Churel
The churel is a female ghost of northern Indian belief: a woman who died while pregnant, on the day she gave birth, or within the set period of ritual impurity, as William Crooke recorded in 1896.
The Guardian reported in 2015 frequent fatal attacks in Jharkhand on women whom villagers blame for curses, and the Indian Express reported an estimate that more than nine in ten women in one state's 1,500 police cases from 2001 to 2015 were widows, separated from their husbands or childless. Neither report uses the word churel, so the link to this belief is indirect: it runs only through the word's loose use for a witch.
William Crooke, in The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India (1896), describes the churel as a dead woman's ghost: a woman who died during pregnancy, on the day she gave birth, or before the set period of ritual impurity had ended. He matched the churel with figures known in Bombay as Jakhai, Jokhai, Mukai or Navalai.
Crooke also records a spell an ojha in Mirzapur recited when someone was held to be under a witch's influence. The spell binds the evil eye, the curse, ghosts and the churel, and the witch by hand and foot, then orders the witch back to her shrine. Crooke adds that such spells often call on Hanuman.
Wikipedia gives regional kin: Pichal Peri in Punjab, Petni or Shakchunni in Bengal, and the Pontianak of Malaysia and Indonesia. Wikipedia notes that in India and Pakistan the word churel is often used loosely, or by mistake, to mean a witch, and that the churel keeps turning up in books, films, television and radio.
"Thus in Mirzapur when a person is known to be under the influence of a witch the Ojha recites a spell, which runs--"Bind the evil eye; bind the fist; bind the spell; bind the curse; bind the ghost and the churel; bind the witch's hands and feet. Who can bind her? The teacher can bind her. I, the disciple of the teacher, can bind her. Go, witch, to wherever thy shrine may be; sit there and leave the afflicted person." In these spells Hanumân, the monkey godling, is often invoked. Thus--"I salute the command of my teacher. Hanumân, the hero, is the hero of heroes."
- The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India, Vol. 1 (2nd ed.), William Crooke (1896), Project Gutenberg
- Chudail, Wikipedia
- What are the laws on witchcraft in India?, Indian Express (2022)
- Five women killed in India by villagers suspecting witchcraft, The Guardian (2015)