Ghosts in the secretariat: Mapping the Bangladeshi Gothic

It is a Tuesday afternoon in Dhaka. Cars are honking, fumes are rising. A banker named Anirban rear-ends another car—typical for the city. Until he steps out. He sees that the other driver has been dead for what seems like days but is still moving. And he wants to talk.

This, we might call, for lack of a better term, the Bangladeshi Gothic. Its haunted spaces look nothing like the crumbling castles of its European ancestors; instead, terror emerges from Dhaka flyovers, government offices, and village lanes. Its protagonists are not knights or clergymen but bankers, doctors, freelance exorcists, and secret state agencies working for the PMO. Its theological ideas are drawn not from folklore alone, but also from scripture and the lived rituals of Islamic practice.

The books discussed in this essay reveal a certain movement taking shape across different settings, tones, and generations. Some are urban thrillers, some domestic hauntings, some rural exorcism tales, and some theological adventures. Yet all ask the same questions: what happens when institutions fail, when justice is delayed, and when the past refuses to remain past?

This literature uses the supernatural to ask unsettling questions about justice, history, and power. It imagines institutions capable of confronting evil—and in doing so, quietly points to the ones we already live with. These books summon ghosts that carry the weight of 1971, of war criminals who prospered, and of wounds that official narratives failed to close. It creates antiheroes who operate in moral grey zones because easy answers no longer convince us.

Bangladeshi writers are shaping something rare: an indigenous occult procedural that treats faith, folklore, and institutional power as moving parts of the same engine. They deploy demons and exorcism not to escape reality, but to argue with it—about justice, history, and who we become when the law fails us.

Take, for instance, the opening of Aamer Ahmed’s novel Pappinjar (Batighar Prokashoni, 2019). No single work announces these ambitions more vividly—and it does so in a traffic jam. Horror no longer waits for midnight; it appears in rush hour and demands to be taken seriously in broad daylight. But Pappinjar is not alone. Elsewhere, an aristocratic lineage is cursed by an entity from the Garo Hills—embedding horror within regional history and geography. In another, rural politics are entangled with black magic and vengeful jinns, where power operates as much through the unseen as through the visible. On the surface, these are genre thrills, but beneath them lies something more serious: a deliberate re-situation of the Gothic within distinctly Bangladeshi social and spatial realities. That repositioning—from night to noon, from myth to municipality—signals a literary movement taking shape. Bangladeshi writers are shaping something rare: an indigenous occult procedural that treats faith, folklore, and institutional power as moving parts of the same engine. They deploy demons and exorcism not to escape reality, but to argue with it—about justice, history, and who we become when the law fails us.

Steering away from the traditional crumbling castles, Bangladeshi Gothic has discovered its own architecture of terror, and it looks suspiciously like the government real estate. In Pappinjar, Ahmed introduces the Directorate of Special Investigation (DSI)—a secret agency under the Prime Minister’s Office tasked with handling, recording and archiving all supernatural phenomena. The DSI maintains archives and library, relic rooms, and a Medical & Preservation Room. Enchanted artifacts, like the Maddiya min Hattusha dagger or the Goyjju Hua (Demon Detection Box), are studied under fluorescent lights for containment, analysis and use. The administrative detail is meticulous: reporting hierarchies, jurisdictional turf wars, etc. It is Marvel’s S.H.I.E.L.D. by way of the Bangladesh Secretariat—and we recognise it because we already know the parameters (as well as the failures) of this system. The question here then arises: if an institution must be invented to confront ancient evil, what does that say about the institutions we already possess? In a country where bureaucratic failure is a daily lived experience, watching a fictional agency function smoothly almost seems utopian.

Set against post-1971 Bangladesh (perhaps during the ’90s), M J Babu’s novel Djinn (Grantharajjo Books, 2022) follows Sajed, and his wife Tareen, who adopt a young girl named Mahaa after being unable to conceive—an intimate decision that soon draws them into an unexpected and supernatural journey alongside Muazzin Hafej. As the supernatural takes hold, beliefs are tested, and a cryptic adventure unfolds. Mohaimin Arefin’s novel Porompora (Iha Prokash, 2022) turns horror domestic: a wealthy family’s mansion becomes a prison of inherited guilt, with curses passed down like heirlooms and death arriving before every wedding. With the last heir targeted to end the Rahman family’s legacy, the question lingers: will they break the curse, or become its next victims? Nabiha Nupur’s novella “Ekhane Bhoot Tarano Hoy” (Satirtho Prokashona, 2025), moves terror to rural Bangladesh, where black magic becomes social technology—petty, vindictive, transactional. The village becomes a haunted house, every relationship potentially a trap.

These are just a few. What unites these settings and creates one of the characteristics of Bangladeshi Gothic is their ordinariness—the horror emerges from traffic jams, tenancy disputes, fluorescent offices, and villages thick with rumor. This grounding makes the supernatural incursion more threatening. When the uncanny rubs shoulders with everyday life, it stops being a foreign concept that we find in western literature.

Then there is theology. Much mainstream western horror rarely attempts the meticulous classification of the demon or djinn. But M J Babu through his novel Djinn, has seemed to create a theological textbook disguised as a thriller. Here, we learn about ifrit and marid djinns, their habitats and relationships with humans, and the ethics of exorcism. The book delves into origins, creation theories, types of black magic, signs of possession, and methods and precise Quranic verses required for protection against the dark arts. These elements are built into the narrative framework in an engaging way. Many Bangladeshi readers approach these books with a lived, intimate relationship with the spiritual world—djinns are not merely metaphors but familiar beings named in the scriptures, discussed in sermons, and whispered about in family stories. “Ekhane Bhoot Tarano Hoy” similarly portrays ruqyah (Islamic exorcism) with clear research, blending ancient wisdom with contemporary storytelling. The rituals feel real because they are: drawn from practices still observed, prayers still recited. This theological sophistication distinguishes the genre from mere entertainment.

Connecting with the protagonists of these books is fairly easy. For instance, the character of Anirban from Pappinjar, the banker who meets the reanimated corpse, responds with his heart instead of his head. He is ordinary, overwhelmed, untrained, yet ambitious. That is precisely what makes him real. Then there is Nisha, Deputy Director of DSI, who has a PhD in Psychology and whose traumatic past could fill its own novel. Her story is raw, brutal, beautifully tragic—yet never deployed for spectacle. She represents this genre’s female vulnerability and, at the same time, authority. Strength is allowed here, but it is never free. 

But the heroes are rarely saintly.

In Arefin's second novel Ityabosore (Iha Prokash, 2024), Ishrafil Shams—“Sammy” to his friends—is a fulltime university student and a freelance magician whenever the money is right or the cause serves him. Detached, sarcastic, and morally grey, he is closer to John Constantine than Harry Potter—he helps people not because it is noble, but because it is profitable. His loneliness and the burden of his occult inheritance make him a layered character. Bangladesh rarely receives antiheroes in urban fantasy, and Sammy signals a genre mature enough to distrust easy binaries. His existence signals that simple good-versus-evil narratives feel increasingly inadequate. In a world where easy answers have failed us, heroes operating in moral grey zones feel more real. 

Where this body of work becomes most serious, however, is in its treatment of history. The recurring presence of the Liberation War is not accidental. In Pappinjar, a character’s pact with a djinn is woven into the impunity of war criminals who flourished after 1971. The antagonist’s fury is born from historically grounded pain the state has failed to address, his suffering mirroring wartime narratives and trauma found in works like Shahidul Jahir's Jibon O Rajnoitik Bostobota (Hakkkani Publishers, 1987). Pappinjar asks a devastating question: when legal and social systems fail to deliver justice, does revenge become not a choice but a parasitic inevitability? Unlike western gothic literature, which often treats the past as a quaint mystery, Bangladeshi writers understand history as an active, malevolent force. Exorcism becomes historical reckoning. The haunted house is the nation itself.

However, this movement did not emerge from a vacuum. Dr Abdul Hai Minar’s short story collection Kuti Kobiraj Shomogro-1 (Protichhobi Prokashoni, 2021) features a village healer-detective investigating eerie incidents in mid-80s Bangladesh—a precursor. But I consider Javed Rasin the pioneer in this genre. His Tamisra Bhubon series (first published in 2016) showed Bangladeshi readers and writers what can be accomplished in this genre. Full disclosure: I have not yet read this series, and intellectual honesty requires saying so plainly. But their reputation among readers is formidable. The series helps demonstrate that Bangladeshi supernatural fiction can sustain an ambitious, elaborate universe while remaining rooted in local fears and desires.

This movement also belongs to a wider literary conversation. Readers who devour fantasy fiction will find familiar pleasures here. Fans of SA Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy (HarperVoyager, 2017) will recognise meticulous world-building rooted in Islamic cosmology. Readers of Saladin Ahmed's novel Throne of the Crescent Moon (DAW Books, 2012) will appreciate theological authenticity. Those who loved Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni (HarperCollins, 2013) will respond to the fusion of cultures and exploration of beings caught between worlds. Closer to home, Saad Z. Hossain's Djinn City series- Djinn City, Cyber Mage, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, and Kundo Wakes Up (2017), demonstrates how the fantastical can intersect seamlessly with contemporary South Asian realities—and with the future. Gwendolyn Willow Wilson's novel Alif the Unseen (Grove Press, 2012) shares a similar genre-defying fusion of cyberpunk urgency and Islamic folklore. Hafsah Faizal's novel We Hunt the Flame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) and Nafiza Azad's The Candle and the Flame (Scholastic Press, 2019) have proven an international appetite for fantasy rooted in Islamic and South Asian traditions.

This matters because it positions the genre for growth. The international success of the Gothic genre from other postcolonial contexts—from Mexican Gothic to African horror fiction—suggests that authentically rooted supernatural literature can find global audiences without sacrificing local meaning. Bangladeshi Gothic writers who maintain their cultural grounding while developing their craft may find themselves part of a growing global conversation—one in which horror from postcolonial contexts is increasingly finding both critical recognition and international readership. The best of these books can travel, can find readers beyond Bangladesh, without sacrificing what makes them distinctive—provided the publishing ecosystem matches that creative ambition with stronger editorial rigor.

These books are quietly doing work that other institutions have not. They imagine what justice might look like when the law arrives too late—or not at all. They ask what happens to grief when it has nowhere to go, when pain outlives every formal process meant to contain it. They put institutions under pressure and ask whether those institutions ever deserved the faith we placed in them.

What strikes me most, though, is how seriously these writers take their characters. A survivor's trauma is not deployed for shock—it accumulates, shapes choices, lingers. A woman's painful past is not the backstory, it is the argument. An anti-hero is not redeemed cheaply; he remains aggravating, contradictory, recognisably human. These are not small things in a genre that can easily mistake darkness for depth.

At their best, these books do what the finest speculative fiction always does—they hold a mirror at an angle. Demons carry the weight of 1971. Curses map onto histories of impunity. A secret agency's filing system says more about bureaucratic failure than any op-ed could. When the craft is right—when the prose is clean, the pacing earns its dread, the antagonist is legible rather than merely menacing—these novels stop being genre and start being testimony. The monsters, yes, are memorable. But it is the paperwork that lingers.

Nazmus Sadat is a Strategic Business Leader from the Bangladeshi corporate sector with extensive experience in key industries—including knitwear (RMG), home textiles, and footwear. He can be reached at nazmus.sadat@hotmail.com.