The Landlord of Bantwal

Folk stories from the Panjurli tradition — original tales, analysis, and storytelling history

The Landlord of Bantwal

In a village near Bantwal, in Dakshina Kannada, there was a landlord named Shekhar Hegde who inherited two hundred acres of paddy fields and a Bhuta Sthana at the edge of his property. The Sthana was old — a stone platform under a wild fig tree, with a weathered bronze mask of Panjurli chained to a post. His grandfather had maintained it. His father had maintained it. Shekhar did not believe in maintaining it.

He was educated in Mangalore, worked in Bangalore for eight years, and returned to the village only because the land was worth selling. The first thing he did was hire a contractor to clear the fields for a rubber plantation. The contractor's men started at the eastern boundary and worked west. By the third day, they reached the Bhuta Sthana.

Shekhar told them to clear it. Pull up the stone platform, cut the tree, remove the mask. The contractor hesitated. His workers — all local men — refused outright. One of them, an older man named Kumara, told Shekhar directly: 'If you remove that Sthana without performing the proper rituals, Panjurli will not leave. It will stay on the land. And you will know it is there.'

Shekhar hired outside laborers. They pulled up the stone platform. They cut the fig tree. The bronze mask was tossed into a shed behind the main house. The rubber saplings went in.

Within three months, the saplings began dying. Not from disease — the agricultural officer inspected and found nothing wrong. They simply withered, one row at a time, starting from the spot where the Sthana had stood. Shekhar replanted twice. The same result.

Then the pigs came. Wild boars — not one or two, but entire sounders — began appearing on the property at night. They tore up the saplings. They destroyed the irrigation channels. They dug trenches in the paddy fields so deep the water drained out. Shekhar hired men with dogs to drive them away. The boars came back the next night. Every night. For two months.

Shekhar's wife began having dreams. The same dream, every night. A boar standing in the courtyard of their house. Not attacking. Just standing there. Looking at her. She told Shekhar. He dismissed it. She told her mother-in-law. Her mother-in-law, who had lived with the tradition her entire life, said one sentence: 'He should not have touched the Sthana.'

On the night of the full moon in Tulam (October-November), Shekhar woke to the sound of something heavy moving through the house. He turned on the lights. Nothing was there. But the bronze mask — the one he had thrown in the shed — was sitting in the center of the living room floor. He had locked the shed. The shed was still locked.

The next morning, Shekhar called a Bhuta Kola performer. Not because he believed. Because he had run out of explanations. The performer — a man from the Nalke community, trained since childhood — examined the property, looked at the place where the Sthana had stood, and said: 'Panjurli has not left. You removed its house, but you did not remove it. It is still here. It is angry. You must perform the Kola, rebuild the Sthana, and ask forgiveness.'

Shekhar spent four lakhs on the ritual. The Bhuta Kola lasted an entire night. When the performer became possessed, the spirit — speaking through the performer in a voice Shekhar's wife later described as 'like gravel being crushed' — addressed Shekhar directly. It listed his offenses. It described the exact order in which the saplings had been planted and the exact order in which they had died. It knew details about the property that the performer could not possibly have known.

The Sthana was rebuilt. A new fig tree was planted. The bronze mask was restored to its post. The boars stopped coming. The next planting season, the paddy grew normally.

Shekhar never sold the land. He maintained the Sthana for the rest of his life. His children maintain it now. When asked about it, he does not say he believes in Panjurli. He says: 'I don't need to believe. I saw what happened when I stopped.'

What Is Panjurli?

Panjurli (ಪಂಜುರ್ಲಿ) is a powerful boar spirit — a Daiva (deity-spirit) — worshipped in the Bhuta Kola tradition of Tulu Nadu, the culturally distinct coastal strip of Karnataka and northern Kerala. Panjurli belongs to the Bhuta (also called Daiva) worship system, a pre-Brahmanical animistic tradition where spirits of animals, ancestors, and nature forces are venerated as protectors of land, family, and community. The name derives from the Tulu word for pig — 'panji' — and the spirit takes the form of a divine boar, fierce and territorial.