If the souls of the departed ones are condemned to become ghosts, shrāddha ceremonies performed by their descendants are said to be efficacious in freeing them from their ghostly existence and relegating them to some other form of life.
The lives of bhuts and pishāchas, male and female ghosts, are said to extend over a thousand years.[15] Shrāddhas, such as the samāchari i.e., the death anniversary and Nārāyanbali i.e., a shrāddha performed in a holy place, emancipate the ghostly spirits from their wretched existence and make them eligible for birth in a better form.[16] Some believe that at the end of their ghostly existence (a thousand years) they take birth in the animal kingdom in the mortal world.[17]
The soul is not said to have finally perished unless it merges into the divine self and attains moksha or salvation. The passions and desires of a dying man do not permit his soul ascending beyond a certain stage, where he or she remains as a ghost until the soul is purged of all his or her desires and sins by the performance of funeral ceremonies. For relieving ancestral spirits from the low order of bhuts and pishāchas, shrāddhas are performed by their surviving relatives in such holy places as Prabhās, Gayā and Pindtārak. These ceremonies are known as Nārāyanbali, Nilotsarga and saptāha-pārāyan (recitation of a sacred book for seven consecutive days).[18]
Those persons who die with wicked thoughts still present and their desires not fulfilled, enter the order of evil spirits, from which they are liberated after their desires have been satisfied and their wicked thoughts eliminated.[19]
Bhuts and pishāchas—ghosts, male and female—can be prevented from doing harm by recourse to certain processes. For instance, the wife of a Nāgar of Gadhadā became a witch after her death and began to torment the second wife of her husband by throwing her out of bed whenever she was asleep. To prevent this, the husband took a vow to perform a shrāddha at Sidhpur in the name of the deceased wife, after the performance of which the ghostly presence stopped harassing the new wife of her husband.[20]
Bhuts and pishāchas are believed by some people to be immortal, because they are supposed to belong to the order of demi-gods. In the Amarkosha—the well-known Sanskrit lexicon—they are classed with divinities, such as guhyaks, and sidhas. The bhut is defined as a deity that troubles infants and the pishācha as a deity that lives on flesh. Bhuts and pishāchas are the ganas or attendants of Shiva, one of the gods of the Hindu Trinity. They are supposed to be upadevas or demi-gods.
Preta is the spirit of a person that dies a sudden or unnatural death with many of his desires unfulfilled. His soul attains emancipation by the performance of a saptāh, that is a recitation of the Bhāgvat on seven consecutive days. It is described in the Bhāgvat that Dhundhumari, the brother of Gokarn, who had become a preta, was released from his preta existence by the performance of a saptāh which his brother caused to be made. The Garudpurān mentions that King Babruvāhan emancipated a preta by the performance of a shrāddha. The mukti or salvation of a preta is in itself its death. This would prove pretas to be mortal.[21]
The span of life of the bhuts and pretas is very long, but those whose descendants offer them the usual oblations gain their emancipation sooner. There is a kund or spring called Zilānand in the vicinity of Jhinjhuvādā, on the banks of which is a temple of Zilakeshwar Mahādev. The performance of the pitri shrāddha by the side of this spring is believed to expedite the emancipation of the spirits of the deceased from ghostly life. Every year, on the Bhādarvā amāvāsya, that is, the new moon day of the month Bhādarvā, a great fair is held on this spot, when people from long distances visit the place to get their relatives exorcised by the bhuvās or exorcists.
It is believed, that though bhuts, pretas and pishāchas are immortal, they are scared away by the sound of a European band and of other musical instruments.[22] It is said that all drums and other weird instruments whether European or Indian, have the power of scaring away evil spirits.
An evil spirit called Bābaro had entered the person of the uncle of Māldev the king of Jhālāvād much to the king’s annoyance. Māldev offered a stubborn fight to Bābaro, who, unable to cope with Māldev, promised to extend his kingdom over those villages in which he would hang up bunting in one night. It is said that the present extent of the Jāhlwād territories was due to king Māldev’s enterprise in hanging up bunting over these territories as asked by Bābaro.[23]