General Information about Item:

• Bad Luck Superstition
• Language: English/Hindi
• Country of Origin: India
• Informant: Aashika Jhawar
• Date Collected: 11-5-2018
• Interview was done over phone

Informant Data:

• Aashika (Aashi) Jhawar is a 19 year old college student from Bellevue, WA. She was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and currently attends the University of California, Berkeley. She is second generation American and her family is from Northern India.

Contextual Data:

• Cultural Context: Aashi did not know why hiccups are culturally specific, but she did link the general superstition to evil eye. Evil eye is a belief, typically held in the Northern states of India that attaches bad luck to malevolent glares or thoughts towards another.
• Social Context: Aashi learned this superstition from her grandmother, who described it as an extension of the ‘evil eye’.

Item:

• If you have hiccups, it means that someone is thinking about you negatively.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript:

• “Another thing that’s considered bad luck in Indian culture is continuous hiccups or just having the hiccups because it signifies that someone close to you is thinking about you in a not positive way or remembering you in a bad way”

Informant’s Comments:

• Aashi prefaced this superstition by stating that she knew very little about the origin of this superstition, but it is something she recalls her grandmother teaching her at a young age. She either was told or assumes that this practice is linked to the Evil Eye belief, as they both include something resulting from a malevolent glance or thought from another.

Collector’s Comments:

• I thought this superstition was interesting because it has very little cultural significance, and yet it is still widely accepted as a superstition. When asked, Aashi did not know why hiccups specifically represent this ideal and neither did her grandmother upon following up. This indicates that either the cultural significance was lost when passed down, or (less likely) there was no cultural significance to begin with. A quick web search does not provide an answer to this, however, I found it interesting that a more common belief online is that hiccups indicate that someone is missing you, not thinking about you negatively.

Collector’s Name: Derek Lue