Real Tantriks and Their Powers: Myth, Truth, and Reality
The THF Team
The Tantrik Who Solved Cases Without Ever Leaving His Room
There's a story out of old Bengal about a man so powerful that kings claimed to see him in their dreams, get their problems solved, and never once meet him in person. No visit. No consultation. Just a bell outside his door and a letter dropped through a slot. That man was called Taranath Tantrik, and depending on who you ask in Kolkata or Tarapith today, he either bent reality itself or became the most convenient legend a region ever produced. Either way, his story opens up a much bigger question: what is a tantrik, really, and how much of what we think we know comes from television versus truth?
What Actually Makes Someone a "Real" Tantrik
Ask around and you'll get wildly different answers, but the most common one goes something like this: a real tantrik is someone who practices their mantras and rituals strictly according to the Vedas and scriptures, using proper knowledge rather than shortcuts. The distinction isn't "real versus fake" in the way you'd expect — it's closer to "disciplined versus reckless." A real tantrik, by this definition, never misuses their abilities. That's it. That's the whole test.
The harder question is what those abilities are supposed to look like. People love the idea of a tantrik "controlling" spirits, the way a genie gets summoned from a lamp and forced to grant wishes. It's a tidy comparison, and honestly, it's the first thing most of us think of. But that framing doesn't hold up. Spirits — genies, energies, whatever you want to call them — aren't described as being controlled. What's described instead is something subtler: a practitioner changing their own energy to the point where the surrounding energy has no choice but to move with them. Less "command," more "gravitational pull."
Siddhis, the Moon, and Why Timing Matters So Much
This is where things get genuinely interesting, and also where they start sounding like folklore dressed up as physics.
Practitioners talk about siddhis — often referenced as the eight primary siddhis, the same ones mentioned in the Hanuman Chalisa line about Hanuman being the giver of "ashta siddhi nav nidhi." Alongside those eight sit sixty-four kalas, or arts, most of which are as mundane as eating and sleeping. The claim is that these aren't separate from daily life — they're baked into it, tied to something as constant and unremarkable as the moon.
The moon is said to carry sixteen kalas of its own, waxing and waning on a cycle, and the belief is that the human body shifts along with it. On amavasya, the new moon, the body's energy is said to weaken and negativity is said to rise. That's exactly the window many tantriks use for mantra sadhana — not despite the darkness, but because of it. The logic goes: you have to learn to master negativity before you can ever hope to master stillness, the zero-point, the "shunya" that's supposedly the real destination.
Purnima, the full moon, gets the opposite treatment. Sleeping under an open sky on a full moon night is said to ease psychological or emotional strain. And there's a tossed-off etymological claim that comes up a lot in these conversations — that the English word "lunatic" traces back to "lunar," because the full moon was believed to unbalance the mind. Whether that's linguistically airtight is a separate conversation; it's repeated often enough that it's worth knowing, even as belief rather than fact.
The Skull, the TV Show, and the Problem With Theater
Here's where the personal aside comes in, because I have to say it: the image most of us carry of a tantrik — skull in hand, ash on the forehead, chanting over a fire at midnight — is almost entirely a media invention. Sure, some practitioners do use a kapal, a human skull bone, in specific rituals. That part's true. But the sheer theater of it, the constant "look what I'm doing" energy you see on screen, doesn't match how the genuinely advanced ones are described. The reasoning is almost circular but makes a weird kind of sense: anyone who's actually reached a high level wouldn't need a television audience to prove it.
There used to be a show hosted by a man named Baba Rizwan, called Kaal Kapal Mahakaal, which spent its runtime exposing fraudulent babas — explaining, for instance, the chemical tricks behind a coconut that appears to bleed, or a lemon that turns red when cut. Rizwan himself, though, is described as a legitimate paranormal expert in his own right, someone who holds onto secret spiritual practices — ruhani amal — that only get passed down through a guru, never publicly explained. It's a strange position: a man famous for debunking fakes while quietly holding knowledge he'd never debunk himself.
And then there's Bageshwar Dham Baba, who's become a massive name thanks to social media, alongside a running controversy over whether what he does is genuine spiritual practice or a very polished form of mentalism. On this one, there's no verdict to hand you — plenty of people who've followed similar figures for years land somewhere in the middle, calling them neither full tantriks nor frauds, but people who seem to carry some kind of guru's blessing that resists easy categorization.
Taranath Tantrik: The Legend Nobody Can Fully Explain
Before getting to him, one book recommendation worth passing on: if you're on any kind of spiritual journey yourself, Autobiography of a Yogi is the one people keep pointing to. It's the sort of book that sounds unbelievable on a first read — the kind of thing a skeptical reader might dismiss as exaggeration — until you sit with it long enough to reconsider.
Which brings us to the main event. If you want the fullest version of this belief system in action, the story everyone circles back to is Taranath Tantrik, immortalized in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's book (later continued by his son) and eventually adapted into a web series. He's often called underrated, which — given the scale of what's attributed to him — sounds almost absurd.
According to the legends attached to him, he was said to be capable of turning an ordinary man into a politician, pulling someone back from the edge of death, speaking with spirits directly, and identifying a troubled spirit in someone's home without being told a single detail beforehand. People in Kolkata and Tarapith still repeat these stories today, treating them less as myth and more as regional history that happens to include the supernatural.
His living situation adds to the mystique. He didn't live somewhere grand. Just a small house, with a board outside instructing visitors — kings and commoners alike — to ring a bell and write their problem down in a letter. No meeting required. The answer would supposedly arrive on its own, sometimes through a dream, with more than one king reportedly claiming they'd seen him in their sleep and received guidance despite never having met him in waking life.
One story attached to him stands out. A young woman was kept in a room, behaving strangely — she'd stand over food for long stretches, speak in languages that weren't hers, act as though she didn't belong to this world. Suitors kept coming and going, none of it making sense, until Taranath Tantrik was brought in. His instruction was oddly specific: in fifteen days, when the next suitor arrived, bring the girl out with a food platter — and hide a knife on it.
Fifteen days later, exactly as described, it happened. The suitor, a merchant, approved of her — and the moment he did, she grabbed the hidden knife and killed him on the spot. The explanation given afterward was that in a past life, this same man had killed her, and this was her revenge finally catching up to him.
It's the kind of story that sounds completely made up until you sit with it a while, because the logic underneath it — that spirits sometimes seek out a specific tantrik specifically so their grievance can be witnessed, not just resolved quietly — shows up again and again in these accounts. There are also references to secret sadhanas connected to figures like him that supposedly don't appear in any scripture at all, with no clear record of where they originated or how anyone learned them in the first place.
A Case Closer to Home
Not every story needs a kingdom or a centuries-old legend attached to it.
There's a case out of South India worth mentioning briefly — a house where every new person who moved in started developing strange rashes and running into bad luck almost immediately. The owner himself couldn't even leave the property; stepping outside brought on severe headaches, bad enough that selling the house wasn't an option either. Eventually, a paranormal expert named Arindam got involved and determined the house was bound by a mantra — and that only by unbinding that mantra could anyone figure out what was actually trapped inside.
That's really all there is to that one. Some stories don't get a dramatic ending; they just get a diagnosis and a door left open for next time.
So Where Does That Leave the Skeptic in You?
None of this comes with proof you can hold in your hand — no lab result, no repeatable experiment. What it does come with is generations of people, across very different regions and very different eras, describing the same shape of thing: a person who studies nature closely enough that they seem to bend it. Believe as much or as little of it as you want.
Have you heard a version of the Taranath Tantrik story where you're from, or something close to it?
