‘Mr Mukerji’s Ghosts’: Supernatural tales of everyday India and forgotten spectres from British Raj

There’s something deeply satisfying about reading old genre fiction, especially the kind that time seems to have quietly swept aside. Between cracked spines, on yellowed pages, or even on the browser tab open to a forgotten PDF, you can find themes and devices that still show up in the latest OTT series, a horror podcast, or a just-published collection. These ancestors, intact and humming, teeming with clues to a past that loved a good story then as much as we do now.

Which is probably why I keep digging: looking for the obscure, the out-of-print, the faintly ridiculous, and the wonderfully eerie. And it’s one thing to unearth an overlooked book – an already exciting prospect, but to find one where even the author is a mystery? That’s a thing of beauty.

And that’s exactly what makes Mr Mukerji’s Ghosts by S Mukerji so compelling. First published in 1914, the collection is a quietly strange, utterly fascinating window into a world where colonial bureaucracy rubbed shoulders with folk belief. The author, known only as S Mukerji, is a mystery – we can’t turn him into a flesh-and-blood person. There are no photographs, no interviews, no easy biography to lean on. We know he published at least...

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