Filming Horror: Hindi cinema, ghosts and Ideologies

2013

While Hindi cinema has often been critically engaged as a narrative form while ‘writing’ the nation, the role of Hindi horror genre in imagining this nation is under-explored. Hindi cinema itself emerged in a charged environment of nascent nationalist politics, and early Indian filmmakers saw themselves and their on-screen projections as part of the patriotic scheme. However Post-Independence wars with Pakistan and China, and the eruption of various separatists’ movements in the North-East, Sikh’s Khalistan movement and Kashmiri Muslims engendered narratives and counter-narratives to the state-sponsored scientific secularist discourse. In this article I trace how the Hindi horror genre with its evolving narrative strategies has itself been an area of conflicting ideas and ideologies in imagining the Indian state. Lying at the intersections of myths, ideology and dominant socio-religious thoughts, the Hindi horror genre reveals three major strands: the secular conscious, the traditional cultural and the Hindutva ideological, roughly corresponding to the way the nation has been imagined at different times in Post-Colonial India. Moving beyond establishing theoretical framework, I intend to demonstrate how the Hindi horror genre with its sub-sets provides us with the means to contemplate the nation and its representation.

Mainstream Indian cinema, with an eye on the box-office, more often than not fixates on the staple romance-cum-action journey of the heroic male protagonist/s. Horror films, in contrast, generate a set of alternative explorations that move beyond this male heroic project, creating willy-nilly a space wherein negotiations with the normative can take place. The present article examines how recent non-Hindi horror films espouse the cause of subalterns both within specific communities and in the larger framework of the entire nation. Examining the Tamil film Kanchana: Muni 2 (Lawrence 2011), and the Telugu Punnami Nagu (Reddy 2009), this article looks at how these these films give space to protagonists who fall outside the prescribed hierarchy of the sanctioned procreative (hetero)sexual order -the transgendered person in Kanchana and the devadasi (temple courtesan) in Punnami Nagu. These films diegetically produce horror through their depiction of the horrors of everyday processes of gendering. However, the paradox generated by the mainstream nature of these films also means that their articulation of a critique of such en-gendering cannot be explosively and entirely subversive either -there is a sweetening parallel containment of subversion through convenient diegetic resolutions that do not depart that much from preexisting stereotypes about these very protagonists. Topics touched upon include the transperson -subjectivities and discourses; transphobia; medicalization; the creation of the social; women´s empowerment; animal poaching; caste-and sexual oppression, and the use of technology in the horror film. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Horror films have been an integral part of Indian cinema right from the path-breaking Hindi film Mahal (Amrohi 1949) to the more contemporary Malayalam Dracula 2012 3D (Vinayan 2013). Horror films, over a period of time, have generated a valuable archive of social, political, economic, gender and cultural formations of India that merits sustained critical exploration. Mainstream Indian cinema with an eye on the box-office more often than not fixates on the staple romance-cum-action journey of the heroic male protagonist/s. Horror films, in contrast, often generate a set of alternative explorations of masculinities and

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2017

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2017

Review of "Filming Horror: Hindi Cinema, Ghosts and Ideologies" by Meraj Ahmed Mubarki New Delhi/ Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2016.

Society and Culture in South Asia, 2020

Granthaalayah Publications and Printers, 2023

Malayalam Cinema is well known for its making of exceptional horror films along with great films in other genres. It is quite interesting that Malayalam Cinema has had a tradition of horror from the beginning. The tradition of horror in Malayalam Cinema starts with A. Vincent's Bhargavinilayam, released in the year 1964. It is notable that Malayalam Cinema attempted the genre of horror even in its early period. This paper tries to examine how Malayalam cinema deals with horror and thereby creates a say in the culture of Kerala. Interestingly, the culture of Kerala has contributed a lot to the making of Malayalam horror films and it in turn helped in shaping the culture too. So, horror in Malayalam cinema is an area that needs discussion and analysis. The exciting part of the study is that Malayalam Cinema has varied versions of horror. As Kerala is enriched with folklore and stories that engagingly instill horror, it is not surprising that Malayalam films have a say in the horror tradition. Not only that but also, Malayalam Cinema owns different kinds of horror films, each one linked with various cultures that exist/existed in Kerala. The study explores various types of horror films made in Malayalam. The paper also aims to examine the cultural connection that each type holds. Feminist Film theories and psychoanalytic theories provide the foundation for the study.

Cultural Intertext, 2022

In India, a popular trope is adapting cultural myths and religious iconographies into visceral images of the monster in literary and visual representations. Cinematic representations of the Indian monster are modelled on existing folklore narratives and religious tales where the idea of the monster emerges from cultural imagination and superstitions of the land. Since it rationalizes several underlying archetypes in which gods are worshipped in their monstrous identities and disposition, the trope of the monster is used in cinema to indicate the transformation from an ordinary human figure to a monstrous human Other. This paper examines cinematic adaptations of monster figures in Malayalam cinema, the South Indian film industry of Kerala. The cultural practice of religious rituals that worship monstrous gods is part of the collective imagination of the land of Kerala through which films represent fearsome images of transformed humans. This article argues that cultural monsters are human subjects that take inspiration from mythical monster stories to perform in a terrifying way. Their monstrous disposition is a persona that is both a powerful revelation of repressed desires and a manifestation of the resistance against certain cultural fears associated with them. The analysis of several Malayalam films, such as Kaliyattam (1997) Manichithrathazhu (1993) and Ananthabhadram (2005), reveals how film performance adapts mythological narrative elements to create new cultural intertexts of human monsters that are psychotically nuanced and cinematically excessive.

I am thankful to the editors for allowing me to reprint this version in English. 2 Hindi Cinema is often used interchangeably with commercial Hindi Cinema, Bombay Cinema, Bollywood and mainstream cinema in secondary criticism. I prefer using the term 'Hindi Cinema' given that not all films discussed in this paper could be qualified as 'commercial' or 'mainstream'. I avoid the term 'Bollywood' for its populist (mis)conception as an extension of Hollywood.