Zombies and India: The neoMONSTERS Epidemiology

Abstract

This paper hunts for zombies – both “real” and “unreal”– in contemporary Indian Science Fiction. It investigates how India's undead appropriate semantic markers of the global zombie industry via metaphors of monstrosity and how they simultaneously propagate a monstrosity of metaphors that disrupts social cohesion and communal harmony. Adopting the filters of genre, form, monster, and location, it advances a neoMONSTERS (Mutating/Mutagenic Ontological Narratives in Space‐Time Echoing Realistic Situations) epidemiology that identifies: (a) etiology (birth/cause) of the zombie, (b) transmission of the infection, (c) treatment/cure of the infected, and (d) teratology, epicentre and ideology of the outbreak.