craft, even though the underlying technique walked in from Iran! Then there is my favourite example-Angkor Wat. Originally built in the 12th century as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu by the Khmer Empire where Indian religious cosmology, Sanskrit inscriptions and temple-mountain architecture were adopted wholesale by a Southeast Asian civilization that had no direct conquest relationship with India, just trade and cultural contact!!!!!!!! It was later converted into a Buddhist site, showing a second layer of transformation on top of the first. Then how chess travelled to Persia and in a classic case of “Chinese whispers” and from its original name of “chaturanga” it became famous in the rest if the world as “shatranj”

You see what I mean?

Now that we have the “growth story” out of the way, let’s talk about how we made some things “sacred” in the process, and how we codified that sacredness into rituals.

Some stories I found very fascinating are those of “sacred groves”. Ecologist Madhav Gadgil (who headed the Gadgil Committee- upsc folks would remember) and historian Ramachandra Guha’s book This Fissured Land- an Ecological History of India, built on Gadgil’s earlier field documentation with VD Vartak going back to 1975 which was published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. It argues that sacred groves are a resource conservation practice grounded in religious belief and that pre-scientific societies arrived at sustainable-use practices through trial and error which then got coded as religious codes. Gadgil documented this across India, Bhutan and Japan over nearly half a century and noted that figures like historian Romila Thapar have argued Jainism and Buddhism’s vegetarianism and restraint emerged partly as a response to ecological crisis. If thats accurate, thats beautiful :’) that means our religious practices transformed with the needs of the times, and unrelated, but it teaches us that we need to resist the contemporary regressive religious doctrine that is too rigid to change with the times. because that is pseudo-religion. The real religious practices- our ancestors knew and performed beautifully.

This, in my UN-professional opinion, is the anthropological backbone for “some trees becoming divine or sacred”- it’s not just rivers having bacteriophages but about an entire field documenting that the sacralization of nature functioned as an unconscious conservation system, independent of which specific religion sat on top of it!!!!!!!!!!! (I personally cannot completely investigate the study owing to my own limited knowledge, but it makes me happy to know this, and I choose to believe it because it makes me look at religion and “traditions” positively and not be disheartened by how we conduct religious practices today eg throwing non-organic things in the Ganga because we believe its a good ritual. no its not, we forgot the actual, real, meaning, we lost in with time? But understanding the meaning, the REASON- can help us use this for good!)

Another beautiful example is of the “growing alongside in creating/assigning the sacred-ness to things” itself. Anthropologist Robert M. Hayden’s well-known paper “Antagonistic Tolerance- Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans” develops a concept of “competitive sharing” to explain how sacred sites long shared by members of differing religious communities, sometimes showing genuinely syncretic mixed practices, persist precisely because passive tolerance (non-interference) is different from active embrace!! On the ground, this shows up concretely in examples of Hindu communities historically visited Sufi shrines believing the saints had miraculous powers, Muslim rulers sometimes sponsored temple renovations to maintain social harmony, festivals like Holi absorbing Sufi poetry and music and more. There’s also a specific peer-reviewed case study (Religions of South Asia journal) on syncretic Islam in Kerala’s dargahs, tracing the convergence of bhakti and Sufism and how these shrines became cultural centres for both Hindus and Muslims. We grew together, and discovered meaning together and created our sacred symbols together. I love that!

Now coming to water, according to the late Dr. R. Nagaswamy, former Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, water was sacred in traditional societies, and rivers were deified which had real implications for how water supplies got protected and managed. Temple tanks in cities like Madurai and Kanchipuram served ritual purposes but were also genuine water reservoirs that collected rainwater and recharged groundwater and the spiritual function and the engineering function were inseparable. This is the exact same logic as Gadgil’s sacred groves, just applied to water infrastructure instead of forests ie sanctification as the mechanism that ensured maintenance across generations, regardless of which empire or ruling religion was in charge of the region at the time.

Coming to the end of this think piece, I believe lot of what got dismissed as ritual or superstition was actually a knowledge system that encoded conservation science, public health practice, social cohesion mechanism and was operating under a different vocabulary than the one we now call “science.” I want to reframe “sacred” not as the opposite of rational, but as an early delivery mechanism for what was, in its time, the most rigorous available knowledge.

Man, June has been crazy.

Just insane.

There’s fire everywhere, but no one knows how to blow it out.

We all stand together looking at it, the smoke settling in our lungs... half of us on one side, with a manic panic, and the other half of us with disinterest.

But we’re all facing the fire.

Man, June has been crazy.

The astro baddies just revealed there is something worse than a mercury retrograde (imagine!)- a Jupiter can’t seem to stay still. And apparently he is excited!

“Sure but what has that got to do with all the youngsters in the streets in grief?”

“Oh! Their umbrella’s blew off in the yearly cyclone, is it?”

“Okay acha.”

“But seriously yaar this is suspicious, how are all the kids angry at the same time?”

“If I had to get to the bottom of this mystery I would look closer, and realise, much to my dismay, the kids are angry because the kids are hurt.”

“What now?”

“Kids get hurt all the time, but unlike some birds who don’t have a helicopter parenting problem, and watch their chick step unsurely towards the edge of the cliff, their doubt revealing itself in their careful steps..

humans ke bacche spend 1/4th of their lifetime marinating in their concrete nest where the balcony faces another building so close almost like they’re kissing; and…”

“Wait.!. when was the last time you saw the sun?”

“Seriously yaar this is suspicious, how are all the kids vitamin d deficient at the same time?”

“Man, June has been crazy.”

“It genuinely feels that the flames are soaring up from the ground, the very soil is radiating hatred. It feels the mother is depressed. And she’s angry?”

“Who knows? I’m just a demodex in a cave!”

Y”ou know this cave is a human being’s hair follicles right?”

“What? What’s a human? And what’s a hair follicle?”

“You live on top of an entity. Its alive. It’s this giant species that is so much more larger than us that we cant see the whole of its body from one place. Can you imagine?”

“What? Youre saying my planet has, like, a personality? No way. Its just a pit landscape where it snows dead-skin cells”

“so you’re saying… there are other places with caves?”

“Yeah. I mean, there are billions of human beings.. and they all have at least a 1000 hair follicles. Yes there are other places with caves.”

“Do you think their dead skin cells with be flakier?”

“.. umm.. idk.. aren’t you attached to your follicle?”

“No, it’s nice. There is warmth radiating from below, the slow heave of the winds. The air is rich with things, but it feels light as nothing. Forests look like dense mats of emerald fur, and oceans are deep, restless shimmer that even the strongest, wisest, richest demodex can drown in instantly. Everything is loud, but usually not in a bad way.”

“Okay so are you looking to move?”

“Yeah I mean, I could. I kinda ended up burning my kitchen down cause I didn’t know how to take care of it *shrugs* I mean the oceans seem more hateful, and the forests aren’t as rich, and since I don’t know how to stop hurting it, I guess ill just move out.”

*pauses*

“I don’t think this is the right approach but okay, let me introduce you to some people. You can probably move in with them, maybe you know if Jeff Bezos gets that rocket going.”

“Jeff Bezos will take us to a new follicle in his jet???”

“Actually, I don’t think so. Anyway, look here. Look towards the right.. 3 o’clock. That’s Mars. That guy is actually cold and his skin is rust-coloured. Your ocean problem is solved cause there’s no water here”

“Where did all the water go?”

“Oh it cracked and vanished long ago, leaving behind white first crystals that jump straight from ice to gas and..”

“Wait. They can do that”

“Apparently yes, but wait let me finish. The breath is here too, but it’s rust-y too and it covers everything on which it heaves. If you looked up, the sky is butterscotch, not blue. Will you miss the blue skies?

“miss them? I can’t live without them” the demodex cried.

“Thats okay, we have some more options. Look left. That’s Venus”

“Isn’t that a hot woman’s name?”

“Oh she IS hot! But son, you’re old enough to know to be careful around hot women. You enter her and the pressure hits immediately, her breath is so thick, inhaling it feels like being deep underwater, crushing your lungs before you notice”

“Im a demodex. I don’t have lungs”

“In this story you do. Now then you look up you will see yellow clouds, but don’t stand under them because clouds drip sulphuric acid and you would immediately dissolve”

“Wow. Okay. Definitely not moving here.”

“You’re so picky! But alright, I can show you some more properties. The most spacious one is Jupiter. He’s massive! He’s the biggest in his pack, but he doest bully the others. There is no solid ground there, you will endlessly fall inwards through layers of clouds that shift from white to amber to deep brown. Each cloud band is a different chemical- ammonia ice crystals at the top, next to its hydrosulphide relative. The wind hits you at 500km/hr so..”

“WHAT? Can you show me a normal piece of property? This is insanity! What kind of a broker are you?”

“Umm.. if you’ll be respectful I can show you around Saturn. As you will crane your neck towards the sky searching for the moon, you’ll see its rings stretching across the sky like an endless wall of ice- from one horizon to other other, paper thin from its edges but blindingly white. You’ll like the lighting here though, it is gold, weaker than the earth’s- giving everything a late afternoon warmth that never quite delivers heat, and the clouds are calmer, almost melancholic””

“So no AC needed. Thats a pro. What else do we have?”

“We have ur anus. But theres something kinda off about him. There’s this weird silence and the light is just… wrong.”

“What do you mean?” The demodex pulled closer

“Ur anus rotates to its side, so you will se a pole thats feel facing the sun since decades. An endless dim, blue-grey day with the sun barely moving for.. did I say tens of years”

“WHAT?” The demodex yelled!

“What about sunsets???? Next you’ll tell me there’s no pan tapri here!” Stunned, he exclaimed

‘You breathe in methane ice, giving everything an aqua marine tint.”

“Wait wait wait. What is methane doing here?”

“Thats a long story”

“I have time”

*pause*

“No. You won’t get it”

“Why?”

“Cause you’re too young to understand.”

“Man! June has been crazy! and now I can’t leave my house?” His eyes welled up with tears..“Why don’t they like me? Why doesn’t anyone want me?”

“You are wanted and loved back home, you know that right?”

The demodex sniffled but said nothing.

“You are so wanted and loved but because you don’t feel loved, you don’t love back. You lash out and you hurt, and for some reason you guys are hairless primates but you no longer cuddle on tree branches and groom each other’s hair follicles”

“Im a demodex. Im not a primate. What are you talking about?”

“In this story you are”

The demodex sighs in resignation. “Okay. How do I fix my home? I feel it radiating hatred into my veins, in everyone’s veins. I’m telling you! It’s radiating from the ground!”

“Love it. The hate will dissolve”

“How do I love it? How do I stop it from pouring anger and grief into my body?’

“Stop hurting it. It will talk to you when you stop hurting it.”

The demodex fell quiet again.

It had seen the butterscotch clouds of Saturn -cold and beautiful and completely indifferent. It had felt the hot hollow wind of Mars where nothing waited and nothing answered. It had looked at every other host and found only silence or violence.

And now it stood in its follicle, on the only living thing in all that darkness, and it understood for the first time that it had nowhere to go.

“So I’m trapped,” said the Demodex. Whether it was a question or a surrender, no one knows.

“No. You’re home. There’s a difference. You just haven’t been still long enough to feel it.”

“And if I am still?”

“Then it will speak to you. It has been trying to. Stop hurting it, and it will tell you about the frogs.

Not immediately. First there will be silence, intentional bare-footedness of everything rearranging itself. And then, when the rain comes.. the kind that soaks into cracked earth and reaches old, waiting things you will hear them.”

“Who?”

“The frogs.”

“Jesus. June has already been crazy. Can you stop talking in circles? Can you stop beating around the bush? Can you cut to the chase? Can you just skip the bloody preamble?” The demodex shouted, his chest heaving with anger.

There was a minute of silence, and then

“The frogs. They have been underground. You thought they were gone. You looked for them from the above, so missed everything except the loud and the lit places, where everything is first announced.

You you did not find them, so you assumed absence. Well, before you argue. You are wrong. The frog does not perform its presence for those who are not ready to hear it. The frog is the earth’s first language. It feels the humidity before the clouds have decided. It knows when the air shifts, when something upstream has changed, when the water carries a new kind of weight. Scientists call them bioindicators- creatures so exquisitely tuned to their environment that their disappearance is the first sentence of a disaster that hasn’t yet been announced.

“ I thought they were cockroches.”

“No. The cockroach is a different creature entirely.”

“How?”

“The frog waits. The cockroach moves. The frog goes underground and watches and remembers and holds the evidence inside itself like water holds salt- invisibly and completely until the conditions change. The cockroach cannot wait. It was not built for waiting. It runs toward the light even when the light is dangerous. It is in the walls, in the streets, in the open, making noise, surviving everything you throw at it, refusing to disappear even when disappearing would be safer.”

“Which is better?” asked the Demodex.

*pause*

“That is the wrong question. The cockroach is the student who stands in the rain with a sign when the institution has already decided the outcome. It is the one who is called radical not because it is wrong but because it is early.

Because it has named the thing before the powerful have finished pretending have finished pretending the thing doesn’t exist. In India you will find them outside university gates, inside courtrooms that don’t want them and in movements that are tear-gassed on Tuesday, quoted in history books thirty years later. They are impatient because impatience is a form of moral clarity. They do not have the luxury of the long game. They are young. They are burning. And they are seldom wrong”

The demodex Was still listening.

“You guys call them a nuisance because that is what you call a cockroach when you do not want to admit it has survived everything you used to kill it.”

No response from the demodex.

A minute of silence later..

“The frog is different. The frog is the officer who has served the same government for twenty-two years. Who has sat in the very room where the strategy was made. has been a witness of the secrets it was supposed to keep, lest the snakes wraps their tight slithering body around it, choking its throat first and breaking its spine next.

It’s who has signed the papers he was told to sign and filed the copies he was told to file and quietly, quietly, kept the copies he was NOT told to keep. And those he was TOLD not to keep.

The frog does not march. It does not have a sign. The frog has something more dangerous than noise.

The frog has memory, it has patience and a drawer that nobody has opened yet.

The frogs don’t speak to the cockroaches and the cockroaches don’t know of the frog but if they did, they would know that the frogs went underground not out of cowardice but out of calculation because the frog understands, in its ancient biological wisdom, that timing is everything. And that coming up too soon is the same as not coming up at all. That the rain has to actually arrive before the ground will receive you.

And so it waits for the air to shift and the tide to turn and for the moment when the truth it is carrying becomes the truth the world is finally ready to hear.

The cockroach makes the noise that tells you something is wrong and if these guys just got along they’d know that the frogs crawl out from the ground with proof.”

“And?” The demodex asked, visibly softened.

“Nature is such that the cockroach evolved to be impossible to ignore and to keep running even when they are coughing in the fumes of the poison spray being showered on them from big metal tubes.

Nature is such that it needs the frog to surface at exactly the right moment, in the rain, with everything it has quietly collected in the dark.”

“And?”

“and to be deafening.”

“So they are on the same side,” said the Demodex.

“Is that a question or a statement?”

“I don’t know”

“They are on the earth’s side, which, if you had been paying attention, is the only side that was ever going to last.”

The Demodex looked back at its follicle one more time.

It was still warm and breathing.

It finally understood that it had not been living on a host but a story. One far older and far larger than anything it had thought to look for on Saturn, or Mars, or anywhere else in that beautiful, empty dark.

“But.. what about the snakes”

+pause+

“the snake did not begin as a snake. This is the part that the frog knows, because the frog was watching before the transformation too, right? Before the coldness and before the hunger that ate other hunger, before the shedding of whatever softness it was born with… there was something else. Something that wanted, simply, to be safe. To be enough. To not be eaten first.

But it was born into a world that said the only one of you gets to survive this round. Soon, scarcity filed the gashes where you hurt your home, and you were stupid enough called it ambition. You crated a world that gave gold to whoever could most convincingly pretend they did not need anyone, and that confused dominance with worth and then punished every creature that couldn’t perform the confusion convincingly enough.

And so the snake learned that warmth was a liability and the ones who showed their soft underside got turned over first and that the only way to stop being hurt was to become the kind of thing it was afraid of. Psychologists have a name for the armor it built- they call it narcissistic adaptation- the self that inflates because the real self was once made to feel it was not enough, in a home that needed someone to be not enough so that someone else could be on top. You know what I mean?”

The demodex nodded slowly.

“The snake is not an anomaly, neither is it your enemy actually. It is just a product that certain soils grow when you take away everything else!! This does not make the snake innocent btw. Let me be very clear! The frog still had to dig underground and your home still carries the damage.

But the earth wants you to understand the whole story. Because the earth has been here long enough to know that you cannot fix what you refuse to understand and you cannot understand what you are too angry or too afraid to look at clearly.

“So what do I do?” asked the Demodex. “With all of this?”

“Again. Stop hurting it. That is the beginning. Stop hurting it, and be still and listen. The frogs are already underground. The rain is already coming. And when they rise, and they will rise, they will tell you everything this world has been trying to say while you were busy looking for somewhere else to live.”

The Demodex looked down again at the follicle beneath its feet.

Warm.

Alive.

Still faintly breathing?

Glowing slightly beneath the clogged smoke.

It decided to stay back and work on the roof of his house before it caves in during the incoming rain. But it wanted to know…

“why now?”

“Well.. the astro baddies just revealed there is something worse than a mercury retrograde- a Jupiter can’t seem to stay still. And apparently he is excited!”

“Wait WHAT NOW?” The demodex now exclaimed in a tired voice as it shook its head in disbelief.

“See, when you can’t make sense of something.. the wisest thing to do sometimes is blaming it on the stars. Love you. Now go home.”

“Man, June has been crazy.” the demodex muttered as he walked away.

This was another world, where you could be anyone. You could pour your miserably ordinary haikus on Tumblr, with a username you pulled out of your ass and a profile picture you screenshotted and shabbily cropped and uploaded. 8/10 times it was the photo of an American teen trying her best to look goth.

No one knew where anything was from.. until the rise of the “blog” created a new kind of internet celebrity. Suddenly, you didn’t need 1200 bucks for a cookbook on how to make healthy meals in your microwave, you didn't have to find the right time to catch a movie and you could socialise beyond the uninteresting people that surrounded you.

Suddenly the internet because a place you didn’t go to hide, but to be seen.

I think that’s where the mess started.

It didn’t matter if you were a movie star, you could make a pretty chocolate cake and do a rough imitation of nigella lawson and you were it. You could write angsty poetry and edit it over a photo of the sunset and become a micro-author people quoted, just that they didnt’ know who they were quoting. Being seen became easier and being voyeuristic became natural. The cooking and the words weren’t enough. There were too many of them.. could we… maybe see your bedroom? Could we then join you as you got ready? Could we see you fucking? Could we perhaps.. see you dying?

Of course, the internet always yearned for the real you. It invited you over with everything you could possibly want, and it would always deliver.

You could watch the goriest porn, you could say the vilest shit, and the internet watched quietly. It always yearned for the real you.

How much angst did you have? How horny were you? How much did you love to show? and how much did you love to watch?

We loved everything. The poetry got as many eyes as the morphed photos, and the creativity got as many eyes as the dying and when it became a fascinatingly disgusting mush of it all, pouring in one after the other, we didnt realise.

The internet felt like a hum, it sounded like a hum that enveloped you as you logged in in a dark room. When did it come to sound like firearms in a kids’ playroom where people were also shooting porn- we didn’t see coming.

Of course there are still pockets of normalcy. They feel like a quaint green village in the middle of a garbage mountain, and there we travel for a few moments of respite. Outside of that, the onslaught is constant.. too many women to undress on grok, too many conspiracies to squash, too many dances to see, too many dogs and too many cats and too many boobs and too many violent videos, when will you watch it all?

Don’t try to build an armour around you.. the internet yearns for the real you.

Tell us your ideology, tell us who you’re sleeping with, is your lip balm with spf?

Be real, or go home. Be too real, and we will find your address.

And remember, the internet started with anonymity, and it ends with it.

Too bad you wanted to be seen.

Now the voyeurs have seen you.

“An edge-of-the-seat experience.”

“Potent enough to excite anyone.”

“Blends expert commentary with valuable socio-political context.”

These are reviews for a Netflix documentary called Indian Butcher-The Diary of a Serial Killer.

The term “serial killer” is said to be coined by former FBI special agent Robert Ressler, who used the term serial homicide in 1974 in a lecture at Police Staff College, in England. At a 2005 symposium in Texas, USA, the FBI officially defined serial killing as “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender, in separate events. The serial killers of USA are famous, or rather, infamous around the globe, partly due to the frenzy and curiosity they evoke among people. The “charming” Ted Bundy, the “elusive” Golden State Killer, and the “twisted” Jeffery Dahmer- all have their own Netflix shows that consistently top the charts.

Its a common assumption that serial killers are a western invention, owing to the popularity of western true crime movies and podcasts. Granted- USA, UK and Russia top the charts with the most (convicted) serial killers according to the World Population Review but you will be shocked to find that India is not low on this list- ranking 5th.

The Netflix shows only scratch the surface of this phenomenon.

It’s a fair question to ask- Are serial killers more prevalent in developed nations and a relatively new phenomenon in India?

Are we wrong to associate serial killing sprees with developed nations?

India has had its fair share of serial killers. The concept of a pathological murderer on a killing spree gained national attention after the Nithari murders left India in shock in 2006. Recently, the half-documentary, half-fictitious movie Sector 36 starring Vikrant Massey brought the case back into the collective consciousness of Indians. But the Nithari killings weren’t the first, though it was the case that received the most infamy in 21st century India. It is estimated that the Thuggee cult in India may have been responsible for the deaths of up to one million people between 1740 and 1840. One notorious member, Thug Behram, is thought to have killed as many as 931 individuals. Over centuries, various ruling authorities in India, including the Khalji dynasty, the Mughal Empire, and later the British Raj, made efforts to suppress the Thuggee’s criminal operations.

You may or may not have heard of Auto Shankar, Doctor Death or Cynide Mohan who were convicted in 1991, 2004 and 2009 respectively. Gowri Shankar, later dubbed as notorious serial killer Auto Shankar, was an auto-rickshaw driver convicted of abducting, raping, and killing 6 people. He was also involved in human trafficking and arrack smuggling. Sentenced to death in 1991, he was executed in 1995 at Salem Central Prison, Tamil Nadu.

Mohan Kumar, also known as Cyanide Mohan, was convicted of killing 20 women by promising marriage, raping them, and giving them cyanide pills disguised as contraceptives. He used this method in all his murders. Mohan was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Doctor Death was the nickname given to a man named Devendra Sharma, an Ayurvedic doctor who was convicted of more than 50 murders, dumping his victims’ bodies in crocodile-infested canals. In 2008, he was sentenced to death.

Ofcourse these cases did not achieve global notoriety to the scale of the Bundy or Dahmer murders, but they show us, nonetheless, that serial killers are not a western concept, but a reality in the Indian criminal and social landscape.

So it might seem that serial murders are few and far between in India, but the truth is, we just don’t know! Here’s the thing- serial killings aren’t recognised as a standalone offence under India’s updated criminal code, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. The law doesn’t carve out a special category for a murderer who kills repeatedly- instead, each death is treated as a separate count of murder under Sections 101 and 103. The only nod to patterns is the interpretation clause that allows an “act” to include a “series of acts”, which helps prosecutors link the killings to show method, motive, or continuity. Unless the crimes fall under “organised crime” such as contract killings committed by a syndicate- there’s no unique legal label for serial murder. In practice, a serial killer is simply charged with multiple murders, each carrying penalties up to life imprisonment or death.

Compare this with how developed nations have established criminal profiling and serial killer task forces. Psychological forensics is relatively new to India and law enforcement in India sometimes struggles with poor forensic capabilities and inconsistent record-keeping, which might obscure the identification of patterns in murders. A 2017 report by the CAG found that high vacancy rates among scientific officers, budget under-utilization and bureaucratic delays hindered solving criminal cases in India. The report also noted that across forensic science laboratories, the examination rate in DNA profiling “drastically declined” in 2016 and 2017, which was accompanied by a rise in pendency rates.

In October 2021, IndiaSpend, a non-profit organisation that works in the field of data journalism reported on the large number of cases closed by police due to the ‘lack of evidence’. One of the problems was the inadequate forensics infrastructure in India, which poses problems in timely investigation and completion of cases, as reported by The Wire Science.

Many police personnel in India lack adequate training in modern crime-solving techniques, forensic science, and cybercrime investigation, leading to poor-quality investigations, wrongful arrests, and mounting case backlogs. Insufficient training in handling gender-sensitive cases further hampers justice for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking. According to the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), most states have an alarmingly low percentage of trained police officers, with significant shortcomings in weapon training and a lack of proper training infrastructure. The situation is worsened by the severe shortage of forensic experts- India has only 0.33 forensic scientists per 0.1 million population, compared to 20 to 50 per 0.1 million in developed countries. This combination of inadequate police training and limited forensic expertise critically undermines the effectiveness and credibility of the criminal justice system.

Even if the files do reach the courts, they are stacked under thousands of more urgent files, as case backlog in Supreme Court hits all-time high of 88,417. District Courts have nearly 4.6 crore pending cases and High Courts have nearly 63 lakh case pendency as per data from the National Judicial Data Grid.

So the question about the population of indian serial killers is tricky to answer, because we only know of the ones that came to light, after transversing a very long & complicated law enforcement & judicial landscape.

Is it possible that we think that serial killers in India are rare because they are underreported due to law enforcement limitations? Possibly.

But as of now, there is not enough data for us to get a conclusive answer.

The Legal Service India’s e-journal discussed that serial killers are often associated with severe mental illnesses, such as paranoid schizophrenia, depression, and other psychological disorders. Many of these individuals may not fully comprehend the nature or wrongfulness of their actions due to their mental health conditions. For instance, Raman Raghav, a notorious serial killer, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and could not grasp the gravity or illegality of his crimes. This raises the need for specific legal provisions in Indian law enforcement to address and map the psychological patterns that could lead to a disturbed individual becoming a serial killer. With the National Crime Bureau reporting that 14.5% of the Indian population suffering from some type of mental disorder, this is a dire reality. Another aspect that is seldom discussed in this context is the insane numbers of crimes committed against animals in our country. From rapes of cows to maiming dogs, and how civil society and the law doesn’t take these abhorrent crimes against voiceless animals to task- makes the potential number of serial killers hidden in plain sight harder to envisage.

Psychology and law are closely intertwined, with the mental state of the offender playing a key role in judicial decisions. While legal psychology is not widely explored in India, it is essential to develop this field to both rehabilitate mentally ill offenders and ensure that justice is served in a fair and nuanced manner.

Further, media’s sensationalization of serial homicide leads to glorification and subsequent ‘copy-cat crimes”. According to writer-broadcaster Sanjeev Verma in an article for The Hindu Business Line, true crime dramas consistently rank among the top 10 most-watched shows on Indian OTT platforms.

This prompts the question- as gore and true crime gain popularity, mental health statistics in India show a downward spiral and society changes rapidly, is there something India can do to make sure we do not rise in the ranks of countries notorious for their serial killer populations?

In the article “The Serial Killers Phenomena” by Priyanka Pellon and Simranjit Kaur Gill, published in the International Journal of Law, several critical measures are suggested to address the issue of serial killings.

Firstly, strengthening law enforcement through increased funding and the establishment of dedicated task forces can enhance investigative capacities. Improving intelligence and profiling techniques will enable law enforcement to identify patterns and behavioral traits associated with serial killers. Community engagement is vital, encouraging public participation and fostering trust between communities and law enforcement to facilitate information sharing.

Additionally, enhancing forensic capabilities and investing in mental health services for early intervention can prevent violent tendencies from escalating. As per the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, India has only 0.75 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, far below the WHO recommendation of 3 per 100,000, exposing a severe human resource deficit in mental healthcare.

Lastly, cooperation among law enforcement agencies across state-lines and national borders is essential to track serial killers operating across borders. By implementing these strategies, India can work towards preventing a rise in its serial killer population. India is severely underpoliced- with a 21% vacancy in state police roles across India. The shortage of personnel forces existing officers to work 16–18 hours a day, leading to stress, inefficiency, and compromised policing. Also a recent survey showcased that the majority of the police personnel had high and very high levels of stress (83.8%), affecting performance and mental health.

All said and done, we come back to our original question- do developed nations have more serial killers than India? The answer, my friends, is that we don’t know.. and we can’t tell for sure.

The more pressing question we should ask ourselves is- How do different societies approach the understanding, reporting, investigation & trials of such crimes?

And finally- will we ever have the legal infrastructure to find an answer?

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