Leadership as a Riddle of Relationship:

In Indian folklore, vetalas are spirits that dwell in cremation grounds and are said to animate the dead. Although unsettling, they are powerful beings who, if subjugated, can be of great use to humans. Vetalas feature prominently across the mythic landscape of the Indian subcontinent.

One of the most well-known and beloved collections of stories featuring a vetala is the Sanskrit work Vetala Panchavimshati (“Twenty-Five Tales of the Vetala”). In this tale cycle, we meet a noble king tasked with an impossible-seeming mission: to retrieve a corpse hanging from a tree in a desolate cremation ground. But the corpse is not inert, it is possessed by a vetala. A restless spirit who refuses to be carried in silence. Each time the king lifts the body, the spirit awakens to tell him a story, ending with a riddle.

The rules are merciless: if the king knows the answer but remains silent, his head will burst; if he speaks, the corpse slips back to its tree, and the whole task must begin again.

This cycle repeats twenty-four times.

On the surface, this is a tale of futility: the king trapped in repetition, speech always undoing his progress. Yet beneath it lies an archetypal meditation on leadership, ethics, and the weight of language. One that resonates deeply within NHS cultures, where institutional strain, moral injury, and symbolic foreclosure often shape the professional landscape.

Leadership as Ethical Burden

The king’s journey is not one of conquest but of integrity. He walks alone through the cemetery, caught in a paradox of speech and silence. Each riddle forces him to balance justice, compassion, loyalty, and truth. Not in the abstract, but in relation to human lives, betrayals, and desires.

Leadership, in this frame, is not about decisiveness or charisma. It is about the slow, recursive labour of returning to the corpse, again and again, under conditions of uncertainty and strain. Within NHS contexts, this might manifest as the clinician who continues to advocate for patient dignity despite systemic constraints. Or the team lead who holds space for reflective dialogue even when time and resource pressures push against it.

To lead is to shoulder a burden that is both moral and symbolic: to remain present when answers cost dearly, and when repetition feels endless.

Speech vs Silence: The Curse of Institutional Absolutism

The vetala’s curse (speak and fail, remain silent and die) echoes the professional dilemmas faced by NHS staff as they navigate complex institutional dynamics. In clinical settings, supervision spaces, and public discourse, words are both necessary and dangerous. One must decide not simply what to say, but when and how to say it, knowing that language can wound as much as it heals.

The king’s ordeal reframes speech as an ethical act rather than a rhetorical performance. His words are not clever flourishes; they carry existential weight. Every utterance risks rupture, yet silence is not freedom either.

In NHS cultures, this tension often manifests in the disavowal of internal conflict. When institutional critique is reduced to binary roles, such as heroic frontline versus villainous management, or compassionate clinician versus faceless bureaucracy. The persecutory object is externalised, and the possibility of relational repair is foreclosed.

The Group’s Voice: Containment over Control

From a group analytic perspective, the vetala embodies the disruptive unconscious voice of the group: ambiguous, provocative, impossible to contain. Its riddles mirror the layered, symbolic speech of group life - half-story, half-demand.

The king’s task is not to dominate or silence the spirit, but to stay in relationship with it, even when this means returning to the beginning. This is what leadership in groups requires: an ethic of containment rather than control, patience rather than mastery.

In NHS reflective practice, this might mean acknowledging the group’s ambivalence about institutional values, or naming the unspoken grief that underlies policy language. It is not about solving the riddle, but about staying with it.

Sibling Leadership: Horizontal Power and Symbolic Risk

The tale critiques vertical forms of power. The king’s authority is not proven by decree or conquest, but by his capacity to endure, to listen, and to respond with moral clarity.

This resonates with the idea of sibling leadership: power held horizontally, in relation, not hoarded above. In NHS teams, this might manifest as distributed responsibility, mutual attunement, and a refusal to collapse into hierarchical defensiveness.

Trust is earned not through domination, but through sacrifice: the willingness to return to the corpse, to keep faith with the group’s demands, even when it costs dearly. The final riddle, which breaks the cycle, can be read as the moment a leader earns the group’s trust. Interestingly, this is achieved not by solving everything, but by offering themselves, symbolically, to the task of holding the group’s truth.

Restoring Meaning to Language

In an age when speech is often hollow and many are simply tired of it all: the relentless strategic planning, the performative hope, the words emptied of depth; this tale offers a counter-vision. Words, in leadership, are not tools for impressing or manipulating. They are crucibles of meaning, forged in the fire of ethical tension.

The king’s persistence reminds us that leadership is not about having the last word, but about honouring the difficulty of speaking at all. Each riddle asks: What does it mean to speak rightly? To risk truth, even when it costs repetition, delay, or failure?

To lead, then, is to stay with the riddle. To risk language. Not as performance, but as a relationship. To shoulder the corpse, again and again.

Though the vetala’s riddles repeat twenty-four times, the cycle does not end in futility. On the twenty-fifth attempt, the king is finally stumped. He does not speak—not out of defiance, but because he genuinely does not know. In this moment of silence, the vetala allows himself to be carried. The final tale is not another riddle, but a revelation: the vetala shares his own story, and the deeper plot behind the king’s mission is revealed.

This shift from repetition to resolution, from riddling to relationship, marks the transformation of leadership. The king earns trust not through mastery, but through humility. He does not conquer the spirit; he stays with it. And in doing so, he completes the task. Not by solving everything, but by offering himself symbolically to the group’s truth.

In institutional life, especially within NHS cultures, this tale reminds us that leadership is not about knowing all the answers. It is about staying present when certainty fails. It is about allowing silence to speak, and recognising that the final breakthrough often comes not through cleverness, but through relational depth.

Should you wish for more support and space to think through the dilemmas of leadership in complex institutional life, do consider joining the Quarterly Group for Psychologists in Leadership on Tuesday, 6th January 2026. It offers a reflective forum for those navigating the symbolic, ethical, and relational dimensions of professional practice. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1753346970989?aff=oddtdtcreator