ABSTRACT
Ghosts figure prominently not only in the Arabian Nights, but across the storytelling spectrum of fairy tales and folktales in India, and they are not necessarily linked to any religious framework. Fairy tales thrive in India as in the rest of the world. Some of the most vibrant tales have circulated in the subcontinent since at least the classical period though they have been subject to much modification and reinterpretation along the way. There are many ways to think about and categorize story literature in India, but from the outset we may observe that English categories for ‘not-empirically true’ stories – fairy tales, myths, legends, fables, romances, and epics – are inadequate at containing them. Hindu stories about apsaras present with a celestial reality that is startlingly removed from the world of the European fairy helper, especially as she manifests in sanitized and commodified fairy-tale renderings in print and digital media.
