Bollywood Horrors

i
 Also Available from Bloomsbury

Martin Scorsese’s Divine Comedy, Catherine O’Brien

Practical Spiritualities in a Media Age, edited by Curtis Coats
and Monica M. Emerich
Religious Humor in Evangelical Christian and Mormon Culture,
Elisha McIntyre

ii
 Bollywood Horrors
Religion, Violence and
Cinematic Fears in India

Edited by Ellen Goldberg, Aditi Sen,

and Brian Collins

iii
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2021

Copyright © Ellen Goldberg, Aditi Sen, and Brian Collins, 2021

Ellen Goldberg, Aditi Sen, and Brian Collins have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.

Cover design: Tjaša Krivec

Cover image: Kabrastan movie poster (1988) (© MKB FILMS COMBINE)

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iv
 Dedicated to the memory of
Kathleen M. Erndl
January 21, 1954–February 19, 2017

v
vi
 Contents

List of Plates viii

Notes on Contributors ix
Preface Brian Collins xii

Introduction Brian Collins, Aditi Sen, and Ellen Goldberg 1

Part One Material Cultures and Prehistories of Horror in South Asia

1 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality: Close Encounters

with Hindi Horror Movie Ephemera Brian Collins 21

2 Vampire Man Varma: The Untold Story of the “Hindu Mystic”

Who Decolonized Dracula Brian Collins 44

Part Two Cinematic Horror, Iconography, and Aesthetics

3 Divine Horror and the Avenging Goddess in Bollywood

Kathleen M. Erndl 69

4 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks Hugh B. Urban 78

5 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? Sāvitri, Satyavān, and the

Other Woman Aditi Sen 94

Part Three Cultural Horror

6 Cultural Horror in Dev: Man Is the Cruelest Animal Ellen Goldberg 115

7 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror Morgan Oddie 140

8 Mardaani: The Secular Horror of Child Trafficking and the Modern

Masculine Woman Beth Watkins 161

Notes 185
Bibliography 220
Index 238

vii
 Plates

We are grateful for permission to reproduce these images in this book. We have
made every effort to secure the permission of relevant parties, but if we have
inadvertently missed any relevant permissions or have been unable to find any
parties, then we will move to rectify this at the earliest opportunity.

1 Poster for Darawani Haveli (The Frightful Mansion, 1997, dir. Rakesh Sinha)
2 Front cover of song booklet for Khatarnak Raat (Dangerous Night,
2003, dir. Muneer Khan)
3 Back cover of song booklet for Khatarnak Raat (Dangerous Night,
2003, dir. Muneer Khan)
4 Song booklet for Lady Killer (1995, dir. S.A. Chandramohan)
5 Poster for Andheri Raat (Dark Night, 1995, dir. V. Prabhakar)
6 Song booklet for Daayan (1998, dir. D.S. Azad)
7 Poster for Khooni Murda (The Bloody Dead, 1989, dir. Mohan Bhakri)
8 Poster for Haiwan (The Beast, 1977, dir. Ram and Rono Mukherjee)
9 Poster for Cheekh (Scream, 1985, dir. Mohan Bhakri)
10 Entrance to the Hanumān temple in Jhandewalan Felhi in Delhi
11 Poster for Jaani Dushman (Bitter Enemy, 1979, dir. Rajkumar Kohli)
12 Photo taken in the United Arab Republic in 1958 or 1959
13 Program for Dalhousie’s 1973 “Transylvania Weekend”
14 Varma as Macbeth in Syria, the United Arab Republic in 1959
15 Varma contemplating a Nepalese mask, c. 1970s
16 Varma at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, c. 1980s

viii
 Contributors

Ellen Goldberg received her PhD from the University of Toronto, and is Associate
Professor of South Asian studies in the School of Religion at Queen’s University,
Canada, as well as cross-listed to Gender Studies and Cultural Studies. She is the
author of The Lord Who Is Half Woman: Ardhanārīśvara in Indian and Feminist
Perspective (2002), and Gurus of Modern Yoga (co-edited with Mark Singleton,
2014). She has written extensively on Indian iconography, and the intersection
between yoga and cognitive science. She serves on the editorial board of two
journals, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR ) and Literary
Discourses: International Journal of Art and Literature (Indira Kala Sangeet
University, India).

Aditi Sen gained her PhD in Ancient Indian culture and history from Deccan
College, Pune, India. Her research interests include witchcraft in South Asia,
Hindi horror films, and Bollywood cinema. She is a regular contributor to
Livemint and The Hindu, and has published several articles on Bollywood in
academic journals and in popular press. She is currently Assistant Professor in
the Department of History and the School of Religion, Queen’s University,
Canada.

Brian Collins holds a PhD in the History of Religions from the University of
Chicago Divinity School. Currently, he is the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande
Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy and Associate Professor of World
Religions at Ohio University. A specialist in Hindu epics with a deep interest in
comparison, he is the author of The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology
and the Critique of Sacrifice (2014) and articles on comparative religion for
Jewish Quarterly Review, Religious Studies Review, and Journal of Vaishnava
Studies. He has also published essays on the films Black Swan (2010) and The
Wrestler (2008) as well as the Saw franchise. Most recently, he has written an
afterword for a new Italian translation of the 1951 book Man into Wolf:
An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy by
Robert Eisler (2019) and a second monograph on Indian religion, The Other
Rāma: Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of Paraśurāma (2020).

ix
x Contributors

Kathleen M. Erndl was Professor in the Department of Religion at Florida

State University, and affiliated with the Department of Religion at the University
of Florida’s Center for the Study of Hindu Tradition. She obtained her PhD
in South Asian language and literature from the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. Her publications include Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess
of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol (1993), the co-edited volume
Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses (2000),
and numerous articles on Śakta traditions, spirit possession, gender, and
Bollywood. During her career, she received fellowships from the American
Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Fulbright-Hays
program. She was also co-chair of the Religion in South Asia section of the
American Academy of Religion, and was completing a book titled The Play of
the Mother: Women, Goddess, Possession, and Power in Hinduism at the time of
her death.

Morgan Oddie is a doctoral candidate in the Cultural Studies Program at

Queen’s University (Canada). She is working on feminist ethnographic research
on the embodiment of consensual pain with women who participate in Bondage/
Discipline/Dominance/Submission/Sadism/Masochism (BDSM ).

Hugh B. Urban received his PhD from the University of Chicago in the History
of Religions. He is Professor of religious studies at Ohio State University. He is
the author of eight books and numerous articles, including Secrecy: The
Adornment of Silence, the Vestment of Power. Comparative Studies in Esoteric
Religions (in progress); The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of
South Asian Studies (2009); Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern
Western Esotericism (2006); Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study
of Religion (2003); and, The Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy and Power in
Colonial Bengal (2001).

Beth Watkins is a freelance journalist. Her pieces on Bollywood have been

published in Filmfare, The Times of India, The Indian Express, Business Standard,
and The Globe and Mail (Canada). She also has written for Indian publications
such as Film Companion, The Big Indian Picture, The Indian Express, The
Hindu, Hindustan Time Brunch, and Tehelka and contributed to pieces in
international media such as BBC radio, Time Out London, and CBC television,
as well as in a weekly column in The Wall Street Journal’s “India Real Time.”
 Contributors xi

She is the education, exhibit development, and publications coordinator at the

Spurlock Museum of World Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. She holds Masters’ degrees in Museum Studies from the University
of Toronto and Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign.
 Preface

Until recently, Hindi horror cinema has been the province of niche collectors
and B-movie aficionados who treated it as a curiosity. But this has begun to
change with recent work by Meraj Ahmed Mubarki, Meheli Sen, and others.
How does Bollywood Horrors fit into this ongoing conversation? Taking a broader
view of “horrors” than other books, this volume will look at the generic
conventions of the horror film, cinematic portrayals of real-life horror, and the
affective response to both.
All three meanings are contained in the English word “horror” already. We
can define horror as a set of generic conventions (as in, “she loves horror novels”),
as a real act of violence (as in,“we all know the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition”),
or as affective response (as in, “she reacted with horror”). Since all three of the
editors and two more of the contributors work in the field of religious studies, we
decided to give religion a prominent place in our analysis, something that has
not yet been done in what scholarship there is on Hindi horror films. I will now
briefly explain how a religious studies book on Indian horror films came into
existence.
This project comes out of a panel session called “Theorizing Horror in
Bollywood” hosted by the Hinduism Group at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the
American Academy of Religion in San Antonio, Texas with Aditi Sen, Ellen
Goldberg, Diana Dimitrova, Kathleen M. Erndl, and myself. With the conference
taking place just a few weeks after the US presidential election in 2016, many of
us were preoccupied, still dealing with the shock and uncertainty we all felt after
watching a man who had called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United
States be elected to the presidency. Although I hesitate to use the phrase “good
time” in connection with this traumatic moment, it was nonetheless a good time
to think about the work that horror films do, allowing us to visualize our deepest
fears and confront them on the screen, to traumatize ourselves as a form of
inoculation, and to participate in a community of fandom marked by gallows
humor, ironic enjoyment, and a celebration of the macabre.
Thinking about these aspects of horror film appreciation in the Indian context
naturally lead to discussions of rasa, the classical Sanskrit philosophy of
aesthetics. Centuries before Freud’s “death drive,” Kristeva’s concept of “abjection,”

xii
 Preface xiii

Bakhtin’s “grotesque body,” or Becker’s “terror management theory,” Sanskrit

philosophers had already developed in rasa a classification scheme that
accounted for the role of the terrifying (bhayānaka) and the horrifying/repulsive
(bībhatsa) in art and religion. Rasa was an innovation of the classical era, first
appearing in Bhārata’s 300 ce Treatise on Drama (Nāt.yaśāstra). But, we
recognized, the tradition of horror in India stretches back beyond the classical
era to the ancient Vedas (See R.g Veda 10.85, “The Marriage of Sūryā”) and,
through folklore and mythology, up to the present cultural moment when it has
taken new forms in movies and in television shows like Darr Sabko Lagta Hai
(Everyone Feels Fear, 2015–16) and Kaun Hai? (Who Is It?, 2018).
Of the four papers given during the session (my “Whistling Past the Kabrastan:
Aesthetics, Demonology, and Politics in Hindi Horror Film Posters and
Ephemera;” Erndl’s “Divine Horror in Bollywood: Avenging Goddesses in Hindi
Cinema;” Goldberg’s “In Dev Man Is the Cruelest Animal;” and Sen’s “Do You
Want to Know the Raaz? Sāvitrī, Satyavān, and the Other Woman”), all of which
are included in some form in this volume, three dealt with the ways in which the
gods and demons of Indian religion influenced Bollywood’s horror tradition. I
will note here, with sadness, that Kathleen M. Erndl passed away suddenly on
February 19, 2017, just about three months after the paper session. Discussing
the matter with her partner, we decided to honor her original contribution to the
panel by including the written version of the paper she gave in San Antonio in
this volume. It has not been edited except to correct a few minor inaccuracies.
Hugh Urban’s “Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks,” the first essay we included in
this volume that did not come from the panel, was chosen because it fits squarely
into our existing framework for picking out what is unique about the horror
genre in India. It went along with the essays based on our papers that Sen and I
contributed to this volume: “Do you want to know the Raaz?: Tropes of Madness
and Immorality in Bollywood Horror” and “Monsters, Masala, and Materiality:
Close Encounters with Hindi Horror Movie Posters and Song Booklets,”
respectively.
The fourth paper on that original panel, that of Ellen Goldberg, looked at the
representation of communal violence in a particular film, Govind Nihalani’s Dev
(2004), which appears here as “Cultural Horror in Dev: ‘Man Is the Cruelest
Animal.’ ” Goldberg’s paper provided a point of departure out of our narrowly
focused discussion on the films that we all agreed belong in the “horror” category.
In the discussions we conducted over email in the months after the panel, we
recognized that communal violence and other real-life horrors are the
background against which Hindi horror films from the 1980s onward should be
xiv Preface

properly understood. So when we considered how to move forward with a book

of essays based on the session, we decided to include not only horror as a film
genre, but also horror as a subject matter, the latter approach leading us to solicit
some additional essays about the cinematic portrayal of sexual violence (Oddie’s
“Bandit Queen, Rape-Revenge and Cultural Horror”) and human trafficking
(Watkins’ “Mardaani and the Trafficking of Women in India”).
This project, three years in the making, would not have been possible without
the invaluable assistance provided by our colleagues. We would especially like to
thank Aseem Chandaver for his own insights into Hindi horror; David
Colagiovanni, director of the Athens Center for Film and Video, for his help in
archiving some rare and delicate posters and arranging for them to be
photographed; Andrew Musil of Ohio University’s College of Fine Arts for
photographing and color-correcting twenty-five posters; Anand Tharaney for
helping track down permissions to reproduce the booklets and posters in this
book; a grant from Ohio University’s Research Council that made it possible to
print in color; and Robin Varma for sharing his grandfather’s archive and his
thoughtful and detailed email responses to my endless questions. Thanks are
also due to Yakini Kemp, Lee Seigel, Ziad Abu Rish, Simon Brodbeck, Berkeley
Franz, Mark Franz, Natasha Madoff, Herman Varma, Judy Varma, Tami Varma,
Melissa Haviland, Jennifer Collins, Asko Parpola, Jayson Beaster-Jones, Davíd
Carrasco, Molly Raspberry, Jai Arjun Singh, Jeremy Bessoff, Namrata Jain, Rajesh
Devraj, Shyam Dasgupta, K. M. Bhakri, David Blamey, Deepak Ramsay, and
Subbir Mukherjee.
Finally, a note on transliteration. On this point, we have striven for clarity
rather than consistency. For Sanskrit, we have used the International Alphabet of
Sanskrit Transliteration scheme (IAST). For Hindi, we have used both the IAST
as adapted for Hindi words (e.g., d.āyan) and the Indian Languages Transliteration
scheme (ITRANS), which is frequently used in Indian film titles (e.g., daayan).

Brian Collins
Athens, Ohio
September 2020
 Introduction
Brian Collins, Aditi Sen, and Ellen Goldberg

A Short History of Indian Horror Films

Ideally, a book on Hindi horror films should begin by presenting a brief

introduction to the subject, including its historical development. That said, it is
notoriously difficult to be certain exactly what the first Hindi horror film was.
One possible candidate, simply titled Haunted House (1932), was unfortunately
lost in a studio fire, and is purported to have been more comedy than horror
besides. Many scholars begin with Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal (Mansion, 1949) and
consider it to be the first example of Hindi Gothic cinema. Whether it was first
or not, it certainly served as a stylistic model and, a little more than a decade
later, it was followed by a spate of successful films imitating Mahal’s Gothic
trappings, including Woh Kaun Thi (Who Was She? 1964, dir. Raj Khosla), Bees
Saal Baad (Twenty Years Later, 1962, dir. Biren Nag), Bhoot Bungla (Haunted
Bungalow, 1965, dir. Mehmood), and Kohraa (Mist, 1964, dir. Biren Nag).
In the 1970s, the massive box office success of Rajkumar Kohli’s monster
movie Jaani Dushman (Sworn Enemy, 1979) proved that the creature feature
could find an audience in India, but it was the seven sons of F.U. Ramsay—
Kumar, Tulsi, Shyam, Keshu, Kiran, Ganguly, and Arjun, known collectively as
the Ramsay brothers—who took the genre to the mainstream. While they were
not the first horror filmmakers, the Ramsays laid the foundation for the basic
framework of horror cinema from the early 1970s to the late 1980s with
commercially successful films like Do Gaz Zameen ke Neeche (Six Feet Under,
1972) Aur Kaun (Who Else? 1979), Purana Mandir (The Old Temple, 1984), and
Veerana (Desolate, 1988).
The Ramsay formula built on the simplistic good-versus-evil plot that was
already present in earlier Gothic films with the addition of a grotesque and often
sexually predatory monster as the antagonist. The premise in a Ramsay film was

1
2 Bollywood Horrors

simple: There is a monster lurking in a haunted or cursed place that the villagers
never disturb. Then a group of young, attractive, Western-educated urban
protagonists who are ignorant of the local folklore come in and foolishly let
loose the monster. In the end, the monster is defeated by a jeweled Om . symbol,
Śiva’s trident, or some other piece of religious iconography. In a Ramsay film, the
dichotomy between good and evil tends to be clearly laid out with little space for
ambiguity.
After their successes, other aspiring horror filmmakers soon jumped on the
Ramsay bandwagon and started producing similar films. Two such Ramsay-
inspired directors were Vinod Talwar and Mohan Bhakri. Between 1987 and
1991, Talwar made half a dozen movies with memorable titles like Wohi
Bhayanak Raat (That Terrifying Night, 1989) and Khooni Panja (The Bloody
Claw, 1991). Bhakri was even more prolific, directing a slew of low budget movies
that included Cheekh (Scream, 1985), Kabrastan (Graveyard, 1988), and Khooni
Murdaa (The Bloody Dead, 1989).1
It was the lackluster box office performance of the Ramsays’ Bandh Darwaza
(Closed Door, 1990) that marked the end of the Ramsay era. Bandh Darwaza
had flopped even though it had all the Ramsay staples, including India’s favourite
monster, “Samri,” and was a well-made film with a rather engaging story to boot.
By the early 1990s, the genre was out of steam and the Ramsays moved to
television, where they had some success producing the anthology series Zee
Horror Show for the 9:30 Friday night-time slot from 1993–7 and its successor
show, Anhonee (Omen), from 1997–2000.
But with the fading of Ramsay-style films came the subsequent rise of a new
type of very low-budget horror film. Many filmmakers had joined the Ramsay
bandwagon primarily because low-budget horror cinema was a lucrative
business in the 1980s. And to cut costs and maximize profits, creative filmmakers
developed an arsenal of tricks and techniques. For example, Joginder Shelly took
Kamal Hasan’s existing Tamil film Behroopiya (Shapeshifter, 1984), dubbed it in
Hindi, edited in some shots of himself as the monster, and released it as a Hindi
film called Pyasaa Shaitan (Lusty Demon, 1985). Movies like these often lacked
a coherent plot, since the main attraction were the monster (frequently, a man in
mask) and the promise of sex scenes. One practice that began in the late 1980s
and continued into the 2000s was the use of “cut-pieces,” a term for sexual
content surreptitiously spliced into the film. Cut-pieces could either be a few
minutes of random pornographic imagery temporarily inserted into the reel, or
a scene of sex or nudity taken out of the original cut of the movie and then re-
inserted (again, temporarily) after the movie had passed the censor board.2
 Introduction 3

Needless to say, these low-budget and salacious films were very far from
mainstream, and it is only because of fan interest in cult cinema, often shared
over social media, that they have had some academic and mainstream recognition
today.
Hindi horror cinema began to make a comeback when it took a more
sophisticated approach like the one exemplified in Talaash: The Answer Lies
Within (2012, dir. Reema Kagti), which boasted major stars Rani Mukherjee,
Kareena Kapoor, and Aamir Khan and had a very good opening at the box office.
The main theme of the film is coping with the grief of a child’s death, and it
explores the fuzzy realms of mental illness and the supernatural. Similarly,
although it was not a commercial success, Ek Thi Daayan (There Was Once a
Witch, 2013, dir. Kannan Iyer) used folk beliefs about witches to spin a story
about deep-seated psychological traumas. Both films were evidence not only
that established stars were now willing to do this new type of horror film, but
that the genre itself was finally incorporating different styles and ideas.
Current horror films are increasingly socially and politically conscious and
many of them want to make a statement. Horror has always been a tool of
subversion and the current Indian political climate is therefore particularly
conducive to that aim.3 For example, Kaal (Time, 2005, dir. Soham Shah) is a
horror film that delivers a timely message about protecting the forests and the
environment. Aatma (2013, dir. Suparn Verma) deals with the theme of domestic
violence. Raagini MMS (2011, dir. Pawan Kripalani), inspired by the American
found footage blockbuster Paranormal Activity (2007, dir. Oren Peli) as well as
real events that took place in Delhi, is about both the clandestine internet sex
tape market and the phenomenon of witchcraft accusations. And even the
zombie horror comedy Go Goa Gone (2013, dirs. Raj and D.K.) is set against the
backdrop of the epidemic of drug abuse and the Russian mafia presence in Goa.
Horror is not just jump scares and scary monsters anymore. It does not allow the
audience the comfort of being spooked without feeling uncomfortable. In fact, it
demands that the audience feel revulsion, distaste, anger, pain, and resentment.
The year 2018 was significant as two horror films witnessed both critical and
commercial success. Set during the Raj in the early twentieth century, the period
piece Tumbbad (dir. Rahi Anil Barve) is an example of modern mythological
Gothic horror, centering on an ancient evil god called Hastar, who resembles the
Hindu god of wealth (and death) Kubera very closely and instills insatiable greed
in anyone who comes into contact with him.4 The horror comedy Stree (Woman,
dir. Amar Kaushik Woman) expands upon a local urban legend that was popular
in the Kannada-speaking region of South India in the 1980s. According to the
4 Bollywood Horrors

legend, once a year, for the length of a four-day pūjā, a witch known as Stree
takes human form and abducts unsuspecting men at night, stealing their bodies
and souls and leaving only their clothing behind. The only men who are safe
from her are those from households that write the phrase “O Stree Kal Aana”
(“Oh Woman, come tomorrow”) on their walls. In the film, men who have
ignored the custom begin to disappear, prompting other men to dress in women’s
clothing in an attempt to hide from the witch. Given these elements of cross-
dressing and the fact the hero who tames the witch is the son of a prostitute, the
movie raises questions about gender roles and sexual morality.
This year also saw the streaming giant Netflix release Ghoul, their first Indian
horror series. Ghoul is set in a detention center and produced by Blumhouse, the
American production company behind the socially conscious horror blockbuster
Get Out (2017, dir. Jordan Peele). Tumbbad, Stree, and Ghoul represent the
extended journey of the horror genre in India, drawing elements from campfire
ghost stories, mythology, Hindi horror comics, international cinema, and
folklore. Their successes were notable because the horror genre was and is
routinely dismissed by Indian cinema critics. But their popularity with filmgoers
is indicative of how the Indian audience has grown more sophisticated and
changed the way it consumes and comprehends horror.

Looking for Horror in Bollywood

Until recently, Indian horror cinema has been the province of niche collectors
and B-movie aficionados who treated it as a curiosity.5 But this has begun to
change, and there are now several recent academic books that have provided
a context for understanding Hindi horror cinema and performed some
thoughtful analysis of its themes, conventions, and historical development.
Journalist Shamya Dasgupta’s Don’t Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Ramsay
Brothers does a thorough job of documenting the history of Ramsay Productions,
the family-led film dynasty responsible for the horror boom of the 1980s
and 1990s.
Meheli Sen’s Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in
Hindi Commercial Cinema discusses the role of the supernatural in Bollywood
movies and analyzes the ways in which it manifests in different film genres
through the lenses of literary criticism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory.
Meraj Ahmed Mubarki’s Hindi Cinema: Ghosts and Ideologies uses psychoanalysis
and critical theory to locate and analyze commercial Hindi cinema while
 Introduction 5

Mithuraaj Dhusiya’s Indian Horror Cinema: (En)gendering the Monstrous goes

beyond Bollywood and also includes a discussion of regional horror cinemas.
Taking a broader view of “horrors” than other books have done, this volume
will look at three related categories of horror as they pertain to Bollywood films:
(1) horror as a genre, (2) cinematic portrayals of real-life horror, and (3) the
affective response to both. As both Dhusiya and Mubarki do in their respective
works, we also find it necessary to delve into the central definitional problem of
what kind of Indian films qualify as what Noël Carroll has called “art-horror” in
his influential writings on the philosophy of horror. With the term “art-horror,”
Carroll is referring to horror as a cinematic and literary genre with distinctive
characteristics, not to be confused with “natural horror.” For Carroll, the term
“natural horror” is properly used when a horrifying or repulsive event happens
in a non-horror movie, such as the gruesome deaths that stuntman Cliff Booth
(Brad Pitt) deals out to the Manson Family-esque home invaders in the climax
of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). While it certainly
features blood and gore, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would never be
classified as a horror movie.
Gore and violence do not a horror movie make. And neither, necessarily, do
monsters. Carroll explains:

What appears to distinguish the horror story from mere stories with monsters,
such as fairy tales, is the attitude of characters in the story to the monsters they
chance upon. In works of horror, the humans regard the monsters that they
encounter as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order.6

It is clear that, while the cult TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and
the Twilight series of books and movies are populated by werewolves and
vampires, neither can be considered “art-horror” because the monsters
encountered by the characters function no differently in the action than any
human antagonist would. They are not “disturbances of the natural order.”
Turning to India, the eleventh century Vetālapañcavim.śati (Twenty-five Tales of
the Vetāla, translated by Sir Francis Burton in 1870 as Vikram and the Vampire)
is a series of stories within a frame story narrated by a talking corpse, but the
stories themselves are no more or less “frightening” than any other Sanskrit story
collection of the period. We cannot call this art-horror either.
We can extend Carroll’s logic about the generic conventions of art-horror to
make a different but related point. When dealing with realistic movies (as
opposed to movies that take place in other realities, as is often the case in science
fiction and fantasy), the distinction between art-horror and natural horror
6 Bollywood Horrors

revolves around the question of whether the feared antagonist is a particularly

terrifying part of the movie’s natural world (like a serial killer or a rabid dog) or
a thing that should not be (like an evil protean clown or a haunted house). In the
first case, the characters may fear for their lives, but they tend to react with a kind
of pulse-pounding, adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight response. But in art-horror,
Carroll observes, “we often see the character shudder in disbelief, responding to
this violation of nature.”7
The violation of nature as a prerequisite for art-horror also conditions the
way audiences relate to the film. As an example, when the characters in Jaws
(1975, dir. Steven Spielberg) encounter the (often assumed to be titular) killer
shark, they experience both terror and horror. But they do not experience the
trauma of being forced to give up their entire previously held worldview. On the
other hand, in The Omen (1976, dir. Richard Donner), the main characters
simultaneously come face to face with an actual Hell-spawned demon and the
mind-shattering revelation that their rationalist assumptions about the world, by
which demons cannot exist, were wrong. Typical American audiences can
realistically imagine themselves living in the universe of Jaws (albeit with some
reservations about the improbably large size of the shark). But they cannot
imagine themselves living in the universe of The Omen because they have no
reason to accept the existence of demons who can possess and control human
beings. The Omen is therefore a horror movie. Jaws is not.
It is not clear that we can easily make the same kind of distinction as the one
made above between The Omen (art-horror) and Jaws (not art-horror) when
dealing with Bollywood horror movies. This realm of ambiguity is where the
religious studies focus of this volume comes into play. Since all three of the
editor-contributors and two more of the other contributors work in the field of
religious studies, religion takes a prominent place in our analysis in a way that
not yet been done in scholarship on Hindi horror films. And, in focusing on
religion, the essays in this volume are engaging the question of what it means to
be a horror movie in India in a new way.
Having established some parameters for what Carroll calls art-horror, we
will now turn to the three distinct but related understandings of horror that
inform this book and unpack them one by one, explaining the theoretical
framework we will be using to interpret them: religious studies frameworks for
understanding the iconography of horror, classical Sanskrit theories of aesthetics
for understanding horror as affect, and scholarship from critical theory of
various types to understand the presentation of real-life horror through the
medium of film.
 Introduction 7

Horror as a Genre: Conventions of Bollywood Horror

Through the Lens of Religious Studies

For over three decades, Hindi horror cinema has used monsters (often derived
from Indic demonology), jump-scares, Gothic-inspired settings, and other
reliable horror tropes to deliver fright to the audience. But unlike most other
horror movies from around the world, Bollywood horror movies of the 1980s
and 1990s prominently feature the song and dance numbers typical of Indian
popular cinema. Somewhat less frequently, they also include martial arts scenes
imitating Kung Fu and wuxia films from Hong Kong, pitting the heroes against
a gang of tāntrikas or goondas.8 Partly as a result of these obligatory sequences,
Bollywood horror movies also run about an hour longer than British, European
or American horror films of the same time period.
But what is useful about Carroll’s notion of art-horror is that it allows us to
think about the generic conventions of horror apart from these cultural
differences (all of which serve to meet the Indian audience’s expectations).
Following Carroll’s definitional logic, if the antagonist confronted by the heroes
in a film appears as a “violation of nature,” the film is art-horror no matter how
much singing and martial arts it contains. A film can have characteristics that
American audiences would not recognize and still be art-horror, but it can also
lack characteristics that some audiences might see as essential and still do the
same. Contrary to some expectations, art-horror does not necessarily require the
jump scares and special effects common in American films.
For example, so-called “cosmic horror”—usually associated with H.P.
Lovecraft (1890–1937) and those who draw inspiration from his work—
frequently eschews the element of suspense but is none the less an unalloyed
form of art-horror because it focuses on piercing the façade that is reality and
revealing the unknowable, incomprehensible void behind it. One popular work
that could be classified as cosmic horror is the Stephen King novel Revival
(2014), in which a minister who has lost his Christian faith upon the deaths of
his wife and child looks beyond the veil into the afterlife and sees a monstrous
nightmare in which an endless procession of human souls suffers eternal slavery
in a realm of black chaos.
What matters most for art-horror is not whether there are choreographed
dances or jump-scares or not, but to what extent a film leaves its audience’s
worldview intact. This means that understanding an audience’s worldview is
essential to understanding their idea of horror. Given the connection between
the plots of Bollywood horror films and the religious context in which they play
8 Bollywood Horrors

out—a connection has all sorts of connotations for understanding horror as a

genre in India—we think that a religious studies approach can yield some new
and useful insights. To demonstrate, we will consider the Ramsay brothers’
Veerana, in which a tāntrika uses his powers to place the spirit of a dead witch
into the body of the local landlord’s daughter. The film begins with this disclaimer:

This movie is a work of imagination, a concocted story written with influence

from ancient folklore and mythological stories. In this film there is mention of
ghosts and goblins (bhoot-pret), witches (chudail) and black magic (kaala jadoo)
such as nefarious powers (naapak shaktiyon), which do not exist in today’s
reality. Viewers are requested to watch it purely for entertainment as the film has
no connection to reality.9

If we take the disclaimer at face value, it informs the audience that the witches
and black magic in the movie are make-believe. The reason for making what
might seem such an obvious claim is the fact that the witch and the black magic
in the film are inseparable from the black-robed tāntrika who summons one and
wields the other, respectively. The significance of this inseparability is that the
viewer knows that tāntrikas are real without a doubt, so it is therefore unclear
whether the witch who possesses the heroine through black magic in Veerana is
meant to inhabit the same realm as the viewers do.
Notably, while it is more common among some groups than others, many
Hindus accept spirit possession as part of the natural order. Is the possession by
a goddess part of the natural world while possession by a witch is not? More to
the point, if the audience disbelieves in the witch, must it also then disbelieve in
the god Śiva, whose murti destroys her with its power? Surely not, as Hindus
pray in front of murtis on a daily basis because they have such power.10 It is also
worth noting that in 1982, six years before the release of Veerana, there were
twelve witchcraft-related murders in the Malda district of West Bengal and there
were about sixty in the state of Jharkhand in the 1990s.11
This is not to say that all Hindus hold to a particular theology or that there is
not significant opposition to these beliefs. Indeed, the speedy passage of the
wordily titled Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and
other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act in 2013 precisely
exemplifies a thoroughly rationalist-materialist form of such opposition.12 We
certainly do not endorse any generalizations about Indian culture being
inherently “superstitious.” We only point out that demonology is intimately
connected with other aspects of the spirit world, including the goddesses who
possess their devotees on a regular basis at temples and festivals. While possession
 Introduction 9

practices may be more or less unusual given the part of the country one lives in,
few in India would call them “abnormal.” It is not the case that every member of
the audience in an Indian movie would believe in possession, but it is certainly
the case that the supernatural elements and demonology in Bollywood horror
movies tend to exist alongside things like prayers answered by gods and the
power of religious iconography that are part of the “natural” world.
With some exceptions, like Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya’s Indian Demonology:
The Inverted Pantheon, the rich demonological lore of South Asia has not been
systematically studied in recent works. This is regrettable because demonology
has clearly been a large part of the spread of Sanskritic culture, as David Gordon
White has demonstrated in pointing out the important role played by malevolent
supernatural entities, many of whose names are associated with screaming and
howling, in tracing the transmission of Tantric traditions into South and Central
Asia.13 More recently, Benedict Anderson and Erik Davis have written about the
popularity of Southeast Asia’s ghost festivals and hell-themed monastic parks
featuring Buddhist demons derived from Indic mythology.14
The witches, evil spirits, black magicians, and curses that populate Bollywood
horror are drawn from a tradition that, by the early modern period, had
already spread far and wide and come into contact with Buddhist, Islamic,
Manichean, Christian, and Zoroastrian cosmologies. And as Natasha Mikles and
Joseph P. Laycock have demonstrated, a handful of Indo-Tibetan demonological
ideas have spread very far west indeed as they were picked up and heavily
modified by Theosophists in the nineteenth century.15 The idea of the tulpa or
“thought-form,” understood as an entity that feeds on the fear or belief of
humans, is a staple in Western horror, from Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on
Elm Street series to the internet-based mythology of Slenderman. A related bit of
cultural borrowing occurs in Stephen King’s 1986 novel It—as well as the 2019
blockbuster movie it inspired—in which the heroes perform a ritual named after
and (very) loosely inspired by the Tibetan rite of chöd in order to defeat the
demonic clown-creature Pennywise (who also bears some resemblance to a
Western tulpa).
We think it is therefore useful when attempting to understand the broader
cultural context of Bollywood horror films to pay attention to the religious
elements in them. Accordingly, throughout these essays, we will draw attention
to Indian myths, rituals, iconographic elements, and religious attitudes when
they are relevant to our analyses. And, along with looking at elements of Indian
thought, we also think it is sometimes useful to look through elements of Indian
thought, specifically the Sanskrit aesthetic philosophy of rasa, in order to better
10 Bollywood Horrors

illuminate the sources of indigenous South Asian horror traditions and give
readers a new perspective on horror in general.

Horror as Affective Response: Reading Bollywood Horror

with Rasa Aesthetics

The shudders and other visceral responses of the horror movie heroines (or
“Scream Queens,” to use a genre-specific term) to which Carroll directs our
attention are more than just convention. They may also tell us something about
the nature of horror. Carroll explains:

The reports of characters’ internal reactions to monsters—whether from a first

person, second person  . . . or authorial point of view—in horror stories
correspond to the more behavioral reactions one can observe in theater and
cinema. Their faces contort. They freeze in a moment of recoil, transfixed,
sometimes paralyzed. They start. Their hands are drawn toward their bodies in
an act of protection but also of revulsion and disgust. Along with the fear of
severe physical harm, there is an evident aversion to making physical contact
with the monster. Both fear and disgust are etched on the characters’ features.
Within the context of the horror narrative, the monsters are identified as impure
and unclean. They are putrid or mouldering things, or they hail from oozing
places, or they are made of dead or rotting flesh, or chemical waste, or are
associated with vermin, disease, or crawling things. They are not only lethal but
they make one’s skin creep. Characters regard them not only with fear but also
with loathing, with a combination of terror and disgust.16

We think that these aspects of horror film appreciation can be illuminated by

discussing them in terms of rasa, the classical Sanskrit philosophy of aesthetics.
Centuries before Freud’s “death drive,” Kristeva’s concept of “abjection,” Bakhtin’s
“grotesque body,” or Becker’s “terror management theory,” Sanskritic philosophers
had already developed in rasa a classification scheme that accounted for the role
of the terrifying (bhayānaka) and the horrifying/repulsive (bībhatsa) in art and
religion.
In his 300 ce Treatise on Drama (Nāt.yaśāstra), Bhārata elucidates the
eight rasas, or aesthetic modes. Along with bhayānaka and bībhatsa, they are
the erotic (śr.ngāra), the comic (hāsya), the violent (raudra), the pathetic
(kārun.ya), the heroic (vīra), and the marvelous (adbhutam). Further, he clarifies
that of the eight rasas, four are generative and the other four are generated as
their correlates:
 Introduction 11

From the erotic arises the comic, from the violent the tragic, from the heroic the
fantastic, and from the macabre the fearful. The comic may be described as an
imitation of the erotic, and the tragic rasa may be understood as an effect of the
violent. The fantastic is declared to be an effect of the heroic, and the fearful
should be understood to come about at the sight of the macabre.17
The bhayānaka rasa (translated above as “fearful”) comes from the Sanskrit root
√bhī (“to fear”), and its generated correlate, the bībhatsa (translated above as
“macabre”), despite its resemblance to √bhī, is actually a desiderative formed
from the root √bādh (“to oppose”) and means something like “repulsive” or
“repellant.” Bhārata elucidates and distinguishes the two rasas, writing that the
bhayānaka “can be simulated, or stem from a criminal act, or be anything a timid
person finds frightening” while the bībhatsa “can be pure or impure: the former
is disturbing, and is brought about by the sight of blood and the like; the latter is
disgusting, and is brought about by the sight of excrement, maggots, and so on.”18
When focusing on the horror genre specifically, which offers chills as well as
thrills and promises to make the audience shudder as well as scream, there are
good reasons to translate bhayānaka as “terror” and bībhatsa as “horror.” This
follows the useful taxonomy that Charles Darwin lays out in The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals, listing some of the same associated
psychophysical responses that Bhārata had delineated in 300 bce for each
emotional state.19 It also speaks to the tension between high-brow and low-brow
conceptions of scary entertainment found in India and elsewhere. For instance,
in an effort to distance himself from the more unsavory aspects of his genre, the
horror icon Boris Karloff insisted in his 1962 interview with Psycho author
Robert Bloch that he made “terror” movies and not “horror” movies, complaining,
“I wish the movies had never found that [“horror”] label  . . . There’s nothing
pleasant, nothing appealing, about the word. It doesn’t promise entertainment.”20
Perhaps more germane to the discussion at hand is the formulation put
forward by pioneering British Indian-born Gothic scholar Devendra Varma:
“The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful
apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling
against a corpse.”21 Or, to put it in operational terms, there is Stephen King’s self-
aware admission: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion . . . and so I will try to
terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and
if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”22
The “gross-out” King is talking about partakes of horror, to be sure, but it often
also mixes with the comic, as it does in the “splatter” horror-comedies of Peter
Jackson and Sam Raimi as well as the ironic enjoyment of low-budget Bollywood
12 Bollywood Horrors

B- and C-movies. In his seminal study Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood

Horror and Comedy, William Paul argues that the political and social upheavals
taking place in America in the 1970s and 1980s “enabled [Americans] to
reestablish ties to a repressed tradition of vulgar art,” leading to the popularity of
slasher movies like Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham) as well as
teen sex comedies like Porky’s (1981, dir. Bob Clark).23
Turning to classical Indian aesthetics, David Gitomer observes that this
connection between revulsion and laughter is encoded not just in theory but in
performance. He writes:

The great Odissi dancer Sanjukta Panigrahi, for example, in one portion of her
act represents in succession the nine rasas. Not only is bībhatsa alone presented
with narrative content (finding a worm in the food—she merely strikes a pose
for each of the other eight)—but the shrinking grimaces are clearly meant to
evoke laughter on the part of the audience, not revulsion.24

There is also some gross-out humor in the bizarre bazaar held in a cremation
ground in the Śitalā-maṅgala of Dvija Nityānanda, an eighteenth-century
Bengali poem connected to the cult of the smallpox goddess Śitalā:

The ears of corpses were sold in the market as pān [betel leaf], and the pupils of
their eyes as śali-rice. Female ghouls bought bags of brains as lime, and rotten
melting corpses as perfume. Pairs of ears were sold as incense, finger and toe
nails as husked rice, and the penises of boys [as] enticing dates. Palates were sold
as ripe cantaloupe and human heads as vegetables. Vomited blood is the best-
loved drink of ghouls; human blood is sugarcane juice for them. Demons bought
and ate the breasts of dead women as if they were custard-apples or pomegranates,
with great delight . . .25

Between the seventh and ninth centuries, the Sanskrit dramatists Bhāvabhūti
and Ārya Ks. emīśvara cultivated horror and terror as transcendent aesthetic
experiences, prompting the questions one still hears today about the aesthetic
paradoxes of horror enjoyment (“What is so fun about being scared?”). They
also juxtaposed terror and horror with other rasas to heighten the effect.
In one memorable passage of what we might call “gore-rotica,” Bhāvabhūti’s
Mālatīmādhava combines horror and eroticism, portraying a scene in which
“with guts for bracelets, and elegant flower chains of hearts, and women’s
lac-painted hands for red lotuses at their ears with thick blood for makeup,
the demon women join their lovers and drink in skull goblets the marrow
wine.”26
 Introduction 13

Thinking of rasa in this way leads us back to religious studies scholarship.

Taking up images of death, decay, and the grotesque, Bengal scholar Edward
Dimock has noted the place of the repulsive in the concept of āndolan or
“oscillation,” the nature of reality as it appears in the partial view granted to
human beings as opposed to the all-encompassing powers of perception
attributed to the goddess:

As all forms of the divine are possible, there is no difference, except to limited
human sight, between what is beautiful and what is repulsive. In the divine realm
of the goddess, in her avatāras and in the texts that describe them, these opposites
do not exist . . . The repulsive, horrifying form, as it seems to our eyes, is latent in
good times; or perhaps it would be better described as repressed, for, poor weak
creatures that we are, we cannot see that the distinction is false, and could not
stand it if we did . . . [What] is grotesque is what is exaggerated, and in the divine
realm the concept “grotesque” cannot exist.27

The title of the essay from which the above words are quoted, “A Theology of the
Repulsive,” could well serve as watchwords for our study and we will keep them
in our sights. But alongside horror as affect and horror as genre, we must also
consider the real-life horrors of human cruelty and desperation that are all too
present in our world and take specific forms in contemporary India.

Horror as Representation: The Portrayal of Real-life Terror

The now-defunct Indian Horror Tales blog proclaims (presumably regarding the
same bhoots, prets, and chudails disavowed by the Ramsays in their disclaimer at
the beginning of Veerana):

Since centuries they have been dwelling in this land, migrating to places & forms,
awaiting reincarnation. From the dark forests to the crowded bazaars—from
abandoned forts to lonely village roads—they are still there, everywhere.
Urbanization may simply camouflage them but their reflections can be sensed
by those open to their vibes.28

Comparing Veerana’s relegation of demonology to the realm of the unreal and

the Indian Horror Tales blog’s insistence that demons never die, but only change
form, we can boil down these two opposing viewpoints into an either-or
proposition: Either Indian horror films are purely for entertainment, or they
relate in some substantive way to today’s reality, with its own attendant horrors
14 Bollywood Horrors

(e.g., Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sudden and complete transformation of

Kashmir into a virtual prison camp for seven million people in August of 2019
or the mob violence committed against JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
students and those protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act in December and
January of 2020).
We titled this book “Bollywood Horrors” out of recognition that horror is
both a genre and a subject matter and that, although cinematic treatments of the
two do not always overlap, they relate to each other in important ways. The
uneasy proximity of real-life atrocities, supernatural beliefs, and the titillations
of cinematic terror is not unique to Bollywood. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the
120 Days of Sodom (1975), a study—set in Fascist Italy—of sexual sadism and a
dark political satire based on Sade’s famous unfinished work, portrays the
corrosive power of authoritarian rule in terms of Sadean excess. While it would
not qualify as art-horror, Salò was listed by the Chicago Film Critics Association
among the top 100 scariest films ever made, despite the lack of any monsters or
jump-scares.29
If horror films are pure entertainment, providing nothing more than safely
unrealistic monsters to induce cathartic chills and thrills in their audiences, then
it would be bad taste to analyze them alongside films dealing with real-life
horrors like communal violence and sex trafficking. If they are something more,
then such a comparison might be very useful, even if it is still not in good taste.
But then, good taste is not something of which horror films have been very often
accused, so perhaps it is the wrong standard to apply.
Two examples from recent Indian scholarship, both of which connect the idea
of horror to the social and political forces in Indian society, will illustrate the
point. The first comes from an essay by Arindim Chakrabarti titled “Refining the
Repulsive: Toward an Indian Aesthetics of the Ugly and the Disgusting.” Tying
together the subjective aesthetic experience of horror with political commentary,
Chakrabarti describes his affective response to a scene from an Urdu story by
Sadaat Hasan Manto in which a child comes upon the body of an ice vendor
stabbed to death during the communal riots that accompanied partition in 1947
and mistakes his congealed blood on the road for jelly:
I am repulsed even to imagine clots of human blood mixed with melting
ice looking like edible jelly to a child. It suggests cannibalism. The clear hint
that the blood is from an innocent victim of mass ethnic violence adds moral
nausea to my gut-disgust. I take no masochistic delight in painful revulsion or
abomination. Yet I like the story as a work of art. I would even say that it is a
beautiful story. Why?30
 Introduction 15

To set alongside this reflection on the appreciation of horror, we can take

Shakuntala Banaji’s observation about contemporary audiences’ enjoyment of
Hindi horror films:

In Bollywood, horror is professional women who undermine men, families who

abandon their elderly, those who disrespect the gods; but it is also the rape and
murder of vulnerable persons; the absence of regulation in mental healthcare in
the global south; the desolate silence in the abandoned courtyard; the bloodthirsty
rage of the unavenged; the inexplicable “other” who refuses to die, to change, or
to submit. Unlike their romantic counterparts, Hindi horror films do not excise
any of these issues: they wallow in them. They probe the effects both of apparently
indigenous traditions and of unevenly experienced modernity. They do so in
ways that are ideologically structured and ribald, open to carnivalesque
enjoyment and disgust.31

As these quotes from Chakrabarti and Banaji suggest, and as the essays in the
volume will demonstrate, horror in the Indian context is as much about the fear
of human violence and unwelcome social changes as about supernatural and the
uncanny.

The Structure of this Book

The eight chapters of this book explore the contributions that individuals, films,
and aspects of material culture have made to the discourses on violence, religion,
and cinematic fears in Bollywood. While our treatment is not intended to be
exhaustive (and necessarily excludes some important issues and films), our hope
is that the wide-ranging perspectives we have addressed will shed light on the
multi-faceted subject of horror in Indian cinema.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section, “Material Cultures
and Prehistories of Horror in South Asia,” begins with Brian Collins’s chapter
titled “Monsters, Masala, and Materiality: Close Encounters with Hindi Horror
Movie Ephemera.” In this chapter, Collins is interested specifically in the
materiality of Hindi horror movie posters and song booklets, which he argues
constitute a type of advertising unique to Indian cinema. As a long-time collector
himself, Collins uses extensive (and often exclusive) archival visual materials to
discuss a diverse range of subjects including possession, colonialism, tantra,
rasa aesthetics and the idea of the wet sari. Collins’s chapter also contains ten
color reproductions of movie posters and song booklets.
16 Bollywood Horrors

The other chapter in this section, also by Collins, is titled “Vampire Man
Varma: The Untold Story of the ‘Hindu Mystic’ Who Decolonized Dracula.” In it
he argues that although conventional wisdom holds that the haunted house and
other Gothic tropes found in Hindi horror movies are simply borrowed from the
West, this does not tell the whole story. In an attempt to do just that, Collins
explores the remarkable life and work of Sir Devendra Prasad Varma, a former
Gurkha paratrooper and lifelong friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, who was one of the
most significant writers of the second generation of Gothic fiction scholars.
Collins recounts how Varma sought out lost Gothic works as an archivist and
oversaw their republication, performed Shakespeare for Gamal Abdel Nasser in
Damascus, hosted “Transylvania Weekends” at Dalhousie College, befriended
horror movie icons Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, was inducted into the
Dracula Society in Hollywood, and published an essay tracing all vampire legends
back to Tibet. Collins maintains that without a treatment of Varma and his works
(presented in this chapter using exclusive archival photos from Varma’s estate),
no account of the adoption of Gothic conventions in Indian cinema is complete.
The second section,“Cinematic Horror, Iconography, and Aesthetics,” opens with
Kathleen M. Erndl’s “Divine Horror and the Avenging Goddess in Bollywood.”
In her essay, Erndl maintains that classical Indian aesthetic theory speaks of
successful drama as an ideal mix of dominant and subordinate rasas that evoke
in the audience appropriate, elevated moods that are central to the aesthetic
experience. The category of “horror” most closely corresponds to the bhayānaka
or “terrifying” rasa, though it also includes at least a taste of bībhatsa or
“disgusting” rasa. Echoing and transforming themes in the Rāmāyan.a,
Mahābhārata, and oral traditions of India, Bollywood has a pervasive fascination
with what Erndl calls the “Avenging Goddess” motif, where a woman, subject to
violent oppression, transforms into a horrific Durgā or Kālī-like goddess to exact
revenge upon the demonic forces and re-establish justice. Erndl shows how the
social, political, and economic oppression of women is homologized with the
cosmic struggle between devas and asuras (gods and demons), and dharma and
adharma (righteousness and unrighteousness). An ordinary woman killing a
rapist becomes Durgā slaying the Buffalo Demon. Using a cluster of films starting
with Pratighat (Retribution, 1987, dir. N. Chandra), Erndl explores how through
visual, aural, and lyrical means, “Avenging Goddess” films evoke the rasas of
terror and disgust to create “Divine Horror.”
Next comes Hugh Urban’s “Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks,” the first essay
we included in this volume that did not come from the 2016 panel. It was chosen
because it fit squarely into our existing framework for picking out what is unique
 Introduction 17

about the horror genre in India. In his essay, Urban explores the portrayal of
sinister tāntrikas, sadhus, and black magicians in a variety of films including
Gehrayee (Depth, 1980, dirs. Aruna Raje and Vikas Desai), Jadugar (Magician,
1989, dir. Prakash Mehra), and Sangarsh (Struggle, 1999, dir. Tanuja Chandra).
Urban argues that these modern Bollywood productions draw upon the image
of the “sinister yogī,” which David Gordon White has shown is a recurring trope
throughout medieval Sanskrit and vernacular Indian literature. Like the medieval
sinister yogīs, Urban claims Bollywood villains are associated with all manner of
terrifying and transgressive activities, ranging from black magic, sorcery and
exorcism to sexual perversion and child sacrifice. Urban also provides a brief
history of tantra in South Asian literature as background for understanding a
variety of Tantric images and themes in Bollywood film.
In the third and final essay of section two, “Do You Want to Know the Raaz?:
Sāvitri, Satyavān, and the Other Woman,” Aditi Sen argues that Raaz (Secret, dir.
Vikram Bhatt), a major box office success in 2002, retells the myth of Sāvitri and
Satyavān and thus opens up space for discussion about the boundaries of
strīdharma (rules of conduct governing women), the sanctity of marriage,
mainstream religion versus folk religion, the limits of sexual morality, and
madness. Sen identifies how Raaz blends the polarizing ideas of the holiness of
traditional marriage and the lure of illicit sexual relationships. She also shows
how the romantic journey of the central couple in Raaz provides the perfect
backdrop to analyze many complex subjects including divorce, evil spirits,
possession, ghosts and madness—elements that throughout the film attempt to
subvert the patriarchal order of married life.
The third section, “Cultural Horror,” begins with Ellen Goldberg’s “Cultural
Horror in Dev: Man Is the Cruelest Animal.” Goldberg argues that horror can be
construed in various way, and while Dev (2004) is not strictly considered among
the standardized Hindi formula horror genre films, it is director Govind
Nihalani’s extremely bold and graphic attempt to capture the real-life horror of
recurring Hindu-Muslim communal violence. Goldberg looks at the haunting
effects of social trauma in the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat as a way to interrogate
and unravel Dev’s complex narrative. She applies insights from Hannah Arendt
on the politics of evil, Frantz Fanon’s work on understanding colonialism, and
Sigmund Freud’s theories of repression. Goldberg also looks at Indian film
scholar Bhaskar Sarkar’s work on trauma and cinematic mourning and situates
his scholarship on Partition films within a framework that she calls “cultural
horror” to reiterate how the memories and ghosts of Partition continue to haunt
the Indian nation.
18 Bollywood Horrors

The next essay is “Bandit Queen, Rape-Revenge, and Cultural Horror,” by

Morgan Oddie. In it, Oddie discusses the controversial subject of graphic rape
and violence depicted in Shekar Kapur’s 1994 biopic of outlaw folk hero-turned-
MP Phoolan Devi. Kapur’s portrayal of gender-based violence illustrates a
cultural horror grounded in reality, while at the time of its release, Devi’s banditry
and crimes against higher caste men were still fresh in the national consciousness.
Oddie argues that Kapur’s representation results in the over-signification of a
subaltern, low-caste woman and reads similarly to a rape-revenge movie, in that
it focuses on the violence to a woman’s body to justify the violence she later
enacts as revenge. Oddie claims that this diminishes the subversive qualities of
Phoolan Devi’s story, by emphasizing the horror she endured without adequate
recognition of her agency as a dacoit or a survivor of the horrors of rape.
The last essay in the third section, focused on the 2014 film Mardaani (dir.
Pradeep Sarkar), is titled “Mardaani: The Secular Horror of Child Trafficking
and the Modern Masculine Woman.” Author Beth Watkins argues that because
Mardaani’s protagonist, Inspector Shivani Roy (Rani Mukerji), is a “masculine”
woman, both the heroine and the villain represent (perceived) societal evils. The
villain abducts children, typically young girls, and sells them into sex slavery;
the hero subverts expectations of women to thrive in the domain of the
home and to serve family and/or God. Mardaani, as Watkins shows, moves the
avenging figure away from the spiritual and familial and into the professional,
anonymous, public-serving world that derives its power from human-made
law. In the mundane world, individuals remain largely unconnected to one
another and innocent children are not protected by community, justice, or the
supernatural. Although Roy restores the moral order, she ignores most societal
conventions to do so. Her violence is not on behalf of God but for public good
and personal catharsis. What Watkins identifies are two very different images of
woman: the formidable image of woman as śakti and the cultural horror of the
image of woman as chattel. Thus, the issues raised in this chapter are complex
and multi-layered.
 Part One

Material Cultures and Prehistories of

Horror in South Asia

19
20
 1

Monsters, Masala, and Materiality:

Close Encounters with Hindi Horror
Movie Ephemera
Brian Collins

Introduction: Posters, Song Booklets, and

“Methodological Fetishism”

Scholars generally agree that the first promotional material of any kind for an
Indian film appeared in the form of a newspaper advertisement for the 1913
“mythological” film Raja Harishchandra (King Harishchandra, dir. Dadasaheb
Phalke).1 However, no evidence exists for an actual poster until Kalyan Khajina
(The Treasures of Kalyan, dir. Baburao Painter) in 1924.2 And it was not until after
the success of the publicity campaign for 1948’s Chandralekha (dir. S. S. Vasan)
that posters became widespread marketing tools.3
Typically, Indian movie posters advertise the title of a film and provide
relevant information like stars, director, and songwriter. They also give an idea of
the film’s genre: mythological, social, family, or masala (“spicy”). When used to
describe a film, masala refers to a something-for-everyone approach, with thrills
and chills, dance and romance, as well as humor. As the director Manmohan
Desai puts it, masala films should have “an item in every reel.”4 Given the amount
of film contained in one reel, this amounts to a dance number, a fight scene, a
jump scare, a romantic duet, or some slapstick comedy about every eleven
minutes.
But when someone describes the style of a poster as masala, they mean
something more like “[an] item in every square inch,” often utilizing a bright
color palette. Devraj and Bouman explain:

An elementary color code marks the characters as positive or negative, with

pink-faced heroines flinching from villains painted angry red or base green . . .

21
22 Bollywood Horrors

The diverse elements are at times unified by some device like a spiral pattern or
a background of flames. The title treatment is often monumentally three-
dimensional and may wield its own pictorial elements, symbols representing the
theme of the film like a rose, a chain, a pair of handcuffs, or a bloody dagger.5

As the art form of the Hindi movie poster developed, illustrators began to
employ an established color scheme to advertise each movie’s genre, using blue,
purple, and dark green paint for action-oriented films and yellow, pink, and light
green paint for family films. And even as posters incorporated more and more
photographic elements and stopped relying on painting, this color scheme
remained in use. “There is probably no [śilpa-śāstra] for this colour code,” writes
Stephen Haggard in an oft-cited article, “but the evidence of the posters suggests
that it is known to artists and perceived by the public.”6 He continues:

These systems of colour reference can also be found in the West, but a comparison
of Hollywood and Bombay publicity shows a far less naturalistic, more symbolic
use of colour in the Indian case. For example, the use of dark blue in poster
representations of Amitabh Bachchan and Darmendra, the two rival heart-
throbs of the late 1970s, is surely significant  . . . In the film Mera Gaon, Mera
Desh, Dharmendra hides in a tree and secretly watches the village girls bathing
in the river. This reference to Krishna is obvious, and there can be no doubt that
similar associations are achieved by colouring a major male star blue in a poster.7

The masala style of poster design is rooted in Indian techniques of storytelling,

art, and imagination. But it also rooted in another hallmark of Indian culture—
bureaucracy. India is divided into eleven film distribution zones derived from an
old Raj-era system: Bombay, Delhi, Nizam, East Punjab, Eastern, Central
Provinces and Berar, Central India, Rajasthan, Mysore, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra.
Purchasers of distribution rights must operate within these geographical
confines, leading to large-scale and flashy advertising efforts to maximize their
profits. Additionally, in each distribution zone there is an “A circuit” for the wide
release of Bollywood blockbusters, a “B circuit” for re-releases of classic
Bollywood films and new low-budget genre films, and a “C circuit” for “sexy
horror” and soft-core pornography.8 The posters that concern us here (if it needs
to be said) come from the B and C circuits.

Song Booklets
When the tradition of printing promotional booklets for upcoming movies first
arose in the 1920s, the booklets that were distributed contained stills, plot
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 23

synopses, and reviews, and were only intended for distributors and theater
owners. But the arrival of sound in the 1930s and the subsequent popularity of
film songs saw the addition of lyrics to the booklets, which began to be distributed
to theatergoers in advance of a film’s showing.9
A typical modern song booklet is 7in. × 10in., printed on magazine paper
stock coated with kaolin to give it a slick feel, and is either one-fold with two
inside panels or two-fold with three inside panels. In some cases, there is an
additional page of cheaper newsprint paper glued or stapled inside like a
magazine. The booklets also contain poster-style artwork for the film along
with the title, credits, and a synopsis (kathaasaar). Usually, but not always,
they also include the lyrics of one or more songs in Hindi, English, and
sometimes Urdu. We should note here that, while Indian movie posters may
have their own distinctive style, they are nonetheless recognizable as a type of
promotional material found all over the world. The song booklet, on the other
hand, is a form of advertising unique to India. As such, they share certain
design characteristics with other products produced, circulated, and used within
South Asia.
This brings us to another influence on the stylistic development of movie
posters and song booklets that has been underappreciated: South Asian industrial
design of the kind documented by design historians Catherine Geel and
Catherine Lévy in 100% India, their photography book featuring everyday
objects ranging from bicycle reflectors to stamp pads.10 In the introduction, Geel
characterizes this design aesthetic:

Indian objects are witty and spirited in every sense of the words. They are filled
with sparkling details and possess a unique sensibility that refashions them
again and again, in thousands of copies. What inspires workers and craftspeople
to take the time to engrave little flowers on the most ordinary of glasses, to adorn
radio-cassette players with flashing lights and LED s? Rather than succumbing
to the inevitable and reflexive appeal to a cultural habit that embellishes and
elaborates everything (from frescoes to temple walls, from a taste for kitsch to
precious textiles) I like to believe it to be the expression of a subconscious refusal
to be subsumed by the market, like the stubborn recalcitrance turned against the
British occupation in its day.11

Building on Geel’s intuition, I will argue that the most useful way of interpreting
these posters and song booklets requires us to see them as drawing from a deep
well of cultural knowledge and forms, but also shaping and being shaped by the
economies in which they circulate.
24 Bollywood Horrors

Market Forces and Methodology

“No social analysis of things,” writes anthropologist of globalization Arjun
Appadurai, “can avoid a minimum level of what might be called methodological
fetishism.”12 By “methodological fetishism,” Appadurai means that, in order to
counterbalance what has historically been an overemphasis on human intention
and cognition in the study of artifacts, a scholar must “fetishize,” or imagine
some inherent power in, whatever object she is studying. To carry out this
recommendation, I will continually reframe and refocus my analyses of these
posters and song booklets in this essay by returning to them as the things that
they are—things that, when interpreted in their overlapping contexts, can tell us
much about the intersecting currents of human activity in which they are caught.
As the objects of an enthusiast’s desire—traveling along a current that flows
from manufacturer’s shop to reseller’s stall to collector’s collection—they are
brittle, age-worn artifacts, dwindling in number; cheap to produce but expensive
to purchase, and originally designed to do nothing more than serve as
advertisements for a few weeks and then dissolve into pulp in the unforgiving
Indian elements.13 On the other hand, as Indian products of manufacturing, these
song booklets and posters have a kind of fragile durability that provides an
explanation for their longevity that has nothing to do with the collector’s market.
It derives instead from traits they share with a wide array of other Indian products.
Referring mostly to the electronic and mechanical items that reasonably
skilled technicians (often either informally or self-taught) can keep in working
order through the ready availability of standardized components, Geel writes:

The incredible fragility that radiates from shop windows in India . . . seems to go
together with the industrial production of the most densely populated country
in the world. For Westerners, this quality makes them unusual objects, filled with
happiness and the symbolic value of transgression. The captions to the
photographs in [100% India] regularly mention the relative efficiency of these
objects; nonetheless, the products do not at all seem to have been designed for a
limited period. There are no preconceived ideas about the life of an object. Such
ideas wouldn’t be Indian. Godrej refrigerators or Penjaj scooters easily give
twenty or thirty years of loyal service. But Indian objects do in fact look fragile,
and they often are.14

Posters are not like motorcycles that can be repaired and put back on the road
by a self-taught mechanic. But the skills of the bricoleur do come in handy when
it comes to storing and shipping such delicate and unwieldy paper items. To
illustrate: After I had spent my research money on a large stack of movie posters,
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 25

I began to wonder (belatedly) how I was going to get them safely out of the
bazaar, much less back to Ohio. I had already established that there were no
enclosed cardboard mailing tubes to be purchased in the area. When I asked the
shopkeeper what I should do, he told me not to worry. He called over his assistant,
who then created a remarkably sturdy tube out of nothing but newspaper and
masking tape that lasted through a wild scooter ride, a taxi, three airplanes, and
a car and even proved difficult to open with a razor blade when I got home. I
have seen other posters shipped using the ingenious method of rolling them up
and putting them in a piece of PVC pipe.
The preservation of old movie posters for resale and/or reuse is thus
overdetermined both by the skills and habits of recycling and repairing acquired
during the decades of economic protectionism and by the desire of collectors
(from India, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the United States) to acquire
rare and remarkable objects. But these objects do not exist in a context defined
only by human attitudes and activity. Just as plastic debris collects in ocean
currents with other objects of like density and buoyancy, these posters and song
booklets tend to travel on the same currents as other related materials and collect
in the same places (we can think of these groupings as “collections without a
collector”). The proximity of all these objects to each other in these “collections
without a collector” then creates a new, properly material context against which
to interpret them.

Material Intertextuality
Along with the materiality of these posters and song booklets, I am also interested
in the total collection of elements (visual, textual, technological, religious, and
cultural) that form the background against which they take on meaning: in a
word, context. The context of the Hindi horror poster or song booklet includes
non-material, conceptual things like pornography, spirit possession, colonialism,
Tantra, economic liberalism, rasa aesthetics, the idea of the wet sari, American
horror movies, the Mālatīmādhava of Bhavabhūti, the online communities that
frequent blogs like I Love Trashy Hindi Movies, Indian village folklore, and the
Gothic novel. Individually and in concert, these elements provide a kind of
interpretive frame by dint of their conceptual relationship to the artifacts in
question.
But what about the context created by material things in a different kind of
relationship to these objects, namely, one of physical proximity? To analyze a
poster as a particular thing rather than an infinitely reproducible image, we have
26 Bollywood Horrors

to consider its provenance and mise-en-scène, the context created by the other
things that surround it in physical space, viewed apart from any human network.
Appadurai writes:
Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view that
things have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions,
and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that this
formal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things.
For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed
in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these
trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that
enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors
encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the
things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.15

When I began to incorporate Appadurai’s ideas into this essay, it became clear
very quickly that, considered as “things-in-motion,” posters and song booklets
do indeed tell us something about their human and social contexts. But, since I
tend to look at myths (my usual subject of study) not only in terms of their
human and social contexts, but also in terms of how they illuminate and are
illuminated by other narratives, I wondered if there was anything like this kind
of intertextuality in the study of objects. It is not possible to talk about the myth
of Paraśurāma’s annihilation of twenty-one generations of warriors in the
Mahābhārata epic without mentioning that two variants of the story are used to
frame the epic’s narration of the great climactic battle at Kuruks. etra that also
wipes out an entire generation of warriors.16 How then, I wondered, can I offer
more than a surface impression of the poster for Darawani Haveli (The Frightful
Mansion, 1997, dir. Rakesh Sinha) without acknowledging that it was found next
to a stack of smaller posters that contained an extremely faded and pulpy 8in. x
10in. publicity still from Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham) showing
Jeannine Taylor and Laurie Bartram chatting aimlessly on a dock? The answer is
that I cannot. A full picture of the context of a poster or song booklet must
include the various things that surround it. They surround it, after all, because
they too have been swept up and carried in the same currents that brought that
poster or song booklet into the here and now.
Following the principles outlined above, in the rest of this essay I will present
a detailed analysis of a poster advertising the film Darawani Haveli, focusing on
the poster as a material object that communicates meaning against the
backgrounds of its Indian cultural context, the intercultural/subcultural context
of global horror fandom, and its physical context as a purchased commodity
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 27

encountered in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar. Next, I will examine the use of synoptic
narrative, Vedic demonology, and repurposed Hollywood horror imagery in the
song booklets for Haveli (Mansion, 1985, dir. Keshu Ramsay), Khatarnak Raat
(Dangerous Night, 2003, dir. Muneer Khan), Ek Aur Khoon (One More Drop of
Blood, 1985, dir. Ramesh Bedi), Lady Killer (1995, dir. S.A. Chandramohan),
and Daayan (1998, dir. D.S. Azad). Finally, I will attempt a psychoanalytic
exploration of what I call, following Richard Kearney’s analysis of the Song of
Songs, the “theo-erotics” of the devouring mouth as recurring image in horror
posters in order to expand my analysis to the more general subjects of sex and
violence.17

Text and Violence in Darawani Haveli

The poster for Darawani Haveli (see Plate 1) is in the masala style and contains
the key credits for director, music, and lyrics. No stars’ names are given, because
the stars (such as they are) are not going to sell Darawani Haveli to audiences.
Instead, we have a collection of publicity photos from the movie in which images
of sex, violence, and the supernatural are on display. They are incorporated into
a painted background with a splashy, stylized title that is part of the overall
poster design and (as is only rarely the case) is written only in Devanāgarī script
with no romanization or Nastaʿlīq in sight.
In the mixed media tradition described by Haggard, this poster would have
been made by hand painting the background on a canvas, then pasting on the
title, credits, and publicity stills from the movie. Evidence of the cut and paste
process is visible in the title, set against a black background. A cursory examination
reveals that the poster artist chose not to trim away the black background from
the right of the word darawani in the way that it was trimmed away on the left to
make room for the umbilical staircase. The cutting and pasting are still more
obvious with the credits—printed in blue type on thin strips of white paper. The
visible painted elements are the monster’s face and clawed hand in the top third
of the poster; the blue-sleeved arm (painted from the shoulder) of the evil
magician or tāntrik and the haveli with the woman in its doorway in the middle
third; and in the lower third, the umbilical staircase that acts as a vertical line to
separate the poster’s two erotic elements, both of them photographs.
The photograph on the left is the familiar image of a screaming woman in a
bathtub, the Western convention of a woman’s bare breasts barely concealed by
suds becoming a more modest bathing top obscured by suds in India. On the
28 Bollywood Horrors

right is a couple with no visible clothing in a clearly sexual, but also puzzling,
position. Both are facing down, with the man’s head behind the woman’s,
suggesting that he is penetrating her from the rear (or is preparing to) while she
lies flat on her stomach. The expression on her face as she stares up and to the
right of the viewer looks like one of resignation. The man’s eyes are unfocused
and his mouth is open to make a sound or maybe to kiss the woman’s shoulders,
and the downward hang of his necklace suggests that he is not lying flat on her
back, but slightly above her. Neither the man nor the woman is obviously
portrayed as hero or villain, but it would be unheard of for a poster to portray a
hero engaged in a sex act like this. More than anything, they seem to advertise
(accurately or not) that the movie contains a fairly explicit sex scene.
The poster’s only obvious hero, representing the vīra rasa, what Sanskrit
aesthetic philosophers called the experience of being thrilled by the valor of a
brave warrior, is the green-shirted man in the top third of the poster. The object
he is brandishing is a triśūl, the divine weapon of Śiva often used to defeat
monsters in these films. The blood coming from his mouth would typically
signify a devourer of flesh or a drinker of blood. In this context, however, and in
concert with the blood on his shoulder, it signifies instead that he has been hurt
in battle but is undaunted and not about to give up the fight.
The most likely candidate for the human villain on this poster is the tāntrik,
who appears twice. The larger of the two images (in which his robes appear blue)
shows some kind of an energy flare shooting, whip-like, out of his fist. This large
image works as the major horizontal element of the poster, stretching all the way
across the middle third. The smaller image (in which his robes appear a more
traditional black) shows him standing behind a skull with his eyes closed and his
arms stiffly pointed down, as if concentrating.
Probably, though, he is only a secondary villain, since in these movies the
tāntrik or pujari ki shaitan (“priest of the devil”) is usually only the one who
summons the monster, and that monster is actually the primary villain. And
indeed, the biggest image of the tāntrik is still not as big as the smaller of the two
images of the female monster positioned above him. Aside from the size
difference, anyone who has seen a few Hindi horror movies would be familiar
with the common plot device of a black magician summoning an evil supernatural
being. In the actual film, though, the female monster appears rarely and the
tāntrik is equally scarce.
Now we come to the appearance of this female monster, which may be a
d.āyan, a creature whose name is derived from the d.ākinī of Sanskrit myth and
Tantric ritual, and generally refers to a vengeful female ghost.18 Global horror
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 29

enthusiast and popularizer Pete Tombs has made the pronouncement that “India,
unlike Japan or China, has no literary tradition of horror outside . . . old folk tales
and puranas.”19 This is a bit like saying that Victorian Britain had no literary
tradition of horror outside of ghost stories and “penny dreadfuls.” In other words,
there is no good reason to disqualify these old folk tales and purān.as as sources
of the horror tradition. We should note though, that in Indian cinema, depictions
of the d.āyan and other beings like it, such as the cur.ail (usually the ghost of a
woman who has died in childbirth or during menses), frequently ignore or play
down the distinctive traits of their descriptions from folklore, such as backwards-
facing feet, in favor of a more generic monster look.20 In contrast, Indonesian
cinema has embraced the very unusual and distinctive form of its own female
demon, the leák, which flies through the air at night as a woman’s head trailing
its stomach and entrails, as seen in the cult classic Leák AKA Mystics in Bali
(1981, dir. H. Tjut Djalil).
B- and C-grade Indian horror cinema has no real special effects budget, much
less the benefit of special effects auteurs like Rick Baker or Tom Savini, so there
is typically only one way to make a monster. Consequently, many of them do, in
the memorable words of Tombs, look like they have a “three-day old pizza” stuck
to their faces.21 But the d.āyan on this poster has a distinguishing characteristic
in her misshapen right eye, which looks dead in the photograph but full of
malevolent life in the painting.
In the film itself, the creature appears only in dizzyingly quick zoom shots and
the part that features most prominently is her clawed hand, which is reflected in
the hand’s prominent placement on the poster. There may be a budgetary reason
for this, since many of the attack scenes were shot from a first-person point-of-
view and therefore all that was required to play the monster was someone
wearing a glove and standing slightly behind the camera, out of frame except for
the forearm. Horror fan and former poster collector Aseem Chandaver argues
that the source of many of the monsters in these films is the village folklore
imported by the rural low-caste laborers brought to work on the movie sets.22 It
is possible, then, that the d.āyan’s prominent eye and clawed hand represent an
independent folklore tradition that matched what was available in the make-up
department at the time of the film’s production.
The two representations on the poster of both the tāntrik and the d.āyan
exemplify the “synoptic mode” of narrative art. Describing the representation
of the Buddha’s birth as a monkey on a stūpa at Sanchi, Vidya Dehejia
describes the synoptic mode as one in which “multiple episodes from a story
are depicted within a single frame, but their temporal sequence is not
30 Bollywood Horrors

communicated, and there is no consistent or formal order of representation with

regard to either causality or temporality.”23 In the poster, we see the tāntrik engaged
in two actions, “invoking” in the smaller image and “spell-casting” in the larger
image, if we take the yellow streak coming out of his fist as some kind of an astra
or magic missile weapon. Likewise, we see the d.āyan brandishing her right claw in
the upper image and stabbing downward with a curved and already bloodied
blade in the lower image, keeping her claw hand above the frame and out of sight.
Typically, a still image on a poster functions as a synchronic distillation of
some part of the diachronic narrative that is the film. But the masala style poster
offers “a condensed narrative of the film, and more besides.”24 But, in this case,
the “more besides” is an unrelated narrative that almost displaces the plot of the
film being advertised. Widening the gap between the story that the poster
suggests and the plot of the film itself is the fact that in the actual movie, two
bumbling Abbot-and-Costello-type detectives and a comic actor in drag (none
of whom figure in the poster) have roughly five times more screen time than the
tāntrik and the d.āyan combined. Without a synopsis to provide narrative
sequence (unlike the song booklets that we will look at below), and without the
context provided by the narrative of the film itself—which the poster’s original
intended viewer has not yet seen, presumably—this poster tells its own story.
The poster also creates its own context through allusion and suggestion, a
process that plays out when we look closely at the appearance of the title.
Expressive typography like the kind in which this title is set began to be popular
in Indian film poster design in the 1970s with box office hits like Bobby (1973,
dir. Raj Kapoor) and Sholay (1975, dir. Ramesh Sippy).25 It is especially popular
in horror films, where it has been used to great effect. But Darawani Haveli does
not use familiar elements like words dripping with blood or letters pointed to
look like fangs. Instead, we see the shattered glass effect that was made iconic by
Tony Palladino’s title design for Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock).
The effect is only on the noun in the title, haveli, which is twice as big as the
modifier darawani and is red with a yellow outline in a direct inversion of the
color scheme used for the adjective. Haveli, we should note, is a common word in
horror titles. Examples include Purana Haveli (The Old Mansion, 1989, dir. Shyam
and Tulsi Ramsay), Maut ki Haveli (Mansion of Death, 2001, dir. A. Raja), and
Haveli ke Peeche (Behind the Mansion, 1999, dir. Vijay Chauhan). Meheli Sen notes
that the haveli “often stands in for feudal excesses and for crimes, misdemeanors,
and exploitative practices nurtured within the feudal dispensation.”26
The subtle reference to Psycho is strengthened by the manner in which the
actual haveli is presented above and to the left of the title. The house or castle is
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 31

painted and, like the famous womb-like manse in Psycho, has an umbilical
staircase, in this case, connecting the thing directly to its name. The haveli itself
calls Psycho to mind again with its figure of a white-haired woman (à la Norman
Bates’s white-wigged “mother” alter ego) stepping out of the doorway and
preparing to run down the steps with arms outstretched.
But how much of this alleged allusion to Psycho is confined to the mind of the
present author? Here, the material context of the object helps us to interpret the
image it bears. The particular Darawani Haveli poster reproduced here was not
found in the state in which it was originally intended to end up (i.e., stuck with
wheat-paste to a wall from which it could never be removed without destroying
it). Instead I found it, like most of the others I will discuss in the essay, stacked up
with dozens of other never-hung posters on a concrete floor in a stall on Mutton
Street in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar. I purchased it there from the father and son
vendors Shahid and Wahid Mansoori, who make part of their living selling
posters, song booklets, and other Bollywood movie memorabilia to tourists and
collectors at a significant markup. And I was both a tourist and a collector.
This seems a good place to state my own position vis-à-vis the cultures of
collecting and cult fandom, so I ask the reader for a bit of indulgence as I take an
autobiographical detour. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a filmmaker.
I worshipped Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch,
Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese, but also maintained my childhood
love of things like the Universal Studios monsters, Vincent Price movies and The
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, dir. Jack Arnold), which I watched on
television with 3-D glasses purchased at a convenience store. Growing up in the
1980s, I was well also aware of—but never allowed to watch—the explosion of
slasher movies from that period, so that Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and
Freddy Krueger were figures of children’s folklore to me long before I ever
actually got to watch their movies (which I did as soon as I was able).
In middle school, I spent a good amount of time at the local video store
renting “cult” movies like those of Ed Wood Jr. and collecting posters whenever I
could. Two of my prize acquisitions from this period were from the horror-
comedy Zombie High (1987, dir. Ron Link) and the low-budget drive-in film
Gator Bait (1974, dir. Beverly and Ferd Sebastian). I also read biographies of
B-movie director Roger Corman, B-movie producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, and
zombie movie pioneer George A. Romero, and subscribed to the magazines Film
Threat and Psychotronic Video. The latter, through its classified section advertising
rare VHS tapes and posters, introduced me to the various subgenres of
“exploitation movies,” most of which were completely unknown to me.
32 Bollywood Horrors

Through the VHS tape trading culture, I discovered Alejandro Jodorowsky’s

The Holy Mountain (1973) and the short films of Kenneth Anger as well as John
Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972), and Richard Elfman’s The Forbidden Zone (1982).
I was also exposed to newer underground fare like the gritty experimental shorts
of New York filmmakers Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd, and Richard Kern. I even spent
the summer of 1993 studying filmmaking at a camp for high schoolers at the
University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where everyone was talking about more
sophisticated (and contemporary) work like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing
(1989), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), and James Foley’s Glengarry
Glen Ross (1992). Even as I developed a serious interest in film, I never really lost
my interest in cinematic “trash” and transgression. Ultimately, after the
embarrassing experience of falling asleep watching Sergei Eisentein’s undisputed
masterpiece Battleship Potemkin (1925) in my first college film class, I abandoned
my plans to study cinema—and college altogether.
Years later, when I was in Chicago pursuing what I (naïvely) thought was
a much safer bet by earning my PhD in History of Religions, I discovered that
I had previously only scratched the surface of cult film fandom. Taking
advantage of the city as best as I could, I attended the Chicago Underground
Film Festival, joined the University of Chicago’s legendary Doc Films society
and regularly attended midnight movies (as well the annual twenty-four-hour
horror marathon) at the Music Box Theater in Wrigleyville. It was the 2000s by
then and Netflix’s rent-by-mail service had become available, which gave me a
chance to see movies I had previously only read about in books (like those of
Pete Tombs). Renting them three at a time and watching one every night, I made
my way through a fair number of Italian cannibal, zombie, and giallo films; the
French vampire films of Jean Rollin; and a smattering of ghost films from South
Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan.
By the time I was getting ready to travel to Pune for an American Institute of
Indian Studies Sanskrit summer program in 2003, I was steeped in cult fandom
but only vaguely aware that Bollywood horror existed. It was after the program
was over and I was in Mumbai wandering through the Chor Bazaar with a friend
that I first came across the Mansooris’ stall, “Bollywood Bazaar.” I was fascinated
by what I saw, but was low on cash, so only purchased a few color continuity
photographs (misplaced as of this writing) from some Ramsay brothers films. I
also discovered what was then still a thriving trade in VCD s (video compact
discs) on the streets of Mumbai and Delhi. Displayed in wooden carts and sold
out of plastic trash bags, practically any Bollywood or Tollywood movie could be
found there, along with a good selection of pirated American and European
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 33

titles from the action, horror, and erotic thriller genres, as well as various “hot
movies.”
On later trips to India, I tried to figure out how to get those remarkable movie
posters off the walls where they were wheat-pasted, but that proved impossible.
On one occasion in Tamil Nadu I thought I had adequately explained to a taxi
driver that I wanted to go to the place where they were showing the film
advertised in a poster we passed by on the road. My lack of Tamil got in the way
though, because an hour later we arrived at our destination: a shop that sold film
for 35mm cameras. Finally, on a trip to Delhi I managed to convince an inebriated
theater manager in Paharganj to let me look in the closet where he stored his
posters and, after some haggling, to sell three of them to me. It was years later
when I returned to the Chor Bazaar as a tenure-track professor that I finally had
the chance to start looking for posters and song booklets in earnest and figure
out what I wanted to write about them.
Scholars of cult fandom of the kind described in autobiographical detail
above have described it as “oppositional taste,” meaning that fans of cult movies
define the movies they like in opposition to whatever they consider to be the
mainstream. This often includes movies from their own part of the world that
are dismissed and forgotten along with movies from other parts of the world that
are mostly unknown in the fan’s own culture. The introduction to an influential
collection of essays on the topic explains it this way:

[Many] cult movies are films that have been transplanted from one specific
cultural terrain and consumed within another quite different one. However, not
only are these products celebrated in this new context for their supposed
difference from the “mainstream” (although they may in fact be the mainstream
of their own culture) but this often involves an exoticization of other cultures. In
other words, cult movie fandom often relies on a celebration of the “weird and
wonderful” of world cinema, but does so in a way that has no interest in the
meaning of these films within the contexts of their own production . . .27

These concerns about cultural appropriation of world cinemas seem to be of

far more relevance to scholars than to the people who stand to make money off
of them. For instance, no employee of Toho in Japan is likely to have worried
about whether audiences were decontextualizing the Kaiju movies that were
being dubbed in English and shown in American theaters as long as they kept
buying tickets. It is, however, worth looking at the Indian merchants who mediate
between foreign collectors (most of whom, I should note, collect memorabilia
from mainstream, even prestigious Bollywood films) and the originally intended
34 Bollywood Horrors

audience for these films and posters. What might they think about the
international popularity of films that are generally poorly regarded in India and
how do they see themselves situated in relation to foreign collectors and Indian
audiences? When asked in an interview about why they though that C-circuit
posters like Darawani Haveli appealed to their customers, Shahid Mansoori
replied that they “go for high prices because they look quirky and add zing to
the room.”28
But this is the pitch of a salesman, not the aesthetic judgement of a horror
aficionado, and as such, it somewhat overstates the broad appeal of these objects
and takes them out of their material context in the Chor Bazaar. Those willing to
pay the comparatively steep asking price for Hindi horror posters, bearing as
they do images that are grotesque and lurid to varying degrees, are not likely to
be merely looking to bring some color to their living room walls. They are far
more likely to be fans of horror in general. And fans of horror in general
(depending upon their age), will probably have some familiarity with Tony
Palladino’s iconic Psycho design, insofar as Psycho is one of the precursors of the
perennially popular 1980s “slasher” genre, of which Friday the 13th—the same
film whose publicity still I found in the same stack as the poster—is a paradigmatic
example. Thus, whether or not the shatter effect used in Darawani Haveli’s title
design is directly inspired by Palladino’s, the connection arises in the reflexive
interpretive act of the horror fan/collector unfolding, laying out, and considering
the poster as a member of the set of noteworthy horror posters—a connection
that is reinforced by the presence of a nearby object representing a classic slasher
movie.
Close examination reveals that the poster spent a good deal of time neatly
folded into a square: the horizontal creases dividing it into thirds were still visible
before it spent several months spread out in the “flat file” in which it I stored it,
and damage to the brittle left edge of the poster shows where it has been handled
repeatedly and subjected to tearing.29 Newsprint, the material on which the
poster is printed, is a mechanically pulped paper, a process that produces short
cellulose fibers that are prone to rapid deterioration, further exacerbated by the
acid in the paper (left over from the hydrochloric acid solution used to remove
the polysaccharides from the lignin) and by its absorption of Mumbai’s pervasive
air pollution.30
This poster was not meant to outlast the run of the film. It survives at all only
because it never fulfilled its intended purpose; it was never pasted on a wall,
which is the sole reason it was printed in the first place. Shahid Mansoori
recounted to me his early years in the business when he ran after the hangers to
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 35

buy some of their posters before they were pasted up and became irretrievable.
Since its acquisition (by Mansoori or one of his agents) for non-advertising
purposes, this poster has been given an exchange value far above its use value
and has been preserved, with the regular spray of pesticides and chemical
preservatives, to sell to collectors.31
Every element of the poster takes on still more nuance and meaning in light
of the other objects that surround it, having all been washed up at the same
place on their own tides of desire and neglect: an antique rickshaw meter;
an Indian men’s magazine from the 1980s misleadingly titled Gayboy and
made up of photocopied pictorials of topless “Page 3” women from British
newspapers and sex advice articles from Cosmopolitan; and a proffered cup of
chai that had cooled (because none of the Muslim shopkeepers would drink
before sundown in the holy month of Ramzan) and was therefore no longer at a
sufficient temperature to kill the flagellated parasite Giardia lamblia that had
found its way inside it. Further context is supplied in the mind of the Indian
horror fan, where the shattered glass effect on the title reflects the iconic image
of Psycho, the black magician conjures up sensationalistic fantasies of Tantra, the
figure of the d.āyan summons the trope of the vengeful female spirit, and the
position of male and female bodies implies regnant notions of sexual desire and
gender roles.

Sex, Blood, and Copyright Infringement in Song Booklets

As we have seen above, the narrative suggested by the imagery on a movie poster
can often be a significant departure from the film. This is not the case in song
booklets, which usually contain a synopsis of the film, presented in a way to
titillate and entice potential moviegoers. The typical English synopsis in a Hindi
horror movie song booklet ends with a riot of breathless questions whose
nonstandard spelling and idiosyncratic (seemingly random) capitalization make
them seem all the more pitched. The song booklet for Haveli (Mansion, 1985, dir.
Keshu Ramsay) asks: “Who is the killer? Why is he killing? Who is going to die
Now? Who’s turn is it now? To Find out all this you also have to face a night full
of Horror in Haveli.”
The booklets also abound with conventional images denoting terror and
horror—like bats, blood, and spider webs—as well as sexual imagery. There is
also a good deal of visual content borrowed from other sources, since the
booklets have multiple panels to fill up and often too few original images with
36 Bollywood Horrors

which to do it. The borrowed images help to advertise the terrifying and erotic
elements of a film that may actually devote precious little of its running time to
either, despite the claims made in its synopsis.32 The most blatant instances of
image borrowing, often from non-Indian movies, may also be an attempt to
appeal to the same horror fans who might purchase black market VCD s of
foreign horror films in addition to visiting the cinema.
One panel for the song booklet advertising 2003’s Khatarnak Raat lifts the
iconic three-quarter view of a skull with staring eyeballs from the poster for Sam
Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) and superimposes a digital drawing of a black widow
spider in the center of a web (see Plate 2). Another panel prominently features a
still of an ape-like monster carrying an obviously white woman from monster
movie maven Jack Arnold’s 1958 film Monster on the Campus (see Plate 3).The
song booklet for Ek Aur Khoon (One More Drop of Blood, 1985, dir. Ramesh
Bedi) makes a similar campy reference with its copying of the Vincent Price
horror spoof The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971, dir. Robert Fuest).
The simple, one-fold song booklet for Lady Killer (1995) provides an
interesting mix of visual and textual elements. The front cover carries the English
title in a stylized typeface and is awash in digitally added blood-red color,
especially on the two figures it features: a man brandishing a chainsaw and an
angry-looking woman pointing directly at the reader. At the top we see the
cut-and-pasted questioning tagline, “WHO WILL BE THE VICTIM
TONIGHT [?]” The back cover gives the title transliterated in Devanāgarī and
Nastaʿlīq along with a woman’s screaming face and a partial image of a sinister,
bloody visage and clutching hand. This same image (with more of the face
visible) appears in the movie poster for V. Prabhakar’s film made the same year,
Andheri Raat Tu Mere Saath (Dark Night with You) AKA Andheri Raat (Dark
Night), which is probably the original source.
Inside the booklet, there are the lyrics for four untitled songs and a synopsis
in Hindi with a much shorter and not very accurate English version beside it.
The English version (with spelling and syntax mostly corrected) reads:

BOBY (Heroine ABHILASHA ) is trapped by CHERAN RAJ by making her

[pregnant] and with a false promise to marry her. One day [Charan] Raj fixes the
marriage spot and calls Bobby at a Horror place that is DEVGARH but Charan
Raj did not turn-up as promised and [in turn she] falls into the [clutches] of
DEVIL who kills her in order for a Re-birth to become Lady killer. Now this
LADY-KILLER (TARA ) kills numerously under the command of the said
DEVIL and she also traps Hero (RAJIV ) and [Comedian] Raghu. Rest see in
the film. How this DEVIL drama concludes?
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 37

But the Hindi version explains that the actual villain of the movie is a blood-
drinking possessed tree (shaitani ped) that gets its power from the infants that
it commands women to offer to it so that it can absorb their lifeforce into its
trunk. Once the reader understands that Lady Killer is about neither a lady
who is a killer nor a killer of ladies, but an evil tree, the tree trunk on the
front cover and the tree roots on the back cover suddenly make sense, and
the man brandishing the bloody chainsaw becomes the hero about to slay
the monster rather than a murderer about to dismember a victim.33 The line
drawing at the bottom of the page of a skeletal hand stabbing a knife into a naked
reclining woman’s torso does not seem to relate to the rest of the booklet at all
(see Plates 4 and 5).
Turning to the song booklet for Daayan (1998), the Hindi plot synopsis
begins, “This is the story of a d.āyan.” But in the English version this sentence is
rendered, “This is the story of a wicked woman.” The actual vengeful spirit that
she summons is identified with the Arabic/Urdu word rūh, or “soul,” which is one
of the two references to Islam (the other being the confusing description of the
“devil” singing a qawwali or Sufi devotional song). Below is the English-language
text with the words used in the Hindi-Urdu version placed next to their
equivalents in square brackets.
This is the story of a wicked woman [d.āyan]. She uses a devilish manner to fulfill
her desires and she is helped by the spirit [rūh] of a beautiful girl Lily (Jyoti
Rana). Actually Lily was Tony’s (Rajkiran) wife. Tony had been unfaithful to Lily
and had tortured her to death. Lily has come back as a spirit to haunt him and
his family and to take revenge. Her first victim is David who is also killed by the
devil [shaitan]. David’s brother Peter has the ability to see and fight with spirits.
David’s spirit comes and tells Lily’s secret to Peter who goes to Tony’s house
where Tony is getting married to Nancy (Afreen Khan) for the third time. The
devil (Shakti Kapoor) comes there and sings a qawali, Peter confronts him but
just at that time Inspector Harry (Kizar Khan) and his assistant (Rajesh Puri)
intervene and thus the devil and Lily escape with Tony’s younger brother, Johny.
They take him to a Graveyard and kill him there. Inspector Harry holds Peter
responsible for this murder. Inspector Harry is in love with Daisy (Monika) who
is Peter’s sister. He and his wife (Sanchi Shrestha) suspect Peter of all the killings
in the city. Harry wants to catch Peter red-handed whereas Peter is trying to save
Tony’s family and to bring an end to the wicked witch who is doing all this.
Then:—Does Peter succeed?—Does Harry catch Peter?—Do Harry and Daisy
get married?—What happens to Tony and his family?—What happens to Lily
and the wicked witch?  . . . who is she really? To find the answers to all these
thrilling chilling questions—See “Daayan” on the silver screen!
38 Bollywood Horrors

Other than being evil and female and witchy, what exactly a d.āyan might be
is unclear in the synopsis.34 But in terms of visual content, the women wearing
bloody white sheets on the front and the back cover—and especially the woman
on the front cover with bloody clawed hands—look more like the description of
the Vedic demoness called the kr.tyā than anything else. Described in R.g Veda
10.85, “The Marriage of Sūryā” (mantras from which are still recited at traditional
Hindu weddings today), the kr.tyā is born from the sheet stained with blood on
a consummated wedding night.
In verse 28, “the purple and red appears, a kr.tyā; the stain is imprinted [on the
gown].” In the next verse, “[the stained gown] becomes a kr.tyā walking on two
feet and like the wife, it draws close to the husband.” In verse 30, the hymn warns
against the husband having sex with the kr.tyā, suggesting that she has the quality
of a succubus: “the [husband’s] body becomes ugly and pale if the husband
covers his penis with his wife’s robe out of his evil desire.” Finally, verse 34 gives
a description of the gown-turned-kr.tyā, saying that it “burns, it bites, and it has
claws, [and is] as dangerous as poison to eat.”
One final point of interest on the Daayan song booklet is the image on the
back cover of pooled blood reflecting the images of three women without visible
clothing. The woman in the middle actually appears to be topless with only her
hands covering her breasts. On the question of nudity in general, Rachel Dwyer
has made a convincing case that “the Indian cinema has a specific erotics of
clothing, whereas nakedness is seen as a source of shame and fear.”35 While these
films typically follow the pattern Dwyer identifies, as in the poster for Bungalow
No. 666 (1990, dir. P. Chander Kumar), Daayan seems to present a picture of the
“gore-otica” variety, mixing sex, nudity, and horror in one image and eschewing
the “erotics of clothing” (see Plate 6).
In these song booklets, images—including visual references to Vedic and village
demonology and a liberal borrowing of non-Indian elements—are used to frame
a text whose frenetic style approximates the masala aesthetic of both posters and
movies. But unlike posters, which were meant to be pasted to a wall and attract the
attention of passersby and only became commodities through the demand created
by horror fans’ desire to collect memorabilia, song booklets were distributed to
moviegoers and had intrinsic use-value. They provided audiences with the lyrics
to film songs and with still images from the movie that could be viewed at any
time. And with the addition of multiple panels, some of which were hidden behind
the fold, there was room for more lurid imagery and cultural references.
And what physical objects do we find in proximity to these song booklets?
There are faded and beaten up lobby cards for English-language movies like the
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 39

erotic thriller Scream for Help (1984, dir. Michael Winner) and the women-in-
prison exploitation film Chained Heat II (1993, dir. Lloyd A. Simandl), the latter
having been laminated in attempt to preserve it and fitted with a metal grommet
in each corner, presumably so that it could be hung on a wall without having to
damage the paper with tacks or tape.36 But in the same stack there is also an
equally well-used lobby card for the 1987 Indian release of the English version of
King Kong Vs. Godzilla (1962, dirs. Ishirō Honda and Thomas Montgomery).
Their proximity to the Chained Heat II and Scream for Help lobby cards (whose
misogynistic taglines read, respectively, “Used for the pleasure . . . with the hope of
freedom” and “Every man’s fantasy becomes one woman’s nightmare”) suggests
that these song booklets belong to a class of items that appeal to the prurient
interest of male audience members. But the second lobby card, advertising a 1960s
monster movie with special effects that are laughable by today’s standards,
complicates the picture: are these booklets meant to be used as material for violent
sexual fantasy or objects of ironic appreciation for their tackiness? Interpreted in
situ, these song booklets (whose images are tame compared to what any Indian
can see on his or her mobile phone) seem to appeal to a more sophisticated viewer
with an ability to ironically appreciate “trash culture.” They also presume an
awareness of the Indian demonological traditions that lie behind the cur.ail and
d.āyan of Hindi horror movies.
Adding even more complexity to the reception of these objects is the fact that
equally lurid images of sex and violence can be found carved in temples and
depicted in Tantric texts (and even the Veda itself) because transgression is
recognized by many as a path to transcendence, if a difficult and dangerous one.
It was this very observation that led one twentieth-century Indian-born scholar
to trace the origin of the European vampire mythology that informed American
and British horror films back to the fierce, fanged deities of his native Himalayas
(see the next essay in this volume for more about this fascinating man). In the
next and final section of this essay, I will dig deeper into the Indian religious
context and provide some new possibilities for reading the images of eroticized
violence we see in these posters and song booklets.

A Psychoanalytic Examination of the Theo-erotics of the

Devouring Mouth

In movie posters and song booklets of the non-masala variety (i.e., featuring a
single tableau or image), there are some images that have the visual power to
40 Bollywood Horrors

stand alone. One of these is the devouring mouth, often closing around an
eroticized female body. This visual trope is by no means unique to India, as
evidenced by the iconic poster for Jaws (1975, dir. Steven Spielberg) designed by
Roger Kastel.37 In the Indian context, it recalls the devouring mouths of demons
like Aghāsura, whom the child Kr.s.n.a defeats in the Bhagavata Purān.a, but also
Kr.s. n.a’s own terrible gaping maw of death in Bhagavad Gītā 11.29–30, in which
Arjuna sees a vision of all the heroes of the epic “hastening into [his] numerous
mouths, which are spiky with tusks and horrifying [bhayānaka]” and in which
“there are some who are dangling between [his] teeth, their heads already
crushed to bits.”38 The posters for Khooni Murdaa (The Bloody Dead, 1989, dir.
Mohan Bhakri), Cheekh (Scream, 1985, dir. Mohan Bhakri), and Haiwan (The
Beast, 1977, dir. Ram and Rono Mukherjee), and the entrance to the Hanumān
temple in Jhandewalan Felhi in Delhi all feature some version of a devouring
mouth (see Plates 7–10).
The mouths of the temple entrance (a demon killed by Hanumān) and the
demonic Aghāsura, whom Kr.s. n.a slays by walking right into his mouth, both
devour in a bloodless, almost passive, fashion, like a baleen whale getting a
mouthful of krill. But the mouths on the movie posters are much closer to the
theologically-charged bhayānaka gore of the Bhagavad Gītā, with the important
difference that the bodies being masticated in the posters are not those of
warriors as in the epic, but women. In the epic, the great devourer is Time and
the world proceeds inexorably into its open mouth. But in the Haiwan and
Khooni Murdaa posters, the women have not just fallen into a mouth. Instead,
they appear to have been hunted and snatched up in a pair of jaws. This is not out
of the ordinary, since violence against women occurs with regularity in Hindi
horror posters and song booklets, and tropes of hunting and eating women are
common in horror cinema the world over.
The sexual aspect of this violence is foregrounded in Haiwan, where the
victim’s sheer negligee has slipped off to reveal one of her breasts. In the context
of a cat’s well-known propensity to play with its prey before killing it, the viewer
could well imagine that the woman is still alive and that her unconscious form is
helplessly awaiting whatever comes next. It also brings to mind the Hindi
proverb, “Billee ko cheechdon ke khvaab” (“The cat dreams of the choice meats”).
Cheekh also plays up the erotic elements, giving the viewer a look up the woman’s
nightgown and setting the open mouth in which her body lies in a sweating,
clearly female face. The title tells us that we should read this mouth as screaming,
not devouring, but the eroticized image of a woman’s body placed in a mouth
cannot easily be seen as something else.
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 41

Entrenched misogyny provides a clear and simple answer to the question of

what these images are doing, but that is really only a redescription of the
phenomenon and not an explanation of its nature. There are desires and fears
at work in the minds of those who view and interact with the image of the
devouring mouth and they may have something to do with the theological
edifice built on the Gītā. In the devotional theology of Kr.s.n.a-bhakti, identification
with Kr.s. n.a’s beloved cowherd maiden Rādhā is a valid attitude of worship for
male devotees. Indeed, the erotic mode of devotion to the male deity is considered
the most sublime in Vais. n.ava Sahajiyā theology, whether the devotees are women
or men.39
In the nineteenth century, rumors spread among British colonial officials that
worshippers of Kr.s. n.a were killed in large numbers when they threw themselves
under the wheels of the chariot carrying his image during the Jagganath festival
in Puri.40 Like many British rumors about India, this one tells us more about the
colonials’ taste for sensationalism and their superior attitude toward the natives
than anything else. But while Kr.s. n.a worship never involves blood sacrifice, the
worship of the great goddess Devī in India frequently does, and also incorporates
a kind of imagined self-sacrifice and passive eroticism.
In one ancient myth from the Aitareya Brāhman.a (c. 800–500 bce ) the
goddess of sacred speech, Vāc, is identified as the “Great Naked Woman” who
couples with the all-important Vedic sacrifice itself.41 Vāc is also identified as the
lion-mounted war goddess who decapitates her enemy the Buffalo Demon. In
later texts, this role is taken over by the figure of Durgā. Looking at developmental
psychology in the Indian context, the psychoanalyst Stanley M. Kurtz identifies
what he calls the “Durgā complex,” which finds expression in ritual and myth as
“an identification between the demon decapitated by the goddess and the devotee
himself.”42 This same identification exists in South Indian myths of Pōttu Rāja-
Pōrmannan, the “Buffalo King,” whose complex story cycles revolve around his
identity as the Buffalo Demon slain by Devī, resurrected and converted into one
of her devotees.43
I have suggested elsewhere that the Vedic story of the kr.tyā, which seems to
be a source for the imagery on the Daayan song booklet I analyzed in the
previous section, bears a resemblance to the paradigmatic Devī myth (not
recorded until fifteen or twenty centuries later) in which the male gods
temporarily cede their power to a “tame” form of Devī like Pārvatī so that she can
take the fearsome form of Kālī in order to kill a powerful demon.44 In this myth,
the gods quickly come to regret their decision after she turns on them in her
indiscriminate bloodlust. The only way to tame the goddess is to have Śiva lie
42 Bollywood Horrors

down in her path so that when she steps on him she is brought back to her senses
by a sudden awareness of the shameful act of placing her feet on the god.
In its orthodox interpretation, the Kālī myth is about the danger of female
power uncontained by the obligations of female propriety. In the popular so-
called Daks. inākālī image in which the goddess is standing on a supine Śiva, the
long tongue that typically protrudes from Kālī’s mouth is seen as an expression of
lajjā (“shame”), albeit one that no other goddess or woman seemingly ever
exhibits in any other narrative. But the Tantric interpretation put forward by
Devī worshippers is that the protruding tongue is an expression of anger,
unabated by her awareness that she is walking on the body of Śiva, who has
succumbed to Kālī’s power.45
The Vedic story of the kr.tyā is a precursor to the story of Kālī’s transformation
in that the demonic being seems to be a dangerous shadow form of the benevolent
solar goddess Sūryā just as the rampaging Kālī, who can dominate men and gods
with her power, is a shadow of the maternal and well-behaved forms of Devī.
Verses 28 to 30 of the Vedic hymn describe the victory of the kr.tyā and the
husband’s surrendering of his lordship to her:

The bride’s garment becomes dark red. She becomes witchcraft, a noose. She is
smeared with blood. Her relatives are elated; her husband is bound in bonds.
Hand over the stained garment; to the brahmins parcel out the goods. She herself
has become walking witchcraft: the wife enters her husband. His body loses its
splendor—glistening in that evil way—when the husband is about to put on his
own member the “garment” of the bride.46

The text seems to worry that, without the intervention of a Brahmin priest to
purify the bloodstained sheet of the marriage bed, the husband will enter the
kr.tyā’s bonds willingly; that he will be so enthralled by this unmediated form of
female sexuality that he will try to eat it and instead be eaten by it, try to penetrate
it and instead be penetrated by it. It is not too hard to imagine that the fantasy of
passive, feminized sexuality could spring from this mythology,
Along with the well-established religious attitudes regarding males identifying
as females and offering themselves up to a terrifying goddess in India, there is
also some evidence that something similar may be happening in men’s enjoyment
of horror films. Consider Carol Clover’s argument that the primary identification
in American slasher films is with the female victim rather than the male aggressor:

[Just] as attacker and attacked are expressions of the same self in nightmares, so
they are expressions of the same viewer in horror film. Our primary and
acknowledged identification may be with the victim, the adumbration of our
 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality 43

infantile fears and desires, our memory sense of ourselves as tiny and vulnerable
in the face of the enormous Other . . .47

In a bit of analysis that has since been incorporated into the highly self-referential
horror genre, Clover notes that while nubile women are often killed in slasher
movies, the male audience also roots for and ultimately identifies with a “final
girl” who will triumph over the (usually male) killer.48
In India, the deep structures that underlie the myth of Devī’s destruction of
the Buffalo Demon and the practice of male devotees of Kr.s. n.a identifying with
desiring females may also encourage male viewers to see “her body, himself ” in
these images of women being devoured in giant mouths. With these arguments
and examples, I am not ruling out the effects of violence against women in a
country whose struggles with that issue have played out so horrifically in the
public sphere over the last decades. Rather, I am leaving open the possibility that
some male viewers of these materials may, on some level, identify with the eaten
rather than the eater.

Conclusion

Why have we been looking at posters and song booklets instead of the movies
themselves? By looking at Hindi horror posters and song booklets instead of
Hindi horror movies, we are able to speak in the language of things and thereby
get beyond questions only of narrative or image, which can lead to broad, often
unwarranted, assumptions about life and thought in India. The materials we
have been examining can never be mistaken for expressions of some timeless
essence of Indian culture. They are subject to decay; they bear the marks of their
human manufacture and of their circulation as “things-in-motion,” to use
Appadurai’s terminology. They are only meaningful or even legible to the extent
we can see them in context that is both cultural and material.
I have attempted to situate these materials on what Catherine Geel calls the
“fluctuating, decorated surface” of Indian culture,49 and put forward my
counterintuitive intuition about the possible meaning of the arresting image of
the devouring mouth with recourse to psychoanalysis and Hindu bhakti theology.
Ultimately, my hope is that I have gone some way towards demonstrating the
wonderful insights that ephemera like posters and song booklets can give us into
the tradition of the Hindi horror film before we have even watched a single frame.
 2

Vampire Man Varma: The Untold Story of the

“Hindu Mystic” Who Decolonized Dracula
Brian Collins

We men are all in a fever of excitement, except Harker, who is calm; his hands
are as cold as ice and an hour ago I found him whetting the edge of the great
Ghoorka knife which he now always carries with him. It will be a bad look out
for the Count if the edge of that Kukri ever touches his throat, driven by that
stern ice cold hand!
Dracula, Bram Stoker

Introduction

In June of 2017, when I was researching the tropes of Gothic literature in service
of my other essay for this collection (“Monsters, Masala, and Materiality”) I
came upon a book with the rather extravagant title, The Gothic Flame: Being a
History of the Gothic Novel in England; Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration,
and Residuary Influences. It was written in 1957 by an author whom I had never
heard of named Devendra Prasad Varma. I was intrigued both by the book itself
(a study of Western horror traditions by an Indian scholar) and by the dedication
it bore to Jawaharlal Nehru, accompanied by a frontispiece depicting India’s first
prime minister in a three-piece suit and fedora, taken, according to the caption,
“on a trip to Ottawa in 1957, when The Gothic Flame was first published.”1
Curious enough to do a little internet research on the author, I soon found an
article online about Varma’s two adult grandchildren, Robin “Rob” Varma and
his sister Tami. Five months earlier they had won a contest sponsored by the
online hospitality brokerage company Airbnb to spend Halloween night sleeping
in coffins in Transylvania’s Bran Castle (commonly referred to as “Dracula’s
Castle” despite having no historical connection to either Vlad Ţepeş or Bram

44
 Vampire Man Varma 45

Stoker). Naturally, I assumed at first that having the grandchildren of “Vampire

Man Varma” win the contest was a publicity stunt. It was not. By happenstance or
kismet, their 500-word entry was selected from 88,000 contestants. Tami and
Rob were then given thirty-six hours to be on a flight to Romania. Rob did not
hold a passport, but Tami’s event-planning skills apparently saw the day through.2
I had no idea what any of this had to do with my original topic of Hindi
horror movie posters, but I was unable to move on from it. Tami, an event
planner in Ottawa, was easy to contact online, and she directed me to her brother,
who graciously provided me with a treasure trove of scans of his late grandfather’s
correspondence, papers, photographs, and notes, along with a healthy dose of
family lore. For reasons that I hope will soon become clear, I quickly became
quite fascinated with the author of The Gothic Flame and equally convinced that
any discussion of horror in India was impoverished to the extent that it ignored
his remarkable life and work.
Fascination aside, how exactly does Varma’s story help us to understand the
development of horror in Bollywood? Let us begin to answer this by looking at the
poster for Indian director Rajkumar Kohli’s 1979 Hindi film Jaani Dushman
(Bitter Enemy, see Plate 11). Anyone who has seen the extremely similar poster for
British director Terrence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula (1958) would rightly conclude
that Jaani Dushman simply copies the iconic design of the earlier poster without
bothering to hide the fact (despite the fact that the monster that actually appears
in Jaani Dushman looks more like Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman than Christopher
Lee’s Dracula). The implication of this obvious borrowing is that influential
Western horror films like Horror of Dracula provided a set of conventions, loaded
with Christian and Eurocentric imagery, that were then appropriated in India and
deployed in subsequent Hindi movies. There is no denying that, as Valentina Vitali
notes, “the ‘vampires and stakes’ of Hindi horror were inspired largely by Christian
ritual, unashamedly borrowed from British Hammer films.”3
But the real story is more complex, because those conventions themselves
were already intimately connected to India before they were imported by
Bollywood. To describe this kind of “cross-cultural form of intertextuality,” in the
case of how reincarnation is represented in the plots of two Hollywood films
(The Reincarnation of Peter Proud and Chances Are) and two Bollywood films
(Madhumati and Karz), Wendy Doniger borrows a term originated by
Agehananda Bharati (1970) and calls it the “pizza effect:”

Madhumati (1958) anticipates, and hence may have been a source of, much of
the plot of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975). Karz (1980) in turn shows
46 Bollywood Horrors

the influence of both Madhumati and American films about reincarnation,

particularly Peter Proud, and may in its turn have contributed to Chances Are
(1989).4

The complicated process of exchange and appropriation at work in the

development of Hindi horror films is even more so when we take into account
the significant role played by a former Gurkha paratrooper, Shakespearian actor,
and Indian diplomat named Devendra Varma. Horror of Dracula is (of course)
an adaptation of the famous 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, whose brother
Thomas served in the Bengali Civil Service from 1872 to 1899. And in Stoker’s
book, Dracula is not killed by a Hollywood-style stake but by a Bowie knife and
a kukri, the latter being the favored weapon of the Indian Gurkha soldier, as the
passage from Dracula quoted in the beginning of this chapter illustrates.
And the film itself, in which the Count is played by Varma’s friend and admirer
Christopher Lee, was part of a wave of movies inspired in part by the
popularization of Gothic literature in which Varma played no small role. British
vampire films like Horror of Dracula were already using Indian-inspired source
material recently popularized by an Indian scholar before they went on to
influence the Indian cinematic vampires found in Bhayaanak (Frightening,
1979, dir. S.U. Syed), Veerana (Wilderness, 1988, dir. Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay),
and Bandh Darwaza (The Closed Door, 1990, dir. Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay).5
For his part, Varma pushed the starting point of this process of exchange and
appropriation back even farther, observing, “Westerners have viewed vampire
lore as a fascinating but unsolved enigma, but the origins of this myth lie in the
mystery cults of Oriental civilizations.”6

A View of Everest

Devendra Varma’s is a biography that strains credulity. Who would guess that
one man would have known horror icons Vincent Price and Christopher Lee as
well as the founder of modern India, Jawaharlal Nehru (a cousin of his, no less);
that this man would also have corresponded with Egyptian president Gamal
Abdel Nasser and Psycho author Robert Bloch; that he would have fought for the
British during “Operation Dracula” in 1945 and been honored by the Count
Dracula Society in Los Angeles in 1968? Nevertheless, all of this is true of a man
who was also, at least in the last phase of his career, a true-life example of the
kind of bow tie-wearing, globe-trotting, ghost-hunting antiquarian that
 Vampire Man Varma 47

populates M.R. James-inspired horror fiction.7 His biography serves as a kind of

missing link, or better yet, a missing Gordian (Gaud. īyan?) knot, connecting
colonial history, the Indian independence movement, the Gothic revival of the
1960s and 1970s, South Asian folklore, British and American horror cinema, and
Bollywood.
Born in 1923 to a high-caste family in Darbangha in present-day Bihar, Varma
was raised with wealth and education. He married Eileen Florence Sircar, a
woman from a Baptist family who was a lifelong intimate of Indira Gandhi.
Varma received his BA in English from Patna University in 1942 and his MA
two years later, after which he joined a Gurkha Battalion of the Indian 50th
Parachute Brigade. In March 1944, the brigade found itself in heavy fighting
at the Battle of Sangshak on the India-Burma border where 652 soldiers lost
their lives. Varma and ninety-nine others were taken prisoner by the Japanese
and held in a prisoner-of-war camp. The brutality of the treatment he endured
there, which he always refused to discuss with his family, marked him for the rest
of his life.
In 1946, Varma was back in India and teaching English when he made a visit
to Birla Cottage, Gandhi’s summer headquarters. In an essay written nearly forty
years later, Varma described his audience with Gandhi (“a strangely sane old
man in a world going mad”) in this way:

“So you are scattering ignorance all around and corrupting the morals of youth,
my dear lecturer in English,” thus the Mahatma greeted me at Birla Cottage in
Mussoorie during the summer of 1946. “I have often seen you at prayer meetings
in the far distant corner of the tennis court in your shark-skin suit and flashing
red-tie . . . thought that you are a deputy magistrate of some sort.”8

At the end of their meeting, Gandhi looked suspiciously at the homespun khadi
clothing that Varma and his companion were wearing (claiming to have adopted
it long ago). He picked out some telltale coarse threads that indicated a recent
purchase and remarked wryly, “Whenever you wear new clothes do take care to
have them first washed and laundered!”9 The sartorial commentary in this
anecdote is perhaps not surprising given the significance of Indian-made
clothing to Gandhi’s movement, but it also speaks to what we will see as a deeper
current in Varma’s life: his penchant for “dressing the part,” whether as a
Gandhian, a high-flying diplomat, a Shakespearean villain, or an aspiring horror
movie producer.
From 1947 to 1953 Varma held the post of assistant professor at the
Universities of Patna and Bihar. He subsequently did two post-graduate stints in
48 Bollywood Horrors

Great Britain, where he was introduced to the English Gothic novel by his
mentor, Bonamy Dobrée. It was during this period that Varma did the research
that would soon yield his most well-known work, The Gothic Flame. In 1957, the
year it was published, Varma was sent to teach English literature at Tribhuvan
University in Kathmandu as part of the Colombo Plan, a development scheme in
which seven Commonwealth Nations (Australia, Britain, Canada, Ceylon, India,
New Zealand, and Pakistan), with significant help from the United States, would
attempt to combat the growth of communism in Asia by investing in
infrastructure, agriculture, and a campaign aimed at improving the image of
democracy and capitalism.10 Describing the origins of the plan, Daniel Oakman
writes: “Equal to these anti-communist ambitions was a more secretive agenda
to use aid to ‘modify any resentment arising from differences between Australian
and Asian living standards’ and ‘strengthen or develop amicable political
relations’ by using economic and social instruments to assert political and
cultural pressure on Asian people and their leaders.”11
In Kathmandu, Varma staged a production of Othello in which he played Iago
and which was attended by King Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev.12 Meanwhile,
The Gothic Flame was widely reviewed at home and abroad. In India, The Sunday
Searchlight Magazine held up his work as evidence of “the renewed vitality of
modern research in English by Indians,” and The Illustrated Weekly of India took
umbrage on Varma’s behalf at the “awkward introduction” in which the publishers
describe him as “an Indian and a youngish man at that!”13
After Nepal, Varma was sent to Damascus, following that humiliating last
gasp of the British Empire known as the Suez Crisis.14 He arrived in September
1958, eight months after the founding of the United Arab Republic (UAR ), a
political union of Syria and Egypt under Nasser (see Plate 12). Per the Colombo
Plan’s raison d’être, it seems likely that Varma was there to keep an eye on political
developments. This would explain his friendship with the former director of
Syrian military intelligence and current vice-president of the UAR , Colonel
Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj, whose biography he was writing, according to press
reports.
A letter of recommendation from Dr. Hikmat Hashim, rector of the University
of Damascus, paints a picture of Varma’s time in Syria:
Dr. Varma’s elevated artistic interests made him a much sought-after person in
Damascus social circles. He proved to be very popular, and always remained a
generous host . . . What endeared him most to us was his sense of loyalty and
devotion to the Arab cause, and his subtle understanding and interpretation of
the Syrian way of life.15
 Vampire Man Varma 49

In 1959, he mounted and played the lead in a production of Macbeth, the first
foreign-language play ever performed in Syria.16 The following season, he put on
Othello and sent an invitation to Nasser. Not only did Nasser attend (along with
Anwar Sadat), he returned the following season for The Merchant of Venice and
gave a short address in which he pronounced himself “greatly affected by the
speech of Dr. Varma” and proclaimed, “I know that Dr. Varma is an Indian
professor. We like India; we love India. We have great respect for India and for
the Prime Minister of India Mr. Nehru.” A photograph from the time shows
Varma as Shylock, decked out in his customary white stage makeup and a cloak
emblazoned with a Star of David, pulling Nasser onto the stage to take a bow.17
Varma’s three years in Damascus more or less coincided with the entirety of
Syria’s participation in the UAR , which began to collapse after a military coup on
September 28, 1961, in which Varma’s friend al-Sarraj was imprisoned. Because
of his known connections with al-Sarraj and Nasser, along with “certain indiscreet
statements” and “professional jealousies,” Varma was abruptly expelled from Syria
in November of 1961 and returned to Delhi.18 Samar Attar, a Syrian graduate
student whom Varma cast as Desdemona (with the condition that she dye her
hair blonde), recalls that “the Syrian military authorities expelled Dr. Varma from
Syria for his association with Nasser during the production of Othello.”19 Shortly
thereafter, in the fall of 1962, Varma traveled to Cairo at Nasser’s request, where
he taught for one semester at the University of Ain Shams.20
After the semester break Varma went to Canada, where he took a position at
Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He later wrote that he owed the
university’s president a debt of gratitude “for salvaging me from my Syrian
nightmare in the explosive Middle East” (1968: ix). At Dalhousie, Varma took on
a persona quite different from the urbane and dapper Shakespearian scholar and
actor who had moved about in the most rarefied social and political circles in
Syria and Egypt. Instead, while he retained his customary well-dressed elegance
and air of cultivation, Varma reinvented himself as a literary sleuth, taking as his
first case the seven “horrid novels” described in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.
The novels are: Castle of Wolfenbach and The Mysterious Warning by Eliza
Parsons, Clermont by Regina Maria Roche, The Necromancer by Ludwig
Flammenberg, The Midnight Bell by Francis Lathom, The Orphan of the Rhine by
Eleanor Sleath, and Horrid Mysteries by the Marquis de Grosse. The conversation
in Northanger Abbey goes as follows:

“But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this
morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?”
50 Bollywood Horrors

“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.”
“Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the
black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?”
“Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me—I would not be told upon
any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton.
Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading
it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from
it for all the world.”
“Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished
Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or
twelve more of the same kind for you.”
“Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?”
“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook. Castle
of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black
Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will
last us some time.”
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”
“Yes, quite sure . . .”21

The novels had been long lost and were, in fact, widely assumed to have been
invented by Austen herself before the Gothic scholar Michael Sadleir had proved
their existence in 1927. After their discovery, the other great Gothic scholar of
the period, Montague Summers, set out to oversee the republication of the
novels, but the series was discontinued after two volumes.
In the 1960s, Varma’s revived republication of the novels was widely
covered in the press and made him into something of a celebrity, cementing
his reputation as a Gothic expert and a literary detective. He went on to
publish deluxe critically edited editions of the works of Gothic novelists Horace
Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and dozens more “rare Gothics,”
including Varney the Vampire and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, both of which
are widely regarded as two of the most significant precursors to modern vampire
fiction.22
In the period surrounding the publication of The Gothic Flame and the
republication of the seven horrid novels, a “Gothic revival” was in full swing in
the popular culture of the English-speaking world. In Hollywood, Vincent Price
appeared in a slew of films directed by Roger Corman based on the work of
Edgar Allan Poe. In Britain, Christopher Lee was starring in blood-spattered
Hammer horror vehicles like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957, dir. Terence
Fisher) and Horror of Dracula (1958, dir. Terence Fisher).23
 Vampire Man Varma 51

Significantly, Varma’s work did not go unnoticed by the major players in this
Gothic revival. Donald A. Reed, the founder and president of Los Angeles’s Count
Dracula Society, had purchased the first edition of The Gothic Flame in 1957 and
in 1968 the Society honored Varma with the “Ms. Ann Radcliffe Award.”24
Subsequently, Reed became a close friend of his and introduced Varma to a crowd
that included Robert Bloch (who had been the youngest disciple of American
cosmic horror master H.P. Lovecraft), science fiction pioneer Ray Bradbury, and
Famous Monsters of Filmland editor Forrest J. Ackerman. Ackerman even hosted
a reception for Varma at the “Ackermansion,” the house where he lived and
displayed his massive collection of horror memorabilia. A 1968 letter from
science fiction author A.E. van Vogt describes a plan for promoting Varma’s work
with the help of fellow Count Dracula Society members, “since a great success for
the Horrid Novels might stimulate a further Gothic revival.”25
Varma also visited the campus of the University of Southern California and
was probably attempting to negotiate a position for himself there, closer to
Hollywood (“For the last five years, like a bad coin I have got stuck in Nova
Scotia!” he complained in a letter to Reed in 1968). Varma’s trips to Los Angeles
exemplified the combination of show business and scholarship that would come
to define the “third act” of his career. The talk he gave at the Count Dracula
Society in 1968 bore the tellingly aspirational title, “On Possibilities of Gothic
Romances on the Silver Screen.”
The question of the extent to which Varma was involved in any actual
filmmaking is difficult to answer conclusively. Sometime in the 1970s, Varma was
in talks to produce a screenplay based on Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
in which Vincent Price would play the lead.26 In later interviews, he mentioned
that he was working on a film of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, and in a 1986 profile
piece he told a reporter that he planned “to turn to publishing and making his
own films when he [retired] from teaching in two years.”27 A 1987 press release
for Voices from the Vaults, a collection of short horror fiction and real-life accounts
of the supernatural that he edited and wrote an introduction for, lists three movie
credits for Varma: The Robert Bloch-penned horror anthology The House that
Dripped Blood (1971, dir. Peter Duffell) and two Vincent Price movies, Theater of
Blood (1973, dir. Douglas Hickox) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1960, dir.
Roger Corman), the last of which seems highly unlikely given that Varma was in
Syria at the time of the movie’s production and release.
Varma was indeed carrying on a friendly correspondence with Bloch during
the time the latter was writing the screenplay for The House that Dripped Blood,
but when Bloch mentions the film in his letters he makes no reference to Varma’s
52 Bollywood Horrors

involvement. Likewise, Varma was in contact with Price during the time in which
Theater of Blood was filmed, but none of Price’s letters suggest they worked on it
together in any way. It seems likely that Varma considered this correspondence
itself and his providing Bloch and Price with copies of his books to constitute a
form of participation in the film-making process, and that he then capitalized on
that self-acknowledged collaboration to publicize Voices from the Vaults, a book
that was clearly aimed at modern horror fans rather than an academic audience
that would know his reputation as a scholar.28
An essay that Varma sent sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s to Sue
Bradbury, the editor-in-chief of the London Folio Society, contains paeans to his
friends Christopher Lee and Vincent Price, and this not-so-subtle suggestion on
the last page:

So far only two strains of the Gothic, the vampire and the monster, in sequels of
Dracula and Frankenstein, have been fully exploited by the cinema industry,
while the rich repository of Gothic classics has been left virtually untouched.
The producers and directors of horror films are not expected to be scholars
of Gothic Romance, but they have still to experiment with that rare kind of
suspense and mystery which is locked in The Monk and The Mysteries of
Udolpho. They have to be initiated into the arcana of these sealed treasuries.29

There is little doubt about who Varma thought would be most qualified to do the
initiating.30
Even apart from Hollywood, Varma was a showman in all things, hosting
“Transylvania Weekends” at Dalhousie in 1973 and 1986 (see Plate  13) and
personally conducting “vigils” at such sites as Dracula’s Castle (where his
grandchildren would spend a night in coffins courtesy of Airbnb thirty years
later) and Castle Lauenstein in Thuringia. A profile of Varma (whose “background
is as exotic as his beliefs”) appeared in The Queen’s Journal on Halloween 1986,
illustrated with a drawing of the “Bleeding Nun” who is said to haunt Castle
Lauenstein. Varma also appeared on Canadian television and radio. His television
work usually consisted of appearances around Halloween on morning talk
shows, where he was asked about things like Dracula and witchcraft. But he also
participated in the Ontario children’s variety show The Hilarious House of
Frightenstein (1971–2), co-hosted by comedian Billy Van along with a late-career
Vincent Price. It may have been around this time that Varma’s son discovered the
horror icon “sleeping one off ” on the family couch.
While he was helping along the Gothic revival in Hollywood, Varma’s
friendship with Rashtrakari (“National Poet”) Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (one of
 Vampire Man Varma 53

whose Hindi operatic works he staged) also gave him some influence in
Bollywood. He reportedly talked Dinkar out of censoring Johnny Walker’s “Sar
Jo Tera Chakraye” (“If You Have a Headache”) from the 1957 classic Pyaasa
(Thirst, dir. Guru Dutt). And when Varma died in 1994 while on a speaking tour
in New York, none other than the most famous Bollywood star of them all,
Amitabh Bacchan, called to offer the family condolences.
The most important thing about Varma that this brief look at his life reveals
is that the theatrical side that he cultivated as an actor was strategically important
to negotiating the shifting sands of the post-colonial, post-war world.31 Whether
he was donning khadi for Gandhi, a tailored sharkskin suit for photo opportunities
with world leaders, or a tuxedo for gala dinners with movie industry people at
the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, Varma always looked the part, just as he
did for his performances as Shylock and Iago.
In Varma’s archive, I found three images that speak eloquently to how central
performance and self-presentation were to his identity. The first shows Varma
the thespian wearing white make-up as he portrays Macbeth in Damascus
(see Plate 14). In the next photo, taken on a visit by royal invitation to Sikkim,
he sits in contemplation of a Nepalese mask, wearing a silk daura-suruwal
with a Dhaka topi on his head (see Plate 15). In the last, we see the professor in
his well-appointed library, decked out in tweed and a bow tie, staring intently
past the camera as he gesticulates to make a point about Walpole or Byron (see
Plate 16).
The scholar of Romanticism Mario Praz once described Varma as a “blend of
Marco Polo, Lawrence of Arabia, and [Melmoth] the Wanderer.”32 The first two
names refer to historical figures who became larger-than-life examples of the
archetypal adventurer and “stranger in a strange land,” both of whom eventually
returned home full of tales about the Mysterious East. The last, Melmoth the
Wanderer, Varma would have known well as the title character in Charles
Maturin’s 1820 Gothic novel of the same name. Loosely based on the medieval
legend of the Wandering Jew, Melmoth is a man who sells his soul for a
preternaturally long life.33 Repenting of the bargain, he then spends 150 years
traveling the earth attempting to find someone he can tempt into damnation in
his stead.
Although a European academic like Praz may well have seen the diasporic
populations of the decolonized world as rootless wanderers like Melmoth,
everything I have read by or about Varma suggests that this story would not have
matched his self-image. Even so, in the letter to Donald Reed where he reproduces
the quote, Varma writes that he “felt highly flattered” upon hearing it and raises
54 Bollywood Horrors

it in the context of feeling stuck in Nova Scotia and frustrated with his
unsuccessful attempts to relocate to Los Angeles. One can detect here a possible
unacknowledged desire for Melmoth’s peripatetic life at this moment when
Varma’s previously episodic existence had slowed its pace. The anticipated next
transition, from literary sleuth to movie-maker, was proving difficult and Varma
was facing the fact that his current identity as half-showman, half-scholar was
likely to become his final one.
We should note here that Melmoth the Wanderer also has a place in the Indian
construction of the Other within.34 The novel’s opening shipwreck scene inspired
the frame story of the 1955 Hindi film Udan Khatola (The Flying Machine, dir.
S.U. Sunny), in which a pilot named Kashi (Dilip Kumar) crashes in an unknown
land whose natives are suspicious of outsiders, worship a fire-breathing idol, and
forbid their women from talking to strange men. In a typical colonial romance,
the outsider Kashi quickly finds himself in a love triangle with a priest’s daughter,
Soni (Nimmi), and the jealous queen (Surya Kumari). In the end, Soni, the
woman Kashi truly loves, throws herself into the ocean, only to come back in an
ethereal form when he is an old man to take his spirit to the other side in her
titular flying chariot.
Throughout Hindi horror films, we find wicked priests, black magicians,
tāntriks, and other stereotypes who come from the rural laboring population
and use their sorcery to torment the hereditary land-owning Thakurs. Often
these rural sorcerers curse the Thakur’s family for multiple generations, since
their monopoly on land ownership also carries on from one generation to the
next. In the films of the Ramsays, “the trope of the monstrous often crystallizes
around [a] fantasy of feudal excess.”35 In Veerana, for instance, the witch Nakita
and her servants are associated with the forests surrounding the well-appointed
bungalow of the Thakur protagonist. Here, the filmmakers not only appropriate
the Gothic castles and curses that Varma popularized in the West, but they also
borrow the colonizer’s fear of sleeping while surrounded by subalterns, translated
into a feudal idiom.
Films like Udan Khatola and Veerana, which also contain elements common
to Victorian adventure-romance novels like She (1887), present an example of
Indian internal colonialism, by which I mean the attitude of the ethnic and
linguistic majority group towards the indigenous peoples (adivāsi) of South
Asia, including the Gond, Great Andamanese, and Munda tribes. Traces of this
internal colonialism are frequently present in Bollywood horror films in the
images of savage jangli cults with primitive rites and alluringly beautiful women.
The discourse of internal colonialism has a tendency to paint rural and tribal
 Vampire Man Varma 55

populations as superstitious, eroticized, and prone to despotism and corruption.

This is also a tendency to which Varma himself sometimes succumbed. Other
times, it was used by critics to marginalize Varma’s scholarly contributions. We
will now look at some instances of both.

“A Hindu Mystic”: The Post-colonial Gothic and the

Politics of Gothic Criticism

In their introduction to an issue of Gothic Studies devoted to the “post-colonial

Gothic,” William Hughes and Andrew Smith write:

Gothic, it is now evident, may not simply be found in the slavery conscious
narratives of the Romantic era and in the immigration- and degeneration-
obsessed novels of the Victorian fin de siècle, but also in the experience of writers
writing out of colonised countries, and those who attempt to rationalise the
confused and competing power structures and identities that may follow the
departure of the absolutist-colonialist.36

In a similar vein, Phillip Holden contends that if Gothic literature serves to

“excavate Victorian insecurities regarding Empire only to ultimately contain
them, postcolonial texts in these new readings display the Gothic’s other face,
subverting and calling into question narratives, patterns of thought, and modes
of representation that have their origin in colonialism and imperialism.”37 The
post-colonial Gothic, which refers both to a practice of critically reading classic
Gothic texts and a subsequent genre of fiction that includes works by Toni
Morrison and Margaret Atwood (who also corresponded with Varma,
incidentally), uses the trope of being haunted by the past in order to explore the
unsettled present and future.
Dealing with the question of the Gothic in India specifically, Rachel Dwyer
writes, “One may detect links between the Gothic and the problems of Indian
modernity, rooted in the Enlightenment, which has often been presented as
India’s only possible modernity . . .”38 Meheli Sen makes the nuanced argument
that although “Bombay Cinema’s romance with the Gothic is . . . an appropriation
and restructuring of an inherited colonial form . . . contemporary reviews of the
Hindi Gothic film suggest that the Gothic arrives in Indian cinema through a
slightly more circuitous route.”39
Both the general idea of the post-colonial Gothic and the application of its
logic to understand the Indian case rest on the presupposition that the European
56 Bollywood Horrors

Gothic developed as a reaction against the context that originally produced it.
Smith and Hughes describe this presupposition as an implicit analogy between
the eighteenth and nineteenth century Gothic’s repudiation of Enlightenment
humanism and the postcolonial era’s critique of that same Enlightenment
humanism as the rationale of the colonial project.40
To view the Gothic in this way, as a kind of antithesis produced by the thesis
of the Enlightenment, is to conclude that its general characteristics are shaped by
an endemic antithetical spirit. That is to say that the primary driving force for the
sense of the uncanny in Gothic literature, expressed in themes of haunting and
the like, is a discomfort with the new regime of Enlightenment humanism. By
this logic, another kind of discomfort, similarly antithetical, but to a different
status quo (e.g., colonized people’s reaction to colonial rule) could also inhabit
the Gothic and keep its general shape, while modifying its specific features to
fit the context. One example of this phenomenon is Sen’s observation that in
Indian horror films Gothic conventions like haunted houses and curses are often
overlaid with Indic themes of reincarnation.41 “In the Indian gothic,” likewise
argues Vijay Mishra, “reincarnation is an uncanny confrontation with one’s past
history structured, as in the English literary gothic, through the discourses of
melodrama and sentimentality.”42
Reincarnation is indeed a recurrent theme in Hindi Gothic and horror
cinema, playing an important role in films like Bees Saal Baad (Twenty Years
Later, 1962, dir. Biren Nag), Neel Kamal (The Blue Lotus, 1968, dir. Ram
Maheshwari), Mehbooba (Heroine, 1976, dir. Shakti Samanta), and Kudrat
(Nature, 1981, dir. Chetan Anand). But it is already present in the Gothic long
before it gets to India. In 1832, Poe published “Metzengerstein: A Tale in Imitation
of the German,” in which a murdered man’s spirit comes back to earth as a horse
to take revenge on the aristocratic family that wronged him. The story is so
ostentatiously Gothic that some critics have thought it a parody of Gothic
literature.43 “Metzengerstein” also seems to have been a primary influence on
Kipling’s 1888 story “The Phantom Rickshaw,” set in Shimla. If Indian filmmakers
overlaid themes of reincarnation onto Gothic conventions, we must conclude,
they were laying it on top of a nearly identical, well-established theme already
present in the European, American, and British colonial Gothic.
Recent critics have rejected the idea of an inherent nostalgic and anti-
Enlightenment bent in Gothic literature (the entire basis of its postcolonial
appropriation) as ahistorical and invented. In their essay, “Gothic Criticism,”
Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall take aim at what they see as the regnant
notions that have poisoned the well of the study of Gothic literature:
 Vampire Man Varma 57

In our view, Gothic Criticism has abandoned any credible historical grasp upon
its object, which it has tended to reinvent in the image of its own projected
intellectual goals of psychological “depth” and political “subversion.” It has erased
fundamental distinctions between Gothic suspicion of the past and romantic
nostalgia, mistakenly presenting Gothic literature as a kind of “revolt” against
bourgeois rationality, modernity, or Enlightenment.44

Baldick and Mighall lay what they see as the insidious misrepresentation of the
Gothic as an anti-rational revolt against the Enlightenment directly at the feet of
both Varma and his eccentric predecessor Montague Summers, under whose
“giant [shadow]” Varma declared himself to be working:45

The assimilation of Gothic fiction into romantic and pre-romantic nostalgia for
the Middle Ages is one of the cardinal errors of Gothic Criticism. [This] notion
of the Gothic as a “Revival” of medieval spirituality overlooks both the fact that
most Gothic novels . . . have nothing to do with the Middle Ages as such, and the
more important tendency of Gothic writers to display a thoroughly modern
distrust of past centuries as ages of superstition and tyranny. Summers and
Varma both seem to have had religious motives for suppressing these awkward
features of Gothic: the former was an ardent Roman Catholic convert, the latter
a Hindu mystic.46

Baldick and Mighall, having dismissed Varma as a “Hindu mystic,” go on to argue

that a properly critical reading of the Gothic novels reveals in them a “self-
consciously Protestant approach to historical representation.”47
The infamous “Protestant presuppositions” exposed in the study of Buddhism
by the scholarship of Gregory Schopen (1991) and, more recently, in the study of
Hinduism by Michael Altman (2017), are on full display in Baldick and Mighall’s
implication, whether intended or not, that Roman Catholicism and Hindu
mysticism share a kind of latent irrational “medievalism.” Baldick and Mighall
were likely unaware that Varma was, according to his grandson, someone who
“took his spirituality seriously, though he was also something of a jokester in the
temple” and considered himself a Buddhist rather than a Hindu at the time of his
death. His wife Eileen was from a prominent Indian Baptist family and later
became a Catholic, but also attended the local Hindu temple with her husband.
When the Varmas arrived at Dalhousie from Cairo in 1963, there was no real
South Asian community, and so they became central to the one that eventually
developed as immigrant families moved in. As in many South Asian diasporic
populations, the temple’s social and economic functions were at least as important
as its spiritual ones, making attendance at the temple a rather poor measure of
58 Bollywood Horrors

personal religiosity, let alone “mysticism.” But for Baldick and Mighall there are
no such distinctions to be made, and the phrase “Hindu mystic” even appears to
be redundant.
Varma himself was by no means free from the Protestant notion of “God-
obsessed India” and writes in his essay on meeting Gandhi that “[adoration] or
idolatry is an inherent [part of the] Indian psyche, an exotic impulse to discover
the fountain head of spiritual-mystical wisdom.”48 However, taken in context,
what appears at first to be the familiar uncritical attribution of excessive
religiosity to India as a whole is undermined by his subsequent description of
that meeting with Gandhi. It is of no little consequence that Varma, the devoted
scholar of English literature, describes that memorable day with the words, “it
still lingers fresh in my memory for I fancied myself to have sat like Conway at the
feet of the High Lama.”49 The “Conway” to whom Varma refers is Hugh Conway,
the hero of the 1933 novel Lost Horizon. In the story, Conway is a British diplomat
brought by magical means to the inaccessible, luxurious, and utopian Tibetan
monastery of Shangri-La, whose inhabitants have eternal youth as long as they
stay on the premises. The centuries-old lama, himself a European (a former
Catholic monk from Luxembourg, to be precise) informs Conway that he is
destined to take over the monastery after the lama’s death.
With the deployment of the influential Orientalist fantasy contained in Lost
Horizon as the lens through which he views his visit with Gandhi, Varma gives
us a glimpse into his complex attitude toward religion. If Varma is imagining
himself as Conway, a Westerner brought to Shangri-La only to learn that he was
always destined to be there, and indeed, to rule over it, wherein lies this “exotic
impulse to discover the fountain head of spiritual-mystical wisdom” that he
describes? Is it in the psyche of the Indian? Is it in the psyche of the colonialist?
Is it the psyche of a colonialist who discovers himself to have been an Indian all
along? To complicate matters further, while equating Conway with himself,
Varma has equated the white European High Lama in Lost Horizon with Gandhi,
the English-educated Indian destined to force the British out! There is much
ambiguity here.
Baldick and Mighall are not alone, however, in arguing that Varma, as J.M.S.
Thompkins puts it in his introduction to The Gothic Flame, “sees the Gothic
writers as restoring the sense of the numinous to a literature cramped by
rationalism and bleached by exposure to unvarying daylight . . . [and] renewing
its contact with the fertile depths of mystery and primitive emotion.”50 David
Richter describes this aspect of Varma’s work in especially harsh terms, scoffing
at “the numinous” (“a term of, shall we say, elusive meaning”) and concluding
 Vampire Man Varma 59

that it was “[despite], or perhaps because of, the vacuousness of his critical
contribution, [that] Varma became the key Gothic scholar of his generation . . .”51
Along with his show business friends like Robert Bloch and Vincent Price,
Varma had friends who did not see the supernatural as pure entertainment. He
was close to the Catholic demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren and invited
them to speak at Dalhousie in 1986. While there, the Warrens had a run-in with
former president of the British Occult Society Harry Price, who had come “for
the gathering,” despite having died in 1947.52 He was also in contact with real-life
vampire hunter “Bishop” Seán Manchester (a direct descendant of Lord Byron,
which must have thrilled Varma) in 1970, during the latter’s search for what he
believed was “a King Vampire of the Undead” stalking London’s Highgate
Cemetery.53
According to an obituary written by Manchester, “Varma subscribed
unreservedly to a belief in the existence of vampires, the supernatural variety, as
defined in every dictionary and chronicled in ancient tradition.”54 But Varma
himself was always ambiguous about this. Writing of his trip to “Dracula’s Castle,”
Varma does recount hearing unexplained footfalls and sensing an “unseen, ever-
watchful presence.”55 But he also describes “demoniac vampire figures” as
“nightmarish projections of a dream world” and refers to “the vampire concept”
and “the vampire legend.”56 However, he once quipped, “[you] don’t need to
believe in a thing to be bitten by that thing.”57

Dracula Decolonized: Knocking on Bandh Darwaza

With a better understanding of Varma’s background and the place of his work in
the history of Gothic criticism, we can now turn to his ideas. While it is inaccurate
to suggest that Varma’s “mysticism” drove him to simply project his own
worldview onto the literature of the Gothic and the macabre, it is equally
inaccurate to deny that his particular ideas about religion and the sacred, rooted
in the traditions of the Himalayas, were inextricable in his approach. For Varma,
terror and horror were something akin to Rudolf Otto’s notion of the mysterium
tremendum. To illustrate, he cites two scriptures. The first is Job 4.13–16 from the
King James Bible:

In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, Fear
came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit
passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: It stood still, but I could not
60 Bollywood Horrors

discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and
I heard a voice . . .

The second is Bhagavād Gītā 1.29–30, taken (without citation) from Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan’s 1948 translation, in which Arjuna says, upon seeing Kr.s. n.a’s
universal form, “My limbs quail, my mouth goes dry, my body shakes and my
hair stands on end.”58
In one of his rhapsodic meditations, seemingly more indebted to the work of
his beloved Romantic and Persian poets than any historical scholarship, Varma
uses the language of the Hindu trimūrti (Brahmā the Creator, Vis. n.u the Preserver,
and Śiva the Destroyer) to describe the vampire as both “the Destroyer and the
Preserver, for the passive vampires of life turn into active ones after death.”59 And
of the fanged Tantric deities of Tibet, Nepal, and Mongolia, he writes:

They were meant to inspire terror—an emotion which, for a time, thrusts an
individual beyond the self  . . . These terrifying Gods and awesome figures of
Tantric Buddhism were manifestations of a great faith. Their timelessly
transcending images and paintings in remote mountain shrines, looming
terrifyingly in their demonic forms, stimulated the mystics to comprehend that
a man can arrive in heaven only if he has the daring and perseverance to wade
right through Hell.60

We should recall here that Varma identified the ultimate source of the vampire
“in the mystery cults of Oriental civilizations,” and more specifically in the
cultures of the Himalayas, writing:

During my own visits to the monasteries in the Trans-Himalayas, and wanderings

into the empire of the vampire from Tibet to Transylvania, gleaning and tracing
sources of lost legends and lore, I gathered fantastic samples of vampire motifs and
murals that may open up possibilities of a fascinating study of antique art forms
and the process of their dissemination into European culture and literature, and
their bearing upon the concept of Hell in medieval paintings and in the Italian
Renaissance. Those glaring demoniac vampire figures, nightmarish projections of
a dream world, had surely been inspired by antique pristine faiths and were
creations of some prehistoric, unknown Oriental Michelangelo or Leonardo da
Vinci of ages long ago.61

We should recognize that Varma’s imagined Himalayan origins of the vampire

are part of a larger discourse about Tibet and environs represented in works like
the aforementioned Lost Horizon and Alexandra David-Néel’s influential Magic
and Mystery in Tibet.62 Likewise, his description of Tantra as “a disastrous
 Vampire Man Varma 61

parasitical disease” and “a cloak to the worst forms of devil worship”63 parrots a
party line that goes back to the nineteenth century reform movements of
Rammohan Roy and others.64
But unlike figures such as David-Néel on the one hand or Roy on the other,
Varma was neither a Western sahib nor a social reformer. He was more of an
Occidentalist than an Orientalist, studying English literature from the outside, as
is made clear in newspaper headlines like “Indian Found Secret Britons Had
Missed”65 and in the title of the (lost, sadly) paper he gave in Delhi in 1982,
“Romance of Research in English: Viewpoint of an Alien Indian.” As one reviewer
remarked:

It is interesting that the authority on this aspect of our heritage should be an

Oriental. The writer remembers meeting a Burmese scholar in a small village in
Wiltshire not far from Foothill. The latter talked much about Beckford and the
gothick novel and said how he had read Vathek as a young man years before in
Burma.66

In his introduction to The Necromancer, Varma writes that the “[black] magic
and diablerie” of German Schauerromantik (“dark romanticism”) “were native to
the soil of Germany, and the transplantation of these exotics into England
pleased English readers.”67 Finding the exotic and bizarre in Germany and
indulging in a gleeful shudder at its delicious depravity would seem to reverse
the direction of the “Indo-Germanic” axis that positions Germany as the spiritual
heir of India’s now-decadent culture.68
The Himalayas were not just some abstraction for Varma, or a mere projection
of Orientalist fantasy. He seems to have remained close to Nepal his entire life,
joining the Association of Nepalis in America, serving as a consultant for
acquisition of Vajrayāna Buddhist artifacts for the Nepali Cultural Centre, and
corresponding with the Nepalese ambassador in China about the role of India in
the country’s future global interests in the early 1980s.
A 1969 newspaper article reports that he “had obtained images which support
his theory that Hindus knew of the Vampire legends long before their occidental
and Gothic brothers.”69 In September of 1970 he traveled to Sikkim on the border
at the invitation of its Queen Consort, Gyalmo Hope Nyagmal (formerly blue-
blooded New York socialite Hope Cooke, a freshman majoring in Asian studies
at Sarah Lawrence when she met the Crown Prince), to examine paintings of
wrathful deities at the Sinon monastery.
“Anti-Tantricism,” the attitude of combined revulsion and fascination toward
Tantra that Varma appears to share with people like Roy and David-Néel, is no
62 Bollywood Horrors

more homogeneous or monolithic than Tantra itself. For Varma, it seems to

come out of a showman’s sense of titillating the reader, performing the duties of
an enthusiastic tour guide of the grotesque, playing up to stereotypes when it
serves his purposes. “Dr. Varma’s rich voice, thickly accented with the mystic
tones of his native India, enunciates each word,” recalls an interviewer, “while
dramatically savoring the unworldly implications of his beliefs. For Dr. Varma, it
is ‘Dwaacullaa,’ not a wimpy ‘Dracula.’ ”70
His deployment of Orientalist fantasies about Tantra have to be understood
as originating in the same impulse that led him to republish in gilt-paged deluxe
editions the “horrid” novels of Jane Austen because they were horrid. Despite (or
maybe as a result of) his prior participation in establishing Western hegemony
in post-colonial Africa and Asia as part of the Colombo Plan, in his incarnation
as the eccentric but worldly “Vampire Man Varma,” (“the best PR man [vampires]
ever had”)71 he seemed uninterested in imposing any cultural taxonomies, only
in using Orientalism as yet another disguise. He became the “jokester in the
temple” who brings everyone in on the joke by playing with Orientalist tropes
out in the open. I argue that with this ludic sensibility, he renders these tropes
“inoperative,” a term I am borrowing here from Giorgio Agamben, who envisions
(following Walter Benjamin) a post-messianic order in which “humanity will
play with the law as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore
them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.”72
But, we may now ask, how does Varma’s influential re-imagining of the Gothic
play a role in Indian filmmaking? His filmmaking ambitions having been
thwarted (though not for lack of trying), Varma never had a chance to directly
inspire any Indian cinematic knock-offs or remakes of his own films. However,
the influence of scholarship like Varma’s on horror cinema is well documented.
We can observe how the folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand’s popularization of the
“urban legend” has inspired genre films like the Urban Legend and Candyman
franchises.73 Likewise, the medievalist Carol Clover’s theory of viewer
identification with the “final girl” in slasher films74 has informed self-conscious
genre exercises like the Scream franchise and the even more explicitly referential
Final Girl (2015, dir. Tyler Shields).
We can see the influence of (or at least some resonance with) Varma’s theory
that Tantra and vampirism spring from a common source in a film like Bandh
Darwaza. Bandh Darwaza was the Ramsay brothers’ last theatrical hit, and it
rehashed many plot and stylistic elements from their earlier successes, especially
Purana Mandir (1984, dir. Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay) and Veerana. Known for
saturating their Gothic landscapes in vivid colors and playing up the blood and
 Vampire Man Varma 63

sex, the style of what Meheli Sen describes as the Ramsays’ “Emergency Cinema”
(a product of the political turbulence of India under Indira Gandhi) looks very
much like what Varma described in the cinema of postwar Britain:

Colour turned more crimson with blotched victims, scarred disfigurements, and
stakes thrust into the hearts of voluptuous maidens resting in coffins spurting
rich blood. The public luxuriated in blood-bath and blood-fantasy, and inevitable
ritual of experience for an audience that had already gorged off real-life horrors.75

While the satin-cape-wearing, widow’s-peaked appearance of the glowering

villain of the film, Nevla (Anirudh Agarwal) is obviously based on the Western
cinematic vampire originated by Bela Lugosi, the plot more resembles a classic
Gothic curse movie like Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960), in which a witch
returns from being buried alive to torment the descendants of her killers.76 In the
film, a rich landowner’s wife Laajo (Beena) is unable to conceive and so her maid
(Aruna Irani), a devotee of Nevla, takes her to the master’s cave, where he ritually
impregnates her on the condition that Laajo will bring the child to him if it is a
girl. When the girl is born, the maid poisons Laajo and brings the baby, Kaamya,
to Nevla, prompting Laajo’s husband Thakur (Vijayendra Ghatge) to rescue his
daughter and stab Nevla in the heart. Twenty years later, Nevla has been
resurrected and uses his magic to lure the grown-up Kaamya (Kunika) to him,
where he seduces and murders her. Finally, Thakur corners Nevla in his lair and
destroys him for good by setting fire to the giant bat-idol in which his power lies.
Usha Iyer identifies the bat idol in Bandh Darwaza as non-Hindu, indeed,
part of “a concerted effort to not associate any Hindu deity with the ‘horrifying’
Tantric practices in the film.”77 But to my eyes, the image closely resembles an
amalgam of a vampire bat, clearly borrowed from Western lore, and the Tantric
goddess Revatī-Jātahārin.ī, said in the eighth century Kaśyapa Sam . hitā to be have
folded wings and fangs and be prone to attacking pregnant women and killing
their unborn children, an identification that resonates with the film’s plot.78
Iyer identifies Nevla himself as the result of a “semiotic osmosis that
interweaves the Western folkloric figure of the vampire and African traditions of
voodoo with indigenous horror traditions of possession and the occult.”79 But he
is also the Lord of the Black Mountain, attended by his devotees and surrounded
by the trappings of pūjā. And his bargain with Laajo is not so different from the
one that Varun.a makes with Hariścandra in the famous story of Śunah. śepa,
where the god grants the king a son on the condition that the son would then be
sacrificed to him.80 In fact, Nevla’s offer is better than Varun.a’s because he at least
gives the child a roughly 51 percent chance of escaping by being born male.
64 Bollywood Horrors

Varma’s entire project to recover the numinous Gothic appears as a kind of

inside-out version of the attraction-repulsion toward the exotic/jangli that we see
expressed in works like Lost Horizon, Bandh Darwaza, Udan Khatola, and Veerana.
The difference between Varma’s discourse and the pure colonial discourse is the
ambivalence lent to it by the cultivated ambiguity of Varma’s self-presentation and
the profound entanglement of his own life with the end of colonialism.
Apart from these thematic connections between Varma’s theory of the
vampire and Bollywood horror, there is a (probably unintentional) parody of
Varma in the 2014 Ramsay brothers’ film Parosi AKA Neighbours: They Are
Vampires, a remake of the American Fright Night (1985, dir. Tom Holland). It was
bizarrely advertised as the first Indian vampire movie, despite being at least the
third Indian remake of Fright Night, following the Tamil Amavasai Iravil
(Mother’s Night, 1989, dir. P. Chandrakumar) and the Hindi Wohi Bhayakar Raat
(That Terrifying Night, 1989, dir. Vinod Talwar).81 The possible Varma reference
in the film is the horror-loving heroine’s favorite author of books on vampires,
the track-suit-wearing professor named Indernath Malhotra. Played by comic
actor Shatki Kapoor, the “Professor Malhotra” character replaces Peter Vincent
(Roddy McDowall) in the original film, himself an amalgam and sendup of
B-movie actors and TV horror hosts from the Gothic revival of the 1960s that
Varma helped to inspire.

Conclusion

The epigraph that sits atop the editor’s preface to The Northanger Set of Jane
Austen Horrid Novels is a Sanskrit quatrain that Varma attributes (incorrectly) to
the Pañcatantra, and translates:

Vedas and Smritis differ in their views;

There is no single philosopher whose opinion is binding on all;
The secret of Dharma lies concealed in a mysterious cavern;
The path trodden by the great ones is the only way.82

Despite what Baldick and Mighall suggest, Devendra Varma was not a “Hindu
mystic” meditating in a mysterious cave, even though that may well be where the
secret of dharma lies concealed. He was instead a wanderer, like Melmoth,
following “the path trodden by the great ones.”
Along with Melmoth, Marco Polo, Lawrence of Arabia, and Hugh Conway,
there is one last historical alter ego that sheds some light on Varma’s self-image.
 Vampire Man Varma 65

The Hungarian Orientalist Arminius Vámbéry (1832–1913), himself a

consummate “wanderer,” was a “small, curious, limping eccentric figure—with a
fund of strange stories to tell,” and “a wonderfully clever man, who had travelled
all over the East and gone in disguise through hair-breadth escapes in Bokhara,
Samarkand, and Afghanistan.”83 Vámbéry was a “free thinker” born into a Jewish
family who sometimes identified as a Christian but also had great sympathy for
Islam and disguised himself as a Sunni holy man to spy for the British during the
“Great Game,” in which he sided with the them against the Russians. In England,
he met with Disraeli, Lord Curzon, and Queen Victoria. He also knew Bram
Stoker, and Varma argued that he provided the inspiration for Stoker’s creation,
the archetypal vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. It is hard to imagine that
Varma did not see something of himself in Vámbéry, who also died suddenly of
a heart attack in New York.
Above all else, Varma was able to be who and what he needed to be for any
occasion, a skill he developed to survive the brutality of a Japanese POW camp,
the high-stakes pressure of a diplomatic crisis, or the difficulties of managing
one’s career as an Indian-born academic teaching English literature at a Canadian
university. Ironically, it is his protean personality that served him so well in life,
along with the attending complexities of his biography, that seem to have so far
kept him out of the intersecting histories of India and horror in contemporary
scholarship. Hopefully, that will not be the case any longer.
66
 Part Two

Cinematic Horror, Iconography,

and Aesthetics

67
68
 3

Divine Horror and the Avenging

Goddess in Bollywood
Kathleen M. Erndl

Editor’s Note

Ellen Goldberg and Aditi Sen organized a panel at the 2016 American
Academy of Religion meeting in San Antonio, Texas titled “Theorizing
Horror in Bollywood.” Panelists included Ellen Goldberg, Aditi Sen, Brian
Collins, and Kathleen M. Erndl, with Diana Dimitrova as presider. After the
panel, all the participants met for dinner to discuss the idea of turning the
presented papers into a book. We agreed unanimously that this was an
excellent idea and that we would each submit a first draft of our papers early
in the new year. However, on February 19, 2017, less than three months
following the AAR meeting, Kathleen died suddenly at the age of sixty-
three. We were shocked and deeply saddened. We have included her paper
here, in its original form, in memory to Kathleen’s scholarly legacy and her
love of Bollywood.

Horror is not found only in genre horror films; it plays a significant role as an
element in mainstream Hindi films, films that may be primarily romances,
comedies, historical dramas, social critiques, and so on. In the film Om Shanti
Om (2009, dir. Farah Khan), a meta-commentary on the Hindi film in general
that reprises well-worn tropes from earlier films of retribution in the next
generation through reincarnating characters, the ghost of murder victim
Shantipriya appears in the final scene, adding a touch of the macabre. One could
multiply examples. If one accepts Vijay Mishra’s argument, at least as a general
observation if not as an absolute rule, that Bollywood films are in one way or
another retellings or re-creations of the Rāmāyan.a and the Mahābhārata, then
the reason for horror as a minor element in many Bollywood films is not hard
to find.

69
70 Bollywood Horrors

Horror appears sporadically, and in some cases extensively, as in battlefield

carnage passages in the epics, as well as in Sanskrit drama and story literature
and in folk dramas and oral tales throughout South Asia. Classical Indian
aesthetic theory speaks of successful drama as an ideal mix of dominant and
subordinate rasas, “tastes” or “flavors,” that evoke in the audience appropriate
elevated moods that are central to the aesthetic experience. These rasas are the
refined results of corresponding stāyibhāvas, or “stable moods,” which have
numerous variations and subtypes (see Table 3.1, on rasas, below).
Several scholars have suggested that popular Hindi (and other Indian language)
films, with their inclusion of music, dance, and “frontality” are driven more by
rasa than by “realism,” plot consistency, or adherence to a single genre. This is not
to say that Indian filmmakers are experts on rasa theory or apply it in a handbook
sort of way. As Philip Lutgendorf has stated, “although modern filmgoers seldom
specialize in classical aesthetic theory, the vocabulary of bhāva and rasa remains
in use in Indian vernaculars, and the broad cultural consensus is that a satisfying
entertainment ought to consist of a range and succession of sharply-delineated
emotional moods.”1 Bollywood films are often referred to, sometime dismissively,
sometimes appreciatively, as masala. Masala means “spice,” or more accurately, a
“mixture of spices.” The masala film is a not really a genre, but rather a mega-
genre encompassing comedy, drama, action, and song-and-dance sequences,
often in exotic locales. It is intended to entertain and appeal to all audiences, to
have “something for everybody.” I suggest that masala is a vernacular version of
rasa, with a similar semantic range, though earthier and more populist. It does not
have the extensive technical vocabulary associated with rasa theory, and of course
includes modes absorbed from Persian, Arabic, and Western sources.

Table 3.1 Chart Outlining Various Moods and Flavors (rasas)

Sthāyibhāva Rasa
Rati (Love) Śr.ṅgāra (Erotic Love)
Hāsya (Merriment) Hāsya (Humorous)
Soka (Sorrow) Kārun.a (Pathetic)
Krodha (Anger) Raudra (Furious)
Utsāha (Enthusiasm) Vīra (Valorous)
Bhaya (Terror) Bhayānaka (Horrific)
Jugupsā (Disgust) Bībhatsa (Repugnant)
Vismaya (Astonishment) Adbhuta (Wondrous)
Śama (Placidity) Śānta (Blissful)
 Divine Horror and the Avenging Goddess in Bollywood 71

Rasa and Masala

There is no rasa or bhāva that corresponds exactly to horror, as we find in genre

horror films, either Western or Indian. The category of “horror” most closely
corresponds to the bhayānaka or “terrifying” rasa though, as I will demonstrate
through the following examples, it also includes at least a taste of the bībhatsa or
“disgusting” rasa. Echoing and transforming themes in the Rāmāyan.a,
Mahābhārata, purān.as, and oral traditions of India, Hindi cinema has a pervasive
fascination with what I call the “Avenging Goddess” motif. Several scholars have
called this motif “Avenging Woman,” which is (also) accurate, but which fails to
give sufficient attention (or maybe considers it too obvious to mention) how
through sound, music, and iconic imagery a woman “becomes” a goddess.
How does a woman become a goddess? This is accomplished through what in
aesthetic theory (see Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta) is called dhvani, or
“suggestion.” First, there is the pervasive idea, found in such texts as Devī-
Mahātmya and popularly, that women embody śakti, the feminine power or
energy that can, under certain circumstances, become manifested as a Devī, or
goddess. Such commonplaces as a wife as “Laks.mī of the house” or a virtuous
woman being a veritable Sītā attest to this. But a woman can also manifest the
fierce aspects of the goddess when pushed to the limit and redressing injustice.
A woman, subject to violent oppression, transforms into a horrific Durgā or
Kālī-like goddess to exact revenge upon the demonic forces and re-establish
justice. This she does with bloodshot eyes and wild hair, wielding a sword, axe, or
sickle, or even tearing at the flesh of the miscreant with her teeth. Severed heads
are often involved. Social, political, and economic oppression of women are
homologized with the cosmic struggle between devas and asuras (gods and
demons), and dharma and adharma (righteousness and unrighteousness).
An ordinary woman killing a rapist becomes Durgā slaying the buffalo
demon. This is shown in various degrees in different films, sometimes minimally.
For example, the 2014 film Mardaani (dir. by Pradeep Sarkar), a police drama
starring Rani Mukerji who hunts down a child slavery ringleader, has little
religious imagery (see Chapter  8 in this volume). But when she, along with a
gang of young women, corner the culprit, the women collectively attack him,
while a non-diegetic voice in the background chants: ya devi sarvabhiuesu sakti
rupena samsthita. The film ironically is called Mardaani (Manliness), while the
dhvani clearly establishes the female power.
Using examples from films like Pratighat (Retribution, 1987, dir. N. Chandra)
and Anjaam (Outcome, 1994, dir. Rahul Rawail) this paper explores how through
72 Bollywood Horrors

visual, aural, and lyrical means, “Avenging Goddess” films evoke the rasas of
terror and disgust to create “Divine Horror.”

The Devī-Mahātmya

In the Hindu sacred text Devī-Mahātmya (Greatness of the Goddess), in times of

crisis when the cosmic moral order (dharma) has been usurped by demons, the
Goddess Durgā appears in order to destroy evil or disorder (adharma) and re-
establish justice or harmony (dharma).2 The text consists of three stories relating
the exploits of Durgā, interspersed with hymns that extol her powers and
qualities. Throughout the text, she is called by various epithets, the most common
being Ambikā (Mother) and Chan. d. ikā (Fierce One). The most well-known in
iconography and oral tradition is the second story, that of the Goddess Durgā
killing Mahis. a, the buffalo demon. Mahis. a has usurped the power of the gods, so
that they are no longer able to receive their proper shares of the offerings of
sacrifice, thus throwing the whole cosmos into disorder. As the gods are unable
to defeat Mahis. a themselves, they concentrate their powerful energies which
fuse together as a heap of brilliance that becomes a beautiful woman who rides
on a lion. Each god gives her a weapon or quality, whereupon she proceeds to
demolish Mahis. a’s army, while her lion devours the dead bodies. Finally, facing
Mahis. a himself, battling his various shape-shifting forms, she places her foot on
the buffalo demon’s neck and pierces it with her trident. As the demon in
“humanoid” form tries to emerge from the buffalo’s mouth, she cuts off his head
with a flourish. After gods praise her with hymns, she promises to return
whenever they call on her again. In folk versions of this story, Mahis. a tries to
capture and marry Durgā against her will. This theme is found in the Sanskrit
Devī-Mahātmya in the third episode, where the demon brothers Śumbha and
Niśumbha try to force her to marry one of them.

Carnage on the Battlefield in the Devī-Mahātmya

Then the Goddess with her trident, club, and showers of spears,
With sword and the like slew the great Asuras by the hundreds.
And she felled others who were deluded by the sound of her bell.
And having bound some Asuras on the ground with her noose, as she dragged
them along.
Others were cut in two sharp blows from her sword.
Still others, crushed by the fall of her club, lay on the ground,
And some, much smitten by her mace, vomited blood.
 Divine Horror and the Avenging Goddess in Bollywood 73

. . . The arms of some were broken, and others had broken necks.
The heads of some fell to the ground, others were pierced in the middle,
And other great Asuras, with their legs cut off, fell to the earth.
Others were cut in half by the Goddess, having in each part a single arm, eye, and leg.
Some, when their heads were cut off, fell and rose again.
Headless trunks, still grasping the best of weapons, fought with Goddess,
And others danced in battle, keeping time to the sound of the drums
Headless trunks, with broken heads, with sword, spear, and double-edged sword
still in hand.
Other Great Asuras cried out, “Stop! Stop!” to the Goddess.
The earth became impassable . . .
Great rivers with torrents of blood from the elephants, Asuras, and horses
Flowed there in the midst of the Asura Army. (Devī-Mahātmya 2.54–65)

While the theme of attempted rape or forced marriage is certainly relevant to

women’s experience in the human realm, the text itself says little about actual
women. The action of the three episodes is all in the divine realm. In the frame
story of the text, a male sage narrates the three episodes to two human males, a
deposed king and an ousted merchant, both of whom worship the Goddess after
hearing her stories and, as a result, receive boons from her. Nevertheless,
adaptations of the text in oral tradition frequently identify human women with
the Goddess in one or more of her many forms.
In folk and regional traditions throughout India, an ordinary woman subjected
to oppression, takes on the power of her divine counterpart, transforming into a
fierce Goddess to avenge the injustice done to her or her community. While the
goddess of the Sanskrit text Devī-Mahātmya is a transcendent mythic figure, the
vernacular and folk traditions abound with divine figures that had prior lives as
human women and, after suffering a devastating injustice, are transformed and
worshipped as goddesses. This theme of feminine (divine/human) retribution,
repackaged in modern political and social contexts, has emerged in popular
Indian cinema over the last several decades, presenting an image of women that
complicates that of the docile, obedient daughter or wife, as well as that of sex
object.

Fierce Goddesses and the Male Gaze in Indian Film

The locus classicus in modern Indian film for “woman” as fierce goddess is the
iconic Mother India (1957, dir. Mehboob Khan), in which the character Rādhā,
74 Bollywood Horrors

overcoming the adversity of flood, poverty, abandonment by her injured

husband, and constant financial and attempted sexual exploitation by the village
moneylender, symbolizes India as an emerging nation. The film opens with her
being honored as the “mother of the village” and asked to bless the new irrigation
system. Her life story unfolds as a flashback, culminating in her killing her
favorite son, Birju, as he is about to dishonor the moneylender’s daughter. This
sacrifice, terrible as it is, is necessary to uphold dharma and requires Rādhā to
assume the form of the goddess Durgā.
In the 1980s, a spate of films, most notably Pratighaat (Retribution, 1987, dir.
N. Chandra), centered on themes of rape and revenge, largely in response to
growing feminist activism in India in the 1970s centering around high profile
rape cases and resulting in on-going changes to rape laws.3 In Pratighaat, the
female protagonist, Laks.mī, files a criminal suit against a corrupt politician,
whose name ironically is Kālī, the name of a fierce Hindu goddess. Kālī had
committed numerous violent crimes, including the gang rape of Laks.mī’s friend
Durgā and the fatal torture of Durgā’s husband. He retaliates against Laks.mī by
publicly disrobing her, a scene reminiscent of Draupadī’s attempted disrobing by
the Kauravas in the Mahābhārata. In the climax of the film, Laks.mi garlands and
anoints Kālī publicly on the stage of a political rally, then kills him by striking
him with an axe, the symbol of his political party. The theme of women becoming
fierce goddesses to redress injustice is more explicitly linked to feminist analysis
of patriarchy in “independent” films of the so-called parallel cinema. Examples
of these include Mrityudand (Death Sentence, 1997), directed by Prakash Jha,
known for his socio-political themes, and Daman (Oppression, 2001) and
Chingaari (Spark, 2006), both directed by Kalpana Lajmi, known for her feminist,
woman-centered themes. Daman, subtitled A Victim of Marital Violence, was
distributed by the Government of India in order to raise awareness of domestic
abuse and promote women’s education and independence.

When a Woman Becomes Chan. d. īka

(Nari Bane Jab Chan.d.īka)

Shivani has been victimized not just by a psychopathic male, but also by the
State, which is all too willing to condemn a woman for even the suspicion of
sexual infidelity. In prison, Shivani bonds with fellow inmate Nisha, convicted
for the death of her mother-in-law who had attempted to murder her over the
 Divine Horror and the Avenging Goddess in Bollywood 75

wedding dowry. Shivani suffers the wrath of the short-haired, cigarette-smoking,

liquor-drinking (Bollywood film codes for immoral) female warden who uses
the inmates to provide sexual services to government officials. Thus, the police,
judicial system, prison administrators, and government officials are shown to be
corrupt, to be the agents of adharma, rather than the protectors of dharma that
uphold Mother India.
Shivani escapes being pimped out to a politician because of her pregnancy,
but her friend Nisha is sent instead. Soon, Shivani finds out that her daughter
and sister have been killed, after the brother-in-law has thrown them out of the
house, by a car Vijay was driving. Shivani has only her unborn child to live for,
but then the warden severely beats her in retaliation for reporting to the
authorities the warden’s pimping activities, causing her to miscarry. When her
friend Nisha tries to comfort her, she says: “Don’t cry Nisha . . . You won’t see a
single tear in my eyes. Like dried-up blood, every tear in my eyes has dried up.
Wipe these tears that weaken a woman. Do you know why a woman is terrorized?
Because she endures it. A woman’s endurance is like the earth. She bears
everything, but at the limit of her endurance, a volcano erupts, and she annihilates
everything. The world has seen a woman as a mother, a sister, and a daughter, but
it has not seen a woman in the form of Chan. d. ī!” Chan. d. ī or Chan. d. īkā is the
fierce, demon-slaying Goddess, who now has finally made an explicit appearance
in the film and remains until the end.
The next scene shows the warden explaining to the prison guards that the
women have requested to hold a jagrata,4 an all-night songfest honoring the
Goddess, and that these sinful women now want to atone for their sins. She tells
the guards that permission must be granted, since the ceremony is a matter of
religion, but that the guards should watch the women carefully. For non-Hindi
speaking viewers, the reference to the jagrata could be easily missed, for it is not
translated in the DVD’s English subtitles.5 The mise-en-scène highlights the
irony of the dialogue; behind the warden is a map of India, reminding viewers
that nationalist images and discourse are always the backdrop of Indian cinema.
Mother India is pure and sacred, while the warden as a representative of the State
is a victimizer of Mother India, who is here represented by Shivani.
As the women begin their prayers in front of a garlanded portrait of the lion-
riding Goddess Durgā, a guard summons Shivani to the warden’s office to meet
some “special guests.” At that moment, Nisha, with the portrait of the Goddess
behind her, wipes her own forehead with blood-red vermillion, turns and,
looking straight at Shivani, intones the following chant:
76 Bollywood Horrors

O Goddess Riding a Lion, your eternal victory!

O Flame Goddess, your eternal victory!
O Fiery Goddess, your eternal victory!

The other inmates join Nisha in this chant, as Shivani enters the warden’s office.
Shivani declares that the warden has brought on her own death by killing
Shivani’s unborn child and says, “You flesh trader! This uniform of law doesn’t
become a woman like you.” The camera cuts back and forth between shots of the
women prisoners blowing a conch, playing musical instruments, and chanting
praises of the Goddess, on the one hand, and Shivani beating and executing the
warden, on the other hand. As Shivani chases the warden down a passageway to
the gallows, her friend Nisha chants these words:

The fire of revenge has ignited

Now that she is poised for vengeance
The fire of revenge rages
Now that she is poised for vengeance
Now that she slays her foes, she vanquishes evil
When a woman becomes Chan. d. īkā
Justice will prevail
There will be no sin
Sinners will not be spared
This vow she will not break
Law and Justice have done enough atrocity
She’s no longer afraid of the outcome (anjaam),
Now that she slays her foes,
She vanquishes evil
When a woman becomes Chan. d. īkā.

The last line, “when a woman becomes Chan. d. īkā,” is the most important phrase
not only in the song, but also in the film as a whole, as it signals Shivani’s
transformation from a virtuous woman who simply plays by the rules to one who
reaches deep into herself to pull out that śakti, that divine feminine power, to
destroy the force of evil. This chant, sung along with instrumentation, the blowing
of a conch shell, and the beating of drums, repeats non-diegetically throughout
the remainder of the film, every time Shivani kills one of her oppressors.
After her release from prison, Shivani first extracts revenge on her brother-in-
law, who was responsible for the deaths of her sister and daughter. Next is the
police inspector Arjun Singh who, bribed by Vijay, was responsible for her
incarceration and who also informed the prison warden about Shivani’s report,
 Divine Horror and the Avenging Goddess in Bollywood 77

leading to the murder of Shivani’s unborn child. Arjun Singh confronts Shivani
at her daughter’s grave,6 knowing that she would go there and that she must have
been the one responsible for the brother-in-law’s murder. He had already figured
out that she killed the warden, but was not able to prove it, since the women all
swore that she was at the jagrata. Shooting at Shivani and cornering her in a
nearby barn, Arjun Singh plans to rape her but she pulls out a sword from under
her shawl and kills him, leaving him to burn in the barn. After another story arc,
Shivani does finally kill Vijay, after nursing him back to health from a catatonic
state, taking on the guise of Durgā killing the buffalo demon. Incidentally, she
kills off the lesser demons first, like in the Devī-Mahātmya, before saving the
greatest demon for last.
Ironically, the brother-in-law has finally picked a winning horse and won the
jackpot. Shivani, dressed in black like the Goddess Kālī, attacks him, bites a
chunk of flesh from his arm, and with blood streaming from her mouth, kills
him by stuffing the rupee notes down his throat. As I have already explained,
Shivani’s actions are an instance of divine retribution, horror in the service
of dharma. So, this is not demonization, but it certainly is a novel form of
demonetization.
 4

Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks

Hugh B. Urban

They are frauds, those who call themselves God. They are so base they are not
worthy of being called criminals. If God is an ocean, they are not even a
millionth drop of that ocean . . . There is only one God. But these men are
Satans who pose as God. Satans!
Jaadugar (1989)1

Among the many horrifying tropes in Bollywood film, one of the most persistent
and popular is the figure of the sinister tāntrik—that is, the dangerous yogī
who uses his knowledge and power to deceive, manipulate, exploit, and/or
destroy those around him. As the embodiment of spiritual power that has
been perverted into a dark and malevolent force, the sinister tāntrik is a
favorite villain throughout Indian cinema, sometimes portrayed in cartoonishly
simple stereotypes and sometimes with remarkable depth and nuance. In
this sense, the image of the sinister tāntrik is a contemporary reflection of
the complex history of Tantra and its various representations in South Asian
narrative more broadly.2
A complex tradition that spread widely throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and
Jain traditions of South Asia from roughly the fifth or sixth century ce , Tantra
has long had a controversial reputation in both Indian and Western imaginations.3
From the first mention of texts called tantras in Sanskrit literature, the tāntrik
has often been portrayed as a purveyor of spells and magic, sometimes ridiculous,
sometimes awesomely powerful, and sometimes terrifyingly evil.4 As such, the
figure of the malevolent tāntrik is a particularly acute example of what David
Gordon White has called the “sinister yogī,” or the widespread image of the yogī
as not so much a pristine ascetic meditating on a snow-peaked mountain top but
rather an ambivalent character endowed with tremendous but dangerous and
sometimes destructive power.5

78
 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks 79

This association between Tantra and black magic was greatly amplified during
the British colonial period, as Orientalist scholars and colonial administrators
began to recount the evils of Tantra in elaborate and often wildly exaggerated
detail.6 Hindu reformers and nationalists would in turn add their own
condemnations of Tantra as an evil perversion of true Hinduism, thus solidifying
the stereotype of the evil tāntrik permanently in the modern imagination.
Ironically, however, while North American and European popular audiences
almost universally associate Tantra primarily with sex and optimal orgasm,
Indian audiences associate it largely with black magic and occult power.7 In sum,
what became “the art of sexual ecstasy” in the Western imagination became “the
art of dark magical power” in the Indian imagination.
The sinister tāntrik appears in hundreds of films released in Hindi, Bangla,
Assamese, Telugu, Tamil, and other languages, ranging from extremely low
budget productions such as Shaitan Tantrik (Tantric Devil, 1999, dir. Wajid
Sheikh) or Khooni Tantrik (Bloody Tantrika, 2001, dir. Teerat Singh) as well as
high-end action films such as Naan Kadavul AKA Himalayan Aghori (I Am
God, 2017 dir. Bala).8 However, for the sake of this chapter, I will focus primarily
on three well-known Hindi films—Gehrayee (Depth, 1980, dirs. Vikas Desai and
Aruna Raje), Jaadugar (The Magician, 1989, dir. Prakash Mehra), and Sangarsh
(Help, 1999, dir. Tanuja Chandra)—and one Telugu film—Ammoru (1995, dir.
Kodi Ramakrishna)—that each draw heavily upon the traditional image of the
“sinister yogī,” while also re-articulating it in a modern Indian context.9 Like the
medieval yogīs, these Bollywood tāntriks are deeply ambivalent characters,
possessing tremendous powers but also engaged in acts of sorcery, exorcism, and
human sacrifice. However, these films also re-articulate the image of the sinister
yogī through a variety of contemporary idioms, for example, by referencing
American horror films or mixing in non-Indian black magic tropes, such as
Haitian Vodou. The sinister tāntrik, we will see, is also recast in contemporary
scripts drawn from modern Indian debates over caste politics, land disputes, fake
gurus and their Western disciples, psychiatry and mental illness.
To conclude, I will make some broader theoretical comments, drawing upon
but also critically rethinking some contemporary approaches to horror, such as
those of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler.10 The sinister tāntrik is in many ways
the embodiment of the “abject” in Kristeva’s sense of the “cast off,” particularly
the horror of death, perversion, transgression, and taboo that is rejected by the
social body. If Vijay Mishra is correct that much of Bollywood cinema is aimed
at projecting the image of a national community and a pan-Indian popular
culture,11 then the sinister tāntrik is precisely what does not fit into and must be
80 Bollywood Horrors

cast out of that national community and pan-Indian culture.12 In Bollywood, this
abjection is always conquered in the end: the sinister tāntrik is ultimately
defeated, usually by a “good” yogī or by a deity representative of pure, normative,
non-tāntrik Hinduism.

From Sinister Yogīs to Bollywood Tāntriks: A Brief History

of Tantra in South Asian Narrative

The sinister tāntrik is by no means a trope that is new to Bollywood film. On the
contrary, the image of the tāntrik as either a charlatan or a dangerous figure
working with the dark side of power dates to the very first mention of texts
called tantras in Sanskrit literature. Most scholars today agree that Tantra is not
a monolithic or homogenous category but rather an umbrella term that covers a
vast array of traditions that spread through the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain
traditions over the last 1,500 years.13 Some of these developed into incredibly
sophisticated philosophical traditions, such as the Kashmir Śaivites, and into
powerful, brāhman.ic ritual traditions, such as the Śākta lineages of Bengal and
Assam.14 Although Tantra is notoriously difficult to define, one of the more
useful attempts is David White’s suggestion that Tantra centers primarily on the
divine energy or power (śakti) that flows through the entire cosmos and human
body, seeking to harness that power for both material benefits and spiritual
liberation: “Tantra is that Asian body of beliefs and practices which, working
from the principle that the universe we experience is nothing other than the
concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead that creates and
maintains the universe, seeks to ritually appropriate and channel that energy . . .
in creative and emancipatory ways.”15
In its more extreme “left-hand” (vāmācāra) forms,16 Tantric ritual often
involves substances and practices that are normally considered extremely impure
and polluting, such as consumption of meat, wine, and sexual fluids, and
meditation upon corpses in cremation grounds.17 The point of such explicitly
transgressive practices, however, is not mere hedonism or self-indulgence.
Rather, it is a radical attempt to shatter all sense of duality—including the duality
between pure and impure, clean and unclean, high and low class, self and other—
in order to experience the all-pervasive unity of the Ultimate Reality. As Alexis
Sanderson puts it in his classic essay on the Kashmir Śaivite Tantric tradition,
“This inhibition, which preserves the path of purity and barred his entrance into
the path of power, was to be obliterated through the experience of a violent,
 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks 81

duality-devouring expansion of consciousness beyond the narrow confines of

orthodox control into the domain of excluded possibilities, by gratifying with
wine, meat and through caste-free intercourse, with orgasm and its products.”18
From the earliest reference to Tantra in Sanskrit drama and narrative,
however, the tradition was also often associated with black magic, sorcery, and
trickery by other non-tāntrik authors. The first known mention of texts called
tantras is Bān.abhat.t.a’s classic fantasy tale, Kādambarī (seventh century), which
describes a rather demented, power-hungry, and comical old sādhu from South
India: “he had collected information about jugglery, mystical formulas and spells
[tantras and mantras]  . . . He had the madness of belief in alchemy. He was
obsessed with a yearning to enter the world of the demons.”19 Later Sanskrit
literature often focuses on the infamous Kāpālikas or “skull bearers,” an early
tāntrik lineage devoted to Śiva in his terrible form that may have been carried
over into modern sects such as the infamous Aghorīs (“those without fear,” who
also carry human skulls as their begging bowls; see Lorenzen 1972). Thus, the
eleventh century author Kr.s. n.amiśra includes a detailed satire of a Kāpālika in
his drama, Prabhodacandrodaya. Inhabiting cremation grounds, drinking wine
from skulls, and offering human sacrifices, the Kāpālika is portrayed here as the
epitome of the most frightening powers of impurity, violence, and transgression:

I who am adorned with a garland of human bones, who live in the cremation
ground and who eat out of a human skull, with an eye purified by the instrument
of yoga, see the world having differences within itself but being non-different
from God  . . . We who offer oblations in the fire in the form of human flesh,
brains, entails and marrow break our fast with alcohol help in the skull of a
brāhman.a. Mahābhairava [Śiva in his terrible form] has to be worshipped with
human offerings, lustrous streams of blood flowing from the stiff throat which is
freshly cut.20

The figure of the perverse and cruel tāntrik Kāpālika reappears throughout modern
Indian fiction, for example in the works of nineteenth century Bengali authors
such as Bankimcandra Cat.t.opādhyāy (1838–94). Born into a brāhman. family and
working as a deputy collector for the British government, Bankimcandra was part
of a broader movement in the colonial period that sought to reform and re-imagine
“Hinduism” for the modern era, while also cleansing it of its more embarrassing
elements, such as Tantra. As Wilhelm Halbfass summarizes Bankimcandra’s
reformed ideal of Hinduism (or “neo-Hinduism”): “The “truly” religious elements
of Hinduism had to be . . . separated from the multifarious forms of superstition,
from local popular cults. Such a purified Hinduism . . . could be placed above Islam
82 Bollywood Horrors

and Christianity.”21 Thus Bankimcandra’s most famous work, Kapālakun.d.alā,

continues the stereotype of the sinister skull-bearer, here performing the infamous
tāntrik rite of śava sādhana, or worship with and upon a human corpse. The
character Nabakumār describes him:

The form with matted hair was seated on a putrid corpse. With even greater fear
he saw that a human skull lay before him, and inside it was some red liquid. On
all sides, bones were strewn . . . He knew that this person was must be a terrible
Kāpālika.22

The cruel Kāpālika then traps Nabakumār and plans to offer him as a human
sacrifice to the fearsome goddess of time and death, Māhā Kālī—a trope that
later reappears throughout Bollywood (and American) horror films.
In short, the image of the tāntrik as a dangerous, power-hungry, and corrupting
figure was clearly in place as a widespread trope in Indian literature by the end
of the nineteenth century. However, it would also soon be taken up, amplified,
and often wildly exaggerated by British novelists of the early twentieth century,
where the sinister tāntrik became the ultimate embodiment of everything they
thought was wrong or corrupt with modern India. As we see in works such as
F.E.F. Penny’s The Swami’s Curse (1929), Flora Annie Steel’s The Law of the
Threshold (1924), or Elizabeth Sharpe’s Secrets of the Kaula Circle (1936), the
tāntrik had become equated with not just black magic but also sexual perversion
and even subversive political activities. As we read in Penny’s novel, “The follower
of the Tantric cult professes no austerities. He seeks to kill desire by an unlimited
indulgence which bring satiety and extinction of emotion. The indulgence is
enjoined by his so-called religion; and his depravity is commended as a great
virtue.”23 Thus, by the mid-twentieth century, the image of the sinister tāntrik
had become more or less solidified in both Indian and Western imaginations as
a figure of ultimate danger and transgressive power, embodying the potential
subversion of not simply the individual self but of society and the body politic.24

The Varieties of Tāntrik Experience: Fraudulent, Sinister, and

Pure Māntriks in Gehrayee

Vikas Desai and Aruna Raje’s 1980 film, Gehrayee, is a particularly interesting
variation on the sinister tāntrik theme. Centered on a mysterious case of
spirit possession involving a young girl in a wealthy Bangalore family, the film
presents three different versions of the tāntrik character—one, a charlatan; one a
 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks 83

power-hungry fiend; and one a pure, selfless devotee of Lord Gan. eśa. As such, it
covers the spectrum of imaginative representations of the yogī in Indian popular
culture, from the ridiculous purveyor of mumbo-jumbo, to the sinister black
magician, to the true knower of powerful esoteric knowledge. As the same time,
however, the film also asserts the triumph of the pure, truly “Hindu” yogī as
devotee of Gan. eśa over the wicked tāntrik.
The father in the film, Chennabasappa, is a successful manager and a hard-
nosed rationalist who initially has little patience for things supernatural. When
he needs money to build a new home in Bangalore, he decides to sell his plantation
in his ancestral village to a soap company. The plantation’s caretaker, Baswa,
becomes deeply agitated, viewing the selling of one’s ancestral lands as analogous
to the rape of one’s own mother. Meanwhile, the young daughter Uma begins to
behave strangely, going into trance states and uttering cryptic revelations about
the past. The most terrible of these revelations is that Chennabasappa had once
seduced and impregnated Baswa’s wife, who later committed suicide.
After trying every possible medication to no avail, the family decides to bring
in a māntrik (“knower of mantras,” a term often used interchangeably with
tāntrik) to try to exorcise whatever spirit, ghost, or other entity that has possessed
the girl. Here we should note that spirit possession and exorcism have a long
history both in traditional South Asian Tantra and in popular representations of
tāntrik magic. As Frederick Smith has shown in his comprehensive study of
possession in South Asia, the ability to possess or dis-possess bodies has long
been part of Tantric literature, and it clearly survives as a trope in the Indian
popular imagination.25
Unfortunately, the first māntrik they call upon turns out to be a ridiculous
charlatan, a buffoon who embodies the stereotype of the tāntrik as mere fraud.
Performing his pūjā with absurd and pompous display, he invokes the goddess
Māhā Kālī while chanting mantras, slapping the girl across the face, smashing
coconuts, and of course collecting a large fee. Disgusted with this huckster, the
son suggests another, more powerful māntrik named Puttachari. This one
appears to possess more genuine abilities, but also seems suspiciously concerned
with knowing whether or not Uma is a virgin. After learning that she is indeed,
he abducts her and takes her to perform a secret tāntrik ritual in a cemetery,
hoping to use her virginal potentiality in order to awaken the power of the
goddess. As he chants and waives his āratī lamp before a fire, the girl sits naked
in a trance, surrounded by mantras, yantras, and various offerings. The tāntrik is
performing his pūjā before a stone image and a yoni (female sexual organ,
symbol of the goddess), invoking the deity, “darśanam. kuru, darśanam. kuru!”
84 Bollywood Horrors

When the brother interrupts the ritual to save the girl, the tāntrik cries out,
warning that they will incur the goddess’s wrath and be cursed forever:
Stay back! You cannot interrupt the worship of the goddess! You will be ruined.
The goddess will never forgive you . . . She cannot be freed now. And you cannot
take her away . . . I have waited for this moment for fifteen years . . . Your daughter
has all the right qualities, because of which the goddess has agreed to come. You
have angered the goddess. You will be ruined!26

Finally, after rescuing the girl, the family decides to consult one last yogī to
exorcize the spirit—this time, the sincere, powerful, yet humble Shastri.
Immediately upon visiting the house, Shastri discovers two cursed objects that
have been hidden around the grounds, a lemon and a small voodoo doll with
pins in it. He burns the evil objects and then confronts the spirit inside the girl.
Sitting before an altar bearing the image of Lord Gan. eśa, Shastri forces the spirit
to confess that it had been trapped through black magic by another māntrik,
who had been hired by none other than the disgruntled caretaker, Baswa. All of
this was Baswa’s vengeance against the family for selling the ancestral plantation.
When the family thanks the Shastri and offers to pay him for his efforts, he
refuses any compensation, humbly attributing his abilities not to himself but
rather to Lord Gan. eśa, whose grace alone can bind or free such spirits:
No, please don’t bow your head to me. All this is the grace of Lord Gan. eśa. Bow
to him. I am a human just like you . . . You don’t need to give me any charity or
anything. I don’t do all this to earn wealth. It is all the grace of Lord Gan. eśa. He
is the one who does all this.27

Here we see the ultimate contrast with the sinister tāntrik: instead of a mere
charlatan or a power-hungry sorcerer who harnesses dark forces for material
gain, Shastri embodies the ideal of the pure yogī who is devoted only to God in
in the loving and generally quite non-tāntrik form. While the power-hungry
tāntrik performs his secret rituals in the cemetery before the goddess yoni, the
selfless Shastri performs his healing pūjā before the flowered-covered image of
Gan. eśa. As such, the film also portrays the triumph of a kind of mainstream,
normative Hinduism over the dangerous path of the tāntrik.

Magic—Real, Fake, and Really Fake in Jaadugar

Prakash Mehra’s 1989 film Jaadugar continues the theme of the malicious and
fraudulent tāntrik, though with an interesting twist of its own. Here the villainous
 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks 85

tāntrik is conquered, not by a more powerful genuine yogī, but rather by a kind
of “genuine fake”—the flamboyant jādugar (“magician”) named Goga.
The story opens when Shankar Narayan returns from America to discover
that his father—formerly a businessman and convict—has set up shop as a
miracle-working guru with a large and lucrative ashram. Bearing an elaborate
handlebar mustache, shaven head and pony-tail, Mahaprabhu performs a variety
of cheap stage tricks, such materializing small objects and manifesting sacred ash
(vibhūti) from his hands, in order to dupe his gullible devotees. His followers
include not only Indian disciples but a large number of wealthy white foreigners
who are pouring millions in cash, gifts, gold and jewelry into his coffers. Thus,
Shankar overhears the guru’s Indian disciples gambling at night, with several
white female devotees hanging on the side: “He lost today’s earnings,” one jokes,
“but it doesn’t matter. He’ll trap ten more rich foreigners tomorrow.”28 Here we
should note that the film is surely parodying some of the hugely prosperous
Hindu mega-gurus of the 1980s, such as Sathya Sai Baba—also famous for
materializing small objects and sacred ash—and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh—who
was quite infamous for both his large following of Western white hippies and his
outrageous wealth and conspicuous consumption.29 The cheating guru offers
Shankar the massive riches from his treasury, but the son refuses with disgust and
leaves and the ashram.
Hoping to unmask his father, Shankar decides to call upon a famous and
flamboyant stage magician name Goga (played by Amitabh Bachchan). The plan
is for Goga to confront the charlatan Mahaprabhu, reveal his cheap tricks for
what they are, and so dethrone him once and for all. This Goga easily does, but
then he too is seduced by the power of guru-ship and takes over the god-man
role himself, assuming the title of “Gogeshwar” or Lord Goga. Still determined to
retake his ashram, the fallen Mahaprabhu tries to unmask and/or kill Goga in
various ways, first attempting to poison him and then sending in his minions to
attack the magician. This leads to a farcical fight scene in which Goga demonstrates
a mixture of martial arts, stage magic, and seemingly genuine tāntrik powers—
sometimes tricking opponents with magic handkerchiefs, sometimes turning
guns into bananas, and sometimes magically removing his foes’ clothing. Indeed,
the fight scene is one of several telling moments in which the film plays upon the
boundary between stage magic and real spiritual power, hinting that Goga may
possess more of the latter than we first assume.
Finally, another of Mahaprabhu’s minions is sent with an axe to chop off
Goga’s hands and so prevent him from working his magic. In response, Goga
freely offers up his hands to the butcher and then delivers an impassioned speech
86 Bollywood Horrors

about the difference between true and false religion. “Stop dancing to the tune of
frauds,” he tells the axman, “They are frauds, those who call themselves God.
They are so base, they are not worthy of being called criminals. If God is an
ocean, they are not even a millionth drop of that ocean. There’s only one God,
whether they call him Bhagwan Allah, Karim, or God. There is only one God. But
these men are Satans who pose as God. Satans!”30 Deeply impressed, the axman
finally accepts the truth that his guru is a fraud who has been deceiving and
exploiting his followers with his lame magic tricks: “Mahaprabhu Jagatsagar
Chintamani is not God but an ordinary mortal, a cheap magician who is selling
God’s name in every home and misleading people.” Instead of taking Goga’s
hands, he returns to his former master and chops off Mahaprabhu’s hands
instead, thus depriving the charlatan of his means of deception.
In the end, Goga completely exposes Mahaprabhu in front of everyone and
then also reveals himself to be, not a god, but simply an ordinary man who has
merely played the role of “Gogeshwar” in order to expose the fraud. “Then where
is God’s true form?” the people ask him. “Look inside yourself!” Goga sternly
replies, launching into another impassioned speech about the difference between
true religion and the chicanery of these false gurus:

God exists in every being. Man cannot become God by displaying fake miracles.
If anyone can do a real miracle, it is the Supreme Lord, whom we call Allah, Jesus,
Bhagwan  . . . Have faith in yourself, but don’t have blind faith  . . . Worship
whatever God you like, but don’t have blind faith . . . Or you will come across
many Mahaprabhus on every street corner, who will continue to loot you.31

In this closing oratory, we can clearly see that Goga is articulating a kind of “feel
good pluralist ‘secularism’” expressed in other classic Bollywood films, most
notably Amar Akbar Anthony, which likewise celebrates the validity of diverse
religious faiths.32 At the same time, he is also articulating a very modern, neo-
Hindu or neo-Vedāntic universalism that has become commonplace since the
nineteenth century, particularly through the works of Rammohun Roy,
Bankimcandra, Swami Vivekananda, and other reformers: God is One, though He
is known by many names, dwelling in the heart of every being;33 and this universal,
pure faith in the One True God has nothing to do with the gross superstition and
guru-worship of the ignorant masses, who so easily fall for trickery and chicanery—
above all, for the occult deceptions of the tāntriks.
In sum, like Gehrayee, Jaadugar narrates the ultimate defeat of the sinister
tāntrik. But in this case, the victory is accomplished not by a “good” or “real” yogī
but rather by a kind of “authentic fake,” a stage magician who uses his trickery to
 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks 87

unmask the pretender. Yet the end result is ultimately very much the same: “true”
religion and a “real” understanding of God triumphs over the deceptive,
exploitative, and indeed “satanic” imitation of religion concocted by the false
guru. The former is a kind of neo-Hindu universalist faith in the Supreme Lord
who is found in all religious traditions, while the latter is the blind faith and
fraud of the sinister tāntrik.

The Silence and the Struggle: Blending Hollywood

and Bollywood Horror in Sangarsh

Like most Bollywood films, many in the sinister tāntrik genre make oblique
references to American Hollywood productions. Gehrayee, as some viewers have
noted, does bear a hint of the American horror classic, The Exorcist (1973, dir.
William Friedkin), in its possession/exorcism narrative; and many of the low-
budget productions such as Shaitan Tantrik (1999) contain clear imitations of
Hollywood classics, with murderous bald tāntriks who bear a remarkable
resemblance to the bald priest of Kālī in Stephen Spielberg’s classic work of
Orientalist excess, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).
However, the 1999 film Sangarsh is a more interesting blend of American and
Indian themes, with both clear references to and complex reworkings of Jonathan
Demme’s 1991 film, The Silence of the Lambs.34 The film begins with a series of
child abduction and murder cases that have remained unsolved by the police and
so are turned over to a CBI trainee named Reet Oberoi. Reet’s investigations lead
her to suspect Lajja Shankar Pandey, yet another embodiment of the sinister
tāntrik figure, who also brings in an added dimension of psychological and sexual
perversion. Like myriad tāntrik characters before him in both Indian and Western
narratives,35 Lajja Shankar is hoping to achieve immortality through the rite of
human sacrifice, using the blood of children to engender his own eternal life.
Meanwhile, detective Reet suffers psychological traumas of her own, having
witnessed the death of her brother—a Sikh separatist—at the hands of the police
when she was a child. Tortured by her childhood memories and by this complex
criminal case, she seeks advice from Professor Aman Varma, a brilliant man who
has been unjustly imprisoned. The professor is initially rude and unresponsive
but eventually agrees to help her, guiding her through her childhood traumas
and ultimately tracking down the villain. Reet discovers that the killer has been
offering to buy street-beggar children for his rituals and so lays a trap for him
with the help of a beggar’s child, using his son as bait. The fiendish Lajja Shankar
88 Bollywood Horrors

does indeed arrive to buy the boy, but he is wearing the disguise of a woman with
a sari and makeup—thus adding a new, gender-bending twist to the sinister
tāntrik motif. When Reet and her team confront Lajja Shankar, he displays
superhuman strength, throwing them around, and surviving a seemingly fatal
gunshot before escaping.
Back in his forest home, Lajja Shankar exhibits psychotic and/or fanatical
symptoms, beating his own head with a rock and engaging in a conversation
with the goddess Kālī like a child speaking to his mother (Mā). The goddess
instructs him to slay the father who had lured him into the trap, which he does;
and as he is strangling the man, he reveals that he has been offering blood
sacrifices to the goddess since he was eleven years old—“satisfying the Mother’s
hunger”—in order to attempt to cheat death and achieve immortality: “I went to
a shed and butchered eleven buffaloes. The god of death has been afraid of me
since then. I’ll keep fighting death until I defeat it!”36 Meanwhile, Reet finds an
old video tape of Lajja Shankar when he had been held in a mental institution, in
which he claimed to have been speaking to his Mother Kālī since he was a tiny
child: “She orders me, and I obey all her orders,” he says, chanting mantras and
going into a trance, “Look into these eyes. These are the eyes of a messenger of
God . . . Small kids can peep into them and find heaven.”37
Lajja Shankar’s next child victim is none other than the son of the Minister
himself, whom he plans to offer as his ultimate gift to the Mother—a child
sacrifice on the last day of a solar eclipse—which will at last bring him immortality.
The sacrifice is to take place in a secret underground cave-temple, which very
much recalls the cave temple in Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(as does Lajja Shankar himself, who has now shaved his head and resembles the
bald priest of Kālī in Spielberg’s film). “I am going to be freed of this cycle of life
and death today!” he declares, asserting his superhuman status as the all-powerful
tāntrik who has now mastered death itself: “This child is my last gift to goddess
Kālī . . . I am not a human being. Life and death are part of the lives of ordinary
beings like you.”38 Fortunately, Reet and the professor (now escaped from prison)
have tracked him down in time to prevent the heinous act. Just as Lajja Shankar
is about to deliver the fatal blow to the child, the professor leaps across the temple
and engages in a bloody fight, during which Lajja Shankar repeatedly bites him,
leaving his mouth dripping blood (recalling images of Kālī, Tārā and other tāntrik
goddesses). While the professor beats down the tāntrik, Reet finally overcomes
her childhood traumas and rescues the child.
Most readers have no doubt by now recognized the similarities between the
basic plot and characters of Sangarsh and those of Demme’s Silence of the Lambs.
 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks 89

Both films center on a female investigator who is pursuing a cross-dressing serial

killer with some form of mental illness, and in both, the key to solving the case
comes from an imprisoned genius, who reluctantly agrees to offer his insight
(the special, maximum security prison cell in which the professor is placed in
Sangarsh is even visually very similar to Hannibal’s cage in Silence of the Lambs).
In both films, the investigator has suffered some childhood trauma that has
permanently shaped her character—witnessing the death of her brother, in Reet’s
case, and witnessing the screaming lambs, in Starling’s. And in both cases, the
villain is seeking some kind of personal transformation through bloodshed—the
quest for immortality in Lajja Shankar’s case, and the quest for a woman’s body
in Buffalo Bill’s.
Sangarsh, however, translates these themes through the uniquely South Asian
idioms of the sinister tāntrik. Here the villain is not a man tormented by his gender
identity crisis and failed sex-change, but rather one driven by the more classically
South Asian spiritual goal of freedom (moks.a) from death and rebirth. And he
pursues this goal through the means not of mere slaughter and skinning his victims
but human sacrifice, a practice that has a long and intensely controversial
reputation—both real and imaginary—in tāntrik traditions for over a millennium.
Human sacrifice and its tremendous material rewards are described in a number of
Śākta and Tāntrik texts, such as the Kālīkā Purān.a, Mun.d.amāla Tantra, and
others;39 the eighteenth century Yoginī Tantra even explicitly calls for the offering
of a male child (narasya kumāra).40 Yet the specter of mixed horror and power
embodied in human sacrifice was clearly amplified and exaggerated wildly through
British and American novels and films from the nineteenth century to the present,
culminating in the bloody offerings to Kālī that we see in the Gunga Din (1939, dir.
George Stevens), the Beatles’ film Help! (1965, dir. Richard Lester) and, most
famously, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).41 Sangarsh has clearly been
informed by all of these various historical influences, weaving them together with
the narrative structure and psychological dynamics of modern American films.

The Great Goddess and the Tāntrik Demon in Ammoru

The figure of the sinister tāntrik is not, of course, limited to Hindi films or to
Bollywood; indeed, he is in some ways an even more colorful and vibrant
character in many other South Asian language films such Telugu, Malayalam,
Bangla, and Assamese, among many others. In some cases, he even becomes a
kind of unexpected anti-hero, as in the case of the kick-boxing martial artist
90 Bollywood Horrors

tāntrik aghorī in Naan Kadavul. And in others, he is a terrifically evil figure of

pure sorcery and malice who can only be defeated by the great goddess (devī)
herself, as in the 1995 Telugu film Ammoru.42
Directed by Kodi Ramakrishna, Ammoru centers on the character Bhavani, a
beautiful young lower caste orphan and devotee of the goddess Ammoru. A local
form of the great goddess (devī), Ammoru is worshipped in her temple in the
form of a pillar with three eyes and lolling tongue that looks much like the
famous Kālī image at Kālīghāt. in Kolkata. The villain in the film, meanwhile, is a
criminal black magician named Gorakh, who in many ways embodies the
ultimate stereotype of the sinister tāntrik—at once tremendously powerful and
yet filled with malice and hatred, using his occult knowledge only for vengeance
and material gain. Bhavani is responsible for Gorakh being imprisoned, and so
he vows to take terrible revenge upon her, upon her husband and upon their
infant child. Gorakh’s mother, Leelamma, first tries to kill Bhavani, but the
goddess Ammoru protects her by assuming the form of a young maidservant.
Upon his release from jail, Gorakh uses his dark tāntrik magical arts to invoke an
evil spirit called Chenda and so finally kills the child and tortures the husband.
In the climactic final scene, Bhavani takes her wounded husband into the
temple of Ammoru and locks the gate. Gorakh then deploys his full powers as a
sinister tāntrik, creating a yantra diagram, uttering mantras, and invoking a
terrifying, hideous spirit in order to create a kind of voodoo doll. Sticking pins
into the doll, he tortures the helpless husband while Bhavani screams in terror. As
Gorakh finally bursts through the temple gate, Bhavani places her hand on the
spikes of the trident that stands in front of Ammoru’s image. Invoking a classic
scene from the Mahābhārata (the disrobing of Draupadī by Duh. śāsana), Gorakh
grabs Bhavani’s sari and tries to disrobe her; however, the act rips her hand across
the points of the trident and sprays her blood across the temple, splashing it on
the face of Ammoru. The blood is enough to awaken the goddess, who rises in a
spectacular display of CGI effects, morphing through all the various forms of the
goddess (Durgā, Laks. mī, Sarasvatī, Parvatī, etc.) before finally assuming a terrible
Kālī-like manifestation. Grabbing the trident and performing a ferocious dance,
she impales the evil Gorakh, beheads him, and finally annihilates him completely.
The impalement and beheading, we should note, are clearly reminiscent of the
classic myth of the great goddess (Durgā or Can.dī) slaying the buffalo demon
(Mahis. a) as narrated in the Devī Mahātmyā and countless other Sanskrit and
vernacular texts. In the end, the goddess returns to her childlike, maidservant
form and restores Bhavani’s lost baby to life, as the whole village cheers and
rejoices.
 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks 91

Once again, Ammoru narrates the ultimate defeat of the sinister tāntrik. In
this case, however, the tāntrik is conquered not by another yogī or by a magician,
but directly by the awesome power of the goddess herself. As such, the film is not
only invoking classic Hindu myths such as the slaughter of the buffalo demon; it
is also depicting the defeat of the evil black magic of the tāntrik by the good and
true religion of the devī, the Hindu great goddess.

Conclusions: The Horrors of Power—Tantra and Abjection

in Modern “Hinduism”

To conclude, I would like to make some broader comments on the place of

the sinister tāntrik in the contemporary imagining of “Hinduism.” In many
ways, the tāntrik of Bollywood film appears to embody much of what Kristeva
means by the “abject”—that is, the death, defilement, or impurity that violates the
boundaries of individual identity and so generates the most intense feelings of
dread, disgust, and horror:

The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall) . . . is cesspool and death; it upsets even
more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance . . . [A]s
in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I
permanently thrust aside in order to live.43

From his first description in Sanskrit literature, as we saw above, the tāntrik has
been associated precisely with this kind of abjection in the form of corpses,
skulls, severed heads, cremation grounds, impurity, and transgression. These
themes of abjection are all clearly carried over into modern Indian horror.
The Bollywood tāntrik is not simply a criminal con-man (as in Jaadugar), but
also a power-hungry practitioner of secret rituals, offering a virgin before a yoni
in the cemetery (as we see in the figure of Puttachari in Gehrayee); he is a cross-
dressing, psychologically damaged pervert, seeking immortality through child
sacrifice (as we see in Sangarsh); and he is a black magician, invoking hideous
spirits in order to torture and kill his enemies (as we see in Ammoru). In each
case, he is the very embodiment of abjection in Kristeva’s sense—the death,
blood, impurity, sickness, and perversion that gives horror its power and power
its horror.
Yet the sinister tāntrik, I would argue, is “abject” not simply in relation to the
individual body; it is also abject in relation to the larger social body and to the
construction of modern “Hinduism” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
92 Bollywood Horrors

As Douglas Brooks suggests, Tantra has consistently been seen as the “Other
within” Hindu traditions, the uncomfortable presence of esoteric and transgressive
traditions that do not fit tidily into the modern imagining of Hinduism as a world
religion.44 Like the terms “tantra” and “Tantrism,” the term “Hinduism” is neither
an indigenous nor a singular category but rather a modern construction used to
label a vast and diverse array of texts, traditions, rituals, deities, and communities.45
And since the nineteenth century, both Western Orientalist scholars and various
Hindu reformers attempted to define the boundaries of this unruly body of
traditions. In so doing, they have typically excluded those aspects of Indian
tradition that seemed to violate the sensibilities of modern civilized society.46
Perhaps above all, both Western scholars and Hindu reformers singled out the
Tantric tradition as the worst, most debased and degenerate mixture of black
magic and sexuality, and thus the first thing to be jettisoned in the re-imaging of
Hinduism in the modern world.47 As Swami Vivekananda warned his disciples,
Tantra in its most perverse “left hand” (vāmācāra) form is corrupting modern
India like a disease, and it must therefore be purged in order to restore the true
teachings of the Vedas: “see how this Vamachara (immoral practice) of the Tantras
has entered into your very marrow. Even modern Vaishnavism . . . is saturated
with Vamachara! We must stem the tide of Vamachara, which is contrary to the
spirit of the Vedas.”48 In short, he tells them, “give up this terrible Vamachara
which is ruining your country!”49
This attempt to purge the abjection of Tantra from the realm of legitimate
Hinduism is replayed throughout modern Indian cinema. However, more
than just the latest reiterations of an older trope, these films each rework this
theme in different ways in a modern Indian context. Thus, in the case of Sangarsh,
the film not only borrows heavily from American films, it also recasts the
sinister tāntrik in terms of modern psychiatry and madness. Jaadugar, in turn,
reflects on the modern ubiquity of fraudulent gurus (along with their gullible
Western disciples). In the case of Ammoru, the film also grapples with the
tensions and complexities of caste politics, which are central to much of Tamil
and Telugu cinema. In short, the tāntrik is not simply a stock villain representing
all that is “other” to the ideology of Hindu nationalism; rather, he is also a
complex figure who is creatively recast in many different ways in relation to a
wide array of contemporary social and religious concerns, conflicts, and
anxieties.
Yet despite this diversity various castings and performances, the final scene
for the sinister tāntrik in each of these films is fairly consistent. Time and again,
the villainous tāntrik is conquered and destroyed—sometimes by a “good” yogī
 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks 93

who is devoted to a non-tāntrik deity such as Gan. eśa (as in Gehrayee), and
sometimes by the goddess herself, who slays him like Durgā slaying the power-
hungry buffalo demon. In the end, the tāntrik is defeated, and the proper Hindu
order is re-established. Yet the perpetual recurrence of the sinister tāntrik in
Indian cinema suggests that he remains a haunting presence, a troubling form of
abjection that can never fully be cast away.
 5

Do You Want to Know the Raaz?

Sāvitri, Satyavān, and the Other Woman
Aditi Sen

Introduction

Vikram Bhatt’s horror-drama Raaz (Secret 2002) was a major box office success
in a year when most big budget films with successful stars had failed. In fact, its
success was an anomaly. The film had everything stacked against it: it starred two
relative newcomers, the horror film market had faded, and it was a low-budget
B-film. The critics dismissed it instantly. The Times of India did not give it a
rating because Raaz did not meet their basic rating requirements.1 Yet Raaz was
one of the most successful films of 2002, and it revived the horror genre that had
ebbed since the mid 1990s. Not only is Raaz an important horror film that
attempts to retell the myth of Sāvitri and Satyavān, it is also a horror film that
opens up a space for discussion about the boundaries of strīdharma, religious
sanctities of marriage, mainstream religion versus the folk realm, the limits of
sexual morality, and madness.
The original Sāvitri myth appears in the Āran.yaka Parvan of the Mahābhārata.
Sāvitri, a princess falls in love with Satyavān who is fated to die soon from a
snakebite. Sāvitri still marries him against her father’s wishes. Satyavān is also a
prince but his parents had lost their kingdom, were both blind and lived in abject
poverty. Sāvitri had known when the snake would actually bite her husband and
when it happens, the god of death Yama comes to take his soul to the other
world. Sāvitri starts following Yama. He repeatedly requests her to leave, but she
insists her place is only with her husband. Yama tries to negotiate with her and
grants three boons to her, on the condition that she doesn’t follow him or ask
back for Satyavān’s life. The first boon, she asks Yama to restore her in-law’s
eyesight. The second, she asks for the return of their lost wealth, honor, and
kingdom. The third boon, she asks for a son. Without realizing the full

94
 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? 95

consequence Yama grants her all three wishes and is forced to return Satyavān
back to life.2
What were the reasons behind the success of Raaz? Was it the marketing
strategy and the catchy tagline that read, “Do you want to know the secret?” Or did
the film just get lucky? In this chapter, I will first analyze the reasons for the unusual
success of the film, then look at the ways in which Raaz complicates mainstream
cinema’s patriarchal narrative and renegotiates the role of horror and its position
in Hindi cinema. The success of Raaz was concomitant with the revival of the
horror genre and its current popularity.3 It was a trendsetter; it rehashed established
Bollywood horror tropes, added folklore and mythology, and introduced the
audience to an amalgamation of familiar ambience with subversive content. Raaz
uses every formula to first scare the audience, then twist the Sāvitri and Satyavān
story and transform Satyavān into an adulterer. Finally, it appeases the audience by
glorifying the sanctity of marriage and reestablishing the patriarchal order.
There are numerous methods that scholars employ in order to unpack the
horror genre. The goal is often to understand its boundaries and origin, and to
raise questions like why we enjoy being afraid. One may also inquire about the
economic reasons behind the production of horror and the ways in which horror
texts are marketed and distributed.4 In focusing on larger thematic issues,
studying the content of the film often takes a backseat.
The mid 1990s witnessed the rise of low budget horror films that were very
likely targeted toward rural areas, small towns, and single-screen underbelly city
theaters which specialized in screening sleazy films. This was the time when
these filmmakers consciously transgressed the boundaries of conventional
morality and created subversive content. The Indian Censor Board focused on
editing glimpses of nipples or too much butt cleavage, and never thought about
the actual content. It was their myopic outlook that allowed the creation of
content that was shocking by global standards.5
For example, Shaitaani Badla (Demonic Revenge, 1993, dir. Harinam Singh)
shows the male servant getting gang-raped by a group of women after they are
drunk. The traditional gender roles are reversed completely, and after the servant
threatens to complain to the police about the crime, he is killed, and his body is
buried in the backyard. Mainstream cinema metes out this dehumanized
treatment of rape victims only to women. Here, we are confronted with total
reversal of conventional roles and Singh attempts to open a dialogue on female
lust and repression.
Harinam Singh is not alone in this pursuit. Kanti Shah, Joginder Shelly,
Teerath Singh, and B. Mittal have repeatedly created content that completely
96 Bollywood Horrors

challenges existing conventions. They have openly talked about discharge of

bodily wastes as a situation of vulnerability when evil spirits can possess the
body. They had the courage to talk about subjects that makes no appearance in
mainstream cinema, and even if they do, they are used as crude comic sub-plots.
Similarly, they negotiated transgendered identities and normalized them instead
of resorting to stereotypes. Above all, they have managed to acknowledge female
gaze and made discussion of consensual sexual pleasure relatively normalized.6
Bhatt is the bridge between the Gothic mainstream content of the earlier
generation of horror directors and these subversive filmmakers. He is consciously
using horror as a tool to start larger discussions on female lust, sexual perversions,
and even necrophilia. His technique is subtle and he still keeps the conventional
modes alive, yet Raaz is the first successful mainstream horror film that blatantly
attacks the Sāvitri-Satyavān mythology. He has been able to destabilize the
Ramsay code of good versus evil moral framework and has unleashed the
uncanny in our living rooms. Regular Hindi cinema audiences generally avoid
watching low budget horror films. Even with the recent interest in cult cinema,
their popularity is limited to cinephiles and fans. Further, they are usually
watched for their unintentionally funny content like terrible editing, hamming,
bad make-up, and shoddy storylines. In the larger scheme of things, these films
have had a minor impact on shaping the genre. Bhatt, however, has been a
massive commercial success and his films have changed the horror scenario in
Bollywood.
The content of a film may seem a simplistic subject for scholarly analysis.
Why is it important to delve deep into a film that was so quickly dismissed by the
critics? It is precisely for this reason that the film needs to be studied. The
overwhelming dominance of elitist viewpoints in understanding Hindi cinema
has deeply affected the ways in which the educated urban audience judges Hindi
cinema. These days, we are repeatedly confronted with severely polarized
opinions on social media that are seldom about the content of the film, instead,
they are about its larger socio-political repercussions. There is absolutely nothing
wrong in analyzing a cinema within larger cultural context, but it also completely
misses out the significance of the story itself. My aim here is to show how by
solely focusing on the narrative we can navigate the intersections of female lust,
monogamy, and madness.
Raaz is a film that displays porosity between conventional Bollywood and the
low-budget underbelly horror films. These B-grade films are structured very
much like folktales; crude, unpolished, and yet they frequently subvert conformist
canonical stories.7 While these films allow marginalized groups a chance to
 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? 97

speak, Bhatt allows them to open a dialogue with patriarchy. One can only
understand the layers of this process by unraveling different facets of the story. I
use Bhatt’s own views on the film, then, analyze all the tropes he employed, and
finally, look at the conscious ways in which he convolutes the moral framework
of Hindu marriage.

The Background

Raaz’s director, Vikram Bhatt, is conscious of the Indian market and moulds his
art to appeal to the masses. He uses conventional horror tropes from previously
successful Hindi films to frame his narratives. In his words, “My main goal was
to scare the audience. Even as a child, I enjoyed telling spooky stories to my
cousins and scaring them. Honestly, it never bothered me when the Times of
India refused to rate my film. I saw the audience screaming, laughing, clapping, I
was satisfied. And look at the kind of success Raaz had.”8 To put the film in
context it is important to briefly discuss the Hindi horror film scenario because
Raaz is a product of that continuance. Raaz is heavily inspired by two films:
Mangalsutra (1981, dir. Vijay B) and What Lies Beneath (2000, dir. Robert
Zemeckis).
Mangalsutra is the story of a shunned lover who kills herself when the man
she loves marries another woman.9 She then possesses her lover and prevents
him from consummating his marriage. His wife, with the aid of her mangalsutra
(a sacred chain worn by married Hindu women), exorcizes the evil spirit and
saves her husband. The Hollywood film, What Lies Beneath, on the other hand,
is the tale of a philandering husband who murders his lover and hides her body.
The spirit of the wronged woman communicates with the wife and the women
unite to fight the evil husband.
There is clearly a thematic similarity between all three films, yet Raaz is
different from the other two; it is a typical Bollywood masala film.10 The film
features good music, the right amount of action and sex; the idea is to make the
audience feel that their money is not wasted. Besides that, it is also a horror film
and thus ensuring that the ghost actually delivers is extremely important, and in
order to do so, a filmmaker has to draw from popular horror films from the past.
Scholars have grouped Bhatt’s films with those of the Ramsay Brothers, whose
name is synonymous with the horror genre in Bollywood.11 For example, Sangita
Gopal sums up Ramsay films as “structurally masala—they had song-and-dance
sequences, action fights, comedy routines, family melodrama—while featuring
98 Bollywood Horrors

curses, monsters and gory slayings as major themes.”12 Retaining this mould is
imperative. It allows the audience to explore a new story in an accustomed
terrain, and it makes the entire experience more palatable.
It is important to briefly discuss Noël Carroll’s idea of “horrific imagery”
before discussing the depiction of evil in the film.13 Carroll maintains that there
are universal attributes that repulse and scare everyone. Some images and
ideas are terrifying irrespective of their cultural context. I agree with him about
the universality of horror. In this vein, Bhatt uses many popular universal
horror tropes, such as possession, poltergeist activities, blood showers and
loud screams, in Raaz, and, in particular, the jump-scares are very well executed
in the film.14
However, the film also moves beyond universality, creating a complex story
completely embedded in the Indian cultural matrix. Raaz is not a simplistic
story of good versus evil. Hence, I consider Raaz to be a groundbreaking film
that marks the transition of Bollywood horror from plain Gothic tales to stories
about deeper fears that haunt our conscience and shake our moral universe
while still maintaining all the popular storytelling devices.

Revealing the Raaz

The story begins with a prelude: a group of youngsters go into a forest, they play
silly games around the campfire, two of them wander deeper into the woods, a
scream is heard, and one of the young girls suddenly becomes possessed by a
spirit. She then attacks her boyfriend and later dies in the hospital while
screaming, “I have woken up. I shall have my revenge” (my translation). An
expert named Professor Agni Swaroop (henceforth, “the Professor”) is called to
the hospital for consultation; he announces that this is just the beginning of
more terrible things to come.
After the opening prelude, we are introduced to our protagonists, Sanjana and
Aditya, whose marriage is on the rocks. Aditya is a wealthy businessman who has
very little time for his wife, Sanjana. After a fight at a party, Sanjana is in a car
accident but has a narrow escape. She then asks Aditya for a divorce because she
is tired of their endless fights. Aditya promises to make it up to her and they go
on a vacation to revive their marriage. Sanjana agrees to give their marriage
another chance and says she wants to go to their secluded farmhouse in Ooty,
the place where they first met. She wants to revive the mutual happy times she
has of that place.
 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? 99

After their arrival in Ooty, Sanjana and Aditya’s old friends help them rekindle
their past love. Soon, they start making minor progress. Unfortunately, Sanjana
is haunted by screams in the night. Aditya cannot hear them, but Sanjana hears
them often and is deeply affected by them. Later, the strange occurrences
increase: her gardening tools move on their own and blood begins to appear on
them. Aditya dismisses all of Sanjana’s fears and concerns, but Sanjana later
discovers that their old servant, Robert, had also heard voices and had gone
missing for a while. Eventually she finds out that Aditya was aware of Robert’s
disappearance, yet he had neglected to tell her about it. Sanjana’s friend, Priya,
believes her account and takes her to the Professor who is an expert on Vastu
and the spirit world.15
The Professor agrees to come to their house to help them. He puts a lemon
wrapped in a cloth in their attic and tells them that if it changes color within
twenty-four hours, it would indicate the presence of an evil spirit; if not, the
house is safe. Needless to say, the lemon turns red and Sanjana is visibly upset. In
a rush of drama, Aditya loses his temper, beats up the Professor, and accuses him
of fraud. The next day, because of a major business engagement, Aditya prepares
to leave Ooty with Sanjana. Just as they are all set to go, the Professor tells Priya
that the spirit would not allow Sanjana to leave the place because it wants to
communicate with her. His prediction proves right; there is a landslide, and
Aditya is forced to fly alone.While Aditya is away, Sanjana decides to communicate
with the spirit. The Professor helps her and gives her a book that has incantations
to call the spirit, and eventually it arrives.16 The spirit behaves like a poltergeist;
it showers blood on Sanjana, throws all of the furniture around, and finally shows
her reflection on a mirror. Utterly terrified, Sanjana runs outside and screams,
“This is my house! I will not let you take it away from me!”
When Aditya returns from Mumbai, he finds Sanjana to be behaving
erratically. She recites erotic poetry and tries to seduce him, but Aditya knows
that this is entirely uncharacteristic of her. Then he suddenly sees another
woman’s face in place of Sanjana’s face and screams, “You! Why are you here? You
are supposed to be dead!” As he screams, the spirit vanishes and Sanjana asks to
whom he was referring.
Aditya’s story unfolds in flashback. He confesses to having had a torrid affair
with a woman named Malini, who had serious mental health issues and had run
away from her home because she was about to be institutionalized. Aditya did
not know anything about her condition (in fact, her mental illness was discovered
later by Sanjana). She came to his house looking for shelter during a storm, and
he later had an affair with her. Throughout the affair, Aditya completely neglected
100 Bollywood Horrors

Sanjana, but then he grew tired of the extramarital relationship, especially

because of Malini’s possessiveness and unpredictability. Malini became
increasingly violent, demanding that Aditya leave Sanjana or she would kill
herself. Aditya finally took a stand, telling Malini that not only would he never
leave Sanjana, he would not see Malini again. Malini threatened to tell Sanjana
about the affair; he dismissed her by saying that Sanjana would never believe her.
In a fit of anger, Malini said Sanjana would believe her if she found her body
there, and she shot herself with Aditya’s gun. Aditya panicked and, instead of
calling the police, asked his servant, Robert, to help him bury her body in the
woods, in the exact spot where the girl in the prelude was possessed.
Aditya asks for forgiveness, but Sanjana refuses and decides to leave him. She
tells the Professor about her discovery and decision. The Professor immediately
informs her that leaving Aditya is precisely what the spirit desires and she has
played into her hands. At this point, the Professor compares Sanjana to Sāvitri
and says that even gods are afraid to take the life of a man whose wife is devoted
to him. The only reason that Malini’s evil spirit could not kill Aditya was that
Sanjana’s virtue—her strīdharma—protected him like a shield. He insists that, as
a fellow human being, she must save his life from the evil spirit. Ignoring his
advice, Sanjana leaves anyway.
With Sanjana gone, the spirit can now take Aditya’s life. The Professor once
again turns out to be correct and Aditya is found in a car accident and left
hanging between life and death in a hospital. Sanjana decides to save him and the
only way she can do it is by performing the last rites of the spirit and burning
Malini’s body—the body that Robert and Aditya had buried in the forest. Priya
and the Professor agree to help Sanjana in her mission. The spirit does everything
in its power to stop Sanjana, and the Professor is killed in the process. Finally,
Sanjana emerges victorious and saves Aditya’s life and their broken marriage.17

Formulas and Techniques

Colonialism
To understand the role of colonialism, we need to unpack the idea of Gothic first,
especially, the ways in which it plays out in the context of Hindi cinema. The
Gothic fixation with erecting sham medieval structures and indulging in moral
decay had a massive appeal to Indian horror writers. Abandoned manors with
dark history of cruel rulers became the Indian staple for horror tales. The Indian
 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? 101

visualization of the horror landscape is a reflection of British imagination. Even

today, dilapidated castles that harbor dark secrets are box office successes.18 The
horror Indian audiences still consume was primarily created by the colonial
presence and it influences the retelling of Indian folktale and mythology. No
matter how Indian the story is, a Gothic setting is necessary for the right mood.
Simon Hay insists that populating native landscape with British ghosts is a
method of colonization. European ghosts are used to either demonstrate “White”
rationalism versus native irrationality, or to illustrate that rationalism is not
applicable to the world outside Europe.19 Further, a colonial framework, in many
ways, legitimizes a ghost story. It works within established patterns of a horror
tale and allows the audience to sit back and enjoy the story without feeling the
stress of something actually horrifying. There are no White ghosts in Raaz, but
the eternal debate between scientific rationalism and Hindu hocus pocus is a
constant reminder of this legacy.
Raaz starts in a haunted forest. At the edge of the forest is a large mansion
where the main action takes place. There are screeching owls, gigantic bats, and
jarring, loud screams. In many ways, it is the perfect horror setup. It has
everything an Indian audience expects in a horror film: the horror is confined to
a space that effectively captures their imagination. The audience is allowed to
indulge in imaginary fears without being challenged in any way.20
Colonialism plays a major role when it comes to visualizing the horror
backdrop. Setting up the right ambience is critical to the success of a story. The
British were always very interested in ghosts. They enjoyed a good spooky story
and liked telling them too. India provided them with an excellent opportunity to
expand their horizons. On one hand, several Victorian authors, such as Bram
Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, B.M. Crocker, and R.V. Smith,
benefitted greatly from “exotic” Indian ghosts.21 On the other hand, Indians used
Victorian tropes to create a good, spine-chilling tale. To quote Ruskin Bond,
“India is full of British ghosts—the ghosts of soldiers, adventurers, engineers,
magistrates, memsahibs, their children, even their dogs.”22 For example, Warren
Hastings allegedly still haunts his residence in Kolkata, and the ghost of Major
Burton, a British officer killed during the 1857 mutiny, still haunts the Brij Raj
Bhavan Palace Hotel in Kota, Rajasthan, while in Ekbalpur, a British ghost named
Bihar regularly demands tea and cake.
The specters of the Raj still work; colonialism still evokes fear, and ghost
stories with a Victorian setting always have an appeal. In fact, it would not be
far-fetched to say that Wilkie Collins was instrumental in laying the foundation
of Hindi horror cinema. His book, The Woman in White (1859), inspired Hindi
102 Bollywood Horrors

filmmakers to visualize ghosts. The book was even made into a blockbuster
movie called Woh Kaun Thi (Who Was She, dir. Raj Khosla) in 1964. However,
long before that, the Victorian staples of horror had already entered Indian pop
culture. The horror-loving audience has always craved Gothic mansions,
mysterious haunting music and ghostly wilderness.
Most successful Hindi horror films before Raaz had all of these features.23
Raaz exploits the exact same tropes as these films. It is a continuation of a well-
established horror legacy. Vikram Bhatt is a traditional storyteller and crafts
almost all of his horror stories in the familiar Gothic mould.24 Bhatt’s other
successful film series is 1920, which is set exclusively in colonial India.25 One of
his most successful horror films, Haunted (2011), also has a Victorian backdrop
in colonial India. To sum up the Indo-Victorian link in creating a horror story, I
will use the lines of a hit song from the film, Naya Daur (New Age, 1957, dir. B.R.
Chopra): “English sur mein gaaoon main Hindustani gaana” (“In English tune I
sing my Hindustani song”). It is an Indian story, but the foundation is English.

Lustful Evil Spirit

A good setting is just the beginning. One of the main reasons behind the success
of Raaz is the character of Malini. The measure of a good horror film depends on
its depiction of evil. Horror stories permit evil spirits to tell their story, and Raaz
does a phenomenal job of giving Malini a voice. Horror may be one of the few
genres in which female subversion gets recognition.26
Female subversion as a horror trope is often neglected. Melissa Edmundson
points out that Victorian women ghost-story writers, namely Bithia Mary
Crocker and Alice Perrin, used “ghosts, native superstition, reincarnation and
curses to illustrate the nebulous relationship and often fragile détente that
existed between the colonized and the colonizer.”27 She further points out that
the independence of nautch girls disturbed the British male gaze since they
embodied many cultural contradictions, and their ghosts continued to terrify
them.28 Nautch girls were in every sense of the term “career women” and had
economic independence. Therefore, men’s relationship with women was
ambivalent but they still felt the need to humiliate and destroy them. There is a
need to demonize women who don’t need men for social and economic security,
but instead openly seek consensual sex from both married and unmarried men
and remain unapologetic about their desire.
Malini is very clearly in the nautch girl realm. She is economically independent,
doesn’t care about Aditya’s marital status or is ashamed of being the other
 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? 103

woman. Malini is hungry, driven by lust, and craves sex. She is also beautiful and
alluring, which makes her all the more sinister because a married man cannot
resist her. These are precisely the reasons why a nautch girl was feared. She is
completely unapologetic about her sexual needs and does not care how they are
satisfied. In patriarchy, male sexual appetite has a place but feminine lust is taboo
and is something to fear. Patriarchy had failed to control Malini when she was
alive; in death, Malini is a ravenous, evil spirit who now wants to consume the
body of her lover. It is her insatiable lust that becomes the driving force behind
her evildoings.
Women have been largely prevented from uninhibited, consensual sexual
relations; a woman demonstrating her sexual needs is deemed evil.29 In fact,
female desire has always been deeply problematic, and horror is the only genre
that has been able to accommodate and discuss it. Malini is attractive, does not
associate morality with sex, and, therefore, has no qualms about loving a married
man. We are also informed that she is insane. Yet in death she becomes a
manipulative evil spirit who refuses to give up the man she desires. For a
madwoman, she is a surprisingly sane and manipulative evil spirit. Malini is
everything that the patriarchy fears. She is not afraid to violate boundaries and
feels no guilt about transgressing these lines. To save the patriarchy, Malini has
to be destroyed. This is not limited to cinema; in fact, there is a precedence in
Indian folklore of women being repeatedly demonized for being lustful and
demanding what society prevents them from consuming.

Historical Ghosts
Ghosts are never created in a vacuum. They are a culmination of numerous
things: actual historical events, social oppressions, and injustice. They hold a
mirror up to the things we do not want to see and force us to confront our
deepest fears and insecurities. It is critical to look into Indian folklore because
Bhatt’s films are rich in folk symbolism.30 Here, I will use popular Bengali ghosts
to illustrate the folk symbology. Even though my examples are from Bengal, they
raise pan-Indian issues.
Bengali folklore is rich in ghost stories, and the ghosts are layered and
complex. Naturally, there is no shortage of female ghosts. Two of the most
popular are daini (witch) and petni. Their haunting hours are at twilight; they
usually haunt ponds, marshes, and bamboo groves, and sometimes they even live
in shayora or sandpaper fig trees. A petni is the spirit of a dead, married woman
who still craves fish.31 Bengali ghosts often crave food, especially fish; there are
104 Bollywood Horrors

many stories of petnis stealing fish from people returning home with their
groceries after work. Sometimes they even follow people home and demand
cooked fish.
Why this love of fish? Bengali widows were forced to live on Sattvik food, and
their diet was very restricted. Since fish plays a major role in the Bengali diet, the
loss of fish created a major gap in their dietary pattern. Their diet was limited to
grains and vegetables, and it severely lacked protein. Their main source of protein
came from moong beans and the dairy they were allowed. Widows also had to
reduce the amount of food they ate. The number of child widows in Bengal was
very large. This was mainly because of the practice of Kulinism, which allowed
Brahmin men to marry many women, often as many as ten to fifteen.32 The death
of one man, therefore, led to many widows, often child widows. These women, in
their prime, were forced into widowhood and had to live on a restricted diet.
Sattvik diet also meant very little or no spice. While the rest of the family ate
wholesome meals that included fish and meat, they were deprived of all of it. It
is only natural that the craving for fish would be a major trait of these restless
spirits.
Since Bhatt draws so much of his inspiration from folklore it is worthwhile
looking at some dominant themes in Indian folktales. In fact, there has been
plenty of interest in rediscovering Indian folk ghosts and creating stories around
them.33 The character of Malini draws many features from female folk ghosts. At
no point does anyone show any kind of compassion for her. Her father considers
her sexuality deeply problematic and tries to seek medical treatment for her. She
is repeatedly locked up in confined spaces for her defiance and no one is willing
to listen to her. Like the petni craving fish after her death, Malini too craves sex
and Aditya’s body after her death.
Ghost stories as a genre “deny the irreducibility of those traumas.”34 One has
to view ghosts as an integral part of historical memory—a memory that refuses
to fade away—and they want their pain and suffering to be acknowledged.
Ghosts are products of our failure to be humane, compassionate and kind.

The Right Techniques

Horror film is an exercise in establishing communication between our world
and the spirit world. Therefore, techniques play a vital role. To spot Indian ghosts,
one needs Indian techniques. For example, the Professor places a lemon in
Sanjana’s attic, telling her that if it turns red, there is a ghost in her house; if not,
all is safe. The lemon turns bright red, confirming her fears. This is a very
 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? 105

common folk technique for detecting spirits and curses.35 One could never
prevent what was coming from the other side. Although the other side is
unknown, it still reflects regional and religious cultural peculiarities. Therefore,
Indian horror needs Indian methods and Indian experts.
The Professor is an upper-caste male named Agni Swaroop. The name is
relevant: Agni is the god of fire, and fire dispels darkness, demons, and ghosts,
and Agni is also invoked to cure someone of madness.36 He has the knowledge
of scriptures and knows how to identify evil spirits. The fact that the character is
a professor is also important. The audience never questions his integrity; the
only one who calls him an imposter is Aditya because he is the culprit. There is
credibility in everything the Professor says. No one questions his techniques of
spirit-detection, nor his methods of communicating with the spirit. He is not a
typical exorcist whose words we doubt. We have a man educated in the western
system, not someone steeped in religious “mumbo-jumbo.” He is a man who has
studied science, but he is also an expert on Indian methods. As well, he is
uncannily correct about everything.
The Professor provides Sanjana with a portal to the spirit world. He is the link
between the two worlds and his role is to keep the moral order of our world
functioning. He tells Sanjana that, as a fellow human being, she should save
Aditya’s life because only she has the power to save him. The point about referring
to her husband as a fellow human being is important. Aditya has abused the
position of husband. While Sanjana may be Sāvitri, Aditya is no Satyavān. It is
Sanjana who has the power and is left with the responsibility of restoring the
patriarchal order that Malini desecrated through her affair with Aditya. Saving
her husband and her marriage is not a personal choice, but an altruistic venture
that Sanjana must undertake for the greater good. Her job is also to reiterate the
position of the mangalsutra that Malini has undermined. Even though Malini
destroys the Professor and possesses his body to stop Sanjana from burning her
corpse, it is only because of him that Sanjana decides to fight the spirit. The
Professor is the male voice of the established social moral order. When he sees it
being so violently desecrated, he gets actively involved in the process of restoring
it, even losing his life in the process.
The palpability of caste is almost always an underlying theme in Hindi horror
films, as well as acknowledging religion and caste boundaries. Every recent
successful Indian horror film (with the exception of 13B), especially after the
1980s, has an “expert” who knows everything about the spirit world. The experts
are often upper-caste professors37 or learned Swamis. In fact, the presence of an
expert is a critical storytelling technique. Since Raaz follows all the conventions
106 Bollywood Horrors

of horror, the expert is a major character in the film. The explanation of evil
always comes from the expert; therefore, the only explanation we are offered is
through the eyes of the upper-caste man.38

The Sex

Sex is the central theme of Raaz. Interestingly, it was never marketed as an adult
film or a film that promised titillation.39 Actually, Raaz was a family hit because
it provided the entire family with a good scare and there were no graphic adult
scenes; in fact, there are very few adult scenes in the film.40 However, it would not
be incorrect to say that the entire film is driven by the theme of lust. It is not male
lust that we fear, even though it had fatal consequences for the woman; rather it
is the lustful woman. It is losing control of our social conditioning that unnerves
us and makes Raaz a horror film. The film opens a nuanced debate on sex,
differentiating between extramarital and marital sex, and Aditya is the medium
through whom the debate is presented.
Aditya is never a victim; he chooses to have an affair with Malini, and he
chooses to cheat on his wife and lie to her. In fact, Malini even warns him before
beginning the affair that she could destroy him, to which he responds, “I wish to
be destroyed.” After Sanjana discovers Aditya’s affair, she accuses Aditya of
enjoying the favors of a whore “in her bed, their marital bed.” Why is Malini
described as a whore? Clearly, any woman sleeping with a married man and not
feeling guilty about it is a whore. Malini is branded as a mad whore who becomes
a dangerous, cunning evil spirit only because she dared to love a married man
and demand acknowledgement of that relationship. Also, it is she who actively
seduced him and started the affair.
Malini must kill herself; she gets no compassion in the story, even though she
is mentally ill and is seriously wronged by Aditya. Malini is the kind of woman
whom the patriarchy has to annihilate because she challenges its very basis.
Malini loved Aditya, even though Aditya used her for sex and backed out later;
her love for him is central to the film’s narrative. Her unrequited love for a
married man is viewed as both dangerous and fatal, and it is Sanjana the devoted
married woman who has the ability to save the situation. Aditya cannot hear
Malini’s screams nor witness any hauntings—only Sanjana can. He tries to negate
his misdeeds by calling the Professor a liar. Considering that Aditya cheated on
his wife and drove Malini to suicide, he gets off with almost no punishment
whatsoever. Instead, his broken marriage is mended because the “evil” woman’s
 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? 107

illegitimate love was successfully exorcized. Aditya is allowed to live because he

is a man, and he is the board on whom sexual territories are etched. He is the
medium, the instrument, so he has to be left unscathed.
Malini not only dared to seduce and love a married man, she even referred to
Sanjana’s mangalsutra as a dog’s collar. She insists that Aditya “is only sticking to
the bitch because she has a collar” and he could just tie the same collar on her it
would solve things. Malini does not comprehend the sanctity of marriage. To
her, symbols of marriage and marital fidelity mean nothing. She compared the
marital symbols to signs of subservience and ownership. Her defiance of
marriage and the marital space is significant; she stands as the antithesis to the
existing social order. For Malini, sex is more important than symbols. It is
consensual sex that determines the legitimacy of a relationship for her. Sanjana
truly has no other option but to completely destroy Malini and what she
represents. So, she has to save her philandering husband from a wronged spirit.
Even though Malini receives no empathy in the film from the other characters,
the audience certainly feels some compassion for her. Despite the professor
reiterating how evil she is, we cannot help but see her as a wronged victim whose
only fault was to fall in love with a married man. We are aware that she is vengeful
and vicious, but the film attempts to explain her story to us. It offers us her
perspective as well; as a result, the boundaries between good and evil are
challenged, and we are thrown into a moral conundrum that the film ultimately
refuses to solve.
Sangita Gopal points out that we are now in a phase where, for the new
romantic duo in Bollywood, conjugation is not the goal anymore; couples come
“already conjugated.”41 In early cinema, the focus was on the romantic journey
and the end result was sex. Gopal therefore believes that the concerns of the
filmmaker have now shifted. In fact, she uses Bhatt’s 1920 and Raaz to elaborate
this idea. In both films, the couple is already married; as a result, their romantic
journey is of no consequence to us. We have moved beyond the romance and are
now looking at sexually experienced couples to complicate the narrative.
In principle, I agree with Gopal, especially her observations on Raaz. However,
sex has always been complicated in horror films. Even the Ramsay films, which
Gopal dismisses, have convoluted “conjugating” issues, namely sex with the
Shaitaan,42 premarital sex and extramarital relations. One of the main functions
of horror films has always been to subvert sexual morality.43 It is only natural
that the process of “conjugation” would play out completely differently in horror
films. Very often, the mechanism used for breaking norms is the phenomenon of
possession. This allows horror films to cross limits that would otherwise be
108 Bollywood Horrors

impossible in mainstream cinema. Only in a horror film would Sāvitri want to

divorce Satyavān, where Satyavān is the actual villain, the serpent is Malini, and
the Professor is Yama who has to plead with Sāvitri to restore the order.

Rewriting the Myth

The protagonist of the film is Sanjana. She is a modern-day Sāvitri who rescues
her dishonest, unfaithful Satyavān from an evil spirit. In the actual myth, Sāvitri
knew her fate but still married Satyavān because she loved him. When Satyavān
dies of a snakebite as fated, she chases Yama, the god of death, and tricks him into
returning Satyavān’s life. Sāvitri had gone against her father’s will and had chosen
to marry Satyavān for love. Sāvitri’s love is extremely powerful, a love that can
defeat death. Similarly, Sanjana turns out to be Aditya’s amulet and shields him
from Malini’s powerful spirit. To make Aditya vulnerable, it becomes essential
for Malini to ensure that the amulet is disarmed. The moment Sanjana makes the
decision to leave him, Malini takes Sanjana’s form and causes a car accident that
nearly kills Aditya. He only lives because Sanjana decides to save him. Aditya is
completely at the mercy of Sanjana. The question is why Sanjana chooses to save
Aditya after she discovers his Raaz, or secret.
It is important to make a distinction between the different types of love
explored in the film. Sanjana’s love for Aditya has waned. In the beginning of the
film, she wants a divorce. Aditya and Sanjana have stopped communicating, they
have grown apart, and later we learn that Aditya has become a philandering
spineless liar who does not care for his wife. Aditya’s love for Sanjana is both
selfish and abusive; he uses Malini to satisfy his lust and continues to mislead her
until it is too late. Therefore, it is only Sanjana’s love and virtue that matter here;
her love is sanctioned through marriage and validated by symbols, particularly,
the mangalsutra. Connected to both of the female characters is the idea of sexual
purity. Even though they both have sex with the same man, Sanjana is sexually
pure because it is a part of her strīdharma.44 Sanjana has fulfilled her role as a
wife; she has not slept with any other man and has not even entertained the
thought of anyone other than her husband. Even though he ignores her and
dismisses her concerns, she still remains loyal to him. She is the pativrata stree
(the loyal wife) whose sexuality is operational only in the marital context.
Malini, on the other hand, violates the sacred marital space. She is driven by
lust; she has sex to satisfy herself and does not care where she gets her satisfaction.
She enters the forbidden territory, dares to love someone who is “unavailable,”
 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? 109

insults the institution of marriage, commits suicide with the intention of

breaking Aditya’s marriage, fights back as an evil spirit to win back her man, and
is destroyed because she tries to defy the fundamentals of strīdharma. It is only
because of strīdharma that Sanjana’s broken love can fight Malini’s obsessive,
intense love. Here, love per se is not important but the source is what matters.
The source is where the power of love lies; it is in the wife’s love for her husband,
a love that, as the Professor mentions, “even gods are afraid of.” Aditya deserves
to die because he was the one transgressing the boundaries, and death is often
viewed as evil and not just as punishment for evil.45 So, Aditya coming so close
to death is also an acknowledgement that he did something evil.
Both female characters are extremely strong, and Aditya is moulded repeatedly
to ultimately comment on women’s position in the patriarchy. Even though I
have noted that Raaz is about the restoration of the patriarchy, oddly enough
Aditya has no agency in the film. Aditya simply allows the women to use their
agency on him and to etch the borders of sexual morality and argue over the
boundaries of strīdharma. Yet, we cannot deny the Western(ness) of Raaz; there
are scenes that are copied directly from What Lies Beneath, but I will still
maintain that Raaz is definitely an Indian story. I have already mentioned that
the modern-day Sāvitri and Satyavān have changed drastically. Satyavān is an
adulterer, liar, and coward. Sāvitri wants a divorce, she is tired of her endless
fights with Satyavān and she refuses to forgive his infidelity until his life is in
danger.

Concluding the Raaz

Sudhir Kakkar describes Hindi films “as a regressive haven for a vast number of
people.”46 This view of the Indian viewer and Hindi cinema is not uncommon.
As Ajay Gehlawat points out, the Indian viewer is like “a child to whom the
national cinema panders.”47 Indian viewers are considered incapable of watching
anything that is slightly different and beyond their realm of morality. Bollywood
filmmakers also share this view and see the Bollywood audience as simple, naïve,
unintelligent and incapable of understanding anything complicated.48 This
deeply problematic view badly affected the horror genre in the past. Infantilizing
the audience influences the way critics review Hindi cinema. This attitude had
also resulted in limited scholarship on Hindi horror films. The academic interest
in horror cinema is recent and horror is finally becoming a popular mainstream
genre in Bollywood.
110 Bollywood Horrors

Valentina Vitali argues that the 1980s often reflected mass stress and that
found an outlet in horror films. Indira Gandhi created a political environment
that nurtured the growth of horror films. From the emergency to her assassination
leading to the Sikh genocide, these stressful times gave rise to horror.49 Vitali
further contends that horror films in India are a product of this political turmoil
and that the Ramsay brothers’ monster flicks were essential in those turbulent
times because they represented the clash between modernity and religion. The
1980s saw Indira Gandhi’s attacks on the Golden Temple followed by her
assassination and the Sikh riots, as well as the rise of communal parties and
Hindu extremism. Ramsay films were about the loss of this known world and the
coming of a new era.
Vitali also adds that horror films ended in the 1990s because their whole
purpose was to satisfy the subconscious conflict in the people’s minds. India
needed horror films to deal with the radical changes in the socio-political
scenario.50 In fact, scholars such as Brigid Cherry maintain that horror films are
a way to express anxiety toward changing times, preserving horrifying memories,
and Vitali seems to be on the same page as her.51 While Vitali raises some
excellent points, horror films did not end with the 1990s. True, the Ramsay
brothers started failing in the early 1990s but the genre had taken on a very
different form. The 1990s saw the peak of these low-budget flicks and the year
2000 saw horror films becoming mainstream again with the success of Vikram
Bhatt’s Raaz and Ram Gopal Verma’s Bhoot.52
I want to reiterate that, while there is merit in looking at political backdrop
while studying the horror genre, it is not adequate. Indian horror has to be
unfolded through mythology and mythical figures, historical memories that are
not recorded, evolution of various thought ferments, conscious processes of
socio-economic marginalization, shifting notions of agency and anxieties of
sexual transgressions. Discussion on horror requires an acknowledgement of all
these facets and the ways in which they manifest in our psyche.
Bollywood horror is an extension of Indian history, religious beliefs, aesthetics,
and social changes. While there is merit in analyzing the reasons behind the rise
of horror, but it is equally important to study the content itself. Raaz effortlessly
subverts a popular myth, convolutes existing moral codes and gives evil a
nuanced voice. Bhatt successfully lures us with familiar Gothic settings to tell us
a quintessential Indian tale of adultery and marital fidelity. He uses horror tale to
provide us with a framework of ideological contradictions. Gone are the days of
unidimensional monsters, instead, we meet a powerful woman who refuses to
remain silent even after her death. Bhatt also makes sure that the audience feels
 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? 111

disdain for Aditya (Satyavān) and some resentment at patriarchy that chooses to
keep him alive.
Hay maintains that ghosts are “historicized, and therefore politicized, reading
of the genre of the ghost story, reading ghosts for the history and politics of
which they are sedimented residue.”53 Bhatt wants to question the Hindu sanctity
of marriage and monogamous relationships. He shows us that rules like fidelity
are only applicable to women and transgression can have fatal consequences. He
further shows us that the burden of preserving a marriage falls on the woman,
even though she has not done anything to disturb it. She suffers the consequences
of her husband’s misdemeanors and is also made to stay in the marriage and
make it work.
Bhatt wants the audience to think about the oppressiveness of Hindu
marriages, and the pressure it puts on the woman. All Sanjana wanted in the
beginning of the film was a divorce, instead, she has to go through depths of hell
to rescue her philandering husband. Bhatt also makes it a point to mention that
symbols like the mangalsutra are some of the methods that patriarchy employs
to subjugate women. He wants us to question the symbolism behind these
mundane objects.
We also witness a clash between monogamous marriage and extramarital sex.
Bhatt is clearly trying to engage us in a dialogue between established ethical
codes versus human instincts and passion. The film may have ended with the
restoration of the old code, but we know that the code is shaken. The professor is
sacrificed, Satyavān has lost all agency and is now fully dependent on Sāvitri, and
Malini has punctured the sanctity of monogamous marriages.
Bhatt has always maintained that his films are educated. The critical dismissal
of his films doesn’t bother him as such, because he feels they pander too much to
the existing elitist views on Hindi cinema. He also feels that the urban Indian
audience is unaware of folklore and ghost stories. As he says, “I love history, I
study a lot of folklore. No matter what critics say, my stories are Indian. Sure, I
watch a lot of horror films in other languages and get inspired, but the soul of my
films is purely Indian.”54
112
 Part Three

Cultural Horror

113
114
 6

Cultural Horror in Dev: Man Is

the Cruelest Animal
Ellen Goldberg

Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long

possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence,
drenched it often with human blood, destroyed civilizations and sent whole
nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society
would be far more advanced than it is now.
Swami Vivekananda

We have exceeded the achievement of Nazi terror, Bosnian atrocities, and our
own Partition violence—if not in numbers or scale then in the intensity of
torture, the sheer opulence and exuberance in forms of cruelty. It is as if the
most gruesome elements from all of the annals of mass destruction have pulled
together to form a whole that is Gujarat today.
Tanika Sarkar

Introduction: Background on the History of Communalism1

As we see in this collection of essays, horror can be construed in various ways,

and while Dev (2004) is not strictly considered among the standardized Hindi
formula horror genre films, it is director Govind Nihalani’s extremely bold and
graphic attempt to capture the “real-life” horror of recurring Hindu-Muslim
communal violence. As Dev shows, a line has been crossed. The horror enacted
during communal riots has reached a point of unspeakable brutality reminiscent
of the most catastrophic atrocities committed in modern twentieth and twenty-
first century history. Yet, the Hindu-Muslim communal expression of killing,
rape, looting, arson, and barbarism bears witness to a particular history,

115
116 Bollywood Horrors

experience, and compulsion of its very own making. Thus, we must consider the
specificity of the local Indian context, that is to say, the unresolved history of
colonization, decolonization, modernity, and Partition in more detail.
We also need to find new words and ways, as Tanika Sarkar suggests, to
describe the horrors perpetrated. Sarkar argues, regarding the events in Gujarat
that inspired Dev:

A serious inadequacy plagues our known vocabularies of horror. Words like

communal violence or carnage or massacre have been over used to describe far
too many situations whose horror is minimal, even relatively “innocent”
compared to the last four months in Gujarat.2

The term “cultural horror” that I have chosen is perhaps also inadequate by
Sarkar’s standards, but through art (e.g., film, literature, theater, dance, music,
and so on) it is sometimes possible to find cathartic ways to express trauma and
mediate the unspeakable.
My goal in this chapter is to try to make sense of the horror depicted in Dev. I
apply insights from Frantz Fanon on understanding colonialism, Hannah Arendt
on the politics of evil, and Sigmund Freud on theories of repression. I also look at
Indian film scholar Bhaskar Sarkar’s work on trauma and cinematic mourning,
and situate his scholarship on Partition films within the framework of what I call
“cultural horror” to reiterate how the memories and ghosts of Partition continue
to haunt the Indian nation. To begin, I provide some background on various
positions vis-à-vis communalism that I hope will help explain the rise of Hindu
nationalism and its role in contemporary communal riots such as those depicted
in Dev.
Tanika Sarkar claims there is something “new” about the communal riots that
took place in Gujarat, India in 2002. She claims that for the first time we hear
explicit references to the Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu State—a concept conceived in
1923 by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) in his work Hindutva: Who is
a Hindu? Savarkar was a highly educated, nationalist freedom fighter who
drafted an extreme racist and separatist ideology while in prison in Ratnagiri,
claiming India is (and should be) the Hindu Homeland. He politicized religion
and argued that any members of society who hold what is perceived to be foreign
religious or cultural affiliations, such as Muslims, could not be considered Indian
in his territorialized dream of India as the Hindu holy land or “punyabhumi.”3
For Savarkar, the designation “Hindu” refers to a common race. As such,
“Hindutva” is an emphatically geographical, political, ethnic, and cultural
designation defined much more broadly than simply religion—especially since
 Cultural Horror in Dev 117

Hindu religion has no apparent “unity or uniformity,” and no single, unanimously

agreed on set of core beliefs, institutions, or scriptures analogous to Jewish,
Christian, or Muslim monotheism.4 As Savarkar puts it, Hinduism, solely as a
religious designation, is “derivative” and comprises only a “fraction” of what is
intended by the more inclusive term “Hindutva” (Hindu-ness).5
The rhetoric that Savarkar and other Hindutva leaders used to construct the
origin myth of “common blood” that is shared by those belonging to a common
Hindu race, culture, and nationality not only excludes Muslims (as well as
Christians, secularists, Communists, and Westerners), it also privileges Hindus
in India and normalizes Hindu-Muslim communalism based on relations of
fear, suspicion, and hatred.6 We see the effects of Savarkar’s Hindutva ideology
throughout Dev. For example, after Arman’s death, Tej Khosla (Om Puri)
embraces Hindutva rhetoric and portrays Muslims as a threat under the banner
of the Hindu collective. Similarly, suspicion of Muslims has become routine, as
we see when Dev Pratap Singh (Amitabh Bachchan) interrogates local Muslim
leaders or when Farhaan Ali (Fardeen Khan) is searched on the train. Also,
extreme retaliatory practices by Hindus are made to appear justified, such as
when mob rioting occurs after the Hindu temple bomb blast. And, Chief Minister
Bhandarker (Amrish Puri) insists that the right of citizenship belongs to Hindus
only. In other words, Hindutva or Hindu-ness as a response and a weapon against
perceived Hindu vulnerability is portrayed as normative in Dev.
But of course, the history of Hindu nationalism is even more complex.
Broadly speaking, Indians essentially internalized contradictory European views
of India. On the one hand, the British maintained that Indians were less than
human. On the other hand, early Orientalists claimed India was the cradle of
human civilization and a place of profound spiritual wisdom (i.e., the Vedas).
These paradoxical views bequeathed India with an extraordinary spiritual
identity while at the same time dehumanizing, shaming, and denying Indians
status, agency, and personhood in their own country. The architects of Hindutva
or Hindu nationalism aligned more closely with the Orientalist idea that India
was once great and attributed India’s cultural and social deterioration to foreign
invasion. This sets the stage for Muslim “othering” as we will see.
It is also important to also bear in mind that the voice of right-wing politics
in modern India is not a monolithic block. Nor is it correct to think of Hindu
nationalism as a fringe or marginal movement. It has become mainstream
(which in itself can be seen as an instance of cultural horror). Contributors to
the rise of Hindu nationalism are diverse, starting with the nineteenth century
Bengali author Bankimchandra Cat. t. opādhyāy (1838–94) who wrote a visionary
118 Bollywood Horrors

historical fiction about Hindu sam . nyāsins (Nāgas or ascetic warriors) mounting
a rebellion against British rule.
In his 1882 novel Anandamath (Monastery of Bliss), Bankimchandra imagines
Hindu nationalism at a time when such an idea seemed unimaginable.7 What is of
critical importance to our current discussion is how Bankimchandra envisions a
pure, pre-Islamic, Hindu India, thereby offering an alternative non-secular vision
of the nation. His militant and highly patriotic vision of India as “nation” and
“mother” anticipated (and set the stage for) the Hindu, upper caste, male
supremacist Hindutva agenda.8 As Sarkar writes, Bankimchandra “was the first
Hindu nationalist to create a powerful image of an apocalyptic war against
Muslims and project it as a redemptive mission, an achievement intended to
endow the Hindu with political energies that he had, all along, enviously associated
with Islam.”9 These messages, and the anti-colonial male subject Bankimchandra
imagined, are still invoked by Hindu revivalists, as his work went on to inspire
political terrorist activity and the ideas of a Hindu national awakening, self-rule,
and the fight for freedom from British colonial power. Echoes of this legacy are
felt throughout Dev in the various voices of Hindutva portrayed on screen.
Other pioneers of Hindu nationalism include Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar
(“Guruji,”10 1906–75), a Marathi (Karhada) Brahmin who became the second
leader (sarsanghchalak) of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) shortly after
the death of its founder Keshav Baliram Hedgewar’s (“Doctorji,” 1889–1940).
Golwalkar expanded the RSS and built it into a popular pan-Indian organization
to promote Hindutva. We see at least three strategies in Golwalkar’s ethnic
nationalism that are germane to the rise of communalism and evident in Dev.
One strategy is to create a selective history by “othering.” Golwalkar posits a
politics of religious opposition emphasizing the Hindu myth of tolerance,
victimhood, and stigmatization, on the one hand, while creating a one-dimensional
stereotype of Muslims as intolerant fanatics and terrorists, on the other hand.11 As
Romila Thapar maintains, this view resonates broadly with early Orientalist
versions of Indian religious history where Muslims are depicted not only as
foreigners but also as aggressive enemy invaders.12 This binary approach, referred
to by Sumit Sarkar as “the theme of medieval Muslim tyranny,”13 was reified
through Orientalist narratives and the novels of Bankimchandra and, furthermore,
it acts to legitimate any and all violence that Hindus perpetrate against Muslims,
including the more recent violence that was suffered during the Gujarat riots in
2002 and in Dev’s finale.
Against this ideological backdrop, riots are not seen as pogroms (that is to say,
conscious or planned attacks), but, rather, as legitimate and justifiable methods
 Cultural Horror in Dev 119

for retaliation and retribution against long-term Muslim violence perpetrated

against vulnerable Hindus. As Dibyesh Anand writes, “the state is absolved of all
responsibility: after all, what can it do when the entire Hindu society lashes out
in hurt caused by an arrogant expansionary minority?”14 In Dev, we see this so
clearly when Chief Minister Bhandarker justifies and supports Mangal Rao and
the Hindu mob’s impassioned need to retaliate after the bomb blast at the Hindu
mandir.
Golwalkar also seems perfectly aware of the interplay between social formation
(i.e., nation-building) and mythmaking.15 Thus, another strategy in Golwalkar’s
tactics to fortify the RSS’s Hindu nationalist agenda is the myth of Hindu unity
(strength and belonging) based on race, not religion.16 Golwalkar gained popular
support for the RSS not only by promoting the idea of Hindu unity and
indigeneity, but also by establishing a pervasive grassroots network of local cadres
and Hindu-only social welfare strategies and philanthropic initiatives, including
charities, hospitals, disaster relief funds, drinking water initiatives, education
programs, and so on. For example, in 1947 the RSS set up exclusive Hindu-only
hospitals and charities. Through these types of direct social work activities
building on the myth of Hindu unity and belonging, the RSS gradually gained
respect in local communities.
In Dev, Ali Khan (Pramod Moutho) recounts a story in flashbacks that reflects
his deeply personal transformation based on the compassion he received from
Hindus during a riot. We also see Dev’s wife, Dr. Bharati Singh (herself a victim
of terrorism and loss), nurturing and administering to the victims of communal
violence on both sides of the Hindu-Muslim divide. These narrative portraits of
secular and inclusive charity stand in stark contrast to the Hindu-only charities
administered by the RSS under Golwalkar.
Golwalkar railed vehemently against the policies of secular politics, and the
religious pluralism of M.K. Gandhi (1869–1948) and the Indian National
Congress (INC ), who openly opposed Hindu nationalism and embraced an
Indian national identity that included all religious, ethnic, caste, and linguistic
communities (symbolized in the film by the roles of Dev, Bharati, and Ali Khan).
Rather, the RSS was established in direct opposition to the INC to promote
India as an all-Hindu nation, with the myth of Hindu unity remaining an
essential RSS identity marker especially when facing a perceived (real or
imagined) Muslim threat. This is the ideal promoted by Tej, Bhandarker, and
Mangal Rao throughout the film.
A third strategy used not only by Golwalkar but also by other RSS leaders,
and which is especially relevant to the film, is the undermining and erosion of
120 Bollywood Horrors

the Indian Constitution. By law, India recognizes the human rights of all its
citizens. Yet, under the RSS , and more recently the authoritarian government of
the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party or Hindu People’s Party), attacks against secular-
democracy and constitutional law in the name of a populist ethnic democracy or
Hindu majority are eroding the freedoms and rights of minorities. Prior to the
1980s, Hindu nationalists (e.g., Hindu Mahasabha) had no seats in government,
but under the RSS and BJP, Hindu nationalism has gained a much stronger
political voice with broad mainstream appeal and growing access to the pan-
Indian political apparatus. By 1989, the BJP had won eighty-five seats in
Parliament. One reason credited for their rise is the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 under
the rule of Indira Gandhi. Gandhi’s “state of emergency” and the INC ’s rampant
political corruption led to the eventual loss of Congress seats and opened the
door to the rise of the BJP under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–
2018). Under Rajiv Gandhi (1944–91), Congress and its hegemony collapsed.
This ushered in a new type of government that was no longer based on the INC ’s
Nehruvian secular-socialist ideals and system of patronage for votes, but, rather,
one that is based on growing membership in Hindu national identity politics.17
During Vajpayee’s third term in office from 1999 to 2004, two major political
events set off campaigns of communal violence that threatened India’s tradition
of secularism based on the rule of law. On December 6, 1992, the Ram
Janmabhoomi Mandir Movement led by Lal Krishna Advani (b. 1927) demolished
the Babri Mosque built in 1528 in Ayodhya in an attempt to restore the glory of
a Hindu temple considered by many nationalists to be the site of Lord Rāma’s
birthplace. A rath yatra (chariot procession) from Somnath to Ayodhya was
organized with the explicit intention of storming the mosque and dismantling it
stone by stone.
Two things are significant about this event that pertain to our analysis of Dev.
First, latent hatred and anger was unleashed that resulted in killing an estimated
1,700 and injuring 5,500 (mainly Muslims) across India over the next four
months. Second, the Babri mosque is an iconic symbol of Moghul rule and
power under Babar. Razing the mosque was thus a political act (as opposed to a
religious act) that announced the (symbolic) reversal of foreign power and
tyranny in India, as well as the reversal of (the myth of) Hindu victimhood
through centuries of invasion and conquest. As such, it stands as a sign of an
“awakened Hindu nation” and the consolidation of nationalist and majoritarian
movements across India.18
The second incident that bolstered the BJP ’s influence is the Godhra train
riots in 2002 during Narendra Modi’s tenure as Chief Minister of Gujarat. There
 Cultural Horror in Dev 121

are various theories and discussions as to why this particular anti-Muslim riot
happened, including lack of economic growth, retaliation against Congress’s
proposed affirmative action regulations, protest against preferential treatment
for minorities and SEBC (Socially and Educationally Backward Castes),
economic competition, inequality, insecurity, and revenge for the destruction of
the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya.19 But, what is perhaps more germane to our
analysis of Dev is the fact that the Gurjarat riots were not random or spontaneous,
they were organized. Hindu rioters had access to names and addresses of
Muslims shops and homes and they came prepared to strike. As such, we can no
longer refer to these incidents as “riots”—they are something much more sinister
and horrendous, as Sarkar says.20 Although the cultural horror portrayed in Dev
is only a fictional rendering of contemporary communal violence, it nevertheless
shows how communalism is manipulated and abetted by local politicians and
police (e.g., Latif (Ehsan Khan), Tej, Mangal Rao (Milind Gunaji), and Chief
Minister Bandarker), how it escalates, and how it is planned. Riots, as we see in
Dev, are also perpetrated by conditions other than conflict between religious
communities to such an extent that it is often difficult to claim the communal
conflict narrative is in fact communalism. As David Ludden writes, “the history
of communalism cannot be reduced to the activity or ideology of any one group
or one set of social, cultural, or political forces.”21
Dev shows us how India’s commitment to secular democracy and the cultural
practices of religious pluralism is eroding. Hindu nationalists and their often
militant exclusionist politics regard secular-democracy as a foreign or alien
system. Under the allure of Hindutva, or any militant right-wing Hindu rhetoric,
for that matter, sanatana dharma is considered the only “true secularism.”22
Muslims are being excluded, or “crushed” to use Farhaan’s reference, from the
body politic under Hindutva rhetoric, and planned riots, such as we see in Gujarat
and Dev, are sanctioned by government officials. Citizenship and full human
rights are reserved for Hindus only, since majoritarian nationalism sees India as
a Hindu-identified nation. As Chief Minister Bhandarker says, “if Hindus in our
own country . . .” Thus, Hindu nationalism’s task is no longer the protection of all
India’s citizens, but, rather, Hindu protectionism and the legitimation of explicit
forms of revenge against minority Muslims for any and all historical wrongdoing,
even to the point of organized murder, as we see in Gujarat and Dev. As Tej says,
“we must root them [Muslims] out and kill them in the streets like dogs.” Or, as
Narendra Modi’s election campaign slogan said, “jo Hindu hit ki baat karega,
wohi desh par raj karega” (only one/he who promotes Hindu interests will rule
the country).
122 Bollywood Horrors

Cultural Horror

In fact, I coined the term “art-horror” just to make sure that people didn’t think I
was talking about the Holocaust, or the horrors of the 20th [and 21st] century . . .
Noël Carroll
It is important to explain the rationale for including Dev in a book titled
Bollywood Horrors, especially since Dev is not considered a horror film in the
strict sense of the term. In this section, I look to American philosopher Noël
Carroll who, in attempting to understand and articulate the form and structure
of the horror genre, distinguishes “art-horror” from what he calls “natural horror”
(e.g., climate change, the Holocaust, terrorism, and so on). Essentially, he implies
that although one might be horrified by murder, murder as a stand-alone act is
not a criterion for art-horror. Examples of art-horror might be a film about a
murder that takes place in a haunted house, or murderers who also happen to be
creepy-crawling alien monsters made of green slime. So, then, what is Dev? How
do we classify cinematic horror when the bloodthirsty monsters (or “horrible
demons,” as Vivekananda says) are ordinary human beings?
I propose a new category: cultural horror, which can be considered an
extension of Carroll’s natural horror, but differs somewhat as it depicts, translates,
and represents acts of cultural violence through an artistic medium such as film
(literature, art, music, theater, dance, etc.). Although cultural horror displays
elements of Carroll’s art-horror classification such as “departure from the
normal,” it omits other criterion such as “impure monsters.”23 The consideration
for making these distinctions is based on a work of art’s ability to intentionally
provoke the negative affect (feeling, emotion) of horror (or disgust) and terror
(also referred to in Indian aesthetic theory as bībhatsa and bhayānaka rasa).24
If one critical feature of the horror genre is the ability of a film or work of art
to create the affect of horror, as Carroll claims, then by this definition Dev fits
into or even extends the horror genre’s semantic range. Many of the “positive
human” characters portrayed in Dev, as we will see, trigger, mirror, reflect, and
identify with emotions that fall well within the rubric of Carroll’s definition.25
The events portrayed in Dev cause the audience, as well as Dev, the film’s main
protagonist, to converge in a set of shared feelings. Like Dev, we “shudder” and
feel “nausea,” “disgust,” and “loathing” when Mangal Rao and Tej retaliate against
the Muslim community at the climax of the film. We “shrink” and “recoil” from
watching this graphically disturbing scene because it “frightens,” “shocks,” and
“revolts” us. Dev’s emotional response, captured beautifully in a close-up shot of
Amitabh Bachchan, instructs the audience how to react appropriately. Our
 Cultural Horror in Dev 123

emotions mirror the affective contours of Dev’s on-screen visceral reactions to

the cinematic events of cultural horror portrayed on the big screen. As Carroll
says, in horror the positive characters in the film show us “how to react.”26
Not only do we confront these feelings, we also experience what Joseph Grixti
refers to as “bone chilling” events on the big screen. We are aware something
“ghoulish” is taking place.27 By evoking such powerful affects in the audience and
the protagonists in the film, Dev elicits emotions akin to Carroll’s art-horror. The
affective responses that the audience and the film’s protagonists share are
consistent with many of the essential affective markers outlined in Carroll’s
definition of the art-horror genre. Thus, as far as I can see, what distinguishes art
horror from cultural (or natural) horror is not the depth or presence of the horror
affect itself, but the degree of intentional realism portrayed.
For obvious reasons, Dev does not fit all of the presumed conventions and
categories of the theoretically regimented art horror genre. Nor does Dev follow,
in the strict sense, Carroll’s extensive definition or blueprint even though similar
features appear. That is to say, we do not encounter cliché monsters, demonic
spirit possession, spooky ghosts, werewolves, curses, poltergeists, jump scares, or
haunted houses, though we certainly experience a haunting quality in Dev that I
will explain in more detail later in the chapter.
Carroll also concedes that horror is “not defined by the presence of monsters.”28
We see monsters in various genres including fairy tales and science fiction. What
is considered one of the essential components or preconditions of the horror
genre is the presence of the “abnormal” or, to put it another way, “a disturbance to
the normal.”29 The events that unfold in Dev depict this clearly through the human
capacity for evil, and it is precisely the film’s portrayal of the “abnormal” that gives
rise to the horror affect, as well as feelings of frustration, terror, and disgust that
are central to Carroll’s definition. He writes, “horror can be conceptualized as a
symbolic defense of a culture’s standards of normality: the genre employs the
abnormal, only for showing it vanquished by the forces of the normal. The
abnormal is allowed center stage solely as a foil to the cultural order, which will
ultimately be vindicated by the end of the fiction.”30
Instead, the critical issue we find with cultural horror, and also with more
recent art horror, is that the so-called “abnormal” is not (always) vindicated at the
end of the film.31 What horrifies us in Dev is not only the symbolic abrogation of
normality, but how the normality of daily life is bracketed or suspended to such
an extent that planned acts of cultural horror are executed by local government
officials including the police, as if these acts of violence were the law of the land.
The film’s antagonists, who violate what Carroll refers to as “standing cultural
124 Bollywood Horrors

categories,” terrify us because their behavior signals a radical breakdown of

morality and an existential threat to secularism.32
Dev’s depiction of cultural horror, or the “abnormal” as Carroll calls it, is not a
mere fiction—it is all too real. In the film, the protagonists’ hoped for defeat
against the “abnormal” takes the form of a constitutional appeal to the Supreme
Court of India. The protagonists fight abnormal with normal, surreality with
reality, and chaos with order. Sadly, as we know, progressive ideological and
socio-political rhetoric in film does not guarantee real-life manifestations of
social evil will be vanquished. But what we do know for certain is that Hindi
films shift perceptions in the national imagination; in the case of Dev, for the
purpose of illuminating the critical importance of ongoing commitment to
secular democracy.
To conclude, I think it is important to once again identify that in art (e.g., film,
literature, theater, dance, music, etc.) there are different types of horror. Introducing
the designation “cultural horror” suggests a new category and a subtle distinction
that I invite others to use and/or debate. In this case study, Dev presents a fictional
account of reality that arouses violent, fearful, and profoundly disturbing emotions
that are, without a doubt, horrifying. Dev exposes, in an undisguised cinematic
account, a horror that haunts the Indian nation. As such, it offers a complex (albeit
fictional) narrative that portrays horror perhaps at its most tacit level: reality. The
audience feels and experiences the horror (affect) simultaneously along with the
protagonists, and they know that the chilling events portrayed on (and off ) screen
could happen again at any time. The horror that director Nihalani and screenwriter
Meenakshi Sharma33 make abundantly clear in Dev is that the fragile normalcy of
secular democracy and the constitutional promise of protection and individual
human rights is eroding. In its place is a nauseatingly graphic and horrific
depiction of the human capacity for evil.

Film Synopsis of Dev

Dev tells the story of Hindu-Muslim communal violence. The audience

participates in the narrative through the eyes of Joint Commissioner of Police
Dev Pratap Singh, who embodies the voice of rational-secular discourse and
throughout the film defends the constitutional rights of religious pluralism. His
character provides the emotional axis for the audience, and his heroic sense of
duty (dharma) and his fight against the “politicization and communalization of
the Indian police,” to use Nihalani’s own words, structures the film’s overall plot.34
 Cultural Horror in Dev 125

We meet Dev in the film’s opening scene, through a series of black and white
flashbacks, when he is called before a police tribunal to testify why he shot a
Muslim student during a campus protest. When we meet Dev again several years
later in the Technicolor present, he is standing in his well-appointed Mumbai
apartment performing pūjā with his wife, Dr. Bharati Singh (Rati Agnihotri), to
the elephant-headed god Gan. eśa and a picture of Dev’s young son Armaan who,
we later learn through a flashback, was shot and killed by Muslim terrorists when
he was eight years old. However, at no point in the film does Dev, as a survivor of
trauma, allow his grief to obscure his reason or sense of duty (dharma). I use the
term dharma in this synopsis because, as we will see, Dev conceptualizes his
understanding of civic responsibility not only in terms of the Indian constitution,
but also in terms of the philosophy of the Bhagavad Gītā
Dev is a character driven film. In the next scene, we are introduced to Ali
Khan and his son Farhaan Ali in their Noor Manzil apartment complex where
much of the film is shot. As the camera zooms in, Ali and Farhaan discuss (and
also disagree on) the state of minority communities in India. Ali remains
sympathetic to his country’s need to monitor and curtail militancy in the name
of national security, whereas, Farhaan, having witnessed Muslims in India being
systematically disenfranchised and the tenets of non-violence (ahim . sa) that
once fortified the so-called fathers of modern India eroding, expresses disillusion
with his father’s generation and their outmoded rhetoric. On the train home
from law school, Farhaan was searched by police simply because he was seen
carrying a letter written in Urdu. Not only is his father’s generation’s philosophy
meaningless, symbolized by photos hanging over Ali’s desk of M.K. Gandhi
(1869–1948), Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
(1890–1988), Farhaan argues that it has all but been replaced by Hindu national
rhetoric. As he says, “Muslims are being crushed only to remind them who this
country really belongs to.” In this scene we are also introduced to Aaliya (Kareena
Kapoor), a vibrant and modern young Muslim woman who we learn is in love
with Farhaan.
In the next scene, we meet the film’s antagonist Tejinder (“Tej”) Khosla who,
as Special Commissioner and Dev’s boss, presents the perfect foil to Dev. Tej is
Dev’s best friend. He was also very close to Dev’s son Armaan and was present
the day he was killed. However, unlike Dev and Bharati, Tej has not been able to
forgive Armaan’s death at the hands of Muslim terrorists and has turned to
Hindu nationalism to deal with his grief and need for revenge. In a pivotal
moment in the film Tej openly declares that his religion or “gītā,” as he calls it, is
“Shakti”—defined by Tej as “the religion of power to annihilate enemies of the
126 Bollywood Horrors

nation.” This is the first time in the film that the rhetoric of Hindutva (Hindu-
ness) is made explicit.
What becomes abundantly clear at this point in the narrative is the extent to
which Dev’s plot is driven by ideologically fractured (male) relationships. As
William Elison et  al. show in their analysis of Amar Akbar Anthony, the
“fracturing of the family and the trauma that ensues is a common theme in
Indian film and literature.”35 The cinematic trope of fracture, as we will see,
harkens back in part to the partitioning of India when millions of people were
displaced and/or killed. As Elison says, “the brokenness of families [in Indian
film] can indeed be read against Partition.”36 Thus, the breakdown of family
relations and friendships also reflects complex and conflicting responses to
personal and collective history.
Next day at the police station, Dev receives crucial information that suspected
terrorist Karim Khan will be in Noor Manzil at midnight. The police prepare an
ambush. However, while apprehending Khan, his wife and young son are
accidentally shot and killed. The film’s storyline is quite clear that police were
apprehending a terrorist who resisted arrest, but news of Khan and his family’s
death is manipulated by a crafty local Muslim politician named Latif who
escalates communal tension and turns the Khan family into martyrs.
At a meeting of the Noor Manzil residents, Latif delivers an impassioned
speech punctuated with Hitler-like mannerisms that sends the already saddened
Muslim community spiraling into rage. He twists the community’s loss into an
indictment of police brutality, claiming innocent (minority) Muslims are being
slaughtered.37 He also cleverly manipulates the situation for his own petty
political ends or, as Dev identifies further on in the film, he treats his community
“merely as a pawn in vote bank haggling.” In the name of the martyrs, Latif goads
the local Muslim community into staging a demonstration. Ali accepts the role
of leader on the condition that the rally follow Gandhian principles of nonviolent
protest (ahims.a). However, Latif ’s gang intentionally incite the police, and Ali is
accidentally shot and killed by one of Dev’s policemen. Ali’s death signals the
end of an era.
Farhaan is grief stricken over his father’s death. Seeking revenge, he turns to
Latiff who sends him to a terrorist training camp. Latiff tests Farhaan’s loyalty,
first, by sending him on a failed mission to assassinate Dev, and then later asks
him to deliver a package to the Gan. eśa Mandir. Unbeknownst to Farhaan, his
motorcycle has been rigged with explosives. As crowds of Hindus enter the
mandir to celebrate a religious festival, the bomb explodes. One hundred and five
people lie wounded or dead on the temple’s steps. When Dev arrives on the scene
 Cultural Horror in Dev 127

to assess the aftermath, he sees Farhaan holding a dying young Hindu girl in his
arms.
This scene presents an ironic turning point in the narrative for two reasons.
First, the carnage at the temple offers a dramatic backdrop that ultimately brings
two very different people and their alien experiences together. Farhaan and Dev
begin to forge a deep bond based on shared loss. Secondly, from this point on in
the narrative Nihalani shows how communal violence escalates. Ali’s earlier
comment becomes salient, that “the real battle is not between Hindus and
Muslims, or between the Muslim community and the Law—the real battle is
against political greed and escalating corruption.”
Local politician Mangal Rao organizes a mob of enraged Hindu men who pile
into open trucks on route to the Muslim neighborhood ready to retaliate. In a
clever split screen shot, we also see Dev, Tej, and Chief Minister Bhandarker
meeting to discuss the need to maintain civil peace. However, Bhandarker tells
Tej privately that the blast at the mandir has ignited Hindu passions. He says,
“this rage cannot and should not be suppressed. If in our own country such
attacks occur at our places of worship, it is natural for emotions to be inflamed.
These feelings should be respected. They must be allowed an expression”
(emphasis mine). He instructs Tej to ensure Dev “stands down” at the riot.
During the riot, Farhaan’s girlfriend Aaliya and her best friend Shabnam
witness police culpability first-hand. Police ask their names and when they learn
they are Muslims they deliberately send the girls into harm’s way. In a chilling
scene, male Hindu rioters chase the girls through the streets to Shabnam’s
apartment where she is gang raped, and her mother, pregnant aunt, and younger
brother are slaughtered.38 When Farhaan arrives on the scene, he finds Aaliya—
the sole survivor—in a state of shock with a dazed dissociative look in her eyes,
holding a knife in her hand that like the goddess Kālī’s is dripping with human
blood. Outside, police arrive on the scene ready to stop the massacre. Tej orders
Dev to “stand down” and let the riot proceed. Dev refuses.
Next day, Dev is summoned to Bhandarker’s office to explain why he
disobeyed the order. His explanation rests with the law. He says, “Using the
powers given to me, I did what I thought was right. Breaking people into factions
is beyond my duty.” The law, as he understands it, is blind to caste, community,
gender, and religious differences: all are equal before the law. Thus, he takes his
orders not from Tej or Bhandarker, but, rather, from the very institution he took
an oath to uphold and defend—the Indian Constitution.
As we reach the film’s climax, Mangal Rao leads one final premeditated act of
savagery. An armed horde of enraged Hindu rioters light pre-made wooden
128 Bollywood Horrors

torches with kerosene and chant their mantra-like battle cry “Har Har Mahadev”
as they lock the residents of Noor Manzil inside their apartments and torch the
wooden building to the ground, knowing full-well no one can escape. Dev arrives,
but Tej, at the behest of the government, ensures the cold-blooded massacre is
not interrupted and Dev is ordered to “stand down.” Once again he refuses,
shouting “To hell with your orders!” He commands his police officers to open the
apartments as hundreds of burning men, women, and children jump to their
inevitable deaths. The graphic realism of the scene is horrific. Upon returning
home from the premeditated massacre, with a look of sheer horror on his face,
Dev says directly into the camera: “The stench. People burning alive. God, that
smell of bodies consumed in flames [agni]. Flesh, bones, eyes, faces. And, the
screams. Soul-rending screams. Burning women, burning children, small
innocent children. . . and that smell. Before my very eyes.”
The very next day, Dev prepares a detailed legal brief with Farhaan’s help that
chronicles the local government’s full complicity in the massacre. As Dev arrives
to testify before the Supreme Court, Tej has him assassinated on the courthouse
steps. In the film’s final scene, as his body is being cremated, Dev delivers a voice-
over soliloquy to his family (and the audience), including Farhaan who has
officially taken the role as his surrogate son signified by his lighting the funeral
pyre. He says:

A man really dies the day he sees injustice and stays silent. The question is not
whether I may win or lose—or even whether I live or get killed—the question is
whether as a police officer am I doing my duty [dharma] or not? As a human
being, am I fighting for truth or justice or not? Life is a battlefield. Facing victory
or defeat a soldier’s duty is to fight. The meaning of life is to struggle continuously
for truth and justice. That is all.

This extremely important soliloquy echoes the teachings of the Bhagavad Gītā.
Set on Dharmaks. etra or the field of law, at the climactic moment just before the
Mahābhārata war, Kr.s. n.a likewise tells Arjuna, “Look to your law and do not
waver.”39 Kr.s. n.a’s instructions to Arjuna resonate when Dev says to his family, and
the audience, “stand up” and “fight.” However, throughout the entire film we hear
the opposite each time Tej and Bhandarker command Dev to “stand down.” In
other words, Dev’s closing thoughts direct the audience and the film’s central
characters to the Gītā’s moral universe, rather than the inverted (and, at times,
perverted) new-dharma of Hindutva politics and governance. Director Nihalani
uses Hindu religion and Indian nationalism, as well as the affective rasas of
horror and terror, to challenge Hindu nationalism and show that Hindutva is an
 Cultural Horror in Dev 129

abnormality—a breakdown of earlier Hindu tradition rather than its fulfillment.

As viewers, we too are called upon to contemplate the message of the Gītā, the
meaning of our actions, and the problem of communal and ideologically driven
violence. By illuminating these horrific, grotesque acts the film becomes a
powerful social commentary on Indian secularism and the fight for “truth and
justice,” which are gradually slipping away.

Theorizing Cultural Horror in Dev: Fanon, Arendt, and Freud

Violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete
preliminary conditions.
Frantz Fanon

A political community that constitutes itself on the basis of a prior, shared, and
stable identity threatens to close the spaces of politics, to homogenize or repress the
plurality and multiplicity that political action postulates.
Hannah Arendt

In spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the memories associated with
the mysterious and terrifying death of his beloved father.
Sigmund Freud

Sadly, the narrative portrayed in Dev echoes the all too real-life cultural horror
Indians face as a consequence of religious, social, and ideological confrontation
stemming, in part, from Indian colonialism, Independence, Partition, and the
rise of Hindu nationalism. The failure of nationalism and the myth of national
unity that we discussed earlier perpetrates epistemic violence in many colonized
nations. Frantz Fanon (1925–61) claims that the deficiencies of the middle class,
who essentially took over the role of rulers at the end of the colonial period, are
responsible for the unrelenting carnage and mass slaughter we see.40 In India,
national leaders (e.g., Nehru and Jinnah) hurried the process of self-rule and
separatism in order to gain access to power, and in their haste (or perhaps self-
interest?) made strategic errors that ultimately resulted in Partition—a fatal
event that some argue could have been averted.
Fanon helps us understand that violence, or “blood and anger,” is inherent not
only in colonization and decolonization, but also in the newly invented post-
colonial, independent, nation-state or “imagined community.”41 Although
decolonization clearly set out to change the world order, it turns out to be a
“program of complete disorder.”42 As Fanon puts it, the masses who were called
130 Bollywood Horrors

upon to “fight in the name of freedom and religion during this uprising,” continue
the “divisive fighting spirit” well after nationhood and independence is established.43
We see this “divisive fighting spirit” depicted in the Hindutva rhetoric in Dev, and
in a cluster of films that articulate the themes of Partition and communal violence,
including Garam Hawa (Hot Winds, dir. Mysore Shrinivas Sathya, 1973), Tamas
(Darkness, dir. Govind Nihalani, 1988), Bombay (dir. Mani Ratnam, 1995), Train to
Pakistan (dir. Pamela Rooks, 1998), and Black Friday (dir. Anurag Kashyag, 2004),
to name a few.
Fanon also explains that the mass violence that occurs as a result of severing
from colonial rule is typically perceived in mythic terms as a “cleansing force.”44
In Dev, Tej, Mangal Rao, and Chief Minister Bhandarker unite in their (unlawful
and illegitimate) use of violence or “cleansing force” at the film’s climax. Every
time Tej orders Dev to “stand down,” or when police intentionally point young
Muslim women toward a Hindu mob, the “cleansing force” is being invoked
by Hindu nationalists. The “cleansing force” that Fanon identifies mutates from
a myth into a type of aspirational project that enables Hindu nationalists
to recover the Hindutva ideal of an undivided all-Hindu homeland. When Tej
says “bring them [the Muslims] out into the streets and shoot them like dogs”
we see how the “cleansing force” is imposed—not to uphold the law, but rather
to subvert it.
The “cleansing force” springs from the desire for revenge or, to use Fanon’s
words, “my blood calls for the blood of the other.”45 We see this both literally and
figuratively throughout the film. For example, Tej seeks revenge for Armaan’s
death at the hands of terrorists, so his interrogation of Farhaan is excessively
violent. Revenge for Ali’s death turns into a failed attempt on Dev’s life, and a
blood bath outside the Hindu mandir. Revenge for the bomb blast at the mandir
results in a well-executed pogrom at the end of the film as innocent Muslim
men, women, and children are burned alive.
And if this isn’t gruesome enough, Fanon explains that the real horror lies not
in the quest for revenge, but in the realization that generations of Hindus, whose
families struggled to attain freedom and independence from colonial rule, have
internalized the discourse of oppression—the very condition they fought so
hard to overcome.46 Fanon writes: “the native militant who confronted the
colonialist war with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is
demolishing colonial oppression he is directly building another system of
exploitation. Once it was all so simple, with the bad on one side and the good on
the other,” but now the truth surfaces—the Hindu who was once the exploited
“other” or colonized subject, has now become “the exploiter.”47 One chant we
 Cultural Horror in Dev 131

hear repeated by RSS boys conveys this idea clearly: “ek ka badla sau milenge”
(we will revenge one death with a hundred).48
The colonial world, as Fanon puts it, is a world “divided into compartments.”49
The brush of communal color that Dev fights against throughout the entire film
paints a racially divided ‘us’ versus ‘them’ world that is, as Fanon says, “cut in
two.”50 The minority Muslim “other” is depicted in Dev by the voices of the
majority Hindu right as “evil,” “the enemy bastard,” “a criminal,” a “fanatic,” a
“betrayer,” a “dog,” and a “terrorist.” In other words, Muslims are dehumanized
and made to feel inferior. They become a repository, as Tej’s character suggests,
for all that is negated by the ruling Hindu majority.
In Dev, as in the real-life struggle against Hindutva politics, we also witness
what Fanon refers to as “the gradual erosion” of the intellectual structures built
by the “bourgeois colonialist environment.”51 I characterized this earlier as an
example of the erosion of the Indian Constitution or the rule of law. As the film
progresses, Dev and the audience become keenly aware how utterly powerless
we are to change the deep social divisions that exist, or halt the mass murder of
innocent men, women, and children at the climax of the film. All power lies with
the totalitarian state, which negates not only the (Muslim) enemies of the nation,
but also its founding institutions—secular democracy and religious pluralism.
These are the very institutions Dev defends with his life.
Dev’s murder at the end of the film, as well as Ali Khan’s at the beginning of
the film, are an extremely important comment on the current state of the Indian
secular nation. When Dev is assassinated, the legal brief he prepared falls to
Farhaan as his surrogate son and the voice of morality and secular democracy.
Yet, there is no closure at the end of the film. It raises the question: Is secular
democracy still possible for India, or are Dev and Ali’s deaths a sign of the collapse
of tradition and the rise of a new totalitarian era of increasing hate and terror?
Fanon’s approach to culture allows us to examine these questions under the lens
of racism, as an evil that is ubiquitous in almost every society. If we look through
this lens, we begin to wonder how ideological violence could ever be avoided.
Next, political theorist Hannah Arendt’s (1906–75) prescient work on
totalitarianism and the politics of evil helps to explain the cultural horror
depicted in Dev. Given that the Holocaust is often referred to as the primary
trauma of the modern era, Arendt’s considerations are very useful. Her thesis on
the “banality of evil,” now widely applied yet also acrimoniously and hotly
debated, seems fitting to our analysis of the narrative of Indian communalism
presented in Dev for many reasons including the (misplaced) admiration and
reverence Hindutva pioneers had for Hitler and Nazi Germany’s Final Solution.52
132 Bollywood Horrors

After considerable deliberation, Arendt concludes in her still deeply

controversial book Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil that
Nazi Germany’s Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for engineering the mass
deportation of Jews to extermination camps during the Second World War, was
“not a monster.”53 Arendt characterizes Eichmann as “diligent,” lacking in
imagination,” a “clown,” and “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”54 Arendt is (perhaps)
correct in identifying that Eichmann was not a “sadist or killer by nature,” but like
the many Nazis who “became murderers” he did his duty according to the “law of
the land.”55 Thus, what is controversial and profoundly disturbing about Arendt’s
argument is that she portrays Eichmann as a “law abiding citizen.”56
In Dev, ostensibly law-abiding citizens and recognized government officials
(e.g., Tej, Bhandarker, Rao, the police, etc.) perform and sanction horrific crimes
against humanity in the name of Hindutva. Chief Minister Bhandarker’s ultimate
refusal to uphold the law empowers ordinary citizens to act as sadists, criminals,
rapists, and murderers. That is, Bhandarker authorizes murder, rape, and looting
when he suspends Muslims’ constitutional rights and allows inflamed Hindu
passions “an expression.”
Dev’s refusal to obey orders to “stand down” at two critical junctures in the film
challenges the mandate of the local government (while also reinforcing Arendt’s
central argument that communal mobs are acting as law abiding citizens). However,
unlike the case of Nazi Germany, the scenes depicted in Dev are an aberration, and
though certainly not unprecedented they are ultimately criminal in nature because
they do not accord with Indian constitutional law. There is criminal intent in the
government’s execution of the massacre though, as evidenced by Dev’s police
investigation and Aaliya’s attempt to identify the culprits, no charges are ever made
because the crimes took place, as Arendt submits, under a “legal order.”57
The “legal order” in Dev and during the actual Gujarat riots issues from
Hindutva ideology, strengthening Arendt’s argument that politics in the modern
world is built on deception and lies, with the most brazen lie of all being the
totalitarian state rewriting history. The rewriting of history, as Arendt says, “not
only denies the history of the past but also moves forward as the creation of an
entirely fictitious world.”58 In other words, lies that once served a political agenda
“replace history altogether” and begin to appear as “true history.” In Dev, the lies
and agendas endorsed by local politicians do not serve the local communities
they represent, but rather their own petty political self-interest.59 Through
organized propaganda and mythic social histories, the architects of Hindutva
create layers of cultural horror vis-a-vis minorities when they refashion,
manipulate, and execute their narrowing version of reality.
 Cultural Horror in Dev 133

Dev, however, unlike Eichmann, refuses to be lulled into blind or unquestioning

obedience.60 As the film’s voice of reason, he defends the institutions of modernity
(democracy, pluralism, secularism) when he dares to “stand up” and fight for his
gītā. It is this very challenge to authority that eventually costs him his life on the
courthouse steps. Nevertheless, he clings to the Constitution. What is implied at
the end of the film, even though Nihalani leaves it open to audience interpretation,
is that monsters and horrible demons who trespass against secularism and
democracy will be brought to trial. The prescripts of Dev’s religion or gītā and the
manifestly unlawful orders that he encounters demand, as Arendt proclaims, a
deliberate refusal “to collude in the abnegation of moral and legal authority.”61 We
referred to this earlier in our discussion of Carroll’s markers of the horror genre.
Cultural horror lies in the very fact that Eichmann per se was not a monster,
but rather the “banality of evil” that Arendt sees in him was “human, all too
human,” as Nietzsche has it. The demonization of Muslims in Dev is also “all too
human” and, as Sarkar would probably agree, “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”62
In Dev, Bhandarker too easily appropriates the police and turns them into an
ethnic-identified force of “muscular Hinduism” that advances the populist
ideology of Hindutva. Over decades of Hindutva racist rhetoric seeping into
public discourse, it seems the perpetrators of riots and pogroms have become
anaesthetized against “one’s elementary sensitivity to the others’ suffering,” just as
Arendt shows in the case of Eichmann.63 In Nazi Germany, “the law of Hitler’s
land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: “ ‘Thou shalt kill!’ ”64
Such terrifying moments when muscular groups rise up in honor of extreme
national ideologies mark (almost) every kind of history and mythology we know.
What does this say about human nature?
While the events portrayed in Dev are emphatically not those of Nazi Germany,
during the Gujarat riots they come close, if not in scale, then in cruelty. By his
own admission, Tej’s ideology is informed by Nazi literature, as is Savarkar’s,
Golwalkar’s, and other Hindu nationalists. Tej sees the state as a natural way to
carry out genocide. Wearing a police uniform shrouds and legitimates the
governments ethnic cleansing agenda. It also protects one’s actions from being
perceived as criminal. According to Sarkar, “Gujarat became a testing ground to
see how much tolerance there is for genocidal behavior.”65 In retrospect, it appears
there is a great deal of tolerance considering that Narendra Modi, Chief Minister
during the actual Gujarat riots, later became Prime Minister (in 2014 and 2019)
with an elected and reelected majority government.
Another relevant point Arendt makes is that once such cultural horrors
happen, it is likely that they can and will happen again. In Dev, we see precisely
134 Bollywood Horrors

what Arendt is saying—there is “no deterrence to prevent them [e.g., communal

riots, pogroms, genocide, ethnic cleansing, etc.] if the law is behind them.”66 The
totalitarian agenda to eradicate or exterminate whole groups of people,
particularly in Nazi Germany, became normalized. So, even though Sarkar
argues earlier in the chapter that something “new” is happening when the Hindu
Rashtra is mentioned in conjunction with the Gujarat riots, a level of brutality
was unleashed that, I would sadly argue, is not altogether new. Nazis engaged in
propagandist and violent partisan rhetoric in order to mobilize Germans based
on the myth of “common blood.” We see this myth, as I have shown, being used
by the architects and advocates of Hindutva. The Nazi fight against inferior races
is the same stance taken in the film by the characters who espouse the voice of
Hindutva. For them, it is a moral fight against threatening foreigners and
outsiders (mlecchas, in Golwalkar’s words) who humiliated Hindus through
invasion, colonization, partition, terrorism, and so on. Dev’s story is set against
the real life rise of anti-Muslim practices that have not only increased but, as
Sarkar says, have become even more horrific. Thus, Arendt’s theory of social evil
foreshadows this new world stage of authoritarianism when she claims there is
an increase in brutality with each incident of terror.67 Although Arendt does not
use the term “cultural horror” explicitly, she does explain it in the broader context
of human nature, which is disquieting in its visceral resonance.
My third and final point derives from Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) theory of
the “uncanny” and also Bhaskar Sarkar’s study of trauma and cinematic mourning.68
Sarkar writes that the Partition of India in August 1947 was “a bloody and protracted
affair that tainted the euphoria of freedom [from colonial rule] with a profound
sense of loss.”69 The violence and trauma that lie at the root of colonial occupation
and decolonization are absorbed and rerouted into murderous communal riots
during and after the Partition of India. According to varying estimates, somewhere
between 200,000 to one million people were savagely murdered in riots that broke
out all over north India following Partition. Between seven and twelve million
refugees fled their homeland in search of safety and refuge, either in India or
Pakistan. Yet, as Sarkar explains, under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s newly
formed government the “exigencies of nation building required a collective
disavowal of this loss leading to an inability to mourn.”70 Thus, the overwhelming
social trauma of Partition remains a painful wound that continues to fester until
today in the consciousness of the Indian nation as “the uncanny.”
Sarkar explains that the extreme brutality perpetrated during Partition is
generally viewed by Indians as “an aberration within an otherwise harmonious
tradition.”71 That is, as something “abnormal,” a trait identified earlier in the
 Cultural Horror in Dev 135

chapter as one of Carroll’s key markers of the horror genre. But, as we also have
shown, the violence that we see at the end of colonialism is all too familiar in
nations that were cut into compartments by British divide and rule administrative
practices. The human atrocities perpetrated during the bifurcation of India into
India and Pakistan are not an aberration as such, but rather a horror that returns
(again and again) to haunt the Indian nation in the form of communal riots. Dev
is one of a cluster of cinematic portrayals that triggers the horror affect as the
audience and on-screen protagonists witness a fictional reenactment of the so-
called “original event.” The looting of shops, raping of women, mutilation of
bodies, arson, moral collapse, and the grotesque forms of murder that we see on
screen trace back to something familiar that has been repressed, as Freud
explains in his famous 1919 essay on the “uncanny” (or unheimlich).
Citizens of the newly formed Indian nation-state cannot simply “banish the
memories” associated with the cultural horror of Partition—especially since
under Nehru’s newly formed government their latent memories have not been
properly mourned or addressed. As Freud knows, unresolved feelings have an
uncanny effect that arouses “the compulsion to repeat.” He writes,“the compulsion
to repeat is powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain
aspects of the mind their daemonic character.”72 The “compulsion to repeat” and
the “daemonic character” that these memories elicit overpowered the celebratory
era of Independence that was ushered in, and also fostered a receptivity toward
Hindu nationalism and ethnic democracy that has resulted in the human
enactment of communal violence. Freud questions whether these memory-
driven behaviors are a type of “possession” or even a sort of “fate” that is outside
of one’s control. Thus, we also must ask to what extent the “uncanny” in India is
a recurring national and/or collective uncanny.73
From a Freudian perspective, the “social foreclosure of grief,” as Sarkar calls it,
under Nehru’s newly formed government after Independence thus surfaces as
the “uncanny.” Hindu rage is expressed against Muslims “as the group responsible
for the lost object.”74 That is to say, Hindu rage is tied to the belief that Muslims
are responsible for ravaging the land, the catastrophic loss of human life, and the
Partition of the Motherland (Bharat-ma).
Uncontrollable repressed rage also explains why the cruelty enacted on the
bodies of women during communal rioting is particularly horrific. Hate and ethnic
rancor is inscribed in a perversely sexualized way—as female victims of communal
violence are frequently (gang) raped, mutilated, and dishonored.75 Women’s
violated bodies become the living indexes of communalism. Though Aaliya plays a
secondary role in Dev, her character bears witness to the suffering of the victims of
136 Bollywood Horrors

violence during communalism. Not only is she a symbol of the many thousands of
women whose bodies have been violated, mutilated, and tortured during communal
violence, she is also the “voice” that cries out from the wound, as trauma expert
Cathy Caruth explains.76 Yet, in a pivotal scene when Aaliya courageously comes
forward to tell her story as an eye-witness, she is silenced.
Freud’s theory of the uncanny provides a critical theoretical backdrop for our
discussion of cultural horror in Dev because it explains how we are haunted by
what we have repressed, or in the case of modern India after Partition by what
we have not had a chance to mourn. Unassimilated and unresolved traumatic
memories recur as ghosts, or in modern India as the ghosts of Partition. Freud
writes, “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is
familiar and old—established in the mind and became alienated from it only
through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression
enables us, furthermore, to understand the uncanny as something which ought
to have remained hidden but has come to light.”77 Thus, we can understand
people’s reluctance to remember the horrors they live with.78
As Freud relays Jacques Offenbach’s story of “The Sand-Man” who tears out the
eyes of children as an example of the uncanny, similar feelings of the uncanny are
aroused in Dev as the “dread of him [i.e., the “Other”] became fixed in his heart.”79
Freud does not differentiate between the uncanny in art or in life, what Carroll
refers to as art horror and natural horror. Whether it is a fictional example drawn
from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman, Nihalani’s portrait of communal violence
in Dev, or the real-life communal riots in Gujarat, Freud’s unheimlich “belongs to
all that arouses dread.”80 This includes the various elements Carroll employs to
frame his philosophy of horror (e.g., graveyards, ghosts, haunted space, monsters,
etc.), as well as individual and collective repressed memories produced from
unconscious moments of cultural horror (real or imagined). In art as in life, the
sense of dread that arises from phantom horrors is thus projected onto the “other.”
By using Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of the uncanny to observe Dev, we
realize that the mirroring and melding of cinematic horror and real-life violence
is not new, but a tactic in aesthetic movements throughout much of history to
highlight how disquieting and surreal our instincts as humans can be.

Summary and Conclusion

I argued in this chapter that contemporary communal violence against Muslim

minorities in India, and in Dev, is a case of recurring cultural horror enacted in
 Cultural Horror in Dev 137

part because, as Bhaskar Sarkar claims, post-Partition Indians were not allowed
to grieve. As Freud and Sarkar suggest, the repressed memories of Partition
haunt the Indian nation. Dev and other films about Partition and communal
violence unveil the persistence of the uncanny in art and also offer extensive and
meaningful reflection on this provocative subject. The visceral feelings of the
uncanny that we experience in Dev, that is to say, the horror that comes with the
collective unleashing of repression, the “uncanny,” or the “affect of horror” is
aroused by our identification with the positive human protagonists Dev and
Farhaan (as well as Aaliya, Ali Khan, and Dr. Bhrarati Singh). This calls us to
create a new category of cultural horror in film mediation that is not ambiguous
or dislocated from the context it loosely portrays.
Also, the “haunting” that Fanon gestures to in his discussion of colonization
and decolonization is reiterated by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx when he
writes, “haunting belongs to the structures of every hegemony.”81 What Fanon
claims, and what Derrida makes explicit, is that “hegemonic power—the
dominance of one group over another—is structured around ghosts.”82 So the
question that Derrida asks is how do we “learn to live with ghosts?”83 In Dev,
communal riots are triggered not only by the ghosts of Partition, but also by
Muslim othering, by Hindutva’s crushing hegemonic binary rhetoric, by the petty
greed of local politicians, by vote bank haggling, by terrorism, and by the myth
that India somehow belongs more to Hindus than to Muslims. Although ghosts
are usually immaterial and visually non-existent, they nonetheless structure the
lives of the nation (e.g., in terms of trauma, social memory, patterns of history,
myths, stereotypes, socio-economic inequality, communal riots, etc.). Thus, as I
have argued, an explicit relationship between nationalism (past and present) and
the uncanny (or “hauntedness”) appears in Dev as cultural horror.
In Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Contemplative Contexts, T.M.
Lemos claims the process of dehumanization and the erasure of subjectivity that
is required to perform horrific acts of violence is not unique to any one context
or peoples. Obliterating the lines of personhood it seems is a necessary and
universal strategy before engaging in egregious acts of violence. Elaine Scarry
writes, the way is not “through war,” but rather through “the suspension of
civilization.”84 As we have shown in this chapter, this is precisely what happens in
Dev when Chief Minister Bhandarker withholds police protection so that enraged
Hindus can have their revenge. When Tej tells Dev to “stand down,” he is in effect
sanctioning the withdrawal of Muslims’ constitutional rights on behalf of the
local government and permitting a level of planned violence to occur without
punishment or retribution to (Hindu) rioters. As we have shown, the erasure of
138 Bollywood Horrors

Muslim personhood and subjectivity is linked directly to the unlawful attempt by

the government to attribute superior status to Hindus written into the Hindutva
worldview. Hindu privilege and rights are tied to their perceived social dominance
and the erasure of Muslim subjectivity (e.g., Tej likening Muslims to “dogs”).
We have also shown that what horrifies us in Dev is the (mis)treatment of
Muslims during the suspension of law and order by Bhandarker’s government.
The abnegation of normalcy is not only sanctioned, it is legitimated, rationalized,
and enforced over and above the constitutional rights of minority citizenship.
Thus, the “abnormal,” symbolized in Dev by the erosion of constitutional law, is
allowed center stage, as Carroll states in his discussion of the horror genre, solely
as a foil to the cultural order, or in Dev until secular democracy is defended and
restored. Yet, we also see in Dev that communal violence is not always communal
in nature, but, rather, is often opportunistic exploitation by petty local politicians
who take advantage of the existing communal/caste issues on both sides of the
Hindu-Muslim divide.
As an expression of the uncanny, Dev plunges us into a gruesome narrative
that arouses feelings of cultural horror and dread through scenes containing
graphic realism and extremely frightening images of communal violence that
include terrorized bodies, innocent victims including children being burned
alive, and the gang rape of women. The question as to why India must write itself
as haunted relates to its social and political history of colonization, decolonization,
and partition. As we have shown, the portrait of Muslims as the threatening
“foreign other” allows powerful Hindus nationalists like Tej, Rao, and Bhandarker
to demonize, dehumanize, and find ways to erase them from Indian history. Yet,
the cultural horror that is aroused because of underlying repression, which
Bhaskar Sarkar identifies as the “social foreclosure on grief ” after Partition,
returns again and again.
Here we showed that the uncanny traces back to something familiar that has
been repressed, or what Freud refers to as “the return of the dead.” We are doomed
to repeat what we have repressed unless the frightening elements are reconciled
and addressed. Sarkar’s thesis that Bollywood films can be a “cinematic mediation
to aid in collective mourning” is an important rationale for including Dev in our
study of Bollywood horror. Collective memorialization and acknowledgement
did not happen in India. We see few if any national memorials or monuments to
the victims of Indian Partition.85 Thus, Dev belongs in an archive of truth and
reconciliation to show how communalism is linked to the transmission of Indian
memory, and why the politics of contemporary communalism are deplorable.
The rhetoric of racial inferiority that is behind the growing solidarity of Hindu
 Cultural Horror in Dev 139

nationalism, portrayed by Tej and Bhandarkar’s on screen characterizations, is a

myth operating as a social message to destroy minorities through a world of fear
and hatred. But this worldview is nothing like the message Dev leaves us with at
the end of the film that tasks each and every person with the responsibility to
stand up and fight for truth and justice. If violence, racism, and terror are not
only social norms but also elements of human nature, then we must not give up,
but, rather, work even harder. We must see cultural horror and violence in art not
as a symbol of doom, but as a wake-up call—a megaphone, a ground zero, a
prodigal moment. Peace, if not natural, must then be our new social construction.
 7

Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge,

and Cultural Horror
Morgan Oddie

Introduction

The film Bandit Queen (1994, dir. Shekhar Kapur) is not an obvious inclusion for
an anthology on Indian horror films. It was controversial in India at the time of
release, largely for the graphic depictions of rape and violence. The cinematic
portrayal of the horrors is based on the real-life story of Phoolan Devi. The
filmmakers’ emphasis on truth in the portrayal was accompanied by an assertion
of their right to revise the story as needed, regardless of Phoolan’s protestations.
As a subaltern subject, Phoolan experiences the double-bind of the production
and representation of her story. Her existence is needed to authenticate the story
as truthful and worthy of audience consumption. At the same time, she is silenced
in favor of the storyteller’s agenda. Her truth becomes less relevant when it
contradicts the constructed story, yet this story is sold on the basis of truth. In
attempting to draw attention to caste and gender-based oppression, certain
conflict threads were emphasized in the film at the expense of more complicated
events. The numerous rapes of Phoolan in the film contribute to a specific version
of her as an avenging woman. Her transformation into a figure for retributive
justice is thereby circumscribed in a rape revenge narrative, limiting the
subversive potential of her story, and undermining her agency as a successful
dacoit. This is how I read Bandit Queen as horror in multifaceted ways. Firstly,
rape revenge as a narrative structure merits Bandit Queen’s consideration as a
horror film because of the bodily violations it is premised on. Women’s subjective
experience of violence qualifies in and of itself as horror, and the representation
of that in film expands what we might superficially think of the horror genre.
Secondly, the caste and gender-based oppression experienced by subaltern
subjects is also horror. Birth and subsequent socialization into caste and gender

140
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 141

are marked by an inescapability of corresponding cultural horrors, a trope

employed in many generic horror films, but read specifically within both the
Indian context and the international reception of this representation. Lastly, and
most alarmingly, the real-life violation of Phoolan Devi’s consent in the cinematic
portrayal of the film adds an additional element of horror to this film. These
elements combine to make an analysis of Bandit Queen a relevant inclusion in
this collection.
This chapter will first explore what rape revenge is as a narrative structure and
how it functions as horror on the basis of women’s bodily violations. I will then
examine competing claims of ‘truth’ in Bandit Queen, emphasizing how it was
expressed by filmmakers and Phoolan Devi’s own accounts and objections to the
film. The over-simplification of caste conflict and oppression in the film, among
other cinematic strategies, has been criticized as pandering to international
tastes. While the film experienced a successful run in international film festival
circuits, it was also domestically popular. The international and domestic success
means that the film experienced a wide range of audiences, and a number of
different interpretations. In this chapter, I have attempted to take the varying
audiences and filmic readings into account in my analysis of Bandit Queen. I
situate rape revenge films and their international appeal by exploring Indian
films, as well as early films from the West that helped define the narrative structure
and generic features of rape revenge in the 1970s and 1980s.1 In doing so, I
highlight that the cultural horror depicted in this film is multifaceted in both its
location in the filmic genre, as well as the implications for the production of a
biopic of a living and marginalized subject.2 That is, while a defining feature of
horror may be its capacity for social critique, Bandit Queen has a unique
positioning of being a supposed biopic of a living subject who experienced real-
life horrors, that in turn were compounded by filmic and non-consensual
representation that drew on rape revenge tropes for audience appeal.

Film Synopsis

Bandit Queen begins with eleven-year-old Phoolan Devi as she is married against
her will to much older widower, Putti Lal. As a member of the low Mallah
(boatmen) caste and one of six children, Phoolan’s impoverished family was
eager to be rid of their defiant daughter. Taken as a child to her new husband’s
village, Phoolan is mistreated by her mother-in-law, raped by her husband, and
experiences caste-based discrimination by others in the village. Phoolan
142 Bollywood Horrors

(portrayed by Seema Biswas as a teenager and adult) runs away and returns to
her natal home with a disgraced reputation only to experience more violence at
the hands of higher caste Thakurs in her village in Uttar Pradesh. She is framed
for a crime, raped by policemen, and then bailed out by Thakurs who expect
explicit sexual favors in return. First banished to live with her cousin Kailash, she
returns home after a dispute with his wife. Her refusal and general disruption of
the social caste-based order of village life leads to Thakurs orchestrating her
kidnap by a gang of dacoit bandits. There, she befriends Vikram Mallah (portrayed
by Nirmal Pandey), the only man who treats her with any respect. After Phoolan
is raped by the current gang leader, Babu Gujjar, Vikram kills him and seizes
interim control of the gang. Under Vikram and Phoolan’s leadership, the gang
targets their banditry at redistributing wealth from higher to lower caste people.
Vikram is then murdered in betrayal by the recently released Lala Ram and Sri
Ram brother gang leaders. They take Phoolan hostage to be gang raped and
beaten. After her escape, she forms her own gang to take revenge on the brothers
and is the primary agitator in the Behmai massacre of twenty-two Thakurs. After
eluding police capture for a while, the film concludes with her surrendering to
the police and being taken to prison for her crimes.

Rape Revenge as Horror

One of the primary criticisms levelled at the film was by feminist critic Madhu
Kishwar, who argued that director Shekhar Kapur went so far in distorting
Phoolan’s story so as to fit it into a formulaic rape revenge narrative.3 There is
some disagreement as to what this formula is, but this critique largely invokes the
singularity of narrative structure where someone is raped, and that action
becomes the motivating—and not incidental—source of their revenge, either by
the victim of the assault or someone else on their behalf. In these films, rape is not
just a plot device; it is central to the transformation of the characters.4 My
comparison between Bandit Queen and other rape revenge films is not to contend
with Hollywood hegemony especially since the Western rape revenge films I
discuss are primarily B-horror films outside of the mainstream Hollywood
structure.5 I also do not want to gloss over the complexities involved in a cross-
cultural analysis of the depiction of sexual assault.6 Instead, this discussion of
rape revenge is predicated on the language of Indian critics of the film.
Additionally, Bandit Queen is also consumed internationally as an Indian example
of rape revenge.7 As scholars like Jyotika Virdi and Lalitha Gopalan point out,
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 143

there is an Indian cinematic history of avenging women (see, for example,

Chapter 5 in this book). Virdi asserts that avenging women narratives are most
prevalent in the “woman’s film genre” that are characterized by female
protagonists.8 Gopalan similarly groups these films as the “avenging women
genre,” paralleling B-list Western rape revenge films and noting how important
genre is for standardized narratives and audience expectations.9 Because multiple
narrative threads and genre features are common in mainstream Bollywood
films, Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda and other scholars of Indian cinema argue
that the logic of Western genre distinctions does not apply to Indian cinema.10
Even if this is true, given the international circuits of production, which will be
discussed in more detail later in this chapter, a discussion of genre in terms of
cinematic consumption is pertinent to this analysis.
There is considerable disagreement on the genre placement of rape revenge.
Without falling into the long history of genre and sub-genre defining in horror
film studies, I will briefly contextualize the major perspectives on rape revenge.
Carol Clover and Barbara Creed position rape revenge as a horror sub-genre,11
while Jacinda Read and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas argue that it is not a genre at
all, but rather a narrative structure found in a wide range of genres.12 Though she
disagrees with Clover and Creed’s reading, Heller-Nicholas states it is easy to
understand why themes of rape and their accompanying graphic and violent
depictions are automatically relegated to horror, precisely because rape is
horrifying. Conversely, Claire Henry proposes that rape revenge is a genre itself
and argues that this is an important distinction because it makes it worthier of
attention and analysis.13 Henry’s argument seems to succumb to parochial
opinions about the limitations of horror, but because horror as a genre itself is
both worthy of study and centrally motivated by social critique, these types of
distinctions seem unnecessary for analytic purposes. I think that Linda Williams
is helpful here, as she describes horror as the affective sensory and emotional
experience and response of the audience as much as it is about the crisis of filmic
bodies.14 Although Williams extends this argument to other “body genres” to
include drama and pornography, it is the fear jerking response of horror that this
analysis of Bandit Queen is most concerned with. So, if visceral spectator
response is a marker of defining horror, and rape and its depiction is horrifying,
then at risk of oversimplification, rape revenge ought to be read as horror on this
basis. Defining horror, Robin Wood argues that one of the core characteristics is
that “normality is threatened by the Monster.”15 Further to this, Read argues that
because rapists are frequently normalized in rape revenge,16 there is often no
identifiable monster, making it seemingly more difficult to define many rape
144 Bollywood Horrors

revenge films as horror from a cursory glance. I think that this unnecessarily
limits the possibilities for monstrosity in film. In Bandit Queen, the context that
produces Phoolan Devi’s oppression is simultaneously normal and monstrous.
The monstrosity is in the normalization. The raped female body is not an
aberration of normalcy but occurs under monstrous conditions. While it could
be argued that Bandit Queen is generically hybrid, much in the same way that
many Bollywood films are, I see this film as part of Indian horror film canon,
guided by a rape revenge narrative structure as a partial but not sufficient
condition for its inclusion.
Though revenge can be undertaken by a loved one, it is typically more
satisfying for the viewer when the avenger is the woman—and it is almost always
a woman—who experienced the rape.17 Clover argues that this is because of the
spectator’s empathetic position with the rape survivor.18 Writing about I Spit on
Your Grave (1978, dir. Meir Zarchi), Clover says, “all viewers, male and female
alike, will take Jennifer’s [the rape survivor’s] part, and via whatever set of
psychosexual translations, ‘feel’ her violation.”19 This identification is thus
necessary for the spectator to empathize with the revenge, which is typically at
least as graphic as the depiction of the rape. For example, Zakmi Aurat (Wounded
Woman, 1988, dir. Avatar Bhogal), thought to be inspired by I Spit, visually locates
the castrated male body analogously to the raped female body to escalate this
horrific empathetic cross-gender identification.20 Feeling and empathizing with
the raped avenger elicits the embodied visceral reaction that Williams refers to.
In this way, rape revenge enacts a type of body horror. Ronald Allen Lopez Cruz
argues that body horror is a type of “biological horror” by manipulating normal
bodily states and playing on the fear of the body and its potential destruction.21
Although Cruz focuses on monstrous bodily hybridities and metamorphoses, I
argue that the characterization of body horror aptly describes the depictions of
rape in Bandit Queen, and many other rape revenge horror films because of the
potential threat of destruction of women’s bodies. So, rather than body horror in
the way it’s conceived of in threatening a universal body, this is a particularly
gendered conception of destructive threat and body horror.
The Last House on the Left (1972, dir. Wes Craven) is largely credited with
popularizing rape revenge,22 and displaces the onus of revenge onto loved ones.
When their teenaged daughter is raped and murdered by a brutal gang, her
parents become the avengers against her assailants.23 Tellingly, film critic Roger
Ebert awarded Last House three and a half stars out of four and called it a “powerful
narrative.”24 Ebert likened it to a more compelling, but similar philosophical
engagement as Straw Dogs (1971, dir. Sam Peckinpah), a film where a beta-male
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 145

academic avenges the rape of his wife and siege of his property. Though Ebert
does not make the connection, in both Last House and Straw Dogs, the avengers
sublimate the rape of their loved ones as a violation of themselves. That is, the
parents—and particularly the patriarch—in Last House are responsible for
protecting their daughter’s bodily integrity and virginal purity. In Straw Dogs, his
wife’s rape is seen in conjunction with the physical siege of his property. Neither
are avenging directly on behalf of the victim but are instead obtaining retributive
justice for the transgressions against themselves.25 Sarah Projansky argues that
this changes the crucial ideological meaning making in the films, so that rape and
murder “justify a particularly violent version of masculinity, relegating women to
minor ‘props’ in the narrative,”26 whereas women taking revenge into their own
hands after facing rape and recognizing the inefficacy of traditional law are
feminist narratives.27
In comparison to Last House, Ebert reviewed I Spit with zero stars, referring
to it as “sick, reprehensible and contemptible.”28 He questioned the audience’s
over-identification and vocal endorsement of the violence but treated the rape
and retributive acts as equally horrific grounds, going so far as to question a
female audience member’s cheering for the protagonist by likening her murders
of the perpetrators to the violence of her own rape. This confuses the violent
refusal of victimhood by women avengers. It is not the revenge that is necessarily
empowering, but the enactment of violence and the identification of the viewer
with the avenging heroine.29 The final scene in I Spit is Jennifer’s last revenge
killing precisely because the retributive justice is final. After pretending to show
him mercy, she uses a boat motor to tear apart her last attacker’s body. Here,
Jennifer re-appropriates an object of terror; the motorboat that was used in her
initial capture becomes a weapon to destroy the male body of her attacker. This
problematically lends to a narrative that rape can in fact be undone by the deaths
of the perpetrators, but as Clover points out, that is the appeal of the film. The
straightforwardness is unrealistic but immensely enjoyable.30

Indian Rape Revenge

Despite Kishwar’s criticism, Bandit Queen isn’t exactly formulaic. Jenny Lapekas
describes rape revenge films as having three stages.31 First, the leading actress is
raped by one or more men. Second, she or another character carries out revenge
on her behalf. Lastly, justice arrives in an unconventional way, leading the viewer
to question the cost of the revenge. Similarly, in Hindi cinema, Gopalan refers to
146 Bollywood Horrors

rape revenge as the avenging women genre, which has an identifiable narrative
structure.32 It opens with family settings of normalcy and Hindi happiness
conventions without dominant paternal figures, and the female protagonist is
depicted as a modern and working woman. Then, she is raped, and the initial
conditions are upset. Charges are filed against the perpetrator, but the law is
highlighted to show little potential for state ability to punish rapists. Finally,
there is a “miscarriage of justice” that allows the protagonist to transform into
avenger.33 In this way, vigilante justice is forced because the traditional justice
system fails sexual assault survivors.
Insaaf Ka Taraazu (Scales of Justice, 1980, dir. B.R. Chopra), inspired by the
American film Lipstick (1976, dir. Lamont Johnson), highlights the inefficacy of
the courts. After Bharti charges her rapist with sexual assault, he is found not
guilty because of the apparently blurred lines between consent and non-consent.
Like Lipstick, Insaaf Ka Taraazu’s female protagonist, a fashion model—portrayed
by real life model and beauty queen, Zeenat Aman—is raped by an acquaintance
and industry professional, and loses her job and boyfriend during the trial.
Bharti’s lawyer says, “for the woman, a rape trial is no less a rape.” Although the
perpetrator admits to his lawyer that he was guilty of rape, the trial proceeds to
attack Bharti’s character. Although this is common rhetoric in diminishing the
validity of testimony against rape, Gopalan points out that in the film, there is a
particular confusion of voyeuristic masochism in the eroticization of violence.34
As such, revenge is only unambiguously allowed after Bharti’s virginal younger
sister is raped. Similarly, Zakmi Aurat has the female protagonist Kiran join a
group of other rape survivors who plan to snare and castrate rapists after none
received justice in court. This is more complicated by the fact that Kiran was a
police officer prior to her gang rape. In both films, obvious miscarriages of justice
lead to the transformation of women avengers.35
As Gopalan’s analysis indicates, it is the idea of modern women who are raped
that causes the distortion of normalcy (e.g., Kiran as a police officer; Bhakti as a
fashion model).36 But, Phoolan Devi is not a modern woman, so her rape was not
considered an aberrant violation of her body in a way that disrupted the social
order. Although the viewer identifies the body horror of rape, it is actually the
“perverse social relations [that] breed monstrosity”37 that form the basis of the
cultural horror central to the film. Despite Bandit Queen’s self-declared aims to
highlight the horrors of gender-based violence, it deals with imagined meanings
of rape in a manner in line with problematic mainstream discourse, or as Karen
Gabriel states, “conjugal rape, caste-based rape, vengeful rape, and yet more
rape.”38 Phoolan had no access to the state justice system to even have the
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 147

possibility of justice being miscarried. In the film, Phoolan’s return to her village
from her cousin’s is met with interrogation by law enforcement after her
false arrest for the burglary of the head Thakur’s house. Phoolan is already
implicated in her association with the bandits and questioned about her
sexual history and promiscuity, rumors spawned from leaving her husband. She
is then raped by the policemen, in a scene implied to the viewer (rather than
direct visual depiction of the rape, which is liberally employed later in the film).
While the rape by the police officers could symbolize the miscarried justice
experienced by others, ultimately Phoolan did not have access to the law in a way
uncircumscribed by her caste and gender. She is metaphorically raped by the law.
So, this formula of vigilantism that usually comes as a necessity after a failure of
the justice system does not work for the already oversignified Phoolan. The
viewer is thus drawn to masochistically empathize with the plight of her station,
but not with her as a real subject. This is also true of audiences in the West who
may not understand this caste-based entitlement to rape or abuse her body (an
idea explored later in this chapter with a discussion of orientalist assumptions
and inscriptions).
After her kidnapping, gang leader Babu Gujjar is shown as cruel and abusive
towards Phoolan. Despite Vikram’s protestations, Babu Gujjar beats her with the
butt of his gun and rapes her as the gang sits in silence, with Phoolan’s screams
audible in the background. Even the physical abuse oversignifies Phoolan’s
gendered sexuality, as the attacks are focused on her pelvis and lower abdomen.
Later in a botched dacoity, two gang members are killed. While raping Phoolan
in the ravines, Vikram kills Babu Gujjar. The low caste gang members immediately
see the ramifications and declare Vikram the gang leader after a fight ensues
between different castes within the gang. Vikram declares, “Victory to the
goddess! She has taken Babu Gujjar.” This development frames the action in
terms larger than revenge directly for Phoolan’s rape, which would not typically
justify murder in the social structure of the dacoits. It is by no accident that
this is the first rape that is visually depicted in the film because the revenge
is immediate. That is, Babu Gujjar is killed mid-rape so that Phoolan must
struggle to free herself from underneath his naked dead body. This is the scene
in the film that could be most easily read as straight-forward rape revenge,
following the cinematic history of men avenging the rape of a loved one who is
dead, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to obtain revenge herself. However, this
is not usually considered part of the rape revenge in analysis of this film, as
Vikram’s actions are framed in larger terms that the individual bodily violation
of Phoolan.
148 Bollywood Horrors

Rape, Revenge, and Banditry

Kapur says that there is “less than five minutes of footage of actual rape in a two-
hour film, yet some people will have you believe that rape is all that my film is
about.”39 Regardless of how many minutes of rape are depicted in the film, it is
the driving plot device. As Heller-Nichols argues, rape does not need to be shown
for the intensity of sexual violence in a film.40 For example, Zakmi Aurat portrays
the gang rape of Kiran without visually depicting the action of rape. It instead
cuts from the characters immediately prior to the rape and cinematically focuses
on the fetishization of banal room objects. It is disingenuous to assert that rape
must be visually depicted in order for it be considered included in a film. As
such, Kapur’s inclusion of graphic rape scenes for any amount of time is an
intentional cinematic choice and a marked deviation from other Indian films.
The narrative structure is intentionally employed so that, in Kapur’s words, “Long
after the film is over, never again will [the viewer] be able to look at an item about
a woman raped in the morning paper and then go back calmly to a cup of tea.”41
Kapur seems to think that this visceral spectator response is predicated on the
visual depiction of rape, or why else would it have been included? What I am
interested in is what this does to the “true” depiction of the story of a real person.
Although Phoolan’s rape was experienced as private trauma, it was made public
through cinematic depiction. Phoolan comments, “In the film I’m portrayed as a
sniveling woman, always in tears who never took a conscious decision in her life.
I’m simply shown as being raped, over and over again.”42 Roy’s indictment of the
film is just that:

According to Shekhar Kapur’s film, every landmark—every decision, every

turning-point in Phoolan Devi’s life, starting with how she became a dacoit in
the first place, has to do with having been raped, or avenging rape. He has just
blundered through her life like a Rape-diviner. You cannot but sense his horrified
fascination at the havoc that a wee willie can wreak. It’s a sort of reversed male
self absorption. Rape is the main dish. Caste is the sauce that it swims in.43

She further suggests, “how about changing the title of the film to: Phoolan Devi’s
Rape and Abject Humiliation: The True Half-Truth?”44
The emphasis on Phoolan’s rape marked her transformation from sexual
victim to avenging bandit as it focused more heavily on her victimization, rather
than her own empowerment. This is not to argue that other types of oppression
can be delinked from sexuality. But by defining her role as an avenger primarily
in terms of her sexuality, the film downplays the intersections of oppression, as
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 149

well as the historical context of dacoits and banditry. As Eric Hobsbawm argues,
“the point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord
and the state regard as criminals, but who remain within the peasant society, and
are considered by their people as heroes, champions, avengers, fighters for justice,
perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men [sic] to be admired,
helped and supported.”45 The real Phoolan connects her role as a dacoit to
gender-based violence, but not as a direct result of her own rapes: “If all these
gang leaders, who happen to be men, would fight against these atrocities, then
they would end. It’s not to earn money that a woman becomes a dacoit; it’s for
retribution and revenge.”46 But Phoolan’s popularity as a bandit is largely
downplayed in the film. William Pinch, historian of South Asia, notes that the
film would have been more successful with the added complexity of real life,
rather than one-dimensional characters, including Phoolan as a protagonist who
is “a sexually wronged woman hell-bent on revenge—a kind of rampaging Kali
cleverly styled to suit both Western and Indian action-drama appetites.”47
Under Vikram’s leadership in Bandit Queen, the gang is seen at a village
shrine, praying to Śiva and Bhavānī, as they cultivate relationships with low caste
village members. Vikram declares Phoolan to be a reincarnation of the Goddess
Durgā for village protection and dons her with the red bed bandana so iconic to
Phoolan’s image. Sarah Caldwell argues that the mythological paradigm of
redemptive violence of Durgā is exactly what made Phoolan’s story resonate
with public imagination in India (see also Chapter 3 in this book).48 While this is
probably an oversimplification, it does contribute to the rationale for the
comprehensibility of female violence as compared to the self-evidence of male
violence. Phoolan and Vikram play up the association with righteous goddess
avengers, but as Indian feminist scholar Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out,
there is no reason to suspect that this association was insincere in real life.49 Even
though this was not her intention, under the idiom of the goddess myth, Phoolan
was restored as a figure for Indian feminism as a model of female heroism.
However, many Indian feminists were less interested in her as a living “feminist
figure or a figure for feminism” because of their reluctance to embrace militant
feminist models, and the agency that has been attributed to militancy—
particularly Hindutva woman leaders—or the exceptionality of a single figure.50
Gabriel complicates this location of Phoolan as a vengeful goddess, precisely
because it is by rape that she is engendered as a woman.51 Though the divine
association complicates the revenge narrative, mostly the gang’s actions are
framed as a caste rebellion. As a gendered subject who is supposedly emblematic
of cultural horror in Kapur’s construction, Phoolan’s cinematic revenge is
150 Bollywood Horrors

somehow mostly related to her rapes. Her vigilantism is determined by her

sexuality. Phoolan’s real life attempts to rebel against caste receive little attention
in the film, which ignores her biographical accounts of anger, and sidelines any
reformist agenda.52
Perhaps because Babu Gujjar is not the most brutal rapist nor is Vikram’s
revenge the most extreme in Bandit Queen, it is not typically interpreted as part
of the film’s rape revenge narrative. The first instance of Phoolan’s transformation
into an avenging woman is when she and Vikram find Putti Lal to take revenge.
Vikram tells her that she has avenged her honor like “a real bandit.” Although
women bandits were rare, Hobsbawm notes that “the most usual role of women
in banditry is as lovers,” and the bandit “turns to outlaw in general and revenge
on men in particular, because she has been ‘dishonoured,’ i.e., deflowered.”53 The
real-life Phoolan notes the power and authority of being a dacoit that allowed
her agency for revenge. She says, “once I became a dacoit and started making lists
of all the people who had tortured me, who had abused me, and I was able to pay
them back in kind, that pleased me tremendously.”54 But the film does not mark
her complete transformation into avenging bandit until Lala Ram and Sri Ram
murder Vikram in front of Phoolan.
The film shows a hysterical Phoolan being carried away from Vikram’s body
and taken to Behmai to be gang raped by a series of Thakurs, led by the brothers.
This scene is the source of much of the controversy surrounding the film. In
Mala Sen’s biography, Phoolan says “un logo ne mujhse bahut mazak ki” (those
people really fooled with me) but she was reluctant to speak of any details of “her
bezathi” (dishonor).55 In her refusal to speak of the rape, Sen (among others)
interpreted Phoolan’s position within the larger framework of rape shame.56
Anuradha Ramanujan complicates this reading in arguing that this is actually a
refutation of the patriarchal notion that female sexual existence and selfhood are
tantamount to each other.57 By delinking these two, damage to the former does
not obliterate the latter, and the meaning of rape as subject is thereby destabilized.
The account of rapes in the film instead comes from American journalist Jon
Bradshaw’s Esquire article that detailed the attack. Kapur is emphatic that “the
point is that the effective portrayal of a rape scene churns viewers.”58 He’s not
necessarily wrong here. When rape is covertly addressed but overly inscribed as
common plot features, much of Hindi cinema has failed to address sexual
violence in a substantial way. Most commonly, rape is used as a framing device,
but does not contribute to commentary on gender based sexual violence. In this
way, the depiction of the actual rape of Phoolan could be considered positive as
a marked departure from the general Hindi cinematic unwillingness to show the
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 151

brutality of rape. However, it is debatable as to whether the rape needed to be

shown to communicate to the audience that rape is horrific and abhorrent. The
word “rape” evokes association with a physically violent act and the moral and
emotional responses to it. Clover says that depicting rape always risks sadistic
participation by the viewer, but there are cinematic and narrative devices that
encourage that participation or foreclose on it.59 In Bandit Queen, the camera
lingers to the point of disgust and indicts the voyeuristic and objectifying gaze of
the spectator to emphasize the empathetic translation of the rape survivor. As
Heller-Nicholas writes, this cinematic strategy forces the spectator to bear the
onus of attempting “to comprehend the brutal incomprehensibility of rape.”60
Although this was a criticism of Bandit Queen, these shots are not titillating, nor
do they lack consensual ambiguity. This has also been a common criticism of
other films that depict rape, which is problematically read as potentially
consensual sex.61 Many of these films, Bandit Queen included, could be criticized
for encouraging voyeuristic fetishism of violence against women, but reading
rape as ambiguously consensual or anything less than cultural horror in scenes
like this one is a mistake.62
The rape scene implicates the viewer as a voyeur, as the camera views the
scene as an onlooker with a slightly obstructed view of the rapes from different
objects in the barn. The banality of the obfuscated view—as opposed to the
fetishistic motivation of objects in the shot of Zakmi Aurat that implies the gang
rape—makes these angles more unsettling. As Gopalan states, there is reliance
on “masochistic identification in the rape scene to fully play out its horrifying
potential, the sadistic dimensions . . . [to] propel the revenge plot and remind us
retroactively that the ensemble of elements in the rape scene is always a volatile
marriage between sex and violence.”63 As a strategy, lingering to the point of
disgust relies on the subject position of the spectator finding the act disgusting.
I question if the excess is enough to elicit this on its own and what excess means
in terms of the depiction of rape. Problematically, how do we even define “excess”
in this regard? The twenty-minute rape scene in I Spit was considered the height
of excess at its release,64 whereas the nine-minute rape scene in Irréversible (2002,
dir. Gaspar Noé) is considerably more unsettling given its steady and unwavering
single frame shot. Roy asks:
How does one grade film-rapes on a scale from Exploitative to Non-exploitative?
Does it depend on how much skin we see? Or is it a more complex formula that
juggles exposed skin, genitalia, and bare breasts? Exploitative I’d say, is when the
whole point of the exercise is to stand on high moral ground, and inform us (as
if we didn’t know), that rape is about abject humiliation.65
152 Bollywood Horrors

Roy highlights the contradictions inherent in the necessity of a brutalized female

body in order to facilitate the transformation to avenger. Similarly, film studies
scholar Gohar Siddiqui notes how the brutal depictions of sexual violence bring
films close to exploitative, but simultaneously represent the realities of abuse and
the necessary motivation for protagonist empowerment.66 The critique is that
women’s agency becomes contingent on the gratuitous depiction of a rape scene,
which may simultaneously be eroticized, thereby limiting the subversive
potential of these narratives.
After three days of rape and physical assault, Phoolan is released from the
barn only to be stripped naked and told to draw water from the village well with
a brass pot.67 Lala Ram announces to the village, “this thing called me a
motherfucker . . . this is what we do to low caste goddesses.” Unclear to the viewer
whether she escaped or was released, Phoolan’s cousin finds her on the street.
Gabriel reads this scene as Phoolan misrecognizing her cousin Kailash as a
potential rapist;68 a scene that thrusts the viewer out of voyeuristic anonymity
because their gaze approaches with her. I didn’t read this as a fundamental
misrecognition. Instead, it is an indictment of all men as potential rapists, as
Phoolan states she does not “trust any man.” The cultural horror faced by the
protagonist did not end with the cessation of the body horror of rape because
her escape/release maintained her caste and gender-based inscription. Phoolan
asks bandit leader Baba Mushtaquim for her own gang to exact her revenge on
Sri Ram, Lala Ram, and their supporters. Appealing to the Muslim leader, she
says that caste divisions will be the downfall of the bandit kingdom. He grants
her supplies and men out of “loyalty to Vikram” and with the support of Man
Singh as co-leader of her gang. By many accounts, the real-life Man Singh was
likely Phoolan’s lover. However, this was omitted from the film, further
contributing to Kapur’s narrativization of preferable victimhood. Baba
Mushtaquim tips off Phoolan about Sri Ram and Lala Ram’s presence in Behmai
but warns her against rashness. Although the two are not there, all the men in the
village are implicated by their lack of intervention in the brutal assaults and
rapes Phoolan in Behmai. The screen flares and images move to slow motion as
twenty-two Thakurs are lined up and killed by the gang.
Shanthie Mariet D’Souza and Bibhu Prasad Routray argue that an avenger is
someone who feels wronged and does not calibrate their use of proportionate
violence.69 I’m unwilling to assert whether the Behmai massacre was
disproportionate or not. What is important for this analysis is how it was depicted
in the film. The real-life Phoolan claims that she was not present when the
massacre took place, and she was wanted by the authorities in the state over the
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 153

murders when the film was released. It is important to note that Sen’s depiction
of the event in the biography does not refute Phoolan’s assertion in the same way
that the cinematic gaze does.70 Regardless, this massacre is the culmination of
revenge. As Mridula Nath Chakraborty argues:

Phoolan Devi’s case is precisely that the widespread approbation she received at
the hands of mainstream and feminist readings is not because she enacted
revenge upon the husband and the same-caste men who abused her physically
and sexually, for her particular version of pushed-to-the-limit domestic violence
might have merited an entry in some forgotten column hidden in the depths of
a newspaper.71

Instead, the murders of upper caste men on such a large scale by a low caste
woman makes it all the more shocking in the national imagination. The avenging
woman in cinema intervenes in the stable binary of masculine violence and
feminized victimhood that typically characterizes the gendered politics of
spectatorship.72 Read argues that this is often accompanied by the hyper-
sexualization of the female vigilante, but in the case of Bandit Queen, Phoolan is
masculinized in her revenge. Caldwell remarks that Phoolan actually chooses to
become a man by denying her social gender when fixating on revenge.73 This
seems to be an over-simplification, but the denial of her social gender as
disavowal of her rapes as a gendered inscription of a feminine body reinscribes
her resistance within a heteropatriarchal script.
With her long period in the ravines avoiding capture, real-life Phoolan had
created sophisticated networks with police and government officials and her
arrest was actually a disruption of these networks.74 In the film, she is seen as
being forced to surrender after the murders of almost all of the members of her
gang and with no access to supplies. While subversive potential can be limited
through the inscription of the raped body, Gopalan expands this critique of the
subversive potential due to the role of the state and the concluding restoration of
the social imaginary.75 The narrative of the avenging woman is initially
transgressive, in that her vigilantism addresses the void of state sponsored order.
However, this power is inevitably undercut by the resolution of state authority.
Phoolan is shown in the film as laying her weapons down in a ceremonious or
even ritualized manner under photos of Mahatma Gandhi and Durgā, at the feet
of the Chief Minister. This is relatively accurate in terms of its portrayal of her
real-life surrender, but her negotiations were not successful in securing demands
for her family’s and her own protection. Instead, the film encourages the audience
to pity her, ensuring that the balance of power remains unthreatened.
154 Bollywood Horrors

Truth and Testimony

Bandit Queen begins with three declarations which are important for the film’s
framing. First, “This is a true story.” Secondly, “ ‘Animals, drums, illiterates, low
castes and women are worthy of being beaten.’ Quote from the ‘Manu Smriti’ a
book of Hindu religious scriptures.”76 Lastly, “The events in this film are based on
the dictated prison diaries of Phoolan Devi—Goddess of Flowers—The Bandit
Queen.” Seema Biswas appears on screen as an adult Phoolan and defiantly yells
into the camera: “I am Phoolan Devi, you sisterfuckers.” Kapur emphasized the
truth in his conception of Phoolan’s story and has her declare her identity and
story for the viewer. Biswas becomes the authorial figure. She is Phoolan Devi
and it is her story, and she is directly inviting the viewer to consume it. In the
spectator’s anonymity, their gaze becomes interchangeable with that of the
omnipresent camera, privy to the most intimate details of Phoolan’s life.77 As
Trinh T. Minh-ha states, “Factual authenticity relies heavily on the Other’s words
and testimony. To authenticate a work, it becomes therefore most important to
prove or make evident how this Other has participated in the making of his/her
own image.”78 This is not the same as facilitating subaltern agency or using power
to subvert dominant storytelling narratives.79 Rather, it is a method that
exacerbates the dispossession of already marginalized people by co-opting them
into a constructed image, and this contributes to a static conception of the
subaltern subject. Instead, as Ramanujan suggests, the “conception of subalternity
as relational and fluid rather than as an absolute category” negates the necessity
of an authentic “real” story.80
Kapur claims a higher truth in his ability to portray Phoolan’s story on
film. Even if he didn’t have all of the facts right or try to portray a version
consistent with Phoolan’s account of the events, he is able to retell her life as
a better representation of gender and caste oppression.81 In the film, after
returning to her family in shame of her marital discord, the now adolescent
Phoolan is shown as an object of desire and disdain for higher caste men in
her village. She rejects the sexual advances of the head Thakur’s son in a physical
struggle that lacks consensual ambiguity. This is important because Phoolan’s
promiscuity would diminish the audience’s capacity for empathy for her. She
is banished from her village because the Thakurs believe “this girl’s bad for
our boys.” From Kapur’s position, an audience is unable to comprehend a
nuanced depiction of a subject’s actions. Kapur says, “I left out many other
things that could have gone against her. I wanted to create empathy for her.”82
Kapur decided that on her own Phoolan wasn’t a sympathetic character or
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 155

entirely appropriate for her relevance to caste and gender-based oppression.83

Phoolan Devi becomes his subject. Kapur is then able to expose “everyday acts of
violence that sustain gender and caste relations in much of north Indian
society”84 by erasing individual agency and subjectivity and translating it to his
creation and vision.
In this case, Kapur’s emphasis on authentic truth received criticism. Arundhati
Roy was a vocal critic of Bandit Queen and argues that the strategy of truth is a
tactic to insulate the film from criticism “against accusations of incompetence,
exaggeration, and even ignorance.”85 If the filmmakers had made a fictional film,
the discussion of its reception and controversy would be different. The more
common criticism was the assessment of the perceived truth of the biopic. Pinch,
for example, critiques the film on the basis that it is not “wholly true” despite its
claims, and the overemphasis on rapes were a directorial invention.86 Phoolan
Devi requested that the film not be shown at the Toronto International Film
Festival (TIFF ) and asserted that the public didn’t have the right to consume
her story and participate in her humiliation. She stated, “I would not go and
watch you being raped, if I knew you didn’t want me to.”87 The director of TIFF
screened the film despite the controversy because he was “satisfied that the movie
is based on Devi’s own testimony, that she freely sold the rights of her story to
Channel Four (the film’s co-producer) and that The Bandit Queen does not
condone the denigration of women.”88 It mattered little that the subject of the
biopic disputed these claims, because the director of TIFF —much like Kapur
as the film’s director—felt entitled to make a judgment and decision about the
film that excluded the real-life Phoolan as a subject with the agency to dictate
her own story. It is notable that with the exception of screenwriter Mala Sen’s
brief encounter with Phoolan for her biography, nobody involved with the
film actually met Phoolan Devi. There was also an ongoing refusal to screen
the film for her, so many of her objections came from what she learned about
the film second-hand from other viewers.89 Roy pejoratively commented, “It
didn’t matter to Shekhar Kapur who Phoolan Devi really was. What kind of a
person she was. She was a woman, wasn’t she? She was raped, wasn’t she? So what
did that make her? A Raped Woman! You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. He was
in business. What the hell would he need to meet her for?”90 This is the additional
layer of cultural horror and the replication of social relations that lead to that
horror in the blatant disregard for the subjectivity of a real-life referent. Phoolan
was bolstered to represent horrors to domestic and international audiences,
while she was silenced and violated.
156 Bollywood Horrors

Circuits of Power, Representation, and Production

If the film is approached solely from the inquiry of whether this is a “true story”
or not, those in judgment are able to use their power to make assessments of
truth claims. Critics who disbelieved this assertion asked why Kapur would not
have made the film more accurate or abandon the format of a biopic, while
others saw authenticity in the film for what they believed merited accolades for
truth. However, as Leela Fernandes states, “binary oppositions between reality
and fiction or truth and partiality, choosing one pole of the dichotomy will not
in itself circumvent the problem of power and representation.”91 The circuits of
representation are even more complicated by the international production of
this film and its intentions for Western and international film festival
consumption. Mala Sen’s biography, India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of
Phoolan Devi, does a better job of exposing these circuits. I am not asserting that
the biography is more effective because it is more “true,” but by detailing the
methodological complications of creating a linear biography of a living subject,
Sen acknowledges the imperfect nature of the biography. The biography presents
contradicting accounts of the same events using reconstructions from journalism,
meetings with Phoolan Devi, conversations with her family, and written accounts
from her prison diaries that were smuggled out of the institution while she was
incarcerated. All of this lends to a more complicated and nuanced depiction.
Interestingly, Brenda Longfellow actually criticizes this literary form because the
real subject and authorial voice in the biography is Sen, and Phoolan Devi’s voice
is only one “faint discursive thread,” which implicates the power relations of Sen
as a “post-colonial intellectual” over Phoolan as a “subaltern subject.”92 This, too,
is an oversimplification of the circuits of power that went into the cultural
production of Phoolan’s biography and inscribes subalternity in a relatively fixed
way. However, it does highlight another thread of cultural horror, where it is
reasonable that because of Phoolan’s caste status, her biography could be
produced without her input. Regardless, this nuancing is lost in the film, made
even more complicated by the fact that Sen was an original screenwriter of
Bandit Queen.
The opening of the film includes a passage from Manu Smr.ti that seems
to justify the abhorrent treatment of low caste women. That is to say, the
viewer gets the “true story” of Phoolan Devi, as framed in the “truth” of caste
conflict. Western film critic Stanley Kauffman summarizes the beginning of
the film:
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 157

The child of low-caste impoverished parents in central India, she was sold in
marriage at the age of 11 for a bicycle and a cow. This was 1970, not 1470. Her
husband, in his 20s, wanted her immediately for labor because his mother was
too old for work, but sexually he couldn’t wait for her to ripen. Soon after their
marriage, despite her screams, he raped her.93
Kauffman is able to read gender-based violence as a particular problem of the
Other. That is, because rural India is temporally backwards, there is a lack of
civilized social relations. Religious justification of caste oppression is apparently
contrary to the secular modernity of the West. In Kauffman’s opinion, the horrors
in Bandit Queen are a misplacement of antiquated social relations. This is of
course a fallacy with orientalist roots that diminish the gender and class-based
violence that occurs in the West. As Fernandes points out, the representation of
rape in Bandit Queen resulted in the re-invocation of orientalist narratives.94
That is, when barbarism is located with the Other, the West is not implicated in
violence against and hyper-sexualization of women.
Kapur claimed he had feminist intentions with the film, explaining his
motivations for the viewer to be particularly horrified by the film’s events and
thus able to connect this empathetic reaction to ongoing caste oppression and
gender-based violence. However, the circuits of representation and production
complicate readings of the film. Kauffman’s interpretation is not entirely wrong.
The narrative begins in Phoolan’s childhood village in the summer of 1968. Her
mother pleads with Phoolan’s father Devideen that at eleven years old, Phoolan is
too young to leave and live with the much older Putti Lal as her new husband.
Devideen is portrayed as uncaring as he states that all daughters are burdens. The
first instance of physical violence against Phoolan is early in the film. When
fetching water for Putti Lal, she is harassed by young boys in the village who
break her clay water pot. She quarrels with her mother-in-law, highlighting the
material differences between castes for the viewer.95 Putti Lal then beats her for
disrespect and, immediately after, rapes her for the first time. There is an intimate
connection between sex and violence that threads throughout the film that is
poignantly highlighted when read on the body of the prepubescent Phoolan. As
the young girl screams, the camera cuts to her mother-in-law, reinforcing the
acceptability of martial rape. In physical pain from the rape, Phoolan is told to
continue to work anyway under threat of further physical violence. She leaves the
village to complete chores, and after looking over the expanse of the surrounding
hills, she takes off running. These events prelude the opening film credits—a
thematic undercurrent is set for the rest of the film—predicated on the cultural
horror of caste and gender discrimination marked by sexual violence and rape.
158 Bollywood Horrors

Kishwar criticized many of Kapur’s choices as pandering to Western audiences,

who needed a more simplified version of caste-based warfare.96 This narrative
did not function well with the inclusion of the real-life land disputes with
Phoolan’s same-caste, but literate and wealthier, cousin and uncle.97 Readings are
complicated because the film was intended for both domestic and international
audiences. Fernandes refers to these as “discrepant audiences.”98 There was a
significant controversy over state certification of the film in India, leading it to be
screened internationally prior to entering domestic theaters. Kishwar claimed
the filmmakers framed this as politically motivated high caste censorship of the
film.99 The producer stated that the Censor Board requested the elimination of
profanity, large portions of the rape sequences, and “all references to the Thakurs”
in deference to the lobbying against the film’s portrayal of caste injustice.100
Kapur also claimed that the film was censored because of the politics of a film
risking box office success that didn’t follow a Bollywood filmmaking formula.101
Kauffman’s reading of the controversy was that India was proud of the candor of
exposing internal conditions abroad, but it was considered to be “too risky at
home.”102 These responses reinforce the notion that caste-based oppression is
still salient and in need of the critique provided by the film.
Absent in responses to Indian censorship is the fact that Phoolan herself was
a vocal advocate against the film. Her voice was silenced in public discourse in
the same way it was in translating her narrative to film. The only response to
Phoolan’s objections was Kapur’s emphasis on her request for more money and
that her marriage to an upper caste man indicated her desire for bourgeois
respectability, which motivated the censorship of more unsavory aspects of her
history.103 This is contradictory, as Kapur claimed to have taken license with the
portrayal of Phoolan to make her more sympathetic. Kapur disregarded
Phoolan’s direct response, “What I object to is that when I can’t even talk to
another woman about balaatkar [rape], how does Shekhar Kapur have the right
to show me being raped?”104 Even critics of the nudity and graphic sexual
violence in the film drew less on Phoolan’s objections and instead focused on
larger social and moral implications of film representation of rape and nakedness.
Although rape is a popular as a plot device in Hindi cinema,105 it is rarely actually
depicted—it is instead implied—and full-frontal nudity is relatively unheard of
in popular masala cinema. This led some to conclude that sex was crucial in
developing wider viewer interest given that Bandit Queen was not cast with well-
known actors or followed the Bollywood formula.106 Kapur said this criticism,
especially as it was directed at the humility of women viewing the film in public,
was baseless and supported by the popularity of the women-only shows that
 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror 159

were organized in deference to the critics who claimed that the nudity was
driving the film’s popularity.107 Interestingly, a double was used for the scene
where Phoolan is completely naked. Actress Seema Biswas says, “that height of
humiliation was beyond my boundary. As an actress, not a part of my execution.”108
While assertions of right to privacy by Phoolan were met with either derision or
completely ignored, conversely, the actress who portrayed her had the agency
and was given the respect to decide whether she wanted to be naked on camera.

Conclusion

In this analysis, I am not attempting to appropriate Phoolan Devi’s real-life

experiences into a script of feminist resistance and patriarchal subversion.
Instead, this chapter has shown that there were a set of contradictory effects of
Bandit Queen. The graphic of depiction of rape and caste-based oppression
disrupted certain patriarchal perceptions, but simultaneously reproduced
problematic relationships of power that contextualize the correspondence of
real-life cultural horror. Rape revenge films are not automatically implicated in
the reification of feminine victimization through the representation of rape. The
history of avenging women in Hindi cinema is firmly established, and Indian
rape revenge films are not mere replications of their Western counterparts,
though there are analytical overlaps that allowed me to draw comparisons in this
chapter. Additionally, I have not argued that the representation of rape to an
international audience need automatically resinscribe orientalist tropes. Take for
instance, the recent film Marlina Si Pembunuh Dalam Empat Babak (Marlina the
Murderer in Four Acts, 2017, dir. Mouly Surya). Marlina has seen similar
international circuits of production experienced by Bandit Queen, however, the
Indonesian film has found widespread critical acclaim for its feminist vision of
justice, vengeance, and a unique take on rape revenge.109 Unlike Bandit Queen,
Marlina focuses on a fictional character, her journey as an avenger, and the
relationships with other women in the film who contribute to a collectivist
revenge.110 Adversely, the inscribed rapes onto Phoolan’s filmic body have
considerable ramifications when the referent is a real-life and fluidly subaltern
woman who voiced criticism of the depictions. The cultural horrors Kapur
attempted to critique through Bandit Queen are instead reproduced and re-
enacted in various ways.
Whether Phoolan was a dacoit fighting for revolutionary social justice or a
thwarted woman with single minded revenge did not matter to the filmmakers.
160 Bollywood Horrors

As Roy concludes, “using the identity of a living woman, re-creating her

degradation and humiliation for public consumption, was totally unacceptable
to me. Doing it without her consent, without her specific, written repeated, whole-
hearted, unambiguous consent is monstrous.”111 When depiction of personal
horrors without consent dehumanizes the real-life person that the truth is based
on, the subject is oversignified to the point abjection. This is an additional layer
to the horror of Bandit Queen. As a rape revenge, it elicits the visceral spectator
response of filmic horror. Focused on caste and gender-based violence, it
represents the cultural horror that led to the context and circumstances of a/the
Bandit Queen. But most troublingly, the violation of Phoolan’s consent in the
film’s creation made it an object of horror that subverted any feminist motivations
of the filmmakers.
 8

Mardaani: The Secular Horror of Child

Trafficking and the Modern Masculine Woman
Beth Watkins

Introduction

In Mardaani (2014, dir. Pradeep Sarkar), Inspector Shivani Roy, a detective in the
Mumbai police, tracks the leader of a child trafficking ring. Because the inspector
is a woman, both the hero and the villain represent societal evils. The villain
abducts children and sells them into sex slavery; the hero subverts expectations
of women to thrive in the domain of the home and to serve family and/or god.
Mardaani moves the avenging figure away from the spiritual and familial and
into a professional, anonymous, public-serving world that derives its power from
human-made law. In its mundane world, individuals remain largely unconnected
to one another, and innocent children are not protected by the community or the
supernatural. Shivani restores a fraction of the moral order, but she ignores most
societal conventions to do so. Her violence is not on behalf of god or family but
for public good, and she transfers physical power to victims for their personal
catharsis.
As a film, many would label an investigative thriller, Mardaani may be an
unusual subject for a study of Hindi horror cinema: it was not marketed as such,
nor does it contain traditional genre elements like supernatural forces, mythology,
spectral surveillance, or unnervingly empty spaces. Through interviews with
Hindi horror film viewers in India and the UK, Shakuntala Banaji found that “In
Bollywood, horror is professional women who undermine men, families who
abandon their elderly, those who disrespect the gods; but it is also the rape and
murder of vulnerable persons;. . . the bloodthirsty rage of the unavenged; the
inexplicable ‘other’ who refuses to die, to change, or to submit.”1 Mardaani
imagines a world in which Hindi cinema’s usual narratives about traditional
social systems of safety (religion, the family and home, state authority figures)

161
162 Bollywood Horrors

are ineffective or absent, not to eventually reinstate their powers but to show
their failures. Instead of triumphing in the efficacy and righteousness of the
police or other figures of moral order, it reveals them to have a reach too limited
to defeat the complex, global threat of human trafficking. It establishes as
ordinary the unsettling ideas of anonymous monstrous forces and their
uncountable victims (all real people in the world of the film). Its bleak ending
reveals an ambivalence about the efficacy of contemporary society and state, and
an inevitable worsening of conditions. Modern society is too distracted to notice
the evils in its midst.
By considering elements of this film as part of the horror genre and discussing
the horror of the film’s subject areas we find a truly horrific picture of modern
urban India. Mardaani reveals a cultural horror of the failure by all traditional
sources of reassurance to protect vulnerable members of society. Furthermore,
its female hero calls upon those very members to break out of traditional gender-
and age-based roles to enter the public sphere and protect themselves, rejecting
the need for a proscribed domestic life prescribed by a patriarchal figure. At the
same time, the film portrays as normal, even necessary, features that traditionally-
minded audiences may find upsetting. The lead of the film is a woman who is
also the hero, decidedly not a heroine. She is fully autonomous and she drives
what little resolution the film offers. She “transgresses” into typically masculine
tasks, and her claim to and use of power are not subjugated. Nuclear families,
religious figures, and effective parents are all absent, replaced in the arc of the
plot by a secular, professional, childless woman.
The release of Mardaani by probably the most mainstream production house
in Bollywood, Yash Raj Films, suggests that creators are willing to gamble
occasionally on their audiences being able to handle a less optimistic view of
contemporary society. This was not always so in Hindi horror. As Meheli Sen
notes, during the rise of Ramsay brothers films in the 1970s and 1980s, “the
divorce between horror and a certain idea of ‘respectability’ thus comes to be
firmly entrenched.”2 Mardaani and some other films of the 2010s such as Stree
(The Woman, 2018, dir. Amar Kaushik) or the largely unnoticed Gang of Ghosts
(a 2014 Hindi remake by Satish Kaushik of the more popular 2012 Bengali
horror-comedy film Bhooter Bhabishyat, dir. Anik Dutta) have begun reuniting
respectability and elements of horror. The film itself (particularly its production
house) and the lead character are respectable. Sen’s observation that “recent
horror cinema. . . is very much about the bourgeoisie as well as made for
metropolitan, bourgeois spectators” rings true for Mardaani.3
 Mardaani 163

Plot Summary

Mardaani focuses all but its first twenty minutes on Shivani Shivaji Roy (Rani
Mukerji), a Senior Inspector in the Crime Branch of the Mumbai Police, chasing a
group of criminals who traffic children. The group has several arms, but most of
her significant interactions are with an ambitious younger man who calls himself
Walt after the lead character in the American TV show Breaking Bad (Tahir Raj
Bhasin). Shivani lives with her husband Bikram (Jisshu Sengupta), a doctor, and
orphaned niece Meera (Avneet Kaur). The initial section of the film establishes
Shivani as no-nonsense, procedure-oriented, and unafraid of physical confrontation.
When Meera is unable to find her friend Pyaari (Priyanka Sharma) for a
scheduled get-together, she worries to Shivani that Pyaari has been kidnapped
(Shivani had previously saved Pyaari from trafficking by her own uncle). Pyaari
lives in a shelter run by an NGO and also works as a flower-seller on the street.
Shivani asks at Pyaari’s school, where classmates and staff also haven’t seen her. A
brief scene of Rajasthan license plates on vehicles in the desert and Pyaari and a
few other girls huddled in the back of a truck confirms everyone’s fears that she
has been abducted. Shivani and her colleagues begin investigating Pyaari’s
disappearance. By tracking clues on a witness’s phone, they learn about an organizer
named Vakil (Anil George). Vakil and his associate (Walt, who is not yet named)
discover the police are surveilling them, and Walt volunteers to deal with Shivani.
This begins the first of several cycles of phone conversations between Walt
and Shivani, alternating with Shivani’s investigative work and Pyaari’s life with
the traffickers. In their first conversation, Shivani tells Walt she wants her
(figurative) daughter back, and he is surprised to hear of her connection to one
of the girls. We next see Pyaari and other girls being auctioned to older men, and
one of the customers rapes Pyaari.
After Shivani disrupts more of Walt’s plans in Mumbai, he sends her a package
with Pyaari’s severed finger inside. Shivani follows him to Delhi, where she meets
with Delhi police about the case and is given authority to work with a local
officer and pursue Vakil’s criminal ring. They manage to close in on Vakil, who
shoots himself rather than face questioning. Shivani tracks down another of
Vakil’s known associates, Minu (Mona Ambegaonkar). Minu admits to Shivani
that she is Walt’s mother and then sedates her.
The action then moves to another auction party at a hotel, where Minu
prepares the girls in revealing clothing and heavy makeup. Walt leaves Shivani
tied up on a bed in a hotel room, and one of his important clients, a political
164 Bollywood Horrors

minister, tries to rape her. Fighting off the politician, she drags him back to the
party and uses threats against him to bargain with Walt to free the girls. In a final
confrontation, Shivani isolates Walt from the rest of the criminals and customers
and, while waiting for the Delhi police to arrive, physically beats him and invites
the girls to do the same. The film ends with the police apprehending the people
at the auction, and in the final scene Shivani narrates that Walt dies from his
injuries and his surviving associate becomes a witness for the prosecution. The
girls are free, but their fates are unknown.
The hero of Mardaani proved popular enough with audiences that a sequel
film was released in December 2019 by the same production company (Mardaani
2, dir. Gopi Puthran), and at the time of writing it has earned almost double its
budget.4 As in the first film, Shivani effectively pursues a criminal whose focus is
sexual violence against women.

Horror Tropes and Appetites

Shivani, Pyaari, and Walt live in a very different world to that which we may
picture when we think of a Hindi horror film. There are no mysterious figures in
white, mad scientists, or fanged monsters. Horror has expanded to include new
evils: the façade of the vanilla-looking villain, the anonymity of the mundane
urban setting, and the complexities of international systems of exploitation. If a
horror film is, as Mithuraaj Dhusiya describes, one of those “that make it their
primary business to generate horripilation in their audiences,”5 then Mardaani is
a horror film. It wants viewers to be startled and repulsed, before becoming
engaged in a real-life issue or emboldened to fight back for ourselves and for
others. Its most significant goose-bump moment may be the finale, which refuses
to tie up the story or the underlying issue happily. Instead of resolving, Mardaani
fractures, sending Shivani and the victims to unknown next stages of their lives,
the issue of child trafficking looming somehow larger than it was before Shivani
identified and apprehended this handful of perpetrators.
Modernizing and urbanizing definitions of some genre traits reveals some
other standard horror tropes in the film. Minu, the mother with twisted affection
for her own horrible offspring, can be read as an old hag who corrupts and scars
children. Airless, windowless spaces in which the girls are held serve as secret
dungeons. Vakil and his helpers coalesce into a sort of mad scientist who
sexualizes young girls, an inverted Dr. Frankenstein who transforms independent
people into objects.
 Mardaani 165

Mardaani does not need many other genre elements. In the modern, urban,
global world, international networks and spectral anonymity take the places of
curses and the supernatural. It also avoids the macabre: Vakil’s death is not a
focus of glee or triumph for Shivani but instead simply a method he chooses to
enable his criminal business to survive. Real people and real issues are frightening
enough. If Hindi cinema like Stree (2018) and Tumbbad ([the name of a village
in Maharashtra], 2018, dir. Rahi Anil Barve) is creating new territory for horror
by using Indian literature and folktales in new ways,6 Mardaani turns to the
news and UN statistics for a source of the terrifying. Child trafficking is not
uniquely Indian; as the film mentions in passing, it connects India to other parts
of the world. The captions in the finale with statistics about the issue in India
remind viewers that this is not a fantastical subject and that these villains are
only nominally make-believe.
While greed and lust loom in the background of the story as the obvious root
causes of sex trafficking, they are mostly unadorned and unexamined. The
criminals may be warped in how they choose to feed their avarice, but they act
as rationally within their professional system as the police do in theirs. Shivani’s
wrath, which is hers alone until she transfers it to the victims at the end, is the
driving appetite. Beyond the children, no one is fully good, including us as
viewers, who are implied to be turning a blind eye to this particular evil like all
the passers-by on the city streets. We global citizens should all be able to agree
that this treatment of children is unacceptable, yet we accept it. It is nothing
otherworldly—just our worst nightmare.
Unlike the plots of most Ramsay brothers’ films, Mardaani coheres quickly
and focuses tightly. It is not masala: no romance, no comedy, no song sequences.
Its only significant social gatherings, music, or even embellished clothing occur
in scenes of child trafficking. A modern urban India that pays attention to
despicable actions is drained of most joy and color. As Nair writes, “Bollywood
horror today arguably surfaces anxieties buried in the delirium of consumerism,
globalization, and the new media sensorium.”7 This is exactly where Mardaani
lands: our fears that among all the demands and diversions of contemporary life
in the city, we cannot (or do not) take care of our children. We do not love them
(Pyaari’s mistreatment by her uncle), and sometimes we do not even see them
(Pyaari’s begging to cars on the street is met by closed by windows; the film does
not mention any of the other children’s families reporting them missing). The
figures who challenge Western cultural influences—a conservative mob angered
over public celebrations of Valentine’s Day—are dismissed easily once, but they
return to menace much closer to home by attacking Bikram and his clinic.
166 Bollywood Horrors

The human body is very much the subject and the object of Mardaani’s lessons
and actions. Walt, Vakil, Minu, Shivani, and her colleagues all detain, transform,
or attack bodies. The only adult in the film who does not is Bikram, and he is the
subject of physical humiliation by the mob. The theft of the girls’ agency over
their own bodies also suggests an anxiety about loss of autonomy (or, less
progressively, a loss of control by those who more “rightfully” have it over girls,
such as their parents or teachers). Like many movie monsters, the children are
transmuted—from innocents into unwilling sexual partners. The criminals
transgress both nature and culture. And like mad scientists, the criminals
“undermine the long-held sacrosanct traditional concept of the integrity of the
human body,”8 at least ideologically if not literally.
If recent Hindi horror can be characterized by “fears and anxieties that involve
the impact of globalization on the family—women entering the workplace,
increased abortion rates, premarital sex, male unemployment, divorce, adultery,
and the disintegration of the extended family,”9 as Sen claims, then Mardaani is
squarely a horror film. Significant story and action elements are driven by an
independent woman using her professional expertise. All the named adult
women work, and even Pyaari sells flowers on the road when she’s not in school.
Extended families are absent, and nuclear family units are ad hoc and
complicated (e.g., the passing reference by Shivani’s male colleague to his child
who spends too much time on the internet and too little doing homework, or the
team’s discussion of their boss’s marital spats). Villains like Walt and Vakil earn
money entirely illegally (so, not quite unemployed but certainly not traditional
workers). Non-consensual premarital sex is rape, not romance.

A Woman Hero

In its title, Mardaani—the feminine form of the Hindi adjective for courageous,
manly, macho—specifies that a woman can be a hero and that its hero is a
woman. The female lead here is not a heroine in the usual sense of being a love
interest or emotional support of a male character who drives most of the action.
She determines goals, logistics, procedures, wrongdoers, and punishments. She
exerts herself physically, attacking, capturing, and restraining men. And she is
not the only mardaani in the film. Minu uses physical threats against Shivani,
and the girls use their own strength to attack Walt as soon as Shivani creates the
opportunity for them to do so. They even use symbols of their oppression: the
high-heeled shoes the traffickers make them wear.
 Mardaani 167

Mardaani’s lead female exists fully formed before the film begins. Is this a fear
to be discussed in the twenty-first century: women who decide for themselves
what missions to pursue, confident in their skills and the appropriateness of
their decisions and involvement? Shivani is complicated as a marker of social
values, because she actively steps away from many of the values usually assigned
to women—caretaking in the home, involvement in extended family life—but
does embody many of the values usually assigned to men—physical protective
action, involvement in and humaneness for the public sphere, self-determined
pursuits thinly disguised under the umbrella of “duty.” Mardaani’s hero also does
not fit the “recognition of women as despised markers of both social values and
of the ‘specious good’.”10 Rani Mukerji also played this sort of topsy-turvy
woman-as-hero in the comic romance Aiyyaa (Oh My! 2012, dir. Sachin
Kundalkar), where she chooses and pursues a romantic interest with a zeal and
disregard for social consequences never seen in a Hindi film heroine. In Aiyyaa,
these actions read as absurd and desperate simply by being assigned to a
conventionally attractive woman.11 In Mardaani, Shivani’s story is surprising for
similar reasons: a woman taking officially-permitted action on behalf of someone
else, with an eye towards the public, rather than the good of a specific family or
love interest.
Shivani also operates beyond religious and personal spheres. The authority
with which she investigates and apprehends villains is formally established and
legally recognized, not temporarily granted by divine power in a private moment
of prayer or worship. Elsewhere in this volume, Kathleen M. Erndl discusses the
avenging goddess figure in Bollywood. She writes:

A woman can also manifest the fierce aspects of the Goddess when pushed to
the limit and redressing injustice. A woman, subject to violent oppression,
transforms into a horrific Durgā or Kālī-like goddess to exact revenge upon the
demonic forces and re-establish justice. This she does with bloodshot eyes and
wild hair, wielding a sword, axe, or sickle, or even tearing at the flesh of the
miscreant with her teeth. Severed heads are often involved.12

Shivani does not manage to re-establish justice on a grand scale, as the final
narration of the film makes clear. The justice she gets is limited: the criminals in
this particular story are part of a larger, global web, and the victims have the rest
of their lives ahead of them, with no indication by the film of how they will cope
with what they experienced, how their families and society will treat them, etc.
Erndl suggests that Mardaani may verge on transforming Shivani into an
avenging goddess. In the last confrontation with Walt, “a non-diegetic voice in
168 Bollywood Horrors

the background chants: ya devi sarvabhiuesu sakti rupena samsthita (Devī, you
live as power in every being in the form of śakti [feminine energy]). The film
ironically is called Mardaani (manliness), while the dhvani clearly establishes the
female power.”13 This moment seems to be more a cue for the viewer, connecting
a specific moment to other Hindi film tropes, rather than a conscious thought by
Shivani. There is no evidence that she is a religious person.
Mardaani’s lead presumably functions within the hierarchical structure of the
police, but she seldom discusses her work with a superior officer. Her work is
centered on the public good; even though the investigation at the center of the
film is initiated through Shivani’s family-like relationship with Pyaari, the film
actually opens with her team successfully working a case to which she has no
personal connection. Shivani’s world has expanded beyond the home: while love
of family was the impetus for Shivani’s quest, her professional duties are the
wider context and establish as reasonable the skills she must use to complete it.
Shivani is not a lioness protecting her cubs. She is a professional protecting her
society. The film’s writers (Gopi Puthran and Vibha Singh) also avoid assigning
her most of the traits and tasks that female leads are usually given: she focuses
her energies entirely outside of the domestic sphere, unfettered by the social
expectations that tend to accompany married women in films. The fact that she
and Bikram both work outside the home and do not have a biological child is
presented as neither shortcoming nor tragedy.14
Shivani disciplines herself. She carries and uses weapons; she jokingly but
with truth compares herself to one of the most famous male police officers in
recent Hindi films (Chulbul Pandey, played by Salman Khan in Dabangg in
2010); and she works within the limits of the patriarchal and traditional police
system. Following procedure is little discussed, so we can assume that characters
do not give much weight to it and that we viewers shouldn’t either, since Shivani’s
mission is more meaningful than following proper channels. She isn’t going
rogue, exactly—for example, she checks in with a senior officer in Delhi to whom
she has a personal connection—but rules are not discussed. The world of the
police in Hindi cinema is not particularly restrained, and we routinely see
officers like Chulbul Pandey breaking the laws of physics in fight sequences, as
well as taking illegal vigilante-type action to solve crimes to which they have an
individual personal attachment. Compared to her professional peers in recent
Hindi films like the Singham series, the Dabangg series, or even the Dhoom
series, Shivani seems like a throwback to officers of the 1970s who are depicted
as physically strong and morally uncompromising but who work at a human
scale. Her final confrontation with Walt is hand-to-hand and utterly alone. Like
 Mardaani 169

many cops of many eras of films, she blends professional and personal duties and
codes of conduct—and is mostly left unsupervised with the freedom to do so.
Just as it makes its hero a woman, Mardaani assigns the traits it considers
monstrous to men. Wanton male desire is primarily the root of the fear in
Mardaani, and a woman in a very non-traditional role for her gender dispels it
and presumably puts victims back on their rightful path home. Their safe return
from trafficking does not necessarily return them to “normative femininity.”15
Depending on what their families and social circles learn of their ordeal, they
may be outcast from consideration for traditional marriage and motherhood:
like Sītā, their sexual status may be assumed to be compromised, regardless of
their utter innocence of how the status was lost. Their fate is unknown, and in
the case of Pyaari, there is no guarantee she won’t be abducted again, especially
with the shadow of already having been rescued by Shivani once before the film
begins.
If in many Hindi horror films “exorcism becomes the means not only of
expelling the interstitial phantasmal being but also of punishing and disciplining
the female body for unrestrained desire and look,”16 then Mardaani also updates
this idea: it is men who exert power from dark corners in the name of fulfilling
other men’s lusts. Female desire is not an issue or method in the film. Male
scopophilic gaze is at play and presented as wrong, notably at the parties where
the traffickers’ clients can shop for girls they want to rape.
Mardaani does not explicitly put forward a “patriarchal fear of the all-
powerful feminine,” as Mubarki puts it, but it certainly does exist “within the
larger framework of cultural misogyny.”17 It tries to pull the viewer in a little bit
to this particular type of crime and wants us to look at the people who engage in
it and sanction it. There is an extremely cathartic moment in which multiple
victims punish their perpetrator, and what makes this scene work so well is that
the punishers are so unlikely to get such an opportunity, even in cinema: they are
female, they are young, and some of them come from very underprivileged
backgrounds. They are, by most definitions, nobody, but the film lets their
presence be felt strongly.

Pushing Definitions of Acceptable Womanhood in Pradeep

Sarkar’s Laaga Chunari Mein Daag

Mardaani shares some similarities with director Pradeep Sarkar’s second feature
film, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (My Veil Is Stained, 2007), also starring Rani
170 Bollywood Horrors

Mukerji. This too is a story about the dangers of the big city for young women,
but it more directly discusses women taking on typically masculine duties like
bread-winning and protection. Mukerji plays Vibha Sahay, the older sister in a
financially struggling nuclear family threatened with homelessness by inheritance
claims on their house. Vibha moves from Varanasi to Mumbai to earn for her
family; upon arriving in Mumbai, she discovers that office jobs are not open to
her because of her lack of education, so she becomes a sex worker catering to
elites. Vibha’s father (Anupam Kher) belittles her decision to move to Mumbai,
saying she’s just pretending to be a son and will accomplish nothing. Once she
starts sending large amounts of money home that enable the Sahays to repair
and protect their house, he describes her success in similarly gendered tones
(unaware of how she earns): “She’s our son now,” he proclaims to his wife Savitri
(Jaya Bachchan) (who until this time has been the family’s primary earner
through her sewing). At the conclusion of the film, when he admits to the family
his own shortcomings as a proactive patriarch, he tells Savitri that he knows his
failures required her to be both mother and father to their daughters.
Mardaani omits the gendered assessments that Laaga Chunari Mein Daag
voices through Vibha’s buffoon-ish, failed father. Shivani’s suitability for the police
force is assumed, and the film spends no energy showing how she earned her
place there. Her professionalism and competence are as matter-of-fact as any
Bollywood hero’s strength or wealth. Shivani’s world is established with confidence,
and no details need to be justified in order for the stories to work. Mardaani also
sheds the religious rectitude implicit in Laaga Chunari Mein Daag’s setting in the
Hindu holy city of Varanasi and Vibha’s visits to a Mumbai temple.
In both films, Sarkar disrupts the traditional norm of honor (izzat) so
commonly assigned to women by men in Hindi cinema. He implies that women
can continue their lives after unconventional experiences that change their
sexual status—and that there are far worse fates than existing outside sexual
“purity,” whether by desperate semi-choice (Vibha) or by other people’s crimes
(Pyaari and implied others). The films reject any questioning of Vibha’s or
Pyaari’s worth. Laaga Chunari Mein Daag depicts this social acceptance
concretely by employing traditional markers: Vibha marries a love interest who
knows about her past, and they celebrate within the embrace of her family and
home community. The fact that Laaga Chunari Mein Daag was a box-office flop18
may suggest audiences at the time were uninterested in soapy sacrifice and
reward on the big screen. The fate of the girls Shivani rescues is unknown, but
their agency and freedom are not ruled out, now that they have demonstrated
emotional and physical bravery. A few decades ago, films regularly depicted
 Mardaani 171

villains abducting, raping, and/or pimping out daughters or sisters of the central
family in a narrative, with victims then committing suicide rather than transfer
the “dishonor” of their victimhood to their family. But izzat is yet another
traditional power and social dynamic that Mardaani refuses to engage with.
The film will not judge or write off victims of sex crimes. Interestingly, this
bleaker, less conventional film was much more financially successful, earning
well over double its budget at the box office and supporting a sequel on similar
themes in 2019.19

Beyond Avenging Women

In “Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,” Lalitha Gopalan lays out a standard

narrative for a specific type of film, from which Mardaani diverges in several
ways. In Gopalan’s typology, a happy family exists without a dominant father
figure, and their stable existence is upset when the female lead is raped. The court
system fails the protagonist, at which point she transitions in status from victim
and sexual subject to avenger.20 At the end, “the avenging woman’s unhindered
access to power is always limited by the arrival of the police.”21 The 1980 film, Insaf
Ka Tarazu (The Scales of Justice, 1980, dir. B.R. Chopra), in which fashion model
Bharti (Zeenat Aman) is raped and then kills her attacker after he also rapes her
younger sister Neeta (Padmini Kolhapure), is a key example of this type.22
Mardaani is not constrained by the older standard formula. A happy family
exists, but it is non-traditional, with the married heterosexual couple not having
biological children of their own and instead reaching out to other children.
Shivani herself may be read as the paternal figure, given the non-hyper-masculine
nature of her husband. Mardaani limits rape as the traditional fuse to action for
both male and female protagonists and replaces it with threats to Shivani’s and
the girls’ self-determination and personal agency. And because of Shivani’s
profession, there is no point of transition from victim to avenger or from
vigilantism to formality. She is already a representative of the state with legitimate
powers and responsibilities to apprehend criminals.
Underscored by the rapist’s use of locked rooms and bondage, Insaf Ka Tarazu
limits the autonomy of both its lead women characters, including vengeance on
their own behalf. The film only lets Bharti kill the rapist after he tortures and
attacks her sister, and because he dies by someone else’s hand, Neeta is denied
victory over him as a plaintiff in court or as a vigilante. Insaf Ka Tarazu also
insists that society has a right to and authority over women’s bodies. Bharti’s job
172 Bollywood Horrors

as a model means she is treated as a commodity that men command, and her
fiancé insists that she will stop modeling as soon as they marry so that she can
bear and raise children. Bharti herself and at least two other characters state that
the rape damages her worth as a person, but in the end the film restores her not
just to her pre-victimhood place as a single working woman but even “elevates”
her to the imminent status of wife, daughter-in-law, and mother. On one hand,
the film rewards Bharti with legal freedom for her vigilante killing; on the other,
it implies her utmost reward is returning to the embrace of a (to-be) husband
and traditional motherhood contained in the domestic sphere. To a traditionally-
minded audience, Bharti’s suitability for marriage and motherhood may have
been the most terrifying aspect of the film, more than the two brutal rapes and
public character assassinations of innocent victims. Even viewers watching the
film almost forty years after its release must ask themselves: are we happy that
Bharti becomes an unlikely crusader, ridding the world of a violent criminal and
upending the legal system with her arguments, or are we happy that she gets
what women in mainstream cinema of the time were supposed to want?
Conversely, Shivani enjoys unquestioned status and autonomy. Shivani’s place
in the police force is never discussed: no one wonders how she obtained the rank
she has or even comments on why she became a cop in the first place. Mardaani
rejoices in this confidence. It does not interrogate the girls’ behavior to see if they
may have done something to suggest they deserve or wanted to be trafficked.
Women and girls deserve autonomy.
Mardaani also diverges from films like Damini (Lightning, 1993, dir. Rajkumar
Santoshi), in which a rape of another character becomes the catalyst for the
female lead risking her own safety by testifying against her husband’s brother in
court. In Damini, heroic action is spread across at least three characters: the
titular Damini (Meenakshi Sheshadri), who witnessed the rape and bravely goes
against her in-laws’ wishes to cover it up to protect their reputation; her husband
(Rishi Kapoor), who also witnessed the rape and is eventually inspired by her
integrity to corroborate her testimony; and her lawyer (Sunny Deol), who verbally
hammers the defense attorney’s arguments in intense courtroom dialogues.
Damini as a female lead shares Shivani’s moral correctness but flinches when her
husband is cross-examined in his initial statements that deny the crime. Her
physical strength is also not called upon. When attacked by the opposing
attorney’s goons on the way to the courtroom, she picks up a weapon and
challenges them, but it is a huge crowd of onlookers who actually fell her attackers,
pelting them with bricks from a construction site. Mardaani rolls the ethical
guardian, the orator, and the attacker into Shivani’s character and has no need for
 Mardaani 173

male saviors. Damini is named for lightning, a natural phenomenon as visually

striking as it is dangerous; Shivani’s middle name is Shivaji, the seventeenth-
century Maratha warrior king. Mardaani also dismisses Damini’s idealized
courtroom outcome as useless fantasy, deciding that potential formal justice isn’t
worth an uncertain slog through the corruption, misogyny, and backlogs of the
courts.
What sets Mardaani apart most significantly from the standard rape-revenge
formula, including films in which a female police officer is raped and formulates
a violent revenge plan (such as Zakhmi Aurat (Wounded Woman, 1988, dir.
Avtar Bhogal)), is that the lead female character is not raped. The crimes are
perpetrated against someone the lead cares for, the same structure often followed
by male hero-centered films. The threat of rape lurks constantly, not just because
Shivani routinely visits dangerous locations full of criminal men through the
responsibilities of her profession, but also because of the trafficking of the young
girls, in whose lives we know rape will occur imminently and repeatedly.
In reference to Insaf Ka Tarazu, which Gopalan describes as “the inaugural
moment in the avenging woman genre,” the author discusses “our inability as
spectators to tell the cinematic difference between a scene of sexual consent and
rape.”23 Mardaani avoids any confusion by making all of the sexual objects
children, whose inability and unsuitability to give informed consent to sexual
activity are never questioned. There is no leeway for interpreting their actions as
consensual or even desirous, as the rapist’s lawyer does in Insaf Ka Tarazu. The
film states clearly that the criminal gang’s activities are reprehensible.
Mardaani refuses to show female bodies in pleasure, denying the audience
titillation through the criminals’ lens and thus emphasizing their wrongness. The
only “body genre” it focuses on is horror, depicting female bodies in emotional
extremes of terror and violence.24 It more often shows the former but, quite
significantly at the film’s end, the latter as well, where one specific woman is
subjected to violence as part of her job and other women, at her behest, commit
violence against their perpetrator once he has been subjugated enough to no
longer be threatening. Their violence is for revenge rather than containment.
As Gopalan points out, “revenge allows female stars to dominate the screen,
but the [avenging woman] genre demands that a violent assertion of masculine
power in the form of rape is the price to exact for such power.”25 Shivani does not
have to pay this price. The ability, right, and necessity to assert physical power
were hers all along. The significant transition of power in the denouement is
from the police to the victims and on behalf of the public, instead of from the
victims to the police, as in the described formula. Shivani’s physical fight against
174 Bollywood Horrors

Walt to subdue him ends with her handing him over to the now-liberated girls,
who beat him further in revenge—or at least catharsis of fear and anger.
Unlike the avenging woman archetype, Shivani’s pursuit of Walt is not solely
motivated by her own survival of violence. While she is motivated to protect
Pyaari, she also wants to make sure other victims can survive. The war in this film
isn’t as personal as the film’s tagline suggests. Contrast this with Kahaani (Story,
2012, dir. Sujoy Ghosh), which also features an independent woman out in the
public world demanding answers and finding perpetrators to specifically personal
crimes. Kahaani’s female hero Vidya deliberately uses her pregnancy, a uniquely
female state, to lower people’s expectations of her skills, to distract them from her
true goals, and to create sympathetic responses that benefit her. Visibly very
pregnant, she comes to Calcutta from Mumbai to investigate the disappearance
of her husband two years earlier. Vidya quickly ingratiates herself into a city
police station, thanks in part to her technical skills as a computer scientist but
mostly due to the emotional response to her plight by a particular officer, who
becomes her sidekick and whose presence provides access to resources and
formal authority to her personal quest. In the film’s final sequence, acting on her
own, Vidya kills one of the villains and disappears into a crowd of women
celebrating Durgā Pūjā, all dressed in similar red and white saris while
worshipping the goddess. We learn that Vidya’s pregnancy was just a disguise and
that she had miscarried a pregnancy upon learning of her husband’s death two
years ago. Vidya’s actual status as a childless widow is not nearly as sympathetic
as the role she has cleverly created and convincingly played, a possibly single
mother who physically carries a more traditionally respected bond to her
husband. Shivani’s sexual and parental statuses do not enter into anyone’s
assessment of her. She claims as much agency as Kahaani’s lead but does so with
more of her own authority and less duplicitousness.
The finale of Mardaani holds only a partial “conventional rearrangement of
law and order.”26 The criminals who survive are arrested, and the most important
antagonist dies. But beyond the immediate freeing of the victims, most threads
are left loose. We don’t see Shivani returning to Mumbai or reuniting with her
husband, and she doesn’t need to be reintegrated into society because she was
already on its fringes. We don’t see the girls reintegrating into whatever society
they left. The film’s point is that this cultural horror is not over, and it refuses to let
these particular characters stand in for a society in which the global problem of
child trafficking is resolved. The narrow specificity of its conclusion is unsettling.
Notably, Shivani does not represent formal justice, as the film ends before we
can see any legal action taken. Explicitly naming the inability of society’s systems to
 Mardaani 175

prevent crime and to protect women and girls, Shivani calls on all of them to
become their own mardaani as the war on exploitation continues. The film
recognizes the limitations of the state in prosecuting such crimes. She wants to stop
Walt from committing these crimes again, whether or not the public will ever know
if this goal is met. Shivani and then the girls annihilating an adult man is just one
of the horrors in the finale: justice is determined by the victims themselves, not by
any civil authority, and in scale far greater than is necessary to subdue the evil-doer.
In these final scenes, Walt too points out the justice system’s failings in
punishing criminals like himself. He taunts Shivani with the inefficacy of the
system, asking what tools are in her repertoire other than the physical violence
she’s inflicting. She turns the argument against him, implying that society
overlooking corruption and unauthorized action benefits her cause as well.

Shivani “You’re right. This is India. This is what goes on here,” twisting his neck.
“Those people sitting outside will bury your crime? They can do it only if you
reach the police station. But you won’t reach the police station because this is
India. If you don’t want to bother the court too much, issues can be settled this
way. Some people call it an encounter.27 Some people call it teaching a lesson. . .
Some also call it the Lokpal Bill.”28
Walt “What’s your plan? An encounter in front of everyone?”
Shivani “This is India. If 50 people take the law in their hands and kill someone,
then it’s not called an encounter. It’s called ‘public outrage.’ ”

At this point in the action, the devotional chant Erndl noted and the sound of a
conch appear. Shivani looks directly at the girls before leaving the room, and
Pyaari leads their attack on Walt. Divine and popular power are invoked as
Shivnai wordlessly gives the girls permission to take their revenge. Mardaani
extends the concept of righteous, invigorating revenge to a group unlikely to
have agency and whose voices are usually ignored or silenced: females who are
young, poor, and even orphaned. Shivani does not wait for any other official to
appear and instead immediately encourages the victims to physically unleash
their anger and fear. The girls represent India, backed by the ideological power of
a hypothetically enraged populace and a direct, uncontrolled democracy.

An Ordinary Monster

One of Mardaani’s most frightening choices is to make the villain Walt into an
average-seeming thirty-something man. Film critic Anuj Kumar of The Hindu
176 Bollywood Horrors

says, “Sarkar doesn’t portray the villain as the odd one out with a hideous laughter
and obvious choices. In fact, he is the most ordinary character in the film. . . It is
this familiarity with the villain that sucks you in and keeps you anxious about his
next move.”29 Walt is absolutely terrifying, both at the personal level through his
unremarkable everydayness and at the societal level in the lack of consequences
for his cruelty to children.
His surface appearances as a film character suggest Walt could be the friend
of any standard urban Bollywood hero. But the film uses this blandness to
conceal destructive actions and monstrous traits. From behind his invisibility, he
provokes anxieties and fears. He actively threatens traditional domesticity by
removing girls from their homes and enabling his clients’ philandering. His
personal entrepreneurial success comes at a very high cost to other people. He’s
close enough to his mother to work with her, though the story never explores
whether their bond is based on affection or fear. Walt’s room looks like that of
many urban heroes and their friends in Bollywood films of the 2010s. In fact,
Walt’s apartment is the closest Mardaani gets to what Meheli Sen labels new
horror’s obsession with carefully-accessorized urban apartments.30 He has an
expensive computer, a bookshelf, and images of Western pop icons (John Lennon
on the pillow and a framed poster of his namesake Walter White from Breaking
Bad just above it). Walt’s heroes are foreign, perhaps a symbol of the economic
and cultural globalization of which the trafficking network is also a part? This
vaguely aspirational but predictable setting would render Walt forgettable if it
weren’t for his horrifying actions.
The actor (Tahir Raj Bhasin) plays his interactions with Shivani as almost
deadpan, as though Walt doesn’t really find her threatening and is only bothering
to taunt her because he knows she will react, despite her efforts to sound blasé.
Bhasin’s casting is significant: a relatively unknown face in his second feature
film, this actor is a blank slate. He elicits no major preconceptions in the audience
of villainy or heroism. This actor can almost slip past audiences the way Walt
slips past the Mumbaikar bystanders to his crimes.
Through interviews with horror film audience members, Shakuntala Banaji
found that “For Hindi horror audiences, it appears to be a combination of
banality and otherness that characterizes the monstrous.”31 Walt looks and
sounds banal, but his actions reveal his monstrousness, and Mardaani chooses to
focus on what the villain does and how that impacts society rather than on who
he is and his identity’s significance to his actions. Walt as an individual adds
nothing special to the crimes he commits, his facelessness an insidious part of
 Mardaani 177

the arms of trafficking rings. His averageness may be key in sealing his fate as
well: specifically because he appears to be an average person who could easily
disappear back into the crowds and continue his crimes, Shivani must eliminate
him as soon as she has the chance. Mardaani mutates this exceptionally
unexceptional young man: if he seems so normal, why is he so pointlessly evil,
and how can he become so disposable? The film does not give him the respect of
an explanation. In the end, his punishment—becoming a corpse who never even
gets a TV news camera shined on him in an arrest or courtroom—mirrors the
facelessness of the girls he stole.
Walt’s involvement in the child trafficking ring is evil for the sake of profit.
There is no specific or emotional motivation in his choice of how to earn
money. He apparently has no connection whatsoever to his victims: unlike
villains in Hindi films of other eras, he does not target the relatives of his (or
his family’s) enemies or try to expunge from society people he feels are
transgressors or inferiors. His targets are not predetermined or predictable. He
seems deeply detached, and that’s part of what makes him scary. His businesslike
demeanor, talking with Vakil about the girls like widgets on an assembly line, is
a weapon against Shivani, who tries her best to put on a cool façade but whom
we know to be deeply upset. Towards the end of the film, we learn about Walt’s
family tie to Minu, as well as his very emotional connection to Vakil, who stands
as a father figure to him just as Shivani acts as a mother figure to Meera and
Pyaari. It is only after these affiliations are revealed that Shivani gets close enough
to defeat him, as though his bits of humanity form a useful crack in his shadowy
persona.
By some definitions, Shivani too may be a type of villain in her choices that
oppose Hindi cinema’s traditionally preferred roles for heroes and heroines. As
described, she resolutely does not fit the categories mainstream Hindi films like
to assign to women in their thirties. She is a married, healthy woman without a
biological child, a figure whom Hindi cinema typically pities at best. She displays
great physical strength and exerts herself in areas other than dance, the medium
through which women performers are expected to show aptitude. Her husband’s
profession is much less macho than her own. They are both caretakers, but her
work is completely outside the home, public-facing, and more system-focused,
while his is done in privacy, one patient at a time. We never meet the Roys’
neighbors, but if we did, they would probably gossip about the unusual couple.
Neither Shivani nor Pyaari have parents, yet these motherless females are in a
better moral position than the villain who works in tandem with his.
178 Bollywood Horrors

Children and Vulnerability

Film scholar Meheli Sen points out that Bollywood has largely ignored the physical
and mental plights of India’s children (e.g., participation in the labor force, extreme
stress in competitive school exams). She writes, “melodrama’s favorite stomping
ground—the family—becomes, almost exclusively, the site for the eruption and
elaboration of the horrific.”32 Mardaani extends the fear by removing children
from their families (both biological and functional, in the case of Pyaari). If the
modern nuclear family is a marker of economic and social progress, Mardaani
upends these concepts by explicitly refusing to show any such families and
implicitly indicating that they cannot protect their most vulnerable members.
Mardaani centers the plights of children in one specific way, depicting an
extreme version of what children, specifically prepubescent girls, could suffer.
Mardaani uses children as signifiers of hope and resistance: most of the girls
resist succumbing to the criminals’ way of life, unlike Alka (Sharika Raina), a
young woman who was once one of them and now helps groom them. Still,
ultimately the children read as a question mark. At the end of the film, we do not
know whether they will reunite with their families, succeed in school, or be
restored to perfect health. Their future is unsecured. Even Shivani’s narrative
contains no finality; she talks about restoring a smile to Pyaari’s face rather than
establishing a new life for her with financial and bodily security.
Children slide more easily between worlds: they are small, they are ubiquitous
(maybe especially in urban India), and they are curious, often wanting to explore
unknown spaces. As Pyaari is broken off from the system that tries to look after
her (school, Shivani), she slips into the world we try not to see. Once kidnapped,
she and the other girls must exist in between identities, mourning the one taken
from them and resisting the one forced onto them. Sexualized children fall
outside standard social taxonomies. This is the abject—defined by Meraj Ahmed
Mubarki as “that which threatens to break down the distinction between the
subject and the object or between the self and others”33—that Mardaani
illustrates. Stealing children, hiding them, and relocating them for money is the
method of abjection, and we even see the hero slide into the world where this
crime happens, starting with the impetus of Pyaari.
The film expands the concept of vulnerability beyond the victimized children.
Most of the characters are shown in a weak or exposed state at least once. Vakil is
frightened by Shivani’s close pursuit into killing himself rather than giving up
information that would endanger the rest of the gang, and Walt is left shaken by
his death.34 The gang kills off some of its own members to stop them from
 Mardaani 179

informing, and powerful clients are eventually apprehended. Even Shivani is

physically distressed when Walt sends her Pyaari’s severed finger. Friends, families,
and professional networks are uncertain in modern urban India. The international
criminal web of which Walt, Vakil, and Minu are a part threatens the innocent
(children) and destabilizes the middle-class comfort (Shivani and Bikram). As
Sen suggests, “recent Bollywood horror films function as excellent barometers for
India’s post-economic liberalization anxieties. . . [T]he genre articulates the
under-tow of the large transformative processes brought about by globalization
via the depiction of fear, resentment, vulnerability, and disempowerment.”35
Although Mardaani does not really have a subplot, certainly not one unrelated
to the main story, there is an important small episode about Shivani’s husband
Bikram, whose demographic category of professional-class male suggests he is
the most secure character in the film. But Bikram too is shown as vulnerable. A
right-wing mob Shivani disrupted and publicly scolded earlier in the film attacks
him at his workplace, humiliating him. Later, he is as horrified by Pyaari’s
dismembered finger as Shivani is—Walt’s monstrosity has now infiltrated
Shivani’s most intimate space. Referring to the culprits, he tells Shivani “Hunt
this guy down, no matter what.” The film cuts to Shivani in Delhi, talking on her
cell phone. His voice on the other end says “Be calm. You are the most dangerous
when you are calm.”
In these two tiny moments, Bikram becomes an almost fatherly figure before
departing from the film: he offers comfort, voices a moral imperative, and gives
advice. The film is not interested in the question of whether Shivani’s departure
to Delhi leaves Bikram more vulnerable. A further attack on her partner is less
important to Shivani than the safety of the children. To Shivani, the good of the
collective outweighs that of the individual, even though that choice requires
much greater physical risk. Bikram’s interactions with Shivani are a reminder
that she is not a completely solitary figure and that other people would notice if
she were to vanish from the fabric of society. This woman’s life is significant, and
she extends that significance to the girls who are victimized by Walt.
However, Bikram is essentially inconsequential to the film’s central story. He
does not appear in the second part of the film at all. This absence mirrors the
structure of many Hindi films in which female characters (mostly mothers and
love interests of heroes) vanish from stories while physical action sequences
dominate towards the climax, only to reappear or step in from the sidelines in
the very final scene in which a family unit is reunited. For some viewers, the
emasculation and irrelevance of this Hindu patriarch may be the film’s biggest
horror element.
180 Bollywood Horrors

Maximum City Horror

The urban settings of Mardaani are crucial. The crevices and hiding spots of the
modern Indian city permeate the film; even the scenes shot in daylight have a
layer of dread, especially once Pyaari goes missing. There is darkness, startling-
ness, mystery, and fear.36 The film makes clear that the horrors of sex trafficking
and child rape that seem ancient, or at least as though they should be relegated
to history, exist just as much in the here and now. As Sen explains,

The supernatural’s retreat from the rural haveli to the urban high-rise has not
necessarily signaled a disabling of feudalism in this larger sense. . . If the narrative
of South Asian modernity remains constitutively unsettled, forces of globalization
have further complicated the scenario. . . Put differently, the genres of the
supernatural—perhaps more efficaciously than many others—demonstrate that
the feudal/modern, past/present, myth/history binaries that remain so beloved
to Hindi cinema, in fact, crystallize as mutually haunted categories.37

The film quietly suggests that growth of cities and the technologies and
infrastructures that enable them are part of the systems of child trafficking.
Crowds unknowingly obscure girls going missing. Highways connect Mumbai
to Rajasthan to Delhi. Mobile phones capture images of victims and obscure
perpetrators’ locations. While Mardaani does not discuss the history of child
trafficking, it implies that the current era is no more enlightened than what
preceded it. Perhaps this crime may be read as a Gothic haunting of the present-
day dense urban landscape by colonial histories of violent displacement of
populations.38
By initiating the story of the kidnapping in Mumbai, India’s financial capital,
the film suggests a nightmarish extension of capitalism. The city stands for the
triumph of money over values, with both the risks and freedoms that entails.
Wealth and efficiency have created a monstrous machine that turns human
children into sexualized automatons and financial profit. When people like Walt,
Minu, and Vakil are given freedom to choose how they live their lives, this is the
path they take. Mardaani juxtaposes the rich and poor in a predatory relationship,
mediated by what appears to be middle-class criminals and interrupted by
middle-class police. This is where some of the film’s fears lie. The vast middle
classes—most of us—have a role in furthering these unethical, exploitative
transactions, and we also have a role in stopping them. The victims and
perpetrators of child trafficking exist in a hidden city that remains out of view
mostly because the rest of us don’t know or bother to look for it. Current horror
 Mardaani 181

films, as Sen argues, “reflexively render late capitalism as a fissured, contradictory,

and contested terrain in spaces like South Asia.”39 The monster in Mardaani is
specifically urban: an uncontainable global trafficking network, motivated by
greed and feeding off of the most vulnerable and overlooked in a society that
ironically has sufficient resources to protect them.
Mumbai is also the entertainment capital of India, but that’s not the version of
the city that Mardaani inhabits. Stylistically, Mardaani is remarkably unadorned,
devoid of Hindi cinema’s famous imaginative exuberance. Instead of using music
to let viewers escape the increasing fear of the story through the magic of song-
sequence teleportation, comic relief, or elements devoted to glamor, this
particular piece of Mumbai-created cinema drags us into a disorienting secret
holding cell, where childhood, safety, and identity are interrupted. There are no
weddings or fantasy sequences, no undercover missions that require Shivani to
dress in expensive clothes or blend in at a five-star hotel. The two scenes with
colorful costumes and attention to physical appearance are focused on the
trafficked girls being dressed and made up against their will in order to make
clients “see their lovers, not their daughters,” as Minu says as she grooms them.
Even with the aspirational, glamorous Yash Raj Films as its production house,
Mardaani depicts an unhappy modern city: “Even as horror becomes more
technologically competent—referencing a shinier, more global India—it
continues to interrogate this gloss through narrative and content.”40
In addition to ignoring urban pleasures and conveniences, Mardaani creates
a city that is unsafe and unstable. It is the terrain of the disruption of moral order
as well as of the rational thinking used to apprehend those who disrupt. When
the film follows Shivani to the criminals’ hub in Delhi, the urban landscape
expands to include the capital and, by extension, the nation. It enables these
monsters who seem like ordinary people, living in ordinary places. The hero is as
isolated in the metropolis as her counterparts in horror films set in villages or
rural mansions. The film isn’t interested in showing the city fighting alongside
her. One poster for the film shows only Shivani in plain clothes and Vakil’s body,
with no other officers or even symbols of her official authority.
“Every war is personal,” the tagline says, and the end of the film shows us that
“personal” also carries the sense of “individual” or “self-determined,” as Shivani
works almost alone in apprehending Walt and his crew and as the girls recognize
their own physical strength and anger. By showing them as unhelpful in
protecting Pyaari, Mardaani rejects the assumed good of automatic and inherited
social groupings such as the neighborhood, the school, or the biological family.
Instead, the story is based on connections forged person to person—antagonist,
182 Bollywood Horrors

friend, mentor, colleague, protector. The social freedoms experienced in the city
require a self-determination that is in direct opposition to extended family
systems and traditionally assumed roles.
Nor can victims or their protectors rely on the divine. Justice comes through
hard work and logic by humans. Mardaani seldom refers to the divine and only
once in the final sequence, when Shivani states that a divinity meted out Minu’s
punishment: a person so invested in control and machinations was stricken with
paralysis. All principal actors in this world are human and all the systems and
resources are secular. By its omission from the film, religion is portrayed as
irrelevant. In her final voiceover, Shivani says she and her colleagues could save
Pyaari, but there are many others who need to be rescued. These particular
criminals were brought to justice, but many others remain. Each woman will
have to discover her inner mardaani (translated as fighter) to win the war. The
closing scene offers no guarantee of a sunny future or of omnipotent protectors,
and the statistics on child trafficking (i.e., 1.2 million children trafficked
worldwide for sexual exploitation), it quotes from the UN support this outlook.
Values of light and dark are combined to uneasy effect in Mardaani. During a
scene of Pyaari being eyed by a politician at a party, Walt’s voice (speaking to
Shivani in another room) narrates that girls are abducted in broad daylight—
public and highly visible areas are a locus for evil. The eventual rescue is at night,
and we never see the sunrise of the next day. The optimism of the lyrics in the
closing song, in which the girls stride forward confidently and independently, is
countered by the dark street on to which all characters exit. Rule of (informal)
justice prevails this time, but it must struggle, case by case.
Unlike the heroes of India’s first post-Independence horror film who traveled
from the rural and irrational to the urban and Nehruvian rational over the
course of their stories—the ghost in Mahal (1949) turns out to be an ordinary
girl who fell in love with an old painting41—Shivani cannot emerge into the light
at the end of the story. The underworld in Mardaani is dark and overlooked like
a decrepit haveli, but it is physically closer to the everyday world. As the child
victims demonstrate, it is distressingly easy to slip between the two. A woman is
the “urban-rationalist hero” here, and she uses reasoned thinking and physical
strength to restore people from victimhood to their rightful place, at least for the
time being.
In the Indian context, Mardaani may be Nehruvian in its secularism, but there
is only limited confidence that individuals will make better choices. If, as Nair
says, Ramsay Brothers films “could be said to dramatize this unraveling of state
authority and secular consensus that had underpinned the Nehru years,”42 then
 Mardaani 183

Mardaani goes a step beyond unraveling to irrelevance. The depiction of state

authority is shared between police and a politician, one good, one bad, canceling
each other out. Somewhat like a noir hero, Shivani has little hope in the future.
She looks ahead with a sort of weary resolve: there’s a lot of “if ” implied in her
final narration. The film’s alarming outcome is not fully certain of social progress
and the prevalence of rationalism, but neither does it surrender to the inevitability
of chaos and suffering. The public can defeat evil but only if we try, even those of
us most likely to be its targets. The real horror in this world—our contemporary
urban world—is that there is no divine power to save us, and we can’t automatically
rely on people in positions of power. We have to save ourselves.

Conclusion: Order Restored?

Mardaani constructs its action on a firm foundation of women’s agency. It is

female in the subject who carries out the actions associated with the hero of an
investigative thriller, as well as in the objects and motivations of her actions.
Even in its final voiceover, the film argues the importance of women and girls
looking within themselves to find the strength to take further action. Unlike
Damini, in which a woman’s witness testimony is not enough to convict wealthy
young men of rape but the addition of her husband’s testimony spurs the court’s
conviction, Mardaani says a male savior is absent, unlikely and, most notably,
unnecessary. “The massive ideological apparatus that typically underpins
commercial Hindi cinema”43 has largely been absent from the film and remains
irrelevant and ignored in its final points.
Says Sen, “the horror genre continues the Gothic tradition of staging a
confrontation with the feudal: these films enact a reckoning of sorts with what
has come before and will not be easily left behind or rest easily in the dungeons
and grottoes of the feudal haveli.”44 While Mardaani does not comment on the
historical roots of child trafficking, as I mentioned earlier, or the lack of control
over appetites and bodies more generally, Shivani confidently and violently
confronts the patriarchal monstrosity of the crime and, more significantly, the
lack of formal justice for its victims. The film leaves us without the kind of firm
answers that we tend to hope for, including any solution to the “real-life” horror
of child trafficking.
How could such a solution actually be created? The film provides no
suggestions. Technology cannot help much, because these crimes are largely
unplugged except for mobile phones, and even those are locked away at the
184 Bollywood Horrors

auctions. Politicians are the criminals’ clients. Bystanders lack the moral courage
to pay attention and intervene. No civic rituals can be performed by police or the
justice system to bring Walt to justice.
In “Bollywood Horror as an Uncanny Public Sphere,” Shakuntala Banaji uses
the wonderful term “wallow” to describe how Bollywood horror elaborates the
issues it depicts. These include places that are too quiet, figures who ignore
traditional sources of power like men and the divine, victims who seek revenge,
and nonconformists who refuse to submit. She writes, “Unlike their romantic
counterparts, Hindi horror films do not excise any of these issues: they wallow in
them. They probe the effects both of apparently indigenous traditions and of
unevenly experienced modernity.”45
Mardaani wallows unapologetically. For a mainstream production, it shows
remarkable refusal to conclude tidily or harmoniously. It will not let viewers
leave the film feeling content. It unsettles through its use of superficially everyday
people who are revealed to be heroic and monstrous, all contained in metropolises
whose promise of modernity does not extend to everyone. In the bleak world of
Mardaani, women and children must fight for themselves and for other people,
talented men must be monitored, and networks continue to spread their
dangerous tentacles across the globe.
 Notes

Introduction

1 There were also some films that deviated from the Ramsay formula. Gehrayee
(Depth, 1980, dirs. Aruna Raje and Vikas Desai) was one of the earliest films to
eschew the “good versus evil” structure, but it was not considered mainstream
cinema since it never got a proper theatrical release and was instead made for
television.
2 For an account of the practice in Bangladesh, see Lotte Hoek, “Cut-Pieces as Stag Film:
Bangladeshi Pornography in Action Cinema,” Third Text 24, no. 1 (2010): 135–48.
3 For an example of how horror can be connected to political crisis see Valentina
Vitali, “The Evil I: Realism and Scopophilia in the Horror Films of Ramsay Brothers”
in Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood, edited by R. Dwyer and J. Pinto (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 77–101.
4 Aditi Sen, “Tumbbad,” Open Magazine, May 17, 2019.
5 See Tim Paxton, The Cinematic Art of Fantastic India. Volume 1: The VCD s (WK
Books, 2018); Vibhushan Subba, “The Bad-Shahs of Small Budget: The Small-budget
Hindi Film of the B Circuit,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 7, no. 2 (2016),
215–233 and “The Returned: The Rise of B-movie Cinephelia,” Sarai.net, April 13,
2016, http://sarai.net/the-returned-the-rise-of-b-movie-cinephilia/, accessed January
20, 2020; Pete Tombs, Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema from Around
the World (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998) and “The Beast from Bollywood: A
History of the Indian Horror Film” in Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema from
Across the Globe, edited by Stephen Jay Schneider (Goldaming, UK : FAB Press,
2003), 243–53.
6 Noël Carroll, “The Nature of Horror,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
46, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 53.
7 Carroll, “The Nature of Horror,” 53.
8 That is to say, t.hags or thugs.
9 It is possible that this disclaimer is a gimmick to scare viewers in an ironic way like
the tagline of The Last House on the Left (1972, dir. Wes Craven): “To avoid fainting,
keep repeating: ‘It’s only a movie, only a movie, only a movie . . .’ ” But this kind of
advertising is only necessary before people have actually purchased their ticket, so it
makes no sense to put it in where people will only see it after they are already in
their seats.

185
186 Notes to Pages 8–11

10 One could of course make the same kind of argument about an American film in
which a crucifix wards off a vampire. Are Christian audiences compelled to place the
power of the crucifix in the same category of make-believe as the vampire it repels?
This important question only demonstrates that the study of horror through a
religious studies lens is useful outside of India as well. See Douglas E. Cowan,
America’s Dark Theologian: The Religious Imagination of Stephen King (New York:
New York University Press, 2018) and Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the
Silver Screen (Waco, TX : Baylor University Press, 2008).
11 Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 34.
12 Sowmya Aji, “Cabinet Clears Anti-superstition Bill with Dilutions,” The Economic
Times, September 28, 2017, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-
and-nation/cabinet-clears-anti-superstition-bill-with-dilutions/
articleshow/60866028.cms?from=mdr, accessed January 20, 2020.
13 David Gordon White, “Netra Tantra at the Crossroads of the Demonological
Cosmopolis,” Journal of Hindu Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 145–71. They may even have
spread as far west as the Mediterranean, where the Ancient Greek strix (“screecher”)
became the Latin strīga and the Italian strega, both of which refer to (often blood-
sucking) witches.
14 See Erik W. Davis, Deathpower: Buddhism’s Ritual Imagination in Cambodia (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2016) and Benedict Anderson, The Fate of Rural
Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand (London: Seagull Books, 2012).
15 Natasha Mikles and Joseph P. Laycock, “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the ‘Tibetan’
Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea,” Nova Religio: The Journal of
Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, no. 1 (2015): 87–97.
16 Carroll, “The Nature of Horror,” 53–4.
17 Quoted in Sheldon Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016), 50–2.
18 Pollock, A Rasa Reader, 53.
19 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals (New York:
D. Appleton & Company, 1872), 278–308. On Darwin and disgust in the context of
Hinduism, see also Herman Tull, “Kālī’s Tongue: Shame, Disgust, and the Rejection
of Blood and Violence in Vedic and Hindu Thought,” International Journal of Hindu
Studies 19, no. 3 (2015): 301–32 and Thomas B. Ellis, “Disgusting Bodies, Disgusting
Religion: The Biology of Tantra,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79,
no. 4 (2011): 879–927.
20 Robert Bloch, “Dr. Psycho and Mr. Stein,” Rogue (January 1962).
21 Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England:
Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences (New York: Russell
& Russell, 1966), 130.
 Notes to Pages 11–22 187

22 Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkeley Books, 1982), 25.
23 William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 48.
24 David L. Gitomer, “Such as a Face Without a Nose: The Comic Body in Sanskrit
Literature,” Journal of South Asian Literature 26, no. 1/2 (1991): 86.
25 Quoted in Edward C. Dimock, “A Theology of the Repulsive: The Myth of the
Goddess Śitalā” in The Sound of Silent Guns and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 140
26 Pollock, A Rasa Reader, 163.
27 Dimock, “A Theology of the Repulsive,” 141–2.
28 See http://indianhorrortales.blogspot.com/ accessed July 12, 2020.
29 Chicago Film Critics Association, “Top 100 Scariest Movies.” Filmspotting, October
2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20080117102530/http://www.filmspotting.net/
top100.htm accessed July 12, 2020.
30 Arindam Chakrabarti, “Refining the Repulsive: Toward an Indian Aesthetics of the
Ugly and the Disgusting,” in The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics
and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Arindam Chakrabarti (London: Bloomsbury,
2016), 152.
31 Shakuntala Banaji, “Bollywood Horror as an Uncanny Public Sphere: Genre
Theories, Postcolonial Concepts, and the Insightful Audience,” Communication,
Culture and Critique 7, no. 4 (2014), 468.

1 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality: Close Encounters

with Hindi Horror Movie Ephemera

1 Stephen Haggard, “Mass Media and the Visual Arts in Twentieth-Century South
Asia: Indian Film Posters 1947–Present,” South Asia Research 8, no. 2 (1988): 73;
Rachel Dwyer and Diva Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 110; Ranjani Mazumdar,
“The Bombay Film Poster: A Short Biography,” in India’s Popular Culture: Iconic
Spaces and Fluid Images, ed. Jyotindra Jain (Mira Bhayandar, India: Marg
Publications, 2007), 92.
2 Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, 110.
3 Haggard, “Mass Media,” 72.
4 Rajesh Devraj and Edo Bouman, The Art of Bollywood (Köln: Taschen GmbH, 2010),
161.
5 Devraj and Bouman, The Art of Bollywood, 161.
6 Haggard, “Mass Media,” 75.
7 Haggard, “Mass Media,” 75.
188 Notes to Pages 22–30

8 Bhrigupati Singh, “Aadamkhor Haseena (The Man-Eating Beauty) and the

Anthropology of a Moment,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 42, no. 2 (2008):
256–7.
9 Dwyer and Patel, Cinema India, 102.
10 And so do Indian political poster designs. For a brilliant send-up of these posters
from a Chennai-based blogger, see Krish Ashok, “Guide to Designing Indian Political
Posters.” Doing Jalsa and Showing Jilpa, December 10, 2017, https://krishashok.
me/2007/12/10/guide-to-designing-indian-political-posters/ accessed July 12,
2020.
11 Catherine Geel and Catherine Lévy, 100% India (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005),
16.
12 Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 5.
13 The reality of their precarious existence was brought home to me when a poster was
rolled out for my inspection and immediately ripped in half right down the middle
(after which it was subsequently marked down in price).
14 Geel and Lévy, 100% India, 15.
15 Appadurai, “Introduction,” 5.
16 See Brian Collins, The Other Rāma: Matricide and Genocide in the Mythology of
Paraśurāma (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020).
17 Richard Kearney, “Diacritical Hermeneutics” in Hermeneutic Rationality, edited by
Maria Luísa Portocarrero, Luis António Umbelino, and Andrzej Wiercinski
(Münster: LIT Verlag, 2012), 195.
18 Ruth S. Freed and Stanley A. Freed, Ghosts: Life and Death in North India (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1994), 80–1.
19 Pete Tombs, Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema from Around the World
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 85.
20 See William Crooke, “Demons and Spirits (Indian),” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and
Ethics, Vol IV, Confirmation-Drama, ed. James Hastings (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 601–7. I should note that there are some exceptions, like the
2013 film Ek Thi Daayan (dir. Kannan Iyer) and a single scene in the Ramsay
brothers’ Veerana (Desolate, 1988) in which a man picks up a possessed woman
hitchhiking and is then horrified to watch her right foot turn around backwards as
she sits next to him in the car.
21 Pete Tombs, “The Beast from Bollywood: A History of the Indian Horror Film,” in
Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema from Across the Globe, ed. Stephen Jay
Schneider (Godalming, UK : FAB Press, 2003), 246.
22 Personal conversation, July 18, 2016. A real-life lomahars.an.a-katha (“hair-raising
tale”): At one point, Aseem’s grandmother threw all his posters away.
 Notes to Pages 30–40 189

23 Vidya Dehejia, “On Modes of Visual Narration in Early Buddhist Art,” The Art
Bulletin 72, no. 3 (1990): 382.
24 Devraj and Bouman, The Art of Bollywood, 161.
25 Mohammad Shahid, Prasad Bokil, and Darmalingam Udaya Kumar, “Title Design in
Bollywood Film Posters: A Semiotic Analysis,” in IC oRD ’15: Research into Design
Across Boundaries Volume 1, ed. Amaresh Chakrabarti (New Delhi: Springer India,
2015): 296–7.
26 Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi
Commercial Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 62.
27 Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro Reboli, Julian Stringer, Andrew Willis,
“Introduction” in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Tastes,
ed. by Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro Reboli, Julian Stringer, Andrew Willis
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 4.
28 Rachana Dubeyl, “The Original Poster Boys of Bollywood,” The Times of India,
23 April 2017.
29 There is some irony in the fact that most of my analysis of the poster comes through
my engagement with its two-dimensional avatar, a high-resolution digital
photograph, taken with a fixed camera mounted above the poster, then digitally
corrected to take out the distortion created by the fisheye lens that made the
picture-taking possible.
30 Library of Congress, “The Deterioration and Preservation of Paper: Some Essential
Facts,” https://www.loc.gov/preservation/care/deterioratebrochure.html accessed
July 12, 2020.
31 Dubeyl, “The Original Poster Boys of Bollywood.”
32 Caveat emptor.
33 The trope of a demonic or haunted tree has deep roots in India, especially in Tamil
country. See George L. Hart, The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and Their
Sanskrit Counterparts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 25 et passim.
34 The Hindi paranormal romance Daayan, which began airing on the &TV network
in 2018, features a male and a female daayan.
35 Rachel Dwyer, “The Erotics of the Wet Sari in Hindi Films,” South Asia 23, no. 1
(2000): 148.
36 The title on the card reads Chained Girls (the title of a black-and-white 1965
pseudo-documentary about the “lesbian underworld”) but the images and stars are
from Chained Heat II .
37 Grady Hendrix notes that the cover for the hardcover version of the Peter Benchley
novel showed a stylized, blunt-nosed, all-white shark with no visible teeth coming up
towards a similarly featureless and white swimming woman. Bantam’s art director
Len Leone then hired Kastell to make the new, lurid, and photo-realistic cover in
order to maximize its impact for the mere six weeks that paperbacks were given on
190 Notes to Pages 41–46

the shelf before being sent back to the publisher for pulping. See Grady Hendrix,
Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction
(Philadelphia: Quick Books, 2017),156.
38 J.A.B. Van Buitenen, trans, The Bhagavadgītā in the Mahābhārata: A Bilingual Edition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 115.
39 Hugh Urban, “Secret Bodies: Re-imagining the Body in the Vais.n.ava-Sahajiyā
Tradition of Bengal,” Journal of South Asian Literature 28, no. 1/2 (1993): 45.
40 As one early nineteenth century historian has it: “It is well known that the Brahmins
have in all ages had their human victims, and that even in our days thousands have
voluntarily perished under the wheels of their god Jaghernaut.” See Joseph
Townsend, The Character of Moses: Established for Veracity as an Historian, Recording
Events from the Creation to the Deluge (Bath and London: M. Gye, et al.,1816), 84.
41 Asko Parpola, The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 252–3.
42 Stanley M. Kurtz, All the Mothers Are One: Hindu India and the Cultural Reshaping of
Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 135.
43 Alf Hiltebeitel, The Cult of Draupadī 1: Mythologies, from Gingee to Kuruks.etra
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 77.
44 See Brian Collins, The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of
Sacrifice (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 282 n. 97.
45 Usha Menon and Richard A. Shweder, “Dominating Kālī: Hindu Family Values and
Tantric Power,” in Encountering Kālī: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West, eds.
Jeffrey J. Kripal and Rachel Fell McDermott (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2003), 82.
46 Stephanie Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, trans, The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious
Poetry of India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1524.
47 Carol Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representations 20
(1987): 191.
48 Clover, “Her Body, Himself,” 204.
49 Geel and Lévy, 100% India, 15.

2 Vampire Man Varma: The Untold Story of the

“Hindu Mystic” Who Decolonized Dracula

1 This was the second edition of the book.

2 See “2 Canadians survive night at Dracula’s Castle,” Toledo Blade, November 1, 2016,
https://www.toledoblade.com/news/World/2016/11/01/Romania-2-Canadians-
survive-a-night-at-Dracula-s-Castle-Brother-sister-were-first-people-in-70-years-to-
stay-there/stories/20161101200 accessed July 12, 2020.
 Notes to Pages 46–49 191

3 Valentina Vitali, “The Hindi Horror Film: Notes on the Realism of a Marginal
Genre,” in Genre in Asian Film and Television: New Approaches, ed. Felicia Chan,
Angelina Karpovich, and Xin Zhang (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 130.
4 Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was: Myths of Self-
Imitation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 135.
5 Horror of Dracula director Terrence Fisher would go on make the 1959 Thugee-
themed colonialist exploitation movie The Stranglers of Bombay on the very same sets.
6 Devendra P. Varma, “The Vampire in Legend, Lore, and Literature,” in The Vampire in
Literature: A Critical Bibliography, ed. by Margaret L. Carter (Ann Arbor and
London: UMI Research Press, 1989), 14.
7 Brian Collins and Kristen Tobey, “From Middlemarch to The Da Vinci Code:
Portrayals of Religious Studies in Popular Culture,” Religious Studies Review 44, no. 2
(2018): 173–82.
8 Devendra Varma, “Meeting with Mahatma,” Folio Quarterly Magazine, unpublished
manuscript version, 1984, 3.
9 Varma, “Meeting with Mahatma,” 4.
10 Charles S. Blackton, “The Colombo Plan,” Far Eastern Survey 20, no. 3, (1951): 29.
11 Daniel Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra: ANU Press,
2010), 75.
12 He also put on a production of Julius Caesar (which may not have been quite as big a
hit if it had been staged after the King’s dissolution of Parliament and assumption of
emergency powers in 1960).
13 The reviewer must be referring to some promotional materials that came with the
review copies of the book, since nowhere does this line appear in the first edition.
14 A publisher’s note on the first edition of The Gothic Flame reads, “Due to unrest in
the Middle East and the closure of the Suez Canal, we regret that Dr. Varma’s list of
acknowledgments has not been received at the time of going to press.”
15 Hikmat Hashim, untitled letter. October 21, 1961.
16 Varma also put on plays by Kālīdāsa and Tagore, but I am unable to determine where.
17 That same year, partially in honor of Nehru’s visit to Palmyra, the government of the
UAR published a collection of essays based on Varma’s researches in Syria, titled
Palmyra: The Caravan City of Queen Zenobia.
18 G.H. Jansen, “Indian Professor Expelled: Indication of Syria’s Nervousness,” The
Statesman CXXVI , no. 29296, November 17, 1961.
19 Michael Bevers, “An Interview with Visiting Professor Dr. Samar Attar,”
NELC ommuniqué 3 (2012): 3.
20 At this point, I must engage in some speculation. The timeline of Varma’s adventures
in Syria and Egypt make it appear likely he was doing more than performing
Shakespeare and teaching English literature. A lot of elements in this story suggest
that Varma may also have been using his popularity and widely advertised
192 Notes to Pages 49–55

connection to Nehru to gather intelligence on the UAR How else can we understand
his relationship to spymaster al-Sarraj? Why was Varma “writing [al-Sarraj’s]
biography,” inquiring about his escape after the coup, then going to Egypt for a
semester upon learning that he was there? Why would an English professor be
summarily expelled after the coup if there were no suspicion that he was anything
more? There is no direct evidence, but given these details and the Colombo Plan’s
dual purpose of serving the west’s interests while spreading culture, I suspect that
Varma was involved in some clandestine activities.
21 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion (London: Simms and McIntyre, 1853), 20.
22 He also attempted to replicate the success of the seven horrid novels by seeking out
the seven novels attributed to “Lydia Languish” in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775
comedic play The Rivals. These have not been found.
23 Lee is perhaps best known, apart from his role as Dracula in the Hammer films
series, for portraying the evil wizard Saruman in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings
and The Hobbit trilogies as well as Muhammad Ali Jinnah in a 1988 biopic.
24 He also received, over the years, the Count Dracula Society’s Horace Walpole Award
and Montague Summers Award.
25 A.E. van Vogt to Devendra Varma, August 13, 1968.
26 Beth Neily, “Varma Digs Vampires,” n.d.
27 Chris Wood, “Close-Up: Devendra Varma: A Connoisseur of Horror,” 1986, 10.
28 The publisher had read his profile in Maclean’s and approached him about the project.
29 Devendra P. Varma, “Gothic Romances and Horror Movies,” unpublished
manuscript, 9.
30 Strangely, though, later in the essay he leaves out India when he lists the names of
countries to which the popularity of the horror movie has spread (though he
includes the Philippines and Mexico), suggesting he may have been unaware of
developments in Indian horror, unlikely as that sounds.
31 Varma seems to have been quite a serious actor who was a Fellow of the Royal
Shakespeare Company and once trained with Sir Laurence Olivier.
32 D. Varma to D. Reed. March 3, 1968.
33 Hyam Maccoby traces the legend of the Wandering Jew to the story of the Roman
guard Cartaphilus, who hits Jesus on his way to the cross and tells him to hurry. Jesus
then tells him, “I go, and you will wait for me until I return,” meaning “until the
Second Coming.” See “The Wandering Jew as Sacred Executioner.” In The Wandering
Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend, ed. by Galit Hasan-Rokem and
Alan Dundes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 237.
34 Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (New York and London:
Routledge, 2002), 51.
35 Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi
Commercial Cinema (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2017), 59.
 Notes to Pages 55–59 193

36 Andrew Smith and William Hughes, “Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and
Postcolonialism,” in Empire and the Gothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William
Hughes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3.
37 Philip Holden, “The ‘Postcolonial Gothic’: Absent Histories, Present Contexts,”
Textual Practice 23 (2009): 353.
38 Rachel Dwyer, “Bombay Gothic: On the 60th Anniversary of Kamal Amrohi’s
Mahal,” in Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema,
ed. by Rachel Dwyer and Jerry Pinto (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 136.
39 Sen, Haunting Bollywood, 24.
40 Smith and Hughes, “Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism,” 1.
41 Sen, Haunting Bollywood, 11, 28,
42 Mishra, Bollywood Cinema, 51.
43 Benjamin F. Fisher, “Poe’s ‘Metzengerstein’: Not a Hoax,” American Literature 42, no. 4
(1971): 487.
44 Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, “Gothic Criticism,” in A New Companion to the
Gothic, edited by David Punter (West Sussex: Blackwell, 2012), 267–8.
45 Devendra P. Varma, “Curriculum Vitae,” (1991), 1.
46 Baldick and Mighall, “Gothic Criticism,” 271.
47 Baldick and Mighall, “Gothic Criticism,” 278.
48 Varma, “Meeting with Mahatma,” 2.
49 Varma, “Meeting with Mahatma,” 4.
50 J.M.S. Thompkins, “Introduction,” in The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic
Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences
by Devendra P. Varma (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), xv.
51 David Richter, “Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic by Anne Williams,” The Modern
Language Review 93, no. 1 (1998): 191. Richter then notes that Varma “proceeded
to make genuine contributions to the field,” an acknowledgment that most of
Varma’s career was spent finding and publishing scholarly editions of lost Gothic texts,
not writing monographs. Indeed, The Gothic Flame stands alone in his oeuvre as the
only true work of Gothic criticism; the planned sequel, The Gothic Galaxy, was never
completed. The only other work of book-length scholarship he produced was The
Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge, a study of the growth of lending libraries in
England. He also granted his imprimatur as a faculty advisor to scholars representing a
variety of perspectives on the Gothic that differed from what he expresses in The
Gothic Flame, including the Lacanian queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose
dissertation he supervised, and the atheism proponent and renowned Lovecraft
scholar S.T. Joshi, for whose seminal The Weird Tale he served as a reader.
52 Malcolm Dunlop,“Demonologist Lecturing at Dal,” The Chronicle-Herald, March 18, 1986: 3.
53 Seán Manchester, The Highgate Vampire (London: Gothic Press, 1991), 84–7. In the
typed draft of his foreword to a 1991 revision of Manchester’s book, The Highgate
194 Notes to Pages 59–61

Vampire, Varma is circumspect as to the reality of the events described therein,

writing “It will enthrall the curious, keep rapt the petrified readers and even amuse
the disbelievers, specially [sic.] at the time of a new Gothic Revival.” For more on the
Highgate Vampire, see Bill Ellis, “The Highgate Cemetery Vampire Hunt: The
Anglo-American Connection in Satanic Cult Lore,” Folklore 104, no. 1/2: 13–39.
54 Quoted in “Devendra P. Varma,” Friends of Bishop Seán Manchester, October 31,
2010, http://friendsofbishopseanmanchester.blogspot.com/2010/10/devendra-p-
varma.html. Accessed August 1, 2017.
55 Devendra P. Varma, “The Genesis of Dracula: A Re-Visit by Dr. Sir Devendra P.
Varma,” in The Vampire’s Bedside Companion: The Amazing World of Vampires in Fact
and Fiction, edited by Peter Underwood (London: Leslie Frewin, 1975), 61.
56 Varma, “The Genesis of Dracula,” 61.
57 Marcus Youssef, “Vampires, Apparitions, Bleeding Nuns: A View into Varma’s
Supernatural World,” The Queen’s Journal, October 31, 1986.
58 Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England:
Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences (New York: Russell
& Russell, 1966), 131.
59 Varma, “The Vampire in Legend, Lore, and Literature,” 14. He could as well have
deployed the Latin verse by Martin Luther that Poe uses as the epigraph for
“Metzengerstein:” Pestis eram vivus—moriens tua mors ero (“Living I have been your
plague, dying I shall be your death”).
60 Varma, “The Vampire in Legend, Lore, and Literature,” 15.
61 Varma, “The Vampire in Legend, Lore, and Literature,” 29.
62 See Natasha Mikles and Joseph P. Laycock, “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the
‘Tibetan’ Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea,” Nova Religio: The Journal of
Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, no. 1 (2015): 87–97. It is also worth noting
that David Gordon White has made a convincing argument that during the period
from the fourth century bce to the seventh century ce , the West Asian “cultural
zone” comprising Kashmir, Gandhara, and Bactria, bordering Greek, Indian, Iranian,
and Chinese cultures, was a “clearing house” for demonological traditions that may
have spread all the way into the Mediterranean. See “Netra Tantra at the Crossroads
of the Demonological Cosmopolis,” The Journal of Hindu Studies 5 (2012): 145–71.
63 Varma, “The Vampire in Legend, Lore, and Literature,” 17.
64 See Hugh Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 62 et passim.
65 The Evening News, September 9, 1955.
66 “Robert Innes-Smith on Books,” The Tatler and Bystander, May 1968.
67 Devendra P. Varma, “Introduction,” in The Necromancer by Ludwig Flammenberg
(London: The Folio Press, 1968), ix.
68 See Robert Cowan, The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins
and European Destinies, 1765–1885 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010).
 Notes to Pages 61–64 195

69 Barbara Hinds, “Professor Seeks Source of Vampire Legends,” The Mail-Star.

September 17, 1969.
70 Youssef, “Vampires, Apparitions, Bleeding Nuns. A View into Varma’s Supernatural
World,” The Queen’s Journal, October 31, 1986.
71 Wood, “Close-Up: Devendra Varma: A Connoisseur of Horror.”
72 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2005), 64.
73 See Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends &
Their Meanings (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).
74 See Carol Clover, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Representations
20 (1987): 187–228 and Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror
Film. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
75 Varma, “Gothic Romances and Horror Movies.”
76 The background score, meanwhile, is lifted from Harry Manfredini’s iconic
soundtrack for Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunnigham) and the equally
recognizable “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist (1973, dir. William Friedkin).
77 Usha Iyer, “Nevla as Dracula: Figurations of the Tantric as Monster in the Hindi
Horror Film,” in Figurations in Indian Cinema, edited by Meheli Sen and Anustup
Basu (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 106.
78 David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yoginī: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 50.
79 Iyer, “Nevla as Dracula,” 103.
80 See Brian Collins, The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of
Sacrifice (East Lansing, MI : Michigan State University Press, 2014), 127–32.
81 India Today Online, “Ramsay Brothers’ Sex Horror Flick: Are Your Neighbours
Vampires?” March 11, 2014. Accessed May 25, 2018.
82 The Sanskrit, which he also includes (in Roman script), is

Vedā vibhinnāh. smr.tayo vibhinnā,

Nāsau munir yasya matam . na bhinnam,
Dharmasya tattvam. nihitam. guhāyām .,
Mahājano yena gatah. sa panthāh.

It seems to be a paraphrase of a line that occurs in slightly different forms in the

Bombay and Calcutta editions of the Mahābhārata, as well as a palm-leaf manuscript
of the epic in Devanāgari script from Madras and a Grantha one from Tanjore. It is
inserted in the Critical Edition between 3.297.61 and 62:

tarko ‘pratis.t.hah. śrutayo vibhinnā

naiko r.s.ir yasya matam . pramān.am
dharmasya tattvam. nihitam. guhāyām .
mahājano yena gatah. sa panthāh..
196 Notes to Pages 64–77

It also appears in the collection of verses called the Mahāsubhās.itasam

. graha. The
specific version quoted by Varma is attributed to Pan.d. it Rāmanārāyan.a Vidyāratna.
The most likely way that Varma found the quotation was as a subhās.ita, Sanskrit
proverbs that circulate widely in India.
83 Devendra P. Varma, “True Identity of Arminius Vambery: The Disguised Dervish,
Hungarian Professor, and Stoker’s Source of Dracula,” Paper presented at Twelfth
International Conference on the Fantastic in Arts, Fort Lauterdale, Florida, March
23, 1991, 2.

3 Divine Horror and the Avenging Goddess

in Bollywood

1 Philip Lutgendorf, “Cinema.” In Studying Hinduism: Key Concepts and Methods,

edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby (New York: Routledge, 2008), 50.
2 The most accessible English translation of the Sanskrit text is Thomas B. Coburn,
Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devī-Māhātmya and a Study of Its
Interpretation (New York: SUNY Press, 1991). The Devī-Māhātmya, dated fifth
century ce , is part of a much larger work, the Mārkan.d.eya Pūran.a, though it is
typically published as a self-contained book in inexpensive bazaar editions, with
auxiliary hymns and translation, commentary and ritual instructions, in one of the
vernacular languages such as Hindi or Bengali. The stories of the Devī-Māhātmya,
with many regional variants, are found in other Sanskrit texts, vernacular texts, and
oral traditions all over India.
3 Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopedia of India Cinema, New
Revised Edition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 446.
4 The jagrata is a ritual performance for the Goddess popular in the northern state
of Panjab and among Panjabi speaking people elsewhere in India. Shivani’s
surname, Chopra, indicates that she and her husband are Panjabi. For more on
the jagrata, see Kathleen M. Erndl, Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of
Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), 84–104.
5 The name Chan. d. ī in the previous scene is also mistranslated in the DVD
English subtitles as “demon.” Furthermore, the refrain of the song “When a
Woman Becomes Chan. d. īkā,” is missing from the subtitles. The inconsistent
quality of subtitles in Indian films is an obstacle to their appreciation by
non-Indian audiences, particularly when it comes to cultural and religious
references.
6 According to Hindu custom, adults are cremated, but children below a certain age
are often buried.
 Notes to Pages 78–80 197

4 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks

1 Jaadugar, dir. Prakash Mehra (Mumbai: Eros Entertainment, 1989).

2 See Hugh B. Urban, “The Extreme Orient: The Construction of ‘Tantrism’ as a
Category in the Orientalist Imagination,” Religion 29 (1999): 123–46; Hugh B. Urban,
Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003).
3 See Urban, Tantra; Douglas Renfrew Brooks, “Encountering the Hindu ‘Other’:
Tantrism and the Brahmans of South India,” Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 60, no. 3 (1992): 405–36; David Gordon White, ed., Tantra: In Practice
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Istvan Keul, ed., Transmission and
Transformation of Tantra in Asia and Beyond (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012); André Padoux,
The Hindu Tantric World: An Overview (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
4 Urban, Tantra, 29–39, 106–33.
5 White, Sinister Yogis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
6 See Urban, “The Extreme Orient.”
7 See Urban, Tantra, and Urban, The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality, and the
Politics of South Asian Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
8 Shaitan Tantrik, dir. Wajid Sheikh (Gold Mines, 1999); Khooni Tantrik, dir. Teerat
Singh (Shafugta Arts Productions, 2001); Naan Kadavul, dir. Bala (Chennai:
Pyramid Saimira Group, 2009).
9 Jaadugar; Gehrayee, dir. Aruna Desai and Vijay Tendulkar (Bombay, 1980); Sangarsh,
dir. Tanuja Chandra (Mumbai: Vishesh Films, 1999); Ammoru, dir. Kodi
Ramakrishna (M.S. Arts, 1995).
10 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982); Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
Sex (New York: Routledge, 2011).
11 Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2002).
12 See Douglas Renfrew Brooks, “Encountering the Hindu “Other:” Tantrism and the
Brahmans of South India,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60, no. 3
(1992): 405–36; Urban, Tantra.
13 See Padoux, Hindu Tantric World; White, Tantra in Practice; Urban, Tantra.
14 See Urban, Power of Tantra; White, Kiss of the Yoginī: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian
Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Geoffrey Samuel, The Origins
of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
15 White, Tantra in Practice, 9; see Padoux, Hindu Tantric World; Urban, Power of
Tantra.
16 Tāntrik texts often distinguish between “left-hand” (vāmācāra) traditions, which
engage in explicitly transgressive practices such as consumption of meat, wine, and
198 Notes to Pages 80–86

sexual fluids, and “right-hand” (daks.in.ācāra) traditions, which engage in non-

transgressive rites and internalized forms of meditation. See Douglas Renfrew
Brooks, The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Śākta Tanta
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 28; Urban, Power of Tantra.
17 See Urban, Power of Tantra; White, Kiss.
18 Alexis Sanderson, “Purity and Power among the Brahmins of Kashmir,” in
The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael
Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 199.
19 Gwendolyn Lane, trans., Kādambarī: A Tale of Magical Transformation (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1991), 226.
20 Sita Krishna Nambiar, trans., Prabodhacandrodaya of Kr.s.n.a Miśra (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1971), 3.12–13.
21 Wilhem Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1988), 339.
22 Bankimcandra Cat.t.opādhyāy, Kapālakun.d.alā (Calcutta: Tipti Publishing, 1966), 87–8.
23 Penny, The Swami’s Curse (London: Heinemann, 1929), 48.
24 See Urban, Tantra, chapters 2–4.
25 Frederick K. Smith, The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian
Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 363–90.
26 Gehrayee.
27 Gehrayee.
28 Jaadugar.
29 See Tulasi Srinivas, Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism
through the Sathya Sai Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010);
Hugh B. Urban, Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality and Capitalism in the Global
Osho Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
30 Jaadugar.
31 Jaadugar.
32 William E. Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Andy Rotman, Amar Akbar Anthony:
Bollywood, Brotherhood and the Nation (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2016), 3;
see also Amar Akbar Anthony, dir. Manmohan Desai (Bombay: Manmohan Films,
1977); Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (New York: Routledge,
2001). As Mishra notes, Amar Akbar Anthony portrays three brothers “who grow up
in different religions but can come together as one in a secular India,” while still not
challenging the dominance of the Hindu majority: “The secular can be celebrated
provided that (Hindu) dharma remains intact” (176–7). See also Mihir Bose,
Bollywood: A History (London: Tempus Publishing Limited, 2006), 279.
33 See Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India, and the
“Mystic East” (New York: Routledge, 1999), 118–42; Urban, Tantra, 159–64; Halbfass,
 Notes to Pages 86–94 199

India and Europe. As Halbfass summarizes this theme in Vivekananda’s version of

Neo-Hinduism or Neo-Vedānta: “the idea and practice of toleration and brotherhood
is India’s gift to the world . . .” As Vivekananda sees it, “the world is waiting for this
grand idea of universal toleration” and spirituality to be passed on by India” (231).
34 The Silence of the Lambs, dir. Jonathan Demme (Los Angeles: Orion Pictures, 1991).
35 See Urban, “Extreme Orient” and Urban, Tantra.
36 Sangarsh.
37 Sangarsh.
38 Sangarsh.
39 Urban, Power of Tantra, 94–7.
40 Biswanarayan Shastri, ed., The Yoginī Tantra (Delhi: Bhāratīya Vidyā Prakāśana,
1982), 2.7.163–6. See also Urban, Power of Tantra, 215.
41 Gunga Din, dir. George Stevens (Hollywood: RKO Radio Pictures, 1939); Help!, dir.
Richard Lester (Beverly Hills: United Artists, 1965); Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Doom, dir. Stephen Spielberg (Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1984).
42 Ammoru.
43 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3; see Butler, Bodies that Matter.
44 Brooks, “Encountering the Hindu ‘Other.’ ”
45 See Urban, Tantra; King, Orientalism and Religion.
46 See Halbfass, India and Europe; King, Orientalism and Religion.
47 See Urban, “Extreme Orient” and Urban, Tantra, chapters 1–3.
48 Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, volume 7 (Calcutta:
Advaita Ashram, 1984), 174.
49 Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, volume 3 (Calcutta:
Advaita Ashram, 1984), 340. It is worth noting that Vivekananda also identifies
Tantra as a non-Indian, non-Aryan tradition that first infected Buddhism and then
later Hinduism: “From central Asia the cruel barbarians came, having established
their terrible practices in their own land; in order to attract the ignorant barbarians
the true path took on the form of the Tantras and Mantras; and that is why when
then became misunderstood, weakened and corrupt . . . they resulted in the terrible
abominations of Vamacara” (The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, volume 6
[Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1984], 226).

5 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? Sāvitri, Satyavān,

and the Other Woman

1 Ratings are completely arbitrary and dependent on the critic. There are no set codes.
In most cases, critics give one star to bad films, so giving no rating is a special
scenario. The Times critic was Khaled Mohammad who is also a filmmaker.
200 Notes to Pages 95–99

2 For further details see Bharadvaja Sarma’s Vyasa’s Mahabharatam (Kolkata:

Academic Press, 2008), 329–65.
3 Raaz is now a famous horror franchise. The success of Raaz was followed by Raaz 2
and 3. The latest one is Raaz Reboot, released in 2016. They are all horror films, but
the stories are independent of each other.
4 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
5 In 2012, I interviewed Amrit Pal, who had acted in many low budget horror films
and had produced a low budget horror film called Woh Kaun Thi in 1996. He
gave me details on how the Censor Board worked. I also interviewed screenplay
writer Kiran Kotrial in the same year, he had spent many years working with
producers of horror films and their unique ways of hoodwinking the Censor
Board.
6 Aditi Sen, “I Wasn’t Born with Enough Middle Fingers: How Low-budget Horror
Films Defy Sexual Morality and Heteronormativity in Bollywood.” In Acta Orientalia
Vilnesia 12, no. 2 (2011): 75–89.
7 Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words:
Reimagining Kinship and Gender in North India, (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1994).
8 In 2012, I interviewed Vikram Bhatt. This is an excerpt from the interview.
9 A mangalsutra is a chain worn around the neck by Hindu married women. Since it is
a sign of marriage, it is considered extremely powerful. Its approximate western
equivalent is the wedding band. Mangalsutra was a box office failure, not a
mainstream release. In fact, it was pitched as a parallel cinema.
10 The idea of masala rasa has already been explored in chapter 1 of this volume.
11 The films of the Ramsay brothers have been discussed by Brian Collins, and as
well, there is a good amount of other scholarship available on them, the most
important being Shamya Dasgupta’s Don’t Disturb the Dead: History of the Ramsay
Brothers (Delhi: Harper Collins, 2017).
12 Sangita Gopal, Conjugation: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012), 95.
13 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
14 Like the Ramsay brothers’ films, Raaz too has a cult following outside India. Even
though they are famous as campy, horror B-films, their universal appeal because of
clichéd horror tropes is undeniable.
15 Vāstu Śāstra is a traditional Hindu system of architecture.
16 The book is in Brahmi. It shows pictures of Ashokan edicts. In fact, I had mentioned
it to Vikram Bhatt and he said, “You are a discerning audience. I like that. Most of my
audience just sees an old book.”
 Notes to Pages 100–103 201

17 Vikram Bhatt told me that, in the first draft of the story, he wanted to end the film in
divorce. However, he later realized that it would never work with the audience and
changed the ending.
18 This is the basic premise of the successful Bollywood horror film Tumbbad (2019).
19 Simon J. Hay, The History of the Modern British Ghost Story (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011), 126.
20 David Stevens, The Gothic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10.
21 Dracula (1897) clearly borrowed from the Indian vampire, Vetala. Stoker’s family
had served in India and he became fascinated with Indian occult; he was a product
of his time—India to him was the exotic land of sinister magic. He knew Sir Richard
Burton, the renowned Indologist who translated the Sanskrit collection of stories,
Baital Pachisi, that featured Vetala the vampire. Burton often spoke of how he
had discussed Hindu myths with Stoker, and Stoker studied Baital Pachisi
thoroughly before writing Dracula. See Jill Galvan, “Occult Networks and the
Legacy of Indian Rebellion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” History of Religions 54, no. 4
(2015): 434–58.
22 Bond Ruskin, “Season of Ghosts” Blackwood Magazine 320, no. 1929 (July-December
1976): 456.
23 Other important successful Hindi films with Victorian backdrops include Mahal
(Mansion, 1949), Bees Saal Baad (Twenty Years Later, 1964), Bhoot Bungla (Haunted
House, 1965), and Purana Mandir (Old Temple, 1984). In fact, almost all horror films
have used a Victorian setting.
24 Growing up, most of the ghost stories Bhatt read and watched had a Gothic
backdrop. He feels most comfortable telling his story in that set-up (personal
communication 2012).
25 The 1920 series includes 1920, 1920 Evil Returns, 1920 London, and 1921. All take
place in that year and are set in Victorian mansions. Many of these films did well at
the box office.
26 For female gaze and male bodies, see Aditi Sen, “I Wasn’t Born with Enough Middle
Fingers: How Low-budget Horror Films Defy Sexual Morality and
Heteronormativity in Bollywood,” Acta Orientalia Vilnesia 12, no. 2 (2011): 75–89).
27 Melissa Edmundson, “Supernatural Empire: The Anglo Indian Ghost Stories of
Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin,” in The Male Empire Under the Female Gaze:
The British Raj and the Memsahib, eds. S. Roye and R. Mittapalli (Amherst: Cambria
Press, 2013), 130.
28 Palaces and manor houses being haunted by the ghosts of nautch girls is a popular
horror trope. Films like Bhool Bhuliya (2007), Poonam ki Raat (Full Moon Night,
1965), Parde Ke Peeche (Behind the Curtain, 1971) have all used this.
29 Lusty female ghosts appear in the Ramsay Brothers’ Veerana (Wilderness, 1988) and
Bhatt’s Raaz 3 (2012).
202 Notes to Pages 103–107

30 Bhatt has read a lot of folktales, and ghost stories are his favorite (personal
communication 2012).
31 Lal Behari Dey, Folk-Tales of Bengal (London: Macmillan, 1883).
32 Raj S. Gandhi, “Sati as Altruistic Suicide Beyond Durkheim’s Interpretation,” in
Contribution to Asian Studies, Vol 10 (Leiden: Brill, 1977): 148.
33 A TV show called Anjaan: Rural Myths (2019) focuses solely on folk ghosts from all
over India. They also have an episode on petni where she is linked with consumption
of fish and lust for men.
34 Hay, History of Modern British Ghost Story, 2.
35 Archana Mishra, Casting the Evil Eye: Witch Trials in India (New Delhi: Lotus Roli,
2003).
36 Moriz Winternitz, “Ancient Indian Witchcraft” in Indian Antiquary 38 (Bombay,
1899): 71–83.
37 In Bhatt’s film Shaapith (The Cursed, 2013) there is a similar upper caste expert,
named Professor Pashupati.
38 Bhatt is the only Indian filmmaker who also made films with Brahmin ghosts. Iyer in
Haunted (2011) is a Brahmin ghost and he is easily the most powerful evil spirit in
Bhatt’s universe. While Bhatt brings the idea Brahma Rakshasha alive in Creature
(2014), it is a very flat depiction. However, Iyer is a truly complicated ghost. He is
sophisticated, educated, and a teacher. His downfall is his lust for his young pupil
whom he tries to rape; he then gets killed accidentally. Iyer becomes a very powerful
evil spirit. He kills his pupil’s caretakers and his spirit keeps raping her. In order to
escape the torture, she kills herself. However, he manages to trap her spirit and keeps
raping her every night for more than eighty years. To save her, the hero has to travel
back in time and alter events just so he can somewhat reduce the power of Iyer. It is
a complicated story and plenty of things happen, but we are never told why Iyer is
such a powerful spirit. One can only assume that being a Brahmin makes him so
powerful. Also, the only thing that can control him is a talisman from a Fakir, so
there is no solution from Hinduism. You have to seek help from Islam in order to
weaken the ghost. Only in 2018, films like Tumbbad and Stree raised the question of
caste.
39 Many horror films are marketed as “adult” with “bold sexy scenes.” This is a common
technique for attracting the young male population, the perceived target audience
for horror films.
40 The film had a PG certificate. I have seen it five times in theatres in Mumbai. Every
single screening was full of families who clapped and screamed throughout the film.
41 See Gopal, Conjugations.
42 Darwaza (Door, 1979), Purana Mandir (Old Temple, 1988), Mahakaal (1990).
43 Brigid Cherry, Horror (Routledge Film Guidebooks. Abingdon, UK : Taylor &
Francis, 2009), 8–19.
 Notes to Pages 108–117 203

44 Julia Leslie, Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992).
45 Wendy Doniger, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980).
46 Ajay Gehlawat, Reframing Bollywood (Delhi: Sage Publications, 2010), 28–9.
47 Gehlawat, Reframing Bollywood, 3.
48 Kiran Kotrial, personal communication, August 17, 2012.
49 Valentina Vitali, “The Evil I: Realism and Scopophilia in the Horror Films of Ramsay
Brothers,” in Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood, eds. R. Dwyer and J. Pinto (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 77–101.
50 Vitali, “The Evil I.”
51 Cherry, Horror, 8–19.
52 Ram Gopal Verma had earlier directed a critically acclaimed horror film called Raat
in 1992 but Bhoot opened up a new style in horror films. It brought the Asian style of
horror filmmaking to Bollywood.
53 Hay, History of Modern British Ghost Story, 23.
54 Bhatt, V. Interview, August 14, 2012.

6 Cultural Horror in Dev: Man Is the Cruelest Animal

1 I would like to express my gratitude to Veronika Shulman who made very helpful
comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter. I would also like to
thank Shelley Cohl without whom this book would not have come to fruition.
2 Tanika Sarkar, “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in the Hindu
Rashra,” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 28 (July 13–19, 2002): 2872.
3 V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is A Hindu? (https://archive.org/stream/hindutva-
vinayak-damodar-savarkar-pdf/hindutva-vd-savarkar_djvu.txt, 1923), 11, 95. See
also Jyotirmaya Sharma, Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism (New
Delhi: Viking, 2003), 24.
4 Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is A Hindu? ii.
5 Savarkar Hindutva: Who Is A Hindu? 3–5.
6 The myth of common blood, shared by a common race, plays a sizeable role in
Savarkar’s ethnic nationalism and those who follow in his footsteps. However, what
is particularly critical here is that the self-referencing notion of “blood” excludes
Muslims and Christians (as foreigners). In Dev, Chief Minister Bhandarker reiterates
Savarkar’s and Golwalkar’s insistence that citizenship belongs only to Hindus. See
V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is A Hindu? 23, 33, 39, 74, 84–90, and 100; Christophe
Jaffrelot “Towards a Hindu State,” Journal of Democracy 28 (2017): 28; Christophe
Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University
204 Notes to Pages 117–119

Press, 1996); and, Gyanendra Pandey, Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in
India Today (New Delhi: Viking, 1993).
7 See J.J. Lipner, Anandamath, or The Sacred Brotherhood (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005); Tanika Sarkar, “Birth of a Goddess: ‘Vande Mantaram,’
Anandamath, and Hindu Nationhood,” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 37
(September 16–22, 2006): 3959–69; http://www.jstor.org.proxy.queensu.ca/stable/
pdf/4418703.pdf; and, Tanika Sarkar, “Imagining Hindurashtra: The Hindu and the
Muslim in Bankim Chandra’s Writings,” in Contesting the Nation: Religion,
Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, ed. by David Ludden
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 162–85.
8 Cat. t. opādhyāy also wrote the lyrics to Bande Mataram (“Hail to the Motherland”),
India’s national anthem. In the anthem, he imagines India as a mother goddess who,
like Durgā, fights the enemies of the nation on behalf of her children (see Chapter 3
in this volume). This has become the “rallying-cry” for Sangh Parivar. See Sarkar,
“Birth of a Goddess,” 162.
9 See Sarkar, “Birth of a Goddess,” 141.
10 Ramachandra Guha refers to Golwalkar as the “guru of hate.” See “The Guru of Hate,”
in The Hindu. Sunday Magazine, 2006, https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/
tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/the-guru-of-hate/article3232784.ece, n.p.
11 See Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, 51; Barbara, Metcalf, “Too
Little and Too Much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India,” Journal of
Asian Studies 54 (1995): 95–96; and Arvind Sharma, “On Hindu, Hindustān and
Hindutva,” Numen 49 (2002): 23.
12 So, too, K.V. Paliwal writes, “the history of Christianity and Islam is full of bloodshed,
barbarism, massacre and genocide of innocent people of other faiths. . . mainly due
to the concept of prophetism, revelational methodology, and prophecies,” see K.V.
Paliwal, Challenges Before the Hindus: From Islam, Christianity and Pseudo-
Secularism (Delhi: Hindu Writers Forum, 2003), 15. History, when viewed from this
perspective, is reduced to a clash of distinct and antagonistic cultures. But, in fact,
Hindu nationalist history is ahistorical. As Dibyesh Anand argues, contexts are
unimportant in the larger perpetual war of religions. See Dibyesh Anand, Hindu
Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011),
31; and Romila Thapar, “Politics and the Rewriting of History in India,” Critical
Quarterly. 47 (2005): 195–203.
13 See Sumit Sarkar, “Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva,” in Contesting
the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, edited by
David Ludden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1996), 229.
14 See Anand, Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear, 16.
15 For more on the relationship between myth, myth-making, and social
formation, see Burton Mack, “Social Formation,” in The Guide to the Study of
 Notes to Pages 119–123 205

Religion, edited by Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon (New York: Continuum,
1999), 283–96.
16 See, M.S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (India: Bharat Publications,
1939), http://www.culturism.us/booksummaries/We%20or%20our%20
Nationhood%20Defined%20Newer%20PDF.pdf.
17 See David Ludden, “Introduction: Ayodya: A Window on the World,” in Contesting
the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India,” edited by
David Ludden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), 1–27.
18 Ludden sees Ayodhya as a lens for looking at other global nationalist movements
including the “ethnic cleansing” in Serbia, the “moral majority” in the United States,
as well as other majoritarian movements in Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Iran and so on. See
Ludden, “Introduction,” 7.
19 See Ornit Shani, “The Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case Study of
Ahmedabad in the 1980s” in Modern Asian Studies 39 (2005): 861–96.
20 Tanika Sarkar writes that chemicals were used to burn the bodies so that no
evidence remains. Thus, Muslims just vanish. This, she says, denies “the body a burial,
forcing Hindu cremation—post-mortem conversion.” See Sarkar, “Semiotics of
Terror: Muslim Children and Women in the Hindu Rashra,” 2876.
21 Ludden, “Introduction: Ayodya: A Window on the World,” 16.
22 Anand, Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear, 16.
23 See Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 28.
24 It is not the goal of this chapter to become embroiled in a discussion of Indian
aesthetic theory vis-à-vis Indian cinema. However, it is still significant since rasa has
been foundational to India’s performative traditions, for example, dance and theater,
since c. 300 ce . For more information on rasa, see, Sheldon Pollock’s A Rasa Reader:
Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Also, for a
more in-depth explanation of “affect” see Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume
XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, edited by James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955 [1919]) 217–56;
Mark Solms and Edward Nersessian, “Freud’s Theory of Affect: Question for
Neuroscience,” Neuropsychoanalysis, 1, no. 1 (1999): 5–14; and Gregory J. Seigworth
and Melissa Gregg, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010).
25 See Noël Carroll and Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Paradoxes of the Heart: The Philosophy
of Horror Twenty-five Years Later: An Interview with Caetlin Benson-Allott,” Journal
of Visual Culture 14 (2015): 336–43.
26 Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 22–4. In this section, Carroll delineates various affects
associated with the art horror genre.
206 Notes to Pages 123–127

27 Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 16–18; see also Joseph Grixti, Terrors of Uncertainty
(New York: Routledge, 1989), x; and S.S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980), 108.
28 See Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 15.
29 See Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 16.
30 See Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 199.
31 In an interview with Caetlin Benson-Allott twenty-five years after the publication of
Philosophy of Horror, Carroll says that typically there is closure in most American
horror films. But, Japanese horror and more recent American horror films such as
The Blair Witch Project (1999) or It Follows (2014) do not give closure. This is
something new. The “evil can’t be explained and maybe can’t be extricated.” This is
closer to the kind of horror we see in films depicting cultural horror. See Carroll and
Benson-Allot, “Paradoxes of the Heart,” 336–43.
32 See Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 200.
33 Dev’s screenwriter Meenakshi Sharma’s father was a police officer. She witnessed the
politicization and communalization of the Indian police’s brutality first-hand, and
writes about it candidly in Dev.
34 See Saibal Chatterjee, “It’s a cop’s life,” in The Tribune India. Sunday, June 13, 2004.
https://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040613/spectrum/main6.htm. Accessed
November 5, 2018. N.P.
35 See William E. Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Andy Rotman, Amar Akbar
Anthony: Bollywood Brotherhood and the Nation (Boston: Harvard University Press,
2016), 41.
36 See Elison, Novetzke, and Rotman, Amar Akbar Anthony, 41.
37 In Latif ’s emotionally charged speech he declares, “Today is a day of grief. The
calamity that befell Noor Manzil at the hands of the brutal cops of this government
is just another face of a system that has been seen in different guises over the years
all over the country. Sometimes it is a face of terror for us . . . elsewhere it is
destroying our sacred places . . . at other times it runs rivers of blood. The system has
nothing but hatred for us. This system allows the slaughter of people like animals. To
this day! There is no limit to intolerance. If we stay silent they will be emboldened
and we will continue to be slain like this” (Dev).
38 See Paolo Bacchetta, “Hindu Nationalist Women as Ideologues: The ‘Sangh’, the
‘Samiti’ and Their Differential Concepts of the Hindu Nation,” in The Sangh Parivar:
A Reader, edited by Christophe Jaffrelot (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004),
108–47. Bacchetta argues that Hindus project sexuality onto its ‘Others.’ Ironically, it
is a Hindu man who rapes Shabnam in Dev. Bacchetta explains that to be masculine
is to perform heterosexual sex; yet, ideal Hindu masculinity, which in many ways
rests on notions of renunciation, denigrates sexuality and sexual acts as demeaning,
distracting, and weakening. Real men, says Bacchetta, are those who control and/or
 Notes to Pages 127–131 207

transcend these bodily weaknesses. The prototypical activist in the RSS , for example,
is “enjoined to be a brahmachari, that is to say, a self-less, celibate disciple whose
devotion to the common good is in direct proportion of his self-control” (108). Thus,
the ideal of Hindu nationalist masculinity does not lend itself to an easy analysis in
terms of virile heterosexuality, since the ideal of masculinity is world-renouncer and
virile asexuality for activists and controlled sexuality for the general population. Sex
is not meant for pleasure, but, rather, as a means of producing Hindu children to
proliferate the Hindu population. This explains why many senior leaders in the
Hindu nationalist movement remain unmarried and celibate in the name of total
devotion to the Motherland. Like religious ascetics, they see marriage as a distraction
from the higher goals of life; but unlike ascetics, the Hindu nationalists’ goal is
nationalist salvation (108). This adds to Tanika Sarkar’s argument that Hindu males
fear the virility of the male Muslim body and take it out on Muslim women. Sarkar
writes, “Hindu male sex organs function as instruments of torture.” See Sarkar,
“Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in the Hindu Rashra,” 2872–6.
39 See, J.A.B. van Buitenen, The Bhagavadgītā in the Mahābhārata: A Bilingual Edition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 24 [2] 30.
40 See Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press., 1963), 93.
41 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 93. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,
1983).
42 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 93.
43 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 93.
44 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 93–5.
45 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 94.
46 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 94.
47 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 94.
48 Sarkar, “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in the Hindu Rashra,”
2875.
49 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 38, 50.
50 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 38.
51 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 45.
52 For example, one source of Golwalkar’s inspiration lay in the ethnocentric fascist
ideology circulating in Germany under Adolf Hitler. The antecedents of his
adulation derive primarily from the Nazi party’s genocidal mandate, as well as
German Romanticism’s reverence for India. Like Hitler and Savarkar, Golwalkar
portrayed India as a hereditary Aryan society, with a common or shared history. And
like Jews in Germany, Muslims in India are portrayed as outsiders (mlecchas). In fact,
Golwalkar even suggests the Nazi campaign of extermination “is a good lesson for us
in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” See Golwalkar, We, or Our Nation Defined, 35.
208 Notes to Pages 132–134

53 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 30.
54 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 135, 30, 130.
55 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 52, 61.
56 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 61.
57 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 136.
58 Hannah Arendt cited in C. Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore:
John Hopkins Press, 2013), 43. See also Thapar, “Politics and the Rewriting of
History in India,” and Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy,
Religious Violence and India’s Future (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press,
2007).
59 Slavoj Žižek, “Notes on a Poetic Military Complex,” Third Text 23 (2009): 503–9.
Žižek puts it this way: “the superego’s suspension of moral prohibitions is the crucial
feature of today’s post-modern nationalism.” He continues: “Passionate ethnic
identity, far from further restraining us, rather functions as a liberating call ‘You
may!’—you may violate. . . the stiff regulation of peaceful coexistence in a liberal
tolerant society, engage in patriarchal mores prohibited by liberal political
corrections, even hate, fight, kill and rape. . . You may—turns into the prescriptive
‘You must!’ ”
60 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 31, 60, 66, 67.
61 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976), 70.
62 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 130.
63 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 505.
64 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 137.
65 Sarkar, “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in the Hindu Rashra,”
2872.
66 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 127.
67 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 127.
68 Here I use Cathy Caruth’s definition of trauma. She writes, “in its general definition,
trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event
or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated
flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena. Traumatic experience,
beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it involves, suggests a certain
paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute
inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness.
The repetitions of the traumatic event—which remain unavailable to consciousness
but intrude repeatedly on sight—thus suggest a larger relation to the event that
extends beyond what can simply be seen or what can be known, and is inextricably
tied up with the belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this
repetitive seeing.” Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and
History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 92–3. See also Stef Craps,
 Notes to Pages 134–136 209

“Wor(l)ds of Grief: Traumatic Memory and Literary Witnessing in Cross-cultural

Perspective,” in Textual Practice 24, no. 1 (2010): 55, who writes: “exposure to acts or
threats of physical or psychological violence is a constant reality – the rule rather
than the exception—for members of oppressed groups, who do not lead safe,
sheltered, and protected lives.”
69 Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation (Durham, NC : Duke University), 18–19.
70 Sarkar, Mourning the Nation, 34.
71 Sarkar, Mourning the Nation, 1–2.
72 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 226.
73 See Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” in Critical
Inquiry 2 (2006): 175–207. Also, Urvashi Butalia recounts that after Indira Gandhi’s
assassination when the Sikh riots of 1984 broke out, older people in Delhi kept
saying: “We didn’t think it could happen to us in our own country . . . This is like
Partition again.” See Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the
Partition of India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 4.
74 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 242.
75 Although not occurring during a specific riot, on January 12, 2018 an eight-year-old
Muslim child named Asifa Bano was found after she was strangled and stoned to
death. She had been the victim of multiple gang rapes inside a Hindu Temple over
the course of four days. Among the alleged rapists were two BJP ministers from the
local Jammu and Kashmir government. Rallies were organized by the BJP in defense
of the accused. See https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/04/india-nationwide-
protests-demand-justice-rape-victims-180415142954535.html. Accessed September
21, 2019.
76 Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History, 4.
77 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 240.
78 See James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the
Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); and,
Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, 10.
79 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 240.
80 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 242.
81 Jacques Derrida, “Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge,
1999), 46.
82 Derrida, “Specters of Marx, 46.
83 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 46.
84 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 18. See also T.M. Lemos, Violence and Personhood
in Ancient Israel and Contemplative Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017).
210 Notes to Pages 138–142

85 At the EASAS conference I attended in Paris 2018, a group of panelists gathered to

discuss the first Partition museum to open in India in 2017. The Panel was called
“The Ethics and Practice of Remembering in India,” organized by S. Kapila and
G. Ganapathy-Doré.

7 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror

1 The “West” is not used in an uncritical manner, recognizing the constructed nature
and semiotics of power that contribute to this type of naming. Instead, I use it to
refer to films and filmic conventions rooted in North American production and film
reception.
2 Phoolan Devi was murdered in 2001, in a crime linked to the Behmai massacre,
discussed later in the chapter. Upper caste man, Sher Singh Rana, was fined and
sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime. Ten others were charged, but acquitted.
See Patrick Reevell, “Killer of India’s ‘Bandit Queen’ Gets Life Sentence,” The Globe
and Mail, August 14, 2014, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/killer-of-
indias-bandit-queen-gets-life-sentence/article20057370/.
3 Madhu Kishwar, “Film Review: The Bandit Queen,” Manushi 84 (1994): 34–7. Madhu
Kishwar is an Indian academic, writer, and founder of feminist publication Manushi.
However, recently she has received attention for her problematic Tweets about the
Kathua case. Asifa, an eight-year-old Muslim nomad was brutally raped and
murdered, and Kishwar wrote about the scapegoating of Hindu nationalists who
have been accused of the crime. This has contributed to social strife and led to a
lawsuit filed against her. See National Herald, “Kathua: Prashant Bhushan Files
Complaint Against Madhu Kishwar,” National Herald, April 16, 2018, https://www.
nationalheraldindia.com/india/senior-lawyer-prashant-bhushan-filed-criminal-
complaint-against-madhu-kishwar-tweets-kathua-rape-case-tweet.
4 This leads me to exclude films like the blaxploitation hit, Foxy Brown (1974, dir. Jack
Hill). This film does have a revenge narrative, as the title character is motivated by
her boyfriend’s murder. However, her rape in the film is incidental to the plot. The
castration of a male character who is not her rapist is not in revenge for the rape but
to avenge her boyfriend’s murder.
5 Lalitha Gopalan comments that the location of rape revenge in low-budget Western
horror and exploitation films raises questions about taste and distribution networks
of B-films in the Third World. See, Lalitha Gopalan “Avenging Women in Indian
Cinema,” Screen 38, no. 1 (1997): 42–59.
6 See, E. Ann Kaplan, “Problematizing Cross-Cultural Analysis: The Case of Women in
the Recent Chinese Cinema,” in Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, ed. Dimitris
Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham (Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 2006): 156–67.
 Notes to Pages 142–144 211

7 For example, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ chapter on international rape revenge films

includes a brief analysis of Bandit Queen as “the most immediately recognizable
intersection of rape and revenge in Indian cinema” outside of India. See Alexandra
Heller-Nicholas, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (Jefferson, NC : McFarland &
Company, 2011), 135.
8 Jyotika Virdi, “Reverence, Rape—And Then Revenge: Popular Hindi Cinema’s
‘Women’s Films,’ ” Screen 40 (1999): 17.
9 Gopalan, “Avenging Women,” 44.
10 Uma Maneswari Bhrugubanda, “Devotion and Horror in a Women’s Genre:
Exploring Subalternity in Cinema,” Critical Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2014): 21–33.
11 Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
(Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1992); Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-
Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993).
12 Jacinda Read, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Heller-Nicholas, Rape-Revenge.
13 Claire Henry, Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014).
14 Linda Williams, “Filmic Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4
(1991): 2–13.
15 Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Movies and
Methods, Volume II : An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985): 203.
16 Read gives the example of Clover’s analysis of the perpetrators in I Spit on Your
Grave (1978, dir. Meir Zarchi). Though Clover argues that the urban-rural divide is
an important defining feature of horror and is embodied by the main character as an
urban writer and her rural attackers, ultimately the male perpetrators in I Spit are
not abnormal. Read sees this as a misstep by Clover because it suggests that the
transformation of victim to avenger is the monstrosity and attack on normalcy.
17 Clover argues that many revenge-horror films owe a debt to Deliverance (1972, dir.
John Boorman), an all-male rape revenge narrative. However, rape revenge films are
largely based on female rape, and as Gopalan argues, rape acts as “a violent litmus
test of identity” (1997, 51) in many of these films.
18 Clover uses the term “victim”, while I use the language of “survivor/ship” to describe
experiences of sexual assault. This is not to flatten the experiences or depictions of
rape or to impose prescribed language on a complicated topic, but to acknowledge
the mobility and agency of those who experience sexual assault. See Liz Kelly,
Surviving Sexual Assault (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). When writing about
characters who were killed in assault, I tend to revert to the language of victim for
accuracy, as they literally did not survive the assault.
19 Clover, Chain Saws, 159.
212 Notes to Pages 144–145

20 Gopalan, “Avenging Women.”

21 Ronald Allen Lopez Cruz, “Mutations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror is
Biological Horror,” Journal of Popular Film & Television 40, no. 4 (2012): 161.
22 This is at least true in the West, as Last House was the first in a series of rape
revenge films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. There are earlier examples of
rape revenge that are often cited, starting with the racist film The Birth of a Nation
(1915, dir. D.W. Griffith) where Ku Klux Klansmen avenge the attempted rape of a
white woman by Black attackers. However, Last House marked the beginning of
popularizing rape revenge as a narrative in B-list exploitation/horror genre
films and spawned a number of international remakes. It is thought to be
inspired by the Italian film The Virgin Spring (1960, dir. Ingmar Bergman).
23 In the remake of The Last House on the Left (2009, dir. Dennis Iliadis), the daughter
is not killed in the attack and instead makes a remarkable escape from her rapists.
However, her incapacitation still leads to her parents being responsible for the
revenge on the perpetrators.
24 Roger Ebert, “Last House on the Left Review (1972),” January 1, 1972, https://www.
rogerebert.com/reviews/last-house-on-the-left-1972.
25 For example, The Crow (1994, dir. Alex Proyas) centres on the transformation of the
lead character into a supernatural figure to seek revenge for the rape and murder of
his fiancée. Because the film begins after the crime occurred, the audience only
knows her character through the memories of the masculine avenger. The other films
in the series also indicate that the powers of revenge are bestowed for the murder of a
loved one (as rape is only in the plot of the first film and is incidental to her murder).
26 Sarah Projansky, Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (New
York: New York University Press, 2001): 60.
27 This has been complicated by recent films where mothers take revenge on behalf of
their children. For example, Mom (2017, dir. Ravi Udyawar) has a mother, played by
Sridevi, taking vigilante justice against her step-daughter’s attackers after a failure of
the traditional justice system.
28 Roger Ebert, “I Spit on Your Grave Review (1980),” July 16, 1980, https://www.
rogerebert.com/reviews/i-spit-on-your-grave-1980.
29 Casey Ryan Kelly, “Camp Horror and the Gendered Politics of Screen Violence:
Subverting the Monstrous-Feminine in Teeth (2007),” Women’s Studies in
Communication 39, no. 1 (2016): 86–106.
30 Films like Descent (2007, dir. Talia Lugacy) problematize this notion. After the
avenger succeeds in literal retributive revenge, where she rapes her rapist, the film
concludes with her lack of resolution from the act. Her rape was not undone by the
rape of her rapist. Similarly, the avengers in the New French Extremity film
Irréversible (2002, dir. Gaspar Noé) unknowingly kill the wrong assailant, making the
graphic violence of the murder even more questionable for the viewer.
 Notes to Pages 145–149 213

31 Jenny Lapekas, “Descent—‘everything’s okay now’: Race, Vengeance, and Watching

the Modern Rape-Revenge Narrative,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
55 (2013).
32 Gopalan, “Avenging Women.”
33 Gopalan, “Avenging Women,” 44.
34 This is also highlighted by the defence’s manipulation of Bharti’s younger sister to
testify against her, because she was a brief witness to the sexual assault.
35 The Accused (1988, dir. Jonathan Kaplan) and Extremities (1986, dir. Robert M.
Young) are sometimes cited as films that show how the legal system can be leveraged
by survivors in avenging their assault. However, it’s important to note that these were
both relatively mainstream Drama films with well-known actresses, perhaps limiting
their subversive potential in state critique.
36 Gopalan, “Avenging Women.”
37 Shelley Stamp Lindsey, “Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty,” in The
Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, TX :
University of Texas Press, 1996): 280.
38 Karen Gabriel, “Reading Rape: Sexual Difference, Representational Excess and
Narrative Containment,” in Narratives of Indian Cinema, ed. Manju Jain (Delhi:
Primus Books, 2009), 154.
39 Quoted in Madhu Jain, “The Truth on Trial,” India Today, October 15, 1994, http://
indiatoday.intoday.in/story/shekhar-kapur-bandit-queen-raises-moral-questions-
on-individual-right-toprivacy/1/294276.html.
40 Heller-Nicolas, Rape-Revenge.
41 Quoted in Jain, “Truth on Trial.”
42 Quoted in Mary Anne Weaver, “India’s Bandit Queen,” The Atlantic, November 1,
1996, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/11/indias-bandit-
queen/304890/?single_%20page1%E2%81%844true.
43 Arundhati Roy, “The Great Indian Rape-Trick I,” October 11, 2004, http://
arundhatiroy.blogspot.ca/2004/11/great-indian-rape-trick-i.html.
44 Roy, “The Great Indian Rape-Trick I.”
45 Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969), 13.
46 Quoted in Weaver, “Bandit Queen.”
47 William R. Pinch, “Film Review: The Bandit Queen,” The American Historical Review
101 (1996): 1149.
48 Sarah Caldwell, “Subverting the Fierce Goddess: Phoolan Devi and the Politics of
Vengeance,” in Playing for Real: Hindu Role Models, Religion and Gender, ed.
Jacqueline Suthren Hirst and Lynn Thomas (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2004): 161–78.
49 Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship
(Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2003).
214 Notes to Pages 149–152

50 Rajan, The Scandal of the State, 217.

51 Gabriel, “Reading Rape,” 160.
52 A few moments in the film notwithstanding, including her interaction with low caste
village girl during a raid where she gives her looted jewelry.
53 Quoted in Rajan, Scandal, 225.
54 Quoted in Weaver, “Bandit Queen.”
55 Mala Sen, India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi (London: Pandora,
1991), 25.
56 Rajan, The Scandal of the State, 25.
57 Anuradha Ramanujan, “The Subaltern, the Text and the Critic: Reading Phoolan
Devi,” Postcolonial Writing 44 (2008): 367–78.
58 Quoted in Jain, “Truth on Trial.”
59 Clover, Chain Saws.
60 Heller-Nicolas, Rape-Revenge, 37.
61 Urvashi Butalia, “Women in Indian Cinema,” Feminist Review 317 (1984):
108–10.
62 For example, the major source of feminist criticism against Straw Dogs was the
exploitative depiction of rape as something that may be enjoyed by the victim. A
newer rape revenge narrative that explores this ambiguity with more nuance is Elle
(2016, dir. Paul Verhoeven), where the relationship between the rapist and the lead
character is complicated and challenges the notion of a “perfect” rape survivor who
acts in ways intelligible to the spectator. However, these themes are larger than this
chapter can explore.
63 Gopalan, “Avenging Women,” 49.
64 Among the changes made in the remake, I Spit on Your Grave (2010, dir. Steven R.
Monroe) has a considerably shorter rape scene than the original, though to a lesser
extent, it does similarly employ the deception that Jennifer may get away from her
attackers. Conversely, the revenge portion is considerably more graphically violent
and more inspired by slasher and torture porn horror genres.
65 Roy, “Rape-Trick I.”
66 Gohar Siddiqui, “Behind her laughter . . . is fear!” Domestic Abuse and Transnational
Feminism in Bollywood Remakes,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 55
(2013).
67 This is an interesting contrast to the initial scene of water drawing when Phoolan
was a child.
68 Gabriel, “Reading Rape.”
69 Shanthie Mariet D’Souza and Bibhu Prasad Routray, “Bandit Queen: Cinematic
Representation of Social Banditry in India,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 26, no. 4
(2015): 688–701.
70 Sen, Bandit Queen.
 Notes to Pages 153–157 215

71 Mridula Nath Chakraborty, “ ‘Ye haath mujhe de dey, Thakur!’: The Dacoit, the
Insurgent and the Long Arm of the Law,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
38, no. 1 (2015): 95. Italics original.
72 Kelly, “Camp Horror.”
73 Caldwell, “Subverting.”
74 D’Souza and Routray, “Bandit Queen.”
75 Gopalan, “Avenging Woman.”
76 The Manu Smr.ti (The Laws of Manu) are the most authoritative books of the
Dharmaśāstra (Hindu Code), which dictate the caste-based duties and obligations
for Hindus. It had a profound impact on caste divisions but was also appropriated in
various ways under British rule to misinterpret Indian barbarism and justify colonial
order.
77 Gabriel, “Reading Rape.”
78 Quoted in Leela Fernandes, “Reading ‘India’s Bandit Queen:’ A Trans/
Nationalist Perspective on the Discrepancies of Representation,” Signs 25 (1999):
132.
79 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–316.
80 Ramanujan, “The Subaltern,” 368.
81 Mina Kumar, “Beyond Mere Factual Truth: The Filmi Bandit Queen,” India Currents
Magazine 9 (1995): 28–9.
82 Quoted in Jain, “Truth on Trial.”
83 Meera Kosambi, “Bandit Queen Through Indian Eyes: The Reconstructions and
Reincarnations of Phoolan Devi,” Hecate 24, no. 2 (1998).
84 Pinch, “Film Review,” 1149.
85 Arundhati Roy, “The Great Indian Rape-Trick II ,” July 8, 2012, http://baajve.blogspot.
ca/2012/07/arundhati-roy-on-shekhar-kapurs-bandit_08.html.
86 Pinch, “Film Review,” 1149–50.
87 Quoted in John-Thor Dahlburg, “ ‘The Bandit Queen’ Still an Outcast in India,” LA
Times, October 20, 1994, http://articles.latimes.com/1994-10-20/entertainment/
ca-52584_1_bandit-queen.
88 Brenda Longfellow, “The Bandit Queen,” Cineaction 36 (1995): 10.
89 Kishwar, “Film Review.”
90 Roy, “Rape-Trick I.”
91 Fernandes, “Reading,” 149.
92 Longfellow, “Bandit Queen,” 12.
93 Stanley Kauffman, “On Films: Sexual Violations,” The New Republic, July 10,
1995: 24.
94 Fernandes, “Reading.”
216 Notes to Pages 157–161

95 Phoolan notes that the higher caste women have metal pots for water and blames
the destruction of the clay pot on the family’s low caste material status. Earlier
in the scene, it also shows that higher castes have an easier time fetching water
with the use of a pulley. It doesn’t explicitly say in the film what caste Putti Lal is,
but it is reasonable to expect that he was also low caste but was in a better financial
situation that Phoolan’s family.
96 Kumar additionally cites the lack of music or dance that is characteristic of
Bollywood cinema. Kapur’s first films, Masoom (1983) and Mr. India (1987) were
filmed in a more quintessentially Bollywood style. The departure in Bandit Queen
was explained as an attempt to launch an international career, which ended up
being largely successful with his later direction of Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth:
The Golden Age (2007), among other films for predominantly Western audiences.
97 Kishwar, “Film Review.”
98 Fernandes, “Reading,” 126.
99 Kishwar, “Film Review.”
100 Dahlburg, “Outcast in India.”
101 Shekhar Kapur, “Is Bandit Queen My Best Movie?” Shekhar Kapur Blog, June 1,
2008, http://shekharkapur.com/blog/2008/06/is-bandit-queen-my-best-film/2008
102 Kauffman, “On Films,” 24.
103 Kumar, “Beyond.”
104 Quoted in Jain, “Truth on Trial.”
105 Virdi, “Reverence.”
106 D’Souza and Routray, “Bandit Queen.”
107 Kapur, “Best Movie.”
108 Quoted in Archana Masih, “An Actress Remembers,” Rediff, April 4, 1997, http://
www.rediff.com/movies/apr/04sema.htm.
109 Maggie Lee, “Film Review: ‘Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts’,” May 26, 2017, https://
variety.com/2017/film/reviews/marlina-the-murder-in-four-acts-review-1202446324/
110 Perhaps to Roger Ebert’s possible dismay, the screening of this film that I attended
included spectator identification with the heroine in terms of audible and visceral
responses to her revenge.
111 Roy, “Rape-Trick II .” Italics in original.

8 Mardaani: The Secular Horror of the Child Trafficking and

the Modern Masculine Woman

1 Shakuntala Banaji, “Bollywood Horror as an Uncanny Public Sphere: Genre

Theories, Postcolonial Concepts, and the Insightful Audience,” Communication,
Culture & Critique 7 (2014): 468.
 Notes to Pages 162–171 217

2 Meheli Sen, “Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing Modernity in Recent
Bollywood Cinema.” Literature Interpretation Theory 22 (2011): 198.
3 Sen, “Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes,” 198.
4 Box Office India, “Mardaani 2,” www.boxofficeindia.com/movie.php?movieid=5741,
accessed February 7, 2020.
5 Mithuraaj Dhusiya, Indian Horror Cinema: (En)Gendering the Monstrous (London:
Routledge, 2018), 19–20.
6 Aditi Sen, “Hindi Horror Films: Beyond the Gothic,” Open Magazine (May 17, 2019),
www.openthemagazine.com/article/cinema/hindi-horror-films-beyond-the-gothic
7 Kartik Nair, “Book Reviews,” BioScope 8, no. 2 (2017): 283.
8 Meraj Ahmed Mubarki, “Monstrosities of Science: Exploring Monster Narratives in
Hindi Horror Cinema,” Visual Anthropology 28 (2015): 257.
9 Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi
Commercial Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 19–20.
10 Banaji, “Bollywood Horror as an Uncanny Public Sphere,” 461.
11 Audiences were much more accepting of Mukerji as an investigation-oriented
female hero in Mardaani than they were of her as a parodic romantic female hero;
Aiyyaa was financially very unsuccessful. Box Office India, “Aiyyaa,” www.
boxofficeindia.com/movie.php?movieid=1149, accessed August 5, 2019.
12 Kathleen M. Erndl, “Divine Horror and the Avenging Goddess in Bollywood,”
Chapter 3 in this volume.
13 Erndl,“Divine Horror.”
14 As an adult woman who works outside the home, Shivani is in a distinct minority:
only 28 per cent of Indian women of working age were in the labor force in 2018.
Smriti Sharma, “The Conspicuous Absence of Women in India’s Labor Force,” The
Conversation, May 15, 2019, http://theconversation.com/the-conspicuous-absence-
of-women-in-indias-labour-force-109744, accessed August 15, 2019.
15 Meraj Ahmed Mubarki, “The Monstrous ‘Other’ Feminine: Gender, Desire, and the
‘Look’ in the Hindi Horror Genre,” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 21, no. 3 (2014),
379.
16 Mubarki, “The Monstrous ‘Other’ Feminine,” 379.
17 Mubarki, “The Monstrous ‘Other’ Feminine,” 397.
18 Box Office India, “Laaga Chunari Mein Daag,” www.boxofficeindia.com/movie.
php?movieid=344, accessed August 5, 2019.
19 Box Office India, “Mardaani,” www.boxofficeindia.com/movie.php?movieid=2296,
accessed August 5, 2019.
20 Lalitha Gopalan, “Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,” Screen 38:1 (Spring 1997), 44.
21 Gopalan, “Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,”52.
22 In the film, successful model Bharti lives with her teenage sister Neeta in an
apartment in Mumbai. At a beauty contest, millionaire Ramesh (Raj Babbar)
218 Notes to Pages 171–181

becomes obsessed with Bharti. He visits her apartment and violently attacks her
when she is distracted from their conversation by a phone call from her fiancé
Ashok. Neeta returns home unexpectedly and witnesses the crime but quickly flees,
upset by what she sees. Bharti reports the crime to the police immediately and
presses charges. Opposing counsel torments both Bharti and Neeta on the witness
stand, and the court finds Ramesh not guilty. Bharti and Neeta leave Mumbai, but in
a twist of fate years later Neeta ends up at a job interview with Ramesh, who taunts
and rapes her. Bharti immediately tracks Ramesh down and, without any disguise or
pretext, shoots him point blank. In her trial, she makes an impassioned speech about
the effect of having been denied justice originally and the role of the law in
protecting criminals. The judge frees her and declares himself so ashamed of his
previous ruling that he quits the bench. Bharti is reunited with Ashok and his
parents.
23 Gopalan, “Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,” 47.
24 Sen, Haunting Bollywood, 6.
25 Gopalan, “Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,” 51.
26 Gopalan, “Avenging Women in Indian Cinema,” 57.
27 A term for violent, often extrajudicial police attacks on criminals.
28 Draft legislation to create an independent body investigating corruption charges and
protecting whistleblowers.
29 Anuj Kumar, “Mardaani: Packs a Punch,” The Hindu, August 22, 2014.
30 Sen, Haunting Bollywood, 117.
31 Banaji, “Bollywood Horror as an Uncanny Public Sphere,” 460.
32 Sen, “Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes,” 201.
33 Mubarki, “The Monstrous ‘Other’ Feminine,” 381.
34 Vakil’s sacrifice is, interestingly, the closest the film comes to the traditional
cinematic mother figure who gives up her life for her children. By reassigning this
action to a villain, the filmmakers create space for Shivani to value her own life as
much as other people’s.
35 Sen, “Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes,” 198–9.
36 Patrick Kennedy, “Definition of Gothic Literature,” Thought Co., www.thoughtco.
com/gothic-literature-2207825Thought Co, accessed July 9, 2019.
37 Sen, Haunting Bollywood, 15.
38 In Haunting Bollywood, Meheli Sen discusses the fit of Gothic elements into
postcolonial settings and refers to the idea from David Punter and Glennis Byron
(The Gothic, 2004) that “the transplantation of peoples” that runs throughout
“half-buried” colonial histories colors cinematic attempts to portray modern nations.
Haunting Bollywood, 22–3.
39 Sen, Haunting Bollywood, 119.
40 Sen, Haunting Bollywood, 118.
 Notes to Pages 182–184 219

41 Nair, “Book Reviews,” 280.

42 Nair, “Book Reviews,” 281.
43 Sen, Haunting Bollywood, 43.
44 Sen, Haunting Bollywood, 18.
45 Banaji, “Bollywood Horror as an Uncanny Public Sphere,” 468.
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 Index

“A Theology of the Repulsive” (Dimock) 13 Babri Mosque 120–1

Aatma (film) 3 Bacchan, Amitabh 53
Abominable Dr. Phibes, The (US film) 36 Baker, Rick 29
Ackerman, Forrest J. 51 balaatkar see rape
“Ackermansion” 51 Baldick, Chris 56–8, 64
adharma (unrighteousness) 16, 75 Bāṇabhat ṭ ạ 81
Advani, Lal Krishna 120 Banaji, Shakuntala 15, 161, 184
Agamben, Giorgio 62 Bandh Darwaza (Ramsay) 2, 46, 62–4
Aghorīs 81 Bandit Queen (film)
Ahmed, Meraj 4–5 circuits of power 155–9
Aitareya Brāhman. a 41 conclusion 159–60
Aiyyaa (film) 167 Indian rape revenge 145–7
Altman, Michael 57 introduction 140–1, 210n.1
Aman, Zeenat 146 rape, revenge, banditry 142–5, 148–53,
Amavasai Iravil (film) 64 214n.52
Ammoru (film) 79, 89–92 synopsis 141–2
Amrohi, Kamal 1 truth and testimony 154–5
Anand, Dibyesh 119 Bangla (film) 89
Anandamath (Cat.t.opādhyāy) 118 Bartram, Laurie 26
Anderson, Benedict 9 Battleship Potemkin 32
Andheri Raat Tu Mere Saath (film) Bava, Mario 63
36–7 Bees Saal Baad (film) 1, 56
āndolan (oscillation) 13 Behmai massacre 152
Anger, Kenneth 32 Behroopiya (Hasan) 2
Anhonee (TV show) 2 Bengali folklore 103–4
Anjaam (film) 71–2 Bhagavadgītā 40, 60, 125, 128
“anti-Tantricism” 61–2 Bhagavata Purān. a 40
Appadurai, Arjun 24, 26, 42 Bhakri, Mohan 2
Āran. yaka Parvan 94 Bhārati, Agehananda 45
Arendt, Hannah 17, 116, 131–4 Bhatt, Vikram 94, 96–8, 102–4,
Arkoff, Samuel Z. 31 110–11, 201nn.24, 25,
Arnold, Jack 36 202nn.30, 38
Ārya Ks eṃ īśara 12 Bhattacharyya, Narendra Nath 9
Assamese (film) 89 Bhāvabhūti 12
Association of Nepalis in America 61 Bhayaanak (film) 46
asuras 16 bhayānaka rasa 11, 40, 71
Attar, Samar 49 Bhoot Bungla (film) 1
Atwood, Margaret 55 Bhoot (film) 110
Aur Kaun (film) 1 Bhrugubanda, Uma Maheswari 143
Austen, Jane 49, 62 bībhatsa 11, 71, 122
“Avenging Women in Indian Cinema” Biswas, Seema 154, 159
(Gopalan) 171 BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) 120–1

238
 Index 239

Black Friday (film) 130 cur.ail 29, 39

Black Sunday (film) 63 Clover, Carol 42–3, 62, 143–4, 150,
“Bleeding Nun” (drawing) 52 211nn.17–18, 212–13n.30
Bloch, Robert 11, 46, 51–2, 59 Collins, Brian 15–16, 69
Bobby (film) 30 Collins, Wilkie 101
“Bollywood Bazaar” (stall) 32–3 Colombo Plan 48, 62
“Bollywood Horror as an Uncanny Public colonialism 15, 17, 25, 54–5, 64, 100–2,
Sphere” (Banaji) 184 116, 135
Bombay (film) 130 communalism 115, 135–6
Bond, Ruskin 101 Conan Doyle, Arthur 101
Bouman, Edo 21–2 Conway, Hugh 58
Bradbury, Ray 51 Corman, Roger 31, 50
Bradbury, Sue 52 Cosmopolitan (magazine) 35
Bradshaw, Jon 150 Count Dracula Society, Los Angeles
Bran Castle 44 46, 51
Breaking Bad (TV show) 163 Creature from the Black Lagoon, The (US
British Occult Society 59 film) 31
Brooks, Douglas 92 Creed, Barbara 143
Brunvand, Jan Harold 62 Crocker, Bithia Mary 101–2
Buddhism 57, 78, 80 Cruz, Ronald Allen Lopez 144
“Buffalo King” 41 cultural horror 122–39, 205n.24
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show) 5–6 Curse of Frankenstein, The (UK film) 50
Bungalow No. 666 (film) 38 “cut-pieces” 2
Butler, Judith 79
Daayan (film) 27, 37–8, 41
Caldwell, Sarah 149 Dabangg (film) 168
Candyman (US film) 62 daini (witch) 103
Carmilla (Le Fanu) 50 dākinī 28
Carroll, Noël 5–7, 10, 98, 122–4, 133, 136, Dalhousie University, Halifax 49
138, 206n.31 Daman (film) 74
Caruth, Cathy 136 Damini (film) 172, 183
Castle Lauenstein, Thuringia 52 Darawani Haveli (film) 26–35, 188n.20,
Cat.t.opādhyāy, Bankimcandra 81–2, 86, 189n.29
117–18, 204n.8 Darr Sabko Lagta Hai (TV show) xiii
Censor Board 158 Darwin, Charles 11
Chained Heat II (US film) 39 Dasgupta, Shamya 4
Chakrabarti, Arindim 14–15 David-Néel, Alexandra 60–2
Chakraborty, Mridula Nath 153 Davis, Erik 9
Chandaver, Aseem 29, 188–9n.22 d.āyan 28–30, 38–9
Chan.d.īkā 74–7 Dehejia, Vidya 29
Chandralekha (film) 21 Demme, Jonathan 87
Chaney, Lon Jr. 45 Derrida, Jacques 137
Channel Four 155 Desai, Manmohan 21
Cheekh (film) 40 Desai, Vikas 82
Cherry, Brigid 110 Dev (film) xiii, 17, 115–29, 130–9,
Chicago Film Critics Association 14 206–7nn.37-8, 208n.59
child trafficking 165, 180, 183 Devanāgarī script 27
chöd (Tibetan rite) 9 devas 16
Christianity 82 Devī (goddess) 41–3
240 Index

Devi, Phoolan 18, 140–4, 146–58, 210n.2, Final Girl (US film) 62
216n.95 Fisher, Terrence 45
Devī-Mahātmya 71–3, 76, 90 Foley, James 32
Devraj, Rajesh 21–2 Forbidden Zone, The (film) 32
dharma (righteousness) 16, 64, 75 Freud, Sigmund 17, 116, 134–8
̣
Dharmaksetra 128 Friday the 13th (US film) 12, 26, 34
Dhoom (film) 168 Fright Night (US film) 64
Dhusiya, Mithuraaj 164
dhvani (suggestion) 71 Gabriel, Karen 146
Dimitrova, Diana 69 Gandhi, Indira 47, 63, 110, 120
Dimock, Edward 13 Gandhi, M.K. 47, 53, 58, 119,
Dinkar, Ramdhari Singh 52–3 125, 153
Do Gaz Zameen ke Neeche (film) 1 Gandhi, Rajiv 120
Do the Right Thing (US film) 32 Gan.eśa (god) 93
Dobrée, Bonamy 48 Gang of Ghosts (film) 162
Doniger, Wendy 45 Garam Hawa (film) 130
Don’t Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Gator Bait (US film) 31
Ramsay brothers (Dasgupta) 5 Gayboy (magazine) 35
Dracula (Stoker) 46 Geel, Catherine 23, 43
D’Souza, Shanthie Mariet 152 Gehlawat, Ajay 109
Durgā (goddess) 41, 72–5, 93, 149, 153 Gehrayee (film) 17, 79, 82, 86
Dwyer, Rachel 38, 55 Get Out (US film) 4
ghosts 103–4, 137, 202n.33, 38
Ebert, Roger 244–5 Ghoul (TV series) 4
Edmundson, Melissa 102 Giardia lamblia (parasite) 35
Egypt 48–9 Gitomer, David 12
Eichmann, Adolf 132–3 Glengarry Glen Ross (US film) 32
Eichmann In Jerusalem (Arendt) 132 Go Goa Gone (film) 3
Eisentein, Sergei 32 Godhra train riots (2002) 120–1
Ek Aur Khoon (film) 27, 36 Goga 86
Ek Thi Daayan (film) 3 Goldberg, Ellen viii, 17, 69
Elfman, Richard 32 Golden Temple 110
Elison, William 126 Golwalkar, Madhav Sadashiv 118–20
“Emergency Cinema” 63 Gond tribe 54
Enlightenment 55–7 goondas 7
Erndl, Kathleen M. viii, 16, 69, 167 Gopal, Sangita 97, 107
Evil Dead II (US film) 36 Gopalan, Lalitha 142–3, 145–6, 151, 171,
evil spirits 102–3 173
exorcism 17, 79, 83, 87, 169 “Gothic Criticism” (Baldick/Mighall)
Exorcist, The (US film) 87 56–7
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Gothic Flame, The (Varma) 44–5, 48, 51,
Animals, The (Darwin) 11 58
Gothic Studies 55
Fall of the House of Usher, The (US film) 51 Great Andamanese tribe 54
Famous Monsters of Filmland Grixti, Joseph 123
(Ackerman) 51 Gujarat riots 133
Fanon, Frantz 17, 116, 129–30, 137 Gunga Din (US film) 89
Fernandes, Leela 155–6, 158 Gyalmo Hope Nyagmal, Queen Consort
Film Threat (magazine) 31 61
 Index 241

Haggard, Stephen 22, 27 Holy Mountain, The (film) 32

Haitian Vodou 79 Horror of Dracula (UK film) 45–6, 50,
Haiwan (film) 40 191n.5
Halbfass, Wilhelm 81 House That Dripped Blood, The (film)
Hasan, Kamal 2 51
Hashim, Hikmat 48 Hughes, William 55
Hastar (god) 3
Hastings, Warren 101 I Spit on Your Grave (US film) 144–5, 151,
Haunted House (film) 1 214n.64
Haunting Bollywood (Sen) 4 Illustrated Weekly of India 48
Haveli (film) 27, 31, 35 INC (Indian National Congress) 119–20
Haveli ke Peeche (film) 30 Indian Censor Board 95, 200n.5
Hay, Simon 101 Indian Demonology:The Inverted Pantheon
Hedgewar, Keshav Baliram 118 (Bhattacharyya) 9
Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra 143, 148, Indian Horror Cinema Dhusiya 5
150–1 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (US
Help! (film) 89 film) 87–9
Henry, Claire 143 India’s Bandit Queen (Sen) 156
Highgate Cemetery 59 Insaf Ka Tarazu (film) 146, 171–3,
Hilarious House of Frightenstein, The 213n.34, 217–18n.22
(variety show) 52 Irréversible (film) 151
Himalayas 60–1 It (King) 9
Hindi Cinema: Ghosts and Ideologies Iyer, Usha 63
(Mubarki) 4–5 izzat 171
Hindu Rashtra 116
Hinduism Jaadugar (film) 17, 79, 84–7, 92
and bhakti theology 43 Jaani Dushman (film) 1, 45
common blood 116–17, 203–4n.6 Jackson, Peter 11–12
and female characters in films 179 Jagganath festival 41
and India 137 jagrata 75, 196nn.4,5
modern 91–3 Jains 78, 80
muscular 133 James, M.R. 47
and Muslim violence 119 jangli cult 54
and nationalism 120–1, 128–9, Jaws (US film) 6, 40
135 Jha, Prakash 74
particular theology 8 Jharkhand state 8
and “Protestant presuppositions” Jodorowsky, Alejandro 32
57–8
and sanctity of marriage 111 Kaal (film) 3
and Tantra 78–82 Kādambarī (Banabhatta) 81
and universalism 86 Kahaani (film) 174
Hindutva (Hindu-ness) 117–18, 121, 126, Kakkar, Sudhir 109
128–34, 137–8 Kālī (goddess) 42, 74, 77, 127, 149
Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (Savarkar) Kālikā Purān. a 89
116 Kalyan Khajina (film) 21
Hitler, Adolf 131, 133, 207n.52 Kāpālikas 81–2
Hobsbawm, Eric 149–50 Kapoor, Kareena 3
Holden, Phillip 55 Kapoor, Shatki 64
Holocaust 131 Kapur, Shekhar 18, 142, 148, 150, 154–8
242 Index

Karloff, Boris 11 Lord Rama 120

Kashmir śaivites 80 Lost Horizon (Hilton) 58, 60, 64
Kastel, Roger 40, 189–90n.37 Lovecraft, H.P. 7
Kaśyapa Sam . hitā 63 Ludden, David 121
Kauffman, Stanley 156–8 Lugosi, Bela 63
Kaun Hai? (TV show) xiii Lunch, Lydia 32
Kern, Richard 32 Lutgendorf, Philip 70
Khan, Aamir 3
Khan, Abdul Ghaffar Khan 125 Macbeth (play) 49, 53
Khatarnak Raat (film) 27, 36 Magic and Mystery in Tibet (David-Néel)
Khooni Murdaa (film) 40 60, 194n.61
Khooni Panja (Talwar) 2 Mahā Kālī (goddess) 83
Khooni Tantrik (film) 79 Mahābhārata (film) 26, 69, 71, 74,
King Kong vs. Godzilla (US film) 39 94, 128
King, Stephen 7, 9, 11 Mahal (film) 1, 182
Kipling, Rudyard 56 Maharashtra Prevention Act (2013) 8
Kishwar, Madhu 142, 145, 158, 210n.3, Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, King 48
216n.96 Mahis. a (buffalo demon) 72
Kohli, Rajkumar 45 Mālatīmādhava (Bhāvabhūti) 12, 25
Kohraa (film) 1 Malayalam (film) 89
Kristeva, Julia 79 Malda district, West Bengal 8
Krṣ ṇ̣ a-bhakti 41, 60, 128, 190n.40 Manchester, “Bishop” Seán 59
Krṣ ṇ̣ amiśra 81 Mangalsutra (film) 97, 108, 111, 200n.9
krtyā 38, 41–2 Mansoori, Shahid and Wahid 31–5
Krueger, Freddy 9 Manto, Sadaat Hasan 14
Kudrat (film) 56 māntrik 83–4
Kulinism 104 Manu Smr.ti 154, 156, 215n.76
Kung Fu films 7 Mardaani 2 (film) 164
Kurtz, Stanley M. 41 Mardaani (film)
Kuruks etra ̣ (battle) 26 an ordinary monster 175–7
beyond avenging women 171–5
Laaga Chunari Mein Daag 170–1 children and vulnerability 178–9,
Lady Killer (film) 27, 36–7 218n.34
Lajmi, Kalpana 74 conclusion 183–4
Lapekas, Jenny 145 horror tropes and appetites 164–6
Last House on the Left, The (US film) introduction 18, 161–2
144–5, 212nn.22-3 little religious imagery in 71
Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood maximum city horror 180–3,
Horror and Comedy (Paul) 12 218n.38
Law of the Threshold, The (Steel) 82 plot summary 163–4
Laycock, Joseph P. 9 a woman hero 166–71, 217n.14
Leák (film) 29 market forces 24–5, 188n.13
Lee, Christopher 16, 46, 50, 192n.23 Marlina Si Pembunuh Dalam Empat
Lee, Spike 32 Babak (film) 159
Lemos, T. M. 137 masala (spicy) 21–2, 27, 30, 38–40, 71–2,
Lévy, Catherine 23 97, 158
Lewis, Matthew 50, 51 material intertextuality 25–7
Lipstick (film) 146 Maturin, Charles 53
Longfellow, Brenda 156 Maut ki Haveli (film) 30
 Index 243

medievalism 57 Northanger Abbey (Austen) 49–50

Mehbooba (film) 56 nudity 2, 38, 158–9
Melmoth the Wanderer 53, 192n.33
Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin) 53–4 Oakman, Daniel 48
Merchant of Venice, The (play) 49 Oddie, Morgan 18
methodological fetishism 24 Om Shanti (film) 69
“Metzengerstein: A Tale in Imitation of Om. symbol 2
the German” (Poe) 56 Omen, The (US film) 6
Mighall, Robert 56–8, 64 “On Possibilities of Gothic Romances on
Mikles, Natasha 9 the Silver Screen” (Varma) 51
Minh-ha, Trinh T. 154 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Mishra, Vijay 56, 69, 79–80 (Tarantino) 5
Mittal, B. 95–6 “Operation Dracula” (1945) 46
Modi, Narendra 120–1, 133 Othello (play) 48–9
Moghul rule 120 Other, the 92, 154, 157
Monk, The (Lewis) 51 Otto, Rudolf 59
Monster on the Campus (US film) 36
Morrison, Toni 55 Palladino, Tony 30, 34
Mother India (film) 73–4 Pañcatantra 64, 195–6n.81
movie posters 21–44 Paranormal Activity (US film) 3
Mrityudand (film) 74 Paraśurāma 26
“Ms. Ann Radcliffe Award” (Count Parosi (film) 64
Dracula Society) 51 Partition 116, 126, 129, 134, 136–8,
Mubarki, Meraj Ahmed xii, 5, 178 210n.85
Mukerji, Rani 3, 71, 167, 169–70, Pārvatī 41
217n.11 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 14
Muṇḍamāla Tantra 89 pativrata stree (loyal wife) 108
mūrtis 8, 186n.10 Paul, William 12
Muslims xii, 116, 118–19, 133–4, 136–8, Penny, F.E.F. 82
204n.12 Pennywise (clown-creature) 9
Mysteries of Udolpho, The (Radcliffe) 51 Perrin, Alice 102
mysterium tremendum (Otto) 59 petni (spirit) 103–4
“Phantom Rickshaw, The” (Kipling) 56
Naan Kadavul (film) 79, 90 Pinch, William 149, 155
Nair, Kartik 165 Pink Flamingos (film) 32
Nasser, Gamal Abdel 46, 48–9 Pitt, Brad 5
Nāṭyaśāstra Bharata xiii, 10–11 “pizza effect” 45–6
nautch girls 102–3 Poe, Edgar Allan 50, 56
Naya Daur (film) 102 Porky’s (US film) 12
Necromancer, The 61 Prabhakar, V. 36
Neel Kamal (film) 56 Prabhodacandrodaya (Krṣ ṇ̣ amiśra) 81
Nehru, Jawaharlal 16, 44, 46, 49, 125, 134, Pratighat (film) 16, 71–2, 74
182–3 Praz, Mario 53
Nepali Cultural Centre 61 Price, Harry 59
Nightmare on Elm Street, A (US film) 9 Price, Vincent 16, 36, 46, 50–2, 59
Nihalani, Govind xiii, 17, 115, 124, 128, Psycho (US film) 30–1, 34–5, 46
136 Psychotronic Video (magazine) 31
1920 (film) 107 pujari ki shaitan 28
Nityānanda, Dvija 12 punyabhumi (Hindu holy land) 116
244 Index

Purana Haveli (film) 30 Rollin, Jean 32

Purana Mandir (film) 1, 62 Roman Catholicism 57–9
purāṇas 29, 71 Romero, George A. 31
Pyaasa (film) 53 Routray, Bibhu Prasad 152
Pyasaa Shaitan (Shelly) 2 Roy, Arundhati 148–52, 155, 160
Roy, Rammohun 86
qawwali (devotional song) 37 RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)
The Queen’s Journal 52 118–20, 131
rūh 37
Raagini (film) 3
Raaz (film) 17, 94–102, 104–11, 200nn.3, sādhu 81
14, 16, 202n.39 Sadleir, Michael 50
Radcliffe, Anne 50 Sākta lineages 80
Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 60 śākti 71, 76
Raimi, Sam 11–12, 36 Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini) 14
Raja Harishchandra (film) 21 “Samri” (monster) 2
Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder 149 sanatana dharma 121
Raje, Aruna 82 Sanderson, Alexis 80
Rajneesh, Bhagwan Shree 85 Sangarsh (film) 17, 79, 87–9, 92
Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir Movement sam. nyāsins (ascetic warriors) 118
120 Sanskritic culture 9
Ramakrishna, Kodi 90 Sarkar, Bhaskar 17, 116–18, 121, 133–8,
Ramanujan, Anuradha 150, 154 171, 205n.20, 208–9n.34
Rāmāyan. a 69, 71 Sarkar, Pradeep 169–70
Ramsay brothers 1–2, 8, 62–3, 96–8, 107, Sarkar, Sumit 112
110, 162, 165, 185n.1 Sarkar, Tanika 116–17
rape al-Sarraj, Abdel Hamid 48–9
circuits of power 156–60 Sathya Sai Baba 85
and communalism 115 Sattvik food 104
and Dev 127, 132, 135, 138 Satyavān, Sāvitri 17
divine horror 73–4, 77 śava sādhana 82
Indian rape revenge 145–8 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 116–17
introduction 15, 18 Savini, Tom 29
in Mardaani 163–4 Scarry, Elaine 137
and Raaz 95 Schauerromantik 61
rape, revenge, banditry 148–53, Schopen, Gregory 57
210nn.4–7 Scream for Help (UK film) 39
revenge 140–2 “Scream Queens” 10
revenge as horror 142–5 Scream (US film) 62
truth and testimony 154–5 SEBC (Socially and Educationally
of vulnerable persons 161 Backward Castes) 121
rasas (aesthetics) xii–xiii, 10, 13, 69–72, Secrets of the Kaula Circle (Sharpe) 82
128 Sen, Aditi 17, 69
Read, Jacinda 143–4, 153, 211n.16 Sen, Mala 150, 155–6
Reed, Donald A. 51, 53–4 Sen, Meheli xii, 4, 30, 56, 135, 162, 166, 178,
“Refining the Repulsive” (Chakrabarti) 14 180–1, 183
Reservoir Dogs (US film) 32 sex xiv, 102–8, 151
Revati-Jatahārini 63 see also rape
Revival (King) 7 Shah, Kanti 95–6
 Index 245

Shaitaan 107 malicious and fraudulent 84–7

Shaitaani Badla 95 in South Asian narrative 80–2,
Shaitan Tantrik (film) 70, 79, 87 197–8n.16
Shangri-La 58 stereotyping of 54
Sharma, Meenakshi 124, 206n.33 and vampire man Varma 60–6
Sharpe, Elizabeth 82 varieties of experience 82–4
She (Rider Haggard) 54 Tarantino, Quentin 5, 32
Shelly, Joginder 2, 95–6 Taylor, Jeannine 26
Sholay (film) 30 Telugu (film) 89
Siddiqui, Gohar 152 Thakur family 54
Sikh riots 110, 120 Thapar, Romila 118
Sikkim 61 Theater of Blood (US film) 51–2
Silence of the Lambs, The (US film) “Theorizing Horror in Bollywood”
87–8 (Hinduism Group) xii
Singh, Harinam 95–6 Thompkins, J. M. S. 58
Singh, Man 152 Times of India 94, 97, 199n.1
Singh, Teerath 95–6 Tombs, Pete 29
Singham (film) 168 Toronto International Film Festival
“sinister yogī” 17, 79 (TIFF) 155
Śitalā-maṅgala 12 Train to Pakistan (film) 130
Śiva (god) 2, 8, 28, 41–2 “Transylvania Weekends”(Varma) 16
Slenderman mythology 9 Treatise on Drama (Nāt. yaśāstra)
Smith, Andrew 55 see Nāt.yaśāstra
Smith, R.V. 101 trimūrti 60
song booklets 22–3 triśūl 28
Specters of Marx (Derrida) 137 tulpa (thought-form) 9
Spielberg, Stephen 87 Tumbbad (film) 3–4, 165
stāyibhāvas (stable moods) 70
Steel, Flora Annie 82 Udan Khatola (film) 54, 64
Stoker, Bram 46, 65, 101, 201n.21 unheimlich (Freud) 136
Straw Dogs (film) 144–5 United Arab Republic (UAR) 48–9
Stree (film) 3–4, 162, 165 Urban, Hugh viii, 16–17
strīdharma 17, 94, 108–9 Urban Legend (US film) 62
Suez Crisis 48
Summers, Montague 50 Vāc (goddess) 41
Sunday Searchlight Magazine 48 Vais ṇ̇ ava Sahajiyā 41
Supreme Court of India 124 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari 120
Swami’s Curse, The (Penny) 82 vamachara (also vāmācāra) 92
Syria 48–9 Vámbéry, Arminius 65
vampire legends 61–2
Talaash: The Answer Lies Within (film) 3 Van, Billy 52
Talwar, Vinod 2 van Vogt, A.E. 51
Tamas (film) 130 Varma, Devendra Prasad
tāntriks death of and legacy 53–5
and American Hollywood productions early life 47–9, 191–2n.12–3, 20
87 gothic revivals 50–2, 192n.24, 30
and Darawani Haveli 27–30 “Hindu mystic” 57
horrifying and sinister 76–80, 89–93 ideas of 59–65, 195–6n.81
introduction 7–8, 17 introduction 11, 16
246 Index

significant role in horror films 46 Warren, Ed and Lorraine 59

and spiritual-mystical wisdom 58–9, Waters, John 32
193–4n.51–2 Watkins, Beth 18
vampire man 44–5 What Lies Beneath (US film) 97, 109
Varma, Eileen Florence (née Sircar) White, David Gordon 9, 17, 80, 186n.13
47, 57 Williams, Linda 143–4
Varney the Vampire 50 Woh Kaun Thi (film) 1, 102
Vedas xiii, 92 Wohi Bhayakar Raat (film) 2, 64
Vedic demonology 26 Woman in White, The (Collins) 101–2
Veerana (film) 1, 8, 13, 46, 54, 62, 64, Wood, Ed Jr. 31
185n.9 Wood, Robin 143
Verma, Ram Gopal 110, 203n.52 wuxia films 7
Vetālapañcaviṃiśati 5
vīra rasa 28 Yash Raj Films 162, 181
Virdi, Jyotika 142–3 Yoginī Tantra 89
Vitali, Valentina 45, 110 yogīs 78–80, 83, 92–3
Vivekananda, Swami 86, 92, 198–9nn.33,
49 Zakmi Aurat (film) 144, 146, 148, 151,
Voices from the Vaults (Varma) 51–2 213n.35
Zedd, Nick 32
Walker, Johnny 53 Zee Horror Show (TV show) 2
Walpole, Horace 50 Zombie High (US film) 31
247
248
249
250
Plate 1 Poster for Darawani Haveli (The Frightful Mansion, 1997, dir. Rakesh Sinha).
Plate 2 Front cover of song booklet for Khatarnak Raat (Dangerous Night, 2003, dir. Muneer Khan).
Plate 3 Back cover of song booklet for Khatarnak Raat (Dangerous Night, 2003, dir. Muneer Khan).
Plate 4 Song booklet for Lady Killer (1995, dir. S.A. Chandramohan).
Plate 5 Poster for Andheri Raat (Dark Night, 1995, dir. V. Prabhakar).
Plate 6 Song booklet for Daayan (1998, dir. D.S. Azad).
Plate 7 Poster for Khooni Murda (The Bloody Dead, 1989, dir. Mohan Bhakri).
Plate 8 Poster for Haiwan (The Beast, 1977, dir. Ram and Rono Mukherjee).
Plate 9 Poster for Cheekh (Scream, 1985, dir. Mohan Bhakri).
Plate 10 Entrance to the Hanumān temple in Jhandewalan Felhi in Delhi. Photo courtesy of
Francis X. Charet (pictured).
Plate 11 Poster for Jaani Dushman (Bitter Enemy, 1979, dir. Rajkumar Kohli).
Plate 12 Photo taken in the United Arab Republic in 1958 or 1959. Pictured: Anwar Sadat (far left), Jawarhalal Nehru
(second from left), and Devendra Varma (third from right).
Plate 13 Program for Dalhousie’s 1973 “Transylvania Weekend”.
Plate 14 Varma as Macbeth in Syria, the United Arab Republic in 1959.
Plate 15 Varma contemplating a Nepalese mask, c. 1970.
Plate 16 Varma at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, c. 1980s.