Mapping the Hindi Horror Genre: Ghosts in the Service of Ideology

Abstract

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.

Book Review: Meraj Ahmed Mubarki, Filming Horror: Hindi Cinema, Ghosts and Ideologies and Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema

“…1. Both authors have also published articles on the topic before, arguments from which have been elaborated for the book (see Mubarki, 2013Mubarki, , 2014Mubarki, , 2015. After Indira Gandhi's disastrous experiment with government by statutory promulgations (better known as the years of the Emergency, 1975Emergency, -1977, one important line of thinking turned to Hindu dharma and its codes as the guarantor of Indian secularism.…”

“…1.Both authors have also published articles on the topic before, arguments from which have been elaborated for the book (see Mubarki, 2013, 2014, 2015; Sen, 2011; Sen, 2013). …”

The Monstrous ‘Other’ Feminine: Gender, Desire and the ‘Look’ in the Hindi Horror Genre

“…The appropriation of gaze and desire by the monstrous other feminine opens up a space of resistance but within the limits set by patriarchy. Thus, an exploration of the cinematic subjectivities reveals that ‘specific historical moment[s] ha[ve] affected the Hindi horror genre’ (Mubarki, 2013, p. 60) and the monstrous narratives enmesh the fear of the interstitial phantasmal female within the larger framework of cultural misogyny and patriarchal fear of the all-powerful feminine. Therefore, these narratives act as moments of catharsis and allow for the manifestation of social prejudices that can be safely dismissed as coming from outside, not from within us.…”

Analysis of Student’s Writing Which Reflect Ghost Stories in Indonesian Horror Film

“…On the other hand, the wider community disagrees with the ideas of some of these scientists, they even consider horror films, horror stories will only have a negative impact on the child spikologis (Clasen, 2017) and only highlight sensuality alone (Benson-Allott, 2015). Ghosts are limited to mere ideological services which have no effect (Mubarki, 2014). In general, students can start writing activities with things that are close to them (Soleh & Siti Afriani, 2016) about their families (Subekti, 2022) which can represent the situation around them (Hasan, 2022).…”