MEHELI SEN
Compared with western children, an Indian child is encouraged to continue to live in a mythical, magical world for a long time. In this world, objects, events and other persons do not have an existence of their own, but are intimately related to the self and its mysterious moods. Thus, objective everyday realities loom or disappear, are good or bad, threatening or rewarding, helpful or cruel, depending on the child's affective state …. Animistic and magical thinking persists, somewhat diluted, among many Indians well into adulthood.
—Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India
Since the mid-1990s, following the liberalization of the Indian economy and the prodigious expansion of the South Asian diaspora, Bollywood cinema has come to be a ubiquitous formation in the global market, incorporating not just cinema but an entire culture industry. 1 Ashish Rajadhyaksha has persuasively argued that what is today understood as Bollywood includes much more than just the filmic output of India: “Bollywood admittedly occupies a space analogous to the film industry but might best be seen as a more diffuse cultural conglomeration involving a range of distribution and consumption activities from websites to music cassettes, from cable to radio” (116). Although hydra-headed Bollywood continues to grow and absorb myriad creative and commercial attractions, the scholarship on Indian cinema has the challenging task of playing catch-up.
I will approach the Bollywood conglomerate through a rarely studied genre—horror. Here, I interrogate Bollywood's recent romance with the horror genre especially in terms of the figuration of nuclear families, children, and teenagers. Globally, horror has generated intense debates about morality—public and private, aesthetics, the politics of taste, and the effects of violence and sensationalism. In regard to Hindi film, these debates have been largely absent; horror is not discussed very often, either in academic circles or in journalistic ones—a measure of its marginal, low-brow status.
Hindi cinema's most sustained engagement with horror began in the 1970s when the rambunctious Ramsay brothers—seven siblings, each of whom handled a distinct aspect of the production process—produced a series of low-budget hits, including Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972), Purana Mandir (1984), Veerana (1988), and Bandh Darwaza (1990). Bordering on pornography in their tacky exploitation of female bodies and featuring low-brow stars and threadbare plots, these films came to be identified with the smuttiness of the genre in this era. In fact, the Ramsay horror film can be understood as a genre unto itself—a hybrid iteration that combines copious quantities of sex, violence, and western motifs, with local idioms and homegrown tales of horror and the supernatural. The divorce between horror and a certain idea of “respectability” thus comes to be firmly entrenched at this time. In the hands of the Ramsay brothers, the screen became awash with lurid fake blood and inhabited by a series of bizarrely monstrous creatures—amorous monster women, predatory werewolves, and lustful male and female vampires. The content was excessive and subversive in its economy of representation as well as its address to a certain kind of spec-tatorship; the Ramsay film's determined rejection of bourgeois trappings and standards of taste, I would argue, makes it a radical iteration of horror in South Asian cinema. 2 And appropriately, as Kartik Nair points out, the Ramsay film made most of its earnings in semi-urban and rural sectors, an indicator of its marginal—non-metropolitan, non-bourgeois—status.
After a brief hiatus in the 1990s—at least in terms of noteworthy films—horror has staged a recent comeback within the Bollywood framework. Filmmakers like Ram Gopal Varma and Vikram Bhatt have “rescued” the genre, as it were, from its low-brow habitations and circuits of dispersal. Recent horror cinema—especially the films I discuss below—is very much about the bourgeoisie as well as made for metropolitan, bourgeois spectators. This rehabilitation involves relatively bigger budgets and a general glossiness of production values that the Ramsay product never realized or, one might argue, even aspired to. 3 The sanitization of the genre—its embourgeoisement, if you will—has drained the genre of not only the outlandish, excessive components but also of any subversive potential it had in the 1970s and 1980s.
In this essay, I argue that recent Bollywood horror films function as excellent barometers for India's post-economic liberalization anxieties. As trade pundits laud India's spectacular growth rates and the meteoric expansion of the middle class, it is the critically neglected, obscure horror genre that registers most powerfully the less celebratory aspects of the nation's determined efforts to participate as an economic and cultural force on the global market. Bollywood itself has come to be emblematic of a marginal form's obdurate and successful resistance of the Hollywood behemoth, at least within South Asia. Horror, I argue, allows us a point of entry into the underbelly of this much-hyped success story; the genre articulates the undertow of the large transformative processes brought about by globalization via the depiction of fear, resentment, vulnerability, and disempowerment. Not surprisingly, Hindi horror cinema has not become a globally popular genre; nightmarish tales of the undead, dispossessed, and vengeful ghosts and spirits have not garnered audiences beyond the political boundaries of the Indian subcontinent. Having said that, however, some of these films have been commercial successes nationally. Partially, these box-office returns are the result of relatively modest production budgets, but I would argue that, in fact, these horror films inscribe into their plots a backlash against the success story described above. The sheer number of recent horror films and the regularity with which they are made resonates with all that is left by the wayside—un-attended to—in the story of globalization.
But Bollywood's romance with horror must be contextualized within the genre's global dispersal in recent years: from the spectacular success of Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998) which has spawned a series of sequels and Hollywood remakes to Takashi Shimizu's Ju-on franchise, horror films from Asia trumped all other contributions to the genre over the last decade or so. Startlingly, and for my purposes, crucially, children, pre-teens, and teenagers occupy the narrative and affective core of recent Asian horror cinema. 4 Bollywood has come to respond to this phenomenal global success not only by often mimicking the styles and technologies of these films, but also by incorporating children and young adults into its own narratives of terror and the supernatural.
For Hollywood, the trend started in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s with films such as Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), Carrie (1976), The Omen (1976), Amityville Horror (1979), and The Shining (1980), all of which focus on terrifying tots or monstrous adolescents. Slasher films of the 1980s and beyond continued to feature imperiled teens and young adults. Scholars such as Vivian Sobchak and Lucy Fischer have persuasively argued that these films articulate the anxieties that beset post-Vietnam and post-Women's Movement America, resonating with the shifting roles of women and the changing structure of families in U.S. culture. Are similar fears now plaguing Asian cinemas? Most scholars of recent Japanese cinema, such as Jay McRoy and Lindsey Nelson, seem to think so and read the predominance of children in films like Ringu, Dark Water (2002), and Ju-on (2002), among many others, to the shifting economic and social landscape in Japan and its impact on gender roles and the institution of the family. Interestingly, most of the Japanese texts feature fractured families and single parents, an indication of the foundational upheavals that have transformed both social and cinematic terrains.
I argue that recent Hindi horror films resonate with not only the current obsession with children in East and South East Asian films but also Hollywood's 1970s concerns with families under siege. However, as Ashis Nandy has pointed out, children and childhood do not harness the same meanings in every culture: “Childhood is culturally defined and created.… There are as many childhoods as there are families and cultures, and the consciousness of childhood is as much a cultural datum as patterns of child-rearing and the social role of the child” (56). Thus, having noted Bollywood's indebtedness to global cinemas, it is important to underscore the fact that a range of meanings gather around children and childhood that are specific to the Indian sub-continent, both within cinema and without.
Children in the subcontinent bear markers of caste and community in their names. 5 For the massive number of children who live amidst poverty in the subcontinent, public discourses echo welfare policies undertaken by the state, involving basic health, care-giving, and education. Although infant mortality rates have decreased dramatically in recent decades, they are nowhere near the standards demanded by organizations such as UNICEF (Infant Mortality Rate). In India, child labor laws are openly flouted, and a large number of these children also participate in unorganized sectors such as domestic labor and in hotels, spas, small-scale restaurants, tea-shops, and so on (Gathia, Pandey). Children of middle and affluent classes are burdened in a different sense: as India pursues its global economic policies aggressively, children come to be seen as baton bearers for the nation's shining future. This fervent ambition translates into brutal school curriculums and sadistically demanding institutions of higher education. Academic expectations from children of the middle classes are so excessive that almost every year thousands of children commit suicide under parental and social pressure for scholastic excellence (“Growing Trend”).
Hindi popular cinema, for the most part, has remained indifferent to these predicaments. 6 Children feature as symbols of happy families as well as unhappy, incomplete, dismembered ones. 7 Siblings get separated by cruel circumstances in childhood and are united miraculously as adults. Scores of films take refuge in the melodramatic modality of coincidence in order to enable this re-union at the dénouement. Most often, children fall victims to corrupt villains and cruel gangsters who bring them up as criminals like themselves—the worst blow to befall any upright, virtuous family within Hindi cinema's moral economy. However, apart from the horror genre, Bollywood has rarely represented children as malevolent forces; thus, the representational idiom I am engaging with here is something of a novelty.
Hindi film's primary generic modality is melodrama; thus, families and familial relations form the narrative and ideological crux of this cinema. As noted by film theorists such as Thomas Elsaesser and Christine Gledhill, the melodramatic mode understands, inscribes, and inflects all large socio-political and economic conflicts into the realm of the familial. Indeed, this is perhaps the most important ideological task performed by the melodramatic mode—a relentless translation of all questions into the language of the personal. The relationship between the horror genre and its familial allegiances has also been theorized: Robin Wood's now classic essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” identifies the modern family as horror's “true milieu.” Given Bollywood's textual hybridity, the horror film remains unconcerned with the incursion of the melodramatic mode; in fact, melodrama's favorite stomping ground—the family—becomes, almost exclusively, the site for the eruption and elaboration of the horrific. The three films I analyze at length here, Vaastu Shastra (2004), Phoonk (2008), and Gauri (2007), were all made after the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s. As such, all of these texts feature the modern nuclear family unit and the upper-middle class consumer ethos that liberalization not only brought into being but also made visible and viable in the last two decades. 8 This is the class that is at the vanguard of the “progress” that is bandied about endlessly in the global media vis-à-vis India's coming of age as an emergent powerhouse in the global arena. The films under discussion offer intermittent glimpses into the fissures that rupture—at least sporadically—the deceptive plenitude of that story.
All three films under discussion here can be grouped under the rubric of “multiplex cinema,” films made for affluent audiences and smaller theatres that have mushroomed across cities in India in recent years. 9 Apart from offering the spectator an immersion in variegated spaces of consumption and entertainment—many of these theatres are housed within swanky, up-market shopping malls—the films in question also target the spectators as metropolitan consumers . 10 In other words, a new kind of cinema is being crafted to appeal to a new kind of spectator—the upwardly mobile, confidently bourgeois subject described above. Multiplex films, in popular parlance, typically feature tight scripts, shorter durations, and often abjure song and dance sequences that Hindi films have traditionally included. When songs are present—as is the case with Gauri —they are more snugly integrated into narrative situations, rather than functioning as spectacular interruptions. 11 Themes, too, have come to be more varied and “off-beat,” as the middle-class audience is understood to have become savvier in its cinematic tastes. The recent visibility of horror, I would argue, should be situated within this new context of industry-audience relations and the perceived desire for novelty.
Vaastu, Phoonk , and Gauri all fulfill the criteria for multiplex films, especially because all of them, at least at first glance, appear to affirm a determinedly modern, metropolitan ethos. However, in the following discussion, I argue that all three films, in distinct ways, elaborate a dismantling of what might be understood as the multiplex dispensation—discourses that attend to modern subjectivities and formations in a globalized world. The figure of the child enables this dissolution of modernity in each of the three films discussed below. The children in question are not “evil” in a traditional sense; however, the films situate pernicious energies within children, rather instrumentally, in order to mount critiques of the larger ideological terrains they inhabit.
Vaastu Shastra was not a commercial success in India, which is hardly surprising as this was Saurabh Narang's first directorial venture; moreover, the film does not boast any of the A-list stars considered necessary for boosting box-office earnings. The fact that it was clearly marketed as a horror film may not have helped matters either, because the audience for this sort of cinema was unevenly emerging at the time. Vaastu Shastra features an urban nuclear family: Dr. Jhilmil Rao and her husband, Viraag, a professional writer, purchase a sprawling bungalow away from the city of Pune in order to escape the chaos and vicissitudes of metropolitan existence. Soon after they move into their new home with Jhil's teenage sister, Radz, the couple's little son, Rohan, starts displaying strange behavior and claiming to have invisible friends, two in particular, whom he refers to as Manish and Jyoti. Meanwhile, a madman pursues Jhil everyday and attempts to tell her something about her new home, episodes that make her understandably nervous. The negative energies that plague the new home seem connected to a dead banyan tree in the yard, to which Rohan develops an unhealthy attachment. Since Viraag, the child's primary caregiver, is unable to juggle childcare duties with his writing, the family employs a maid, Rukma, to keep Rohan company. Rohan, however, dislikes Rukma and accuses her of being a thief; in turn, Rukma traumatizes the child and threatens to kill him. Soon after, Rukma is mysteriously killed in what appears to be a hit-and-run incident, and the police confirm Rohan's version of the woman's dishonesty. Initially amused by the child's imaginative potential, the parents get anxious when Rohan's visions of a “bad man” and some other angry spirits living in their home become more strident. Since none of the adults are able to see the ghosts yet, Rohan is diagnosed with a psychological disorder accompanied by visual and aural hallucinations. However, once Radz is brutally and inexplicably murdered, the madman is finally able to communicate to Jhil the truth of the evil tree that kills everyone who inhabits its home, but not in time to save Radz and Viraag, who fall victim to these evil forces as well. After a protracted struggle with the malevolent undead that now includes both Viraag and Radz, the tree is destroyed, and Jhil is able to save her son. The evil force, however, continues to live within the child.
Vaastu expends considerable time and narrative energy establishing the modern worldviews of the couple and their family. Although they move away from the city, the couple brings their modern metropolitan ideologies to the wilderness. The family's non-traditional living arrangements are underscored by the presence of Radz, Jhil's sister, who is included in the family unit and the fact that Jhil is the professional breadwinner while Viraag stays at home writing and serving as the primary caregiver to Rohan. Soon after the family moves into the new home, spectators witness the unorthodox domestic arrangements when Jhil and Radz leave for the hospital and college respectively, while Viraag is left at home to cook, clean, and look after the child. We are expected to note the liberal and liberated politics of the family via these expository sequences.
I argue that in Vaastu , the child Rohan is used strategically in order to mount a stringent critique of the discourses of neo-liberal modernity that the couple embodies, for the film makes apparent Viraag's inability to provide the child with the company he clearly craves. In a key sequence, Rohan unsuccessfully tries to draw Viraag's attention to his ball that mysteriously gets suspended in mid-air. The mise-en-scene, particularly the blocking of actors, alerts the spectator to Rohan's plight, since for much of the scene he remains in the foreground trying to make sense of the haunted ball while Viraag is placed in the deep background, with his back facing his son and the audience. In other words, the placement of actors in space demonstrates Viraag's inattention, as his child encounters supernatural forces in plain sight. After being gently shepherded away by his father, Rohan ventures into the shed in their backyard where he meets his new “friends” (presumably for the first time). While Viraag seems oblivious to his son's loneliness, Jhil's guilt over abandoning her child for her profession is immediately apparent—an early indication of the film's rhetorical allegiances—as she frantically searches for Rohan as soon as she comes home from work and eventually locates him in the ramshackle shed. It is instructive to note the length of time the adults in the film spend hunting for an elusive Rohan; the implication is that the child would not be missing in the first place, if properly looked after.
Rohan's behavior becomes increasingly more bizarre as he insists on the real-ness of his new friends. The very next day, Viraag finds him gone once again and finally sees him talking to his invisible friends, Manish and Jyoti, under the banyan tree that is the repository of malefic forces in the film. Initially amused by Rohan's imaginative explorations, his parents become understandably alarmed when they find him missing from his bed at night and perched on top of the banyan tree, after yet another protracted panicky search. As Rohan continues to try to convince his parents unsuccessfully of the existence of his new friends, Jhil and Viraag speculate that the child is perhaps not able to handle the new space and his new environs.
Rohan is the narrative fulcrum of Vaastu , and while the child does not embody evil on his own, the spiteful supernatural forces in the film use him as a conduit for terror. The film deploys a cornucopia of stylistic techniques to alert viewers to the evil that resides in the new home. 12 One of the most effective devices used are crane shots that simulate the point-of-view of the dead/dreadful tree; the audience is optically aligned with the tree during these “looks” at the hapless abode, via birds-eye-view shots that dwarf the home and render it vulnerable. The cinematography, more generally, is absolutely crucial in generating terror in Vaastu : a restless, mobile camera constantly “stalks” the characters, while weird, canted frames render spaces and people out of kilter. The sound track combines ominous music with a plethora of disturbing noises, including, inexplicably, the loud buzzing of insects and high-pitched sounds of children giggling. All of these sonic components coalesce to create the disturbing aural universe of the film, a perfect foil for the unsettling visuals.
It is the absence of family members—extended family members—that propels the family into crisis; the film implies, I would argue, that it is the non-traditional familial situation to which Rohan falls victim. Vaastu subtly criticizes not only Viraag's care-giving skills but also Jhil's professional commitments which keep her away from home and child. It comes to be a critique of modernity—of the modern nuclear family, of the modern companionate couple, modern professional femininity, and even modern parenting. Again, I would argue that Rohan—and by extension the rest of the family—is haunted by big empty spaces; there is so much space between characters in their new home that Manish, Jyoti, and the other undead are easily able to inhabit it. The uncanny, the unhomely, very easily erupts into domestic space that is left empty and unattended. It is the lack of “real” people that forces Rohan to befriend the spectral children; the film wants us to believe that his far-too-modern parents create the situation that imperils him.
The crisis reaches a fever pitch when Jhil and Viraag employ Rukma, an ersatz parental figure to look after Rohan and provide him companionship. Again, we are made aware of the lack of genuine familial care. Rukma's “care” for Rohan turns out to be not just inadequate but, in fact, pernicious. In a disturbing take on class and domestic labor, Rukma is portrayed as a deceitful thief and a verbally and physically abusive person who threatens to throw Rohan under a speeding truck. When Rohan complains to his parents about Rukma having pinched items from their home, they—in typical, liberal employer fashion—not only dismiss his tale, but also wonder if the child's disturbed psyche demands psychiatric intervention. Vaastu's ideological propensities congeal around this event. Meanwhile Manish, Jyoti, and other ghostly inhabitants murder Rukma, and Rohan's version of events is vindicated once the police come to report her death and return the stolen items. The police inspector also reports that a truck driver had witnessed Rukma threatening to toss Rohan under its wheels, a horrible revelation that sends Jhil into paroxysms of remorse for having doubted her son.
The unearthly undead grow increasingly more assertive after Rukma's death; Rohan is able to see not only the dead children but also the malefic adult ghosts who walk about freely through the home. Until this point in the film, we had only seen the ghostly inhabitants fleetingly, but now they appear to us as solid, corporeal beings that wander about unafraid and even gaze silently at the family members as they sleep. Physically, they look more or less human, except for their unusual pallor and darkly shadowed eyes. 13 In Rukma's absence, the spaces between the other characters seem to grow and expand, filling up with the angry undead. Rohan clearly articulates this to Radz, telling her that Manish and Jyoti are no longer his friends because the ghosts are now very angry with the family. The cause of their anger, however, remains unclear.
The climax of the film involves Radz's steamy tryst with her boyfriend, Murli, which eventually leads to her brutal death. Echoing countless American slasher films, Radz seems to be punished for her promiscuity, but we do not see exactly how she is killed. After Murli disappears in the middle of their sexual encounter, Radz walks downstairs to look for him in what she perceives to be a game of erotic hide-and-seek. Something horrific accosts her soon after, but her terrified look off-screen is all we are privy to. An abrupt, disjointed cut transitions us into the next sequence, as Jhil, Viraag, and Rohan return home after an evening out. Jhil—to her abject horror—discovers Murli's mutilated corpse on Radz's bed and her sister's body strung up on the banyan tree. On the final day, a distraught Jhil leaves Rohan at home with Viraag, creating the necessary conditions for the climactic series of attacks. She will become the target of ghostly assault upon her return.
The madman who had been uttering garbled warnings from the very beginning manages to draw Jhil's attention at her hospital on this day, but his explanation of the haunted home and murderous tree and their wicked inhabitants remains as incomplete and incoherent as Rohan's understanding of the ghosts' angry energy. I would argue that this incoherence at the very heart of Vaastu lays bare its political propensities—we never quite find out what transpired in the site of the home. Our knowledge of past events and past violence—arguably crucial to our understanding of any horror film that invokes past events—remain vague intimations and inchoate ramblings from a madman and a terrified child. In other words, the foundational reason for the hauntings remains unarticulated, decidedly unclear, indeed, incomprehensible. Likewise, the attack on Viraag is implied by his horrified look at something off-screen, but like Radz's death, the specifics of the violence remain unseen by spectators. I would argue that it is this silence that enables us to unravel the specters that plague the family; it is in resonance with this informational vacuum that Viraag's final attack on Jhil comes to be meaningful. When Jhil rushes back to the house, terrified for her husband and child, she is finally confronted by the monumental canker that has been slowly but surely eating away at her home—a crowd of silent, angry undead including Rukma, Radz, and, worse, her now (un)dead husband, Viraag. Finally the empty spaces of the home are full of bodies and energies that it has seemed to have lacked from the beginning.
Viraag's attack on Jhil is immediate, horrific, and inexplicable. He throttles her repeatedly and flings her across the room in a show of immense strength and profound rage. The audience does not echo Jhil's astonishment at this instance because we realize that the film has come full circle—the dénouement is a decisive blow to the discourses of modernity that Jhil has so confidently inhabited so far. Viraag's feelings of inadequacy and impotence finally boil over—he is not, after all, as comfortable assuming the feminizing role of homemaker/caregiver as he had deluded himself into believing. The non-traditional family unit, the lack of patriarchal/feudal supervision, the unorthodox organization of professional and domestic duties, finally prove too much for Viraag. He is emasculated, rendered obsolete in this much too modern household.
Vaastu finally makes its ideological allegiances obvious: it is a cautionary tale about being or becoming modern. Wealth, education, and bourgeois discourses of consumption and coupledom can be endorsed only up to a point: when traditional gender roles are subverted, the family taps into a fountainhead of rage that requires no naming or explanation. At the closure, Jhil—the confident, articulate professional woman—is rendered completely silent and on the verge of psychological implosion. She finally realizes the sheer fragility of her modern existence and the extent of her self-deception. It is moreover no accident that Rohan—the male heir—remains the bearer of the last look and the last laugh. The last look, which Rohan casts over Jhil's shoulder as she holds him, situates the source of evil within Rohan via his now hypnotically gleaming eyes. Somehow, unseen by us, the evil energy has been transferred to the child. 14 The malevolent force that has destroyed his family lives on in him, a warning of things to come.
Phoonk was a significant box-office success India, alerting us to the horror genre's newfound popularity in the subcontinent. This success was undoubtedly buttressed by director Ram Gopal Varma's reputation as a horror auteur , who has delivered remarkable horror films in the past, such as Raat (1992), Bhoot (2003), and Darna Mana Hai (2006). Phoonk is both similar to and distinct from Vaastu in that here, the disassembling of modernity is channeled through the re-education of a rational technocratic ethos. Phoonk revolves around Rajiv, Arati, and their daughter, Raksha, who becomes the victim of black magic unleashed by Madhu, Rajiv's female business associate, who is fired for embezzlement early in the film. Madhu is accompanied by her husband, Anshuman, on her quest for revenge. The family also includes their young son, Rohan, Rajiv's mother, Amma, and a bevy of help. Rajeev works on a construction site, and part of the film's action also takes place in this non-domestic space peopled by urban laborers. It is here that a rock bearing the features of Lord Ganesha, the god of luck and prosperity, appears, and the laborers demand a shrine for it. Rajiv, however, refuses to pander to what he considers an irrational request until the very end. Meanwhile, psychiatrist Seema Walke diagnoses Raksha's condition—seemingly uncontrollable fits—as the psychological malaise Dissociative Personality Disorder and orders a series of tests. As Raksha's affliction worsens and doctors and medical science remain largely ineffectual, Rajiv capitulates and approaches a blind seer, Manja, for help. Manja apprehends the culprit, removes the curse, and kills Madhu, thereby ensuring a happy ending. Initially unable or unwilling to accept the “superstitious” and fantastic notion of black magic, Rajiv finally comes to accept the limits of his knowledge as a rational, modern subject. In this film, the figure of the child is deployed in order to stage a process of “re-enchantment” for its male protagonist, Rajiv. Raksha, the child who unwittingly becomes the victim of adult machinations, is not evil per se. However, as the embodiment and conduit of Madhu's malevolent, enraged curse, she functions as the cause for the instability and terror experienced by the family.
The film's affective universe is divided between the rational and the irrational along strictly gendered lines: Rajiv is the bearer of an absolute, obdurate, technocratic rationality, accompanied by the doctors. On the other side—the realm of the credulous, the imaginative, the irrational, the hysteric and, crucially, the childlike—are the women, the children, and the witch doctors: Amma, Arati, Madhu, Manja, and, of course, Raksha who becomes a victim of demonic possession. The laborers at the construction site belong to the second group, infantilized by their obstinate faith in the deity of Ganesha, as I explain below. Phoonk carefully arranges the principal characters on either side of the divide before bringing them into conflict. 15
The fact that Madhu chooses Raksha as the instrument of her revenge against Rajiv is not accidental; she is clearly delineated as Rajiv's favorite offspring. The connections between Madhu and the child are established early on—as Raksha's rudeness toward the woman is returned by Madhu's apparent affection. 16 Rajiv, too, understands Madhu's strangeness, but he views it as a result of her “childishness,” evidenced by her high-pitched giggle and generally odd behavior. Madhu singles Raksha out as the object of her vindictive rage not simply because she is Rajiv's favorite but also, I would argue, because she recognizes in the little girl her own mirror image. Madhu seeks revenge for the humiliation she undergoes at the hands of Rajiv after he discovers the couples' embezzlement; however, the extent of her rage comes to be incomprehensible in the light of the fact that Rajiv's feelings of betrayal are entirely justified . In other words, Madhu's desire for revenge remains meaningful only if we engage with her as a willful, irrational, hysterical, malevolent child—and the film underscores these qualities repeatedly. 17 Rajiv's professional decision to fire Anshuman and Madhu is also, of course, personal—we learn, early on, that the trio not only collaborate professionally but have been close friends. In the light of their personal relationship, Madhu's attack on Rajiv's life via his favorite child makes sense. In this sense, the home and the construction site—the private and the public spaces—come to be co-extensive, both equally vulnerable to Madhu's monumental wrath.
Phoonk is not only about adults and children, the rational and the irrational, but also about transforming the former into the latter—the narrative is one of re-educating Rajiv via his induction into the realm of the irrational. For the purposes of my argument here, Phoonk is foundationally a text of re-enchantment and, if you will, one of infantilization—of transforming adult disbelief into childlike faith. Rajiv's rational skepticism is harnessed not only to masculinity, but also to his identity as a technocrat, a class that the economic liberalization of India has made immensely vocal. Secure in his faith in the realm of reason, Rajiv initially gently refuses and later angrily dismisses the workers' request for a shrine on the construction site. In fact, he refuses to comply with this simple demand on at least three different occasions, despite entreaties from friends, colleagues, and even Arati. The construction site—Rajiv's favorite terrain for the exercise of his faith in reason—thus remains unsanctified.
Interestingly, the film does not rest on this evidence: Phoonk continues to expend considerable narrative energy in buttressing Ravi's pigheaded, intractable—almost irredeemably masculinist—rationality. When cursed fetish objects—animal bones, lemons, vermilion, etc.—are found in the yard, Rajiv ignores the entire family's requests and tosses them out with the trash. Predictably, he turns a deaf ear to all of Amma's warnings and Arati's concerns regarding the possibility of black magic afflicting their home. Preceding this material evidence of things going awry, Raksha mysteriously disappears from home and is finally located in the vicinity of a park seemingly unaware of her surroundings. Arati, who locates her, is relieved to note that the child seems physically unharmed; however, she is puzzled at her daughter's inability to explain how she arrived at that location. Also disquieting is Raksha's interest in a crow; insistent shot reverse shot editing shows her apparently in deep communion with the bird. Crows function as bearers of evil in Phoonk ; each time Raksha is attacked or possessed by the evil spirit, she is shown exchanging looks with a crow, usually perched on a tree in the vicinity.
Following the disappearance, Raksha complains of hearing strange noises and also claims that someone has cut off some of her hair, complaints that are brushed aside by Rajiv. Raksha's first major “episode” occurs when she is at school. Soon after she enters the school, the steadycam performs the role of the predatory spirit in pursuit, circling and following Raksha into the building. Once again, just before she enters her classroom—where she eventually will laugh maniacally, frightening her teacher and classmates before passing out—she exchanges a series of glances with a crow. In this sequence, close-ups of the crow alternate with extreme close-ups of Raksha's chillingly expressionless face and eyes. In the series of these attacks that follow the initial episode, she speaks in a guttural, manly voice and becomes violent. The violence is primarily directed at adults who try to attend to her, especially at a distraught Rajiv. The child also acquires enormous physical strength during the fits of possession and is able to shove adults away from her bedside, a fact that astonishes the family doctor. In one particularly terrifying instance, Raksha recites nursery rhymes in this alien voice, in a seemingly catatonic state. Amidst all of these disturbances, a crow maintains a stubborn vigil outside Raksha's bedroom window, casting a watchful eye on proceedings; the soundtrack also incorporates the cawing of the birds. Once again Amma tries to intervene, only to be lectured about her superstitious television programs. Rajiv's response to the crisis is to summon doctors and rush Raksha to the hospital.
The entry of psychiatrist Seema Walke is important, not only because she diagnoses Raksha with Dissociative Personality Disorder—medicalese that Rajiv gratefully hangs his rationality on—but also because the film stages one of the most crucial battles between the realm of the scientific and the terrain of faith via a conversation between the doctor and Amma. Desperate to help the suffering child, the elderly woman eventually brings her request to Seema. The latter's response is more generous than Rajiv's—she concedes that what plagues Raksha can indeed be called a ghost or an evil spirit but remains adamant about the psychological nature of the problem. Crucially, Seema finally blames Amma's homespun wisdom—i.e., her superstitious nature—and her “fantastic stories” of ghosts and demons for Raksha's “deep psychological trauma”; according to her medical expertise, it is the effect of being exposed to these, in conjunction with objects in the yard, that push the child into a state of fear and distress.
Meanwhile, Amma summons a Shaman to exorcize the evil spirit that she believes is haunting their home and her grandchild. Predictably, when Rajiv discovers the shaman performing the rites of purification, he flies into a rage and evicts the mystic from the house. Following this altercation, Raksha's situation worsens—she actually begins to levitate close to the ceiling in absolute defiance of the rules of gravity. As Raksha shrieks and flails about uncontrollably, the terrified parents rush her back to the hospital. The medical personnel promptly restrain the child and begin their scientific ministrations. It is this final attack and a confrontation with the truly incredible that finally bring about Rajiv's transformation. Raksha's immense suffering forces him to capitulate to the suggestion of his friend and self-proclaimed religious opportunist, Vinay, that they find an “alternative solution.”
Vinay takes Rajiv to Manja, a blind mystic who immediately seems to have knowledge of Rajiv's plight. It is Manja's wisdom that brings about the foundational changes in Rajiv's belief system. Unable to scoff at Manja's methods of investigation—which involve divination with iron spikes—he witnesses, instead, the mystic's superior powers. Manja bluntly tells Rajiv that his daughter will die unless the couple casting the black spells is stopped immediately. On the way to Anshuman and Madhu's, Rajiv gives the order for the Ganesha shrine to be built on the construction site—the final evidence of Manja's transformative powers. What follows is the climactic struggle between good and evil—polarities that are now both firmly grounded in the realm of the irrational. Madhu is dismembered and destroyed, as are her evil designs on Raksha. Ironically, when Rajiv embraces his now healed daughter, Arati is convinced that it is the doctors and medical science that have saved the child's life. This ironic reversal of roles between believers and skeptics closes Phoonk .
Phoonk remains a typical melodramatic conflict between opposing forces; the film neatly arranges the rational and irrational on either side of its central battle between good and evil. What makes the film especially interesting, as mentioned above, is that the final apocalyptic clash of bipolar ideologies are aligned to the realm of the modern, rational, scientific on the one end and the supernatural, the non-rational, and the child-like on the other. When Rajiv sheds his skepticism, he also sheds his rationality and, in a sense, his masculine obduracy; he enters the realm of the women and the children, the realm of the irrational and the magical. Phoonk gives us a glimpse of the re-enchantment that not only saves Rajiv's family but also by extension, redeems his soul. Phoonk allows for the voices of the marginalized to be heard above the din of a ruthlessly commonsensical technocratic rationality that has accompanied India's love-story with globalization; Manja's victory is, above all, an affirmation of an “unofficial” spiritual domain, one that is not aligned to any dominant religious formation in the subcontinent. Rajiv's final capitulation is the film's endorsement of these universes—of faith, spiritualism, child-like belief, and magic—that have fallen by the wayside in recent decades.
Gauri , like Vaastu , was not a commercial success and for similar reasons. Director Aku Akbar is primarily a Malayalam-language filmmaker, and Gauri was his first foray into the Hindi-language industry. The lack of stars and its relatively low budget ensured that the film went largely unnoticed by mainstream audiences. However, reviewers commented on the film's innovative visual effects as well as its “socially relevant message.” 18
When married couple Sudeep and Roshni decide to go on vacation, their young daughter, Shivani, insists that the family return to their old home in the wilds of Neelgiri. Initially resistant, the parents eventually capitulate, and the family travels back to the place where Sudeep and Roshni had spent the early years of their marriage. Soon after returning to this old home, the couple realizes that some terrifying force is haunting their house and also Shivani. This ghost turns out to be Gauri, the spirit of a female fetus they had aborted early on in their marriage. Gauri, now inhabiting Shivani's body, delivers a dreadful ultimatum: she declares that after three days of subjecting the couple to acute terror and suffering, she will kill Shivani to avenge the termination of her own life. Sudeep and Roshni plead with Gauri but to no avail. However, the ghost frees Shivani at the end of the stipulated period once she realizes that the parents are genuinely regretful of her “murder.” The family in turn embraces Gauri as a spirit-daughter to assuage her pain and their guilt.
Gauri is a frightening film in many respects—not the least of which is an unrelenting sentimentalization of the hugely important issue of reproductive rights which so many women are still struggling for. Interestingly, the film makes no distinction between the appearances of Gauri and Shivani which would enable us as well as the parents to tell them apart; we encounter Gauri only in Shivani's body, rendering the victimized child monstrous as well. I read Gauri as an especially troubling text, which deftly blurs the lines between the selective abortion of female fetuses with the larger issue of reproductive rights and freedoms; in doing so, the film disavows the very notions of modern coupledom and conjugality by prohibiting them from deciding if and when to have a child.
The issue of abortion is a hugely contested one in India, with implications that are considerably different from controversies in the West. Given the bugbear of population explosion in the subcontinent, the right to abortion is a given; it is legally available to all citizens as the state's intervention into population control. However, this “progressive” right continues to be widely deployed all over the country for the selective abortion of female fetuses after sex determination tests, thus raising vexed issues for feminist activists who support the right of women to keep control over their bodies but simultaneously oppose the termination of female fetuses on ethical grounds (Menon). While Gauri does not invoke the public or policy debates surrounding abortion, I would argue that the specter of female feticide does haunt the margins of the text; the film simply relocates this rhetoric within the private ambit of the family. In other words, the fact that the aborted fetus is female remains consequential in the larger discourses with which the film resonates. 19
Sudeep, Roshni, and Shivani present a perfect picture of the modern, affluent nuclear family in the opening sequences of Gauri . The couple is also liberal in parenting techniques, as witnessed in their indulgence of Shivani's every wish and the relative absence of disciplining measures. It is Shivani who insists that they vacation in the family's old home, instead of Mauritius, the more suitable holiday destination that Roshni suggests. The child—presumably already possessed by the spirit of Gauri—brings the couple back to the scene of the crime, where Gauri had been conceived and the couple had made the decision to terminate the pregnancy. Once Sudeep and Roshni realize that Gauri has returned to exact revenge—Shivani gives them details of the abortion that she cannot possibly know—the film takes an ominous turn.
Via flashbacks, we learn of the early days of their marriage and of Roshni's desire to name their future child Gauri—a mythic name for the goddess Durga or Shakti, the symbol of female power within the Hindu pantheon. 20 We also learn that while Sudeep had been firm in his opinion about terminating the pregnancy (he felt unprepared to be a parent at the particular stage in life and career), Roshni vacillated widely in her decision about the pregnancy, and it had caused her considerable distress. Finally, however, she relented to Sudeep's wish, and the couple moved on with their lives. It was Sudeep's elderly father (unnamed) who struck a crucial note of dissonance in the midst of all this: once informed of the decision, he delivered a lengthy diatribe against the present generation's “selfishness and irresponsibility” and shunned the couple thereafter. His speech included, among other quasi-religious discourses, a description of the “magical moment of conception when a life miraculously takes birth in the womb,” which echoes exactly the rhetoric of right-wing, conservative, pro-life groups everywhere.
Once Sudeep and Roshni discover the horrific nature of their predicament, Gauri delivers her ultimatum to the hapless parents via Shivani: just as she had awaited in dread the moment of her death in the womb, she will now terrorize the couple for three days after which she will kill Shivani as retribution for her own “murder.” The terrified couple initially tries to escape with their child and then pleads in desperation, but to no avail. Gauri gleefully executes a series of attacks on the terrified, cowering parents, which range from spectral knives thrown at Roshni to an unbearable medley of weeping infants who keep the couple awake at night.
Gauri is essentially a neo-traditionalist, pro-life text that disregards the entire discourse of free will and individual rights. It does so particularly effectively by sentimentalizing the trope of home. As mentioned above, the demonic fetus not only brings the parents back home but also brings home to them the implications of their decision to undergo the abortion. In the process of attributing blame and culpability, the very topos of their house comes to be haunted and terrifying, since Gauri stubbornly claims it as her own home and continues to assert that the family belongs there. Beyond this hostile takeover of domestic space, Gauri also relentlessly lectures the parents on the womb as a metaphoric home: it is the womb in which a “baby” is supposed to feel most secure and loved, and yet she was brutally murdered in the very space of supposed sanctuary. We read Roshni's pregnant body retrospectively as colonized terrain in a sense, while Gauri's sermons simultaneously imbue the fetus with vindictive consciousness.
On the final night of their three-day period of terror, the film takes us into a virtuoso display of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) to drive home the monumental nature of Gauri's wrath: luminous, ghostly fetuses descend from the night sky and literally besiege Sudeep and Roshni's home. Another horrific scene follows when glass shards rain on the unprotected Shivani, and the helpless parents cower in abject terror. 21 This attack presumably re-creates Gauri's experience of the termination of her life with sharp instruments. Thus, the latter half of the film is a long-drawn phase of epiphany for the couple, as they are driven to paroxysms of guilt and suffering and finally to the dreadful realization that their only child will be murdered by vengeful the ghost-fetus, Gauri. Gauri finally relinquishes her rage but not until she extracts a crucial promise from her “parents” that she will find solace in their home and family whenever she feels alone, insecure or threatened. The final images show a vastly chastened Roshni making room on their bed for the spectral form of Gauri, now rendered as luminous orbs of light, and finally lavishing on her the love that the film tries to convince us she deserves.
Needless to say, as the ageist counterpart to Gauri's rhetoric, Sudeep's father returns to the scene in a key moment in the latter half of the film. As the unheeded patriarch whose homespun wisdom was spurned by the much too modern couple, the dénouement is as much his vindication as it is Gauri's. The fetus/ghost tells him that she has missed him, and he holds her in his arms in affection and regret for the life lost; clearly, for him, Gauri is not simply a vindictive ghost but a child who could/should have been. The obscenity of the moment when grandpa and Gauri embrace in profound communion is unmistakable: the unborn fetus and the feudal patriarch reserve the right to pass judgment on the irrelevance of reproductive rights and, by extension, comment on the ethics of companionate coupledom, conjugality, and procreation.
Gauri is a horrifying text in many ways, not least because it conflates the issue of abortion with the selective termination of female fetuses, which continues to plague a rapidly globalizing India. In referring to Gauri as “she,” my analysis, too, risks bestowing personhood/gender on the fetus; in embodying the fetus as a little girl, the film manages this canny sleight of hand whereby we can no longer refer Gauri as “it.” Gauri systematically and horrifically dismantles the very notion of the modern couple in allowing not only the feudal patriarch—Sudeep's father—but also the unborn zygote to articulate their opinions on the matter of reproductive rights and planning parenthood. Finally, it affirms their rhetoric—a rhetoric of miraculous birth that brings the past (grandpa) and the potential future (Gauri) together in a curious but efficacious indictment of modernity. The overdetermined terrain of parental love and nurture is deployed, I would argue, in a dissolution of modernity itself.
As demonstrated in my readings of recent films, the horror genre in Bollywood offers us a valuable optic into the dissonant, disruptive, and disturbing aspects of the triumphant narrative of globalization. As mainstream Bombay cinema participates wholeheartedly in the rhetoric of progress, globality, and consumption that supposedly accompanies India's entry into late modernity, it falls on the much-derided horror genre to register the voices of discontent and dissent.
We can engage this dissonance in several ways, some of which are more sobering than others. As foundational transformations attend to the Indian socio-cultural and economic fabric, chasms yawn between classes, women contribute in increasing numbers to urban workforce, divorce rates skyrocket, and families come to be imperiled more than ever before. The horror film responds to these changes in several ways: first, the genre imbibes the rhetoric of backlash, a reactionary, conservative discourse that holds late modernity, especially modern women and couples, culpable for all the ills plaguing Indian society. In this respect, the horror film abets and indeed resonates the neo-traditionalist rhetoric of Hindu nationalists and other right-wing formations. Most troubling perhaps is the instrumental use of the figure of the child—innocent, vulnerable, in need of nurture—in buttressing this regressive ideological terrain. Vaastu Shastra and Gauri remain exemplary films in this context.
Phoonk intervenes into this tug and pull of the modern and the non-modern in a way that remains, I suggest, more compelling. It calls for a re-enchantment of private and public domains that have come to be entirely disenchanted in the wake of industrial and post-industrial modernity. In this reading, Phoonk , and other films of its ilk generate a desire for a re-inscription of the magical, the mystical, the feminine, the childlike, and the irrational into a world that has relentlessly marginalized these nodes of experience. The figure of the child, however privileged, then serves as a stand-in for an abject subaltern; the child articulates all that is lacking and is ruthlessly marginalized and silenced in the story of India's triumphant and celebrated romance with globalization.
1. For a discussion of the implications and valences of the label “Bollywood,” see Prasad.
2. The Ramsay films are finally receiving much-deserved critical attention from cult cinema fans as well as film scholars. See, for example, Tombs.
3. Although this newer crop of films were certainly made and circulated in a transformed industrial environment, filmmakers, especially Varma, continue to cite and pay homage to the Ramsay films through mise-en-scene and iconography.
4. Examples abound and including Dark Water (2002), Whispering Corridors (2003), A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), and Acacia (2003).
5. First and especially last names in South Asia clearly indicate what caste, community, and religion an individual belongs to. It is virtually impossible to disguise these markers of social belonging once a person has been officially named.
6. Exceptions to the rule: Mrinal Sen's Kharij (1983) represented the exploitation of young rural children as domestic workers and Aamir Khan's Taare Zameen Par (2007) invokes a different kind of child labor—the enormous burden put on children by the arguably harsh scholastic systems in India.
7. Although male children are most often represented, curiously, many of the actors playing little boys are actually girls—a tendency that has fallen somewhat out of vogue in recent years.
8. Much scholarly work has recently focused on the emerging middle classes in pre- and post-liberalization India. See, for example, Fernandes.
9. For a discussion of the Multiplex boom and attendant transformations in distribution and exhibition of films, see Sharma.
10. This immersion within a larger space of consumption is so crucial to understanding the specta-torial experience of the viewer that Amit Rai has coined the term “Malltiplex” to describe the textured and sensate world of the urban multiplex.
11. For a theorization of Indian cinema through the trope of interruptions, see Gopalan.
12. Style in Vaastu —and the other films discussed here—remains highly self-conscious. The filmmakers clearly speak to an audience that is competent in reading, or is at least relatively familiar with, formal conventions typically deployed by the horror genre in Hollywood and beyond. It is this “knowing” spectatorship that Philip Brophy gestured towards when he wrote, “The contemporary Horror film knows that you've seen it before; it knows that you know what is about to happen; and it knows that you know it knows you know. And none of it means a thing, as the cheapest trick in the book will still tense your muscles, quicken your heart and jangle your nerves.”
13. The undead in Vaastu look very similar to those in Takashi Shimizu's global hit Ju-on ; the children in particular seem to have been modeled on those in the earlier film. The emphasis on a cursed home where inhabitants die mysteriously is also resonant with the plot of the Japanese film.
14. One possible explanation for Vaastu's open-ended closure is that the producers may have had plans for future sequels. The director's untimely death in 2010, however, makes this possibility unlikely.
15. This division—and particularly Rajiv's claim to adult rationality in the film—is resonant with Nandy's reading of modern childhood, in that it resonates powerfully with the adult anxiety of regression: “childhood has become a major dystopia for the modern world. The fear of being childish dogs the steps of every psychologically insecure adult and of every culture that uses the metaphor of childhood to define mental illness, primitivism, abnormality, underdevelopment, non-creativity and traditionalism” (65).
16. When Anshuman and Madhu visit the family, Raksha clearly states, “I don't like her,” prompting an immediate demand for an apology from an embarrassed Rajiv. At the fateful party, Madhu pinches Raksha's cheek cooing, “She doesn't like me. But I love her!” Madhu's sinister energy is signposted most clearly in her interactions with the little girl.
17. Especially in the party sequence, Madhu's defiant screaming even after having been discovered—her lack of remorse and her aggression—alert us to the insane, irrational child within. Her reaction to their humiliation is a childish covering of her eyes and wailing—hardly, I would suggest, the response of an adult. What I would like to emphasize here is that Madhu's baroque anger is linked to her child-likeness, which eventually becomes pathologically vindictive.
18. See Taran Adarsh's review.
19. Even user reviews on IMDB mention female feticide in relation to the film's take on abortion.
20. Interestingly, the name “Shivani” also refers to the same goddess, another technique by which the film equates the child and the fetus.
21. As an aside, it is interesting to note that in many of these films CGI—a modern technological innovation that has irrevocably transformed the cinema in recent years—is deployed in aid of elaborating and often buttressing a non-modern, traditionalist ideology.
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