While the monstrous feminine of Hollywood is available transhistorically over much of cinema across the world, the female monster of Hindi horror cinema remains ignored and merits serious academic exploration. Much of the widely accepted modern art-horror theory as applied to the horror genre is predicated upon Julia Kristeva's notion of the 'abject' and the Freudian notion of the 'return of the repressed'. While Creed (1993Creed ( , 2002 exemplifies that horror texts indeed serve to illustrate abjection, her work reduces all forms of the monstrous feminine in the horror genre to fear of the abject mother. I posit that there is no universal archetype of the abject mother, and the maternal as an abject figure does not find resonance in the Hindi horror genre. Instead, I propose that a sub-genre, which I term the 'Monstrous "Other" Feminine' narrative, within the Hindi horror cinema engendered in the 1980s, presents an interstitial phantasmal female monster with wanton sexual desire and gaze as the abject 'other'. Through narrative closures, traditional gendered perspectives are reinforced, normative femininity is deified and the monstrous other feminine, commanding sovereign female desire and controlling gaze, is annihilated. 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.
While Hindi cinema has often been critically engaged as a narrative form while 'writing' the nation, the role of Hindi horror genre in imagining this nation is under-explored. Hindi cinema itself emerged in a charged environment of nascent nationalist politics, and early Indian filmmakers saw themselves and their onscreen projections as part of the patriotic scheme. However Post-Independence wars with Pakistan and China, and the eruption of various separatists' movements in the North-East, Sikh's Khalistan movement and Kashmiri Muslims engendered narratives and counter-narratives to the state-sponsored scientific secularist discourse. In this article I trace how the Hindi horror genre with its evolving narrative strategies has itself been an area of conflicting ideas and ideologies in imagining the Indian state. Lying at the intersections of myths, ideology and dominant socio-religious thoughts, the Hindi horror genre reveals three major strands: the secular conscious, the traditional cultural and the Hindutva ideological, roughly corresponding to the way the nation has been imagined at different times in Post-Colonial India. Moving beyond establishing theoretical framework, I intend to demonstrate how the Hindi horror genre with its sub-sets provides us with the means to contemplate the nation and its representation.
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