Kuldhara

Kuldhara lies about 18 km southwest of Jaisalmer in the Thar Desert: some 400 roofless sandstone houses laid out along three long streets around a temple, with the remains of a town wall, wells, a step-well and three cremation grounds with carved memorial stones. It was a village of Paliwal Brahmins, a community of farmers, traders and bankers who migrated from Pali. Memorial inscriptions show the village was settled by the early 13th century, and an inscription records a step-well commissioned by a Kuldhara Brahmin named Tejpal in 1757.

The famous legend tells of a sudden end. A cruel minister of Jaisalmer State, Salim Singh (sometimes Zalim Singh), demanded crushing taxes – and, in the best-known version, the hand of the village headman’s daughter. Rather than give her up, the Paliwals of Kuldhara and 83 neighbouring villages slipped away in a single night, leaving everything behind, and laid a curse that no one would ever settle there again. Those who try, the story goes, are driven out by strange happenings.

The historical record tells of a slower decline. Historian S. A. N. Rezavi estimated the village’s 17th–18th-century population at about 1,600; the British officer James Tod recorded 800 people in 1815; by 1890 only 37 remained. Drying wells along the seasonal Kakni river, falling harvests and unrelenting tax demands are the likeliest reasons people left. A 2017 study in the journal Current Science by geologist A. B. Roy and colleagues argued that collapse patterns in the ruins of Kuldhara and other Paliwal villages point to an early 19th-century earthquake as well.

From the late 20th century the curse legend made Kuldhara a famous “haunted village.” Local people say they do not believe the ghost stories but tell them to attract visitors. In the early 2010s the Indian Paranormal Society, led by Gaurav Tiwari, spent a night there and claimed to have recorded moving shadows and voices. The Rajasthan government has since developed the site for heritage tourism, and in 2016 officials discussed allowing overnight tented stays. The ruins and cremation grounds are memorials to a real community, and visitors are asked to treat them that way.

Visitors and ghost hunters report footsteps and voices in the empty lanes, shadows moving between the houses and a sense of being watched. The legend holds that anyone who tries to live in the village is driven away by the Paliwals’ curse. The claims are anecdotal.

The roofless houses along the main streets, the central temple, the step-well and the cremation grounds with their memorial stones, particularly at dusk and after dark.

Kuldhara features in countless Indian ghost-story lists, TV paranormal shows and YouTube videos, often alongside Bhangarh Fort. It has been used as a film location – controversially in 2011, when a Bollywood crew was fined for defacing the ruins – and is now developed as a heritage site near Jaisalmer.