Horror Fiction in the Global South: Cultures, Narratives and Representations 9789390077359, 9789390077267

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To Misery and Horror. Our life long companions. —Ritwick’s dedication To Priyani and Orhan.

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—Saikat’s dedication

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A necessary monster. Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

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Acknowledgements This book is a result of a lot of minds working together for the success of this project. The first acknowledgement, then, has to go to all the people who answered our call for papers. While we could not include all the papers that were sent to us, the sheer number of entries was, if nothing else, quite encouraging. The second, as always, to Chandra Sekhar, from Bloomsbury, who has once again been an angel to work with, from start to finish. I don’t think this book would have had happened had he not pushed us into it and taken care of the formalities. Finally, a heartfelt gratitude to all those people who are working from Bloomsbury’s end to make this book see the light of day in difficult times as these.

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Introduction I. Beginning Horror I heard, He has been taken to the morgue. Last night—in the middle of the February dark As the western moon blackened, He wished to die. His wife had lain beside him; his child too. There was love and hope shining in the moon light. What ghost did he see then? Why did his sleep break? Maybe, he hadn’t slept in ages. But now he will—in that morgue. I understand, this is what he wanted. His neck shrunk like a plague rat’s— Blood and froth smeared on its face— Tucked away in a darkened corner, he sleeps, Never to wake up again. —Jibanananda Das (2018) ‘Aath Bochor Aager Ek Din (A Day Eight Years Ago)’ is a poem about the inexorable miseries of life. It is not just the occasional sadness that Jibanananda Das depicts, but an ontological despair that governs the vicissitudes of human existence. This, at once primal as well as primary despondency, is displayed in the poem through a man who has not ‘slept in ages’. Having, thus, been kept awake, this man has been deprived of the peace that sleep brings with it: a peace that is essential for the stabilisation of the core of being. This discord is also an internal one. It is noteworthy that the man does not lack external and worldly affectations: he has a wife, a child, love and even hope. Yet, this external world seems to be just that—external. It does not cancel out that thing inside him; a thing that the poem calls a ‘dangerous phenomenon’, coursing through his veins, tiring him and wearing him out. What the man desires, then, is death: an everlasting sleep that will permanently analgise his pain. This is a desire that he ultimately achieves by hanging himself from an ashvattha1 tree. So, the poem begins in a mortuary where his body is kept, finally at ease. The interiority of the man thus 1

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presented is, however, not merely a personal internality. The ineffable despair that this man felt in his lifetime, the poem attempts to show, is not his exclusive predicament. The latter part of the poem, where it says that the dangerous phenomenon courses through ‘our’ and not only ‘his’ blood, stands testimony to this despair as a much more widespread, perhaps all-pervasive, affliction. Similarly, in the middle of the poem, there is a silence that, while moving through the world, arches its neck inside the window of the mortuary and tells the man: ‘Never will you wake again/Neither will you tolerate/the weight of the knowledge/of life’s unstoppable dark agony’. This silence, a thing in and of the world, though existing outside the man, understands not only the pain and agony that life is, but also the knowledge of that pain and agony. This comprehension, in turn, grants legitimacy to the man’s ‘sleeplessness’. His misery, hence, is not subjective or personal anymore. The inclusion of the world’s knowledge of this misery marks it as something pervasive and objective. There is a horror then: a horror that characterises the existence of all human beings, that which can end only in death. For, what else could this ‘dangerous phenomenon’ be if the only way out is in death? That said, the bigger question, in such a scenario, is why do all humans not follow the man into an endless sleep? The answer, Das’s poem reveals, lies in knowledge. The only difference, as the silence of the world shows, between those suffering from this horror and those who aren’t, is in knowing the existence of this horror (and, as shown later, of a connection to the cosmos that gives birth to this horror). In other words, while this horror, in the form of the ‘dangerous phenomenon’, courses through the blood of all human beings, it is the knowledge of this phenomenon that sets the terror in. Between the two states then, there is a moment of crisis: a moment that reveals, that defines, and that directs the rest of that person’s life. For the man in the poem, this moment is when he sees a ghost. Well, to say that he sees a ghost would be a leap, because the poem merely questions: ‘What ghost did he see then?’ This, however, is an interesting question, because within the limits of this question, there are implications that become quite important for this book. First, the poet seems to draw a direct connection between an entity that exists within the realms of generic (and, at times, psychological) horror and the setting of an existential horror. This connection effectively bears upon both these kinds of horror. Second, at least on the face of it, the poem insinuates that an interaction with a ghost (where the ghost stands in for supernatural horror) disturbs the balance of the world. After all, the man was ‘seemingly’ quite happy with his wife, child, love, and hope. It is only when he sees the ghost that his ‘sleep breaks’. Third, this sleep (repose) that breaks, the poem

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shows, was just an apparition in itself. It covered, as it were, the fact that there can be no genuine repose at all. The man’s interaction with the ghost, in a sense, reveals a truth; a deeper horror that characterises not only his but everyone’s life. Put together, these three implications reveal, perhaps, a characteristic of supernatural horror in itself: of its importance in human life towards the revealing of existential truths and, thereby, finding a rather prominent spot within (at least here) the Bengali South Asian imagination. Obviously, Das’s poem is not about supernatural horror. Neither is it a typical example of literature that concerns itself with such elements of horror within the Global South. That said, it is also not fair to overlook the images that the poem plays with. After all, Das does summon a ghost even if in an offhanded manner. In fact, this works within the schema of the poem. Not only does this invocation, as mentioned above, betray an imagination within which such entities reside, but also, in its casual texture, it endows an automatic naturality to the supernatural. When looked at in this light, Das’s poem, though not representative, offers a key phenomenological entry point into the different kinds of horror fictions and discourses of the Global South. Like Das’s poem, the experiential matrix of lives in the Global South is rift with connections to the supernatural. Empirical Western rationality often compels cultural analyses to approach the peculiarly easy traffic between the so-called natural and supernatural worlds in terms of reductive binary schema of modern/premodern, mythical consciousness/historical consciousness, religious/secular and so on. While myths, legends and folklore are rich cultural repositories of beliefs that cannot find a suitable location in the Cartesian Cogito, cultural analyses often overlook the material presence of the supernatural in the experiential matrix of the Global South. Ghosts, spirits and other such ‘spectral’ figures do not necessarily obfuscate the objective aspect of reality; in fact, if anything, much of the fiction that has been studied by the authors contributing to this book shows that supernatural sources of horror help unmask the ideological underpinnings of social order as well as its objective material relations. The unmasking itself is a disruptive moment that manifests itself in ‘horror’. This book, through its 15 different chapters, interrogates the different kinds of invocations, interventions, interactions, consultations and visitations that the people living in the Global South have encountered with supernatural horror, both in their lived realities and representative literature. The intention behind such interrogations is, ultimately, a preliminary exploration of possible theoretical frameworks that may enable the world to read the supernatural presence within the Global South. Quite obviously, this book intends to do so because there is a

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veritable lack, in today’s world (both academic and otherwise), of positions that examine the presence of horror in the Global South within homologous and homogenous parameters. Most explications of horror come from the West or the Global North. This lack is perhaps the reason why most of the chapters in the book are still forced to use Western theories—albeit ones that are critical of the Eurocentric bias of mainstream theory—to talk about the experiences and representations of horror of the Global South. This, however, does not mean that the book falls back into old habits of Westernised interrogations. Though the constituent chapters here use Western theories, all move beyond them as well. In doing so, they present new formulations, approach new systems of comprehending experiences and representations of horror in the Global South, by authors whose imagination and creative choices are derived from their experiences embedded in the realities of the Global South. This, in turn, enables the book to examine both the material and the cosmic dimensions of these experiences. For, rather importantly, both these aspects are included in the span and flow of the varieties of such interactions: from the creations of the cosmic and cosmological to the affectations of the material. They are neither paradoxical, nor mutually exclusive; rather they present themselves as different points of the same continuum. Each of the 15 chapters included in this book reveal the continuum, but the emphases in their interrogations may be on one or the other. Unsurprisingly then, the chapters can broadly be divided into these two aspects as supernatural horror flows from infusing the material affectations in the lives of the characters to a signification of the cosmological necessities. There is then, at the outset, a need to talk about these two aspects in some detail before getting into the chapters proper.

II. The Horror and the Horrific in the Human Cosmos With the horror that besets Das’s protagonist, there reverberates an ontological dissonance2 between the self (that becomes both the site and the experiencer of this horror) and the cosmos within which this self is placed. For, it is only within the terms of such a dissonance that a kind of violence happens: a violence that fatigues the self to the point of annihilation. It is as if the self is never at ease with the universe around it and constantly rejects it even as it is placed within it. There is a desire in the protagonist and, Das would argue, in almost every human being, to change that which resists change. Obviously, there is death, and that is what ultimately ends suffering. However, the change that the self of the

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protagonist desires is not through death. It wishes to reach a differential state in which there is a perceptible absence of the discord between the self and the universe, where the horror subsides from its roots, allowing for a possibility of relief (as opposed to exhaustion). It is, in a sense, this desire to get rid of that which can never be gotten rid of, and that which gives rise to the aforementioned violence and the subsequent horror. If this were not enough, this dissonance, itself marked by a disruption of the continuum of an absence3 in the phenomenal world, is initiated and, perhaps, complicated by an epiphenomenal visitation. There are, in this entire smorgasbord of existential horror, therefore, three elements that interact with each other—the self, the cosmos and the ghost4; with the last becoming catalytic towards the initiation of a rupture between the other two. This in-between-ness of the ghost, in turn, allows it to have an intricate contact with both the self and the universe. The resulting horror (of not only the ghost, but also of an existence in the universe) stands testament to this connection. After all, the universe outside the self becomes septic for that very same self only with the ghost’s manifestation. Having said that, there is an interesting paradox at work here as well. This, the ghost and its position, results in, vis-à-vis the relationship between the self and the cosmos, not only the aforementioned dissonance, but simultaneously, a consonance as well. By a simple mathematical transitiveness, the ghost works as a bridge in between the self and the universe, equating one to other. It is only in a concord between the self and the cosmos that the discord between them becomes not only possible but, subsequently, apparent5 as well. The epiphenomenal, in that sense, becomes an agent that actively marries two phenomenal entities, making one aware of not only the other, but its position inside that other as well. There is a question here, however: what is it that allows the epiphenomenal, the supernatural, or the ‘horrific’ to even have the possibility of a connection to both the human self and the cosmos? For there definitely is horror. The protagonist of Das’s poem does not feel anything else but horror. Nevertheless, the answer to this question cannot be an easy one. It requires the presentation of such entities as being ontologically capable of negotiating the radical alterity that exists between the Self and the cosmos. In light of this scheme, then, the following section is an attempt to not only answer this question, but interrogate the modalities that function behind the very asking of this question as well. Especially considering that this inimical association between the object that initiates horror, the universe, and the self is not unique to ‘Aath Bochor Aager Ek Din’: either in presentation or typology. Such associations can be seen within not only different literary representations, but also cultural and anthropological comprehensions of horror.

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There are two concerns that need to be addressed at the beginning of this interrogation: the issue of what has been called above the radical alterity between the Self and the universe, and that of the location of this Self. However, before getting into these two concerns, a clarification regarding the two have to be made, given that there is, quite immediately and rather obviously, a question regarding the need of the latter. After all, the Self that is being examined here has necessarily already been located inside the universe. What is the need to talk about any other location then, given that the spatial coordinates of the Self have already been defined? But, in the placement of the Self inside the cosmos, what matters more is the negotiation that the former enters into with the latter, rather than the facticity of its location inside it. This is not to negate or deny the existence(s) of relationships that human selves have with other forms of spatial coordinates. But there is, even if thought intuitively, a difference between the locating the Self in the universe against a more specific position in the (a) world. Given that the universe is wound infinitely around all Selves (no matter their placement in other location or, for that matter, time), it ceases to act as a locus; as something that singles a specific entity out. In universalising, it neither grants anything nor takes away from any of the Selves inside it. This, in turn, fails to make clear the differences in and of Being. One can always argue for this universalisation and say that all humans, and consequently, all human selves, are the same, given that they all live inside a singular homogenising universe. But this is merely wishful thinking, for, locations, sub-located inside the infinity of the universe, do matter. The locus standi of one prefecture does not correspond to another. A difference in Being does exist, however much one tries to negate it, where this difference is contingent to, among others, a variance of location. The humans who have evolved to live near or at the equator of the earth, for example, have a darker skin pigmentation than the ones who have evolved to live more towards the poles. The racial violence that this has led to is visible to this day. This violence, however, is not external to the existence of those involved with it, but has definitively been embedded into the constructions of the Self of these agents. Another example to the existence of a difference in Selves corresponding to a difference in space is the rise of nations as unified entities. These examples aren’t exactly new, but neither is this argument as such. It has surfaced, in one form or the other, since the time humans have come to know that there are others like them, living somewhere else, offering a possibility of either kinship or war. But despite its age, this line of interrogation is still important, especially for the purposes of the arguments that the current book presents. First, it reveals that the variation of ‘worldly’ locations exposes existential differences,

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while the universal one doesn’t. In that, the former kind becomes closer to human Selves (and their formations) than the latter. Second, in its distance, the negotiations between the Self and the cosmos also becomes contingent to the changes in ‘worldly’ spaces. So, locating the self becomes important before talking about the radical alterity. Third, and finally, in the change in the kind of negotiation that the Self has with the cosmos, experiences of supernatural horror (and the objects of this horror) changes as well. This has already been pointed out, to an effect, in the last part. This book, therefore, is an attempt to show that the relationship that the Global South has with horror is fundamentally different from the one that the West/Global North has. This horror is not just the feeling of fear, but incorporates something more: something that is specific to different cultures. It needs to be, thus, seen and dealt with as such. Given that the question of location has already been broached, it provides a comfortable footing into the discussion of the two aforementioned concerns (of the alterity and the location of the self). All the chapters in the book agree with the conclusion drawn above— that the way the Global South interacts with supernatural horror and its elements is fundamentally different from the way that the West/ Global North does. Rajarshi Bhattacharjee’s chapter ‘Spirits and Possessions’, for example, argues that while the West seeks to actively distance human psychology from ghosts and demons (exorcising them both ontologically and epistemologically), in a country like India, these epiphenomenal entities become indispensable for the psychological well-being of its citizens. Along with the three Oedipal presences of the mother, the father and the son, there is, in the Indian (male) psyche, what Rajarshi calls, a psychological fourth that ends up mapping these supernatural entities onto the psychological topography of the people of the country. Rajarshi, rather interestingly and obviously, is not the only one to present such an argument. Seen across this book, this psychological method of comprehending the interactions with elements of supernatural horror is merely one of many, especially considering that there is also a variance in the way different locations within the Global South network with these entities. Where almost all of the chapters conceptually converge, however, is in the delineation of the fact (like Rajarshi’s) that the people of the Global South employ, and often enjoy, a closer and a more intimate relationship with entities of supernatural horror than their counterpart across the equator. The textures of this bond might be different, but the fundamental facticity of it is not. The reasons for this closer rapport with the supernatural are multi-fold and often historical. These reasons range from the geo-political conceptualisation of the Global South, in and as itself,

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to the proliferation of Christianity and empirical rationalism in the West/Global North. Added to this is the fact that most countries of the Global South haven’t gone through industrial evolutions as their more ‘developed’ others have and, as a result, have had to face almost a century’s worth of degradation, suppression, marginalisation and often massive scale annihilation at the hands of the latter. The next section of the introduction talks about these issues and concerns in detail to figure out the material rootedness of the reality of these nations, in which the supernatural enjoys almost a civil existence. For the time being, however, what matters here is this rather unanimous acceptance of the ‘closeness’ that the humans of the Global South share with the likes of ghosts and demons, a closeness that stems out of the geo-political and historical positioning of these nations and their people. This ‘closeness’, however, is a function of another kind of ‘closeness’. While the different chapters of the book delineate different reasons for and ways in which this first kind of ‘closeness’ manifests, they are, once again, of a common belief, almost an intuitive one, of this second order of ‘closeness’ that these peoples have; this time with the cosmos in which they live. This latter ‘closeness’ is, in fact, what is being called the radical alterity between the human self and its surrounding universe so far. In such a scheme of things, what follows in the rest of this section is a deeper look at this second order of ‘closeness’ (with the cosmos) to see how it entangles with the former kind (with ghosts). For the two are definitely entwined with each other. That the different chapters in this book, written by scholars from different nations, fields of study, and academic involvement agree to the two kind of ‘closenesses’ is not simply coincidental. In fact, the aforementioned entanglement can be said to manifest as a relationship of Cartesian functionality where the ‘closeness’ to the supernatural becomes a function of the ‘closeness’ that the people of the Global South have with the larger cosmos. The latter, in that sense, becomes a generalised explanation towards the mechanics of the former. There is, after all, a systematic way in which the universe and its objects function. On the face of it, there is a paradox within which the argument regarding the ‘closeness’ to the cosmos has been presented so far. On the one hand, there has been an insistence on this ‘closeness’ to have a texture of an entanglement, while, on the other hand, simultaneously, the relationship between the Self6 and the cosmos has been couched in terms of an alterity. This foundation of otherness that exists between the humans (of the Global South) and the cosmos is, after all, counterintuitive, if the two are supposed to have ‘closeness’. But ‘closeness’ of entities do not necessitate physical (or emotional) proximity. It delineates, instead, possibilities of action within the ambit of the two

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entities. Action can, after all, happen only when there is an allowance of action to happen. The action talked of here is, of course, deliberate and not either accidental or co-incidental. One entity can act on/with/ in another only with the applications of this ‘closeness’. Alterity, when looked through this system of an ‘acting-upon’, loses its connotative part of distance. Within the ontological conceptualisation of alterity, in other words, there is a simultaneous allowance of action. Within the foundational paradigms of otherness, that is, lies a kind of a theoretical equality7 that allows one to act either with, inside, or against the other8; where this action, as shown above, is always only possible within the functions of ‘closeness’. What this means here is that given, in a sense, the cosmos’s otherness to the humans, there is a possibility (and, as shown later, a subsequent manifestation of this possibility) of the latter acting for or against the former. There is, in other words, an involvement that the Self (of the Global South) has with the universe it exists in, an involvement that is methodologically impossible for their counterparts living in the other half of the globe to have. In the West (or the Global North), the relationship between the Self and the universe has been talked about either in terms of reason and rationality or within the ambit of Christian religious institutionality. The way that natural sciences, especially modern quantum physics, understands the universe is an example of the former while a singular God’s hand in the creation of both the human self and the cosmos exemplifies the latter. Either of these methodologies inevitably allow the self a kind of a comfortable position within the relational contours of the cosmos. The rational scientific discourse, on the one hand, posits a cosmos that cannot be bargained with. Things are objectively what they are and cannot be affected by humanistic concerns. Even if and when they are, such affectations are built in into the part of the objectivity and causality of the cosmos. On the other hand, within the Christian discourse, given that it is the singular and all-powerful God who has created the universe, it is only this God who can affect (or not affect) a change in it. The human self and the universe around it are a part of the same plane of creation, thus marking in them a ‘sameness’.9 In being thus, neither have the capacity to act on the other on its own whim. Things that happen find root in the singularity of God. Added to this is the fact that, within such a conception, the universe is transitory as well. What matters is that which is beyond, or rather, behind this cosmos— heaven and hell—both standing in as a kind of a meta-universe, into which everything finds an ultimate placement. These are God’s realms. Both these discourses—rational and theological, therefore, prevent an active engagement between the human self and the cosmos. The former is inside the latter and can’t really do anything about it or to it. So, never

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really allowed to change it, they are comfortable inside it. There is, as an addendum to and a comingling of the two above, a third methodological categorisation of the relation between the cosmos and Self as well: one that is found in philosophical tracts or literary imaginations. In this, the universe is something that is awe-inspiring, that has the potential to induce fear and apprehension and that can fundamentally create or destroy the human self. Kant’s conceptualisation of the sublime (in part) and Wordsworth’s tranquil recollection of his encounter with a ‘huge peak’ in his poem Prelude are rather good examples of this. However, even in this, there is a sense of the comfort that has been talked of above. The human self is still inside the cosmos. It’s merely articulating its position inside the universe. It is nevertheless a simple articulation. The Self has to make peace with whatever the result of this articulation is. All these three ways of interacting with the universe, therefore, present an impossibility of an action that the Self can take in relation to the cosmos. Having said that, three points of caution need to be made here before moving on. First, to argue for the comfort that the Self feels inside the cosmos does not doom this Self to eternal physical relaxation and happiness. It can, obviously, feel all kinds of emotions. The comfort here merely relays a ‘laying-back’ in the face of the lack of authority. Second, none of the claims made above regarding any of the three methodologies reveal a transcendental truth to which all humans (have to) adhere to. These are anthropo-cultural typologies that either allow or curtail certain actions. These (dis)allowances might be transcendental truths to the ones who are contingent to them, but this ‘seeming’ transcendentality does not necessitate a contemporaneous universal objectivity. It simply presents the impossibility of the action and nothing else. Third, these three methodologies have developed over time. The pre-Christian and pre-scientific Global North was, obviously, not like this. The Norse or the Greek mythological systems and their corresponding cultural existences stand testimony to this evolutionised nature of the ‘comfort’. Like the ones of the present-day Global South, the Self, in these cultures, had the power to affect a change in the universe around them. The Viking raiders would, for example, present offerings to Thor, the god of thunder,10 before setting on a sea voyage, to ensure clear skies (and often get them). Greek literature, similarly tells tales of multiple attempts made by humans to garner the universe’s favour in one form or the other. In any case, it is only with the rise of Christianity that this power is wrenched away from the humans living in these countries. There is, then, a commonality between these ‘pre-modern’ Western societies and the present-day Global South, presencing itself as the absence of the influences of Christianity and Science. However,

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this is a common ground only in kind. The two existences, in being separated by space and time, are perceptibly quite different. Among others, one such difference lies in an endurance, in the survival of the mechanics of being of the Global South that, despite years of Christian and Scientific oppression, continues to have a possibility of action in/with/for/against the universe. In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to argue that many societies of the Global South have survived such colonial incursions, because they have, adamantly, held on to their active connection with the universe. After all, this connection allows them to aggressively oppose the metaphysical mechanics of the everencroaching West. That said, it is also quite reasonable to point out that the argument here is not about the actual affect that the humans have (or, in the case of the older pagan Western societies, have had) on the cosmos. It is, in the division between the East/West or the Global North/South, a much-contested ability.11 What matters, however, is the allowance itself: a possibility against an impossibility. It does not matter if the Viking raiders actually affected the skies and ensured a smooth sail. That they could do it is of the only notice here. Further, the action that is being talked of here is not in the sense of a control. It is a friendlier (where friendliness is not a quality judgement, but simply a way of action), and a more intimate activity that the people of the Global South participate in. Two short examples should suffice to explain this. The first is the African (primarily Zulu and Umuntu) philosophy of Ubuntu. This is a framework which presents an intimate and indisputable relationship between traditional African tribes and the universe. It is a ‘way of being-in-the-world’ (Baloyi and Makobe-Rabothata 2014), where, to be-in-the-world, requires a human to connect to entities beyond just other humans.12 So, the dead too, for example, become objects of this connection where, even after their passing, they intervene for the ‘upkeep and the protection of the family of the living’ (Baloyi and Makobe-Rabothata 2014). There is, then, a constitutive comprehension of a cosmic harmony that regulates Ubuntu (Ramose 2002). This, in turn, gives rise to elaborate rituals that not only form or strengthen this bond with the cosmos, but also supplicate its assistance in and for the living. It is imperative, for example, to slaughter an animal and feed it to all those who have come to attend a funeral to ensure the new spirit’s happiness in its ‘living-dead’ state and guarantee its subsequent assistance (Baloyi and Makobe-Rabothata 2014). The second example is closer home and concerns the Hindu conception of ‘dharma’. Adam Bowles, in his book Dharma, Disorder and the Political in Ancient India notes that in Vedic cosmogony, the idea of dharma finds its roots in the verb dhr, which refers to holding apart (Bowles 2007). Dharma, then,

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as conceptualised in the ancient Hindu scriptures, becomes that which supports or holds the universe in its current form: it holds apart the heavens and the skies to ensure a continuance of existence. But unlike an unfeeling objective pillar, dharma is contingent to its interactions with humanity. In other words, it falls on the human to ensure the upholding of this cosmological dharma and prevent an apocalyptic collapse. To this effect, Bowles cites Wilhelm Halbfass, who says: The ritual dharma is the reactualization and earthly analogue of the original cosmogonic acts of ‘upholding’ and ‘holding apart’. Whatever the functions of the ritual in Indian history may have been—its fundamental, though forgotten connection with cosmogony, and its commitment to ‘upholding’ the space of the world, and to keeping the entities in it apart from each other and in their appropriate identities, is beyond question. (Bowles 2007)

There is here, like in Ubuntu, once again an action (or the possibility thereof ) that has been granted to the human in the form of ritualisations. These rituals have a necessary and ‘fundamental’ connection with the cosmic, which allows the human to interact with/against/for it. In fact, as these two examples show, rituals become an important form of the kind of action that the Self in the Global South has with the cosmos.13 Further, though these examples suggest otherwise, these rituals, having begun with a connection to the cosmic, still continue to have so. Rituals are, after all, actions done towards the garnering of universal certitudes. Take, for example, the ‘rituals’ that are employed in India today to uphold dharma. Behind their rather ugly Brahminical, sexist and casteist form, there still lies an apprehension that if they are not done, the cosmic order will either not listen to the humans’ pleas or altogether crumble. There is still a feeling of connection with the cosmos that is exuded by this (now, very vehement) adherence to rituals. Neither the rituals, therefore, nor the acknowledgement of the human’s connection with the cosmic is archaic in that sense. It still exists and fundamentally defines the existential realities of the people of the Global South. In this, finally, lies the phenomenon of the action that the radical alterity allows. Given that this cosmos is the humankind’s other, it is something that can be acted on by a form like a ritual. That this belief is somewhat necessary only adds weight to this argument. In the absence of definitive answers to metaphysical questions, the recognition of the cosmic connection becomes an answering mechanism in itself. For the West, God and science hold answers to questions pertaining to (as Douglas Adams says) the life, the universe and everything. For the people living in the Global South, however, these answers mandate

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a different worldview, where it is possible for humans to cut a goat and, because of it, have their deceased ancestors help out the living. A world order—where this possibility of action (owing to the ‘closeness’ with the cosmos) is dismantled—is nothing but chaos, and to return to this idea, full of horror. In such a scheme of things, ghosts, spirits and demons become entities that help forge the Self’s connections with the cosmos. There are primarily two reasons that make up these entities to be so. The first is their liminal position. They have the ability to forge connections because of their in-between space, mediating, as it were, movements between the humans and the cosmos. Das’s ghost (as already shown in the beginning of this section), in fact, exemplifies this in-between-ness. They are creatures, in a sense, which owe their formative fundamentals to the phenomenal existences of both the human and the cosmos. A ghost, after all, is formed only once a soul, upon the death of the body, moves into and merges with the other of the cosmos. Even if thought about epistemologically, the creation of the fantastical object of the ghost (and its like) requires a combining of that which is real with something that extends into unreality.14 In this combination, then, there lies a merger of that which is perceptibly within the realm of the human (the real which the human deals with) and the cosmic (in terms of an imaginative addition to the real that stems from somewhere ‘out there’). It is, therefore, this in-between-ness that accounts for the ‘closeness’ that humans have with these epiphenomenal objects. Puja Sen Majumdar’s chapter’s ‘Feminine Sexuality and Sexual Trauma in Bengali Horror Fiction: The Emergence of the Goddess’ works within the contours of this connection, delineating how the figure of the devi mediates between the broken human Self and the cosmos that doesn’t seem to fit with this self. The ‘closeness’ in her chapter is categorised in terms of a friction, which is, then reconciled through the devi. The second reason lies in their phenomenal necessity of a reminding of the horror that lies in the failure of the connection between the Self of the Global South and the universe. If its ‘closeness’ to the universe allows this Self to institute systems of metaphysical answers, thereby delineating existential meaning, a rupture between the two also takes away such answers and meaning. In the breaking of this connection, therefore, lies a thrust into what Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, calls an absurd world, but without the imagined happiness grafted on to Sisyphus. When the structures that provide answers fail, existence is rendered nothing but horrific. The ghastly, in being entities of horror, remind the human of this, more primal, horror as well: of a deeper existential kind. This failure is constituted primarily in terms of the failure of the action that the Self of the Global South has the possibility

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of taking, in relation to the universe. If Hindus, for example, do not obey the rites necessary for the upholding of dharma, the cosmos will collapse.15 Similarly, Nuzo Onoh, one of the first African horror novelists, notes how horror in Africa stems from the ‘dire consequences of ignoring or abandoning’ core African values and traditions (Onoh n.d.). In either of these examples, the results of the failure to manifest (the possibility of) cosmic actions are quite clear: unending horror. That said, rituals are not the only form of actions that humans can take. Neither is the act towards the upholding of the existing structure of the cosmos, the only act possible. Das’s poem’s protagonist, once again, becomes a rather interesting example to one such kind of action. It shows, as Majumdar’s chapter does, that the Self’s ‘closeness’ with the cosmos can take different forms as well. Here, Das’s protagonist doesn’t wish to retain the cosmic status quo, but change it. As long as the ghost hadn’t visited him, he was unaware of his ‘closeness’ with the universe and was living a life within the binds of, what has been called above, a rather alien and Western form of ‘comfort’. But when the ghost visits, the protagonist’s connection with the cosmos is forged, which then gives rise to an action towards wishing in a changing of the universe. When that action fails, like in the failure of the adherence to rituals (which relate to a failure of these rituals themselves, because rituals have systems of dogmatic conformity coded into them), horror strikes. Ghosts and spirits, therefore, perform two major functions within the cosmogony of the Global South. First, they forge and maintain the Self’s connection with the cosmos and, second, they remind of the horror that awaits the Self in the absence or the breakage of this connection. Apart from the ones already mentioned above, other chapters in the current book relate to such tripartite connections as well. Sakshi Dogra’s chapter, ‘Conjuring an Atmosphere: A Study of Tumbbad as Folk Horror’, reads the horror present in the Global South as ‘atmospheric’. This allows an extension of this horror, the elements of horror and finally, the representations of this horror, into the cosmic and outside the human. Meenu B’s chapter ‘Historical Time and Mythical Monsters: Negotiating of Mortality in M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s “Little Earthquakes”’ shows how Nair’s protagonist similarly reaches out into the cosmos to negotiate her reality. Anurima Chanda’s ‘Funny Ghosts, Friendly Ghosts: A Study of How Indian English PreTeen Horror Fiction Turns Fear on Its Head’ and Srinjoyee Dutta’s ‘Mythopoeia and Horror in the Global South: Reading Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Fairy Tales at Fifty’ both show, in their own ways, how this cosmic texture of horror introduces the universe and modulates it for human developments and evolutions. Finally, Meenakshi Sharma’s

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chapter ‘Oriental Vampires vs. British Imperialists: Looking into the Figure of the Vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire’ and Soumyarup Bhattacharjee’s ‘Horror at the Margins: Phobic Essence and the “Uncanny” Home in Contemporary Asian Gothic Literatures’—both show how there is a fundamental difference in the way this cosmic horror functions in the Global North against the South and how the world of the latter is made and constituted along with the entities of horror. Obviously, none of these chapters are talking just about the cosmic angle of horror and the epiphenomenal entities. However, these are, nonetheless, involvements in these chapters which require a framework that this section has tried to present. The next section, similarly, intends to talk about the more material nature of horror that the chapters of the book are grappling with as well.

III. Horror as Ideological Counternarrative The search for a material locus of horror fiction in the Global South presents, at the outset, a conceptual challenge. The Global South is not really defined by physical boundaries. It is a term that has come to acquire some currency within the discourse of Globalisation in the late decades of the 20th century. It refers to societies that are in the process of being globalised and would presumably need the benevolent intervention of the more advanced Western nations to fully integrate themselves with the global commerce in goods, services and technology. To a lay person, the term conjures up images of a stultified and backward people living cheek by jowl in densely populated urban slums and restive ghettos. Yet, contending images of masses of such people moving about and migrating across long distances, beyond national borders and cultural barriers in search of livelihood and security have tended to flood the media in our times. The Global South is a bewildering, and often paradoxical, experience: of premodern traditions breathing oppressively down the neck of wounded and tattered communities, yet in a simultaneity with the richest youth subcultures and the most intrepid forays into the worlds of the future. It evokes the desperation of lives that lack access to basic formal education and healthcare, but are seduced by the easy circulation of cheap technology, weapons and drugs. Media plays an important role in producing and regulating the semantic valency of the Global South. The gritty realities of refugee exodus, sweatshops, AIDS and other deadly contagion, organised gangs, human trafficking, randomised violence and cheap pleasures flesh out the idea of the Global South on television screens and digital monitors. Through the anxious responses

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that these images elicit within the ordered drawing rooms of Europe and North America, it can be easily ascertained that ‘Global South’ is a term that both culturally represents and contains the fears associated with the excesses of late capitalism—that is, it keeps at bay the erosion of order, the ruptures of time and the mutilation of bodies attendant upon the seamless and unobstructed operations of markets and profits. Unlike Edward Said’s characterisation of Orientalism, however, the Global South is not the product of a monologic discourse of authority. Its constitutive images are often self-produced by people whose subjectivities are, in turn, encoded by mediatised and contradictory experiences of precarious lives and triumphant fantasies. Therapists hardly cater to such people; fantasies often do. These fantasies are produced by the people themselves, to the extent that the unregulated spread of media and communication technologies allow them. Despite the extraordinary nature of these fantasies, they are not mere narratives of wish-fulfilment. They magnify the struggles of their subjects and project the overwhelming contingencies of their lives on to a cosmic plane. Within the experiential matrix of the Global South, these fantasies play a critical role in helping people comprehend and communicate the real nature of their lives and challenges, in the determination of their political choices and dubious alternatives to law, in the creation of adhoc strategies for survival. Horror manifests itself in these fantasies through the sordid details of the lives of individuals and communities, as well as through culturally familiar spectres, monsters and sundry other figures of dread, derived from traditional lore, but retooled to act as conduits between the banal and the cosmic. The Western world’s interest in horror fiction from the Global South will be misplaced if it is merely confined to an anthropological curiosity about the resilience of premodern belief systems in the postmodern global lives of people originating from societies in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Since the very mention of the term, Global South deterritorialises these places and identities, the experiential matrix associated with the lives ‘within’ it is far more spread out. Additionally, these lives, though lived on the margins, are nevertheless directly invested in the global arrangements and energies of late capitalism. A more accurate approach can be spelt out in the acknowledgement that the insertion of the fantastic or supernatural may actually free the representational modes and narrative arts from their reified ‘hostage’ status to the reality principle of Western realism and, as Fredric Jameson has argued, be seen to ‘offer the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or Utopian transformations of the real now unshakeably set in place’ (1981). In the wake of the Cold War, the NATO alliance had emerged as a hegemonic order to

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dictate the economic realities and cultural choices of the Third World nations. This hegemony was instrumental in unleashing the forces of Globalisation in goods and markets, including cultural commodities. However, Globalisation also potentially meant that cultural specificities and autochthonous forms of creative expression could be subsumed under a homogenous order of representations. Fortunately, this may not have happened; yet, as Jameson has observed, under the burden of a premeditated trajectory that Third World nations were expected to follow, many real encounters with the emerging social ruptures and new problems were pushed to a ‘collective unconscious’, while civic rhetoric and governmentality were tailored to suit a set of abstract priorities that fulfil the consensual agenda of neoliberalism. Even so, traces of the anxiety-ridden collective unconscious could be seen in the ‘symbolic act’ of culture, especially in the imaginary—fantastic or even phantasmagorical—expressions of felt problems. It would of course be presumptuous to see the cultural preoccupation with horror as pathological or merely symptomatic of reality (1981). A genuine critical enterprise would eschew hermeneutics of bad faith, and instead, engage with the fantastic forms in which the weight of necessity asserts itself for people and societies that represent the Global South.16 The postmodern cultural turn has ushered in a range of representational possibilities, within which the fantastic and phantasmagorical can be allowed to mingle with the banal realities encountered by subjectivities that are produced within the experiential matrix of the Global South. This commingling allows the communication of affects that are hitherto unknown to consumers of Western culture. Let us consider an example. Kolkata-based author, Indrapramit Das, has lately been in the limelight for his celebrated cyberpunk story of dread, ‘Kali_Na’ (2019). His story weds the myth of Kali, the dark and monstrous manifestation of shakti, with an AI (artificial intelligence) named Devi 1.0, created by a group of coders working for a powerful ‘Hindu’ multinational corporation that seeks to attract virtual reality (‘veeyar’) tourism and rake in a considerable amount cryptocurrency through hordes of her followers. Devi 1.0 is purportedly the New Indian goddess of the masses, but as her namesake protagonist, Durga, realises that her appearances and benefactions are controlled by an order that is steeped in the age-old Brahminical caste hierarchy. Durga is an independent coder, who spiritedly fights trolls and desires to destroy the ‘formulaic hostility’ that ‘manifesting out of the digital ether, hiding under iridescent masks and cloaks of glitched data, holding weapons forged from malware, blades slick with doxing poisons and viscous viruses, warped voices roaring slurs and hate’ is directed against the meek and weak sections of society. Due to the pacifism in her coded messages

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of universal peace, the trolls attack Devi 1.0 with vile accusations of ‘anti-national’ effeminacy. It is left to the ingenuity of Durga who eventually hacks into her and recodes her as Kali_Na, the dark and angry goddess of the night, who defies her original algorithm to cut down swathes of these trolls, ‘slaughtering those very assholes so it rained blood’ and shattering their blades into ‘sparks of fragged data’ (2019). Durga’s own subjectivity carries the wounds of entrenched caste-oppression (she belongs to a lower-caste family) even as its edges are shaped by the experience of growing up in electronic wastegrounds, salvaging scrap and making low-end code goods to sell to the lowincome veeyar consumers at the port. The horrific nature of Devi 1.0’s re-animation by an embodiment of the fury that propels Durga towards revenge against her upper-caste troll perpetrators is described as the mythic retelling of Kali killing the demonic adversary Raktabija, drinking his blood and embarking on the frenzied cosmic dance of Chaos, reminiscent of Shiva’s taandav. The story is neither a contemporary reimmersion into myth à la Lovecraft, nor does it work as a recognisably feminist parable. Anxieties of gendered and caste-based oppression do intersect strongly in the subjectivity of the protagonist Durga (as well as the author of this story), yet it does not seek a revolutionary reordering of the society that provides it with its context. It is entirely the drama of affects that lays bare the contradictions of this society and the current of desires that profoundly question its complex network of technology, knowledge and power relations, even as they are spawned within such a network. The affects find a potent vehicle in a premodern myth that dialectically fuels a spectacular renegotiation of terms between a popular subjective belief in Hindu mythology and cosmic symbols of fear on the one hand, and a subaltern technoaesthetic response to the aggressive ideological recasting of the national character as Hindutva, on the other. The goddess herself refuses to be tamed or appeased by cryptocurrency and weaponised faith; instead, she turns her elemental powers against her Aryan ‘masters’ in a bid to avenge the humiliation suffered by the subaltern subjects of New India. Distinctions between the sacred and the secular, or the empirical and the subjunctive do not matter in this story. What matters is the visceral nature of felt experience and the completeness with which the wounded rage of the subaltern finds a psychic echo in fearsome figure of the goddess whose bloodlust and dark fury cannot be traced back to any single origin in time. More importantly, the narrative in ‘Kali_Na’ blends the corporeality of humiliation and desire with the disembodied energy of the virtual world in ways that could not have found traction in a pre-21st century Indian imagination. That is why ‘Kali_Na’ draws attention to the peculiarly synthetic constructions of subjective experience and the new

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forms of militant agency that are catered to the subaltern protagonist by the mediating technology of AI, even as it continuously reorders and re-produces our world by eliminating older distinctions and oppositions between the physical and the virtual or the real and the fantastic. The Global South is a category necessitated by the disappearance of territorial limits in cultures, identities and the jurisdictions of nation states. Constituted purely through data, images and soundbites that proliferate and legitimise themselves in the centripetal chaos of the digital world, the Global South ironically brings our attention back to the body as the most palpable site of presence. The body bears all the traces of surveillance, subjugation, memory and physical as well as psychic transformation. Indeed, the body’s presence has always been central to the operations of power. As Hamid Dabashi has lately argued, the political authority of the State has always been founded on self-legitimising violence inflicted on the bodies of subjects (2012). The body as ‘corporeally integral, autonomous, rational, indispensable, and above all the site of a knowing subject’ is an ideological cover-up by the European bourgeoisie who preached the gospel of Enlightenment in the colonies and simultaneously invested in slave-trade and genocide. This Eurocentric myth of the body is ‘superseded’ by its posthuman transformations. In the context of analysing a suicide-bomber’s subjectivity, Dabashi observes that the suicide-bomber explodes the Eurocentric myth of the body even as he blows himself up as part of the design to deny his oppressor the opportunity to inflict wounds on his body and preserve the marks of violence as juridical prerogative. The resulting dismemberment of the body into strips of burnt flesh, ash, dust and smoke is eloquently termed ‘corpus anarchicum’: a rebellious and disintegrated body that does not allow the more powerful adversary to adjudicate over its fate. Dabashi’s notion of the corpus anarchicum can be extended beyond the analysis of suicide bombing to acquire an insight into the way corporeality becomes a site of play, alternating between presence and absence, in the horror fiction of the Global South. The horrific ‘thanatopolitics’ of post-Gulf War Iraq is given corporeal presence through an atrocity exhibition of raped, mutilated and wasted bodies reanimated as monsters in the fictional narratives penned by Ahmed Saadawi, Hassan Blasim, Sinan Antoon and Lu’ay Hamza Abbas. In her chapter for this volume, ‘The Corporeality of Horror: Spectres of War Victims in the Post-2003 Gothic Narratives from Iraq’, Sushrita Acharjee makes a case of habeas corpus for the victims of military violence, whose wounds are memorialised and their disfigured bodies used as instruments for the call to justice. The ruined landscape of

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Iraq is haunted by the undead who comprise, in terms of a negation, a radically new body polity. Deformed and disfigured bodies are familiar sources of horror in Western genre fiction. Rarely, if ever, do these bodies carry the traces of a social or political history of violence. And while these bodies are used as props to manifest concepts of perennial evil within a Christian apocalyptic framework, they are typically denied a voice, exceptions like Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein (1818) notwithstanding. In Jarrel De Matas’ chapter, ‘Monsters of the Caribbean: Haunting Histories and Haunted Bodies in The Rainmaker’s Mistake and Soucouyant’, the monstrous body emerges as a racialised corporeal witness to the systemic excesses of colonialism, unmasking its mechanical design to produce deformed societies that can be ruthlessly kept under submission. The monsters are flesh-eating zombies that help produce and corroborate the identity of the ‘other’ race in physical, moral and affective terms. The colonisers also construct a stable racial identity for themselves, in their spontaneous opposition to the monstrous. Yet, as the chapter argues on the basis of counternarrative fictions, the monstrous face of the ‘savage’ race is really a projection of the violence visited upon it by the colonisers.17 The real horror though, as Jarrel De Matas seems to suggest, lies in the potentially repetitive and cyclical manifestation of monstrous traces of colonial violence through which the past is not merely recovered, but traumatically made present in the contemporary postcolonial predicament experienced by the Caribbean peoples. The body as a material repository of affect is, once again, the overarching theme in Shweta Khilnani’s canny and nuanced chapter, ‘Embodying Horror: Corporeal and Affective Dread in Junji Ito’s Tomie’. Khilnani’s preliminary contention is that through a systematic study of the visceral style employed by popular shojo manga comics, it becomes possible to see the culturally reified female body as a site of contestation between competing post-War ideologies and claims. Tomie stands out within the genre, because it literalises, through visceral presentations of horrific dismemberment, the grotesque female body that has been long been subjected to powerful cultural attempts at sanitising it to make it socially productive or fetishising its sexual appeal to make it consumable. The literalisation is taken a step further in the figure of the protagonist who comes back from a violent death to self-propagate through her dismembered body-parts. This ‘impossible’ manner of reclaiming the body’s lost sovereignty, Khilnani argues, is actually the moment that the simulacrum of the manga comic utilises to disperse a range of affects that eventually convey the otherwise incommunicable ‘unease’ and dread of the body experienced by the female subject in post-War Japanese society.

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Cinematic form also plays an important role in enabling affective empathy between the reader/viewer and the violated subject who is robbed of her corporeal presence. The camera’s point of view can be possessed by a spectral presence, as is the case in the films that Anhiti Patnaik examines in her chapter, ‘The Spectral Witness in Contemporary Indian Horror Cinema’. Patnaik chooses films that typically allow the narrative to reveal its gendered underpinnings as it pans out before a ghostly witness who had been the victim, in her earthly life, of patriarchy closing its ranks to erase the evidence of sexualised violence. The ghost of the dead victim directs the plot through a specular gaze that cannot retrieve evidence but can connect to the characters in terms of the affects of dread and pain. She can instrumentalise her desire for revenge through the psychic connections she establishes with similarly placed female characters who retain a physical presence and agency in the plot. While ghost stories depicting the spectral return of the wronged woman have long been a staple of fiction in various Indian languages, they have never felt so real. In other words, they have never quite managed to successfully, and so completely, align the subjectivity of the reader/viewer in affective empathy with the ghost before this moment in which the film camera is able to materialise the specular gaze. The affective empathy is complete because the camera as a disembodied viewer eliminates the need for a corporeal manifestation of the ghost-figure, thus allowing the spectral witness to fully inhabit the viewer’s point of view and become, as it were, her eyes. A common idea inferred by almost all chapters included in this volume is that horror fiction of the Global South mobilises the tropes and affects of this genre to tear away the ideological veneer of society and reveal the actual relations of power. At the risk of repeating ourselves, we must underline this—possibly the most crucial—point of difference from conventional horror fiction in the Global North. Instead of obfuscating reality, horror disrupts the naturalised order of everyday experience. Its function is akin to that of the alienation effects in Brechtian epic theatre, i.e., to defamiliarise and distance the subject from her experience and to insert a critical lens in the cognitive field of the reader/viewer. This quality allows horror to penetrate a wide array of fantasy literature that may not strictly conform to the generic definitions of horror fiction. Aina Singh explores the role of horror in denaturalising the heteronormative society in her reading of a Rajasthani romance tale, while Samarth Singhal demonstrates the manner in which horror disrupts the stability of generic conventions and paves the way for complex cognitive pleasures in a body of contemporary serial fiction revolving around the character of Anantya Tantrist, an interpreter of supernatural maladies. The concluding

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chapter in this volume is not a study of horror fiction per se. Krushna Dande’s ‘Terror and Wartime Cosmologies in Liu Cixin’ is a complex reading of the iconic Chinese SF author Liu Cixin’s novels about a militarised future in which the management of war and death reveals itself as the central driver of life. Dande’s chapter pushes the role of horror to its logical conclusion: as a catalyst in exposing the bare bones of civic life that pushes its biopolitics towards the climax of certain annihilation. The increasing weaponisation of data, the steady tread of footsteps approaching a nuclear winter and the failure of leaders and statesmen to bend the ‘arc of cosmic history’ towards harmony are signs of Entropy, the ultimate natural law. Through the bleak signalling of destruction, horror has always shone a light on our shadowy pathways into the unknown and the unknowable.

IV. Progression Despite overlapping themes, the 15 chapters in this volume have been divided into two sections. The first seven chapters, clustered under the section titled ‘Cultures’, broadly map the idea of horror epistemologically within the cultures of the Global South and examine how the affective field of horror is created around specific cultural experiences that are constitutive of desires, identities and different forms of human or non-human agency. The remaining eight chapters shift the emphasis on to the creative possibilities in representation and storytelling that emerge from such cultural contexts. They are placed under the section titled ‘Narratives and Representations’. The reader will note that this division of the volume into sections is not really a compartmentalisation; rather, it is merely the acknowledgement of an editorial perspective that distinguishes between one kind of thrust and another. More importantly, such a division is meant to guide the reader in their purely functional negotiations with the text.

Endnotes 1. The ashvattha or Ficus religiosa (commonly known as the peepal tree) is associated with Yama, the god of death, in Hinduism. Buddhists associate this tree with the Buddha and his moment of nibbana. 2. The reason for this dissonance is, for the purposes of this current book, rather auxiliary. It could be anything. What matters though is that there is this friction.

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  3. The absence here is the absence of the (any) interaction that the self has with the universe.   4. Strangely resembling the Christian trinity of the Father, the Ghost and the Holy Spirit.   5. To speak in terms of this concord gives rise to a possibility of an amenability between the self and the universe: something that existed before the ghost acted upon the body. But that previous state cannot be understood within relationalities. The self and the universe, in the state before horror, were unaware (as it were) of each other’s existences before the ghost acted. In that state of unawareness, there is no possibility of a confluence and, consequently, a dissonance.   6. The Human and the Self have been, so far, used rather synonymously. They need not necessarily function in such a manner. But adherence to this difference is not really important to the current project and even if the two are taken substituting for each other, there is no perceptible loss that happens.   7. Which need not be political.   8. Consider, for example, Edward Said’s concept of the oriental other in his book Orientalism. The occident is able to act in relation to its oriental other, and concretise its own identity, only because there is an existence of this otherness between the two. This otherness demarcates an inevitable ‘closeness’ that allows the occident to act in such a fashion. Within the processes of othering, therefore, there is a simultaneous process of creating-up as well; where this creation corresponds a theoretical equality. Obviously, such actions need not be politically valid or have a morally valid direction to them. Neither is this ‘closeness’ always desirable. But that does not negate the existence of such and the actions that happen thereafter.   9. Unlike ‘closeness’. That which is same is just that—same. But closeness necessitates difference. If A is the same as B, A cannot be close to B because A is B. 10. While these societies, much like the Christian one, would ask one of their gods to ascertain change in the universe, it is imperative to remember that these older gods are not like the Christian God. The former are not singularly responsible for the creation of the cosmos. In fact, the cosmos is a product of processes outside these gods. But these gods have power of these processes, or, at times, they are the elements that surround the human. To ask them for change relates a direct request to the cosmos on not a via-media of a singular God like the Christian one. This is also something that functions similarly in the societies of the Global South even today. As shown later, there are rituals that ask different gods to affect different kinds of changes in the cosmos. But these gods (like Indra and Varuna in the Indian pantheon) are the cosmos and not its singular creators. There is no distance between these two entities. 11. First, this is a part of a longer debate about the objective nature of reality. But that is beyond the scope of this book. Second, I agree that doubting the veracity of the action that the Self of the Global South has over the

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universe is a product of the Western rationality that has bled into the Southern systems as well. 12. Who, though are a part of the world, do not singularly constitute it. 13. Of course, the West has rituals too, but unlike the ones of the Global South, their rituals neither have the possibility of affecting the cosmos, nor seek to do so. 14. In = Humanity’s Strings, it is shown in detail how such formations happen and how, even being fantastical objects, these entities have a reality of their own. 15. This is not an objective statement, but an articulation of how Hindu cosmogenics function. 16. One only needs to recall the ‘unbridled’ and ‘outsized’ reality of wars, exile, disappearances and homelessness that, the celebrated Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez argued, could not be represented through ‘conventional means to render our lives believable’ to the European imagination and hence, must necessarily be seen to constitute the ‘crux of our solitude’. See Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. 1982. ‘The solitude of Latin America’. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. Available at https://www. nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/lecture/. 17. Similar counternarratives have been offered in the context of a rigorous discursive examination of cannibalism and savagery as common traits associated with Polynesian islanders since the late 18th century serial voyages of the Endeavour, under Captain James Cook. Ship logs documenting communication between the intruding seamen and the native islanders revealed miscommunication and mutual attribution of cannibalism. The islanders’ ‘interest’ in the anthropophagy they associated with the white-skinned Europeans is fuelled by listening to snatches of tales about shipwreck survivors who had to eat their mates to ward off starvation. That interest led to a misconstrued native enthusiasm for cannibalism which, in turn, helped ‘confirm’ the worst fears of the seamen about the island tribes they encountered. See Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1992. The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Also see sequel by the same author, published in 2005. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Works Cited Adams, Douglas. 1995. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Random House Publication. Baloyi, Lesiba and Molebogeng Makobe-Rabothata. 2014. ‘The African Concept of Death: A Cultural Implication’. In Toward Sustainable Development Through Nurturing Diversity: Proceedings from the 21st International Congress of the International Association of Cross Cultural Psychology, edited by

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L.T.B. Jackson, D. Meiring, F.J.R. Van de Vijver, E.S. Idemoudia, and W.K. Gabrenya. Available at https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/iaccp_papers/119/ (accessed on 10 July 2020). Bhattacharjee, Ritwick. 2020. Humanity’s Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy. New Delhi: Bloomsbury Bowles, Adams. 2007. Dharma, Disorder and the Political in Ancient India: The Apaddharmaparvan of the Mahabharata. Lieden and Boston: Brill. Camus, Albert. 1975. The Myth of Sisyphus. Great Britain: Penguin Books. Dabashi, Hamid. 2012. Corpus Anarchicum: Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Das, Indrapramit. 2019. ‘Kali_Na’, in The Mythic Dream, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. New York: Saga Press. 220-242 Das, Jibananda. 2018. ‘জীবনানন্দ দাশের শ্রষ ে ঠ ্ কবিতা/আট বছর আগের একদিন’ Available at bn.wikisource.org/wiki/জীবনানন্দ_দাশের_শ্রেষঠ ্ _ কবিতা/আট_বছর_আগের_একদিন (accessed on 27 July 2020). Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen & Co. Onoh, Nuzo. n.d. ‘Top 10 Things We Never Knew About African Horror Stories’. Available at https://www.lounge-books.com/award-winners-welov/horror-lounge-blog-nuzo-onoh (accessed on 10 July 2020). Ramose, M.B. 2002. African philosophy though Ubuntu. Harare, Zimbabwe: Mond Books Publishers. Wordsworth, William. 2001. The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind; an Autobiographical Poem. Global Language Resources.

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1 Embodying Horror: Corporeal and Affective Dread in Junji Ito’s Tomie Shweta Khilnani Manga (Japanese comic books) are arguably the most resonant global icons of Japanese cultural production that have garnered a dedicated fan following across the world. The world was first introduced to manga during the last decade of the 20th century and ever since, it has become synonymous with Japanese culture itself. In contemporary times, manga are deeply integrated within global markets and this localisation has ‘blurred the boundary between autochthonous graphic traditions and manga as a Japanese product’ (Rosenbaum 2013). As manga travels to different parts of the world, it results in the dissemination of several Japanese cultural and ethnic ideas. This chapter will explore how horror is produced transnationally as a somatic and affective state or experience through a detailed examination of Junji Ito’s manga series, Tomie. More specifically, it will study the body as the site and source of horror and the processes through which a strong affective sensation of dread is evoked in a global audience. Tomie is a Japanese horror manga series, written and illustrated by Junji Ito. It was first published in a manga magazine titled Monthly Halloween in 1987. Since then, the titular character, Tomie has become an iconic horror character and the series itself has been adapted in multiple formats. Tomie narrates the story of a beautiful, manipulative, adolescent girl who has the ability to multiply and produce clones of herself. It has multiple episodes, each of which features Tomie in a different set-up. In most of these episodes, she beguiles male or female characters who often become fixated with her and turn homicidal or suicidal. Several episodes also contain ghastly images of her regeneration, a process by which any part of Tomie can produce her entire self. The truly fascinating element of Tomie is the viscerality of the reading experience. In other words, the physical body comes alive in the form of a material presence and constitutes the very fabric of the manga. The formal mechanics of the comic form, more specifically the manga form, are used strategically to create this effect by adapting 29

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panel shapes and transitions in a peculiar manner. Before we conduct a comprehensive study of Tomie, it is important to contextualise the perception of the physical body within Japanese historical and sociocultural tradition.

I. The Physical Body in Japanese History and Culture The body has been a significant point of contention in religious, cultural and political philosophies throughout Japanese history. Since a comprehensive historical account of the discursive productions around the human body are outside the scope of this chapter, we will limit ourselves to the period after the Second World War (WWII), commonly known as the post-war period in Japan. The atomic violence of the war and the image of self-sacrificing kamikaze soldiers were just some of the factors which informed the Japanese society’s dominant notions of the human body in the decades following the war. In the Japanese language, there is no single word which encompasses the many nuances of the English word ‘body’. In his book titled The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction, Douglas Slaymaker explains the finer distinctions between the Japanese words, nikutai and shintai, often used as synonyms for the word ‘body’. Shintai refers to the material body and is commonly used in academic and philosophical discourse while nikutai signifies the expressly carnal and physical body (Slaymaker 2004). War time propaganda often established an opposition between nikutai, the individual body, and kotukai, the national body or the body as the nation. The desires of the individual body had to be sacrificed at the altar of the national polity and gradually, kotukai acquired characteristics of the Imperial realm, which was considered holy before the Meiji Restoration. Within this formidable, all-consuming interpretation of the state’s role and function, there was little space for expression of the individual self and body during the war. However, after the end of the war, the term nikutai gained currency and was employed to foreground a new form of individual identity which emphasised the carnal and physical dimensions of the body. The surrender of the Japanese forces along with the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had left the country in a sorry state of affairs. There was a chronic shortage of food supplies and the state was forced to reduce the recommended caloric requirements of an average male from 2,400 to 1,793 calories per day in 1945 (Tsurumi 1986). The infrastructure of all major cities of Japan had been severely affected by the Allied bombings and it was commonplace for people to spend hours

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trying to procure daily food requirements. As the threat of starvation became a plausibility, people contended with the ‘sheer physicality of everyday life’ (Slaymaker 2004). At the same time, any discussion of the erotic or the carnal was forbidden during the war years and the body was deemed productive only when it was in the service of the kotukai or the national polity. The years following the war witnessed a revolt against such repressive ideals and the carnality of the body emerged as a central literary and cultural trope. The sheer intensity of the violence experienced by Japan during the war also had a significant impact on the understanding of the human body. Besides leading to the death of close to 200,000 people, the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki also led to severe injuries, burns, amputations and long-term damage due to radioactive poisoning. The horrific images of survivors served as grim reminders of the vulnerability of human bodies. For a population that had witnessed such an unprecedented violence, the body became a source of abject horror and physical monstrosity. The survivors of the bombings, known as hibakusha, faced severe discrimination for decades due to lack of proper medical information. They were often treated as contaminated bodies and became objects of contagion fears and reproductive anxieties (Dumas 2018). This sense of unease about the corporeal body was further strengthened by reports of Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army, where notorious human experiments were carried out on Chinese colonial subjects to develop weapons of biological warfare during the war. Thus, the conception of the body as a foreboding presence is deeply ingrained in Japan’s history and is palpable in its literary productions, including manga.

II. Assemblage of body and emotion in shojo manga Junji Ito’s Tomie is classified as shojo manga, or comics meant primarily for female adolescents in Japan. Shojo manga features ‘distinctive decorative and expressive artwork, along with stories that emphasize the inner feelings of the characters’ (Shamoon 2015). The female characters in shojo manga typically have slender bodies, large eyes and are seen sporting latest fashion trends. The figure of the teenage girl or shojo has occupied an important symbolic position in Japanese contemporary culture. In the decades following WWII, Japanese economy experienced rapid growth and development and soon became the world’s second largest economy after the United States of America. The economic

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climate of the country also had a significant influence on the conception of feminine adolescence. By the 1990s, the country had witnessed a shift from its production-oriented culture to one driven by the ethos of consumption, primarily of commodities that came from the rest of the world. The figure of the teenage girl or shojo, driven by an urge to possess all things cute or kawaii, is symbolic of this culture of consumption. Shinji Miyadai, a Japanese sociologist, argues that the last decade of the 20th century saw the emergence of a new kind of Japanese youth, kogyaru, which refers to a subcultural group of street-smart and media-savvy teenage girls, who define themselves in terms of their material possessions (1995). This demographic, usually associated with self-commodification, perverse pleasure and mindless consumption (Dumas 2018), is the target audience for shojo manga. In keeping with the dominant thematic traditions of shojo, the female adolescent body is repeatedly fetishised and sexualised in Tomie. Tomie’s physiognomy bears all features usually associated with beauty and attractiveness in Japanese culture. At times, this phenomenon acquires a rather disturbing character as Tomie’s physical attractiveness is coupled with abject morbidity. Tomie begins with a re-telling of a gruesome episode where Tomie is hacked to pieces by her male teacher and classmates while they are on a school trip. During the funeral, Tomie makes a shocking reappearance, donning her signature long, black tresses. As she enters the school, a male character exclaims with a monstrous look on his face, ‘Zombie or not I wouldn’t mind a piece of that.’ This statement is just one example of the ironic treatment of the physical body in the text, as it evokes both desire and disgust. This tension between the two forces becomes a significant source of horror in the comic. The other most distinctive source of horror rests in the corporeality of the body itself. The visual representation of the body is manoeuvred in such a way as to expose its gruesome details and baseness. There are multiple visual portrayals of the human body being cut into pieces, dissected, operated and experimented on. For instance, when Tomie’s body is being hacked to pieces by her teacher and classmates, the size of the panels decreases, and each panel carries an image of a single body part being axed. Oftentimes, a panel has an extreme close-up of a body part abstracted from the rest of the body. The result is a collage of small panels that features the dismemberment of the physical body in all its goriness. This physicality of the body assumes the role of the abject as theorised by Julia Kristeva who defines it as the threat of breakdown of meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between the subject and the object. According to Kristeva, abject is something that disturbs identity, system, order and does not respect borders, positions and rules (Kristeva 1982). The reader is violently made to confront the abjection

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of the physical body in its crudest form, torn to pieces and reduced to its base anatomy. The nature of transition between panels also produces horror as an affective state. The space between two panels, often known as the gutter, plays a crucial role in the production of meaning in the comic form. Scott McCloud, one of the foremost theorists of the comic form, argues that it is in the gutter that ‘human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea’ (1993). Traditionally, the gutter is used to signify passage of time or an action taking place. However, one form of panel transition, known as aspectto-aspect transition, provides different aspects of the same place, mood or idea even, and the motion of time is bypassed. McCloud asserts that such transitions have been an integral part of Japanese mainstream comics and they are often used to establish a mood or a sense of place (1993). One can notice a similar phenomenon at work in Tomie where aspect-to-aspect transition is used to establish an environment of dread and horror. In the episode titled ‘Mansion’, Tomie kidnaps a young girl Tsukiko and takes her to a mansion where an impostor who poses as her father is conducting experiments on human beings. When Tsukiko tries to escape, she confronts the other inmates who have been subjected to unspeakable torture and mutilation. Aspect-to-aspect transition is used to portray the different dimensions of this grotesque scene. Once again, the many images of physical distortion that create the sensation of dread and horror becomes an emotional or affective state. Interestingly, emotional engagement between readers and characters is an identifying feature of shojo manga. It often features full body portraits of teenage protagonists inserted rather abruptly between panels, producing an irregular collage of sorts. Shamoon argues that such features were crucial since they allowed readers to engage emotionally with characters (2015). Enlarged eyes were used to convey emotions, full-body portraits allowed for corporeal identification and the collage like sequence of panels broke the narrative flow, making way for readers to experience emotions more deeply. Such disjointed sequences of panels are used in Tomie to produce horror as an affective state. While one can find traditional full body portraits of Tomie in the manga, the more striking panels are the ones that feature dismembered organs in a collage form. The body of the adolescent female, quite literally, becomes a source of horror. In her critical reading of Junji Ito’s Tomie, Rachel Dumas studies the trope of monstrous female adolescence as a ‘metaphor for the ascendance of Japanese post modernity’ (2018). The prevalence of a robust culture of consumption along with the pervasive presence of technology has led scholars to posit Japanese culture and society

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as the posterchild of postmodernism. Hiroki Azuma has famously compared contemporary Japanese society to a ‘database’ in which, modernist hierarchies, like real/artificial, original/copy and whole/ part, are subordinated to that which is fractured, fluid and fictitious (2009). The trope of mechanical reproduction is central to the plot of Tomie. At the end of the first episode, readers witness the first of many grotesque regenerations that Tomie’s body will undergo. The final panel shows how her heart, the only organ not found during the murder investigation, transformed into a demonic version of Tomie herself. The image is particularly macabre with a malformed body, empty eye sockets and dishevelled hair. A similar phenomenon takes place in the second part of this episode when Tomie’s kidney becomes available for a medical transplant. During the surgery, the kidney mutates and begins to grow into a human head in the recipient patient’s stomach. It is later revealed that Tomie begins to split on her own accord when she is faced with psychological trauma. The only way to stop this proliferation is if she lives long enough to see herself age. Dumas employs the concept of the simulacrum to understand the endless process of self-propagation. For Jean Baudrillard, simulacrum represents a stage when an image bears no relation to any reality and becomes its own pure simulacrum. In other words, in postmodernism, it has become impossible to make any distinction between nature and artifice, original and its copy. While philosophers like Baudrillard approach the simulacrum with pessimism and loss, Gilles Deleuze conceives of it as a site of endless possibilities. According to Dumas, Tomie embodies the uncertainties and pleasures of the simulacrum. Her lack of a stable identity alludes to an impossible mode of being. This has been often understood as the source of horror in manga, as readers are forced to confront the threatening knowledge of their own instability or lack of a composite self. Therefore, there is no denying the fact that the fear of technological reproduction or postmodern anxieties about the loss of the original are pervasive in Ito’s manga. However, it must be mentioned here that these fears are articulated primarily through the corporeality of the human body; it is a certain visual re-imagining of the body (the dismemberment of the body through a careful use of panels and transition being a perfect example) that produces an uncomfortable sense of terror.

III. Monstrous Body in Japanese Horror It must be noted that Japan is no stranger to spectacles of grotesque viscerality. There is an entire sub-genre of Japanese horror or J-Horror

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cinema constituted by movies which are suffused with graphic imagery of bodily torture. Several epithets, like torture porn, cinema of cruelty, Extreme Asia and gorn (a combination of gory and porn), have been used to refer to movies like the Guinea Pig series, including Satoru Ogura’s Devil’s Experiment (1985) and Hideshi Hino’s Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985). Movies belonging to this sub-genre usually ‘contain explicit scenes of torture and mutilation’ which are excessive and gratuitous (Edelstein 2006) for purposes of ‘audience admiration, provocation and sensory adventure’ (Lowenstein 2011). In such movies, the body becomes the site of trauma and is pushed to its extreme limits as its very humanity comes under threat. This unabashed depiction of viscerality also produces a strong range of affects and sensations within viewers. Such movies have often been analysed using psychoanalytical concepts like the return of the repressed, Oedipal complex, narcissism, etc. For instance, Slavoj Žižek has used Freud’s and Lacan’s theories about the development of the self to study Alfred Hitchcock’s movies. However, instead of focusing on the realm of the symbolic (as is common in psychoanalytic theory), I wish to call attention to the corporeal and the affective dimensions of horror. In order to better appreciate the workings of horror, there is a need to foreground the sheer corporeality of the body without studying it as a symbol of cultural or social constructs. How does horror function through the physical body? What are the range of sensations and affects that are experienced by the viewer/reader? As has been discussed above, Ito’s Tomie uses formal techniques of the comic medium to emphasise the physical dimension of the human body. How does this viscerality affect the reader? In order to address these questions, we must understand the difference between feelings, emotions and affect. Brian Massumi, a leading theorist of affect studies, makes a nuanced distinction between emotions and affect. For Massumi, an emotion or a feeling is a ‘recognised affect, an identified intensity’ (2002), while for Noël Carroll, emotions are inherently cognitive in nature (1990), based on a process through which we react to external stimuli. Affect, on the other hand, is ‘primordially an unrecognised recognition’ (Reyes 2012); it is intensive, involuntary and always comes before cognitive thought. Massumi refers to this as ‘visceral perception’ or the way in which our internal organs perceive external sensations prior to their apprehension at a cognitive level (2002). Fear and horror are perhaps best understood as a complex combination of both emotions and affects. However, with special reference to the treatment of the body, we are more interested in the interplay between viscerality and affect.

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When we witness physical mutilation of bodies, it evokes a particular range of affective responses through which we align our bodies with that of the victim. While discussing the affective-aesthetic experience of viewing a body horror film, which features excessively gory imagery, Xavier Aldana Reyes argues that the identification with the filmic body is at the core of the horror experience (2012). This is achieved through a visceral involvement or participation with the mutilated body on screen. Massumi further elaborates on the peculiar sensory relationship between the two bodies. He believes that this experience is invested in potential, not facticity, and is premised on ‘the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns from the other’ (2002). Therefore, the reflexive, hard-wired response to an image of physical dismemberment or torture is a result of a corporeal alignment with the suffering body. This is not to say that cultural, social or symbolic alignment is absent in this phenomenon. Fear is a complicated state which is informed by multiple systems of thought and values, which might be culture specific. Having said that, the corporeal-affective understanding of the horror genre provides a fertile ground for an alternative understanding of the body, affect and horror. It is equally fascinating to see how viscerality functions in a transnational context. There are several elements in Tomie which are deeply informed by Japanese ethos and folklore including the plot, Tomie’s physiognomy and the formal qualities of manga as a medium. Additionally, the Japanese society’s understanding of the human body is situated in the country’s long and rich history. It is no secret that Junji Ito’s Tomie was a huge global success with dedicated cult fandom groups throughout the world. While a lot has been written about the global appeal and transnational hybridity of Japanese horror genre, we are more interested in studying the circulation of affect grounded in the physicality of the body. During an interview, Hiroshi Takahashi, the screenwriter of the iconic Japanese horror film, Ringu, states that his objective is always to create an ‘encroaching sense of dread’ through a movie that stays with audiences (2006). It is significant that he emphasises the primacy of the sensation of fear or terror experienced by the viewer. This affect or sensation is produced by establishing a sense of intimacy between the image of the mutilated body and the reader’s corporeal self. Interestingly, this affinity transcends geographical, national and cultural boundaries. Sara Ahmed argues that the ‘surfaces and boundaries of the global body materialise through processes of intensification in which the bodies of others are both felt and read as ‘like me’ or ‘not like me’ (2004). In other words, emotions circulate among bodies to create affinities between certain bodies, while simultaneously distancing others.

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According to Ahmed, the sense of physical intimacy is produced and controlled by the flow of emotions with global circuits (2004). However, in the case of horror, that causal relationship is slightly different in so far as bodily intimacy is established at a pre-cognitive level, producing in turn, the sensation of dread. An image of Tomie’s body being hacked to pieces, or multiple heads growing out of the body’s trunk, produces an assemblage of sensation that is grounded in bodily disgust. The experience of reading created by the formal features of manga forces a reader to confront the dismemberment of the body as a corporeal reality. This, in turn, aligns the mutilated body and the reader’s body, leading to the powerful sensation of dread and terror. Thus, bodies are not produced as physical artefacts via the power of emotions (as Ahmed argues), instead, the body travels as a corporeal, visceral entity. It is here that I wish to locate the potential of Japanese body horror as a cultural product that has a transnational appeal. One can debate endlessly about the cultural politics of appropriation of distinctively ‘Oriental’ and ‘Asian’ themes and artefacts. Nonetheless, what is particularly compelling in how this sub-genre of horror is able to produce an ‘encroaching sense of dread’ transnationally by locating it within the sheer viscerality of the body. The sense of anxiety and unease with the body, which might be rooted in the country’s long and arduous history, is transported to other cultures through the somatic-affective complex. Since affect is not located in the cognitive function of the mind, it bypasses questions related to ‘meaning’ or symbolic significance. On the other hand, what remains is the intensity of feeling and the sensation of dread which is experienced at a somatic level. This presents a brief window of opportunity which can circumvent traditional debates of cultural imperialism and postcolonial politics of representation. The distinctive corporeal nature of the reading experience challenges differences produced by physical distance, producing a kind of global intimacy premised on the shared experience of intense affect. This affective interpretation of horror also contradicts some of the central tenets of postmodernism including Fredric Jameson’s ‘waning of affect’ (1991). Postmodernism is typically understood as a movement away from reality into simulacra and hyperreality, where objects and phenomena are de-historicised. Quite the contrary, body horror establishes an alternate form of intimacy with the physical body. Steven Shaviro argues that modern body horror shows us how the body ‘mutates into new forms, and is pushed to new thresholds of intense, masochistic sensation’ (1993). As a result, this form of horror becomes for Shaviro an affect machine, which exalts, enthrals and articulates lived experience (2011), creating a world quite removed from the flat, depthless world of postmodernism. The transnational

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success of Japanese horror is testament to this alternative form of existence where emotions are felt as embodied, material things and the body is capable of producing an acute sense of dread and horror.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2004. ‘Collective Feelings: Or, the Impressions Left by Others’. Theory,Culture and Society, 21(25): 25–42. Azuma, Hiroki. 2009. Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. London and New York: Routledge. Dumas, Rachel. 2018. The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Edelstein, David. 2006. ‘Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn’. New York Magazine, 6 February, 2006. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Rouidez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lowenstein, Adam. 2011. ‘Spectacle Horror and Hostel: Why “Torture Porn” Does Not Exist’. Critical Quarterly, 53(1): 42–65. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial. Miyadai, Shinji. 1995. Owarinakinichijo o ikiro. Tokyo: Chimumashobo. Rosenbaum, Roman. 2013. Manga and the Representation of Japanese History. London and New York: Routledge. Reyes, Xavier Aldana. 2012. ‘Beyond Psychoanalysis: Post-millenial Horror Film and Affect Theory’. Horror Studies, 3(2): 243–261. Shamoon, Deborah. 2015. ‘Situating the Shojo in Shojo Manga: Teenage Girls, Romance Comics, and Contemporary Japanese Culture’. In Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, edited by Mark W. MacWilliams, pp. 114–136. London and New York: Routledge. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2011. Post-Cinematic Affect. Washington and Winchester: Zero Books. Slaymaker, Douglas N. 2004. The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. New York: Routledge Curzon. Takahashi, Hiroshi. 2006. ‘Interview with Producer Hiroshi Takahashi’. Marebito. Subtitled DVD. Directed by Shimizu Takashi. Los Angeles: Tartan Video. Tsurumi, Shunsuke. 1986. ‘Everyday Life during the War’. In An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945, pp. 85–93. New York: KPI.

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2 Monsters of the Caribbean: Haunting Histories and Haunted Bodies in The Rainmaker’s Mistake and Soucouyant Jarrel De Matas History’s my nightmare —Condé (1995) The colonial history of the Caribbean often reads like horror fiction. Deforming the body and infecting the mind, history created the people of the Caribbean and rendered them monstrous Others. Early Caribbean writing attempted to theorise monstrosity through these physical and psychological imprints which intersect processes of racialisation. Imprints affecting the colonised body, characterised as ‘wounded’ and ‘a pervasive figure in colonial and postcolonial discourse’ (Boehmer 1993, p. 268) are symptomatic of the postcolonial condition which left an indelible mark on the psyche of the previously colonised. The effect of wounding on individuals and society is an ongoing discussion that has been taken up by Caribbean writers such as Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris and David Scott,1 to name a few. These writers emphasise the pervasive and perverse monstrosity that is built on systemic processes of racialisation and sexualisation that have only intensified through cycles of imperialism and conquest. As more recent works of Caribbean fiction, Brobder and Chariandy’s The Rainmaker’s Mistake and Soucouyant, respectively, both published in 2007, are as much about past horrors as they are about present-day forms of violence directed against the body and the landscape. In this context, monstrosity and horror refer to the atrocities that accompanied the colonial project and took new forms in the pre-independent Caribbean. Both novels are works of horror fiction insofar as they highlight the use of fear, terror and warped bodies to implicate imperial enterprise in the construction of postcolonial ontologies. Although neither text incorporates conventional tropes of horror fiction, i.e., gore, zombies or haunted houses, the stories of horror revolve around a shape-shifting blood-sucker—in Soucouyant, and a plantation house that mechanically 39

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‘creates’ bodies—in The Rainmaker’s Mistake. Brodber and Chariandy develop nuanced horror fiction tropes that speak to the experience of colonial terror in the Caribbean. In both cases, the fictional imaginary translates into an image of the characters as monsters. Functioning as conduits for the narration of repressed individual and collective histories, the configuration of their monstrosity remains tethered to historicized notions of Caribbean alterity and strangeness. Origins of the Caribbean monster can be traced far back to the first documented transatlantic encounter, which brought Christopher Columbus face-to-face with the native inhabitants of the Caribbean. Describing them as an ‘audacious race’ who ‘eat the people they can capture’ (Markham 2010), Columbus projected a stereotype unto the indigenous Kalinagos of the Caribbean which would eventually define their legacy as cannibals. Centuries later, the dehumanisation of the Caribbean individual would be echoed through a language of monstrosity to describe the West African people as a ‘miserable minority, and a half-reclaimed race of savages, cannibals not long ago, and capable, as the state of Hayti [sic.] shows, of reverting to cannibalism again’ (Froude 1888). The colonial narratives follow racialised othering of the Caribbean that is etched in history. The undoing of these narratives require a confrontation with these images of monstrosity first projected unto, and henceforth internalised by, the Caribbean. Together with the amplification of history as a monster of its own, both texts speak to the cultural significance of monstrosity as ‘an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place’ (Cohen 1996). For the novels being examined in this paper, that cultural moment is as much about the past as it is about the present. By emphasising the horrific realities of colonialism and imperialism, Brodber and Chariandy offer new perspectives for understanding and questioning the predatory intrusions of colonial structures. The Rainmaker’s Mistake and Soucouyant recount stories focused on colonised Caribbean subjects who have monstrosity imposed upon them. Both novels show that these projections of monstrosity materialise, and thus reveal, the disaffected histories of Western imperialism. Therefore, while they may be products of the imagination, they symbolise the ongoing spectre of slavery and Western ontological systems of racialisation in a ‘never-ending process of brutalization’ (Mbembe 2001). The novels extend the discussion of haunted histories by highlighting the horrific markers of physical wounds on the body and psychological imprints on the mind. Both novels explore the ways that history manifests ghostly and haunting imagery that continue to affect the lives of people in the present. Brodber revisits the history of the plantation, while Chariandy explores a lesser-known history,

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that of the American occupation of the military base in Chaguaramas, Trinidad and Tobago, during World War II. Each author attempts to confront the ghosts lingering from slavery and imperialism to examine the effects of colonial terror that continues to pervade Caribbean history. The Rainmaker’s Mistake explores the stasis of existence at the individual and communal level in an unnamed Caribbean island, assumed to be Jamaica.2 The novel traces the lives of a group of formerly enslaved West Africans, who upon receiving news of their freedom, have to learn to be self-sufficient. This freedom, however, is represented not as desirable, but as a nightmare to be avoided. Although their independence is expected to bring hope, it instead fills them with a sense of dread, something to which Queenie, one of the main characters, alludes when she says, ‘What could life be on our planet without Mr. Charlie. Nothing. No action. No will to act. Still’ (Brodber 2007). Brodber depicts the horrors of slavery, which creates mindless subjects. The process of creation is emphasised by Mr Charlie who is shown to ‘grow’ the children much in the same way that they would eventually learn to grow crops. As the narrator goes on to say, ‘he [Mr Charlie] dug a hole in the ground and planted a wash of seed from his body. And made us … children of one father dug from an everlasting underground source.’ The image of cultivating a people from the land translates into the feelings of dependency to the land. This is the source of spectrality that haunts the previously colonised and which binds them inextricably to the plantation and keeps them perpetually enslaved. As man-made creations, the enslaved gang resembles the birthing of Frankenstein’s monster. And because they were created to carry out Mr Charlie’s orders, they mindlessly go about their duties until they are forced to confront the nightmare that their minds and bodies have been appropriated. During the novel, the characters attempt to come to terms with the creation of their monstrosity, projected unto them by Mr Charlie, the plantation owner, but also self-constructed to justify their mistreatment because of an internalised pathology of racism. Feelings of inadequacy that follow the racialisation of the enslaved perpetuate the pathological monstrosity of the Caribbean body. Brodber shows that processes of racialisation are vestiges of colonial terror that disrupt our understanding of the present, because the vestiges have evolved into monstrous forms. The spatio-temporal complexity in the novel underlies trauma as a haunting spectre for the postcolonial subject. This past-in-the-present spectre, or as Queenie refers to it, a ‘vigorous movement between our present and the past’ (Brodber 2007), appear in hauntology studies, particularly the return of revenants and an involuntary repetition of its continuous presence

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that is incomprehensible to the individual (Derrida 2006). In the novel, these revenants return in the form of traumatic experiences that are transferred generationally to the pickney gang. Memories of the dead are recalled during the novel as the characters signal a past that haunts them. It is a haunting past that implicates them, signalled by London who says, ‘we were not normal: we were nearly two hundred years old’ (Brodber 2007). The self-prescribed abnormality highlights the internalisation of racial difference as well as locates the source of their horrific existence in a nightmare engineered by Western man. In the process, the novel allows readers to reflect on colonialism as possessing the present and continuing the transformation of Caribbean bodies into monstrous alterities. The legacies inherited by all the members of the pickney gang go beyond the individual and toward the regional. As a novel centred on the experience of slavery in the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, The Rainmaker’s Mistake highlights the dispossession of people who are transplanted to an unfamiliar environment and the disjunction that occurs when they attempt to assemble the fragments of their memory. Even as slaves on the cusp of abolition, the pickney gang continues to be victim of the systemic dispossession of their language, culture and history. During the novel, they try to repossess their lives beginning with the realisation that their ‘whole history had to be seen in a different light.’ This different mode of perceiving Caribbean ontology is enabled through a confrontation of ancestral ghosts who remain bound to the plantation. Although sceptical at first about the elders who ‘bring back dirt as their offering’, Queenie eventually realises that ‘they were extending the island with dirt.’ As a space for the creation of a haunted presence, the dirt extends the setting of the plantation as a grim reminder of the haunted past. The terror of the invaded or haunted plantation highlights a confrontation with the nightmare of colonial domination that invades the minds and bodies of the previously subjugated. The Rainmaker’s Mistake substitutes the conventional haunted house for a culturally relevant haunted plantation. Horror is located physically in the plantation as much as it is maintained through the power structures that contain the enslaved within a grim existence. Along with the mystery and unfamiliarity associated with the unnamed island, the plantation’s isolated space keeps its inhabitants locked in without any hope or even desire for escape. As much as time is stunted during the novel, the space of the plantation is also confined. Implications of being forever tied to the plantation magnify the extent of colonial terror, which in the novel is depicted through the trans-fixation of the nowfreed slaves. Their bodies are rendered immobile as expectations of Mr Charlie’s second coming haunt their daily lives. When the abolition

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act is passed, the children are tasked with reconstructing their lives independent of ties to the plantation. Queenie observes that ‘with nobody tending the fields, grass grew all over and with no one tending the cattle and the four-footed livestock, they roamed at will over our verdant estate while we, transfixed, kept looking up for the return of the Master.’ For Brodber, the mental servitude experienced by the postcolonial subject is conceptualised as a psychological and traumatic connection to the Caribbean landscape, which is symptomatic of the body being tied to and, in the case of this novel, born out of the plantation. The decolonisation process enacted by the novel entails a scrutiny of ‘the theory and the technology by which we were changed’, as Abdul tells Queenie. This technology of the plantation is complicit in changing their bodies to a dehumanised state and co-opting their minds. Therefore, by questioning the systems that have constructed the Caribbean body as Other, the novel also explores the haunting that occurs from within—that is the psychological tethering of the Caribbean mind to the plantation. To enact this tethering, the novel uses the trope of the ‘nick’ which resembles a modern version of lobotomy. The forceable act of invading the body through lobotomisation emphasises the technology of manipulation during slavery, which creates gaps in the memory of the characters due to the severance of ties to their ancestral past. The nick reinforces the impression left on the enslaved body and acts as a literal mark of originary trauma that is retained in the bodies of the enslaved African descendants. As Queenie points out, some of the members of the gang have more nicks than others, such as Woodville who ‘Had several nicks’ which meant ‘he was changed and changed several times.’ The result is a greater magnitude of monstrosity with Woodville representing the most extreme case. The extent of monstrosity projected unto Woodville is illustrated through animality: ‘a tired mule working too hard at the mill’ and a ghoulish appearance; ‘Woodville’s flesh hung down his face as if his jaw line was a bag of water.’ Woodville’s strangeness becomes symptomatic of the wounded postcolonial subject. Through Queenie, the novel carries out a selfreferential process of probing the wounded body much in the same way that Queenie describes her intention of becoming educated. She says, ‘I would have to study our body if there were to be answers’ (Brodber 2007). In this way the nick not only creates a void, but also leaves a trace to examine the impact of history on the body. It calls to mind the concept of the phantom limb which acts as a ‘nucleus of great promise— of far-reaching new poetic synthesis’ (Harris 2008) that enables the act of creativity. Like Harris, Brodber does not try to heal the wound, but rather understand and use it to create something new—a different version of Caribbean identity. The novel ends with an inversion of

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monstrosity once projected unto the enslaved. Accordingly, Mr Charlie is compared to a ‘dried up carcass’ who is left ‘rotting in the cave’. If the pickney gang are like the people in the cave who were chained, and—upon being freed from the cave—feel compelled to return, then the novel ends with a cautionary tale of returning. Although Mr Charlie continues to haunt the lives of the formerly enslaved, the novel ends with the possibility of deliverance from his ghost. In offering a possibility to exhume the haunted past, The Rainmaker’s Mistake marks not only the emergence of a different kind of slave narrative, but also a new generation of decolonised sensibilities. Out of the haunted plantation, Brodber demonstrates a new way to imagine the postcolonial Caribbean. Framed by the themes of haunting and woundedness, The Rainmaker’s Mistake reveals how the horror of colonialism must be confronted to reconstruct Caribbean history and identity. Telling a more recent story of imperial horror that continues to haunt the present, Soucouyant highlights the trauma of American occupation of the naval base in Chaguaramas in Trinidad during World War II. The novel probes the wounding of the mind caused by the wound of history. Using the main character, Adele, to channel the horror that characterises the pre-independent nation of Trinidad and Tobago, Soucouyant highlights the problem of articulating a horrific past. Adele is haunted by her experience of victimisation at the hands of an American soldier, which left an indelible mark on her mind, manifested primarily by her dementia. The novel traces Adele’s present life in Canada with frequent intrusions of her past life in Trinidad. There are gaps in her memory that are brought on by her physical and psychological dislocation. These gaps take the form of dementia, which is both a cause and effect of the weight of the trauma she has carried. Unable to exorcise the ghosts of the past by herself, Adele relies on her son to help her remember—and subsequently to help her to forget—her past. Like the pickney gang in The Rainmaker’s Mistake, Adele’s trauma follows the impact of imperial domination on the minds and bodies of colonial nations. Through Adele’s personal experience of extortion, which is intertwined with the national narrative of oppression, Chariandy emphasises ongoing traumas of imperialism that continue to haunt the people of the previously colonised nations. The Caribbean folklore character, the soucouyant,3 is the novel’s most overt depiction of the horror that haunts Adele. Along with tropes of ‘curses and bad magic’ (p. 8), ‘lagahoos, douens, and other spectres’ (Chariandy 2007), the soucouyant illustrates the demonisation of Adele, who during the novel, is revealed to have accidentally set her mother on fire. Like the soucouyant, which is described as a ‘neurotic creature’ (Chariandy 2007), Adele is revealed to also suffer from an extreme case

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of neurosis brought on by the effects of racism and a haunted psyche. The soucouyant functions as a doppelgänger, a mirror image, shadow and spirit of her mother that continues to haunt her. As a ghostly double that encapsulates one kind of postcolonial haunting, the doppelgänger reflects Adele’s mental degradation, which has consequences for her physical state. Alluding to a transformative dehumanisation, the narrator notes that his mother ‘seemed, magically to inhuman proportions ... swelled as big as one of those inflatable puppets you sometimes see on poles at parades.’ As an object of other people’s gaze, Adele is never allowed to escape the strangeness projected unto her. This strangeness is further highlighted through the persona of the soucouyant. The word and the legend of the soucouyant is meant to explore a ‘generational condition, a particular state of sensing but not really and, consequently, a particular process of exploring one’s origins without easy recourse’ (Dobson and Chariandy 2007). The generational condition establishes a passing down of an aspect of Trinidadian history from mother to son. It is a story that needs to be told for the mother to exhume her past as well as the son, a second-generation immigrant, to be educated about his country’s history. Similar to The Rainmaker’s Mistake, in which Queenie acknowledges the conflation of centuries of enslavement that connect her to her ancestors, Adele and her son must share in the mutual exchange of trauma to exhume the ghastly past. Both novels direct attention toward the need for understanding Caribbean ontology beyond the wound. The location of a haunted past through generational contact corresponds to the ‘being-with specters’ which is ‘a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’ (Derrida 2006). Queenie and Adele’s being is attached to their nonbeing of alterity. Through Queenie’s metaphysical interaction with her ancestors and Adele’s interaction with her mother’s soucouyant persona, the submerged hauntologies are resurrected and made palpable. During the process of exploring Adele’s—and his—origins, the protagonist through physical proximity to his mother gets closer to an understanding of the trauma that has debilitated her. The folkloric persona of the soucouyant is invoked as a way of understanding the impact that fire has had on Adele. As the protagonist explains: She … she saw a soucouyant … I mean, it’s not really about a soucouyant. It’s about an accident. It’s about what happened in her birthplace during World War II. It’s a way of telling without really telling, you see, and so you don’t really have to know what a soucouyant is. Well, I guess you do, sort of. (Chariandy 2007)

The difficulty of making the connection between his mother’s dementia and the folkloric soucouyant reflects the unintelligible personal and

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national histories that converge during the novel. As Adele wrestles a losing battle with the ghost of her past, her dementia worsens. In the same way that the soucouyant terrorises people for its survival, so too does the image of Adele’s mother being engulfed in flames terrorise her. One of the first ways she attempts to articulate the horror she experienced is through associating the image of her mother with the soucouyant. Throughout the novel, Adele’s suffering is pinned against imagined altercations with the soucouyant. Early on it is used to highlight the internalisation of her monstrosity and her own transfiguration into a victim of the soucouyant. Her feelings of monstrosity are amplified by being a Black woman stereotyped as being part of the ‘dark-skinned troubles’ (Chariandy 2007) to have affected Scarborough, Canada. It is a system of racialisation that follows her from Trinidad, as her memory of being confronted by the American soldier highlights. After giving her an American dollar, the soldier says ‘hey nigger girl… What the hell do you say to a white man?’ (Chariandy 2007). Soucouyant shows that the spectre of race evolves with the haunted history, both of which Adele is tasked with resolving. The narrator notes that she would often move her hand ‘involuntarily to a mark on her neck’; a red mark resembling the kind left after a soucouyant bites its victims, or as the narrator says, ‘how the monsters strike’. Later he recounts another of her stories involving the soucouyant which are intertwined with memories of US military activity: ‘She told me over and over again of her encounter with the creature … the smells of the soldiers who visited her mother’s home. The thin blue fire on the day of the accident.’ Folklore and historical fact overlay each other as Adele gives a sensationally horrifying and morbid account of her experience during the military occupation. It becomes clearer as the novel progresses that Adele uses folklore to articulate her dementia. Before her mind collapses, she tells the story of her mother, the ‘soucouyant’: ‘Chaguaramas,’ she explained. ‘She loss she skin at the military base in Chaguaramas. She wore a dress of fire before it go ruin her. I wore a hat of orange light, a sheet of pain, yes, on my head and neck. I turning to her, turning to help and undo it all, but I trip up. My chin busting up against something sharp. Darkness washing me all over. (Chariandy 2007)

Two horror stories converge in the novel: on the one hand the terror of American militarization and on the other, that of its violent imprint on Adele. Both the personal body and the collective nation are inflicted by the ‘untreatable pathology’ that occurred during the American

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occupation of the naval base in Trinidad (Neptune 2007). The scar on her chin, like the nick in The Rainmaker’s Mistake, acts as a site for the recollection of memory. By tracing the scar, Adele is able to articulate the source of her pain. In the same way that The Rainmaker’s Mistake highlights the manipulation of the enslaved through the nick, Soucouyant makes reference to invasive surgeries that attempt to ‘fix’ the human mind. When Adele’s son accompanies her to the doctor’s office, the description of his surroundings resembles a horror scene involving nightmarish clinical procedures. He is particularly disturbed by the ‘scissors and hooks which certainly lurked in those antiseptic spaces. The bloody and jaggedly sewn cures. Patients’ heads opened up and then roughly laced back like old washekongs.’ Both novels condemn these human practices as further debilitating the mind. Instead, they advocate working through the trauma by finding a way to articulate it. In Adele’s case, there is also the spectre of ageing, which, unlike the perpetually young existence of the pickney gang in The Rainmaker’s Mistake, does not allow her the time to resolve her haunted past. Both novels, however, signal the importance of memory in challenging the perpetuation of discursive horrors. By the end of Soucouyant, it is up to Adele’s son to assemble and reconcile her fragmented memories and to tell her story to the reader. The memory of her and of the horrors suffered at Chaguaramas end the novel as the narrator fills in the gaps that her dementia did not allow. Adele’s dementia draws attention to the psychological dissonance caused by imperial history as well as illustrates her gradual deterioration represented in the novel through images that reinforce her monstrosity. She soon loses control of her own bodily functions resulting in ‘an odour that shouldn’t ever emanate from a human body’. Adele’s inability to own her body signals the relinquishment of power to imperial forms of domination. Near the end of the novel, when her son describes the transformation of Adele’s mother into the soucouyant, the events are rendered in horrific detail. It begins with the soldiers who throw oil on them to the moment her mother’s dress is lit on fire: The woman looks at her belly and arms, watching a miraculous aura grow upon her […] and beings to beat her body, fanning the flames and transferring them about herself. Adele herself feels a pain assaulting her, a sheet of pain on her back and shoulders […] She sees her mother in a dress of fire. (Chariandy 2007)

This is the key memory that Adele tries to recall, and the reason for her incredulous claim that she encountered a soucouyant. As an experience

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inflicted through excessive violence, this attribute of horror is shown to be exercised through imperial repression where the military power makes horror a spectacle. The spectacle of monstrosity used to describe Adele is extended to the peripheral islands off the coast of Chaguaramas. The narrator tells us ‘There is Chacachacare, a haunted island off the island’s easternmost tip that was once a leper colony’ (Chariandy 2007). Chacachacare, and by extension Chaguaramas, is the ghostly symbol of a decomposing imperial altercation that continues to wreak havoc through the haunted memories of Adele. The mutability of the body and land into an abject state follows the impact of colonial violence. Images of a diseased land are connected to Adele’s psychological unease. During the novel, Adele’s monstrosity does not only affect her mind, but also her ability to control her body. As the novel’s most abject spectacle, Adele struggles for her concerns to be taken seriously, even by her own son. When Adele asks him if he has seen the ghost, he replies ‘Don’t be silly Mother. There are no ghosts here.’ As the novel shows, however, there are in fact ghosts that haunt Adele—ghosts of a different kind: the narrator eventually learns this after patching together his mother’s disjointed stories. He admits later—‘she couldn’t do all things, really, against the specters of history.’ Although he concludes that his mother’s fragmented mind was never capable of bringing closure for injustice inflicted on her by the American soldiers, the novel’s ending suggests otherwise. Because he is able to tell her story, it is the reader who gets the closure and intelligibility that Adele sought. In The Rainmaker’s Mistake and Soucouyant, there are monsters created out of systems of racialisation and imperial encounters that continue to haunt the present. The shared depiction of history as horror and the reliance on memory to recover the past enables a unique redefinition of horror fiction that is socioculturally and historically suited to the Caribbean. As such, the characters of these novels assume monstrous forms projected unto them by their proximity in colonial spaces and through their contact with imperial powers. These encounters altered the people’s sense of themselves, their ancestral histories, and their homelands. Both novels use monstrosity to highlight the horror of colonialism—in The Rainmaker’s Mistake, and imperialism—in Soucouyant. The unique horror tropes employed in each novel reflect the specific haunted histories experienced in the region. Although the narratives of horror are shown to be intricately bound to history, the novels’ use of the horror fiction genre is not only about portraying the strange and shocking history of the Caribbean: they also enable a process of recovering the suppressed histories of the people and the nation.

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Endnotes 1.

Whether it is Walcott’s ‘Wound of History’, Harris’s ‘Wound of Being’ or Scott’s ‘Echo in the Bone’, tropes of woundedness in Caribbean literatures predominate, as writers attempt to grapple with postcolonial loss and pain. 2. While the actual Caribbean island is never named, linguistic markers of the characters’ speech—‘haffi’, for example—and references to Cabarita Island (Brodber 2007) establish the novel’s setting as Jamaica. 3. In folklore, the soucouyant is represented as an old woman who can shapeshift into a ball of fire. As the novel describes it, ‘a soucouyant is something like a female vampire’ (Chariandy 2007) that feasts on the blood of her victims in order to stay alive.

Works Cited Boehmer, E. 1993. ‘Transfiguring: Colonial Body into Postcolonial Narrative’. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 26(3): 268–277. Brodber, E. 2007. The Rainmaker’s Mistake. London: New Beacon. Chariandy, D. 2007. Soucouyant. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Cohen, J.J. 1996. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’. In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, pp. 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Condé, M. 1995. Crossing the Mangrove, translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Random House. Derrida, J. 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Dobson, K. and D. Chariandy. 2007. ‘Spirits of Elsewhere Past: A Dialogue on Soucouyant’. Callaloo, 30(3): 808–817. Froude, J.A. 1888. The English in the West Indies: The Bow of Ulysses. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Harris, W. 2008. ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas’. Caribbean Quarterly, 54(1/2): 5–38. Markham, C.R. 2010. ‘Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus’. In Journal of Christopher Columbus (During His First Voyage, 1492–93): And Documents Relating the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, pp. 15–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Neptune, H.R. 2007. Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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3 Feminine Sexuality and Sexual Trauma in Bengali Horror Fiction: The Emergence of the Goddess Puja Sen Majumdar The primary question that perhaps comes up when we speak of horror fiction is ‘What/Who haunts?’ and ‘Who is being haunted?’, i.e., who/ what is/are the source(s) of horror in a particular work of fiction, and from whose subjective position does one see the events unfold. As María del Pilar Blanco, Esther Peeren and several other critics have pointed out, hauntings are closely linked with the historic and social positions of the subjects as a result of which,the gender, sexualities and race of who haunts and who is being haunted need to be examined. The literary works that I intend to discuss in this paper have a similar source of horror, which is the figure of a goddess or goddesses, one who is in many instances compared to that of Kali, but the locations from which the characters look at her vary. This paper intends to trace the emergence of this figure of the devi in Bengali horror fiction, taking into account the literary works of Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, Humayun Ahmed and Avik Sarkar. The figure of the devi or the goddess recurs in the stories of these authors as the agent and the driving force behind supernatural occurrences and results in a particular kind of horror which surrounds the sacred feminine body. The paper is divided into three parts: the first part discusses why history, memory and located-ness become very significant in these stories; the second part examines the notion of the abject and its relationship with the feminine; the third part explores the possibilities of feminine spaces within these narratives. The works that I have taken into account are Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s Taranath Tantrik stories, two of Humayun Ahmed’s novels from the Misir Ali series, Debi (The Goddess) and its sequel, Nishithini (The Night Roamer) and Avik Sarkar’s ‘Bhog’ from his book Ebong Inquisiton. The problem of sexual difference and differentially marked bodies is a theme that haunts all the stories, since it is one of the major problems from which the horrific emerges. 50

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I. History, Knowledge, Hauntings In the history of Bengali Shakta1 literature, the figures of terrifying goddesses abound. However, several Bengali scholars, such as Sukumari Bhattacharjee and Sashibhushan Dasgupta, have argued that most poets and mystics, who dealt with the figure of the terrifying mother goddess—Kali, Tara or the Dashamahavidya, treat the horror aspect as something that can be transcended to reach the affection and knowledge offered by the mother. Thus, mystics, such as Ramprasad Sen, Kamalakanta and Ramkrishna, focus on the maternal side of the goddess more than her fearsome visage. Yet, whenever the origins of Kali are spoken about, scholars bring up certain communities who are not considered a part of ‘civilisation’ or civilisation in the way they see it. For example, Arun Kumar Ray Chaudhuri points out that the background of the Kali image made of dancing evil spirits were possibly contributed by ‘the primitive, uncivilised, savage tribes of India’ (Ray Chaudhuri 1956). Thus, when these goddesses dramatically embody what is subversive, polluting, dirty and discarded—the origins are linked to people who are not Hindu and do not adhere to Brahminical practices. Scholars of tantric rituals, such as David Kinsley and Jeffrey J. Kripal, describe how the goddess symbolises ritualised confrontations with cultural constructions of anxieties pertaining to death, sexuality, pollution and the dissolution of the socialised self (Kripal 2003). Bibhutibhushan’s Taranath Tantrik2 is a part of this pedagogical tradition. But before going into the Taranath Tantrik stories, it is important to speak about a short story based in the rural areas of Manbhum called ‘Rankini Debi’r Kharga’. Bibhutibhushan had travelled extensively around Chhota Nagpur, Hazaribagh, Manbhum and Ranchi for work. In a number of his stories featuring these places, the Bengali narrator usually finds himself in a rural area whose history he is unaware of. In the above-mentioned story, at first nothing is known about the identity of the goddess, Rankini. She is as much a spectral existence as the community who used to worship her. The village called Chero, where the narrator is posted as a school teacher, is occupied by Bengalis and Madrasis, but they are not its original inhabitants. The only remnant of the ‘barbaric’ people who once lived in Chero is the sacred site of Rankinidevi, a dilapidated temple which lies desolate, without a door, in the middle of a forest. The narrator is warned by his students to refrain from approaching the ruins. The idol is absent. Towards the later part, a Brahmin priest, Chandramohan Panda, explains to him that strange incidents occur in Chero since it is far from civilisation and used to be home to oshobyobunojaati or

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wild and uncivilised tribes. Therefore, it also seems normal when the narrator discovers an old womb like dungeon in the house he is living in that once belonged to the worshippers of the goddess. This is when an event occurs that the narrator cannot interpret. He finds a weapon of the goddess smeared with blood and is told that it is an ominous prediction of famine or plague. The goddess is a malicious one and even though she was worshipped by Hindus as Kalilater, she never completely became a Hindu goddess. This disjunction between Rankini as a goddess of indigenous communities and Kali as an established Hindu devi is what ultimately leads to the sense of intense fear and discomfort. The narrator, who escapes from this place, later realises that the goddess was simply sending out signals to people in order to warn them of the upcoming disaster. But it was a code that they did not have the ability to read. Mieke Bal had suggested that spectres can work as a system of producing knowledge or as a discourse (Bal 2010) and not merely as an entity. In this story, the blood that appears on the khnara or the weapon and the spectrality of the lost goddess does not create any knowledge, the possibilities are merely hinted at. Bibhutibhushan will deal with these in great detail when he writes about Taranath Tantrik. What this story suggests is that perhaps the history of dispossession is intricately related to horror.3 It is related to the fear of indigenous communities or fear of people driven away from their homes. The space from which the devi emerges is a very specific space. It belonged to people who have either been victims of ethnic cleansing or who have been forced to migrate due to sociopolitical as well as cultural conflicts. Thus, the social position of the source of horror, in terms of what is considered normative, becomes important.4 Kali and her other forms (and the fundamental differences that exist amongst them) make this disjunction evident, but also gesture towards erased histories that constitute the notion of spectrality. The other aspect of these stories, especially the ones that concern Taranath Tantrik, focus on objects, places, rituals and actions that are vehemently rejected by the society. The story that narrates Taranath’s predicament when he tries to acquire knowledge from an ambiguous woman known as Pagli, who lives at the edge of a village inside a cremation ground, focuses specially on such practices. The goddesses who appear to Taranath are grotesque, ferocious and often cannibalistic. Taranath has to sit on the corpse of a young woman, feed the corpse fish and alcohol in order to calm her and prevent her from tearing him apart. These women who appear in Bibhutibhushan’s stories show no aspect of the mother goddess that mystics (such as Ramkrishna, Ramprasad Sen, Aurobindo) and famous poets (such as Tagore, Biharilal Chakrabarty or Nazrul Islam) had written about before. None of these spectres are cosmic mothers or life

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affirming saviours. The way in which the author describes them or the way in which the male narrator looks at them evoke disgust and often revulsion. And yet, Bibhutibhushan is tapping into a pedagogy that has existed in Bengal for a long time. The rituals, the stages of meditation and the entities that appear to Taranath are parts of well-documented narratives written by practitioners such as Krishnananda Agamvagisha. The interesting aspect of these stories, however, is the element of seduction that underlies the description and actions of each woman. It is as if each feminine entity has a dual nature—one that seduces and another that horrifies. Taranath is always close to the new knowledge offered by them, but he never quite manages to reach it. This brings the readers very close to a certain notion of the feminine abject.

II. The Sacred and the Abject What is it that connects the feminine abject to both the horrific and the seductive? And what does the sacred in the form of a goddess have to do with such a notion of abjection? Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject and its connections with feminine sexuality as well as Joan Copjec’s theories of sexual trauma can be looked at in this case. The notion of ‘I’ is constantly challenged and the binaries between the inside and the outside, the object and the subject are rethought, thereby questioning the location of agency. If we look at the idols of the goddess or its accompaniments, they are often treated are mere objects kept in curio shops or spoken about in stories. In some of the stories, except for the ones written by Bibhutibhushan, there is an attempt to secularise the idols in some ways. There are also attempts to show a certain dual nature of the goddess, i.e., when she remains dormant, she is nothing more than an object. However, as circumstances awaken her, she not only becomes a powerful entity, but also something that challenges the boundaries of the self when she cannot be distinguished from some of the characters. For example, in Humayun Ahmed’s works, there ultimately remains no distinction between the goddess and two women, Nilu and Ranu. In Bibhutibhusan’s stories, the inside-outside binary is constantly challenged through corpses. Initially, the narrator is disgusted by the dead bodies in the cremation ground and yet the key to acquire knowledge resides in treating them as subjects with agency, which have to be spoken to, understood and feared simultaneously. These corpses, certain aspects of the goddesses often appear disgusting, which as Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller suggest it is this element of disgust that brings with it a certain instability making us consider perhaps the fragmentary nature of the self. Thus,‘Everything

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seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is a state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of self-preservation’ (Kutzbach and Mueller 2007). One of the practices that Bibhutibhushan refers to is the possibility of the adept vision of himself in the corpse that he sits on, in order to perform a certain ritual. Hence, what was disgusting before is the self now. Similarly, the decomposing and horrific body can also appear to be that of a seductive woman. Hence, what was enticing previously is nothing but the rotting dead now. The figure of the goddess is looked at, often with a gaze that is patriarchal, but when she seems to make certain impossible events occur, the narrative does not know how to categorise her. A part of her appears to reside within the characters, which makes this even more complicated. The devi exists beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable or the thinkable, and at the same time, they are unassimilable with ‘the real world’ in many situations. We are never completely sure about the authenticity of their existences, but they emerge from sexual encounters, which have sometimes taken place in the past and are traumatic in nature. The figures of several tantric goddesses in Bibhutibhushan’s Taranath Tantrik stories often appear as a result of encounters with feminine sexuality that cannot be categorised easily.5 For instance, in one of the stories, which has been examined in detail later, the woman Pagli whom Taranath addresses as mother appears to him at one point of time as a beautiful girl of sixteen. She speaks to him almost as a lover and when Taranath is scared of accepting this, she reappears as a mother figure. This is the same girl that he will encounter as a corpse which has been decomposing for 56 years at a later stage. Taranath’s repeated rejection of the girl is translated by Pagli as his incapability of pursuing a certain aspect of knowledge. This interchangeability of the maternal, the seductive and the disgusting or the rejected, i.e., a half rotten corpse, is one of the main elements of horror in this case. Taranath Tantrik recounts his past as tells the narrator and his friend Kishori, his experience with tantra. It is important to note that Taranath lives in a dilapidated house at Harish Mukherjee Road in central Kolkata with his wife and daughter and he can prove nothing that he narrates. The incidents take place far away from the familiar parts of the city or the village where Taranath is born, and thus seem quite implausible. A number of these acts have to be performed in liminal spaces, like cremation grounds or in fallow lands, which lie outside villages and human habitations. These acts also seem to connect what is considered the real world with the world of spirits. Bibhutibhushan tries to assimilate these feminine entities with the help of tantric philosophy to a great extent. But the gaze with which Taranath looks at the women become important. It is almost as if the male practitioner has to learn how to dominate the

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feminine forces in order to reach a particular stage of authority. The implication that the stories carry (even the later ones written by his son, Taradas Bandhopadhyay) is that borders need to be drawn and what is disgustingly feminine need to be encountered, but at the same time discarded, in order to keep oneself safe. This is when one can think about Kristeva’s as well as Bataille’s notion of what constitutes the abject. For Kristeva, the abject cannot be categorised as either object or as subject. The abject forms a part of the subject and disturbs identity, system and order. Abjection, thus, is an individual and collective fear of otherness, which manifests itself as loathing of particular kinds of food, filth, waste or excreta. In order to maintain the binary of the inside and the outside, the abject needs to be expelled. Taranath does this continuously as he rejects the ‘food’, the corpses and the possibilities of seduction offered by Pagli.6 This rejection carries immense attraction for him, while at the same time, it poses a threat to the separated self. He cannot let go of this fascination even years later when he speaks of it in a domestic setting. Kutzbach and Mueller comment that encounters with the abject destabilise both personal and collective identity, because they threaten the border of the subject and are accompanied by feelings of loss and loneliness. In order to escape this danger that the subject can in no way accept, they must reject the abject to defend their notion of their own identity. Taranath’s ultimate escape from the cremation ground as he is incapable of tolerating the aspect in which the goddess appears to him in the end is, in all probability, a narrativisation of this. But the dissolution of boundaries is still desired because of the attraction of the maternal body (Kutzbach and Mueller 2007).The desire is also a result of the mourning of an object that has been already lost. As Barbara Creed points out, the abject is situated within a patriarchal and phallologocentric structure and is intricately linked with the problem of sexual difference and the way the maternal is looked at. She points out: Through ritual, the demarcation lines between human and nonhuman are drawn up anew and presumably made all the stronger for that process. One of the key figures of abjection is the mother who becomes an abject at the moment the child rejects her for the father who represents the symbolic order. (Creed 2020)

And using the father’s symbolic order or the father’s language, the child has to represent the mother. Thus, Kristeva will comment that this is where the abject confronts us in our earliest attempts at breaking away, a break that is under the constant risk of failing. In the struggle, the mother or the one performing the maternal function

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becomes the abject. Hence, the place of the abject constitutes the place where meaning collapses and the place where the ‘I’ can no longer hold sway. Thus, the abject is threatening to life and must be ‘radically excluded’ (Kristeva 1982) from ‘the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border’ (Creed 2020). This is exactly what happens in Avik Sarkar’s story. In Bibhutibhushan’s story, while this is true to a certain extent, the excess that the character Pagli, along with her spectres, manages to create dominates till the end. When Taranath meets Pagli, at the edge of the cremation ground, she seems almost mad. She screams at him, kicks him, threatens to beat him, throws things and yet, Taranath refuses to leave. Pagli is dishevelled and dirty, but that night, she appears in Taranath’s dreams as a caring mother. She is both aspects of the abject, horrifying and affectionate at the same time, and Taranath can no longer decide or distinguish between dreams and reality. Pagli asks him to perform infamous tantric rituals, such as putting the coal that has been used to burn corpses in his own mouth, drink impure alcohol and even to kill her (his teacher) and use her corpse as a seat of worship. When Taranath protests, he is told that tantra is not the work of a bhadralok or a gentleman. He gets to know about various creatures from other worlds who are half human or non-human such as hakini who are hybrid animals, dakini, apadebata and djinn. Throughout the story, Taranath tries to find meanings in what Pagli is doing or trying to teach him. Suddenly, she turns into a 16-year-old woman and briefly attempts to seduce him. This particular element of masculine fantasy is something that persists in all these stories concerning the devi.7 During a final night of horror, Taranath encounters several other monstrous women. A beautiful girl comes to him and calls herself Sharashi, one of the famous Mahavidyas. Taranath, who does not trust any woman at this point, keeps questioning her, during which, he suddenly realises that the corpse he is sitting on while worshipping, looks the same as the goddess. At this point, both the corpse and the goddess begin to speak/cry/scream in unison. It is never quite clear whether these goddesses are the manifestations of Pagli herself or if a part of the goddess resides inside Pagli. Taranath tries to ask Sharashi this, but only receives mocking laughter in response. Mahadamori (another goddess of ‘barbaric’ communities) appears in the end (after a number of hakinis, who are initially beautiful and later change into monsters) and this is when Taranath starts running. Although not explicitly mentioned anywhere, the fear of sexually marked bodies is very evident in the entire narrative. This fear reaches its highest in ‘Bhog’, a story written by Avik Sarkar about Matangi, the ninth

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Mahavidya amongst the Dashamahavidyas. She is the Tantric form of the Hindu goddess, Saraswati, a goddess who imparts language8 and knowledge, exclusively to her worshippers who can follow certain uncanny procedures. She is immensely attractive to men, but also repulsive in the way in which she has to be awakened. She wears clothes that have been drenched in menstrual blood, accepts food or bhog only when it is left-over, discarded, dirty and half-eaten. She lives in a place covered with severed wings and limbs of birds and animals, bones, broken nests, oil and blood. The worshipper has to wear dirty clothes and live in darkness. While the central male character insists in the beginning that this is a story of mother and son and that no outsider should get involved, he has to be saved in the end by three benevolent Brahmin patriarchs and the mother goddess has to be (according to how the abject is treated) thrown under water from the Howrah Bridge. The pisachi or the supernatural female worshipper called Damri, who had sought refuge with Atin, is destroyed before she could harm him. One oblique reference in this story, which is probably a remnant of earlier Bengali horror stories concerning the mother goddess, is the unconcerned comment made by a character about a devi idol gifted by the Munda community (in the hope that Hindus would not usurp their land) to an upper caste landlord and her assimilation into Brahminical traditions. But what is most interesting in the story is perhaps a horrifying scene where the pisachi is making the devi’s food with meat torn from a human hand. The hand belongs to a woman called Pushpo, an affectionate mother figure. The ring in one of the fingers of the hand is a ring that she was gifted to her by Atin’s mother. Unsurprisingly, at the end of the narrative, no trace of the maternal remains. The doting mother are dead and the scary mothers/lovers are gotten rid of. Unlike Bibhutibhushan’s story, the unruly and impure feminine has been dealt with and thrown away. To return to Kristeva and her exploration of religious rites, she says: This is precisely where we encounter the rituals of defilement and their derivatives, which based on the feeling of abjection and all converging on the maternal, attempt to symbolize the other threat to the subject: that of being swamped by the dual relationship, thereby risking the loss not of a part (castration) but of the totality of his living being. The function of these religious rituals is to ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother. (Kristeva 1982)

This is what the Brahmins in Sarkar’s story take part in. Thus, there is always a possibility of taming the goddess in various ways. In the stories

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written by Humayun Ahmed, however, something very different happens.

III. Repetition, Trauma, Horror The central character in the two novels written by Humayun Ahmed about the devi is Misir Ali, a professor of psychology in Dhaka University. Misir Ali who refuses to believe in hauntings and ghosts, attempts to make the supernatural events that occur tolerable by using logical analysis. He does not stop doing this even at the end of the second novel, when he can see the devi standing right in front of him. As a result, he posits his theories of sexual trauma that claim that women have hallucinated and imagined a goddess residing within or with them as a companion in order to cope with the sexual abuse that they have faced, often as children. The novels, nevertheless, contain a certain excess which he is incapable of explaining away with the help of the philosophical tools available to them. The characters of the two women Ranu and Nilu become very important to understand this excess. In this section, I intend to focus on is the feminine spaces of intimacy that are created by both these authors between the devi and these female characters. Several critics who have tried to work with psychoanalytic interpretations of the South Asian goddess (especially forms of Kali) have concluded that she is nothing but products of male fantasies. For example, in his essay, ‘A Garland of Talking Heads’, Jeffrey J. Kripal comments that goddesses who inculcate fear in us are perhaps, in the end, bound by ‘male constructions, male fears and male solutions’ (Kripal 2003). While this is true in the earlier stories which we look at, Ahmed’s narratives deviate from this in an important way. The first novel begins with Ranu, who claims that a goddess lives with her. Her husband also starts feeling the devi’s presence as he hears laughter9 from their kitchen, smells a certain perfume, hears the sound of bangles and anklets. When Misir Ali starts investigating the situation, he comes to know that Ranu had been molested as a child in front of a Hindu temple by a man named Jallaluddin. According to both Ranu and Jallaluddin, at this point, they had seen a white goddess come out of the temple, run at a great speed towards Ranu and vanish inside her. Jallaluddin, terrified after witnessing this, flees the spot. Ranu claims that from that day she became very beautiful, almost like an idol and started to be able to see the future. According to Misir Ali, however, Ranu is traumatised by what had happened to her and the only way she can bear to remember the past is by imagining a goddess who always saves women from male violence. Even though

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Ranu is initially extremely frightened of the goddess, she eventually becomes used to her company. She accepts the presence of the goddess completely when her landlord’s daughter and her friend, Nilu gets kidnapped by a man who wants to kill her. Ranu, at this moment, realises that the men around her who are trying to understand all the incidents with the help of reason, would do nothing to help Nilu. Ranu, as a result, seeks help from the goddess and dies in the process of saving Nilu. The goddess starts living with Nilu. Consequently, she almost becomes a new person, someone who is all three: Nilu, Ranu and the devi. In the sequel, Nishithini, we find an uncannily beautiful scene where Nilu holds conversations with the goddess and enjoys her company, while none of the men around her such as her father or Misir Ali are allowed access in their safe space. In historical texts, while characters such the Bhairavi (who enlightened Ramkrishna) are often mentioned, womens’ encounters with the goddess are not recorded as such. A close reading of Humayun Ahmed’s texts offers us these spaces. The notion of the devi can be read as transgressive in this case, especially since neither the goddess nor the women who host her can be contained by phallologocentric logic. In a brilliant essay, ‘The Sexual Compact’, Joan Copjec had spoken about how sexual trauma cannot be located within a certain incident or a certain experience. It is repetitive and cannot be bound by a homogenous timeline. In a sense, trauma is incomplete and it returns. In these novels, the goddess returns with the return of trauma. But in addition to that, she offers safety and strangely enough, she also offers the women a type of pleasure, which the men are completely unaware of. She is demonic and she is ambiguous but she refuses to be ousted till the very end of the narratives. Misir Ali has no power over her. In conclusion, the Bengali horror stories related to the goddess speak about a very specific fear, a fear which is not just of the mother, but also of everything exaggeratedly feminine. At the same time, as suggested by Peeren and Blanco, they show us that perhaps categories of subjectification like ‘gender, sexuality, and race can themselves be conceived as spectral’ (Peeren and Blanco 2013).They do not just arrive from the past, but also lays claims over the future which can be reimagined with their assistance.

Endnotes 1. Bengali Shakta literature refers to works revolving around the goddess, Kali, in various forms such as Shyama, Tara, Durga, etc. This includes songs and speeches by mystics, such as Ramprasad Sen and Ramkrishna to famous authors, such as Rabindranath, Nabinchandra, Hemchandra and Madhusudan Dutta.

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2. Bibhutibhushan (1894–1950) created the character of Taranath in 1940. He wrote only two stories. His son Taradas wrote six stories about the same character after the death of his father. 3. It would perhaps not be too farfetched to think of Spivak’s discussion of Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha’ in her essay, ‘What is Left of Theory’ here, since she discusses the implications of a message that an ancestral spirit tries to convey to an outsider. Can the question of ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ be extended to spectres belonging to certain communities? 4. Even in Humayun Ahmed’s Nishithini, the character Ajmal experiences extreme fear for the first time when he walks to an uninhabited part of a village, where the broken down houses of Hindus, who had fled Bangladesh during 1971 and never returned, stood. 5. There is extensive scholarship on whether such encounters transgress heteronormativity. One can look at the works of Jeffrey J. Kripal, Rachel Fell McDermot and David Kinsley for this. 6. It is interesting to note that Taranath expects good food from Pagli, because he is a Brahmin. But Pagli only offers him the coal used to burn corpses. Perhaps, it will not be too farfetched to read this as a rejection of Brahminical hierarchy. Taranath expects it will turn into something else while he puts it in his mouth, but it remains the same filthy coal and he has to spit it out. 7. This is an element that is also found in Taradas Bandhopadhyay’s story concerning Madhusundari Debi, a supernatural lover with whom Taranath lives in a forest for some time. She is at once devoted and ruthless. The fear that she evokes is similar to the fear that Bibhutibhushan’s stories concerning the pari also calls to mind. However, in the story that is discussed in this paper the horror arises from the fact that the same entity which is maternal is also seductive. In that sense, this particular story is different from the others. 8. A language which we do not have access to, since in the end it is completely silenced by a language of indignant and benevolent patriarchy. 9. In all the stories feminine laughter also becomes a source of horror. Perhaps this is not surprising when one looks back at Cixous’ ‘Laughter of the Medusa’.

Works Cited Ahmed, Humayun. 1993. Misir Ali Omnibus. Dhaka: Protik. Bandhopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan and Taradas Bandhopadhyay. 2019. Taranath Tantrik Samagra. Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh Publishers. Blanco, Maria del Pilar and Esther Peeren. 2013. ‘Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities’. In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, pp. 1–29. New York: Bloomsbury.

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Blanco, Maria del Pilar and Esther Peeren. 2013. ‘Spectral Subjectivities: Gender, Sexuality, Race/Introduction’. In The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, pp. 309–317. New York: Bloomsbury. Copjec, Joan. 2012. ‘The Sexual Compact’. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 17(2): 31–48. Creed, Barbara. 2020. ‘Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’. In The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, pp. 211–225. Minneapolis: University of Michigan. Kripal, Jeffrey J. 2000. ‘A Garland of Talking Heads: Some Autobiographical and Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Western Kali’. In Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses, edited by Alf Hiltebeitl and Kathleen Erndl, pp. 239–268. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2003. ‘Why the Tantrika is a Hero’. In Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West, edited by Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal, pp. 196–223. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Kutzbach, Konstanze and Monika Mueller. 2007. ‘Introduction’. In The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture, edited by Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller, pp. 7–19. New York: Rodopi. Ray Chaudhuri, Arun Kumar. 1956. ‘A Psycho-analytic Study of the Hindu Mother Goddess (Kali) Concept’. American Imago, 13(2): 123–146. Sarkar, Avik. 2020. Ebong Inquisition. Kolkata: Book Farm.

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4 Spirits and Possessions Rajarshi Bhattacharjee The bhuta-preta are said to exist in a halfway house between the human world and the world of ancestral spirits (pitri-lok). Until they have been judged, have paid their Karmic debts and are allowed into the world of ancestral spirits, the bhuta-preta continue to yearn for a human body which they can enter and contrive to make sick through their nefarious activity. I was, however, struck by the fact that both the individual’s guarded apprehensiveness in relation to the malignant spirits and his longing for guidance from the benign ancestral spirits had an underlying tone of easy familiarity. In his relationship with these spirits, the person did not seem to feel the terror and the awe often evoked by the village and local deities… Perhaps this psychological proximity is due to the fact that these spirits, occupying the lowest rungs in the Hindu hierarchy of supernatural beings, are closest to the human state. Whatever the reason, both the bhuta-preta and the pitri are a tangible, living presence for most people. —Kakkar (1982)

Ghosts have always been an intimate and an inimical part of our Indian lives. Not only have we grown up listening to and/or watching myriad stories about these spectral beings wriggling their way into the world of the humans,1 their existence has also been encoded within our mythological realities. The post-death rituals that we perform, especially within the Hindu religious existence, for example, are tailor made towards the alleviation of any imbalance in the cosmic world that would force the departed spirit to leave its heavenly abode and move into, what Sudhir Kakkar calls in the aforementioned quote, the ‘halfway house’.2 What these rituals testify to, in a sense, is a lived reality of these spirits—the bhoot and the preta—in which there is an actual possibility of their movement away from their natural place of rest. This possibility, in turn, betrays a reality wherein these ghosts not only may exist in the world of the living, but often, do so as well. 62

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Within the context of this argument, Kakkar’s point about the ‘easy familiarity’ of these entities that we Indians have develops a new and interesting implication. Not only do these spirits have a ‘tangible’ and ‘living presence’, these presences are not necessarily rejected either. Further, this presence and the subsequent acceptance of the bhoot and the preta allot a historicity to them as well. After all, rituals that involve these spirits are themselves historical. It’s not surprising either that the origin of the bhoot and/or preta can be traced to the annals of Indian mythologies and Vedas. The word bhoot, in fact, derives from the Sanskrit bhuta (from bhutkaal) which means and refers to the past and being-in-the-past. The Atharva Veda, similarly, lists in detail how a Hindu exorcist can help the bhoot to attain peace and go back to its heavenly abode or be re-incarnated.3 This is the mythological historicity that I spoke of above. Owing to such a vivacity of this rootedness of the spirits, the Indian population comprehends the existence of these spectral entities real, as temples and dargahs are often filled with people either wishing to be exorcised or, through the bhoot that is haunting them, trying to contact with the ‘past’. Notwithstanding the reality that is accorded to these spirits, there is, however, a rather gnawing question that arises concerning the nature of that reality: are these energies real or a construct of the mind, locked away in and as hysteria.4 The current paper then intends to try and look at the necessity of these spirits and energies: the need for the bhoot or preta in the Indian society and how the scientific mind works with and around them. This reality that has been accorded to the ghosts in India is not merely theoretical. Examples of actual encounters with bhoot are peppered aplenty all over the country. The Bhangarh Fort is perhaps one of the most famous examples of such an encounter. Another one is that of the village of Bemni. Hidden deep into the Himalayas, the village has been struggling with the ‘epidemic’ of possession for some time now. Some of these possessions are expected (and perhaps welcome) while others are quite unwelcome and need immediate alleviation. If one walks around the village and talks to its different residents, it would be very difficult to come across someone who has not had an encounter with ghosts. As yet another example: in his book, Shamans, Mystic and Doctors, Sudhir Kakkar talks about a temple in Rajasthan called the Balaji Mandir, where exorcisms of young women are conducted on an hourly basis. Similarly, the doors of the Patteshah Dargah are always crowded with men and women crying on the top of their voice and waiting for their turn to be exorcised. These examples, among many more, indicate a certain amount of truth in the existence of these energies: a truth that is quite material in nature, as it affects the lived realities of all the human beings involved in these processes.

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The current paper takes a position that these encounters are not things that merely happen to these people. There is a fundamental need that these people have as well that leads them to have such encounters. In other words, these possessions and encounters are not just things that happen to people. There is an essential connection between the belief that these people have in (the reality of) these ghosts and the things that happens to them. The question that arises in such a context, then, is why. Why does it become so important for these people’s lives to regulate the aforementioned energies and have such encounters or possessions? The answer to this question is rather simple: that it is necessary. It is necessary that we Indians have contacts with and understandings of the spiritual world and to believe in possessions even if not experience them first-hand. The reason for this necessity, however, is rather complex and lies in what the current paper terms as the fourth—the fourth prong of the already existing triumvirate of Freud’s oedipal system5 particular (and rather peculiar) to the Indian psychological markup. Normally, as Freud shows, it is the son’s destiny, as it were, to kill his father and marry the mother. This, in turn, creates a relational attachment between the three and allows, with time, not only the psychological development of the child, but also the onset of psycho-civilisational complexities.6 But, this three pronged system fails when concerned with the Indian psyche and it takes a rather different shape in which the son is destined is to never be able to kill the father, because of a primordial fear of the father and yet be able to steal away the mother.7 Further, given that the son is still able to steal the mother away, the only recourse that the father has to win the mother back is through the death of the son. The threat of which, in turn, increases the fear that the son has for the father forcing the former to device more ways to circumnavigate the father to steal the mother. It is in this complex circularity that the fourth can be seen. That fourth becomes the interstitial prong because of and within which the son finds power against the father whom he is essentially afraid of and, subsequently, manages to win the mother over. On the other hand, it is also because of this fourth that the father wishes to kill the son, because it allows the son to escape the fear that the father imparts. This fourth then, in a way, grants power to both the son and the father against each other towards the playing out of the aforementioned psychological dance. The world of the spirits occupies and categorises this fourth. Before moving on to talking about the fourth and its connection to the supernatural further, it is important to take a small diversion and explain the fourth through an example. For the same, the current paper takes the mythology of the birth of Ganesh. As scriptures note, Ganesh is given birth by Parvati with the clay that she takes from her

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own body and is given the task to protect her as she is taking her bath. His instructions are quite clear: that no one should enter the bath house. When Shiva comes to the door, Ganesh, under his mother’s instructions, does not allow him to enter the bath house. Shiva, enraged at this prohibition and unable to meet his wife, cuts off Ganesh’s head. When Parvati hears the commotion and comes outside, she finds her son dead and decapitated. Furious, she turns towards Shiva and asks him to bring her son back to life. Shiva, realising his mistake, that he has killed his own son, goes into the forest in search for a head for Ganesh. There, Shiva sees an elephant, decapitates it and places the elephant’s head on Ganesh’s body, thus bringing him back to life. Shiva, as a reparation, then announces that before any ceremony, Ganesh should always be the one to be worshipped first. Notwithstanding the mythological quality of this tale, between the interactions of the father, the son and the mother, the existence of the fourth is revealed. While the fourth here is not overtly, or at least tangibly, present as the other three are, it is because of the fourth that Shiva had had to decapitate Ganesh. Shiva’s authority is challenged the moment he is barred from entering the bath and seeing his wife. This challenge is, in fact, meted out to him by Ganesh, when he assumes authority over him and prohibits him from meeting his wife. Shiva’s wrath and his subsequent murder of his son is solely dependent on the loss of his power to Ganesh. In other words, the decapitation of Ganesh has been possible only when the son took away the power from the father. It is within and through the (intangibility of) the fourth that this transference has been possible. Within the Indian civilisational psyche, it is the father who is always the authority; who tells the child what to do. The fourth, in that situation, becomes a reliable ground from where the son finds his freedom from the authoritarian entity of the father. In the aforementioned mythological story, Ganesh gains this reliability through Parvati’s instruction. He knows that nothing can happen to him, because he occupies a position where he has the utmost power. This position, this fourth, becomes a position of the divine, the other worldly in which nobody, not even the father has any power. It allows the son to continue, to persist and to exist. Hence, the fourth is necessary. The fourth is the voice, the position and the power, which maintains the balance between the other three by allowing the son to be reintegrated within the oedipal system—reintegrated, because the son has been pushed out. Unlike its Western counterpart, the son no longer has structural autonomy to even think about moving against the father; hence disturbing the oedipal structure. The fourth, in such a scheme of things, allows the son to have authority and have, even if as a possibility, a stand against the father.

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Another way to understand this fourth is through the Lacanian other; or at least as the intersection of the two types of other that Lacan uses throughout his career. The first form is the ‘other’ (with a small o), built inside the ego, where the ego itself is not an entity of the subject, but its object; lying outside as a wholesome I in itself, determining itself and its own existence.8 The second form of the other is with a capital O (the Other) which is best characterised as a projection of the self. While the other corresponds to what Lacan calls the Imaginary register, the Other relates with the Symbolic and the Real.9 This latter is the ‘overarching “objective spirit” of trans-individual socio-linguistic structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions’ (Johnston 2018). In other words, it is in the processes of Othering that a subject is able to form relationships with society both in physical and metaphysical capacity. In being both Symbolic and Real, the Other reveals the world: of the living and the spiritual. For a child (the son, here), the self is aligned with the other, while the father and the mother with the Other. In the case of the Indian psyche, the fourth becomes the interaction between the other and the Other, which the current paper terms as the O(o)ther. It is that part of the subject which is taken over by the projected self, while, at the same time, merging with the ego. This self, so formed, then finds its bearing within two entities: the ego possessed by the world as the other and the Other merge. There are then two mergers, as it were. The first which forms the O(o)ther, and the second where the self is merged with the entity that is the O(o)ther. These two mergers, ultimately, take away the fear of the authority and enables an ‘energy’ to take control. When Ganesh is made the sentry, the merger of the Other of the mother and the other of his ego allows the formation of a self where he has the authority to stop Shiva: an authority that is granted by the fourth and/or the O(o)ther. He is, in other words, possessed by a world that should have been outside him. This possession allows him access to authority otherwise absent. His beheading, in that sense, signals a circle back to status quo when Shiva, the father, takes back his role as the Other. The possession of the bhoot can be understood in the same way. When a subject is possessed, it is in the state of the fourth—a state that has already been shown as rather crucial. The possessed acquires authority that was missing erstwhile: an authority over his father through his own past or history10 (harking back to the bhoot and the bhut connection) and subsequently within civilisational contexts as well. It’s no wonder then that those who are possessed can cause the world around them to ‘suffer’. Exorcisms, in such a scheme, ensure a reallocation of the two others. But, as mentioned above, this fourth is responsible not only for the child to regain authority, but also allows the father to retake authority that

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the son takes on, pitting them into an eternal circle of contestation. Shiva, after all, would not have decapitated Ganesh had the latter not exerted authority over the former. Similarly, while in the moments of a ghostly possession, it is the possessed who gets authority, there is also an in-built mechanism, which allows the father to take back control. Consider the belief, among almost all cultures, that people die and become spirits only when they have some unfulfilled business left in this world. When a spirit possession happens, the possessing spirit finds its voice and is able to explain its unfilled task or its purpose of the possession. The merging of the spirit with the subject, or as explained earlier, of the formation of the O(o)ther, opens a dimension of power itself. This dimension is regenerative in nature, allowing the movement of power and authority between the father and the son and vice-versa ad infinitum. Herein also lies the necessity of the existence of the bhoot: in finding a voice and authority where there is none; in filling a lack, as it were. After all, the functioning of every humanistic structure is conditioned on a transaction of power. No wonder then that most bhoots that people encounter, or are possessed by, are women: a category from whom structures of patriarchy have been taking power away since time immemorial. Two examples need to be mentioned here towards the delineation of the same. The first is a case that Krzysztof Iwanek talks about in his article titled ‘Gods against Ghosts: The exorcism’s of India’s Mehndipur Balaji’. In the essay, Iwanek talks about an experience he has at the Balaji temple. After the completion of the evening aarti, he joins a crowd of people who are sitting alongside the wall of the temple. It is already near nightfall and the people around him are singing devotional songs. Suddenly, Iwanek sees a woman passing through the crowd as if it is nonexistent; as if there is no one in the temple except her. Once she reaches the top of the staircase, she lays down and then, quite suddenly, like a child, starts to slide down the stairs. She slides down from right in front of the people present in the temple and no one attempts to either catch or stop her. As soon as she reaches the bottom of the staircase, she stands up without any indication of pain or any physical injury and climbs the stairs back up again. Iwanek notes here that when the woman was passing by him, she accidentally brushed his shoulder and he felt as if a frightening force has passed him by. In any case, the woman does not pay any attention to the crowd and goes up and slides back down again. Meanwhile all she is saying is: ‘If there is a wedding, I will dance’ and ‘Leave me alone’ in Hindi. Later, he says, he witnesses an exorcism. The scene is enveloped in darkness and a group of four or five people are surrounding a woman who has her hair open and flowing. It was as if the group had ensnarled the woman and she was clearly in distress. The group, however, is not using any kind of rope, trap or even violence.

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They are just singing and dancing around the woman. The group is small and though it is easy for the woman to run from there, she does not, or perhaps, is unable to do so. Iwanek soon realises that it is the same woman who was sliding down the stairs whom he had encountered earlier. The people in the group are chanting just one phrase and are led by one man who has a simple musical instrument in his hand. While circling around the woman, the crowd keeps on repeating a phrase while increasing the pace of their movement. Soon enough, the slow chant turns into an outright song and the slow circular movement turns into a fast-paced run. As the speed of the crowd increases, the woman in the middle of the circle, rather calm until then, starts to struggle. It seems as if the woman’s body is entrapped by the rhythm of the song and the woman, wishing to catch up with the pace, ends up becoming the centre of the spinning circle. Iwanek, explaining further, says that he notes a part of the woman fighting back against the song and the movement. As this part which is fighting gets stronger, her body starts convulsing and she starts to make rather violent moves. She tries to reach out and stop the circle, but is unable to do so. Each of her attempts to stop the circle is in vain and she remains trapped helplessly inside the circle. It seems as if the music is influencing her like a magnet even as she is resisting the pace. Finally, the rhythm gets hold of her and she is forced to swirl with the music without any further resistance. The music then reaches a pace at which it is impossible for the crowd to keep up and then, suddenly, everything came to an abrupt halt. While the group is easily able to stop their movement, the woman falls down on the floor as if pushed by an invisible force. Then, as if nothing had happened, the woman gets up very quickly and looks at the group. The group, in turn, doesn’t say anything. The woman just gets up and leaves. As she is exiting the temple, she passes by Iwanek again. But, this time, he notes that she is calm and relaxed may have had a slight smile on her face. In this case scenario, one can note how the woman is engulfed by the rhythm of the group. The power of this rhythm pulls her back and ‘exorcises’ her and the erstwhile ‘frightening force’ changes into a calm happiness. A careful look at the scenario reveals the structures rather clearly. The father is the crowd that not only has authority in that moment, but also a civilisational one, the son is the woman herself, and finally, her possessed self is the fourth. There is a clear power struggle between the son within the fourth and the father, where there is resistance by the fourth. The self is not ready to let go of the moment of the possession and has to be ‘decapitated’ through the dancing and the music of the group. Then, as the group lets her go without saying any word, she is ‘reborn’.

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To conclude, the existence of spirits and the subsequent cases of possessions become necessities for the formation of a self that is able to successfully garner voice and authority. Hence, their existence has to be seen beyond modern forms of rationalised and often sceptical explanations. These spirits, the bhoot and the pret, find existences deep inside the tunnels of history and the Vedas, precisely because their pan-temporal need. The point here is not about finding their locus in history or categorise their existence as archaic, but present a continuity. It is this continuum which reveals the authenticity of the multiple kinds of experiences that people have of the ghostly, the pan-Indian practice of exorcisms, and the creations of rituals that cater to these entities and energies. But of course, there is also a possibility of extending the argument outside just the psychological (and metaphorical). Within this formulation, the role of the father is taken by God, the role of the son by the human being and the role of the mother by the Being. In the interaction between all these three, the requirement of the fourth reveals itself rather nicely. The power over Being is solely restricted to God. It is God who decides the answers and explanations to the questions of Being. The human, within this dynamic is too weak and afraid to peek into the complicacies of Being. Within the triumvirate, then, the son does not have any power to attain the affections of the mother, because the father has all control not only over the mother, but also the son. But history has shown how human beings are not content with not knowing, or at least attempting to know the intricacies of Being. The fourth then comes in the guise of ghosts, spirits and demons. It grants a different kind of power to the human. As possessed, the human is not a simple God’s creature anymore. It is outside, and more. The supernatural is exactly that: the super-natural. Suddenly, there is a new kind of possibility: in being outside the control of God, the human is allowed to peek into the complicacies of Being. The human has power. Then, as God commands (in exorcisms) for the spirits to return to their places, to lay in rest, the human is ‘decapitated’ and is reborn as God’s son once again. Further, aside from the allocation of a voice, as it were, to the son, the fourth also ensures the continuation of the belief on the might of the father, for the father, however authoritarian, is necessary in the chain of existence. In putting the bhoot to rest, God regains his strength, thus ensuring that the son reveres him once again.11

Endnotes   1. The stories of Thakurmar Jhuli and TV serials like Aahat immediately come to mind.

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  2. From where they would have easy access into the world of the living.   3. This is rather interesting because, unlike the Western exorcism of ghosts, bhoot are not destroyed, but merely guided back to their correct place.   4. But, a closer inspection would reveal this question to be part of a larger question: Is reality objective or a construct of the mind? There is no definite answer to this question. Therefore, it would be rather facile to try and answer the one concerning the spirits. What becomes important, though, is the knowledge that they are real.   5. Theoretically, the fourth works within the Elektra complex as well. However, it would be a stretch on my part to say that without a hint of a doubt.  6. See Civilisation and It’s Discontents.   7. The reason for this deviation from the ‘normal’ oedipal tendencies are many and would require an entire paper on its own. But, primarily it relies on the kind of relationship that the son and the father have; a relationship which is not based on autonomy but on ownership. This is quite unlike the relationship that a father and his son have in the west.  8. This outside nature allows the ego to have, what Lacan calls, the imaginative register where the subject (now distanced from the ego) has the possibility to imagine the ego to be anything whatsoever.   9. Lacan talks about three kinds of registers that exist in the psyche of a human being: the Imaginative, Symbolic and Real. The Imaginative consists of the imaginations that the self has of the ego, the Symbolic is the self ’s interaction with society through the structures of language and the Real which defines reality from within the Imaginative and the Symbolic. 10. This is a concept that the current paper moves back and forth with quite often. The father is never really only the father, but also connotes a past and a history. 11. At first, this proposition might seem preposterous, for the common conception is that God has been the singular reason for some of humanity’s worst tendencies. But, there has to be a distinction formed between religion and God. If God were not necessary, history wouldn’t have provided one (or the many) to humankind. God, perhaps not as an entity, but as a force; or even as a construct and an institution.

Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. 1962. Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey. New York: WW Norton and Company Inc. Iwanek, Krzysztof. 2018. ‘Gods Against Ghosts: The Exorcisms of India’s Mehandipur Balaji’. Available at https://thediplomat.com/2018/06/godsagainst-ghosts-the-exorcisms-of-indias-mehandipur-balaji/ (accessed on 20 May 2020). Johnston, Adrian. 2018. ‘Jacques Lacan’. Available at https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2018/entries/lacan/ (accessed on 20 May 2020). Kakkar, Sudhir. 1982. Shamans, Mystic and Doctors. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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5 Oriental Vampires vs. British Imperialists: Looking into the figure of the vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire Meenakshi Sharma On one hand, Bram Stoker’s Dracula features a villainous vampire who wishes to impose his demonic way of living onto the people of England. Before setting foot in London, he researches England’s language, culture and geography, and while in London, he converts the locals into beings like himself. On the other hand, while entering Dracula’s castle, Jonathan Harker describes it as ‘leaving the west and entering the east’ (Stoker 2008). The figure of Dracula thus represents a paradox wherein he is both the oriental dealing with mystic arts unfamiliar to the scientific and rational West,1 as well as the inversion of the very trope of imperialism by being the conqueror who transforms the indigenous populace into creatures like himself in what could be considered a parallel of the civilising burden of the white man. Stoker’s Dracula finds echoes in Robert Druce’s genre of ‘mutiny gothic’, because it concerns thematically with the Indian rebellion of 1857 in depicting the Orient as a bloodthirsty, mysteriously powerful enemy, who must be defeated in a self-righteous war (Druce 1993). This war between the East and the West is also a war between the occult and the scientific. Here, Dracula represents the secret spiritual wisdom of the East, which is a mystery to the rational scientific developments of the West represented by the men hunting the vampire. Moreover, Dracula is the embodiment of the state of half-death especially in relation to Indian spiritualism of detachment of the astral soul from the body. Therefore, he finds resonance with the vetal of Indian mythology. In the 70s and 80s, Stoker discussed these legends and myths with Burton. Here it is interesting to note that Richard Burton’s retelling of the tales of ‘Vikram and Vetal’ turns this figure into a vampire. Such a misappropriation allows for an easy understanding of the mysterious character for the Western readers familiar with the vampire. 71

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The term vetal does not offer an easy translatability for its Western translators or audience, because there is no complete equivalent of the concept. Various works enlist the being as a genie, djinn, phantom, demon or ghost.2 However, one particularly misleading translation of the term would be a vampire, especially considering the popularity of the folklore surrounding the same. Unlike a vampire, vetal does not bite the neck of its victims to suck their blood. Instead, a vetal devours magicians who try to control it to gather boons from it. On the other hand, accomplished magicians manage to overpower a vetal using their occult powers (sidhis).Vetal is related to alchemy and can animate a corpse, but may not always have ill intentions. Unlike Dracula, who is described as pure evil, the vetal in the tale ends up helping King Vikram. Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire is chosen for the present study, primarily to draw a connection between the two beings—Dracula and the vetal, but also, because unlike other translations, Burton chooses not to remove the supernatural element and, in fact, focuses on the occult practices.3 In calling the vetal a vampire, there is an erasure of the concept of vetal itself through its merging into another being—the vampire. Burton does not attempt to explain the nature and origin of the vetal, further conflating the two categories of supernatural beings. St-Pierre notes that the ‘conquest of India was to take place through the translation of one space into the other, a translation which involved a hierarchical ordering, with one space—the native or Indian space— marked as inferior and in need of translation’ (2000). Burton’s aim in translating Vetal Panchavimshati was to teach the ways of the East to the West so as to be able to govern the colonised better. Interestingly, Stoker’s Count Dracula also partakes in this colonial exercise of learning the ways of the colonised. He studies extensively about the history and geography of the place he seeks to conquer. He comes to a major English city (London) with the sole purpose of controlling her people and assimilating them into his own identity. Rather than being uncannily Other, Dracula for its Victorian readers is unnervingly familiar. Even though he confronts Western rationalism with oriental magic, he uses this magic to obtain imperialistic gains and to colonise the colonisers. Hence, he questions the culture’s sense of itself by showing it the mirror. Interestingly, Stoker conflates the image of the novel’s protagonist, Jonathan Harker, and its villain, Dracula, when Harker sees only himself in the mirror: This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself. (Stoker 2008)

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It is possible that Harker only sees himself in the mirror, because the goals of both Harker and Dracula are similar. It is not one man or the other, but the Empire’s monstrosity reflecting back at Harker. Both the men intend to dominate a different race so as to establish themselves as superior and control the racial, cultural and social identities of the other, both sap vitality from the other to profit in their enterprise of greed. Stephen Arata (1990) talks about reverse colonisation in Dracula where the imperialist practices of Britain are mirrored by the Eastern Orient (Dracula) who, in turn, colonises the British populace, thus serving them a taste of their own medicine. Moreover, he says that Dracula is the response to the cultural guilt of the colonisers and their fear of turning into the Other. Dracula himself admits that his homeland has been through a perpetual exercise of invasion. He says, ‘... there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders’ (Stoker 2008). In his pride about invading and conquering, Dracula links vampires to military conquests and the rise and fall of empires. Dracula is both a vampire and an invader. However, as a vampire, he colonises his victims’ bodies. He functions as a threat to their personal identities as well as their cultural, political and racial selves. Dracula has the ability to colonise by turning his victims into beings like himself. He doesn’t so much as destroy bodies, but transforms and thus appropriates them much like his counterpart vetal, who takes over a human corpse of the oilman’s son and changes its shape and appearance. Dracula, then, is by all means an occident who seeks to colonise the other and transform it into a being like himself. However, he is often associated with the East and the Orient. This latter connection is made stronger with the fact that both Dracula and the vetal possess shape-shifting abilities. While Dracula can transform into a bat (amongst other things), the vetal is often described as having a bat-like appearance. Scarcely, however, had the words passed the royal lips, when the Vampire slipped through the fingers like a worm, and uttering a loud shout of laughter, rose in the air with its legs uppermost, and as before suspended itself by its toes to another bough. And there it swung to and fro.... (Burton 1893)

On his way to Castle Dracula, Jonathan Harker notes how he feels like he is entering the East. He says, ‘it seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains’ (Stoker 2008). Throughout his journey he exercises an imperial gaze in noting the peculiarities of the places he visits. He comments on the dress, food and mannerisms of the natives. His imperial eyes4 travel through the landscape and its people

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whom he calls ‘oriental bands of brigands’ (Stoker 2008). Kaplan defines the imperial gaze as ‘gaze structures specific to representing ethnic Others’ (Kaplan 1997). This representation is situated within an unequal nexus of power, where the one who controls the gaze also controls the view of the reader. That is to say, gaze becomes a tool to mislead or educate the reader about the Other who is being looked at. The whole paranoia and dread of the gaze is inverted by Stoker in his anti-British oriental villain, Count Dracula, who serves as both the Orient dealing with Eastern occult as well as the conqueror who transforms (conquers) people into beings like himself. He simultaneously represents oriental mysticism and British imperialism. In doing so, he embodies the West’s worst fears about what the Orient was capable of. Through his mysticism, he represents the dread of the Eastern occult, but through his enterprise of turning the others into creatures like himself, he is the guilty projection of Britain’s own imperial practices. On the other hand, Burton’s whole exercise in translation is a work of imperial gaze which turns the colonised into objects to be studied by the more rational colonising subjects. It isn’t just the vetal who serves as an equivalent to a vampire, but Goddess Kali too is described in a manner that portrays her as a blood-sucking vampire. There stood Smashana-Kali, the goddess, in her most horrid form. She was a naked and very black woman, with half-severed head, partly cut and partly painted, resting on her shoulder; and her tongue lolled out from her wide yawning mouth; her eyes were red like those of a drunkard; and her eyebrows were of the same colour: her thick coarse hair hung like a mantle to her heels. (Burton 1893)

Kali’s bloodshot eyes, her wide mouth with the tongue lolling out— these physical features describe her as a bloodthirsty vampire.5 Such a depiction of Kali is no coincidence. Hugh B. Urban writes that ‘[i] n the eyes of the early British colonial authorities, missionaries, and scholars, Kali was identified as the most depraved of all forms of modern popular Hinduism ... they also identified its darkest and most perverse age with the worship of Kali and her votaries, the secret cults of the Tantras’ (Urban 2003). Thus, Kali, for the Western audience, represents a perversion of the norm. She therefore comes close to the figure of depravity that a vampire and, particularly Dracula, represents. Jill Galvan notes how the battle between Dracula and the humans is a contest between Eastern and Western technology, ‘telegram vs. telepathy’ (Galvan 2015). Indeed, Dracula’s occult means of communication (mind control, telepathy) and the Londoners’ technological modes, like memos and telegram, are foils of each other,

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perpetually competing to either spread vampirism or defend the British nation against imperialism of the mind and body. The text can be read as a contest between the occult and scientific means of communication, where triumph means control of the land and the body, while losing the battle also means losing one’s very own identity and personhood, much akin to the enterprise of imperialism. The reception of Dracula for the British audience included their fascination for mesmerism and hypnotism and its association with the East. It also intersected with the British interest in theosophy during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which popularised the image of the mystical East and its spiritual wisdom. Dracula constructs this eastern mysticism as a Western lack, as concepts, notions and knowledge missing amongst the civilised. Blavatsky connects vampirism with astral projection.6 She introduces this concept as rooted in Indian belief (Blavatsky 2010). Interestingly, Burton too writes in his tales about astral projection and similar bodily experiences in the form of dream sequences. These often serve as deus ex machina and propel the action forward. Helsing, who himself is a student of occult tries to convince Seward that there are phenomena that science and technology cannot explain. He then gives a reference of the vampiric behaviour of an Indian fakir: Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men come and take away the unbroken seal, and that there lie the Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before? (Stoker 2008)

Helsing compares the bloodthirsty and mysteriously powerful Dracula to an Indian fakir. This fakir finds a direct correlation with the vetal who is a powerful being. Stoker, here, may be hinting at the latent power of control over the mind and the body through trance or meditation, a practice he surely derived from India due to her Victorian reputation of dabbling with magic and Occult. Burton too narrates the frame tale of a yogi’s sadhana7 to fulfil his revenge on King Vikram. Moreover, Stoker had at the time of writing his treatise met Richard Burton several times and, in fact, admired him. Christina Artenie discusses the theory that Dracula might be modelled after Burton and comes to the conclusion that ‘despite the possible comparison between Burton’s teeth-baring tic and Count Dracula’s iconic representation, one should note that the famous traveller is shown as an example of Western mettle in ‘savage places’ and ‘supremely of all the East,’ where the adventurer must kill or be killed. Rather than an inspiration for the vampire, Burton’s figure

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seems to be a model of fortitude and resoluteness for Dracula’s vampire hunters’ (Artenie 2015). Indeed, as an Irishman, Stoker was privy to the enterprise of imperialists. His picture of British imperialism finds an echo in Burton’s act of translation and dissemination of the ways of the colonised to the West. Said calls Burton a master of societal rules and codes who could easily assimilate the values of a culture without ever feeling any real sense or alliance with that culture (Said 2003). However, if Burton truly did understand the rules and codes of other societies, he did not venture to defend them against the British imperialist cultural hegemony. His translation,Vikram and the Vampire, in no way challenges the ethnocentric or racist ideas, nor is it in any manner subversive, but rather confirms and at times adds to the stereotypes that the British readers had about Indian culture. Such an attitude brings to question the very purpose of the translation as a colonial enterprise, i.e., to bring the East to the West as a means of understanding the Other so that it can be governed better. In doing so, there’s also an attempt to make the Orient more palatable by tailoring it to meet the needs of the local market with the addition of some element of familiarity to the Indian-ness of the space. Venuti rightly identifies translation as ‘an asymmetrical act of communication’ which attempts to domesticate the foreign text (Venuti 2000). Cronin writes, ‘[t]he British Empire in the nineteenth century covered a vast geographical area. Since it was clearly impossible to control this empire by force, information became the dominant means of control’ (Cronin 2000). Translation then serves as a means of providing knowledge of the world of the Orient. Interestingly, both the Dracula and the vetal express a certain epistemophilia, where each either controls or seeks to control knowledge and knowledge systems which govern the world around them. The vetal is privy not just to the greater knowledge of the plot against Vikram, which Vikram only suspects, but as the narrator of the stories and asker of questions to which he knows the answer, he is also part of a larger network of dissemination of knowledge where he, as the disseminator, has the upper hand. Before invading the bodies of his victims, Dracula first invades the spaces of their knowledge through his extensive study of Britain’s customs, which he pursues via his books. His victory is dependent on his successful juggling of the occidental study of the British society as well as his oriental knowledge of that which this very same British society considers primitive. The means of knowledge acquisition, however, are different in each case, indicating the differences of the same means within the lives of the translator and the author, respectively. While Burton travelled extensively throughout the eastern regions of the

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world, his travels under the guise of an Arab gained much popularity8; Stoker’s research of the different folklores surrounding vampires was based mostly on his reading of various treatises and tracts that he does not fail to mention in his notes.9 Moreover, knowledge becomes a tool of dominance in the hands of the coloniser who seeks to prove his hegemonic superiority on the basis of superior knowledge. Macaulay’s minute on education details how ‘... lakh of rupees [was] set apart not only for reviving literature in India ... for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories’ (Macaulay 1835). This scientific knowledge that needs revival is obviously the one deemed necessary by the ‘British territories’ and hence posits itself in contradiction to the oriental knowledge, which is considered primitive. However, in Dracula, the Western scientific technology in the hands of the Londoners is heavily inadequate compared to Dracula’s mystical knowledge and networks of information gathering. He must, in the end, be defeated by means of an amalgamation of the two knowledge systems, the scientific and the occult. Dracula’s end is only possible using the Eastern weapon of a kukri knife and by utilising the means of hypnotism. This hypnotism is couched in scientific terminology developed by the neurologist Dr Charcot whom Helsing mentions. The purpose of mentioning Dr Charcot and the Western scientific discourse is to seamlessly blend the Eastern and Western knowledge systems such that the task of defeating Dracula can only be accomplished by the merger of the two. Valente proposes that the novel posits a certain level of ‘metrocoloniality’10 which exceeds the demands of simplistic reductions like East/West and Self/Other (Valente 2000). Helsing finds the flaw in modern science for not being open to newer concepts: ... it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new, and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young. (Stoker 2008, p. 205)

Stoker’s Dracula does not follow the binary patterns of the West as progressive and advanced in technology, and East as primitively constituting of crude practices and systems of superstitious beliefs, because Dracula embodies both the notions of the self and the other, the Occident and the Orient. On the other hand, Burton’s translation offers a peak into the world of the Orient, but neither does it laud, nor does it criticise; rather it attempts to present the ways of the east without any prejudice. However, as mentioned earlier, the translation

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offers nothing in way of explanation for any misconceptions in the minds of its British readers, nor does it downplay the unrealistic aspects within the narrative which would shape the understanding of the East for the Western readers.

Endnotes 1.

The East-West dichotomy is often used in this chapter. Here it is important to mention the way in which the terms are used. The sociological categories of the East and the West are not constructed geographically but used here to refer to the divide between the colonised and the coloniser. The notions of primitive, backward and poor are associated with the East while in contrast the West posits itself as enlightened and advanced. 2. Note the titles of the texts by various other translators who try to appropriate the vetal: Twenty-two Goblins by Arthur W. Ryder (1917), The King and the Corpse by J.A.B. van Buitenen (1959), The Twenty-five Tales of a Sprite by John Platts (1871), etc. 3. In some of the translations, vetal in the end turns out to be King Vikram’s vizier who is privy to the plot against him and therefore decides to help him. 4. See Pratt Mary L., 2007, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York and London: Routledge. 5. Goddess Kali is also worshipped as the goddess of vampires. She killed the demon Raktabija (lit. seed of blood) who would germinate wherever the droplets of his blood fell on the ground, by drinking his blood directly from his body and draining him completely, thus stopping him from multiplying. See also: ‘Kali’ in Kinsley, D. 1986. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. California: University of California Press and White, D.G. 2001. Tantra in Practice. UK: Princeton University Press. 6. See also Crow, J.L. 2012. ‘Taming the Astral Body: The Theosophical Societys Ongoing Problem of Emotion and Control’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80(3): 691–717. 7. Time spent in serious and regular practice or learning, especially in religion, meditation carried out by mendicants. See www. oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/sadhana. 8. For more information, see Burton, R.F. 1893. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah. London: Tylston & Edwards. This treatise details Burton’s travels through Meccah and Madinah under the guise of an Arab, his experience mingling with the Orient, and his admiration for both Islam and its people. 9. See Miller, E. 1999. ‘Back to the Basics: Re-Examining Stoker’s Sources for “Dracula”’. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 10(2): 187–196. Miller examines the various source materials available consulted by Stoker through his notes and the novel itself in an attempt to separate the speculative sources from the factual ones.

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10. For further elaboration, see Valente, J. 2002. Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. Urbana (Ill.): University of Illinois Press and Valente, J. 2000. ‘“Double Born”: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic’. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 46(3): 632–645.

Works Cited Arata, S.D. 1990. ‘The Occidental Tourist: “Dracula” and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’.  Victorian Studies, 33(4): 621–645. Artenie, C. 2015.  Transylvania and Romania in Scholarly Editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (dissertation). Blavatsky, H.P. 2010. The Bewitched Life. Kissinger Publishing. Burton, R.F. 1893. Vikram and the Vampire: Or Tales of Hindu Delivry. London: Tylston & Edwards. Cronin, M. 2000. ‘History, Translation, Postcolonialism’. In Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era, edited by Sherry Simon and P. St-Pierre, pp. 33–52. University of Ottawa Press. Crow, J.L. 2012. ‘Taming the Astral Body: The Theosophical Societys Ongoing Problem of Emotion and Control’.  Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80(3): 691–717. Druce, R. 1993. ‘And to Think that Henrietta Guise Was in the Hands of Such Human Demons!:Ideologies of the Anglo-Indian Novel from 1859–1957’. In  Shades of Empire in Colonial and Post-Colonial Literatures, edited by C.C. Barfoot, Amsterdam- Atlanta GA: Rodopi. Galvan, J. 2015. ‘Occult Networks and the Legacy of the Indian Rebellion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. History of Religions, 54(4): 434–458. Kaplan, E.A. 1997. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze. New York and London: Routledge. Macaulay, T.B. 1835. ‘Education in India Since 1835; With a Minute of Lord Macaulay’. The Competition Wallah, pp. 408–452. Miller, E. 1999. Back to the Basics: Re-Examining Stoker’s Sources for “Dracula”’. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 10(2): 187–196. Said, E.W. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin Classics. St-Pierre, P. 2000. ‘Translating (into) the Language of the Colonizer’. In Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era, edited by Sherry Simon and P. St-Pierre, pp. 261–288. University of Ottawa Press. Stoker, B. 2008. Dracula. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Urban, H.B. 2003. ‘“India’s Darkest Heart” Ka¯lı¯ in the Colonial Imagination’. In Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West, edited by J.J. Kripal and R.F. McDermott, pp. 169–195. California: University of California Press. Valente, J. 2000. ‘“Double Born”: Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial Gothic’. MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 46(3): 632–645. Venuti, L. 2000. ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by L. Venuti, pp. 468–488. London and New York: Routledge.

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6 Genres from the Orient: Instability in Shweta Taneja’s Cult of Chaos Samarth Singhal Given the proliferation of the genre of fiction in post-1991 India, which includes the revitalisation of a hybrid fantastic, there are multiple movements made in the direction of a complex and sophisticated literary landscape. Authors, like Samit Basu, Payal Dhar, Ashwin Sanghi, and graphic artists, like Appupen, have brought into their narrative worlds, a familiarisation with Hindu mythology and a sharp relationship between text and image, in order to uncover the fantastic violence that sanitised official cultures conceal in their literary and visual output. ShwetaTaneja’s trilogy, first published in 2015, is an expert mixing of the genres of detective fiction, horror, and fantasy. The protagonist is Anantya Tantrist, a female practitioner of tantrism, who helps the Delhi Police investigate supernatural crime in the Indian national capital, New Delhi. Cult of Chaos is her first foray into the trilogy. As we shall see, it is an amalgam of many genres and destabilising elements that undercut Orientalism and undermine any idyll that can potentially persist in the imagination of magic and trauma in contemporary India. This paper makes a twofold argument. The first is that the Indian novel is perennially involved with the mixing of genres. The second is a focus on re-orientalisation of tropes associated with the exotic East, as enumerated by Said and consequent commentators. There are two sections in this paper. The first, designated as ‘Genre’, places Taneja’s work in two histories of intermixing, indeed the twin histories that her work is indebted to—the histories of linear instability in colonial cultures of print, and the uneven ‘editorial complex’ (Delany 1987) that the Western literary output reveals in the 20th century. The second section, called ‘Rendition’, closely reads moments in Taneja’s text, Cult of Chaos, to see how these twin histories play out in her work. The paper then concludes with some exploratory observations. 80

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I. Genre The culture of books emerged in existing sites and patterns of shared leisure: whether women’s sessions during hours of rest, or joint trips to market fairs, or after-work community singing by migrant workers living together in the city. Francesca Orsini’s Pleasure and Print is an excellent elaboration on cultures of print in 19th and early 20th century North India. She informs us that books as objects, and later books as novels, ‘infiltrated’ extant sites of storytelling, oral and performative. The theatre and its contiguous motions are an important part of how print persuaded the upwardly mobile of its cultural ascendancy. For Orsini, there is a clear move to make print pleasurable in a nascent print culture and the genres it uses—the Hinduised dastan, the barahmasa, the detective novel—feed into the powerful impulse operating in the scenario. Admittedly, Orsini does not discuss ‘pleasure’ at length, but her aim is not to discuss pleasure. It is to think about parallel histories with ‘pleasure’ as a point of entry. Indeed, pleasure and leisure cannot be severed from an understanding of the passage of print in South Asia. Orsini underscores this when she discusses Chandrakanta, which becomes a print phenomenon soon after it is published and ensures that the author, Devakinandan Khatri, has a long prolific career. Speaking of the naturalisation and adaptation of ethos performed by Devakinandan Khatri for Chandrakanta, Francesca Orsini opines, ‘I would like to suggest that the “thrill of familiarity”, added to the “thrill of the marvelous”, contributed in great measure to the success of the novel.’ In her chapter on Chandrakanta, Orsini proves that the ethos of the dastan is successfully adapted to a North Indian context and ends the chapter by arguing that a transposition of the dastan from Persia to a fictional Rajput setting involves the insertion of peculiarly Hindu elements. For example, the aiyyar or the trickster, the source of plot mobility and disguise in a dastan is changed. One of the many aiyyars in Chandrakanta is a Brahmin priest in the service of a king. Aiyyars in the traditional dastan are not priests. What is notable, however, is the emphasis on thrill or suspenseful narrative pleasure. There is thrill in recognition of familiar forms and locales as both the dastan and the Rajput codes of courtly warfare enjoyed popularity in North India at the time. This is complemented by the thrill of a breach in consensual reality. The magic world of tilism is explained by way of mechanics: when hit in a particular fashion, stone slabs reveal secret doors and chambers; long tunnels are actually excavated in the rocks, secret

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Horror Fiction in the Global South doors can be opened with special locks and hidden knobs. (Orsini 2009)

At the same time, the adaptation is neither easy nor straight forward. Tilism, the clearest demonstration of marvelous magic in the dastan, is ‘explained’ in Chandrakanta. In other words, and Orsini is quick to clarify this, there is an attempt to use the supernatural tilism for narrative pleasure. It pervades the atmosphere of the text as characters find themselves shackled by powerful tilisms. It is only at the end that the supernatural is explained in terms of mechanics, i.e., naturally occurring phenomena. Thus, a story like Chandrakanta depends on the supernatural, but is careful to nominally exorcise it as it concludes. This is not to say that this betrays a desire to comment on faith and belief systems. But it betrays other contending desires: the desire to appeal to readerly pleasure and at the same time, owing to codes of novelistic import, rethink narrative ‘accountability’. Orsini cautions us about making sharp generalisations about narrative and genre. Writing about the ‘import’ of the detective novel, or what came to be known as the jasusupanyasi in North India, she confirms that ‘disguises’ and the ability to formulate hypotheses and decipher clues … constituted the basic template, but several novels displayed some “generic instability” (McKeon) and included elements pertaining to other genres. The “head-to-toe” (nakhshikh) description of the beautiful captive heroine (or of the vamp) borrowed conventions from erotic poetry; the life-story of a goonda borrowed from fashionable “confession” narratives, while love interludes introduced motives from contemporary social and romantic novels. (Orsini 2009)

The pursuit of pleasure in print demands that generic boundaries be blurred, and source materials be repurposed. We see that the novel and the dastan are imperative elements in a history of print. It is also worthwhile to note that adaptation affects ‘generic instability’ as well. It is difficult to claim purity of genres as pleasure is paramount. This instability is evident in contemporary accounts of the genres of horror, fantasy and science fiction (SF) as well. The relation (between SF and fantasy) goes back to the happy accident that Amazing Stories, a SF magazine, and Weird Tales, a fantasy outlet, were founded at approximately the same time in the 1920s. Add to this the accident of H.P. Lovecraft’s interest in using both SF and fantasy forms to tell a horror story.... (Delany 1987)

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Samuel R. Delany, in a small retrospective chapter, ‘Gestation of Genres’ (1987), notes the muddying of categories arising in the literary marketplace, out of what he calls an ‘editorial complex’. According to Delany, the 20th century creates synthetic genres out of older categories, like Romance and Gothic. While his primary argument is clear, and novelistic commentators like McKeon would ratify this, it is instructive to notice another detail: the birth of genres like SF and fantasy lies in an elaboration of horror by Lovecraft. An intimate connection between what is now called ‘speculative’ and the horrific is established. I am looking for the form or mode that interacts with fantasy, and must conclude that science fiction, with its sequential patterns of growing up, of leaving home, is not it. That form is rather horror, the nightside to our homecomings. I do not want to discuss fantasy and science fiction then, but fantasy and horror. The child and the home comprise their joint generic space. (Pernicone 1987)

Celeste Pernicone also arrives at a similar position. Although for her, there is an inextricable relationship between fantasy and horror through the figure of the child. The child’s fantasy and the child’s horror, seen as symptomatic of larger bodies of work, compel the genres to work together, as if each is the obverse of the other and may be found unexpectedly in either.

II. Rendition Beauty is a handicap to any tantric, especially a detective tantric and exponentially worse if she happens to be female. (Taneja 2014)

As Taneja weaves the rituals and practices of tantrism in her work, there is a clear attempt to render it contemporary. Anantya Tantrist, the protagonist, perceives a gendered awareness of her position in contemporary Delhi. Taneja’s writing insists on a reimagination of fantastic horror across temporal difference. The adaptation and transposition mentioned in the first section is clearly visible here. By inserting a wry comment on feminine beauty in Anantya Tantrist’s first person monologue, Taneja wrings the past into the present. The lines quoted above deserve attention, because they echo discussions of clanbased heterosexist magical power in 20th century feminist debates. I argue that there is strategic employment of the tropes of Orientalism in Taneja’s oeuvre. One of the consequences of crafting a contemporary

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tale is to interrogate the relations of production that make the thrilling fantastic possible. And we see Taneja making a fruitful attempt to highlight these relations, make the novel amenable to a realisation of these relations and perform an opposition to them. She had taught me tantrism, her style. Taught me how to delve into my own shakti. Taught me dignity, taught me to be confident and love my body. She had untaught everything that the Kaulas had drilled into me for years. Everything that said helplessness, that said need. (Taneja 2014)

Here, Tantrist relates her redemption in retrospect. Her journey from a state of need to a state of independence is imagined as her harvesting her own shakti, in contrast to a male tantric using her body for shakti, with impunity. The novel, as I will discuss later, displays signs of generic and intertextual awareness and thus intervenes in a reworking of tropes. As in the tropes of love harvested from ‘contemporary social novels’ in colonial print history, Taneja’s 2014 novel labours similarly. Taneja also brings to our attention another contemporary concern: the ritualistic sacrifice of living creatures to enable the tantric to perform fantastic manipulations of space and time. Tantrist doubts her practice and the motivations for sacrifice. ‘How was I so different from that man who had sacrificed someone for something too? The ritualistic act of sacrifice had been the same. Only, he had done it to a little girl, his daughter, while I did it to animals’ (2014). This is in context of a debate that permeates the trilogy, the sacrifice of young women, sexual and physical, to harness their sexual energy that the main group of tantriks are guilty of. Tantrist is a victim herself band relives the trauma in every part of the trilogy. The author’s intention to render an indigenous fantastic temporal is clearly at work here: the protagonist is a survivor of such rituals and has conscientiously substituted human sacrifice with animal sacrifice. It is thus that she encounters the philosophical nuances between the sacrifice of girls and animals. In other words, the novel does not simply use plot sequences to create scenarios where it is possible for the reader to observe a reworking, but it also consciously reads the past in terms of the present. ‘You do your best, you fag,’ cried Nasty. ‘And you, filthy chandaali, I will find you and slowly squeeze your vagina dry for this. And I will enjoy every bit of it’ (Taneja 2014). This is an uncomfortable moment in the text: more than one expletive operates here. Derogation unites many identities in one sentence. The speaker is Narahara, Anantya Tantrist’s half-brother, who yells these lines in frustration. Tantrist’s immediate boss is a ‘diversity hire’ at the CBI. He is homosexual; the

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story imagines that the Supreme Court has prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and has called for affirmative action. Chandaali is a caste slur, and Taneja uses it knowingly to emphasise the unfair distribution of labour and pain that is inherent in the use of power, in this case magic. The text tells us chandaalis are supernatural creatures who can be used for the mesmerising shakti that can be extracted by having sex with them. They are held enslaved by tantrics. The blood of a chandaali is one of the most potently magical liquids in the universe of the story. Tantrist is called a chandaali here to emphasise her femaleness, her presumed position of sexual and physical subservience to male tantrics. Taneja stubbornly uses the conventions of horrific descriptions to undercut them. The body is endemic to the text. But in Taneja’s usage, nudity becomes a tool to uncover the painful nudity of power: ‘No one in the ashram was your friend. Even Neel, your lover. Like me, like your father, all he wanted was the moist shakti that oozed from between your legs. But you were so infatuated with that idiot’ (2014). These words are said by Riju Das, Anantya Tantrist’s former friend and antagonist in this novel. Riju Das represents many aspects of the status quo that Taneja critiques, but his deception and final revelation is meant to signal the depth to which Tantrist’s subculture is toxic. ‘His tongue got a chance to slobber at me again like a giant dog. Although I tried to take a discreet step back, I was too late, and it licked me from breasts to hairline’ (Taneja 2014). This is a tongue stitched to the back of Tantrist’s helper, who has literally stitched himself together using body parts obtained from cemeteries. But the tongue has an embodied mind of its own and licks Tantrist perpetually. Descriptions of bodily acts are peppered across the text, which is part of the atmospherics of thrill that Taneja employs. We notice the matter-offact intonation of this description of a violation. It seems the narrative also uses pleasure. As did early novels of detection and dastan, which lay the foundations of supernatural thrill, possibly to persuade and create a body of readers. Even if that means the exorcism of the supernatural by the end. Taneja refuses to exorcise narrative pleasure. She persistently uses it, intent on displaying the ambiguity of pleasure itself. Her work is the work of a sedulous storyteller who is comfortable in her art, and who unpacks the story of the art itself. It is important to discuss the code of willing suspension of disbelief here. It is a conventional critical concept invoked in tales of the fantastic. But there is something more at work here. In a conventionally realist setting, a scene where a character urinates on a prone woman is liable to be a violent act, with consequences for the reader and the writer. ‘Dark, smelly, hot liquid spurted on my face and neck, my breasts and legs. Bloody

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rakshasa had just peed on me. Didn’t I say I had a vial of rakpiss in my snakebone locket? Yup, rakshasa’s piss’ (Taneja 2014). The urine of a demon is imagined as possessing restorative and healing powers, which justifies this act upon the body of a wounded and bloodied Anantya Tantrist. This scene is possible and comprehendible, only after a certain element of accord between the reader and the writer is performed. That is the function of genre—it eases the expectations between writers and audiences. Here, Taneja relies on a genre that implies female subjection, especially in its historical roots in the Gothic. This is also why we may argue for a re-employment of a strategic orientalism, that ruptures earlier notions of power, as a commentary on the past as well as the present. The East as the site of heady genres, bodies, bodily contact and pleasures is perpetually referenced in the text. And yet, as we see, there is a tradition of reconfiguring extant ways of seeing. ‘Dhuma squatted on top of the pyre of rotten and dead things and shat on it to mark the beginning of the ritual’ (Taneja 2014). Dhuma is Anantya Tantrist’s teacher, a fellow tantric, and the person who helps Anantya Tantrist become the confident powerful tantric she is. Dhuma, like other characters in the novel, lives beside a cemetery and engages in rituals that are frowned upon by the men of the most prominent tantric clan, the Kaulas (the group that ousts Anantya after violating her). Dhuma’s defecation on ‘the rotten and the dead’ is a double grotesque, defecation of the defecated. It is not just a description of a collection of gross bodily expulsion, but also its ritualistic harvest through human waste. There is another kind of pleasure here. In fact, the grosser the text shows itself to be, the more pleasurable the narrative makes it. There seems to be a play of the erotics of disgust here, made clearer in the following passage. The saccharine smell of garbage and rotting flesh rose, heavy and heady. I breathed deeply, without recoiling, the pure smell of the foul and the terrible. I had never felt more alive as I did then, breathing in the freshly drained blood, holding the baby’s white, bloodless, stiff dead body. The living and the dead. Who would she choose to come into?

Pleasure and disgust find themselves intimately intertwined. This ensures a muddying of genres and a careful deployment of genres to comment on each other. Commentary, direct and indirect, informs the fabric of the text. Before I conclude this paper, I want to briefly discuss two related aspects which make visible the redeployment I mention in the second section of this paper. A textual self-awareness, which also translates

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into moments of breakdown of the heterosexist order by alluding to homosexuality in varied guises is palpable. Most hands shot up. Not mine. Vampires had become part of the popular culture recently with books and films dedicated to them. There had been a case recently when a boy had reported a vampire sighting and I had gone to investigate, only to discover that it was just a little ghoul. (Taneja 2014)

The book displays an awareness of textual travel within the text. It is an allusion to the stupendous popularity of Twilight, which has burgeoned into a popular culture phenomenon. While this is visible in the works of writers like Samit Basu and Payal Dhar as well, Taneja is careful to deftly add a tiny yet significant detail: ‘it was just a little ghoul’. Vampires, autochthonous as well as imported, confront the ‘little ghoul’. This is certainly a self-aware moment in the text, but it seems a self-awareness of the act of mixing traditions and genres itself, as one artistic element is chosen over another. This confirms the hypothesis that Taneja’s work is intensely aware of artistic choices. Thus, it is imperative to understand her text as strategic. As we do so, it becomes easy to read her work as demonstrating productive uses of ‘generic instability’. Taneja does not shy away from a consideration of consensus reality either. Anantya Tantrist’s monologue is punctuated by moments where she or her colleagues display doubts and uncertainty over what they experience in the novel. ‘What the hell was it about that Shukra fellow that had irked me so much anyway? It wasn’t as if I hadn’t met assholes who considered tantrism pure fantasy fiction. I had had enough of rational thinkers who thought reality was only what they experienced’ (Taneja 2014). Tantrist’s thoughts glide to the inadequacy of trusting human faith in verifiable reality, which itself perhaps may be revealed to as ‘pure fantasy fiction’. Indeed, Shukra, the individual mentioned here, is made to rethink his entire scientific temper by the end, as his body experiences effects of the tantrism practiced around him by the antagonists. I have argued that the novel veers towards a reorientalisation, as if the incriminating characteristics of Said’s Orient are reworked for contemporary India, and all the tropes of a marvelously magical and gratuitously violent East are brought to a different stage. ‘What do people come to the ashram to learn? Sexual positions? Asked Madhu, picking up one of the small-sized statues on the table, again a pose from the Kamasutra, and examining it’ (Taneja 2014). Even though the immediate impetus for Madhu’s surprise is the Osho parody of spiritual sexuality, peddled by the ashram (run by Tantrist’s father, one

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of her tormentors), the ashram is written about like a den of corruption and enforced obedience. It is no surprise that spiritual cults, which after Osho have been scrutinised by the media for marketing a utopia that is embedded in international cash flows, are also juxtaposed with the Kama Sutra, another export to the West that has garnered inordinate attention after Richard Burton’s translation, and specifically after the early 21st century rediscovery of the text. Tapati Guha Thakurta devotes a chapter to the enlarged photographs of Khajuraho sculptures that reinforced the deviancy of the mysterious East (2004). In sharp contrast to the contemporary interest in Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra, which does not create enough space for queer sexualities (despite the hints in Burton’s translation), Cult of Chaos draws our attention to other sexualities almost by chance. Almost casually, the novel reminds us of a fluid sexuality that moves painfully underneath the perils and strictures of modernity. ‘Finally, the nagin stood in front of me, butt-naked and nauseatingly beautiful’ (Taneja 2014). This is Anantya Tantrist, who finds the nagin beautiful despite herself. This will become a running theme in Taneja’s novels: the intentional play with gender, dissolution of body and identity. ‘I cried over the screaming whirlpool of electricity that rotated around Riju, who stood, with his arms spread wide and screaming: “Come to me, my lord!”’ (Taneja 2014). Another example of homoeroticism, where Riju, the actively heterosexual deceiver, begs for attention from his Lord, Kolahal, the Lord of Chaos. Kolahal will enter his mouth, as Riju stands with arms wide open. The sexually potent imagery is obvious. Riju, the masculine mastermind of the nefarious plot, is now the ecstatic recipient of his lord’s essence and being. Passages and plot points, which visibly invoke homosexuality, are another element of the contemporary. The intrusion of the contemporary and the invocation of fantastic horror then walk together in fiction across time in the Indian subcontinent. There is no doubt that Taneja’s project is separate from the 19th century fantasy that characterized Devakinandan Khatri’s agenda. Time and context have changed. The point of this comparison is not to imply that their styles or peculiar novelistic concerns are the same. What emerges from a comparison is the creative imperative of self-consciously modern storytelling that necessitates fluidity of form and genre.

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Works Cited Delany, Samuel R. 1987. ‘The Gestation of Genres: Literature, Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy…’. Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by George Slusser and Eric Rabkin. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Lau, Lisa and Ana Cristina Mendes, eds. 2011. Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Order Within. Routledge. Orsini, Francesca. 2009. Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fiction in Colonial North India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Pawling, Christopher, ed. 1984. Popular Fiction and Social Change. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Pernicone, Celeste. 1987. ‘Homecoming: Fantasy and Horror’. Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by George Slusser and Eric Rabkin. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. Vintage. Taneja, Shweta. 2014. Cult of Chaos. Noida: HarperCollins. ———. 2017. The Matsya Curse. Noida: HarperCollins. ———. 2018. The Rakta Queen. Noida: HarperCollins. Thakurta, Tapati Guha. 2004. Monuments, Objects, Histories. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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7 The Corporeality of Horror: SpectREs of War Victims in the Post-2003 Gothic Narratives from Iraq Sushrita Acharjee The cultural form of the horror genre has often been utilised as a vehicle to convey disturbing emotions, images, relations and even unstable sociopolitical landscape. Although, from time immemorial, horror as a primal emotion has been a central component in ancient texts, folk narratives, ballads, religious scriptures and so on, horror in literature gains an emphatic ‘malignity’ through the emergence of European Gothic tradition in the late 18th century (Lovecraft 1973). The Gothic genre which had initially developed as a critique of European Enlightenment rationality, foregrounded an aesthetic of liminality between reason/frenzy, being/non-being, good/evil, light/ darkness, beauty/ugliness and the like. The Gothic subject, in contrast to the enlightened man, is ever exposed to such liminality, forms of ambiguity—fear, desire, awe, as well as forms of irrationality— madness, melancholia, frenzy. Spatiality and atmospheric disposition are two ingredients that function as catalysts provoking ambiguity and irrationality as well as conjuring the negative, yet alluring, sensation of fear, terror and horror in the Gothic subject and the reader alike. Non-European sites and landscape have commonly been exoticised as the locus of horror, the macabre and the grotesque, especially after Galland’s early 18th century French translation of Arabian Nights, which resulted in the exposure of places such as Baghdad and Damascus for the occidental eye (Lovecraft 1973). In the 19th century context of the Empire and cultural expansionism, the European Gothic tradition thrived by integrating ‘colonial settings, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening’ with the experience of fear of the unknown (Paravisini-Gebert 2002). It has liberally incorporated and often misappropriated the belief systems of the colonies by popularising horror tropes of cannibalism, divergent sexual behaviour, sacrificial pagan rituals, native spirits, supernatural creatures and so on. For instance, the anonymous 90

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two-volume Gothic fiction  Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), set in Jamaica, and Marcus Clarke’s Gothic novella, The Mystery of Major Molineux (1881), set in Australia, seem to represent, through the point of view of the settlers, ‘the gothicising of the settler-colony as a site of repression’ (McCann 2000). The contemporary Gothic tradition, both in critical theory and praxis, problematises the interrelation between colonial rule and the violence perpetrated on the colonised by unveiling the repressed byproducts of colonialism—the memory of violence, trauma and disorientation of the colonised as well as the guilt of the settlers (McCann 2000). In postcolonial Gothic texts, the repressed victims of the colony return in forms of spectres or monsters, bloodthirsty and vengeful, as the narratives traverse pertinent questions, under the rubric of fictionality, associated with the haunting consequences of colonialism— violence and terror that cannot be enunciated in rational terms. Post2003 Iraqi fiction gains its currency from the postcolonial Gothic tradition, which counters the Western grand narrative of ‘othering’ the people of the colony by subverting the European gothic conventions and tropes. Some of the most prominent features of post-2003 Iraqi fiction, marking the downfall of the Saddam Hussein regime and the beginning of stringent US occupation, constitute detailed, recurrent and objective descriptions of human corpses, which contribute to the macabre element of the Gothic aesthetic. The Frankensteinian monster in Ahmed Saadawi’s novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), whose body has been configured with the dismembered remains of Iraqi citizens, the djinn in Hassan Blasim’s short story, ‘The Hole’ (2014), who feasts on human corpses, or the walking dead in Lu’ay Hamza Abbas’ short story, ‘A Much Traveled Man’ (2013), whose throat has been slaughtered and whose eyes are covered with a thick, white film, affectively induce fear and disgust. These narratives render corporeality to the abject and grotesque reality of Iraq and its colonised people by producing monsters who defy and deny scientific symmetry, common knowledge and cultural categories, culminating in the cathartic feelings of fear and disgust. The monsters of these fictional texts emerge very much from the real plane, victimised by colonisation, war and foreign occupation; those who are killed return in grotesque forms of the monsters, but those who remain alive within the arena of tremendous oppression are exposed to a disembodied horror, which is rooted in realistic incidents. The Gothic aesthetic propels the subjects to confront repressed trauma, taboo and negative emotions; they are haunted by ‘the Unconscious’ as the reservoir of repressed memory as well as by ‘the Unconscious’ as a symbolic site, where social and historical conflicts are buried in the deep recesses of their minds (Hogle 2002).

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In Sinan Antoon’s novel, The Corpse Washer (2013), Jawad’s repressed trauma finds manifestations in the recurrent nightmares of his own murder in the hands of the military and the sexual violation of his lover, which evoke sensations of fear, anxiety and disgust all the same, despite the lack of monstrous figures. Evidently, many of these post-2003 Iraqi texts, I would contend in the essay, encompass a striking balance between natural horror and ‘art-horror’ (Carroll 1990), with the former often functioning as the instigator for the latter, i.e., affects induced by the tropes and generic conventions of horror. Politically, these texts ultimately succeed in constructing a counter-discourse in resistance to the totalitarian regimes and colonial occupations.  Carroll envisages the monsters of art-horror as being not only frightening, but also filthy, slimy, grotesque, disgusting and decaying, rising from the marginal, abandoned, discreet sites, such as, graveyards, abandoned houses, morgues—sites that fall beyond the classifications of normative sociocultural life. He draws up the most befitting example to substantiate the nature of the emotional response that the creator of the monster, looks upon the horrid creature and remarks, ‘... but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart’ (Shelley 1998). Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad conceives a monster that rises from the ‘Jewish Ruin’, an ancient decrepit building, and is similarly abject and repulsive in its manifestation. The monster is depicted as a naked man, with viscous liquids, light in colour, oozing from parts of it.... It was hard to say what colour the skin was—it didn’t have a uniform colour.... The area where the nose should have been was badly disfigured, as if a wild animal had bitten a chunk out of it. (Saadawi 2013)

The body of the Frankensteinian monster is stitched together with the remains of the dismembered Iraqis who have lost their lives in war, during the US invasion or in the torture dungeons. It harbours the soul of a young man named Hasib, whose body is mutilated in an explosion: ‘In a coffin, they put his burned black shoes; his shredded, bloodstained clothes; and small charred parts of his body. There was little left of Hasib Mohammad Jaafar; the coffin that was taken to the cemetery in Najaf was more of a token’ (Saadawi 2013). The objective, unceremonial description of corpses killed in the US invasion and/or militant terrorism may evoke a sense of natural horror, but it simultaneously induces nausea, anxiety, fear and disgust in the reader—compound negative responses that are functional only in the realm of art-horror, as Carroll1 seems to claim. Justin Marozzi records that the approximate death toll of Iraqi civilians fell between 114,000 and 50,000 during the

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US occupation since 2003. There would be corpses lying unattended on the streets of Iraq on a daily basis at that time. During the insurgency of sectarian militants, mutilated, tortured bodies would be found in public places. The bodies would often have signs of gruesome torture, such as, cigarette burns on the skin, electric drill holes in limbs, skulls, gouged out eyes and so on (Marozzi 2015). The evocation of these violated bodies in the form of monsters or disembodied spirits seeking their bodies to return to them bridges the gap between natural and arthorror. Beyond the story of a Frankensteinian monster, there is a larger allegory of the ‘What’s its name’, as Jonathan Wright has translated the Arabic word, shoo ismo, representing the very nation-state of Iraq that has been stitched together with the dismembered bodies of the citizens who have been sacrificed first in Hussein’s nation-building mission during the Ba’athist regime, and later, during the US-led war on terror. The djinn of Blasim’s short story, ‘The Hole’, does not instigate immediate disgust in the reader: His face was dark and rough, like a loaf of barley bread. A decrepit old man. His torso was naked. He was sitting on a small bench, with a dirty sheet on his thighs. Next to him there were some sacks and some old junk. If he hadn’t moved his head like a cartoon character, he would have looked like an ordinary beggar.

It is when he ‘crawled on his knees towards the body of the soldier and started cutting out chunks of flesh and eating them’ that the reader feels nauseated and so does the narrator, the fictive witness of this sight. The djinn is ever-changing, as it assumes the shape of the next person who falls into the hole, a purgatory-like limbo, where the narrator falls into, while trying to escape the onslaught of three masked men with guns. The haunted hole, seemingly detached from the real world, offers a historical perspective that leads one to ponder upon the nature of injustice, cruelty and lack of good will in human beings: ‘…everyone who visits the hole soon learns how to find out about events of the past, the present, and the future…’ (Blasim 2014). The narrator learns that the century-old, cannibalistic, malicious djinn was an educator, author and a scientist, who invented lanterns in the time of the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, and later fell into the hole while being chased by thieves and robbers who were aggravated by his contribution to the illumination of the city. The hole functions as a non-space where the inhabitants are anonymous and are trapped into abstractness—into the memory and consciousness of the wrongs perpetrated on them and of the perennial war of human beings against each other.  The djinn offers an insightful observation on this: ‘Anyone who’s looking

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for a way out of here also has to develop the art of playing; otherwise they’ll remain a ghost like me, happy with the game…’ (Blasim 2014). The corporeality of the supernatural creature is significant in these instances, because the body, however repulsive it may be, has a history of being brutalised by an oppressive force; the face of the monsters and spectres symbolises the ‘ghoulish face of empire’ (Hedges 2014). These monstrous bodies, victimised by war and terror, have culturally become representatives of ‘… an ungrievable life … one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived’ (Butler 2009); they are not worthy of being mourned or grieved especially from the perspective of those who wage war or are responsible for their death, and for whom they have been invisible even in their lifetime. The body of the monster deviates from the ‘social bodies’ in the Foucauldian sense of the term, as it belongs to ‘the crowded terrain of embodied others’.2 These ‘frightening others’ (Paravisini-Gebert 2002) who remain in liminal states, ‘betwixt and between’ (Beal 2002) the living and the dead indeed arouse fear, disgust and nausea, as they threaten established structure, normative representation and power equilibrium; yet, the disfigured, grotesque body of the monster and its inhuman behaviour makes the injustice and violence perpetrated on it during its lifetime unforgettable: ‘Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.’3 One, thus, may not be able to rationalise its acts of revenge, but may very well sympathise with the reasons behind its return to haunt ‘the secure citadel of consciousness’ (Kearney 2002). It is this irrepressible drive towards revenge that incites the eccentric individual named Hadi to take up the project of constructing the Frankensteinian monster, as he wishes, post his friend Nahem’s death in a bomb explosion, to immortalise those who have been killed unfairly. It is, therefore, that the shoo ismo, maddened by its noble mission of avenging the death of everyone who has contributed to the making of its body, continues his frenzied slaughter across the country, creating in consequence, an atmosphere of terror. The repressed violence of the colonial occupation, thus, resurfaces in the shape of the monsters, ghosts, grotesques or, as Julia Kristeva reflects, ‘abject’, created to embody contradictions (Hogle 2002). The abject creature, in contrast to the ‘object of desire’ which endows the individual with the ability to associate with the symbolic order of meaning, is located at a juncture where meaning collapses (Kristeva 1982). The abject triggers the reconfiguration of the primal repression which manifests itself in Gothic narratives, in the shape of supernatural creatures or in the forms of nightmarish vision, occult practice, uncanny atmosphere and mise en scène functioning as the objective correlative, surreal or hyper-real element, and the like.  Atmospheric horror in post-2003 Iraqi fiction succeeds in evoking a sense of claustrophobic spatiality

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congested with corpses, severed body parts, bombshells, devastated buildings and debris from explosion,  as the living beings revolve around sites smelling of gunpowder, dust, smoke and burnt flesh: ‘The smell suddenly hit his nostrils—the smoke, the burning of plastic and seat cushions, the roasting of human flesh. You wouldn’t have smelled anything like it in your life and would never forget it’ (Saadawi 2013). These lines from Frankenstein in Baghdad illustrate the nature of horror in an all-encompassing manner, by capturing the senses of the fictive onlooker as well as of the reader on olfactory, auditory and visual levels. Besides the realistic depiction of the haunting atmosphere of death and decay, the motifs of occult practice and irrational, hyperreal occurrence heighten the Gothic aesthetic of these texts. The European Gothic tradition, especially in the Victorian era, was fascinated with the occult and the paranormal operating beyond the ‘threshold of the civilised rational mind, tapping into primal energies and unconscious resources as well as into deep-rooted anxieties and fears’ (Arata 1990). While the ‘imperial Gothic’4 fiction of the West would misappropriate the native occultist belief system of the colony to often channel the anxiety of reverse colonisation, postcolonial Gothic narratives written from the perspective of the colonised take refuge of the occult to make meaning of the irrational violence and unpredictability. The helplessness that the people of Iraq experience in the hands of unpredictable, powerful forces propels them to put their faith in occult practices and supernatural powers or baraka. Several post-2003 Iraqi texts feature characters who seemingly have special ability to receive visions of the future or premonitions from some higher power. The old woman Elishva, in Frankenstein in Baghdad, who lives a solitary life in a dark, ancient house with a cat and speaks to saints, is considered by her neighbours to be a clairvoyant endowed with baraka.  Hassan Blasim’s short stories often ironically portray the limitations or failure of such occult power in the face of a larger, more ruthless power of the state, of terrorist forces and foreign militia. Daniel in Blasim’s short story, ‘The Iraqi Christ’ is conferred the title of ‘Iraqi Christ’ because he is endowed with a miraculous ability to predict impending perils. Ironically, however, this special ability could not save him from being taken as a hostage by a suicide bomber who forces him to wear the explosive belt in his place, while in return he promises that he would safely move Daniel’s old, disabled mother away from the restaurant where the kamikaze bombing must take place. Ultimately, the chronicle of terrorism, colonisation, dictatorship and military occupation affects the psychological disposition of the people of Iraq to the extent that the memory of violence and subsequent trauma repressed in the ‘Unconscious’ manifests itself in the elements of horror and uncanny.

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Sinan Antoon’s novel, The Corpse Washer, through the pervasive graphic description of corpses gives rise to this sense of abject and of the horrific that is deeply rooted in the social reality of a than atopolitical regime. The mghaysil or morgue owned by Jawad’s family functions as a microcosm of the nation-state of Iraq, which has been transformed into a mass grave in the wake of the Iraq–Iran war (1980–1988), the Gulf war (1990–1991) and the US war on terror (since 2001). A corpse is a supreme example of the abject, as it creates a disjunction between the individual subject and the stable symbolic order of identity and meaning to which the individual is associated: ‘The corpse seen without God and outside of science is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject’ (Kristeva 1982). The trauma of witnessing a human corpse, especially one of a beloved, creates that disjunction; the subject is horrified by the proximity of her own ‘authentic death’.5 Jawad comes into regular contact with corpses, as he has no choice but to inherit the family business of corpse washing; the trauma of such consistent proximity to the abject that he represses in the ‘Unconscious’ finds outlet in the form of recurrent nightmares of his own decapitation: I feel a sharp pain, then the cold blade of the knife penetrating my neck. Hot blood spills over my chest and back. My head falls to the ground and rolls like a ball on the sand. I hear footsteps. One of the men takes off my blindfold and shoves it into his pocket. He spits in my face and goes away. I see my body to the left of the bench, kneeling in a puddle of blood. (Antoon 2013)

The vision of one’s own murder features in Lu’ay Hamza Abbas’ short story, ‘A Much Traveled Man’, too. The story is narrated in first person by the dead man himself, who has been the victim of undeserved violence on the outskirts of Baghdad. As a disembodied spirit, he sees his own slaughtered corpse surrounded by other corpses with ‘their heads severed from the bodies. Some heads have gaping eyes, and a thick white film begins to cover them’ (Abbas 2013); the helpless cries of the other bodies being slaughtered and decapitated make it unbearable for him to stay amidst the pile of corpses. The dead man rises and moves faster than the cars passing him by on his journey from Basra to Baghdad where his home is. As he enters his bedroom and lies down on the bed facing the ceiling, his wife enters the room and is horrified to find his corpse on the bed with his eyes covered in a thick, white film. The story functions on a surreal plane, as the borderline between fiction and reality, corporeality and disembodiment blurs, and so does the distinction between natural horror and art-horror. The short story borrows its elements of horror from the ground reality of

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the nation-state—irrational murder of the civilians both by militant groups and by the US army, and consequently, the abundance of dismembered, beheaded corpses. The incorporation of the walking dead with its slaughtered throat and eyes covered with thick, white film, who rises from the pile of corpses and returns home, only accentuates the irrationality and the sensation of fear and repulsion. The Gothic elements jar the reader out of the comfort zone and instigate her to face the gruesome reality, as the spectres of the victims return to offer counter-narratives against ruthless oppression (Azzam 2007). The locus of horror remains the war-torn, ancient land of Iraq, as horror stories are woven at war zones, military camps, inside trenches or in war affected areas. The interactive online forum, Your Ghost Stories, has published several real-life experiences of the Iraqi people or the US veterans deployed in Iraq. These narratives are set in army camps, wherein the authors proclaim to have witnessed spectral figures of spies, soldiers and civilians who have been killed by terrorist organisations or in the US invasions. The authenticity of these narratives is not so much of significance here as is the nature and register of the horrible; in these stories too, the effects of horror emerge from war, violence and subsequent trauma. These spectral visions may have been the manifestation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or the repressed anxiety of a reverse colonisation by ‘primitive forces’ and the cultural guilt of being complicit in the acts of violence on the colony and its people (Arata 1990). In a horror narrative titled ‘The Man Who Died for His Family’, written on the online forum, in the year 2013, by an army veteran of the US deployed in the Fob Anaconda army base, the narrator encounters the spectre of a local informant named Hazim the day after he was killed by a militant group on the account of his loyalty to the US army. The spectre of Hazim enters the army base following the usual protocols and hands over his badge to the narrator. The return of the spectre in this story may have been a figment of the army officer’s imagination, giving way to his repressed guilt and to his anxiety of being overpowered by incomprehensible, native forces. The spectre is, however, emblematic of a man who has had to bear the brunt of both foreign colonial occupation and the local oppressive terrorist force that has murdered him for betrayal. These contemporary horror narratives from Iraq ultimately offer corporeality to the disembodied, dismembered spectres of the victims who emerge from the pile of corpses killed by missiles, bombings, kamikaze attacks, years of war and colonial occupation, from the dungeons of Abu Ghraib prison, tortured, sexually violated, defiled and from the margins of the civil

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society that turns its back on these pained ghostly figures moving among the living in search of justice and liberation.

Endnotes 1.

Carroll remarks in the essay ‘Enjoying Horror Fictions’, as cited by Stuart Hanscomb in his essay ‘Existentialism and Art-Horror’: ‘The monster in Horror Fiction … is not only lethal but … also disgusting. Art-horror is the name Carroll gives to this “compound” emotion.’ 2. The Foucauldian idea of the ‘social bodies’ as developed by David G. Horn (1994) in Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity, pp. 3–4, as cited by Kathleen Canning (1999) in ‘The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History’, Gender & History, 11(3): 502. 3. See W.H. Auden. September 1, 1939, II, 22. 4. Wilt, Judith. 1981. ‘The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic and Science Fiction’. Journal of Popular Culture, 14: 620. She attributes the emergence of the classic gothic and science fiction texts of the 19th and early 20th century to Britain’s ‘imperial anxieties’. 5. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 299; ‘Authentic death’ can only be experienced through one’s own death while all other deaths that a person experiences in her lifetime fall secondary to that authentic death.

Works Cited Abbas, Lu’ay Hamza. 2013. ‘A Much Traveled Man’. In Closing His Eyes, translated by Yasmeen Hanoosh. London: Moments Digibooks Limited. Antoon, Sinan. 2013. The Corpse Washer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Arata, Stephen D. 1990. ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization’. Victorian Studies, 33(4): 621–645. Azzam, Julie Hakim. 2007. ‘The Alien Within: Postcolonial Gothic and Politics of Home’. PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Bahoora, Haytham. 2015. ‘Writing the Dismembered Nation: The Aesthetics of Horror in Iraqi Narratives of War’. The Arab Studies Journal, 23(1): 184–208. Beal, Timothy. 2002. Religion and its Monsters. London & New York: Routledge. Beardmore, Lydia. ‘Iraqi Sci-Fi: Post War Visions of Trauma and Change’. Available at https://bosphorusreview.com/why-you-should-read-iraqi-scifi (accessed on 5 March 2020). Blasim, Hassan. 2014. The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, translated by Jonathan Wright. New York: Penguin Books. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror. New York: Routledge.

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Carroll, Noël. 1987. ‘The Nature of Horror’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46(1): 51–59.  ———. 1995. ‘Enjoying Horror Fictions: A Reply to Gaut’. British Journal of Aesthetics, 35(1): 67.  Chia6251. ‘The Man Who Died For His Family’. Available at https://www. yourghoststories.com/real-ghost-story.php?story=18779 (accessed on 10 May 2020).  Deer, Patrick. 2017. ‘Beyond Recovery: Representing History and Memory in Iraq War Writing’. Modern Fiction Studies, 63(2): 312–335. Hanscomb, Stuart. 2010. ‘Existentialism and Art-Horror’. Sartre Studies International, 16(1): 1–23. Hedges, Chris. ‘The Ghoulish Face of Empire’. Available at https://www. truthdig.com/articles/the-ghoulish-face-of-empire/ (accessed on 5 March 2020). Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, pp. 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Kearney, Richard. 2002. On Stories. London: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.  Lovecraft, H.P. 1973. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.  Luckhurst, Roger. 2012. ‘In War Times: Fictionalising Iraq’. Contemporary Literature, 53(4): 713–737. Marozzi, Justin. 2015. Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Love. London: Penguin. Masmoudi, Ikram. 2015. War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McCann, Andrew. 2000. ‘Colonial Gothic: Morbid Anatomy, Commodification and Critique in Marcus Clarke’s the Mystery of Major Molineux’. Australian Literary Studies, 19(4): 399.  Motyl, K. and M. Arghavan. 2018. ‘Writing against Neocolonial Necropolitics: Literary Responses by Iraqi/Arab Writers to the US “War on Terror”’. European Journal of English Studies, 22(2): 128–141. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2002. ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerold E. Hogle, pp. 229–258. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saadawi, Ahmed. 2013. Frankenstein in Baghdad, translated by Jonathan Wright. New York: Penguin Books. Shelley, Mary. 1998. Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. E-Books Directory.  Smith, Andew. 2000. Gothic Radicalism: Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century. UK: Macmillan Press Ltd. Young, Robert J.C. 2011. ‘Terror Effects’. In Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, pp. 307–328. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

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8 The Spectral Witness in Contemporary Indian Horror Cinema Anhiti Patnaik The iconic Malayalam horror film Manichitrathazhu (1993) revolves around Ganga and Nakulan, a married couple who discover that their ancestral home is haunted. Their ancestor Sankaran Thampi had executed a courtesan Nagavalli, whose vengeful spirit begins attacking the family and possesses Ganga. In the memorable exorcism at the climax of the film, priests arrange for Ganga to execute an idol resembling Thampi. It is revealed there after that Ganga suffered from dissociative identity disorder, which caused her to identify with Nagavalli’s tragic story. Although there is no ‘real’ spectre in the film, Manichitrathazhu inaugurates a singular intimacy between the human and the non-human through the female body. It accomplishes this in the dramatic scenes where Ganga pursues and attacks her victims in the guise of Nagavalli. Strikingly, they are presented from Nagavalli’s spectral gaze, so that it appears as if the audience is in the position of the predator. Not only do we see through the eyes of the spirit, we become the spirit. The camera invites us to also identify with Nagavalli and encounter the horror story from the subaltern gaze of the female spectre. Similarly, the Hindi film Stree (2018) forges an empathic connection between the spectre and the spectator. ‘Stree’ is the moniker given to a female spirit who abducts men during a local festival in Madhya Pradesh. While global horror cinema has seen its fair share of monstrous women, from Regan, Bathsheba, and the Blair Witch in Hollywood to Makdee, chudels, and daayans in Bollywood, the aesthetic and ethical treatment of the female spectre in Stree is not only novel, but potentially radical. Stree deviates from Bollywood stereotypes of the monstrous feminine; the spectre is ‘padhi-likhi’ (literate), she respects sexual consent, and she can enter religious spaces like a ‘nastik’ (atheist). The character played by Rajkummar Rao does not care whether Stree is benevolent or demonic and is not invested in establishing whether the spirit exists or not. 103

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His comic unwillingness to acknowledge her presence in the first part of the film parodies Western procedurals based on quasi-Christian practices of exorcism or neo-colonial principles of empiricism. He even abandons his quest to destroy Stree, ‘Maarna zaroori haikya’ (‘Do we have to kill her?’). But the film’s remarkable singularity may be seen in the predatory scenes which, parallel to Manichitrathazhu, are shot from Stree’s perspective. The film commences with a dolly shot of the empty nocturnal streets of Chanderi. The camera zooms successively on locked doors and walls upon which are etched the dimly-illumined phrase ‘O Stree kal aana’ (‘Oh female spectre, come tomorrow’). When the camera ‘reads’ the inscription and pans out obediently from spaces that are marked by this sacral edict, it becomes clear that neither the spectre nor the audience may enter. What are the aesthetic and ethical implications then, of watching a horror film where the spectre is not a spectacle but a ‘specular’ subject like us? Who can validate what its dead, sightless ‘eyes’ may witness? It is worth interrogating whether contemporary Indian horror is evolving towards a kind of radical feminist aesthetic. By redefining spectrality and subalternity, is it curating the audience’s relationship to the monstrous feminine in new ethical directions?

I. Deconstructing Colonial Specularity The spectral camera in Stree revives a precolonial category of witnessing that challenges popular concepts of being and evidence in Western crime and horror cinema. By allying the audience to the female spectre at the outset, it engages in a feminist ‘spectropolitics’ unique to the lived experience of the Global South: First, there is the fact that these phenomena are culturally specific, with non-western traditions yielding considerably different epistemological frameworks and critical possibilities than the [W]estern conceptions that initially dominated the spectral turn. Second, it is vital to acknowledge that notions of spectrality may facilitate the understanding and addressing of not only historical injustices and their commemoration in personal and/or collective memory, but also of situations of injustice and disempowerment arising in and from a present characterised by diffuse processes of globalization. (Blanco and Peeren 2013)

In Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (1969), the sociolinguist Émile Benveniste identified a model of truth, specific to pre-

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colonial Indo-European cultures that addressed the paradox of a non-human witness. Ostensibly, a non-human entity like a ghost or spirit cannot narrate or witness an event, because it lacks presence or ‘being’. But Benveniste noted that the ghost often occupied the role of the elder, ancestor, or storyteller in Indo-European myths. The ghostly witness was a trope that went as far back as the prophetic spirits of Agamemnon’s dreams or the cold skeletal hands of Vetala, who threatens to throttle Vikramaditya if he cannot answer his riddles.1 Benveniste drew attention to the common root ‘testis’ of the Latin term ‘superestis’ from which the modern words ‘testimony’ and ‘superstition’ are derived.2 In his analysis, the evidence given by a non-human creature, like an animal, ghost, spirit or angel constituted a specific kind of testimony that was, ‘beyond or outside of the testamentum, not here or there, not present but a testimony that is beyond the here and now; the ghost, the elder, the storyteller, the angel’3 (cited in Bordo 2008). There was an ironic commonality between the words ‘testimony’—what counted as ‘truth’ in the West, and ‘superstition’—what counted as ‘truth’ in the East. However, specularity dominated the legal, empirical and evidentiary paradigms of Western culture by the 19th century, spreading to become the order of truth in a large part of the colonised world. Instead of the spectral or the supernatural, the specular witness promoted science. Instead of religion, it proposed rational and secular thought, and instead of hearsay, it elevated eye-witness statements to ‘truth’. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida analyses the importance that colonial law accorded to the material body and the material witness even in death. The ritual preference for interment contained the abject horror of the corpse by situating it in a grave with a labelled tombstone. By extending the ‘life’ of the body and allowing it to shed only its fleshly garb, interment upheld what Derrida calls the ‘fantasy of dying alive’. Conversely, cremation reduced the corpse to a pure state of nothingness, allowed the mourner to interiorise the finality of death, and was practised traditionally in Eastern cultures. Though lacking the corporeality of an interred body, ashes retained their trace value in the East and were often preserved in ornate urns or vessels. No matter whether the ghost story originated in the East or the West, the corpse possessed materiality and could not disappear without leaving a single trace or residue, ‘One does not have the right to make a corpse disappear, and there is no right to disappearance. The one whom one sometimes calls, in a touching euphemism, the departed [le disparuou la disparue], must on no account disappear without leaving a trace’ (Derrida 2011).

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Derrida observes how the corpse has, in and of itself, no legal rights like habeas corpus because it cannot be considered ‘human’. There is no such thing as ‘habeas corpse’ (Derrida 2011) as the corpse is precisely that body which cannot produce itself at court. By that logic, the legal subject of Anglo-Saxon culture had to relinquish their right to a thirdparty sponsor legal proxy. The common practice of making wills and last testaments gave a person the right to control how survivors would treat their body. A witness in colonial law was a (human) subject who saw the unfolding of an event and could testify in the absence of or in lieu of the body/victim/corpse. The word originates in the Old English ‘wit’ meaning wisdom or knowledge combined with the conditional verb ‘ness’.4 The congruent term ‘testimony’ derives from the Latin root teste that means evidence, token or the mark of a fact, as well as the French témoin that deals with empirical vision. The witness was valuable mainly for specularity: its ability to see and reflect. The emphasis on exorcism and ghostbusting in horror genres of Hollywood may well be a legacy of this colonial insistence on specularity as ‘truth’. Carlo Ginzburg claims that a ‘model of medical semiotics’ (Ginzburg 1980) underpins Western culture, beginning with the work of prominent figures, like Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud. These 19thcentury representatives of masculine and scientific exceptionalism valorised an epistemology based on ‘clues’.5 Camera work in horror films like The Blair Witch Project (1999), Paranormal Activity (2007) and The Conjuring (2013) rely heavily on this evidentiary model of witnessing. Ghosts exist mostly as a phenomenal or paranormal reality, or an epiphenomenal experience of the specular witness. The protagonists of Paranormal Activity, for instance, invest in a hidden camera precisely because they are unable to witness the inexplicable occurrences in their home. Micah replies, ‘But we’re having it documented, it’s going to be fine, OK?’ in response to Katie’s question, ‘Are you not scared?’ Cecelia Sayad discusses the evidentiary aesthetics of Paranormal Activity in its use of a diegetic camera, raw cuts, elliptical narrative, shaky footage, and precariously framed scenes that imitate amateur pornography. There is a distinctive effect of veracity and reassurance produced by this specular aesthetic that tries to ‘prove’ the presence of the ghost. However, the camera affords the audience only an ‘illusion of control’ (Sayad 2016). Micah also needs a microphone and audio recorder to translate spectral breathing and monstrous grunts into measurable soundwaves. The hidden camera, left to its own device, only records that which Micah and Katie cannot see during sleep. It fails to capture even a speck of light, a silhouette, face, figure or any Ginzburgian ‘trace’ of the spectre, so much so that ‘the nearly scientific dissection

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of the filmed images and sounds by Micah and Katie contrasts with the unruly nature of the entity’ (Sayad 2016). Consequently, the audience also remains in the dark about what they did (or did not) witness. Films like Paranormal Activity push the limits of cinema vérité by questioning whether a camera can see what the human eye cannot, whether a ‘specular witness’ is more qualified than an ocular witness to give testimony. There is an interesting aporia at the core of its evidentiary aesthetics, due to which, there is no valid witness in this film. The diegetic camera captures the events with the same blind spot as the naked eye and by extension, the audience’s gaze is restricted to its ‘lack’. That leaves behind only one true witness—the ghost itself—who sees and reflects the action in its entirety. But a ghost can’t be a witness in Western culture, because it is non-human in all legal, corporeal and existential significations of the term; it is Derrida’s ‘corpse’. The foundfootage of a hidden camera is often employed in Western horror, but the ‘flawed’ camera in Paranormal Activity reveals the impossibility of gathering admissible testimony in a haunting. A Heideggerean6 metaphysics of presence dominates Western discourses of spectrality by presupposing that a witness, ‘be present in the here and now’— ‘when we speak about “menschliche Dasein”, we mean a being who meets two necessary existential ontological conditions to be a witness— that being has to be present to witness and that being has to be able to share its testimony as speech’ (Bordo 2008). Jonathan Bordo notes that a ‘specular witness’ is a being or entity that can see, record or mirror reality. It may perform the active interventionist role of witnessing in abstentia, like a concealed camera. Since it is neither here nor there and unable to say ‘da’ meaning ‘here’ and ‘there’, the ghost in Hollywood horror fails to qualify as a ‘specular witness’. In an interview, Derrida acknowledges the etymological convergence of the terms ‘spectre’ and ‘spectator’, ‘the cinematic experience belongs thoroughly to spectrality’ (De Baecque 2015). The former originates in the Latin root spectrum, meaning a spectacle or object to be looked at, while the latter is the past participle of spectare, meaning vision or visibility.7 Horror cinema in the West dramatises the fragility of spectatorship by attempting to make visible an invisible spectacle. Since the audience progresses from the expectation of seeing a ghost to the experience of seeing through the ghost, Indian horror films like Manichitrathazhu and Stree thrust us into the ontological status of the non-human. The affect generated by this reversal is not sublime awe, but uncanny dread; the sound of Nagavalli’s anklets alerts us to the imminence of our own arrival (arrivant). Derrida states, ‘Every viewer, while watching a film, is in communication with some work of the

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unconscious that, by definition, can be compared with the work of haunting.’ He invokes Freud’s concept of the ‘unheimlich’ (uncanny) where fear of an external phenomenon is replaced by dread of an internal or subconscious experience. The spectre in contemporary Indian horror cinema is cast in the liminal position of a spectral witness like the audience; a witness that is neither present nor absent, neither human nor non-human, neither the ‘masculine’ specular subject or a ‘feminine’ object of spectacle. What demands does this alternative phenomenology of spirit make on popular cultures that attempt to resist colonially-inherited tropes of evidence and haunting?

II. Stree too: Spectrality and the Subaltern At this critical juncture between two different traditions of witnessing in global horror cinema—specular versus spectral—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s feminist postcolonial critique of Western concepts of haunting is invaluable. In ‘Ghost writing’, Spivak highlights the absence of the subaltern in Derrida’s history of the corpse, the body, and the spectre in Western literature and culture. Spivak asks, where is the ‘spectre’ of Ophelia in Derrida’s deconstruction of Hamlet, and dismisses his celebrated book Spectres of Marx (1993) as ‘a how-to-mourn-yourfather-book’ (Spivak 1995). She counters Derrida’s notion of the spectre as a carrier of the past (revenant) with her concept of the female spectre as a metonym of radical alterity. Spivak’s exemplars are the incoherent suicidal Ophelia, the ‘menstruating’ corpse of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri,8 and the ‘ghostwomen of Islam’ who ‘welcome the undecidable as the condition of possibility for responsible action’ (Spivak 1995). Throughout her career, Spivak’s deconstructive readings of Western philosophers from Marx to Derrida have been grounded in the body of the monolithic Third-world woman. Stephen Morton claims, ‘For Spivak, contra Derrida, this open-ended political commitment to the alterity of the Other (what Derrida terms the Messianic) is not without content; rather it is inscribed and embodied by the situated knowledge of the subaltern woman’ (Morton 2006). In this regard, the fact that the villagers call the vengeful female spirit in Stree by the Hindi signifier for the reproductive female body (rather than commonplace words for the supernatural like daayan, bhootni or pretni) is extremely crucial. The Hindi word ‘stree’ signals the radical alterity of the reproductive female body in North-Indian patriarchy, being the socio-linguistic subordinate to ‘purush’ (man). The film’s chosen title highlights the ordinariness of this spectre instead of her monstrosity or paranormality. The first time the audience witnesses her ‘body’; it confounds all

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cinematic stereotypes of the wild-haired daayan or the silent pretni in her ascetic white sari. Stree is a veiled comely figure in traditional North Indian bridal attire. The men she abducts consider her alluring and beautiful and the hero wins her over by returning her gaze with loving recognition and equality. It is hardly surprising when he exposes the ordinariness of the circumstances that brought about her violent death and spectral return. The local historian of Chanderi reveals that the female spirit plaguing the village had once been a tawaif (courtesan/ prostitute), a classic example of the subaltern or monolithic Third World woman in Indian cinema. She was executed by the villagers on the eve of her wedding night, as they were outraged by her desire to marry for love. The primal act of patriarchal heresy that occasions a singular sort of spectral witnessing in order to be recovered is a lowly courtesan’s quest to gain sexual autonomy through love. The character played by Shraddha Kapoor initiates the process of this testamental recovery and reparation. The female spectre’s threat to patriarchy manifests not in her bestiality or connection to dark magic, but her appropriation of the legitimate reproductive body of a married woman … a ‘stree’. Spivak argues that the ‘socialisation’ or enforced legitimisation of the reproductive female body in colonial and neocolonial discourses operates through a ‘spectrality of reason’. In other words, the very category of truth produced by specularity, trace value and rational empiricism ends up dislocating or displacing the ‘merely empirical from itself’ (Spivak 1995) in the postcolony. This manifests in the tussle between the two cameras at work in Stree. When the female spectre attacks her first victim at the very beginning, the dolly shot slows to a predatory pace in order to creep up on the receding figure of a man. A disembodied female voice calls out seductively to him and curiously enough, the voice emanates from the camera itself. This resembles the uncanny dread generated by the tinkling of Nagavalli’s anklets in Manichitrathazhu. When the man turns around to face the spectre, he looks directly at the audience, and this is the most radical aspect of the film’s feminist ‘spectropolitics’. The man’s eyes flash a demonic red, his head tilts to his left, and the angle of the spectral camera tilts accordingly. There is an uncanny sound of muscles and bones stretching following which, the camera rushes towards the man, using rapid zoom technology to drown out his deathly scream. This kind of alternative spectatorship wherein the audience’s gaze collapses with the gaze of the subaltern rejects both local myths of the monstrous feminine and colonially inherited genres of realism and specularity. Instead, the spectral camera imposes a degree of radical empathy and extreme ontological vulnerability on the audience, thus putting us temporarily in the shoes of the subaltern ... we also become ‘stree’.

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In her anthropological study of the ‘feminist’ ghosts of South East Asia, Stephanie Lai writes that, ‘instead of a monster, [we] see a woman who is fully her own. Instead of a lack of humanity, embrace her humanity for all that it is. All women are at the mercy of the patriarchy, and they require some method of seeking reparations’ (Lai 2014). To that extent, Stree concludes with a complex gesture of feminist reparation that merits theoretical attention. The penultimate shot of the film uses the spectral camera to focus on a monument that has been erected in honour of the female spectre. We read a new inscription ‘O Stree raksha karna’ (‘O woman, protect us’), which immediately circles back to undo the condescending and cautionary edict ‘O Stree kal aana’. The climax of Manichitrathazhu dramatised an elaborate patriarchal deception and destruction of the female spirit, organised by male doctors and priests who want to restore the community to its original state of grace. But the climax of Stree allows the audience to bear witness to reparation and communal atonement for the patriarchal injustices that the female spectre had suffered in the past. And yet, it must be noted that there is another camera at work in Stree, one that subscribes to the specular structure of a traditional Western horror film. This is the non-diegetic camera that allows the much of the film to unfold from a distanced, ‘masculine’, objective or omniscient point of view. The primary function of this specular camera is to dilute the audience’s identification with the female spectre by reducing her body to its subaltern state through laughter (the film does, after all, market itself as a horror-comedy). It defuses the empathic power generated by the spectral camera and prevents a committed feminist ‘spectropolitics’ from emerging fully. Unfortunately, Stree does not end the horror story with the spectral camera as it had begun. The final scene splits the audience from the female spectre by switching back to the normative non-diegetic camera. It pans out to reveal the subaltern figure of the female spectre floating silently with impotent resignation as she reads the inscription on her monument. We are unsure whether to critique this token gesture or feel bemused for this disembodied and disempowered spectre. Spivak warns against such gestural politics that achieves nothing more than the endless deferral of emancipation. She advocates for, ‘an attempt to establish the ethical relation with history as such, ancestors real or imagined. The ethical is not a problem of knowledge but a problem of relation. It is singular yet generalisable, or already generalised in its singularity’ (Spivak 1995). Perhaps the film’s engagement with a feminist ‘spectropolitics’ would have stood out had the entire action been shot from the subaltern perspective; had spectral witnessing been treated as an ethical imperative rather than mere cinematographic

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flourish. Naisargi Dave’s redefinition of witnessing through affect theory might be useful to conclude this discussion. When a privileged human subject bears witness to the non-human through experiences of pain, death, loss or haunting, Dave writes that the mere act of witnessing ‘blows the fiction of the self apart, but witnessing can create truth as much as it can explode it, can concern the safely encased human self as much as the radically exfoliated one’ (Dave 2017). The ethical imperative that underlies an authentic encounter with the non-human or the subaltern—‘Consider witness not as a thing one does but as the imperative’—may thus be applied in practice through a well-developed spectral witness in horror cinema.

Endnotes 1. A vampiric creature from the medieval Sanskrit text,Vetala Panchavimshati. 2. I borrow Benveniste’s distinction between testis and superestis from Jonathan Bordo, 2008, ‘The Homer of Potsdamerplatz: Walter Benjamin in Wim Wenders’s Sky Over Berlin/Wings of Desire, a Critical Topography’, IMAGES, 2(1): 107. 3. I would like to thank Prof. Jonathan Bordo, Trent University, who deeply influenced my work on ethical witnessing and spectatorship. My theory of the ‘spectral witness’ develops from his comparison of the ‘specular witness’ and the messianic witness in Walter Benjamin from his essay ‘Homer of Potsdamerplatz’. 4. ‘Witness’, The Oxford English Dictionary Online (25 December 2019): Old English witnes, more frequently gewitnes, < (ge)wit wit n., i-wit n. + -nes -ness suffix. Compare Old High German giwiȥnessi, Middle Dutch wetenisse. The passage in sense from abstract to concrete is paralleled in French témoin (< Latin testimonium). (i) Knowledge, understanding, wisdom. Obs (ii) (a)  Attestation of a fact, event, or statement; testimony, evidence (b)  The action or condition of being an observer of an event. Obs. (c)  Applied to the inward testimony of the conscience; (iii) One who is called on, selected, or appointed to be present at a transaction, so as to be able to testify to its having taken place: spec. one who is present at the execution of a document and subscribes it in attestation thereof; more definitely, attesting or subscribing witness. Often in formulæ corresponding to medieval Latin teste me ipso, teste rege, his testibus, etc., Anglo-Norman tesmoin… (iv) One who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation; one present as a spectator or auditor. (Cf. ear-witness n., eyewitness n.) 5. Ginzburg’s link between Holmes to Morelli is striking because it connects the primary object of a criminal investigation, the corpse, to the primary

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object of art criticism, the corpus of an artist. He defines the scientific obsession with traces in the West as the key ‘cultural modality’ of the 19th century. 6. Martin Heidegger’s 1927 work Being and Time introduces the term ‘dasein’ to refer to an entity, that is, conscious of the meaning of its own existence. In its strictest formulation, ‘dasein’ defines human beings since, arguably, no other life forms are conscious of their own existence or can express themselves as being conscious. 7. ‘Spectator’ and ‘Spectacle’, The Oxford English Dictionary Online (25 December 2019): Early 17th cent: from French spectre or Latin spectrum n. a ghost, something widely feared as a possible unpleasant or dangerous occurrence Late 16th cent: from French spectateur or Latin spectator, from spectare ‘gaze at, observe’. 8. The figure appears at the conclusion of Spivak’s bestknown essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ (1988). She provides the hypothetical example of the suicide of a young revolutionary, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, during the Indian struggle for independence to elaborate her conclusion that ‘there is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak’. Rather than executing a political assassination, Bhaduri killed herself. Most importantly for Spivak, she chose to do it during her menstrual cycle to dispel any suspicion of an illicit affair or illegitimate pregnancy. The centrality of the reproductive female body in Spivak’s theories of political resistance originated in this essay, and as if to answer the unanswerable, Spivak states, ‘the subaltern female cannot be heard or read’.

Works Cited Blanco, Maria del Pilar and Esther Peeren. 2013. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Bordo, Jonathan. 2008. ‘The Homer of Potsdamerplatz: Walter Benjamin in Wim Wenders’s Sky Over Berlin/Wings of Desire, a Critical Topography,’ IMAGES, 2(1): 86–109. Dave, Naisargi. 2017. ‘Witness: Humans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming’. Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming, pp. 152–169. Durham and London: Duke University Press. De Baecque, Antoine, et al. 2015. ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’. Discourse, 37(1–2): 22–39. Derrida, Jacques. 2011. The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fazil, 1993. Manichitrathazhu. Swargachitra, India. Ginzburg, Carlo and Anna Davin. 1980. ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’. History Workshop, 9: 5–36. Kaushik, Amar. 2018. Stree. Maddock Films, India.

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Lai, Stephanie. 2014. ‘Sympathy for Lady Vengeance: Feminist Ghosts and Monstrous Women of Asia’, The Lifted Brow, No. 23, Nick Henderson Zine Collection, 18–22. Morton, Stephen. 2006. ‘Postcolonialism and Spectrality: Political Deferral and Ethical Singularity in the Writing of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1(4): 605–620. Peli, Oren. 2007. Paranormal Activity. USA: Blumhouse Productions. Sayad, Cecelia. 2016. ‘Found-Footage Horror and the Frame’s Undoing’. Cinema Journal, 55(2): 43–66. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1995. ‘Ghost Writing’. Diacritics, 25(2): 64–84.

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9 Conjuring an Atmosphere: A Study of Tumbbad as Folk Horror Sakshi Dogra Horror films often rely on jump scare and gore to produce their affect and effect. Whether it’s the sudden clapping of the hands in The Conjuring (2013) or the unexpected clucking of the tongue in The Hereditary (2018), the startle reflex trigger is a mainstay in most horror cinema. Other motifs include the haunted house, ghosts lurking in the dark corners, possessed and contorted bodies or the stalkand-murder sequences of slasher movies. Jolt and shock are always accompanied by suspenseful and eerie music. This is not to reduce horror movies to a formula, but instead underscore some dominant tropes that have defined this genre. Where the Hindi language horror cinema is concerned, Ramsay brothers are habitually remembered for movies such as Veerana (1988) and Tehkhana (1986) that epitomised simplistic and sordid stories. Although later movies, such as Raaz (2002), Bhoot (2003), Darna Mana Hai (2003) and 1920 London (2016), were successful, profitable and able to capture the imagination of the audience, their synthetic settings and thin narratives made them tedious. There has been a recent and visible shift in the aesthetics of horror movies, with the release of Tumbbad (2018). It marks a clear break from the banal and derivative quality of Hindi language horror movies. More significantly, the jolt and shock tactics of Western horror movies are done away with to introduce, instead, an all-encompassing atmosphere of fear and dread, which is monumental in constituting the genre of Folk Horror.This genre allows for the narration of an unusual story which is made of an indigenous folk myth, an engagement with pre-independence reality and the horror of the living. This telling is completely at odds with the horror that is communicated in the conventional Western horror cinema. To plunge further, an atmosphere is produced when lighting, settings, diegetic sounds, cinematography and other formal components combine to produce the look and feel of a scene. Mundane details such as the time of the day, environmental 114

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conditions, and visibility make up a visual aesthetic that is the main source of fear. As Gernot Böhme articulates, ‘The aesthetics of atmospheres shift attention away from the “what” something presents, to the “how” something is present’ (Böhme 2017). In fact, it is not what you see but what you sense that dominates this horror cinema. The paper seeks to study the atmosphere of dread, horror and suspense that is dispersed throughout the movie, Tumbbad (2018). The atmospheric quality is an outlining feature of folk horror, a subgenre of horror cinema that has found mass appeal in recent times. In an attempt to introduce this contemporary variety of horror, Andy Paciorek writes, ‘So in a bid to answer “what is Folk Horror”, one may as well attempt to build a box the exact shape of the mist; for like the mist, Folk Horror is atmospheric and sinuous’ (2018). First, Paciorek’s usage of the metaphor of mist suggests that it is the environmental element that makes folk horror atmospheric. Second, this peculiar metaphor underscores the sheer difficulty in analysing an indeterminate and diffused concept that shapes folk horror. Paciorek harks to writer and filmmaker Adam Skovell to point out the principal tropes of folk horror, such as ‘landscape, isolation, skewed moral beliefs and Summoning or Happening’ (Paciorek 2018). While I shall examine these tropes at length, I purport to argue that it is atmosphere which constitutes the fundamental concept of a new aesthetic and consequently a contemporary genre in horror cinema, namely, folk horror. The events of Tumbbad are divided into three parts and take place from 1918 to 1947 in an eponymous village in the Konkan region of Maharashtra. The movie narrates the story of Vinayak Rao, who along with his widowed mother had to leave Tumbbad after the death of the local feudal lord, Sarkar, who was also Rao’s illegitimate father. He comes back 15 years later in search of a treasure that is rumoured to have been buried in the deep recesses of Sarkar’s mansion. His greed leads him to his abandoned hill house and the cursed grandmother who shares the secret of attaining the treasure. In order to obtain everlasting gold, Vinayak Rao (played by Sohum Shah) must descend into a well in the (now battered) mansion, summon the monstrous Hastar1 with a doll of dough as bait, and steal gold from his loincloth. The movie closes with greed overtaking Rao’s better judgement, leading to his painful death. The first chapter of the movie introduces a young Vinayak, his family and the house on the hill which they inhabit. The house is cut off from the rest of the village, which registers feelings of isolation and alienation, thus accentuating the terror. In the courtyard stands a dead tree, the fall from which leads to the ominous death of Vinayak’s brother, a young Sadashiv, setting us up for more portentous happenings. The

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dusty and musty interiors of the hill house are merged with the rough texture of the walls. The unpolished stones produce irregular dull surfaces which absorb light. The dimness thus produced is substantial in creating an atmosphere of dread. As Robert Spadoni notes, ‘The innate spatiality of a film renders settings—and the things arrayed across them, such as props and lighting—uncontroversially relevant to studying atmosphere’ (Spadoni 2019). There is just a flickering light of the lantern, under which, the dramatisation of Vinayak’s first encounter with his cursed and disfigured grandmother takes place. The lamp/lantern doesn’t completely light the interiors of the house on the hill, but, instead, produces dark shadows. This creates the impression of a narrow and cluttered alley or corridor which leads to the room of the sleeping grandmother. Besides, premodern objects, such as the lanterns and brass utensils, situate us in the past. The partial visibility created by the lantern evokes a sense of disconcerting anticipation. The diegetic sound of the snoring of the cursed grandmother permeates and punctuates nearly all episodes in the hill house which only furthers this sensation of unease. Thus, lighting, setting and diegetic sounds—all contribute to the atmospheric character of Tumbbad. Atmospheres assist the movie like characters do; except, their presence is more enveloping. An atmosphere drives the events of the movie forward, which is to say that it is not just a background, but, instead, essential in founding the aesthetic totality that is the movie. As Spadoni maintains, Atmosphere refuses to stay in the backgrounds and outer rings. Far from a support and an accompaniment, it is everywhere. To recognise this quality is to take a step toward revising our understanding of the place and function of atmosphere within the total film viewing experience. (Spadoni 2019)

For instance, the relentless rainfall that haunts every single outdoor frame of the movie is crucial in building a sense of darkness and foreboding as well as moulding the narrative. Weather events are central to the evocation of atmospheres and, in Tumbbad, rain invades the indoors too in the form of dimly lit interiors marked by an absence of sunlight. As Kristi McKim rightly asserts, ‘cinematic rain is a consequence of both water and lighting’ (McKim 2013). Moreover, the aural pressure of rain punctuates all dialogues in the movie, manifested either as the sound of downpour or the rumbling of thunder. Even in the mise en scènes that portray Vinayak’s life in Poone, the tones of the movie retain their dark and gloomy essence, because the sky is eternally overcast. The rain in Tumbadd is murky and muddy and so is the river which flows there. This weather event is deliberately not picturesque. It wets

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everyone and is far from photogenic. Often in movies, cinematic rain shows the passage of time. If the same weather persists throughout the movie, as it does in Tumbbad, the impression produced is of a time that is still and stagnant. Furthermore, cinematographically, rainfall in Tumbadd is not relegated to the background; instead, it can be seen falling torrentially on people in the foreground, drenching them completely. As Sadashiv and Vinayak sprint to the secluded hill house, a wide shot captures the inefficacy of their umbrellas made of branches and dried leaves, in the face of enveloping rain. The exact next close-up shot, features the faces of the actors which are smeared by rain drops. The blanketed weather covers everything and we see all events through the lens of rain. Correspondingly, a strain of constant stuffiness dominates the movie. There is a persistent dreariness, a sense of being trapped as movement is difficult in constant rain. Images of dampness and stickiness abound, building an atmosphere that’s cagey and obstructive. The profusion of roots and webs, at a variety of places in the movie, which appear like traps and snares further emphasises the feeling of being entrapped. One such occurrence is when Vinayak Rao reaches Tumbbad to look for his grandmother 15 years after the events of chapter one. A highly redolent mise en scène captures an infinite tree that has sprouted out of her chest. To reach her Vinayak has to navigate through a dense mesh of web and roots. He slouches and squats to find his way out, calling attention to the hindering and ensnaring nature of this environmental network. The roots are reminiscent of the graphic representation of Hastar from the beginning of the movie, leaving the audience with the feeling that something primal, natural and sinister plagues all frames. Thus, the feeling of being entrapped possesses the movie and the meteorological element of rain particularly functions as a natural stormy wall that doesn’t allow you to escape. This all-pervasive endless rain induces a sense of fearful apprehension. The rain causes perpetual delay and interruption represented in the narrative through the widowed mother’s inability to first reach the mansion and consequently, the house on the hill on time. Rainfall and resultant deferral thus precipitate the eventual encounter between the young Vinayak Rao and the cursed grandmother who pulls him to the beheading table, his face covered in flour about to be devoured by her. This foreshadows the finale of the movie where Vinayak will become the doll of dough to be consumed by Hastar. The abysmally low camera angle which is used to capture the grandmother, when she teases Vinayak for having forgotten the incantation to put her to sleep, gives us the eerie impression that the grandmother is looking at us, the audience. The second chapter of the movie presents us with absorbing settings that further accentuate the suspenseful and lasting

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atmosphere of the movie. As R. Spadoni rightly points out, ‘atmosphere is not merely space but its emotional coloration’ (Spadoni 2019). To illustrate, the vast stretches that Vinayak Rao has to cover to reach Tumbadd from Poone evoke a sense of otherworldliness. The enormous door placed at the entrance of the mansion functions like a gateway, a portal to another reality. It’s here that the audience eventually and visually learn about the particulars of Vinayak’s wealth acquisition arrangement, who hurt by his friend Raghav’s betrayal, sets the latter on the path to certain death in the mansion. A treacherous hide and seek ensues between Raghav (played by Deepak Damle) and Vinayak in the mansion, taking the audience on the tour of this ruin, which is extremely sensual and made of uncanny spaces. The camera submits a labyrinthine structure of the ruin and shows us staircases and passageways that seem to lead in all directions. There is a lack of spatial logic or closure to these architectural features. This is to say that the audience is never provided with a fixed viewpoint in this mise en scène from which to evaluate the puzzling routes. There is a lack of safe distance from which to contemplate these alarmingly confusing spaces. An illogical space such as this, with no stable geometry to guide the gaze, strikes the audience as sinister and oppressive, because its mazelike quality renders it incomprehensible. Its decrepit form which is run over by overgrown and untended plants, grass grown paths and mosscovered walls communicates an anxiety of decline. Depth is also often employed to mediate a threatening atmosphere, a feeling of being entrapped and a focus on the deepness of the well in which Hastar resides fulfils exactly that function. The script of the movie too describes the well as a ‘bottomless abyss’ underscoring the depth and consequent dread. The well is further likened to ‘a giant gaping black mouth in the ground. Rainfall dripping constantly into it’, which compares the descent to being eaten or be consumed by it (Shah et al. 2018). The threatening and frightful atmosphere that the depth establishes is additionally accentuated by the set design of the womb where Hastar dwells. When Raghav touches the ground of the womb his hands become sticky with bile or saliva giving the impression of being consumed and ingested by an organism that’s alive, secreting and breathing. The extravagance of the colour red engulfs the scene and furthers the feeling that one has been devoured and is now residing in the belly of a living organism. Hastar is the same deep shade of red as the womb hinting at the interchangeability between the consuming and successively threatening quality of both the demon god and his surroundings. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the womb is fully sealed by means of a single source of light, i.e., the lantern which obscures and darkens. Thus, settings or landscapes accompanied by

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feelings of isolation with fitting lighting, camera angles and sounds are the foundation of the atmospheric form of folk horror. Besides these elements, skewed moral and societal values are a vital mainstay in folk horror. The sub-genre often represents a clash of belief systems or a conflict of worldviews. To demonstrate, Tumbbad opens with the famous quotation attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, which states that ‘there is enough in this world for man’s need but not for man’s greed’, which quickly cuts to the narration of the folk myth around which the events of the movie are spun. This has the effect of establishing greed as a social malaise that consumes people. The story of Tumbbad begins by inaugurating an environment of perversion and immorality that the Brahminical class in India has cultivated. This is done right at the beginning where we see Vinayak’s widowed mother (played by Jyoti Malshe) masturbating Sarkar in the hope that he will award her with a gold coin. The picture of the old aristocracy that is fast dwindling is personified by Sarkar, the frail and weathered feudal lord of the mansion who spent all his riches trying to find the treasure buried there. In Poone, cruel competition and exploitation, fostered by greed are the bedrock of the friendship between Raghav and Vinayak. The latter does not want to share the source of his wealth or the knowledge of wealth creation. A montage accompanied by the title track song depicts an ecstatic Vinayak, as the money looted from the treasure in Tumbbad is used to finance impractical consumer products which creates commodity fetishism for things such as a gold-plated razor and gold-plated lighter. Gradually, his wealth begets sexual desire and a taste for substances. Vianayak’s house can be seen cluttered with luxurious useless items. In a mise en scène where Raghav offers Vinayak a young, widowed woman, in exchange of clearing his debt, a large chandelier lying on the chair in the background illustrates the futility of these articles. Vinayak Rao continues to draw money from this past heritage pretending indifference to its violent and prohibited origins till he grows old and is physically unable to descend and climb up and down the well/womb in time. In the backdrop of this narrative of incessant greed is India’s struggle for independence, which doesn’t capture Vinayak’s interest, sympathy or approval. Tumbbad presents a strong contrast between the greed of the Indian elite class and the sacrifice and martyrdom that the struggle for independence requires. At multiple points in the movie, Vinayak’s lack of concern for the freedom struggle is explicitly voiced. For instance, when Vinayak returns to Poone after having discovered the treasure, he finds his house has become a hub for activities for the ongoing struggle against the British. Where a young girl can be seen painting ‘vande

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mataram’ (praise to thee, mother) on a cloth piece, his wife has been grounding wheat to aid the freedom movement. He admonishes his wife for the same who defends herself by arguing that dire conditions made her resort to this alternative. In another episode, Raghav visits Vinayak’s house to deliver another unusable commodity, a gramophone. Vinayak’s wife can be seen trying to unsuccessfully collect the rainwater that has invaded their house in Poone. The unnatural intensity and relentlessness of rain underscores the omnipresence of greed. On noticing Vinayak’s limp and his bruises, Raghav jokingly asks his wife Sukesha (played by Anita Date) ‘Waini, swatantrata sainani toh nahin hai tera pati?’ (Does your husband happen to be a freedom fighter?), to which she responds, ‘Nahin, nahin ... main hoon’ (no, no … I am). Vinayak is displeased and looks at her enquiringly as she explains that she sacrificed a 10-rupee imported doll in the pyre to burn foreign goods, which was organised as part of the civil disobedience and noncooperation movement. Vinayak’s wounds here are not caused due to any struggle for the independence of the nation, but instead result from his attempt to loot more money to satiate his appetite. Furthermore, when a procession celebrating the Indian independence is being held in his street, a visibly irritated Vinayak can be seen closing his ear with his fingers. This conflict comes full circle in the last and final chapter of the movie that depicts a haggard and worn-down Vinayak Rao training his young, polio infected son to descend the well. As the movie enters the third and final chapter, it is revealed to Rao’s utmost shock and dismay, that Tumbbad has been given, in charity, to the Indian government. Even though Vinayak has hoarded up enough to last a lifetime his greed eclipses him and he decides to make one final trip to Tumbbad. He is accompanied and aided by his equally greedy son, who conceptualises the idea to steal the loincloth of monstrous Hastar this time, the very source of endless gold. In a climax that is hypnotic and overwhelmingly atmospheric, Vinayak sacrifices his life to save his son’s. A turn of events happens when a cursed Vinayak offers the loincloth to his son, Pandurang, who refuses to take it, marking a new beginning which evocatively coincides with the dawn of Indian independence. Pandurang’s refusal to claim this ill-gotten wealth suggests the birth of a nation which is disavowing its illicit, corrupt and unethical dealings in the past. This is the only time that we see a character (in this case, Pandurang) close and not open the door of the mansion and that too with a sense of finality. However, this is not a wholly cheerful ending, because the atmosphere doesn’t quite break. This dawn of independence as a new beginning and foundation of a less corrupt world is suspect, because there is no sudden sunshine

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that dispels the rain; the sky stays overcast, even though it’s not raining torrentially. Tumbbad, the source of unethical and depraved wealth is not done away with, but instead changes hands. When Rajaji, who believes in the nationalist cause, tells Vinayak that Tumbbad has been given away in charity, Vinayak appears ‘visibly furious’ as he asks ‘Kaun sarkar?’ (who is this master?), since he considers himself the sarkar or master of Tumbbad. Rajaji responds with an emphatic and pregnant, ‘Bharat sarkar’ (Government of India). The play on the word ‘sarkar’ indicates the transference of influence from the elite Brahmin class to the Indian government. There is a sense of premonition maintained till the last shot of the movie that is contained in the gloomy and melancholic sky of the last shot. The movie takes an ambiguous position on the promising and hopeful future of the nation. There is sense of foreboding that is affirmed till the very last moment of the movie. Tumbbad doubles up as an atmospheric story of the birth of a nation at the centre of whose inception is an inheritance that corrupts, a perverting element of greed that can consume. To conclude, Tumbbad makes for a stimulating contribution to the genre of folk horror. The movie engages with landscapes and settings to emphasise isolation, and the summoning of the demon god, Hastar, is at the centre of the folk myth that Tumbbad narrates. Greed, hunger and insatiable appetite represent a set of ideas that are at odds with the narration of the new nation and thus must be disavowed for a promise of progressive nation to be fulfilled. Sinfulness and decay and correspondingly, an eerie sense of being hunted by a primal and sinister entity, envelope the entire movie and evokes fear and dread. Through this paper, I have tried to argue that this diffused and dispersed feeling of horror is created by organising spaces in a way that they evoke feelings of suspense and terror. Lighting, sounds, environmental conditions, camera angles—all add to an anticipation of ultimate doom. Whether it’s the continuous and torrential rain or the lantern which creates hiddenness, the aesthetics of atmosphere are crucial in producing the affective valence of folk horror as evidenced in Tumbbad.

Endnote 1. The movie is spun around a folk myth about a goddess of prosperity/ plenty and her first-born son who is greed incarnate, namely Hastar. The latter attracted the ire of other gods when he tried to steal wheat from the goddess after having stolen all the gold. As punishment for his transgressions, the gods were about to kill him when the goddess saved him in her womb on the condition that he will be forgotten by posterity

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Works Cited Apel, Dora. 2015. Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press. Böhme, Gernot. 2017. Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces. London and New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2017. The Aesthetics of Atmospheres. London and New York: Routledge. Dhusiya, Mithuraaj. 2018. Indian Horror Cinema: (En)gendering the Monstrous. New Delhi: Routledge. Griffero, Tonino and M. Tedeschini. 2019. ‘Introduction’. In Atmosphere and Aesthetics: A Plural Perspective, edited by Tonino Griffero and Marco Tedeschini, pp. 1–9. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McKim, Kristi. 2013. Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change. New York and London: Routledge. Paciorek, Andy. 2018. ‘Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields and Furrows: An Introduction’. In Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, edited by Andy Paciorek, Grey Malkin, Richard King and Katherine Peach, pp. 12–19. Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press. Shah, Mitesh, A. Prasad, R.A. Barve, and A. Gandhi. 2018. Tumbbad. Film script. Available at Allfilmscript.com (accessed on 28 June 2020). Spadoni, Robert. 2014. ‘Carl Dreyer’s Corpse: Horror Film Atmosphere and Narrative’. In A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by H.M. Benshoff, pp. 151–167. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2020. ‘What is Film Atmosphere?’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 37(1): 48–75. Tumbbad. 2018. Dir. Rahi Anil Barwe. Sohumshahfilms. Film

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10 Mythopoeia and Horror in the Global South: Reading Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Fairy Tales at Fifty Srinjoyee Dutta

I The horror! The horror!1 —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (2011) Jack Zipes in his foundational theorisation of the ‘fairy tale’ as a cultural meme or a ‘polygenetic cultural artefact’ (2006) in Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre, writes: A product of civilization, the literary fairy tale, in contrast to the rough and raw folk tale, is very ‘civil’. Paradoxically, the fairy tale creates disorder to create order and, at the same time, to give voice to utopian wishes and to ponder instinctual drives and gender, ethnic, family, and social conflicts.... The writers/speakers of this genre knowingly play upon a scale of memorable and notable motifs, conventions, and topoi to engage the audience in a dialogue that harks back to a tradition of oral folk tales and literary fairy tales and refers to present and future social conflicts.... Like the selfish gene, a fairy tale as meme2 is concerned with its own perpetuation and will adapt to changes and conflicts in the environment. (Zipes 2006)

The fairy tale then constitutes itself as a genre within the oral literary tradition, wherein the lack of a point of origin or spatio-temporal fixity allows it its ubiquity and palatability to contextual differences. Yet, this notion of ‘civility’ coupled with the humanist impulse to create a universal mythos for its pervasiveness demands some unpacking, especially with regard to its history. Fairy tales, in the Western context, have been subject to embellishment and sanitisation, often 123

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in conformation to sociocultural mores of said context(s). Further, they have also performed the function of perpetuating conservative notions vis-à-vis gender, class and race. Thus, the Western fairy tale carries with itself the baggage of the Empire, intersected by issues of gender and class, while acclimatising itself to the postcolonial ethos of the Global South. Postmodern retellings of such fairy tales, in their attempt to grapple with these issues, now constitute a formidable body of work that interrogates and subverts aforementioned categories. Writers from the Global South form a unique and considerable part of that body of work, faced, as it were, with the challenge of rethinking influential Western paradigms and native fairy tale narratives vis-à-vis a nascent, but burgeoning sense of postcolonial identity. Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Fairy Tales at Fifty, published in 2014, attempts a revisioning of popular South Asian myths and Eurocentric tales to weave a topical, contemporary narrative that is designed to shock and disturb the reader with its almost outrageous and downright macabre twisting of ‘fairy tales’ and their utopic impetus as Zipes describes. Using elements of Black Comedy and Magic Realism, the text tells the story of two brothers separated at birth in a way that blurs the boundaries between the factual reportage of everyday, mundane realities and the strange and fantastical interiorised ideations of the world by the characters in the text. The paper will attempt to analyse the text as a postcolonial narrative that seeks to reveal the grim realities of the Global South through deliberate grotesque imagery and supernatural contouring. Not only does the story, in its titular and thematic impetus, invoke a parallel to the Western ‘fairy tale’ paradigm, it also critiques the ‘sanitised’ version of the paradigm that hides the true horrors of the ‘kernel of evil’.3 Thus, the paper will attempt to explore the text as an exercise in reclaiming and documenting the aforementioned myths, as a parallel to reclaiming and documenting the ‘story’ of the Empire and the macabre underbelly of the independent postcolonial nation state. It will further locate it within a tradition of ‘mythopoeia’, idiosyncratic to the writers of the Global South who attempt to ‘mimic’ and challenge the hegemonic paradigms of the Empire. Set in India, Chatterjee’s Fairy Tales at Fifty, follows the story of two twins, separated at birth and sketches their bildungsroman in a way that highlights the stark realities of a postcolonial nation caught in a web of violent sexual excesses surrounded by a ruthless Neo-Capitalist market that demands loyalty in terms of material and social power. Chatterjee models the intertwining stories on Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper,4 and deliberately twists the ‘happily ever after’ motif into an ‘unhappily ever after’ with the protagonists caught within the structural violence that society teaches them and compels them to

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perpetuate. Nirip, the wealthy ‘prince’, and Angulimala, the ‘pauper’, set themselves on a quest for knowledge, much like the traditional hero of the Western fairy tale or fantasy, except that the knowledge that they seek is of their own identity. Both come from deceitful and oppressive familial structures with monstrous and demonic parents that are out to ‘eat’ them. As the story progresses, the ‘kernel of truth’ that they seek reveals to them their own hollowness and allows them to reflect upon their own lack of anchorage, which they vent in gratuitous sex and violence. The traditional bildungsroman is then inverted, because ageing does not constitute conventional spiritual fruition. Instead, it reveals a fragile and vulnerable self, catalysed by social and psychological deterioration. This then becomes a platform for Chatterjee to comment on the layered problem of postcolonial nationhood and the terrifying liminal existence of its subjects, caught between the material and often illusory sociocultural capital that the Global North offers and the grim reality of a developing country with more than half of its population caught in a manic race for survival. This liminality is further complicated by the intersections of caste, class and gender politics specific to the Indian context, which lends a more grotesque aspect to the storyline. Nirip’s father is described as an ogre, his mother a witch and his household is replete with ghouls and other such supernatural personae. At the age of fifty, he finds out that he is not their biological child. He also has a half-sister who suffers from gender dysphoria and is unable to contain the violence within her on account of her father’s and, by extension, society’s, disdain for her. Angulimala, on the other hand, christens himself by that name after having heard the story of Buddha and Angulimala.5 He also becomes a literal serial killer who wanders around the country in search of potential victims and fundamentally, in search for his origin. The deliberate obfuscation of time and space in the traditional Eurocentric fairy tale is then subverted: both seek their points of origin in an effort towards self-rehabilitation. Intertwined with that is the demand of the postcolonial subject for a rehabilitated sense of identity and history, unshackled from the demonic and patronising colonial father figure. It is important to note that both Nirip and Angulimala occupy layered subject positions: the former often plays the ambivalent role of both the coloniser and colonised insofar, as he maintains the insidious hegemony of the collaborator class and reinforces the status quo at the expense of the latter’s life. The text then makes no pretensions towards any kind of redemption; it only drives home the point that if we were to look at the fairy tale from the other side, invert its formal and textual structure for a perspectival shift, we would find ourselves caught in the tragic horror of everyday lives. The text then begins to occupy the shifting genres of

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fairy tale, horror fiction, folktale, myth and legend, coalescing with and contradicting each other within the postmodern framework. It reflects through this formal complexity, the shifting identity positions of its characters, caught in a nexus of political, economic and sociocultural power, out to best their loved ones. Chatterjee makes use of farcical black humour and magic realist techniques precisely to tackle the difficult demand for history and identity. It is only via the radical act of mimicry that the postcolonial subject is able to address his or her own sense of ambiguity. Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, theorises the notion of ‘mimicry’ as a response to the continual stereotyping and misrepresentation of the colonised subject insofar as the joke is turned on oneself thereby entailing a shift from the strict authority of the coloniser. He then turns into a figure of farce and the attempt at a wholesome notion of authority is displaced into what Bhabha calls the ‘metonymy of presence’ (1994). In this way, not only is the postcolonial subject able to subvert the notion of the coloniser as the authoritative father, but is also able to force the rigid parameters of said authority into more fluid grounds. The structures of power then shift in the Foucauldian6 sense and the oppressed are able to demand and eventually write their history through mimicry. The oppressor-oppressed binary is then challenged in what constitutes a usurpation of power through laughter and mockery. Fairy Tales at Fifty uses this as a theoretical springboard to reveal the horrors of the Indian nation state: the reader is prodded into discomfort at the disturbingly familiar reality that Chatterjee portrays through the use of the fantastical. The ruthless murders, the pervasive sexual violence and the phantasmagoria of stifling familial and social norms, couched in the vocabulary of the demonic and the fantastical, successfully reveal the many tiers of mimicry that the postcolonial subject is compelled to perform for the rehabilitation of the self. Along with the vestiges of the Empire, there is now the additional burden of a competitive market, imbued with toxic masculinity that literally consumes the poor and the downtrodden. While Nirip contemplates on his identity, covered from head to toe in luxury and the spoils of his father’s illegal trade, Angulimala fights the battle of poverty and the obvious notion of the ‘dispensable’ attached to his subject position. On the other hand, there is Magnum or Kamagni, Nirip’s half-sister whose machinations at ‘becoming a man’, both medical and cultural, end in tragedy, and Nirip’s mother, who often controls the family business insidiously, but is forced to face the humiliation of her husband’s continuous infidelity. Further, there is Shivani, Nirip and Angulimala’s birth mother, who is compelled to abandon her children and spend her life roaming around the country, donning various disguises like a modern-day

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shapeshifter,7 and in turn, partaking in different experiences in her search for happiness. Nirip’s father, Pashupati, the reigning king of this urban mythos, indulges in the worst kind of sexual, consumptive and murderous excesses to retain that position. Thus, the characters battle it out with each other for the highest position of power, whilst being always already burdened with the baggage of performing postcolonial subjecthood. Chatterjee then uses the technique of mimicry not just as a challenge to the imperial nature of the fairy tale paradigm, but to also reveal the conspicuous flaws of those who challenge it. The gaze of the text is meant to unsettle every possible paradigm through macabre mockery: the underbelly of the Western fairy tale, the corruption of Indian society and, in turn, the reader’s own complicity in the same. The laughter then is directed at the coloniser as well as at the self: both seemed to have failed in the task on rehabilitating identity.

II First, grant me my sense of history: I did it for posterity, for kindergarten teachers and a clear moral: … I ran with that weight and fell down, simply so children could laugh at the noise of the stones cutting through my belly, at the garbage spilling out with a perfect sense of timing, just when the tale should have come to an end. —Agha Shahid Ali, ‘The Wolf ’s Postscript to “Little Red Riding Hood”’ (2010) Bhabha elaborates on the ironical role of mimicry as follows: Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse, which Edward Said8 describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination—the demand for identity, stasis— and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history—change, difference—mimicry represents an ironic compromise … in order

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to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference. (1994)

This tussle between the need for rigid categories of identity and the unavoidable impossibility of such an exercise is what produces the site of difference on which the ironic role of mimicry finds fruition. The text is peppered with examples that throw light on this notion of difference. For instance, after Angulimala kills his father’s paedophilic friend, he takes his truck and starts driving on the highway. The traffic, mostly comprising truck drivers, caught in daily toils with no sleep, is described as having the motto: ‘We shall overcome, we shall overtake, we shall overturn’ (Chatterjee 2014). In a moment, a song for peace is turned into an anthem for banal violence. One of the most pertinent examples from the text for this is the event of Magnum’s death. Towards the end of the novel, beaten down by life and its vicissitudes, she commits suicide by jumping off the building, after having thrown the dead chauffer’s infant at Nirip and Angulimala. Three kinds of parodies play themselves out in this scene. First, she jumps from the same roof from where she had killed a monkey and thrown its corpse in a bid to impress her father. The scene acts as a leveller in the hierarchy of events and especially the notion of the ‘Chain of Being’.9 Second, while she jumps, she is seen wearing a dress with a picture of Wonder Woman.10 It is almost a cruel joke, because not only does it reflect Magnum’s failed attempts to combat the pervasive toxic masculinity of Indian society and deal with her own gendered crisis, but it also exemplifies the illusory aspiration of being Wonder Woman, entrenched as she is in the logic of late capitalism. And lastly, she is not even allowed the finality of death—the last glimpse of her that the reader has is her flailing in mid-air, liminal and caught in the cruel space between contradictory identities. Interestingly, her twofold crisis of identity: gender and social position begin with a twisted fairy tale. At twelve, when Nirip leaves for boarding school, she deals with his absence through the psychosexual realm of the fantastic. She dreams that ‘… at midnight, Cinderella opened her window and there was Hanuman. Cinderella was instantly bewitched by his erect cock’ (Chatterjee 2014). It is this easy, but unsettling conflation of Western paradigms and native myth that produces the most subversive mimicry in the text. The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is likened to the Lanka crusade. The photo of a young Manasa, Nirip’s mother, holding an infant Nirip (which later turns out to be Shivani and Angulimala), seems like a blatant parody of the famous Mary and Jesus painting. The inspirational book that Nirip writes is very suggestively titled ‘No Evil Greater than the Ten Other Commandments: Lessons in Dharma at the foot of Satan’. His impoverished biological father is the ‘Fairy Godmother’ who helps

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him in the quest and saves him from death twice, all the while ignoring his own child. Right before Nirip’s fantastical adventure in the water, in which he glimpses his child (begotten with the chauffer’s wife) in the mouth of a monstrous fish, he and Magnum have a philosophical albeit comedic conversation about what it means to live happily ever after: Not everyone does, not the children of Hamelin. But Hansel and Gretel and Cinderella and Snow White live happily ever after. How can anyone be happy on a Monday? It boggles the mind. Why? Hansel and Gretel have a baby and it disappears one day. They continue to gaze at each other and feel happy and say, at least we have each other, darling; never mind. (Chatterjee 2014)

In another example, Ehsaan Awesome, a rural gangster, comforts Magnum during a cricket match with the following words: What was a fast unto death anything but a sulk unto death? Life for us all is quietly and imperviously hideous. The single thing in its favour is that death is even more so. Hey Ram.... Please stop crying, madam. One must simplify the sources of suffering. And shag when one can’t. Great men did it all the time, supermen too. Supershag. Look at Nietzsche. (Chatterjee 2014)

In the necessary combination of the ideals of antithetical societies, Awesome is able to lay bare the fact that for a lot of the people, the utopic vision that the fairy tale offers is often a horrifying, terrorinducing predicament, such that, even death is unable to provide solace. Chatterjee supplements these ideas with the conspicuously playful and parodic: he writes, ‘But to-be-or-not-to-be ki ma chudaye’11 (2014). The course of events in the novel actually exemplifies this statement. As each character struggles to find footing in an increasingly oppressive world order, it is laughter coupled with mimicry that raises the most pertinent questions vis-à-vis identity and the oft-encumbering remnants of colonial authority.

III … One call’d her proud, Cross-grain’d, uncivil; Their tones wax’d loud, Their looks were evil. …

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Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking, Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking, Twitch’d her hair out by the roots, Stamp’d upon her tender feet, Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits Against her mouth to make her eat. —Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’ (2010) Tzevtan Todorov in his foundational conceptualisation of the ‘Fantastic’ as a genre places it between the uncanny and the marvelous. Taking from this, Adam Zolkover, in his essay on British Urban Fantasy, redefines the genre using Brian Atterbury’s term ‘indigenous fantasy’. He quotes Atterbury, … indigenous fantasy exists within a fundamental logical contradiction: it takes place, on the one hand, ‘in the ordinary world accessible to our senses,’ but it simultaneously includes elements ‘contrary to all sensory evidence and experience’. (Zolkover 2011)

He further locates this genre as mapping ‘fairy tale structures onto the vertical axis rather than the horizontal, onto the experiential rather than the spatial’ (Zolkover 2011). These tales also make the Freudian ‘uncanny’12 the pivot of that experience: through the pervading motif of the (un)familiar double, they challenge the supremacy of ontological certainty and produce through the phantasmic an experience of and through haunting. Fairy Tales becomes a fundamental text in understanding this genre within the context of the Global South. The signifiers of horror in the text are both textual and subtextual: the demonic characters become tools to invoke obvious terror, but more insidious terror is generated when the demonic crosses over into reality and invokes that strange sense of familiarity that is the Freudian ‘uncanny’. Similarly, a pervading sense of strangeness engulfs the text because the protagonists constantly deal with their doubles, literally and figuratively. It is at fifty that the fairy tale consummates itself: it is halfway through life that the protagonists take cognisance of the other side. The temporal marker is intertwined with corporeal deterioration such that both ontic and ontological certainty is subject to scrutiny. Jacqueline Ford in an essay that explores the notion of the ‘uncanny’ in the movie Pan’s Labyrinth delineates three themes often found in surrealist texts in relation to the former: the double, the link between castration and the loss of the eye, and the return of that which is repressed (Ford 2011). Fairy Tales reclaims these themes and posits the threat of the double within the context of the Global South, in which,

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one is always already haunted by the violence, of various kinds, that one witnesses. This haunting, both interiorised and exteriorised, lays bare the Erotic and the Thanatotic13 as primordial drives that steer the formation of identity. Angulimala, Nirip’s obvious Other or literal double is informed by his father that in the legend of Angulimala, the terrifying fingers that hang around his neck are actually penises and that the tale has been sanitised for the ears of little children. Nirip’s father, Pashupati, an abuser, is described as a man who ‘… drank the blood of newborn babies, cooked and ate their livers’ (Chatterjee 2014). Violence, then literally and figuratively, becomes intertwined with the sexual: there is Magnum who cannot fathom a sexual encounter without physically beating the partner; she half rapes Nirip and violently blinds her mother in one eye as a child. Then there is Vinayak, Nirip’s friend who commits suicide after sex with a hired man who reveals to him his deepest insecurities and his cowardice. Further, Angulimala, who actually kills the woman that he falls in love with also realises that he had attempted to rape and beaten to pulp his biological mother. Thus, the frequent employment of the motif of the sex drive and the death drive force the reader into that uncomfortable liminal position, wherein fantasy turns into horror and one is forced to acknowledge the spectre as someone who is indeed the self. The Freudian uncanny is further complicated in the characters’ own confusion with respect to the Other. While Nirip and Angulimala are clearly antithetical in their class positions, but similar in their corporeal selves, Nirip and Magnum embody the gendered contradictions of Indian society. Perhaps it is important to note here that Angulimala, the ‘perverse’ progeny of a South-Asian myth, the obvious rural ‘pauper’ caught in the machinations of capitalism meets a tragic end, much like Magnum, trapped in a body that she hates. It is Nirip who survives, thereby reinforcing the preservation of the rich and the privileged and underlining the fact that the Global South’s claim to postcoloniality is a farce. Behind the veneer of ‘independence’ hides the evil face of power that has changed hands. Thus, the ‘strangeness’ that comes to depict the nation state is deeply unsettling and can only produce ‘monsters’. The children of an ogre and a witch have to continue that legacy, driven by an approved and applauded carnality; even Magnum who claims to be pregnant towards the end says that the baby inside of her has three legs and two heads. Chatterjee thus uses the uncanny to depict the ethico-moral perversity of this legacy, in which God is glimpsed with a ‘hardon’ and outlines the fantasy in a way that the Other, the monster, the doppelgänger, which is also the self, the ‘I’, is bound to consume itself. In keeping with the necessary orality of the fairy, Nirip and Anguli tell each other about their lives:

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He’d [Anguli] cut off the finger of a victim just once, but he couldn’t immediately remember when and where, just that it was long long ago. Ghosts of course had no sense of time, they squeezed out when they could.... Perhaps they’d already eaten up his fairy godmother.... The ghoul’s hand seemed to beat an authoritative rat-a-tat on the window. They’d crush his skull with their fangs, suck his brains out, but he’d go down fighting, how could any darkness that they revealed be more profound than the blackness within him. It was everywhere, in every heart and every life … just blackness at the core of creation. (Chatterjee 2014)

The menacingly consumptive nature of the familial also allows for this ‘blackness’ to reveal itself. The abusive father, Pashupati, who begins his flourishing trade with the export of skulls and human skeletons, and then onto illegal organ trade, etc., threatens to cannibalise his son, in keeping with the traditional motif of the demon/witch/ogre, who eats children. Zipes actually points out that this is one of the most enduring tropes of the fairy tale, that is, ‘we eat our young, and if we don’t succeed, we confront them with the question, to be or not to be eaten’ (2006). Before his staged abduction of Nirip, in a moment that induces obvious horror, Pashupati mockingly ‘eats’ his son: Pashupati, delighting in Nirip stilled by terror, swooped down to clutch his son’s hand and, holding its index finger as one would a toothbrush, bore it to his mouth. The purple lips parted in welcome, the canines crept out to receive the guest. (Chatterjee 2014)

Manasa too, although not as vicious in her behaviour, controls the business through the threat of ‘eating’. She herself is never seen putting food in her mouth, but is able to procure the right kinds of food, medicines and herbs to both cause disease and heal. One of the contributing factors behind Pashupati’s death is the ‘fattened’ variety of sweets that she keeps feeding him (the portrayal resonates with the motif of the witch fattening the children for consumption, for instance, in Hansel and Gretel) even after an episode of cardiac arrest. He dies, or is consumed, before he can accomplish his ambition for politics and a seat in the Parliament, funded by his violent criminal capital. Thus the overarching narrative of the Other, the haunting double that threatens to consume the normative self, also furthers corporeal consumption. It has to be the literal death of Angulimala and Magnum for Nirip to survive; Manasa can only win if Pashupati physically perishes. The fragility of the body then occupies a central thematic concern: it is at fifty that the quest reveals itself to the protagonist, especially in a moment of weakness wherein he (they?) is burdened by the knowledge

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of corporeal deterioration. Chatterjee writes that ‘even in the lives that have the quality of a fairy tale, human beings change with the aches and pains of age, with the sense of failure and futility that time always engenders’ (2014). The traditional impetus for immortality in the Western paradigm, founded on the lack of spatio-temporal focus is challenged. In a portrayal that resonates with Swift’s Struldbruggs,14 Chatterjee reveals the Cartesian15 gap: while the cerebral establishes itself as certain, the body questions that very certainty. It forces the reader to locate the characters in their own real history and not in the obscure timelessness of a fable. The modern variation of the postcolonial fairy tale becomes a demand for identity and the move towards an ‘indigenous fantasy’ straddles the fantasy of the Empire. Attila Kiss, in her work on the idea of fantasy and anatomy, locates this within the anatomical turn in the postmodern insofar as ‘fantasies of corporeality, which used to be marginalised and suppressed, are now infiltrating the practices of social spectacle’ (Kiss 2011).

IV Now we, returning from the vaulted domes Of our colossal sleep, come home to find A tall metropolis of catacombs Erected down the gangways of our mind. Green alleys where we reveled have become The infernal haunt of demon dangers; Both seraph song and violins are dumb; Each clock tick consecrates the death of strangers. Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun. Still, stubbornly we try to crack the nut In which the riddle of our race is shut. —Sylvia Plath, ‘Doom of Exiles’ (1981) In the field of translation and the necessary translatability that is associated with the perpetuation of the fairy tale, Zipes refers to Gabrielle Brandstetter and Gerhard Neumann’s examination of Hansel and Gretel, in which, they argue that it is requisite for the children to

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leave their homes for ‘psychological socialisation’, for them to realise that the familial is ambivalent; ‘loving, and cruel, and they must learn to come to terms with this ambivalence and their own sexuality and aggression in order to survive’ (2006). He further goes on to elucidate: A relevant translation can provide a different perspective on history and on one’s relationship to it in the present because it both negates certain anachronistic aspects of the source text and maintains usable aspects while forming a synthetic work that will endure as long as people in a particular culture need it. (2006)

Chatterjee performs a similar exercise in cultural translation/ adaptation, wherein he uses the Western fairy tale paradigm as the springboard for a definitive postcolonial narrative that caters to the idiosyncrasies of the Global South. The conflated consumption of the colonised, the child, the woman, and the poor, underlies the entire narrative to create a unique mythopoeia of the ‘Anti-fairy tale’, set in India. Before Magnum kills the monkey, Nirip politely tells her that according to several ‘white men’ from the 19th century, the monkey and she belongs to the same family. David Calvin, in the context of feminist fairy tales that undercut the ubiquity of the Bluebeard myth, defines the genre as follows: … the anti-fairy tale—particularly those variants that re-visit familiar narratives—is not parabolic or forward thinking but retrospective and revisionary. The intent is not to a promote a universal parable, as the reception presumes, but to explore and the criticize the effects of such established narratives; to expose the true bias of these tales, and un-tell them in a real-world context. (Calvin 2011)

Fairy Tales at Fifty thus becomes the classic anti-fairy tale, meant to subvert the established givens of the neo-colonial, capitalist and patriarchal nexus of control and governance in the Global South. The force of its horror is the liminality of identity, which can only be articulated through a ‘transcendental’ (but not quite), tale of the imagination, in which ‘the imagined world merged with the real, folktale with fact, good with evil’ (Chatterjee 2014). When Nirip meets Angulimala, he asks him to explain his past, so that they can do something about their future, such that the oral anti-fairy tale establishes a habitus for the rehabilitation of identity. This going back to understand the self becomes essential to the anti-fairy tale. Chatterjee writes that ‘it’s like allowing the bustle of the world to pass you by, so that you regress to that once-upon-a-time point, when you could think

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in tranquillity, from where you saw clearly’ (2014). While the ogre is killed, symbolic of the colonial father, the privileged still survives thus entailing a layered subversion, which does not cater to the ossified coloniser-colonised divide. The force of the real is the force of the fairy tale in continual crossing over to the other side and the pervasive pessimism, nihilism even, becomes the necessary pivot for mythopoeia in the Global South after ‘mythmaking’16 has ended and the ‘dramatis personae’ are always on the move in the ‘present continuous’.17 It is necessarily a ‘trans-genre’ narrative, as Zolkover describes, ‘ensnared in an intertextual web, deploying a combination of history, literature, prior fantasy and legends in order to populate a landscape at the border between the fantastic and the uncanny’ (2011). This intertextuality then places the text within Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence that entails both mimicry and menace, ‘where history turns to farce and presence to “a part” can be seen the twin figures of narcissism and paranoia that repeat furiously, uncontrollably’ (Bhabha 1994). The horror-inducing mythopoeia of the Global South then addresses its own history, its own identity, but through the necessarily farcical and the fabulous. Caught in the excesses of abjection18 and violence, the postcolonial subject then claims: ‘I wink, therefore I am … I puke, therefore I am’19 (Chatterjee 2014).

Endnotes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Kurtz’s (in)famous proclamation at his own ethico-moral destitution, in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness—the phrase has since then become a literary symbol that portrays the ‘darkness’ of the Empire. Zipes uses the idea of the ‘meme’ as a unit of cultural information perpetuated by imitation, as theorised by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, in The Selfish Gene, published in 1976. This phrase is often used to describe the oppressive horrors of colonization, and in turn, the horror in one’s self, in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Published in 1881, The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain is a famous novel that tells the story of two identical boys, born on the same day, one a prince and the other a pauper. It is an ideal story with an ideal ending with an underlying critique of social inequality in society. The story of Buddha and Angulimala is quite popular in South Asia, especially vis-à-vis the Buddhist tradition. There are many versions of the tale, as is wont to happen in oral traditions. Essentially, Angulimala grows up as an intelligent, model human being, but due to a number of reasons, mainly concerning jealous classmates, is forced by his teacher to find a thousand human fingers. Incidentally, Angulimala literally means ‘a necklace of fingers’, which he wears around his neck. The mission

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compels him to become a murderer and serial killer, and a source of terror for people. When attempts by the people, his mother, and even the king fail, the Buddha intervenes. Some sources say that he attempts to make Buddha his thousandth victim, but fails because of the former’s prowess. He then shows Angulimala the right path and transforms him into a devout follower.   6. Reference to the French philosopher, Michel Foucault—his foundational ideation of power as a shifting, dynamic entity that pervades all structures of society.  7. Shapeshifters are creatures with superhuman capabilities that can transform their physical appearance at will. They are found abundantly as characters in myths, folktales, speculative fiction and popular culture.   8. Edward Said, a prominent cultural critic of the second half of the 20th century, is often credited with pioneering the field of Postcolonial Studies.  9. The Chain of Being was an essential idea in medieval Christianity. It comprised of: God at the top, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants and minerals. Renaissance Humanism challenged that idea to posit Man as the centre of the universe. 10. Wonder Woman is a fictional superhero who appears in comic books by DC comics and movies based on the same. She is also seen as an iconic female role model in popular culture. 11. ‘Ma chudaye’ is a misogynistic, sexually explicit slur used in the Hindi language. Roughly translated, the phrase means ‘the mother of to-be-ornot-to-be can go fuck herself’. 12. In his 1919 essay titled ‘The Uncanny’, Sigmund Freud conceptualises the idea of the uncanny as the disturbing sense of strangeness and familiarity with one’s double or Other, especially in the light of the return of repressed memories. 13. Sigmund Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), theorised that the human psyche is often primordially driven by both ‘Eros’ or the instinct for survival and propagation, and ‘Thanatos’ or the instinct for death and self-destruction. It is important to note that Freud never employed the term ‘Thanatos’ in the book. He explained the notion of a fundamental ‘death drive’, which was termed ‘Thanatos’ in post-Freudian thought. 14. In Book 3 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a misanthropic satire on the Enlightenment, the Struldbruggs are a race of human beings who despite being immortal continue to age and deteriorate without dying. 15. Refers to René Descartes’ theorisation of the mind-body duality, in which, the realm of the mental is distinct from the corporeal such that the former determines the latter. 16. This refers to the chapter titled ‘An End to Mythmaking’ in which the narrator dwells upon the inevitability of death, horror and the fantastical. 17. In the novel, Chatterjee presents the idea that the characters are always already in the ‘present continuous’, thereby indicating violence and trauma as an incessant cycle of mythopoeia.

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18. Julia Kristeva, in Powers of Horror (1980), describes abjection as the physical and mental feeling that one experiences when confronted with the breakdown between the rigid ideas of the Self and the Other, especially in the light of one’s corporeal reality. 19. A play on the French philosopher René Descartes’ famous proclamation ‘I think, therefore I am’, first published in Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences in 1637.

Works Cited Ali, Agha Shahid. 2010. The Veiled Suite. Delhi: Penguin. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Calvin, David. 2011. ‘Anti-Fairy Tale and the Demythologising Business in Jane Campion’s The Piano’. In Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales, edited by Anna Kérchy, pp. 181–201. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press. Chatterjee, Upamanyu. 2014. Fairy Tales at Fifty. New Delhi: HarperCollins. Conrad, Joseph. 2011. Heart of Darkness. New Delhi: Worldview. Descartes, René. 2008. A Discourse on Method. Project Gutenberg E-Book. Ford, Jacqueline. 2011. ‘“Cover Your Eyes and Count to a Hundred”: Freud’s Uncanny and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth’. In Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales, edited by Anna Kérchy, pp. 383–402. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, translated by John Reddick. London: Penguin. ———. 2003. The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin. Kiss, Attila. 2011. ‘Postmodern Fantasies of Corporeality: Identity and Visual Agency in Postmodern Anatomy Theatres’. In Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales, edited by Anna Kérchy, pp. 251–275. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Plath, Sylvia. 1981. The Collected Poems. New York: Harper & Row. Rossetti, Christina. 2010 ‘Goblin Market’. In Victorian Poets, edited by Suroopa Mukherjee, pp. 115–136. New Delhi: Worldview. Swift, Jonathan. 2011. Gulliver’s Travels. New Delhi: Book Land. Twain, Mark. 2000. The Prince and the Pauper. The Pennsylvania State University. Zipes, Jack. 2006. Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. New York: Routledge. Zolkover, Adam. 2011. ‘King Rat to Caroline: Fairie and Fairy Tale in British Urban Fantasy’. In Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales, edited by Anna Kérchy, pp. 67–82. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press.

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11 The Horror of Heteronormativity: The Supernatural in Vijaydan Detha’s ‘A Double Life’ Aina Singh

I. Introduction Vijaydan Detha’s short story, ‘A Double Life’ (Dohri Joon, translated by Ruth Vanita), has been celebrated and repeatedly anthologised as a striking representation of same-sex love in the literary landscape of South Asia. The plot, set in rural Rajasthan, is littered with references to spirits, astrology and an ardent faith in fortune. The supernatural force in Detha’s tale is not a source of terror for its two female protagonists. Instead, it acts as a guardian against patriarchal society. This paper seeks to examine the interventions of the supernatural in the narrative, particularly in its intersections with the conceptions of gender, sex and sexuality. The story begins with a description of two moneylenders and their close friendship, highlighted by simultaneous weddings and seemingly synchronised conception of their daughters, Beeja and Teeja. A pledge by the two men to wed their children to one another, along with the greed for dowry, results in Beeja being raised as a boy. The two women uncover the deception soon after their wedding, but are banished from the village once Beeja dons women’s clothing. They are adamant to pursue their affection for each other and are looked after by the ghosts of the haunted tank. The outcasts lead a life of bliss until Beeja transforms into a man, with the help of the ghost chieftain’s powers. The anatomical change is followed by hours of horrifying emotional and physical abuse for Teeja. Eventually, Beeja repents and reverts to the earlier female form. The couple continue to reside in a magical palace far from the village, protected by the spirits. Horror, in Detha’s text, is evoked by the seemingly ‘natural’ world of humans and its heteronormativity, while the supernatural acts as an ally to the transgressive women and enables them to indulge in their socially censured relationship. The experience of horror varies 138

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across the characters of the story, with fear resulting both from the imposition of social norms as well as from the subversion and violation of these rules. The physical form of the human body interacts with the formlessness of the supernatural characters, underlining the coexistence of the corporeal human world and the shapeshifting supernatural world in non-Western fictional settings. This coexistence, in ‘A Double Life’, culminates in the creation of Beeja and Teeja’s palace as a feminine utopia, safe from the horrors of patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. The discursive hegemony of the West, particularly in the field of feminist theory, body politics and horror fiction, has driven the utilisation of predominantly Western theoretical sources in this paper. The interaction between these sources, and the themes and arguments generated by Detha’s text (couched in non-Western cultural traditions), produces instances of both contradiction and postcolonial complication.

II. Horror from Different Perspectives One of the themes found across Detha’s stories is the collapse of the boundaries of the natural and the supernatural. Instead of a linear conception of the supernatural provoking horror amongst the beings of the natural world, one finds several different locations of the sources of terror, disgust and dread in Detha’s work. Nishat Zaidi notes, in her review of Chouboli and other texts by the Rajasthani writer, ‘The makebelieve world of fantasy in these stories by Detha, as in the narrative tradition of any oratory, takes for granted the connection between nature, nurture, natural, and supernatural’ (2012). This connectedness and blurring of boundaries presents itself in sharp contrast to the Western notion of the supernatural as the antithesis of the natural. Durkheim observes how the West assumes a ‘natural order of things’, that is, a conceivable, comprehendible pattern or set of laws governing the phenomena in this universe. Any phenomenon that appears to violate these supposed natural laws is relegated to the world beyond human comprehension—the supernatural. ‘In order to arrive at the idea of the supernatural, events so labelled must be conceived as being “impossible”—that is to say, irreconcilable with an order which, rightly or wrongly, appears for us to be implied in the nature of things’ (1965). This distinction is ripe for comparison with the conservative portrayal of heterosexuality as ‘natural’ and homosexuality as a violation of the natural (and social) order. However, in ‘A Double Life’, the supernatural and natural work in tandem. In fact, the supernatural characters of the story seem to be the ones controlling the forces of

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nature. This control is also shared with the two protagonists, whose same-sex relationship places them outside the villagers’ conception of ‘natural order’. Beeja and Teeja’s departure from the village—which is also a departure from its heteronormative constraints—is accompanied by dramatic thunder and lightning. Heavy rainfall lends cover to their taboo lovemaking, which takes place on a secluded mountain peak, under the supervision of the ghost chieftain. ‘The lightning is thirsting to meet us. Perhaps its thirst cannot be quenched through these veiled clothes (...) As the blouses fell open, the lightning flashed.’ Descriptions of the act of transgression are replete with nature imagery, including comparisons with clouds, flowers, ladybugs and birds. ‘For the first time, the daughters of nature met with nature.’ The duo’s connection to nature intensifies once they are granted asylum by the ghosts of the water tank. ‘They felt as if the sun was rising from the pure petals in between their thighs.’ The narratorial insistence on the ‘naturalness’ of the act lends itself to the possibility of romanticisation and even eroticisation of the lesbian coupling for the patriarchal gaze. Closer inspection, however, reveals Detha’s strategy of the alignment of formidable natural forces with the marginalised, while the so-called ‘natural’ order of heteronormativity is exposed as unnatural. The supernatural world does not terrify or repel Beeja and Teeja, as they firmly declare upon first encountering the ghosts. What, then, is the source of horror, in this story? The women partially answer this question, by stating, ‘There is reason to feel afraid of human beings. What is there to fear from ghosts?’ The world of humans—a world that claims to be following the ‘natural order’—with its arbitrary rules and heteronormative logic, is terrifying for the women. Additionally, there is emphasis on the horror evoked by the male form. Once Beeja changes into a man (to conform to social norms), he is initially terrified of his own body. ‘For a moment, he felt scared of those huge curling moustaches. But how could he allow himself to feel scared? The glory of curling moustaches lies in their ability to scare others.’ Teeja resists male Beeja’s obnoxiousness at first, but is gradually horrified by his abusive behaviour. In comparison to their earlier lovemaking, the physical act is now dominated by Beeja, and is frighteningly violent. The subtext seems to be that the performance of masculinity depends heavily on its ability to induce fear. However, the horror flows in both directions. The same-sex relationship fills the villagers (and the village men in particular) with dread and Kristevan abjection. Not only do the men respond with shock and disgust, but their superior position in the heteronormative order is also threatened by the couple. ‘If a woman marries another

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woman, what is a man to do—go and find a mouse hole for himself?’ One may read further into the ‘closeness’ of the two moneylenders (mentioned in the introductory section), the simultaneous conception of their children, and their desire to ‘unite’ through their children’s marriage. The homoeroticism implies a projected fear of their own desires—a startling reminder of Freud’s foreign-yet-familiar ‘uncanny’. In any case, all the village men, along with the king, offer to marry the two women. The assumption is that heteronormative marriage would eliminate the terror of the homosexual relationship. The supremacy of the heteronormative (naturalised) order is destabilised by the solidarity between the couple and the ghosts, all of whom thrive outside the boundaries of the village. Their bastion, the water tank, causes men to tremble even when they pass by the place in daylight. When Beeja and Teeja return to the village for a visit, none of the men are able to oppose them as they are frightened by the couple and their supernatural guardians. The ghost chieftain too minces no words in expressing his derision towards the villagers. Besides calling them ‘savages’, he blames the deceptive order of the human world for the marginalisation of his supernatural brethren. ‘We are consigned to this existence because of the black deeds of the dishonest humans. We avenge ourselves on the fearful ones by frightening them as much as we can.’ The supernatural in Detha’s tale poses an unequivocal challenge to masculinity. The palace, which becomes an asylum for Beeja and Teeja, is the physical manifestation of this challenge. Described as ‘the envy of kings’, their splendid home is more plentiful than the state treasury. As soon as Beeja becomes a man, the supernatural is no longer available to him as an ally. Nor do natural phenomena seem to be in his favour. After subduing Teeja physically, he attempts to impose his authority on the supernatural world, but is unable to do so. His declarations that the ghosts do not ‘frighten’ him are almost comical to the reader. He demands sole ownership over the palace, seeks to establish his own kingdom and desires a harem full of women like Teeja to submit to him. In other words, the growth of his moustaches is followed by attempts to re-establish the horror of heteronormativity in the palace. He incorrectly assumes that he is in control of the ‘natural order of things’—‘Seeing the rays, pride awoke in his heart, telling him that it is man’s heat and power that rises in the heavens in the form of the sun.’ However, nature responds negatively to his behaviour. The landscape is personified as being drenched in sorrow and mourning. It is only after the skies rain down violently upon him that Beeja wishes to return to the female form. Once Beeja’s female anatomy is regained, harmony is restored and the horrors of masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality are once again banished from the palace.

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III. Form and Formlessness When Beeja and Teeja return to the village, the markers of human civilisation fill them with disgust. ‘The same encirclement of walls and barriers. The same huts and roofs. Each with its own limits and boundaries.... The squabbles of thine and mine.’ The world of human beings is preoccupied with confinement, separation and limitation, and the anxiety extends to the cultural perception of the human form. Traditional concepts of gender, sex and sexuality, all revolve around the physical shape of the body. The discourse of biological determinism not only imposes certain behaviours and roles based on anatomical differences, but also limits the ways in which different bodies can interact with each other. Heteronormativity associates the (seemingly ‘natural’ and standardised) male form with power, acquisition and assertiveness. Its inverse, the supposedly softer, female form, is conceived as being at the receiving end of these assertions. The coupling of these two forms is considered the norm. Meenakshi Thapan’s work on intimate partner violence, though emerging from the urban context of New Delhi, is a useful reminder here of the construction of the female body as a ‘body-for-others’ (1995). The patriarchal social order limits imagination of identity and relationships through its fixation with the corporeal. The supernatural, on the other hand, is traditionally imagined as lacking a concrete physical form. Shapeshifting and invisibility are two elements associated with the world of ghosts and spirits. These elements also link the supernatural to the divine—another distinction that is not always strictly maintained in non-Western cultures. In Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization (2006), Frederick Smith notes that while humans may be possessed by spirits, the power of shapeshifting or changing from one form to another is limited to celestial beings. This absence of (permanent) form, common to divinity and ghosts, is brought into Detha’s story through an invocation. Ruth Vanita’s translation mentions Eros, the Greek god of love: ‘May Eros, the formless one, be gracious and give to each one of us a double life’ (2000). Scholar Christiann Merill observes that the original text also uses the word adehi, which she translates as ‘the Bodiless One’ (2002). Merill’s translation suggests that the bodiless, formless force being invoked is unnamed. When the reader is introduced to the ghosts of the story, no description is provided for their physical shapes. The appearance of the ghost chieftain is only described through the words ‘dazzling’, ‘white’ and ‘moulded from moonlight’, further emphasising the fluidity of his physical manifestation. The incorporeal world in the story offers stark

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contrast to the corporeal world of human beings and their obsession with form. Cheryl Akner-Koler’s thesis, concerned with a multidisciplinary approach to aesthetic experiences, comments on the nature of formlessness: ‘The formless takes on different shapes and conjures up unexpected happenings that cannot be repeated. Due to this constant transformation, the formless has no sharp contours or stable structures, making it difficult to literally grasp and control’ (2007). The formless can neither be grasped literally, nor metaphorically. The shapeshifting supernatural is disorienting for conventional modes of human cognition, and thus a source of mystery and fear. Detha’s fiction sets up these two worlds of corporeality and incorporeality, and then repeatedly destabilises the distinction. The reader may turn once again to Zaidi’s review of Detha’s stories: ‘Here, humans interact freely with other products of the mother environment, such as animals, birds, insects, and plants, often interchanging their forms as also their language…’ [emphasis added]. Beeja and Teeja are on the cusp of form and formlessness. They do have concrete physical forms. But the coupling of their forms is a threat to heteronormativity. So is Beeja’s journey from female to male, and then back to female. Her initial performance of gender does not conform to her sexual anatomy, and her later transformations are nothing short of shapeshifting. As mentioned in the earlier section, the two women and their subversion of gender norms becomes a source of horror for the villagers. This point can be viewed in conjunction with Linda Badley’s commentary in Writing Horror and the Body (1996). Badley examines the articulation of images of the body in Horror Fiction. She draws on feminist theory to observe the ways in which the body is transformed beyond gender in the fantasy genre. Horror, she concludes, is produced by corporeal transgressions. The motif of shapeshifting allows for an analysis of queerness and fluidity in the text. The difficulty of locating gender, sexuality or even sex in the ‘natural’ form, or the body of a person, has been emphasised through the ways in which Foucault, Butler and Beauvoir’s theories respond to each other. The body becomes a slippery site of contestation, escaping the rigidities of heteronormativity, much as Beeja and Teeja escape the corporeal world. The reader may even follow the metaphor of a ‘double life’ by viewing the two women as having stepped into the realm of the supernatural. While describing the haunted tank, the narrator warns that any humans venturing into the ghosts’ territory will not return alive. It may be suggested that the protagonists are not ‘alive’ in the conventional sense either. They have left the human world of fixed forms behind. The supernatural also seeks to intervene and participate in the corporeality of humans through the two women.

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One example of this stepping across of boundaries is the repeated, almost voyeuristic supervision of the forbidden lovemaking by the ghost chieftain. Merrill notes how this fluidity of boundaries and shifting of forms is complimented by the very nature of the narration. ‘The shift from wordplay to invocation alerts the reader to the duplicity inherent in a telling that takes place as if it were oral when it is written’ (Merrill 2002). The text itself shifts between elements of the oral and the written form. Amidst the fluidity, the narrative is still unmistakable in its attribution of violence to the male form. Descriptions of violence by both male Beeja and the cousin’s husband are horrific. Beeja’s cousin is beaten brutally and her entire body is bitten by her husband who feels frustrated at his own impotence. Unable to impregnate her, the husband seeks to prove his masculinity through physical abuse. She is raped repeatedly by her father-in-law and brother-in-law, but is only able to imagine revenge as the ability to reproduce the male form, that is, through giving birth to a son. Similarly, Beeja’s anatomic changes are related in great detail: All at once, her breasts flattened out and hair sprouted on her cheeks and upper lip. She felt her limbs and ran her hands down her thighs. Yes indeed, she was now a fully developed young man. Her body was covered with curly black hair. The change in form is followed by a violent performance of masculinity. With his new body, Beeja penetrates Teeja, and the latter feels ‘as if the entire universe had entered her’. The heterosexual coupling is aggressive and a harsh experience for Teeja. It culminates in her impregnation; the male form perpetuates itself and its violence through reproduction. David Summers’ text, Form and Gender (1993), further problematises the idea of form. His work focuses on Western philosophical discourse on the distinction between form and matter. Summers paraphrases Aristotle as claiming an association between semen and form. In this conception, feminine menses is matter, which needs masculine semen or form, to become concrete or complete. This distinction is evidently opposed by Detha’s female protagonists who refuse to be ‘completed’ by the male form. Their departure from the village finds an objective correlative in the erection of a scarecrow, meant to mock the masculine body. The proverbial happy ending for the couple involves the removal of male Beeja’s seed, described as the ‘filthy seed of man’. Teeja’s womb is also burnt away by the ghost chieftain. The two women, with the help of the supernatural, reject the male form so vehemently, that they do not wish to be sexually/reproductively compatible with it at all. The world of human beings, governed by form, and that of ghosts, defined

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by formlessness, coexist in Detha’s universe. Beeja and Teeja, and their subversive bodies, serve as the connection between these worlds. Along with the supernatural characters, they topple the supremacy of the male form in heteronormative structures and discourses.

IV. Feminine Utopia In A Salute to Feminine Utopia (2013), Jacqueline Claire Vischer theorises an imagined future for femininity in fiction: ‘This utopian place is more than a place to go. It is a place that expresses what femininity is based on—more than simply that which is not masculine— and offers fulfilment outside and beyond the rigid masculine-feminine dichotomy of patriarchal society’. In more ways than one, Beeja and Teeja’s resplendent palace matches the description by Vischer. Not only is it located at a physical distance from the village, but it is also insulated from the heteronormative impositions of the human world. The protection granted by the ghosts allows the two women freedom from the censure and ridicule heaped upon them by dominant discourse. Their subversive gender-sex identities and transgressive relationship are given the space to grow. The palace, as a utopian place, offers narrative critique of the patriarchal village, and creates room for the imagination of a more fluid world. Men are forbidden from entering the palace, but all women from the village are welcome. Teeja’s mother and Beeja’s cousin are invited to visit and even live with them. Emma Cornwell, in her analysis of utopian writing, notes the solidarity between women as an important feature of a feminine utopia. ‘[Feminine utopias] highlight the importance of relationships within the setting, particularly of female friendships and female friendship networks ... they are not interested in conquest in the way that masculine utopias are ...’ (Cornwell 2019). Beeja and Teeja live together in an egalitarian set up, sharing the resources available to them equally. Their palace becomes an asylum for women treated unfairly by the men in their lives. It is only once Beeja turns into a man that the masculine notions of conquest and ownership rupture the utopia. In fact, the ‘dreadful’ return to the village reminds both the protagonists and the reader of the horrors playing out in the so-called civilised world. After investing several paragraphs in the description of the couple’s bliss, the dramatic shift in setting is used by Detha to heighten the contrast between the feminine utopia and dystopian realities of the village. Their visit is followed by a hesitant trip to the palace by Beeja’s cousin. She is simultaneously fascinated with and frightened by the two

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women’s defiance. Her account of the abuse she faces at the hands of her husband and in-laws is a harsh interruption of the idyllic lives of Beeja and Teeja. It is a reminder of the extremely violent world, from which the couple are being shielded. The cousin’s resignation to her life of desolation, as well as her desire to birth a male heir to her inlaw’s property, are both realistic futures for women in patriarchal frameworks. After the ghost chieftain grants the cousin’s husband with the boon of virility, Beeja requests to be turned into a man. Male Beeja aggressively demands a hierarchical rearrangement of the palace. He is eventually remorseful of his actions, and the desire to return to the earlier harmony is coupled with a return to the female form. The only other man to enter the palace is the narrator, who claims to have been recounting the story from Teeja’s perspective. While highlighting her agency and authorial authority over the story, he also remarks (in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner) that his fidelity to her narrative results from fear of the ghost chieftain. This remark highlights the fragility of the utopia. While the reader was aware of the ghosts’ guardianship all along, the concluding lines of the story re-emphasise the fact that such a utopia subsisted primarily due to men’s fear of the supernatural. Butler’s observations on compulsory heterosexuality can be used to understand Detha’s use of the supernatural as a narrative device. In ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’ (1998), Butler notes the imposition of specific appearances and dispositions that are made to seem natural over time. This conceals the compulsory nature of the heterosexual contract. In such a scenario, only something beyond the perceived natural can expose and overthrow the insidious contracts of society. It is the supernatural which intervenes with its extraordinary abilities and proves to be a formidable ally to the protagonists. The otherworldly characters serve as foils to the mortals of the human world, offering Beeja and Teeja a home free from greed, treachery and straight-jacketed notions of love and domestic roles.

Works Cited Akner-Koler, Cheryl. 2007. ‘Form & Formlessness’. PhD Thesis: Department of Architecture, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden. Badley, Linda. 1996. Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Theatre Journal, 40(4): 519–531. Cornwell, Emma. 2019. ‘“Margaret the First”: Rebelling Against Gendered Modes of Utopian Writing’. Scripps Senior Theses: Claremont Colleges, California, USA.

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Detha, Vijaydan and R. Vanita. 1997. The Dilemma and Other Stories, edited by M. Kishwar, pp. 1–50. New Delhi: Manushi Prakashan. Durkheim, Emile. 1965 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Free Press. Merrill, Christi Ann. 2002. ‘Playing the Double Agent’. The Translator, 8(2): 367–384. Smith, Frederick M. 2006. The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization. New York: Columbia University Press. Summers, David. 1993. ‘Form and Gender’. New Literary History, 24(2): 243–271. Thapan, Meenakshi. 1995. ‘Images of the Body and Sexuality in Women’s Narratives on Oppression in the Home’.  Economic and Political Weekly, 30(43): 72–80. Vanita, Ruth and Kidwai, Saleem. 2000. Same-sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Vischer, Jacqueline Claire. 2013. ‘A Salute to Feminine Utopia.’ PhD Thesis: Department of English Studies, Universityof Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Zaidi, Nishat. 2012. ‘Review of Detha, Vijaydan’. Chouboli and Other Stories. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews.

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12 Historic Time and Mythical Monsters: Negotiation of Mortality in M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s ‘Little Earthquakes’ Meenu B At the end of M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s intriguing short story ‘Little Earthquakes’,1 the young narrator, Janakikutty, who had been addressing an unnamed audience, calls out to someone. The addressee is another woman present in her current location, identified as a hospital room, who Janakikutty believes is a nurse. Janakikutty, who had just narrated her mutthashi’s2 death in detail, informs her listener that mutthashi is, at the moment, present in the room. In fact, she is the little girl sitting behind her, with her hair cropped short and wearing Janakikutty’s prized silk skirt. The woman runs away in fear and makes a racket. Janakikutty, though, remains unperturbed. She calmly continues her story, informing her audience that though others might have left, mutthashi is still in the room and, what is more, is accompanied by Janakikutty’s old playmates: Kunjathaal and Karineeli, two female ‘malevolent’ folkloric spirits. What is of greater interest to Janakikutty is that the addition of her dead mutthashi to the spirit world has lent it the perfection it had lacked—with her mutthashi joining her gang of playmates, there is now a foursome who can be evenly split up into teams. The story ends with Janakikutty exclaiming in absolute bliss, ‘Ah! What more is there to wish for’ (Nair 1992)! One can read this tale in multiple ways—as a tale of the supernatural if one believes in the existence of Janakikutty’s otherworldly companions (whatever be the nature of their interaction, whether it be a forced possession or a conscious friendship) or of a young girl’s descent into insanity. All the readings are perfectly permissible for this cleverly crafted tale, which has enough ambiguity not to admit any one reading alone. These readings leave us in horror of Janakikutty’s situation. However, the true horror of the story needs to be located in Janakikutty’s alienation, which makes it easier for her to seek companionship in a world of spirits than in her immediate family. It is in the realisation that Janakikutty’s breaking away from the constraints of the real/human at 148

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the end of the tale is at once a transcendence as well as a point of no return, the zenith of her quest for companionship as well as the nadir of her existence as a member of a human community. M.T. Vasudevan Nair is known for his fiction that explores the psyche of individuals, alienated from their immediate surroundings. However, ‘Little Earthquakes’ is one of his rare stories that uses supernatural paraphernalia to interpret this alienation. I have chosen to analyse this particular tale for three reasons. First, it is a fascinating exploration of the human psyche at work as it encounters death. Second, the protagonist’s alienation, a major factor behind her creation of a spirit world, underscores the fact that the supernatural is as much a business of the living as the dead. Third, Janakikutty’s choice of a yakshi, an ancient female folkloric monster who was once a primitive mother goddess, to articulate her discontent is no coincidence. It is a choice motivated by the specific historical circumstances she is part of. Thus, this tale also helps me explore the meaning-making process behind the creation and sustenance of mythical monsters. Monsters, while they are the embodiment of a particular cultural moment—‘of a time, a feeling and a place’—have the tendency to reappear ‘in slightly different clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social movements or a specific, determining event’ (Cohen 1996). This story is set in a transitional period in Kerala’s progression to modernity as the matrilineal joint family undergoes a slow rupture to be reconstituted into the modern patrilineal family. As premodern societies crumble, do the spirits of the past haunt? What are the real social contradictions these symbolic inventions try to resolve? While stories in which young children create fantastical worlds in the face of a crisis involving the death of a loved one, or make imaginary companions are common, what sets ‘Little Earthquakes’ apart is that here, the imaginary companion chosen is a mythical monster, whose invocation is meant to preserve both a person and a time period she represents. After all, mutthashi’s death in the story marks not just the end of an individual, but also of an era. Ghosts and monsters are often seen as figures which disrupt the conventional notions of temporality in the challenge they pose to linear or historic time. If, for Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the monster destroys the boundary that demands the twinned foreclosure of the past and the present (1996), ghosts are for Derrida ‘at the same time revenant and arrivant, as agents that connect the past (as something that returns to the present) with the future (as something that the present fears will materialise soon)’ (Gygi 2016).This is an interesting framework to situate this story, because the invoking of the yakshi from the past can be read as the response to a fear in Janakikutty’s present about an anxiety-inducing future event. In ‘Little Earthquakes’, it is no

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accident that Janakikutty comes upon the yakshi for the first time after her mutthashi, her only confidante in the house, falls sick and is bedridden. The impending event of her mutthashi’s death is something the young Janakikutty cannot come to terms with, because it would mark her complete alienation within her joint family. Janakikutty lives with her mother and her aunt in their matrilineal Taravaad.3 Janakikutty has elder siblings as well as a cousin, but they have all entered adulthood, while she is in the liminal phase between childhood and adolescence. Her siblings and cousin live in a world marked by adult gossip, film magazines and flings, a world from which Janakikutty is excluded. She doesn’t receive any emotional succour from her parents either. Her father works in a tea plantation far away and her mother is too busy taking care of the household responsibilities in his absence to make time for her youngest child. Her mother’s life is also filled with disquiet as rumours of Janakikutty’s father’s affair with a helper in the plantation reach her from time to time. In this family, the only person who dispels Janakikutty’s loneliness is her mutthashi who is a mother-figure to the young girl with whom she shares a room. Mutthashi provides her the nurture she longs for. She teaches her how to recite her prayers and rubs rasnadi powder on her head after a head-bath to prevent her from catching a cold. Mutthashi is also her only confidante in the house who, even when Janakikutty describes her tryst with the yakshi, assures her that they are a good lot and won’t harm her. The impending death of the mutthashi is thus traumatic for the young girl who is already alienated from her joint family. Part of this alienation also needs to be understood in terms of Janakikutty’s preference for homo-social bondings over the heterosexual pursuits the others are part of. All the women in Janakikutty’s life, except for the mutthashi, be it her cousin and elder sister in their teens or her mother constantly worried about her husband possibly cheating on her, are marked by their interest in heterosexual pursuits. Janakikutty, on the other hand, either considers them abnormal or else, undesirable. When the adults claim she has been possessed by a spirit, Janakikutty claims it is her elder cousin going to meet her lover on the sly who is ‘possessed’. When she listens to the rumours about her father’s infidelity and the ‘Urvashi’ (‘the other woman’) in his life, she wonders if she should ask the yakshi to kill them both. Thus, to a large extent, while the yakshi could be said to be a stand-in for the unavailable mother figure as well as the elder sibling, she is also much more than that. The yakshi is different from the older women in Janakikutty’s life in one major respect—in her lack of interest in heterosexual pursuits. In fact, the yakshi, Kunjathaal, though it is not

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made explicit in the novel, seems to have had an unhappy married/love life while she was alive and in her yakshi form, has a deep antipathy towards matrimony. Janakikutty’s alienation is thus also perhaps a result of an unconscious refusal to be a part of a world where growing up equates to finding a male companion. The death of the mutthashi is traumatic for another reason. It also marks the end of an older world and its ways she represents—the matrilineal community. Janakikutty lives in ‘a time of change’ and inhabits ‘a space and time out of joint’ (Menon 2005). Her alienation can be read as part of the larger alienation that gripped the Nair community in the second half of the 20th century with ‘the disintegration of a traditional society and order’ that had been held together by the matrilineal households of the Nairs (Menon 2005). This is a period marked by the fragility and fluidity of the social structure as agriculture ceases to be a lucrative occupation because of a host of factors, such as the partition of jointly held property into small plots, and rising labour costs (George 2011). As the close-knit mutually supportive village community bound together by ‘strong ties of family relationships and neighbourliness’ breaks down, the sense of place and the feeling of identity and security experienced by the individual disappear (George 2011). It is this world that Janakikutty inhabits. The gradual transformation of this world is marked by two events in the narrative. If the mutthashi’s death is one pole of this gradual change sweeping the community, the other pole is Janakikutty’s cousin’s wedding. Unlike the mothers who continue to stay on in their taravaad after marriage, her elder female cousin is expected to move away from the village community to the urban space of Bombay, where her husband works. In her re-location, we have the beginning of transition of the matrilineal joint family into a patrilineal nuclear family unit. If Janakikutty gets married, this is a displacement she will also have to undergo. However, the most obvious manifestation of the end of this world is the impending death of the mutthashi. In the treatment meted out to the mutthashi by the members of her joint family, we already see the decline of the matrilineal bonds. Mutthashi, who is Janakikutty’s dead grandmother’s younger sister, had started living with her sister’s family in her old age. Janakikutty’s family considers her as a millstone around their necks and alleges that her children abandoned her because of her wrong doings. They call her ‘wretched old hag’, ‘blasted woman’, etc. and allege that the troubles in the family, embodied in the adults’ belief of Janakikutty’s possession by a spirit, started after her arrival. The old woman has to prove her utility to the family each step of the way, when it could be argued that as the grandmother’s younger sister, she would have been considered as a legitimate part of the matrilineal family in an older order.

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This comes out in the instance where Janakikutty’s valiamma (mother’s elder sister) is beset by the fear that mutthashi might die around the wedding date of their daughter forcing it to be postponed. Janakikutty’s valiachan (mother’s sister’s husband), ‘living as he did in Bombay’ and ‘quite ignorant in such matters’ argues that since she is not their ‘direct mutthashi’, there is nothing to worry about (Nair 1992). However, he is set right by Ravunni Nair, the caretaker of the household, ‘Whether you like it or not, she is the eldest member of the Taravaadu [the joint family]. What difference does it make whether she is Mutthashi or Mutthashi’s sister? If she dies, there will be mourning’ (Nair 1992). Mourning ritual in a community identifies the members of the original in-group. In the older conception of the taravaadu, Mutthashi’s sense of belonging to the family unit is indisputable. After all, as the eldest member of the family, she is supposed to be its cementing unit. However, these kinship bonds do not have the same value in the new order, especially in the business of the living. Yet, the remnants of the old order haunt the present—Mutthashi’s death creates a situation where the adults are unable to make a call between loyalty to the old order and the emerging new order associated with urbanised diasporic spaces like Bombay, where the rules of the old order do not operate. Janakikutty’s ‘state of crisis’ comes from the fact she is the only one within her taravadu who acknowledges and believes in this old order symbolised by the Mutthashi. Mutthashi’s knowledge of herbs may be of no use to the others in the changing order where modernity has already made its presence felt in the English doctors who get called in for serious diseases. It is a world Mutthashi doesn’t want to enter, for when she falls sick, she refuses to have the English medicines and a vaidyan, a traditional medicine-man, has to be called in to treat her. The epistemological significance of this world is not lost on Janakikutty who exclaims, ‘She picks leaves and roots. Mutthashi alone knows which are medicinal. Before she dies she must pass on the secret to a little girl in the family, the kutty she likes best. Who else but me!’ (Nair 1992). It is important to note that this knowledge is passed on from the older woman to a younger girl in the family, another marker of the matrilineal bonds that sustained it. Mutthashi’s death is thus not just a personal loss for Janakikutty that reminds her of her mortality, but also the loss of the world she represents. The march of history, which leaves behind older kinship systems, and the force of historic time—both loom large in mutthashi’s impending death. This death, both literal and symbolic, is countered through the invoking of the yakshi—a spirit who inhabits mythic or eternal time. At the same time, the yakshi, a mother-goddess turned

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monster, also stands for the powerful mother figure this transitional period requires, where the existing mother figure, the weak mutthashi, and the world she represents, are fading. Janakikutty’s fascination for the yakshi, a blood-thirsty female monster, also needs to be read as part of her feelings of resentment towards her family members. Much of this resentment is induced by their treatment of mutthashi. The old woman’s desires are treated with utmost contempt by the others. When she expresses a wish to witness her granddaughter’s wedding in person, Janakikutty’s amma (mother) brusquely informs her that it is not possible, since others would have to carry her. When she asks for a good set of clothes for her granddaughter’s wedding, the caretaker of the house says with a sarcastic chuckle, ‘Yes, shortly new clothes will be needed for the mourning’ (Nair 1992). The relatives and neighbours, who visit the house as part of the wedding, urge the mutthashi, in Janakikutty’s hearing, to pray to God to grant her a quick death and not trouble her concerned family any longer. Mutthashi is denied respect even after her death. Her relatives bring a tiny branch of a mango tree for the funeral rites even when the kitchen is stocked with thick bundles of firewood meant for cooking the wedding feast. Janakikutty’s mother-like mutthashi thus has no one to take care of her other than the young girl, who is herself alienated within her family. This is where the yakshi acts as an avenging angel, who not only protects both the girl and the old woman, but is also powerful enough to punish the wrong-doers. Thus, the yakshi’s fangs, her damshtras, are as much part of her appeal as the sweet voice with which she addresses Janakikutty during their first meeting. Janakikutty had heard about the yakshi from the people around her. In their tales, she often appeared as a blood-thirsty monster who sucked the blood of people with her sharp canines and chewed up their bones with her giant molars. This was in line with the familiar portrait of the yakshi in Kerala’s folktales, where she appeared as the monster haunting lonely pathways. In the typical yakshi tale of Kerala, the traveller would meet a beautiful woman at night who would invite him to her house to spend the night. Once he was in her home, he would realise to his shock that the woman was in fact a yakshi and the house, her palm tree. The yakshi would make short work of the man, drinking his blood and eating him, leaving only his hair and teeth to be found under her tree the next day. In these tales, the yakshi was bound by a mantravadi (sorcerer) who would nail her to a Kanjiram tree (Snakewood tree). Though the yakshi appears as a monster in these tales, in her original avatar, she was a mother-goddess. Historians opine that the yakshi was a primitive mother-goddess associated with fertility rites and

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tree worship, whom different organised religions absorbed into their fold either as a sub-deity or as a monster to be tamed by the deities of these religions. Her presence in the traveller-tales of Kerala can be traced to the Buddhist Jataka tales where she appears in the guise of a shapeshifting femme fatale whom the Bodhisatta had to defeat in his night-travels (Meenu 2017). These stories have to be read as part of the monsterisation of primitive mother-goddess cults, whose practices of worship involved blood sacrifice.4 It is this figure whom Janakikutty invokes from the past as she faces a crisis. In this mother-goddess, whose powers of magic can transform reality and whose fangs can strike terror in the hearts of any on-looker, Janakikutty tries to find the absent-mother-figure who can sustain the collapsing world around her. The yakshi’s purpose is also to stall time through per powers of magic, for it is time which stands as the enemy of the aging mutthashi and the disintegrating matrilineal community. When Janakikutty meets the yakshi for the first time, she and her mutthashi are bound by historic time, while the yakshi, as a monster, inhabits mythic time.5 This meeting, as is usual with monstrous encounters, happens during liminal time. Janakikutty meets the yakshi during ucchakkaanam (the time period between noon and evening). Ucchakkaanam, just like ‘midnight’, is a liminal time, reserved for the yakshi. It is also a time when both the mothers rest and the children in the family get to do what they want for a while, unobserved by the adults. The meeting happens in the parambu, where her grandmother used to collect herbs, a space forbidden for young girls to stray into. Parambu refers to the area surrounding a traditional house in Kerala, which consisted of groves and woods, ponds and usually a serpent mound. It is a liminal space, the in-between land—neither completely domesticated, nor wild. As a terrified Janakikutty shuts her eyes tight as she spots the yakshi and starts chanting the hundred names of Arjuna to give her courage, the yakshi’s soft voice greets her as her full name ‘Janakikutty’ rings in the air. ‘It had a strange fondness in it. I liked the way she called me by my full name. Others call me Jatti. I opened my eyes slowly. Kunjathaal was standing next to me’ (Nair 1992). Janakikutty, whom everybody considers in the house as a mere child and not deserving of the respect of a grown up, is impressed by the yakshi’s addressing her by her full name. She finally meets a person who acknowledges her as an individual, unlike the majority in her family. When Janakikutty asks her where her damshtra (fangs) are, the yakshi replies, ‘The damshtra grows big only when we have a prey. But it scared everyone away. That’s why we have no one to play with’ (Nair1992).

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Instead of the femme fatale of the folk tales, here, the yakshi transforms into a lonely young woman in search of a playmate. Janakikutty’s other playmate in this world is Karineeli. Karineeli, in folklore, was a female spirit who drank the blood of children and threw their dead bodies into the well (as cited in Sajan 2006). In ‘Little Earthquakes’, she is shown instead to spit at her victims, afflicting them with small pox, a disease usually seen as a punishment inflicted by the Dravidian goddess, Bhagavathi. The two spirits, the yakshi and Karineeli, also stand for the feudal past with its caste norms. The yakshi is dressed as a namboothiri or a Brahmin woman, while Karineeli is dressed as a lower caste woman.6 Karineeli also addresses the yakshi as thampuratti, which was the term lower-caste women used to address upper-caste women in the premodern, feudal society. The ethereal bodies of these female spirits thus continue to be marked by their castes even after their death. However, once Janakikutty enters this world, they undergo a transformation. The two spirits, who have an antagonistic meeting in front of Janakikutty, soon become friends and playmates. Karineeli is revealed to be another lonely spirit, whose resentment towards the yakshi is caused by the latter excluding her from her games. Janakikutty compares these two female spirits, who bury their differences, with her amma and valiamma, who often have terrible fights in front of the young girl. The world of the spirits thus also seems to embody a sisterhood that is not possible in the matrilineal taravaad Janakikutty is part of. That this world has two spirits who are contrasted with her mother and aunt also indicates that Janakikutty is constructing another family in her world that mirrors her own. Janakikutty’s meeting with the yakshi and Karineeli saves her from her loneliness. The two female spirits are not just playmates; they are also her protectors. Janakikutty believes that they protect her from the other spirits in the parambu and her family members. When her brother scolds her, Janakikutty has to intervene as she watches the yakshi’s fangs lengthen and Karineeli about to spit on him. The fear her playmates induce is also something she exudes at times. Her cousin and elder sister run away when she stares at them. However, the company of the spirits also alienates her from her family, who believe her to be possessed. They clamp restrictions on her movement, which make her afternoon forays into the parambu impossible, but the yakshi and Karineeli thwart such attempts by coming inside the home at playtime. In these developments, we see the walls between the two worlds thinning down, as the spirits, once restricted to the parambu, start encroaching into the domestic space. The rest of the tale can be read as Janakikutty’s negotiation of the conflicts that occur between these two worlds—the real/human and

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the fantastic/supernatural, a negotiation that becomes increasingly difficult in the face of repeated crises. All the four crises in the story have to do with death in one form or the other, though Janakikutty perceives it to be so only in three cases. The first crisis comes in the form of an exorcist who performs an elaborate ritual to drive out the yakshi from Janakikutty’s body, an event that could mark the collapse of her supernatural world. Janakikutty fears the worst, but feels reassured as the Yakshi and Karineeli stand behind her. Her reassurance grows as her mutthashi, her human ally, joins her. The ritual ends when Janakikutty falls down in a faint and is declared exorcised. However, it is on the yakshi’s comforting lap that she lands. The second crisis arises when Janakikutty’s bed-ridden muttthashi expresses a desire to attend her grand-daughter’s wedding and is turned down by her relatives. When Janakikutty requests the yakshi to work her magic, her uncharacteristic silence enrages the young girl who wonders aloud if all the tales about her powers are just a bluff. The meeting ends with the yakshi agreeing to help Janakikutty. However, to the reader, the second crisis appears far more serious than Janakikutty perceives it to be. The snippets of adult conversations Janakikutty relays to the reader without understanding their import have revealed that her mutthashi is in fact dead. She had passed away on the morning of the wedding, but the adults had kept it a secret to forestall any postponement of the wedding. As Janakikutty confronts the yakshi and asks her to make her mutthashi attend the wedding, she is importuning her friend to make a dead person come alive. At this juncture, death is still an unknown event for Janakikutty. She doesn’t understand its implications, which is why even when the caretaker informs her that her mutthashi is dead, she keeps on asking her to wake up. In the tale, Janakikutty’s mutthashi opens her eyes, adjusts her clothes and takes Janakikutty’s hand. She runs with Janakikutty and her spirit friends to the temple, where she showers flowers and rice on the bride and groom. When Janakikutty recounts the happenings to the adults, they think it is her hallucination. However, the flower petals inside the dead mutthashi’s palm unnerve them and they wonder aloud if Janakikutty has been possessed by the dead mutthashi’s spirit.7 For Janakikutty though, mutthashi remains alive during the wedding, irrespective of whatever the adults claim. The second crisis thus passes with the thin walls that separate Janakikutty’s human world and spirit world still intact. However, a third crisis follows soon after. Watching the wedding ceremony, the yakshi Kunjaathal’s damshtras grow longer, while her eyes spit fire at the bridegroom. When Janakikutty sees Kunjathaal about to pounce on the groom as he poses for a photo with the bride,

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she bursts into a loud scream and falls unconscious. Janakikutty’s fainting fit can be read as a dramatization of the conflict within her, if one may read the mutthassi and the yakshi as standing for the two worlds—the real/human which is fading, and the fantastic/supernatural which requires the former to be left behind. The conflict is also between the two mother figures she needs in her—the ‘good’ mother, mutthashi, who wants to bless her granddaughter and the ‘bad’ mother, yakshi, who wants to kill the groom. It is no wonder Janakikutty faints, unable to make a decision. It is also significant that Sarojini edathi’s wedding, which signifies the establishment of the patrilineal system where the woman of the taravaad relocates to live with her husband, is an event the yakshi, the representative of an older order, cannot embrace. When Janakikutty wakes up, she finds out that the groom is unharmed. It, however, leads to an altercation between Janakikutty and her spirit friends. Her friends leave ‘heads bent in shame’ when an angry Janakikutty declares that she is not going to play with them any longer (Nair 1992). Janakikutty, thus, chooses to remain in her real/human world at this juncture. However, remaining in the real/ human world requires Janakikutty to confront the march of historic time and acknowledge mutthashi’s death. This is an impossible feat for Janakikutty and leads to her embracing the spirit world once and for all as the fourth crisis emerges. The fourth crisis mirrors the first crisis in many ways. If it was the yakshi who was going to be burnt in the exorcism ritual, it is mutthashi who is going to be destroyed in the funeral pyre. This is an event that produces a visceral reaction in Janakikutty, who cries out in agony as she imagines her mutthashi scorching in the fire. This is the point where Janakikutty gives into the pull of the other world completely, accepting its magical powers to alter reality. Magic happens and Janakikutty sees Mutthashi coming out of the pyre and flying to her, the white cloth covering her body turning into wings (Nair 1992). Janakikutty exclaims in relief as she watches the sight, ‘Mutthashi will not die. Mutthashi will not leave this house. There’s still so much to be done. Mutthashi is still to show me what herbs and roots are to be gathered and how the paste is to be made and applied for eruptions, wounds, swellings’ (Nair 1992). The fourth crisis, thus, ends in Mutthashi turning into a spirit whose continued existence also ensures the continuation of the world she represents. Now, Janakikutty, the youngest child, has time to inherit the epistemological secrets of the matrilineal world her mutthashi inhabits. In the last scene of the story, as the woman who Janakikutty thinks is a nurse runs away in fear, she is joined by Kunjathaal and Karineeli, who call her silly and assure her that they hadn’t left her. Janakikutty

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is happy to be surrounded by her mutthashi and her playmates, though the absence of her family members in the room indicates that her link with that world may have snapped for ever. Janakikutty doesn’t appear to be bothered by that as the storyteller in her places her ‘dead’ mutthashi within mythic time, which her monster friends inhabit.8 This time is free from the constraints of historic time also because it is the time which children at play inhabit. After all, children ‘perceive time as either compressed or expanded depending on what they are doing’, oblivious to the world around them (Nikolajeva 1996). Mutthashi doesn’t just come back from death. She also transforms into a little girl addressed as ‘mutthashikutty’ (kutty is used to refer to a child), who takes part in the games the other three play (Meenu 2017). Mutthashi’s suitability to join her games is indisputable now, for her pretending to be dead is the biggest trick anyone could have played. In her new avatar, mutthashi is also free from the trials and tribulations of adulthood. As we leave them for the day, Janakikutty and her friends, like Peter Pan, the boy who will never grow up, continue to play, inhabiting the timespace of eternal childhood and ideal sisterhood. The rite of passage from childhood to adolescence which would have marked Janakikutty’s coming to terms with the march of historic time, ‘the painful growing and aging towards inevitable death’, has ended in the suspension of that time itself (Nikolajeva 2000).

Endnotes 1.

‘Little Earthquakes’ is the English translation of M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Malayalam short story ‘Cheriya Cheriya Bhookambangal’. The earthquakes in the title refer to the disturbances within the joint family of the narrator. Most of these disturbances are due to the fear that the narrator is possessed. 2. Mutthashi is a term used for one’s grandmother. Here, the term is used for Janakikutty’s dead grandmother’s younger sister. 3. Ancestral home. 4. Crossroads were the original Stone Age sites of the Mother-goddess cults of India, which later developed into trade routes. The travelling merchants had the custom of offering animal sacrifices to the deities at the crossroads before starting a journey, promising more if their journey helped them in reaping profit (Jordan 2012). It is believed that in order to preach their religion that insisted upon the cessation of blood-sacrifices, Buddhist monks might have frequented these mother goddess cult-spots, often at the junctions of great trade routes, where sacrifices were most made (Kosambi 1983). Hence, the yakshas and yakshis encountered on the crossways in the Jataka tales may have been the deities of local cults, especially mother

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goddess cults, whose use of animal sacrifice (which was anathema to the Buddhist monks), resulted in their portrayal as cannibalistic/demonic beings. 5. K.A. Nuzum in ‘The Monster’s Sacrifice—Historic Time: The Uses of Mythic and Liminal Time in Monster Literature’ distinguishes between three temporalities. Historic or Linear time exists as ‘man’s deepest existential dimension […] linked to his own life,’ with a ‘beginning and an end, which is death, the annihilation of his life’ (2004). As against that, there is circular time. This time is ‘indefinitely repeatable’ and ‘neither changes nor is exhausted’ (Nuzum 2004). Monsters are known to abide in mythic or circular time (Nuzum 2004). The third is liminal, or marginal time, a ‘time of transition from one state of being to another or from one category of time to another’, night-time being its most common manifestation (Nuzum 2004). This is also the time when monsters roam (Nuzum 2004). 6. Kunjathaal, is fully covered in a white mundu, blouse and has a white cloth around her neck, while Karineeli doesn’t wear a blouse and insists that she is forbidden to wear anything other than a necklace made of stones and beads. 7. This is one indication within the text that there is a possibility for Janakikutty’s world to be ‘real’. 8. Janakikutty’s strange tale where a dead woman attends a wedding and yakshis who roam free in the parambu ends, if one can call it that, in the ‘present continuous’. It breaks temporal notions of a classical narrative, though the very act of story-telling is often referred to as ‘calling forth ghosts’ (2002). In Janakikutty’s case, this invocation is reflected in the structure of her story itself. Sajan argues that the two points of culmination in a classical tale are a wedding signifying the beginning of life and death, signifying the end of life (Sajan 2006). In Janakikutty’s tale, neither Sarojini edathi’s wedding, nor her mutthashi’s death can serve as endpoints (Sajan 2006). Janakikutty’s tale, in fact, tries to transcend these two as she reforms her ‘coterie of friends’ with mutthashi added to the group (Sajan 2006).

Works Cited Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’. In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, pp. ix–x. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1996. ‘Preface: In a Time of Monsters’. In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, pp. 3–25. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. George, T.K. 2011. ‘Ecosensibility in Narrative Fiction: A Reading of the Novels of Mulk Raj Anand and M.T. Vasudevan Nair’. Unpublished PhD Thesis: Department of English, Kannur University, Thalassery.

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Gygi, Fabio, 2016. ‘The Memory That Dare Not Speak Its Name’. Semiotic Review, 2: https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/18 (accessed on 13 March 2020). Meenu, B. 2017. ‘The Woman Who Walks the Night: Yakshi as Myth and Metaphor in Kerala’s Cultural Imaginary’. Unpublished PhD Thesis: Department of English, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad. Menon, Dilip M. 2005. ‘Things Fall Apart: The Cinematic Rendition of Agrarian Landscape in South India’. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 32(2): 304–334. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150500094519 (accessed on 13 March 2020). Nair, M.T. Vasudevan. 1992. ‘Little Earthquakes’. In Katha Prize Stories: Volume 2, edited by Geeta Dharmarajan, pp. 13–32. New Delhi: Katha. Nikolajeva, Maria. 1996. Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic. London: Routledge. ———. 2000. From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature. London: The Children’s Literature Association & The Scarecrow Press. Nuzum, K.A. 2004. ‘The Monster’s Sacrifice—Historic Time: The Uses of Mythic and Liminal Time in Monster Literature’. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 29(3): 217–227. Available at https://muse.jhu.edu/ article/250044 (accessed on 13 March 2020). Sajan, N. 2006. ‘Folklore and Superstition in M.T.: A Tropological Reading of Select Short Stories’. In M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Fiction and Films: An Analysis, edited by Jose Augustine, pp. 100–109. Muvattupuzha: Nirmala Academic & Research Publications. Wolfreys, Julian. 2002. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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13 Funny Ghosts, Friendly Ghosts: A Study of How Indian English Pre-Teen Horror Fiction Turns Fear on its Head Anurima Chanda In her seminal work, The Case of Peter Pan; or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984), Jacqueline Rose argues against the very possibility of children’s literature. She writes: ‘Children’s fiction is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot be written (that would be nonsense), but in that it hangs on an impossibility’ (Rose 1984), an observation which stems from the fact that it is adults who write, publish, criticise and choose books for children. The anxiety of the self-conscious author to represent their (read ‘adult’) world in the best possible light to appeal to the senses of the self-conscious adult buyer who wants to project that image of an invincible selfhood onto the actual child reader to make sure that the power dynamics at home remain intact—is evident in most children’s fiction. It was only as late as the 1980s/90s (in Indian English, even later) that questionable adult figures started making their presence felt within the genre, starting with the US. However, such deviations still remain an area of great debate among the adult society, keeping its instances contained within safe numbers. As far as Indian English is concerned, such a trend of including ‘inappropriate’ topics that expose children to the harsh realities of life is relatively new, with adults still not fully confident to own up to their fallibilities. How can they, who claim to be the protectors of childhood, confess that they too can go wrong! Ranjit Lal’s Faces in the Water (2010) and Payal Dhar’s There’s a Ghost in My PC (2012) can be taken as cases in point. Both the texts deal with two hard-hitting social issues, the former dealing with female infanticide and the latter with cyberstalking and depression, topics that adults have still not found the language to talk to children about. These not only expose to children the ugliness of the adult society, but also the truth about their flawed nature, one that is clearly not coveted. Against such a backdrop, how do these two authors choose to initiate such a difficult dialogue, especially with a pre-teen audience? Both of 161

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them, very interestingly, take refuge under the banner of horror, using its medium to talk about these unspeakable horrors underlying the apparent safe haven of the adult world. However, there is a catch here. Going by Noël Carroll’s decoding of art horror (or, horror generated by a work of art that falls under the genre of horror) in The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart, the elements of horror should be thus that they induce feelings of disgust and repulsion in the reader. In that respect, Lal and Dhar’s ghosts emerge to be royal misfits. If anything, the ghosts of the discarded foetuses or the masked ‘predators’ frequenting digital spaces become epitomes of friendliness. Instead of disgust, they evoke a state of kinship. Instead of repulsion, they evoke friendship. Instead of fear, they evoke laughter. In a strange way, they allow children to sneak a peek into the society’s decomposing centre without really experiencing the full horrors of the situation. Is it a clever way to safeguard one’s unchallenged authoritative position or to make sure that the readers are not scarred by its import? Or, does it have some other ulterior motive? This chapter attempts to read these two pre-teen horror fictions, within Indian English children’s literature, to understand how horror operates within the domain of children’s literature, a genre obsessed with the suitability of content. In this process, the chapter will try to problematise the figure of this kid-friendly ghost, standing for the unspoken horrific reality of a space burdened with the insecurities of a developing postcolonial nation, in order to understand what role it plays. Does it become a way of toning down the horror for the sake of the child reader or the insecure adult?

I. Horror and Children’s Literature Going by the Eurocentric model of classification, the roots of horror as we understand it in the modern sense (excluding its presence in oral traditions and ancient literatures), go back to the 18th century. As Carroll writes in The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart, the immediate source is believed to have been in ‘the English Gothic novel, the German Schauer-roman [shudder novel], and French roman noir [thriller]’ (1990) with Horace Walpole’s 1765-novel, The Castle of Otranto, being the first horror fiction of any relevance. It is interesting to note how this overtly fantastical genre developed around a time when scientific reasoning was of utmost importance. The excesses of horror are therefore seen by many as having grown as a response to the imaginatively barren and intellectually rich Age of Reason. As Carroll aptly points, ‘... the horror novel can be thought of in several different ways: it might be construed as compensating for that which

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the Enlightenment suspects, operating like a kind of safety valve; or it might be conceived of as a kind of explosion of that which is denied’ (1990). Whatever be the reason, horror arrived, stamping its presence as an established genre. With time, it branched out into various subcategories with the horror-inducing elements changing form and shape. The idea was to capture a moment of interruption, of one reality with another. As Ian Almond writes: Two worlds, two times, bump into one another, sometimes antagonistically, sometimes collaboratively. In some texts, a struggle takes place as two different temporalities vye for control of the same building or person; in others, the two worlds merge and overlap harmoniously, content to mirror one another without intruding to the point of primacy. (2017)

Within this struggle, one thing remained constant. The expectation of the emotion that such a work of art is designed to extract from its readers—that of ‘a combination of fear and repulsion’ (Carroll 1990)— the former stemming from the terror unleashed by these ‘unnatural’ forces and the latter arising from the impurity of its presence. It is hence no wonder why John Locke felt that children should be preserved ‘from all impressions and notions of spirits and goblins or any fearful apprehensions in the dark’ (Locke 1913), a view that continued to dictate children’s publishing for a very long time. Children, with their fragile impressionable minds, had to be sheltered from such grotesqueness, especially one that had no scientific basis. Therefore, till about the second half of the 19th century, horror was absent from children’s printed literature. Even as the genre’s popularity and marketability kept rising in the adult market, the writers and publishers of children’s literature remained uncomfortable in allowing the ghost story to enter the market for the younger readers. In its stead, grew up something of a mock ghost story culture, serving a bipartite function: satisfying children’s craving for the horror tradition (which, although not in the print format, existed aplenty in the oral ghost story tradition, entering the nursery space mainly through the servants1) without exposing them to an actual spirit, and thereby mocking one’s belief in the superstitious by ultimately rubbishing the presence of ghosts through some rationalist thread (Ferrier-Watson 2013). This trend, which grew up as an attempt to block out supernatural ghosts, did something interesting, argues Sean Ferrier-Watson. In an otherwise ghost-free domain, the hoax ghost stories ended up introducing elements of horror and sparking an interest in the genre among young

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readers, which ripened the ground for its full blown development in the subsequent century. By the turn of the 19th century, several factors precipitated a gradual transition of the mock ghost stories into the supernatural ghost stories within children’s literature. The precedent had already been set by the changing landscape of ghost stories within literature for the adults, where, as Jennifer Bann argues, the rise of spiritualism had led to the figure of the ghosts becoming more empowered. Additionally, the liminal space offered by the genre had also been recognised as an appropriate vessel to explore issues of class, gender, economy and religion. While children’s literature found in these changes ready models to emulate from, the shift would not have been possible without advancements in the study of childhood, where one became more open to equipping children with ways of confronting fear by exposing them to it in safe proportions as an important developmental need rather than sheltering them from it. An important work in this direction, considered by Dale Townshend as pioneering the move to supernatural spectral figures within children’s literature, was Charles Dickens’s ghost stories. This view, however, is strongly contended by Ferrier-Watson as being misdirecting on the ground that Dickens never sought to write specifically for children even though his stories appealed to young readers. With the borders between adult and children’s fiction still not strongly etched out, such instances of fluidity in readership was far and many during this period. Some instances of this, as mentioned by Daniel Hahn, would be Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). Be it for adults or children, the elements of horror had already started levelling up by this time, with its effects becoming more tangible within print culture universally. The widespread disillusionment with rationalism, technology and science as generated by the world wars might also have played a huge role in this regard. In children’s literature, the move started with the emergence of ghostly figures possessing supernatural powers, but ones that were quite simple and cartoonish in nature than horrific. This served the purpose of not overtly terrorising the young readers within a genre too sensitive about the suitability of its content, as it was just beginning to open its doors to topics hitherto banned. By the 1940s, this transitioned into the birth of the ‘friendly ghost’ reaching its high point with the appearance of Casper, the Friendly Ghost, in 1945. Calling this new form as the ‘first truly successful supernatural ghost archetype’ (Ferrier-Watson 2013), Ferrier-Watson argues how it brought about a change in the imagination of the appearance and attitude of ghosts within children’s literature, bridging the gap between old ghostly traditions and the newly emerging one.

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From the second half of the 20th century, supernatural ghosts no longer remained a rarity within the genre. They developed rapidly and became more sinister and autonomous. With the hesitation in portraying ghosts as truly terrifying dissipating to a large extent—as the raging success of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series will show (although many scholars tend to diss its literary merit)—writers today are more prone to experimentation. Usually one step behind its adult counterpart, horror within children’s literature still has a long way to go, but at least now, fear is no longer seen as a taboo within the genre, thanks to the constant developments within childhood studies. Moreover, with the growing realisation of the lucrative commodifiable value of fear,2 as far as the children’s market is concerned, it is improbable that the tradition will fizzle out anytime soon. In the Indian children’s market, specifically in the English language, the scene is still very different. Given that children’s literature as a separate category came to India through colonial contact, it is understandable why trends, which made itself felt in the West quite early, are still at its nascent stage here. While a move towards ‘realist’ fiction in children’s literature was first noticed as developing in America around the 1950s and the United Kingdom around the 1960s, it is only in the last two decades that the Indian market has started opening up to issues that have so far been considered as controversial within the genre. The same has been true for horror, and here I must stress that I speak categorically in the case of Indian English children’s fiction as the country’s folktales and regional literature follow a different trajectory that is beyond the scope of this chapter. As adults are still divided over the issue of how-much-is-too-much for children, horror remains an area to be treaded upon carefully. We see a similar thing in the Faces in the Water and There’s a Ghost in My PC. In fact, this anxiety gets doubly intensified in these two texts, as the supernatural here seems to stem from a disruption in the social makeup of the culture, thereby rendered unsuitable for children on more than one count. A major part of the Garuda Purana, one of the 18 Maha Puranas of Hinduism, deals with death and its aftermath. In it, one can find 17 types of ghosts listed along with their origin story, which propagate the notion that these spirits choose to inhabit spaces where falsehood and lowliness can be found in abundance. While being caught in this liminal zone between the living and the dead for sins committed by and against them (according to the Hindu religion), ghosts emerge as symbols of leakages seeping out of the cracks of society’s rotting interior that has been forcefully repressed. Their existence thus bears testimony to erasures in the living present and helps give voice to the unheard. Haunting becomes a way of

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interrogating truths that have been suppressed, thereby raising ethical questions of exclusion and coercion that plague the ‘other’. In many ways, horror emerges as a culture’s conscience keeper by abnegating all that is immoral. Lal and Dhar seem to tap into this quality of horror to talk of those truths that are not easy to talk about, especially with a young audience. Their choice of audience in this regard is interesting because, thanks to the Rousseauian and Lockean theories that see the child as a zero state of innocence, adults have always been extremely conscious about appropriateness of content. For a very long time (one that is largely dominant even today), this has also led to wide censorship of topics in this area in order to preserve this image of the child as ‘a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality and the state’ (Rose 1984). Rose would, however, read this censorship of content as merely a projection of adult fears and desires designed to manipulate the realities of childhood in order to shape the figure of the child in a way that is not threatening to the adult idea of what childhood should be like. Within this imagination, adults have automatically assumed that children’s text ‘could not refer to sexuality, mention certain bodily functions, graphically describe violent acts, portray adults in a negative light, use swear words, criticise authority figures or address controversial social issue’ (West 1996). For India, this perception changed only from around the early to mid-1990s, when many small independent children’s publishers entered the market. As Wood writes: … many presses … producing high-quality work with progressive or radical orientations. Recognizing the importance of telling stories about many different kinds of children and rejecting the notion that children ought only to hear about happy or morally proper themes, these publishers see children’s books as places to tell important— and traumatic—stories about the recent past.... (2014)

These publishing houses are keen on commissioning children’s books that grapple with ‘real problems’ and no longer ‘shy away from publishing books for kids on sensitive topics—female infanticide and drug abuse are no longer taboo topics’ (Mazumdar 2015). Having small overheads and less accountability to other owners, independent publishing houses in any case have more scope to take greater risks in terms of experimenting with content, something that the mainstream publishers are not in a position to undertake and in terms of experimentation, what better place to invest in than the children’s literature market, which offers them with greater

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possibilities having been a fairly untampered territory so far? Luckily for them, the market dynamics has also changed in the recent years, not just because of the changing attitude towards childhood, but also because many of the limitations that plagued children’s literature publishing so far (widespread illiteracy especially among females, poor financial resources of the purchasing group, lack of public libraries, limited readership owing to multilinguality and other social and financial factors, high cost of children’s publishing, inadequate means of distribution, etc.) are slowly receding. This has put them in a beneficial position to dabble with unconventional ideas. Unfortunately, even though publishing houses have finally opened their doors to such taboo subjects, the potential buyers are still largely divided in their opinions regarding appropriateness of content. For this reason, despite interesting work being done in this area, many parents and schools have chosen to ban these books on the grounds of impropriety rather than welcome such changes. Despite such challenges, these publishing houses are always on the lookout for fresh voices that have different stories to tell in order to show how such works challenge ‘traditional canons by being unpredictable, innovative, subversive and risk-taking’ and often deal ‘with issues that are taboo or considered unsuitable for children’, but are still worth telling, because in the hands of ‘a talented writer the same issues are communicated with a sensitivity that opens the child’s mind in ways that more conventional books do not’ (Menon 2000). Lal and Dhar clearly belong to this league of writers, but in them we also see a carefulness in how they choose to narrate their tales. In this light, it might be interesting to mention an incident from Lal’s literary career. In the original manuscript of Smitten, a book on child abuse published by Young Zubaan in 2012, the abuser had been the father who was shown to sexually abuse his fifteen-year-old daughter, Akhila. This suffered a major setback when the manuscript was sent to some schools for suggestions and they wrote back requesting the figure of the father be changed to the stepfather. Even though Lal did not want to give in to such unhealthy stereotypes, he had to accede for the sake of the book (IANS 2016). This remains a primary problem within the genre, given that here the connection between the producer and the purchaser is not direct, but has to pass through a mediating agency (comprising of adults, again) who chooses and buys the books for their children. So, the producer has to first appease the adult purchaser without whose confirmatory nod the book might not reach the target reader at all, thus foiling the entire project. Reading against this backdrop, the use of caution, as has been practised by both Lal and Dhar in their texts, take on newer meanings. Is their use of kid-friendly ghosts, producing the

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effect of mild horror at best, to talk about controversial social issues that show the failure of the adult world, a way of safeguarding their own interests or that of the adult principal buyers for whom maintaining the status quo is of utmost importance? The next section of the chapter will probe these questions.

II. Reading the Texts The first line of Lal’s Faces in the Water reads: … my family is very proud of ... the fact that only boys have been born in our family for generations—they say no one can really remember when a girl was born the last time. (Lal 2010)

The story revolves around the Diwanchand family, where all the family members enjoy a robust and long life. Their secret is a mystery magic well, tucked away in a corner of the Diwanchand’s huge ancestral farm—about an hour and twenty minutes’ drive from their house in Delhi—whose water is drunk by the entire family and considered to be some sort of an ‘elixir’. While spending some time on the farm, 15-year-old Gurmeet, one of the brother’s sons, discovers this nasty secret that his family has been safeguarding for years. The family has a reputation to keep—only sons are born to them—for those that give birth to girls are weaklings. To keep up this reputation, every time a girl is actually born to one of the wives in the family, the body is disposed off in that well from which comes their drinking water. Curious about the magic well, Gurmeet ignores all warnings to find it on his own. When he does, he is shocked to find ‘faces in the water’ staring back at him. He gradually discovers that the faces are of his sisters and cousins who have been victims of the violent fate of the daughters of the Diwanchand family. Strangely enough, instead of polluting the water they have continued to live a normal life within the well, blessing the family with its life nourishing water. Gurmeet soon becomes friends with his ghost sisters and cousins, spending a summer of fun and frolic. Things change when Gurmeet’s mother is brought back to the house again, to have twin girls this time. Gurmeet takes upon himself the task of saving his newborn sisters and making his family realise the atrocity of their actions. The plotline has a lot of loopholes that make the book problematic and unrealistic (as much as a horror can seem real!) on various levels. However, the biggest problem arises from how the ghosts have been depicted. The well is inhabited by seven girls (Mohini, Nandini,

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Bishaka, Loveleen, Sagari, Anita and Richa), three of whom are Gurmeet’s own sisters, while the others are his cousins. They continue to live a parallel life in the well as if they were never killed. On probing, Mohini, the eldest and the most responsible, repeatedly claims: ‘... we were alive—maybe unconscious or sleeping … and we somehow never died’ (Lal 2010). They, therefore, continue with their daily life as they would in ‘real’, except that nobody seems to be able to be aware of it. In the absence of their guardians, Mohini takes up the role of parenting the girls, cooking for them, indulging them and even scolding them. The girls write their board exams, crave for cheesecakes and have night outs. Ironically, none of them question their situation. It is Gurmeet who keeps questioning their complacency, urging them to show their anger, but is snubbed by Mohini’s reasoning everytime, which feels too sanctimonious to be believable. She reminds him, ‘They’re our parents after all, in spite of everything’ (Lal 2010) and proudly proclaims that this is ‘the difference between sons and daughters’ (Lal 2010). Gurmeet, too, ultimately gives in to her logic, reasoning with himself that ‘Girls … absolutely no sense they had’ (Lal 2010). When, finally, he rescues his newborn twin sisters and eventually confronts his family about the truth, the girl ghosts are nowhere to be seen. Mohini later tells him, ‘Sorry about that Gurmi … that was something you had to do by yourself. We couldn’t interfere’ (Lal 2010). Soon after this, they all simply disappear because, ‘It just doesn’t work that way’ (Lal 2010). The only sign that they leave behind are framed photographs of all of them on their respective parents’ bedroom walls. The elders of the family decide to convert the farmhouse into a home and school for abandoned baby girls, a redemption that seems too easily earned. In There’s a Ghost in My PC, we see a similar pattern. Madhu and Kumuda live with their mother Amritha, having lost their father in an accident. Amritha is a working woman, who is shown to manage both home and office quite well. She has gifted 12-year-old Madhu with a second-hand laptop, but not before removing the Wi-Fi card from it, for fear that her daughter would be corrupted by the influence of the internet. Like an intelligent mother, she has also informed her about the perils of the cyber world. This, however, backfires when Madhu discovers the laptop being haunted by Viru, their next-door neighbour’s son and the original owner of the laptop, whose depression had led him to commit suicide. Viru becomes Madhu’s close friend, being trusted with her darkest secrets, even on occasions, helping her access the internet. Evidently, this does not go well with Amritha, who takes the laptop back as soon as she discovers the truth, worried that it might be some cyber bully. Viru manages to convince her of his real

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identity (Amritha had been his good friend when Viru was alive) and officially finds a place in the family PC. The text ends with the two worlds coexisting in harmony. This is not it. Dhar chooses to add to this a direct apology at the end, where she agrees that her book might set a ‘Very Bad Example’ (Dhar 2012) by upholding everything that a child must ‘not do’ when their PC shows signs of behaving oddly— like Madhu’s laptop. She confesses that Madhu had not been ‘clever’ to hide the truth from the elders and urges her readers to be more careful. She shares a long list of instructions to follow, in case somebody does become a victim of cyber threats. With the narrative style they assume, both the texts make a departure from the friendly ghost tradition in the West by failing to evoke any genuine horror. The horror in texts of this kind does not lie in the figure of the ghosts, who by virtue of their nature are subversive to the ghostly culture in their desire to befriend humans. Instead, it is the situation leading up to their exposition, which generates the eerie sensation that causes the heart to pound and the hair on the neck to stand—elements that are central to this genre (even in children’s texts, where fear is used judiciously). That experience of frightening that is generated before the unmasking as the readers assume the border between the known and the unknown is completely missing from the two texts. The ghosts are introduced quite early on in the novels, even before the feeling of the uncanny has been properly cultivated. For Gurmeet, it happens in broad daylight and the immediate response it elicits from him is to blame the heat (Lal 2010). Similarly, when Madhu’s sister, Kumuda, discovers Viru, it is a chance encounter and she doesn’t even realise that it is a ghost till much later, by when the readers are quite nonchalant to the ghostly presence and are actually more engrossed in solving the underlying mystery thriller being investigated upon by the two girls. The feeling of horror, therefore, is dissolved even before it can set in. In fact, the spectral figures in both Lal and Dhar seem secondary to the storyline and makes one wonder if it would have made any difference had they been excluded. The only significant purpose they serve is to disclose the dirty family secret to Gurmeet in Faces in the Water and to give Madhu access to the internet and be her agony aunt in There’s a Ghost in My PC. What is more interesting is how both the texts end with a restoration of status quo, the very thing that this genre has a tendency to challenge. From the lack of anger in the ghost girls to Viru’s unthreatening presence, Dhar and Lal seem to contain the transgression within acceptable proportions. But ghosts are supposed to move beyond the acceptable, to challenge the norm with their unfamiliarity and rupture it to create new avenues of action. In that sense, the ghosts in these tales through their refusal to transcend the norm, sacrifices the agency

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that horror provides to its agents. Their agency gets nullified because of the presence of more powerful forces lurking underneath the surface of the form. Stuck in the body inherited from the West, but with a mind conscious of its fragmented identity, Indian English pre-teen children’s horror seems to be haunted by the postcolonial adult who wishes for the child to be moulded on an imaginary ideal that might be too restrictive for its reality, but necessary to satiate its postcolonial angst. A form that is already haunted by the spectres of adult insecurities has no place for other ghosts. Thus, the actual ghosts get deterritorialised and their haunting gets foiled. Instead, we are left with a set of apology for ghosts, who are neither scary, nor humorous in the way humour can be used to defamiliarise and challenge. Instead, they are the ones living in constant fear of the adult, hiding behind the child. Their transgressions too are half-hearted and unable to produce any actual shift, unless permitted. Indian English pre-teen horror clearly needs to be exorcised before real horror can begin!

Endnotes 1. In The Uncommercial Traveller, a collection of semi-autobiographical sketches written by Charles Dickens, he mentions, ‘I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills’ (Ferrier-Watson 2013). That the corrupting influences of frightening folklore were passed onto children primarily through the nursemaids was a commonly held belief. 2. As Ferrier-Watson mentions, reading and telling ghost stories during Christmas was a customary practice in the West. While many scholars credit Dickens as having initiated this trend with his Christmas stories, there are others who trace it back to the medieval times. A similar association of ghosts with holidays can also be seen with Halloween, which has had a huge role to play in the emergence of supernatural ghosts within children’s literature thereby turning it into a saleable product.

Works Cited Almond, Ian. 2017. ‘The Ghost Story in Mexican, Turkish and Bengali Fiction: Bhut, Fantasma, Hayalet’. The Comparatist, 41: 214–236. Bann, Jennifer. ‘Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency: The Changing Figure of the Nineteenth-Century Specter’. Victorian Studies, 51: 663–685. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Dhar, Payal. 2012. There’s a Ghost in My PC. New Delhi: Scholastic India.

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Ferrier-Watson, Sean. 2013. ‘Fearful Beginnings: The Evolution of the American Ghost Story for Children’. Unpublished PhD Thesis: Department of Literature & Languages, Texas A&M University-Commerce, Texas. Hahn, Daniel. 2015. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. IANS. 2016. ‘Teen lit turns bolder with love, sex, homosexuality’. Available at https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/teen-lit-turnsbolder-with-love-sex-homosexuality-116051700750_1.html (accessed on 27 March 2017). Lal, Ranjit. 2010. Faces in the Water. New Delhi: Puffin Books. Locke, John. 1913. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: J. and R. Tonson. Mazumdar, Arunima. 2015. ‘The new storytellers’. Available at https:// www.livemint.com/Leisure/TQcqwUqQyIVPWGXcg6EoiM/The-newstorytellers.html (accessed on 27 March 2017). Menon, Radhika. 2000. ‘Are There Taboos in Children’s Literature?’. Available at https://www.tulikabooks.com/info/are-there-taboos-in-children-sliterature (accessed on 27 March 2017). Rose, Jacqueline. 1984. The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd. West, Mark I. 1996. ‘Censorship’. In International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt, pp. 491–500. London and New York: Routledge. Wood, Naomi. 2014. ‘Different Tales and Different Lives: Children’s Literature as Political Activism in Andhra Pradesh’. In Little Red Readings: Historical Materialist Perspectives on Children’s Literature, edited by Angela E. Hubler, pp. 169–190. The United States of America: University Press of Mississippi.

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14 Horror at the Margins: Phobic Essence and the ‘Uncanny’ Home in Contemporary Asian Gothic Literatures Soumyarup Bhattacharjee The term ‘Gothic’ first attained prominence as an aesthetic and architectural style in medieval and early modern Europe, an aesthetic perceived primarily as an antithesis to the Renaissance and Neo-classical patterns in architecture. As John Ruskin has argued in his seminal essay ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in the dominant cultural imagination of the 18th century, the term, with its distinctly medieval and Germanic connotations, represented a genre, style, attitude or aesthetic removed from the heartlands of renaissance Europe as well as the principles of enlightenment, both temporally and topographically. Although there is no readily perceptible, one-to-one relationship between the term ‘Gothic’ in architecture and the term as it is used in the context of literature, it might be said that from a literary perspective, two factors played a crucial role in ‘Gothic’ becoming a definitive generic signifier. First, an overwhelming majority of Gothic novels were set in castles, cathedrals and large mansions isolated from civilisation, with dark labyrinthine corridors and secret passageways, invoking not only a brooding atmosphere and a palpable presence of the sinister, but also the visual imagery associated with the towering Gothic structures in real world. Second, with the frequent inclusion of the supernatural and the grotesque along with liberal borrowing of elements from the earlier romance traditions, the term ‘Gothic’ in literature aligned itself with prominent and already existing associations of the Gothic architectural style—‘barbaric’ and ‘medieval’. The advent of literary romanticism, however, with its renewed emphasis on imagination and the supernatural, proved particularly conducive to the flourishing of Gothic fiction and its inclusion into the European literary mainstream. Philosophical and artistic expositions on the Gothic by the likes of Friedrich von Schlegel, Friedrich Schiller and, in the context of Victorian England, by John Ruskin et al, along with the critical acclaim and commercial success of Gothic fiction in German and Anglophone literature, had further ensured that the Gothic, despite initially being 173

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seen as originating from the margins of European cultural landscape, had been repositioned as something that is quintessentially European. Even in the early days of Gothic’s inclusion in the language of literary criticism, the term was applied to distinguish tales of medieval and supernatural haunting from the fantastic and supernatural tales of oriental origin. This played a significant role in the centring of the Gothic and the subsequent formation of a Gothic canon, giving it a particularly European character to the extent that for a long time, critics traditionally approached Gothic literature as strictly limited by certain geographical and temporal specificities. Since the late 20th century, however, new theoretical and critical approaches to Gothic literature have emerged, questioning these imposed limitations with a view to locating and defining a ‘contemporary Gothic’, necessitating an expansion and reformation of the Gothic canon as it had existed and, more importantly, a critical revaluation of the genre itself, with critics now having to explore new ways of negotiating with Gothic texts produced both on the threshold and outside the temporal and geographical boundaries of the classical Gothic period. A contemporary revaluation of the Gothic in literature thus necessitates an insight into the decentring of the genre since the late 20th century. Today, the Gothic has attained a truly global character, and authors belonging to different regional and cultural backgrounds have chosen to appropriate the genre in diverse ways; new idioms of horror have emerged either through a fusion of the Gothic with indigenous Folk Horror elements or by situating the generic conventions of the Gothic within local sociocultural histories. In this chapter, I shall examine how Gothic literature produced and set in third-world Asian countries can potentially provide significant interventions into the genre as much as they can influence the modes of evocation and experience of Gothic horror itself. This chapter will also focus on the existence of alternative and multiple Gothicisms in literature at the margins of the canon and seek to explore how Gothic can be a potent instrument for fictionalising deep cultural trauma, both at the level of the individual as well as the community. As novels such as The Graveyard Apartment (Mariko Koike 1993), Giraya (Punyakante Wijenaike 1997) and Frankenstein in Baghdad (Ahmed Saadawi 2013) indicate, the plurality of generic conventions coming out of diverse national and cultural backgrounds expand the heterogeneity and the limits of the genre without necessarily disrupting its intra-generic consistencies. The argument of this chapter will be centred on how the home provides the representational topos, through which the dynamic and violent unfolding of political, sociocultural and spatiotemporal conflicts are enacted within the Gothic narrative. Although

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the construction of ‘home’ in the three texts mentioned earlier, coming out of diverse cultural and literary traditions within Asia, are not homogeneous, I focus on the shared functional impulse in their treatment of ‘home’ as the locus vivendi that translates larger cultural conflicts and anxieties into a complex economy of desire, despair and trauma for the inhabitants. My intention is to highlight how these texts, despite their internal differences, historically contextualise the expression of the phobic essence within cultural conflicts manifested most prominently in the Global South since the late 20th century and, in the process, foster distinct modes of Gothic horror that deviate, but without complete disjunction, from the European Gothic tradition. Bearing in mind that the home as a site of haunting has been central to the Gothic mode for a long time in both European and North American Gothic traditions, locating how this integral Gothic motif is functionally repurposed and transcultured in contemporary Asian Gothic fiction can provide an important means of accessing these generic deviations and transgressions. Although the ‘uncanny’ home might be well entrenched into the Western Gothic mode since its inception, as the texts in this chapter exemplify, in the context of the Gothic originating from the Third World Asian literary traditions, the home is frequently, if not always, made uncanny as a narrative strategy, with the specific aim of collating the moments of horror with the specific conflicts in national and personal histories producing them. Punyakante Wijenaike’s Giraya is written in the form of a personal journal, where the events in the novel are accessed exclusively through the personal journal maintained by the protagonist, Kamini. Although the journal spans exactly a year, beginning on 13 April and ending on the same date a year later, the entries are occasional and irregular, and they are either related to days that have a special religious significance or to the occurrence of some particularly important event in her life. Kamini’s narrative is discontinuous and episodic; she omits more than she mentions, and the readers are intrigued by what she does not say as much as they are fascinated by what she does. She exhibits an almost uncanny awareness of and sensitivity to the full moon days and the waxing and waning phases of moon, something that she diligently mentions to the reader every time she begins a new entry. Perhaps what intrigues the reader the most is the curious pattern of dating she follows in her journal; Kamini uses both the Gregorian calendar and the traditional Sinhala calendar simultaneously, to mark each of her entries. This coexistence of the colonial import with the culturally inherited, the foreign with the endogenous, is significant in this context; first, approaching these two different calendars merely as two different patterns of timekeeping would be a simplistic reduction,

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and second, to understand the temporal complexities embedded in the narrative, it is necessary to recognise their representational potencies. The very foundation of the Gothic is in its irreconcilable oppositions and the consequent conflict of the two: the self and the other, the civilised and the barbaric, the rational and the occult, the modern and the primitive, etc. Similarly, in the context of Giraya, time itself emerges as the primary oppositional pivot and source of conflict in the narrative. If the Gregorian calendar is a marker, or, in Homi K. Bhabha’s term, a ‘sign’ of colonial inheritance and, by its natural extension, of ‘modernity’, then the Sinhala calendar evokes the past, rooted in a much older cultural tradition. If, on the one hand, it reflects the strange predicament of Kamini as a woman with modern university education, married against her will into a household where tradition and nostalgia for past authority rule supreme, then on the other hand, it also reflects the predicament of the time that gave rise to this novel in the first place, a fledgling postcolonial state trying to formulate and articulate its national culture and ‘independent’ cultural identity. Since time as an agent of cultural difference dominates the narrative as the primary source of conflict, the ‘home’ or, in the context of the novella, the walauwe (a Sinhala feudal manor house), emerges as the location of that conflict. The home, which should ideally be a sanctuary against the hostilities of the external world, simultaneously functions as a destabilising agent in Kamini’s psyche. As Anupama Mohan appropriately observes: The novella’s spatial imaginary centres, of course, on the walauwe … where rooms within rooms, doors behind doors, secret compartments in desks, ancient furniture and vintage English carpets, giant beds ‘over six feet in length’, abundance of luxurious materials like lace and silk, intimations of family jewellery such as coral, amethyst, and pearls, as well as exotic fragrances such as eau-de-cologne and lavender, all present a virtual assault on the senses for Kamini whose own impoverished background converts the walauwe for her into an exotic space. (Mohan 2015)

The walauwe is central not only to the spatial organisation in the narrative action, but also to the lives of characters who inhabit it. Although not comparable to the castles and cathedrals of Walpole or Radcliffe in its grandiose, like its more prestigious predecessors the walauwe too embodies a space of absence, a temporal anomaly. A remnant of an otherwise superseded past, it exists as a shadow of its former authority in a predominantly feudal way of life that is no longer compatible with the emergent discourses of modernity in relation

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to the post-independence Sinhala nation-state. Its crumbling visage witnessed by Kamini mirrors its crumbling relevance in time: Suddenly I turn and face the walauwe. In daylight it looks worn and crumbling. The white trellis work below has rotted away and only stumps remain like old gutted teeth.... The roof leaks badly. The distemper has peeled off the damp walls and the broken windows have been carelessly patched up or held together with cardboard and string and nails. (Wijenaike 2006)

In Gothic literature, however, the ‘setting’ also has a specific function; it not only stands as a fortress against time protecting a gradually disappearing way of life from complete obsolescence, but also as a barrier that marks a physical separation from the outside world. For Kamini, it represents a claustrophobic enclosure, a physical space embodying human decay and perversion. It is within the space of the walauwe, where she has to contend with the violently possessive, almost demonic presence of Lucia Hamy, a loyal servant to Adelaine and the keeper of the Giraya (an arecanut slicer), the gruesome murder of Adelaine by Lucia in a fit of jealousy, and the knowledge of the ‘perverted’ sexuality of her husband. In Kamini’s account, the readers find her constantly threatened for her life and the well-being of her infant son, Sugath, and in each instance, she associates her sense of fear and anxiety with the walauwe itself. Kamini refers to her separation from the world outside as ‘imprisonment’ and, in her imprisoned state, the dominant feeling in her is one of vulnerability and impending catastrophe; her sense of confinement is not only physical, but also a temporal one. She is trapped in the time and tradition of a space that she can neither fully comprehend, nor escape; what she perceives as her only means of survival is not permitted by the hostile rigidity of the walauwe: ‘The world is changing my son, and you and I must change our circumstances too’ (Wijenaike 2006). In the short prologue Kamini adds to her journal, she writes: Surely death is but another change and are we not accustomed to that in life as well?… and yet there are those who cling on to the old life and old ways as a frightened, reluctant babe clings to its mother’s womb at birth. (Wijenaike 2006)

Given the fact this prologue was written after all the events in the novel had already taken place, it implies Kamini’s own awareness of her failure to initiate change in a space that survives by resisting it, the failure of her attempt to take control of her life in a space that dictates the lives of all those who are dependent on it. Hence, it might be said that for Kamini,

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the chief source of the abject in the narrative is her dual entrapment in the time and space of the walauwe. Instead of providing a safe space to spend her conjugal life, the walauwe, her conjugal home, emerges as what Minoli Salgado has appropriately termed as an ‘unhomely’ home (2007). The notion of ‘uncanny’, as Freud approaches it, rests on the implications of the German term Heimlich, something that is familiar, intimate or homely. The uncanny then, first and foremost, is a disruption into that sense of familiarity and homeliness; it is, by definition, something that is ‘unhomely’. In Wijenaike’s novella, the home metonymically replicates within its space the temporal and cultural conflicts of the larger Sinhala society at a particular moment in history, allowing for the proliferation of the uncanny within its domain and creating, for Kamini, a disconcerting atmosphere of estrangement and lack of territorial security. Entrapment in an unhomely home metonymically embodying a society caught in violent cultural transitions is also central to the evocation and experience of horror in Mariko Koike’s novel, The Graveyard Apartment. The novel follows the family of Teppei Kano, his wife Misao, their little daughter Tamao and pet dog Cookie, who move into a sprawling new apartment in the posh suburbs of Tokyo with the hope of finding a ‘wholesome, peaceful home’. The apartment itself is situated in an in-between space; although located within the greater Tokyo Metropolitan area, it is surrounded by an old decrepit graveyard on three sides—located, in the literal sense, between the city and the vast expanse of the abandoned graveyard, the space of the living and the space of the dead. This liminal location also extends to the apartment a sense of physical isolation, which, in turn, is mirrored in the unsettling sense of psychological isolation experienced by its inhabitants. The novel opens with the inexplicable death of a caged bird inside the Kano family’s new home, foreshadowing the imminent tragedy. As the narrative unfolds, the sinister presence within the apartment increasingly manifests itself through a series of macabre occurrences, creating a dissonance that prohibits the possibility of attaining any comfort or familiarity for the inhabitants in their new home, which should ideally be a place that provides shelter to its residents against the uncertainties and flux of the external world. Rather, in Koike’s novel, the characters (as well as the readers) encounter a home harbouring invasive and malevolent spectres that are rarely seen, but constantly felt, heard and experienced. The novel, in fact, ‘chronicles’ the gradual descent of the Kano family into chaos and towards their final, fateful realisation through a series of tragedies—each more horrific than the previous—from the mysterious slashing wound to Tamao’s leg and Teppei’s encounter with the shadowy spectral figure at the basement

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to the violent deaths of Tatsuji and Naomi. The theme of entrapment within one’s own home functions at multiple levels within the narrative. First, the apartment literally imprisons the Kano family by limiting their physical movements and violently resisting their attempts to relocate to a different home. Second, the Kano family is trapped within the deep trauma originating from the suicide of Reiko, Teppei’s first wife, as a result of his illicit affair with Misao. The proximity of their new home to the graveyard and the adjacent Buddhist shrine acts as a constant reminder to Reiko’s death, a source of guilt that, despite Teppei and Misao’s best efforts to bury in the past, continues to surface at almost every instance of their present traumatic encounters and contributes significantly to their gradual psychological disintegration. Stephen King terms this phenomenon as the ‘disestablishment’ effect of horror, the anxiety stemming from the fact that structures of familiarity, be it family, home or one’s psychological coherence, ‘are in the unmaking’ (King 1987). What amplifies this terrifying effect further is the fact that the narrator never tries to provide any explanation for these occurrences, either rational or fantastic, perhaps for the same reason why the sources of haunting too remain unnamed and unexplained throughout the narrative. The shadowy beings who make themselves apparent through their whispering voices resembling ritualistic Buddhist incantations, or the handprints on the glass door of the apartment, represent a phobic essence that belongs to a repressed past, which can no longer be accessed, but is always felt and must be endured. Koike’s literary exploration of the Gothic mode in the novel exploits a culture increasingly determined by the impositions of a predominantly imported, Western form of modernity on its traditional, autochthonous past. Like the apartment itself, Mariko Koike’s Tokyo at the cusp of the fin-de-siècle epitomises an in-between space, suspended in its state of incomplete transition to capitalist modernity and caught in the conflict between its traditional, ritualistic and religious past and its deeply contested present. On the one hand, the graveyard and the adjacent Buddhist shrine, repeatedly associated throughout the novel with everything malevolent, haunting the lives of the Kano family, do not only serve as a reminder of this repressed past and submerged cultural heritage, but also physically embody its hostile and destabilising incursions into the present. On the other hand, the presence of the ‘graveyard apartment’ within the cartographic limits of Tokyo show how the urban space steeped in such radical cultural transitions can potentially contain within itself anomalous points of rupture that resist rational appropriation and function as sources of terrifying possibilities. As the novel indicates, these ruptures, to a great extent, stem from a lack of familiarity and understanding of the beliefs and mores of a

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modus vivendi that has been pushed to the margins and superseded by an increasingly Westernised and new urban middle-class way of life. As a result, the Kano family, firmly rooted in their ‘modern’, secular and rational outlook, can neither fully comprehend, nor exorcise the constant resurfacings of the abject and the occult preternatural confronting them. It is important to note in this context that, as critics like Tamara S. Wagner have argued, Gothic appropriations of conflicts emerging from the exponentially expanding and rapidly Westernising Asian metropolises in the late 20th century can potentially condition selfreferential and self-ironic reworking of the Gothic mode by dislocating its established ideological underpinnings. A closer inspection of the novel from this perspective suggests that although the author borrows the familiar external structure of the Gothic, the text subverts the relational mapping of its central constituent elements, sustaining that structure through a series of interrelated interventions. First, the novel strategically situates the cultural disjunctions and the concomitant anxieties, operating both at the level of the individual and the collective, under a gaze that is itself marked by the friction between the persistence of a largely endogenous past and a consistent movement away from it. Second, the text transgresses its generic limits at the moment it substitutes the ‘Western’ gaze of an outsider with the Westernised gaze of an insider and, in the process, problematises the relative positioning and hierarchical prefigurations of the East and the West, the insider and the outsider that are pervasive in Orientalist and imperial Gothic romances. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the text subverts the simplistic Gothic motif centred on the resurgence of an obscure and barbarous past onto the civilised present and instead reprioritises narrative focus on the incompatibility of a Western, exogenous modernity at the site of an organic past that has been rendered opaque and obscure. Hence, it might be argued that the literary potencies of Gothic horror in the text is sustained entirely by the specific historical moment of cultural transition that the novel seeks to capture, and although the past in itself does not constitute the grotesque, by (re)locating the evocation of Gothic horror along this defamiliarised axis of disparate cultural and temporal realities, the text simultaneously reproduces and transgresses the conventional generic expectations of urban Gothic. Koike’s novel thus exemplifies how juxtapositions of an occult, obscure and somewhat self-exoticised past with the simultaneously fascinating and repulsive excesses of Western modernity, what Wagner has appropriately termed as the ‘remaking of the urban preternatural’ in the changing Asian cityscape, can provide contemporary Asian Gothic literature with the possibility of a distinct, yet self-aware, generic identity compared to the dominant Western Gothic tradition (Wagner 2008).

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Another useful approach to understanding the transcultural dispersion of the Gothic might be to analyse how the language of Gothicism, on the one hand, locates personal experiences within larger structures of sociocultural and historical experiences, and on the other hand, epitomises social anxieties in a particular site or character within the textual plane. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad projects the trauma and anxieties emerging from the entrapment in a society devastated by war onto the site of ‘home’ through the figure of the monster. The text is by no means a passive rendering of Mary Shelley’s novel in a different historical setting; rather, it is an imaginative retelling of the familiar ‘Frankenstein mythoi’ as an organic augmentation of the deep historical and cultural trauma embedded in the collective psyche of modern-day Iraq. As its title indicates, the novel is set in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, reeling in the aftermath of invasion and occupation by the US forces; once an ancient and deeply cosmopolitan city, now ravaged by death, sectarian violence and suicide bombings, where old modes of familiarity and recognition for its inhabitants have been radically altered by the apocalyptic imagery of bombardment and missile attacks, loss of lives and livelihood, forced immigration and changing demographics. The reader is introduced to the lives of characters struggling not only to survive physically, but also to maintain some a semblance of sanity in the face of a violent rupture between the past and the present, and the horrors of everyday existence in a society torn apart by tragedy. Within this overwhelming atmosphere of sterility and decay, the only possible birth is that of the ‘monster’, whose monstrosity is predetermined by the conditions of its existence. He, like the monstrous body in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is truly the physical embodiment of the grotesque and the uncanny, made up of body parts collected from the eviscerated corpses at different blast sites. Gothic horror proliferates into the narrative as much through the anxiety and dissonance present in the society as it does through uncanny phobic essence embodied by the figure of the monster. The monster in Saadawi’s novel, however, is not the creation of a Faustian genius like Victor Frankenstein; his physical form is an assemblage of disparate body parts put together by Hadi, a dealer in scrap metal and broken furniture, his soul is of a private security guard killed in a terrorist attack, and he is named ‘Daniel’ by Elishva, an old lady mourning the disappearance of her son with the same name. Daniel, or simply ‘Whatsitsname’—as Hadi prefers to call him, is not born out of the mad ambition to project human control over nature or the pursuit to subsume the maternal through science, but out of the humane struggle to cope with the terrifying reality of loss and suffering.

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A closer inspection of the narrative highlights the deeply ambivalent relationship between the monster and the metaphor of home within the textual space; the monster simultaneously emerges as a symbol of hope and the possibility for reclaiming the normalcy of home for those who had created him and, at the same time, is manifested as a potential source of terrifying possibilities, unknown and unknowable threats to the city. If Hadi assembles the body to make up for the death of his protégé/ friend/son, Nahem, and regain some form of filial companionship in his home, Elishva welcomes the monster in her house with the hope of compensating for her frustrated maternal instinct since the loss of her son, scarcely realising his destabilising potential in their lives as he compulsively seeks revenge for those who were killed and whose body-parts were borrowed by Hadi to create him. It is important to note in this context how the city of Baghdad itself functions in the text as a natural extension of home—a metonymic home that unites the disparate characters and their daily existence in the face of tragedy, a common referent attained through the loss of many individual homes and families in the violence of war. It is the backdrop against which the familial desires, social aspirations and tribulations of these characters are played out. At the same time, however, it is the same home that represents a claustrophobic enclosure and the collective sense of inescapability from the imminent fatality and collapse, which is further amplified by the fact that the monster, created from the eviscerated corpses of Baghdad’s inhabitants, is not simply an extension of the city; rather, it is the city itself that, in a truly Frankenstein-like turn of fate, creates its alter ego in the form of the monster, with its heavily disfigured, repulsive body as a living reflection of the city’s own disfigurement and ruin. In conclusion, it might be said that the three texts I have had the scope of discussing in this chapter offer a glimpse into the range of variations, both in terms of subjects as well as approaches to literary horror as different cultures, with their own histories, traditions and beliefs; offer alternative modes of engagements with horror. The Gothic, especially in a Third World context, provides a space for cultures, and individuals or communities situated within those cultures, to engage with the sources of trauma, fear and anxiety, both collective and personal. This engagement is precisely facilitated by a conscious reconfiguration of ‘home’ within the textual space; it no longer simply remains a location or a site of haunting, but is re-purposed as a metonymic embodiment of the specific historical and cultural moment it is situated in. Contemporary Gothic texts emerging out of non-Anglophone and non-European literary traditions thus call for not only a more inclusive, transcultural and transgeneric understanding of the literary Gothic, but

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also for new perspectives on generic definitions and canon formation. With the decentring of the dominant Eurocentric understanding of the Gothic and its subsequent implosion across different literary traditions, as the texts discussed in this chapter exemplify, conceiving the possibility of a coherent Gothic canon has become exceedingly difficult. Centrality being one of the primary organising principles in the formation of a canon, dispersion of the Gothic and variations in literary texts that significantly employ Gothic elements, either thematically or aesthetically, make the identification of such an organising parameter a particularly challenging one. Until such a parameter can be identified, contemporary Gothic can perhaps be best characterised as the coming together of multiple Gothic traditions, each with its own cultural, formal and structural variations.

Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. 1919. ‘The Uncanny’. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (Vol XVII), translated and edited by James Strachey, pp. 217–256. London: Hogarth Press. King, Stephen. 1987. Danse Macabre. New York: Berkeley. Koike, Mariko. 2016. The Graveyard Apartment, translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm. New York: Thomas Dunne. Mohan, Anupama. 2015. ‘Giraya and the Gothic Space: Nationalism and the Novel in Sri Lanka’. University of Toronto Quarterly, 84(4): 29–52. Ruskin, John. 1892. ‘The Nature of Gothic’. In Selections from ‘Stones of Venice’, edited by Edward A. Parker, pp. 65–92. New York: MacMillan. Saadawi, Ahmed. 2017. Frankenstein in Baghdad, translated by Jonathan Wright. London: Penguin. Salgado, Minoli. 2007. Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place. New York: Routledge. Wagner, Tamara S. 2008. ‘Ghosts of a Demolished Cityscape: Gothic Experiments in Singaporean Fiction’. In Asian Gothic: Essays in Literature, Film and Anime, edited by Andrew Hock Soon Ng, pp. 46–60. London: McFarland. Wijenaike, Punyekante. 2006. Giraya. Colombo: Sri Lanka State Printing.

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15 Terror and Wartime Cosmologies in Liu Cixin Krushna Dande ... Although the man-made desertification of the Earth could not be calculated directly from physics, it still follows laws. Universal laws are constant.’ ‘Heh heh heh heh. Ding Yi’s laugh was not joyous at all. As he recalled it later, Bai Aisi thought it was the most sinister laughter he had ever heard. There was a hint of masochistic pleasure, an excitement at seeing everything falling into the abyss, an attempt to use joy as a cover for terror, until terror itself became an indulgence. ‘Your last sentence! I’ve often comforted myself this way. I’ve always forced myself to believe that there’s at least one table at this banquet filled with dishes that remain fucking untouched.... —Liu (2016)1 Hard science fiction (SF) may be understood as the avant garde of materialism. From the limited material of history and the animating figures of science arises an expansive imagination that reaches outwards, extrapolating the laws formulated on Earth to the temporal and spatial ends of the universe. The ‘hardness’ of science fiction may be understood in various ways—this may mean having to do with the hard sciences of orbital mechanics or time dilation rather than the soft sciences of anthropology and sociology—the emphasis thus being placed on the coherence and feasibility of technical innovation, instead of on the verisimilitude of the societies thus formed. The hardness may refer to an unsentimental hardheadedness, a drawing of blueprints and a bringing to account where each part is to play its function faultlessly, humans in societies no less than molecules among themselves.2 Yet, hard science fiction can also take the form of speculation that is too expensive to confirm by experiment, or that relies on laws of physics or circumstances of the universe that to us remain unfalsifiable. The laws, after all, which we imagine as universal, may only hold for this stable eddy called Earth. When this realisation is carried to its conclusion, it begins to seem that behind every seeming order is a precarity, a precarity that once 184

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imagined may be manipulated and weaponised. Such schemes of imagination in hard science fiction have long been linked to the process of military and technological speculation,3 and novels of hard science fiction often deal as much with bureaucracies and state apparatuses allocating funds and bowing to political expediency as they do with scientists experimenting and formulating theories.4 Many massive undertakings imagined in science fiction are made possible only under the duress of war or the demands of capital. The work of Liu Cixin is placed in continuity with this strain of rigorously materialist speculation that takes as the iterative substance of its thought not only physical processes, but also sociological and geopolitical forces. In the universe described in the novels Ball Lightning and the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, is one of an ever-increasing elaboration of technical means by which the universe can be grasped or reconstructed. Every new realm made technically accessible immediately reconfigures the past relations that appeared merely natural or cultural. The new shapes of the universe bring novel dangers, and we see societies reshaped through sharp shocks of panic, with a violence that can only be understood as terror. Peter Sloterdijk, in his book Terror from the Air (2009), describes the epistemological effect of the innovation of gas warfare in World War I, where a certain section of the atmosphere was made unbreathable and, life within it impossible. The air, which until then had been safely construed as a background condition of life, was permanently called into question once weaponised. The conditions of technical civilisation no longer allowed one to forget that ‘individuals who currently or habitually find themselves in distinctly outdoor situations must be hooked up to a life-sustaining “air supply system”.’ Air cannot recede into an innocent background again—its finitude becomes too apparent. Terror, according to Sloterdijk, is the iconoclastic moment of the making-visible, the rupture that makes the previously ignored into the undeniably present.5 The danger is not restricted to bombastic bloodletting, it now prowls unseen in molecules and microbes. A growing refinement in the state of scientific knowledge found its perfect counterpart in the technical application of this knowledge in the field of war—trigonometry brings with it trebuchets. Every attempt to clarify the underlying principles that govern a wide range of phenomena also allows one to undermine them or heighten them to the point of catastrophe. There is a clear understanding in Liu’s work that the history of our best understanding of the natural process cannot be separated from that of warfare. The mode of hard sci-fi that Liu places himself in6 has been complicit in the imagination of the possibility of planetary war that became a geopolitical necessity during the Cold War.7 The baroque

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structure of an interminable tension that develops between the various competing factions in Liu’s universe owe much to a paranoid thinking finely honed by the constant threat of first strike, then second strike, then nuclear winter. Seen from this perspective of terror, the earth once mobilised cannot be demobilised again, all future generations must live in the shadow of the sword, at least until it falls. Breakthroughs in warfare in Liu’s novels acknowledge this twinned progress. In Ball Lightning, the protagonist develops a morbid fascination with the yet-unexplained natural phenomenon of ball lightning, after it kills his parents during a storm. His seemingly innocuous atmospheric research is, over time, revealed to be the latest step in a decades-long multipolar field of Cold War scientific research carried out by the US, the USSR and, now by China. As has often been the case in the 20th century, the funding and infrastructure needed to research this is only available through the state military apparatus, and the protagonist thus finds his research co-opted into a weapons program. The conceptual breakthrough that makes possible the capture and use of ball lightning as a weapon is the discovery that ball lighting is, in fact, an excited macro-electron, whose weak interactions with our mundane matter have kept them from being discovered. This opens up to us a dizzying new picture of the world, having macro-atoms several orders of magnitude greater than the size of a planet, perhaps even forming part of a macro-universe with its own physical laws. Yet the properties of this other universe are not the concern of war machines— the concern is with this new weapon that may pass through walls and may selectively target only particular substances such as organic matter or silicon, while exhibiting quantum behaviour at a macroscopic scale. Ball lightning is promptly used to end a terrorist plot—it is fired into the building and reduces the bodies of the terrorists (and the hostages) to ash, leaving all else untouched. Ball Lightning also explores the sadistic pleasure in the destructive power of weapons felt by their creators. One such weapon described is a landmine in the shape of a twig, an eternal danger when placed in a jungle. Another, even more heightened, is in the form of an extremely volatile liquid that may be poured onto the ground, a puddle ready to detonate at the slightest footfall. Such weapons may be terrible, but they remain only crude and molecular, utterly unequipped for the cruelty that warfare in space would call for. When the protagonist turns from his work on ball lightning to the ploughshare of cyclone prevention, it is only to find that his warmly-received scientific work has been repurposed into a system to summon titanic cyclones for use as terrible weapons of war. A tentative peace is only reached after a unilateral strike originating in China wipes out all silicon-based electronics over

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a vast portion of the earth—leading to an international consensus that a war which would lead to all technologically-advanced societies being kicked out of the information age cannot be fought. When the field of warfare changes, it becomes impossible to guarantee lines of safety as previously held. Terror is to be experienced as a civic threat, one that during the beginnings of aerial warfare was already understood as making civilians into accessible and thus vulnerable targets. The Cold War, of course, elevated the threat into a terrifying image of the peace being broken by an ever-growing number of missile trails cast over continents. There are many moments in Remembrance that place the absurd responsibilities of annihilation on individuals, many of whom compare themselves to functionaries in the 20th century nuclear deterrence, having to decide whether an alarm light or launch order was genuine, and then to decide whether striking back in vengeance was then a duty. In a dizzying moment in Death’s End, as humanity faces defeat and annihilation, one is whiplashed past geological processes that formed the earth, the morbid efflorescence of life, and the evanescent explosion of human history that finds its fate linked to an artificed system of deterrence. ‘Finally, this 3.5-billionyear-long road full of trials and tribulations stopped in front of a tiny human individual, a single person out of the one hundred billion people who had ever lived on the earth, holding a red switch’ (Liu 2016). In the ultimate analysis one reaches what Achille Mbembe calls the ‘inability to conclude peace’, a cosmos where life becomes something to be jealously guarded and conserved while being under threat at every moment (Mbembe 2019). In the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, the scale of the geopolitical imagination balloons to trillions of years and the entirety of the visible universe. The series begins with a first-contact scenario with aliens living in orbit around the three-star system of Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbour. Due to the chaotic nature of a three-body system, life on their planet is punctuated by imprevisible catastrophe whenever the planet wanders too close or too far from the suns. Here normalcy may be shattered at any moment, and countless Trisolarian civilisations have flourished only to fall to infernal heat or cold. Through eons, all the other planets of the system have been consumed, and the eventual end of their planet is only a matter of time. Thus, when humans reveal their locations in communication with Trisolarians, a covertly and then overtly waged war between the humans and Trisolarians ensues. Trisolarians set sail to invade Earth, in order to flee the proximate doom of their home. However, the technological superiority of their invading force is not assured—they remain relativistically limited and thus the fleet itself would require four centuries to reach the earth. Being aware

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that the previous four centuries have been kind to the technical prowess of human societies, they know that for victory to be possible, there can be no fundamental progress in human science. The Trisolarians, therefore, open their invasion by unfolding two pairs of paired protons into two dimensions and carving circuits into them, turning them into supercomputers that move at nearly the speed of light and, through quantum entanglement, can send messages to Trisolaris faster than light. What ensues is total surveillance of the earth, against which, radio silence is useless. These ‘sophons’ are entrusted with sabotaging utterly the capabilities of humans to do fundamental research. Their interference with particle accelerator experiments, means that no consistent results can be obtained, and their ability to create retinal hallucinations and photographic traces terrorise the scientists at the forefront of potentially military research. Terror is not merely a question of damage to property, here the damage is a revelation of impotence— many scientists commit suicide when apparently universal laws are revealed to be playthings of technologically advanced civilisations. For the Trisolarians the link between basic research and technomilitary capability is a simple one. These subatomic invaders suffice to ensure that human technology will not surpass that of Trisolaris in the four centuries that will elapse before their ships land on Earth. They also find help from subversive elements among the humans, some of whom see the aliens as an messianic force bringing an end to human history and ushering in an enlightened galactic leadership. This prong of psychological warfare is accomplished by means of a video game called Three Body, which is distributed as a means of philosophical indoctrination of the humans. This game, a sort of virtual reality MMORPG, places the players in a world whose laws mimic those of Trisolaris. All collaborative efforts to build civilisation abruptly end in unpredictable periods, where life becomes impossible, and the players must dehydrate their bodies and wait until it is possible to attempt to rebuild. Over time, there are efforts by players to predict and plan the stable eras and chaotic eras, requiring the positing and testing of various cosmological models, but each apparent breakthrough is frustrated by the chaotic nature of the three-body system. The solution to the problem is made clear—the aggrieved civilisation has no choice but to strike out and colonise any other possible home. To some humans, this argument is persuasive, and they choose to become a fifth column working towards the ends of the Trisolarians. Yet this belief by the collaborationist humans is only naivete that does not grasp the urgent need for distrust. Liu elevates war to a formal proposition—war is not a human concept indiscriminately and erroneously applied to the universe—it is rather the condition

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under which cosmic life exists. The Earth Trisolaris Organisation are only fools for not realising that a state of ‘cosmic maturity’ must remain unattainable in a decaying universe. Constrained by the speed of light and the finitude of energy, every civilisation, no matter how advanced, can only survive by enshrining paranoia. Against an optimistic humanism that would wish to broadcast, like SETI, a cosmic notice of friendship, Liu places a cruel or amoral society of those who look at history and see only a store of injustice and vengeance. The global society of human rights and ethical principles to be decided by consensus is presented as a disavowal of the material condition of life, which is built on a management of violence and death. Of the societies that form in the wake of the upending of history by terror, only those that retain in themselves a knowledge of this bestial nature can stay vigilant and safe. Here the act of realising that the cosmic ether is a fog of war changes one’s place in the cosmos and one’s status as a cosmic agent, and receiving this declaration makes us into ‘new humans’. We reach here a structure of cosmic horror that stems from the incommensurability of our habitual human frame of reference and the one that must be adopted if humankind is to survive. Earthlings must become extraterrestrials and learn this new code of conduct—yet, this cannot be done from the safety of an armchair, but on a war footing. Faced with an enemy whose material superiority is unquestioned, there emerges in time a united response by a world government that is founded on the only stores of information illegible to the sophons— the human mind. This is carried out as the Wallfacer Project, where four individuals are given a virtually unlimited mandate of arbitrary power, being able to mobilise vast amounts of resources without having to give justification. Each act by a Wallfacer must become the cryptic expression of a great secret. The exoteric meaning of their orders must hide a deeper and usually more terrible course—and the project of each Wallfacer culminates in terror. Luo Ji (whose name in Chinese means logic) is unexpectedly chosen as a Wallfacer, out of place among the others who are all scientists and statesmen. This is due to a short conversation with the scientist responsible for the original series of broadcasts that revealed the earth’s location, where he is given clues that would lead one to discover cosmic sociology. The field of cosmic sociology described in The Dark Forest derives itself from simple propositions: (a) the universe is finite, meaning that any species must compete for resources in order to survive; (b) any other species may have a technological breakthrough at any time, meaning that one can never trust another group and find safety in cooperation. In such a system without a possible hegemony, it is never in one’s rational interest to collaborate with any other species, since even a

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small minority of individual actors with advanced technology may be able to destroy you at any moment without warning. Through just these two points, one reaches an aporia of distrust and paranoia that characterised strategic thinking in the Cold War. For the Trisolarians, Luo Ji poses the greatest threat, since any message that would broadcast the location of the Sun to a potential third observer would condemn both the star systems to eventual destruction. If cosmic sociology were an accurate depiction of the universe, then it would follow that any advanced civilisation would find it in their interests to destroy any star system hinting at signs of life. As a demonstration, Luo Ji decides to ‘cast a spell’ by revealing the coordinates of a particular star to an observer, and then goes into hibernation to await the result. On awakening, he encounters an earthly civilisation gripped by hubris, confident in the military superiority of their ships. They ready a phalanx of spaceships to intercept an advance probe arriving 50 years before the Trisolarian fleet, expecting a quick capitulation by the invaders. This confidence proves unwarranted—this is not far from raising halberds against a hydrogen bomb. The single probe of stronginteraction material destroys the majority of Earth’s fleet and makes it impossible to use the sun as an antenna for sending any further cosmic notices. The star designated by Luo Ji, meanwhile, has been destroyed. If the universe is such that any marked star is doomed, then the only way that remains for humanity to survive is to threaten the Trisolarians with mutual destruction. The Dark Forest ends in a jury-rigged truce based on this knowledge—Luo Ji connects himself to a dead man’s switch that would, in the event of his death, reveal the location of the sun, in effect, condemning both civilisations. Therefore, the picture of the universe is that of The Dark Forest— one full of dense foliage and prowling hunters, one where those who ignore or defy the fear are in the greatest danger of all. Outer space is an occult domain, one founded on insecurity and steeped in terror. Cosmology becomes more than the cataloguing of a universe that proceeds as a working out of first principles; rather, it is a speculation into the past of a universe, that has been determined by the workings of technology. A materialist vision of a doomed universe—a solution to the Fermi Paradox where the silence of the heavens is that of hunters holding their breath. Hence, even with the poverty of our telescopes, we see no Dyson spheres, that grail of energivorous use of a star (Carrigan 2012). In the universe here described, any evidence of an engineering project of that scale can only be a profligate and foolish gesture and a notice of great and immediate danger. The familiar figures from the annals of hard sci-fi, such as universes composed of sophisticated belletristic civilisations dealing only in

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culture and knowledge, seem to be painted as naive. The arc of cosmic history does not bend towards harmony; it shelters only those, and only temporarily, who can stomach a life in wartime. Time and time again one sees the traumatic refashioning of society caused by the realisation of the nature of space, and the impossibility of organising a space-based society along the principles of the earth. Left behind after the destruction of the earth’s fleet are only a few ships near the edge of the solar system, who can see in real time that the battlefield, according to which the resistance of the earth had been designed was illusory, and that escape had always been the only option. The remaining ships realise that they are forever unable to return to the earth, and immediately form themselves into a hierarchical and totalitarian form of government. The questions of building consensus, of human rights and of an answerability to human society in the abstract become, to them, absurd—it is only the cradle of Earth that can entertain these frames for ethical behaviour, living as they do in a place governed by rhythms of nature and laden with mythology. The reassuring sphere of the earth blinds those tethered to it to the tenuous film on its surface that holds it together as a familiar home.8 At that moment—not the moment of the attack, but the moment when I realized that Bronze Age would never return home, when the ship would be my entire world—I changed. There was no process; I was simply transformed from head to toe.... Only if the space behind the ship turned into a bottomless abyss—only if the Sun, the Earth, and everything else were swallowed by emptiness—would you have a chance of understanding the transformation that I went through. (Liu 2016)

But the earth itself is a spaceship, one with exceptionally large reserves, one whose crew does not seem to realise the fact that they are crew.9 Once humans truly open their hearts to the coldness of space, which pulls at the seams of the ship to suck out the air and dilute it into nothing, they are uninterested in justifying themselves in the ethical language of humans. One of the fleeing spaceships is convinced to return as heroes, but on arrival it is revealed that they are considered traitors and murderers and are despised. The message they send to the other ship being made to return is to leave, since Earth is no longer their home. Such an emergent technocracy is to be understood as a realpolitik, an attempt to affirmatively identify with the apparatus of state and war that circumscribes history. There is a recurring appeal to understanding or reclaiming the bestial nature of humanity, seen as a legacy of a

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masculine control over the apparatus of war, forever willing to cross an ethical boundary for the purpose of survival. The later society that develops during the armistice with the Trisolarians is depicted as naive and feminised, influenced by the hyper-aestheticised mirror held up to human society by the Trisolarians. The deterrence-based system of sovereignty that underwrites the armistice develops from being a dead man’s switch connected to Luo Ji’s vitals to a position called Swordholder, the person with the unitary authority to launch the broadcast in the event of an attack by the Trisolarians. It is only the belief of the Trisolarians that the Swordholder would retaliate to their first strike that keeps them from attacking. Yet the society picks as Swordholder the central character of Death’s End (and writer of the paratext, A Past Out of Time, that forms a large part of the novel), Cheng Xin. Her selection represents a desire for a more empathetic figurehead for human society. The position of Swordholder is meant to serve as the impenetrable and unpredictable, one that would not allow the enemy the confidence to strike. The earth on which Cheng Xin awakens from hibernation is one which prizes femininity, and which sees traditional masculine figures as boorish and paranoid. The cruelty of the role of Swordholder is disavowed by this society—they do not realise that such a position can only be fulfilled by someone who would doom billions to a shared death, if the peace were broken. Acceding to the sovereign position requires acceding the rules of the field. The handover of the position of Swordholder from Luo Ji to Cheng Xin is the moment where the deterrence collapses. The moment she receives control over the apparatus, the strike is launched—and, in fact, the betrayal has been planned in advance, so that the probes escorting a human spaceship in pursuit of galactic humanity will destroy them even as they are outside the light cone of the earth. The state of cosmic affairs here is one where this paranoia must be generalised and made to move across spacetime at the speed of light. In such a scheme, the only rational move is to maintain complete radio silence and an indiscriminate and casual response of destruction against any possible life. The Great Filter, then, is the interminable gulf of intersubjective suspicion, a suspicion of the abilities of destruction that may be harnessed by even a breakaway faction of a more advanced civilisation and lead to annihilation. In this atmosphere of precarity, ‘human social organization is intrinsically hard-wired to tribalism, and factionalism is the hotbed of primitive irrationality. While realpolitik is depicted as little more than a vestigial realm of the species’ primitive history, only expertise can rescue history from politics’ (Solomon 2019). What remains of politics in Remembrance is depicted as almost entirely pernicious—the martial society that Galactic humans fall into can

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maintain itself because of its unapologetic utilitarianism, while the earthbound play at a politics only meant to assuage the desire of selfdefinition of the populace. This ends in a sense of the cruelty of a universe in which the only purpose of life can be its own furtherance. The promethean dream of a human civilisation spanning stars can only be a few orders of magnitude longer than recorded human history—and even if it were to be successful, this would only mean further pages of death and tragedy, thousands of planets to lose and mourn rather than only the one. This is a cosmic horror, yet one that does not rely on the atavistic fears and visceral reactions of humanity, attempting terror through a multiplication of tentacles and a scientisation of madness. The horror that emerges is that of the ‘crypto-materialism of the grotesque’ (Wilson 2016), one that reveals the universe itself as a ruin, its laws a patchwork that have been rent apart as a result of cosmic warfare. Nothing within the universe transcends it—even the most advanced alien civilisation depicted is unable to find a way to transcend this drive towards death— Entropy increased in the universe, and order decreased. The process was like the boundless wings of the giant balance bird pressing down upon all of existence. But low-entropy entities were different. The low-entropy entities decreased their entropy and increased their order, like columns of phosphorescence rising over the inky-dark sea. This was meaning, the highest meaning, higher than enjoyment. To maintain this meaning, low-entropy entities had to continue to exist. (Liu 2016)

The terror reaches a keening pitch—it is a macro-existential, rationallogical-thanatological force, one that carries the implacable form of a thought experiment which reshapes the universe in its own image. The models used to understand the universe are elaborated—not for the purposes of pure and disinterested pursuit of knowledge, but the fulfilment of geopolitical (and eventually cosmopolitical) interest. By beginning in the idea that the universe can be seen as a battlefield of competing interests, Liu reaches the delirious image of a cosmos in an ever-telescoping collapse of space and time, a ‘corpse puffing up’. One may only dehumanise oneself to face up to this—there can be no peace in an unquiet universe.

Endnotes 1.

This dialogue is between two characters in Death's End who wonder whether the present of the universe has been prescribed into the conditions of its past.

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2.

For a discussion on the cybernetic imaginary of the space age that relies on a similar technical abstraction, see Höhler (2008). 3. See, for instance, Sigma, a ‘group of science fiction writers who offer futurism consulting to the United States government and appropriate NGOs,’ whose work extends to imagining new methods of counterinsurgency, mechanised surveillance, and opportunities for ‘creative destruction’ in times of crisis. Available at http://www.sigmaforum.org. 4. See Tom Shippey. 2016. ‘The Cold War in Science Fiction, 1940–1960’. In Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction. 5. ‘I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through’ (Clapson 2018). 6. See Liu Cixin (2013). In science fiction, of course, the moon exists as a real physical object, not only to illuminate lovers on a beach. 7. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Christophe Bonneuil discuss this coupled technomilitary progress in The Shock of the Anthropocene. 8. See Arènes et al. (2018). 9. This idea is explored in much greater detail by Liu Cixin in the short story ‘The Wandering Earth.’

Works Cited Arènes, Alexandra, Bruno Latour, and Jérôme Gaillardet. 2018. ‘Giving Depth to the Surface: An Exercise in the Gaia-graphy of Critical Zones.’ The Anthropocene Review, 5(2): 120–135. Bonneuil, Christophe and Dominique Pestre, eds. 2015. Histoire des sciences et des savoirs. Tome 3, Le siècle des technosciences. Seuil. Bonneuil, Christophe and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. London: Verso Books. Carrigan Jr, Richard A. 2012. ‘Is Interstellar Archeology Possible?’. Acta Astronautica, 78: 121–126. Clapson, Mark. 2018. The Blitz Companion: Aerial Warfare, Civilians and the City since 1911. UK: University of Westminster Press. Höhler, Sabine. 2008. “‘Spaceship Earth”: Envisioning Human Habitats in the Environmental Age.’ GHI Bulletin, 42: 65–85. Liang, Qiao and Wang Xiangsui. 1999. Unrestricted Warfare. Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House. Liu Cixin. 2013. ‘Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature.’ Science Fiction Studies, 40(1): 22–32. ———. 2014. The Three Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu. New York: Tor Books. ———. 2015. The Dark Forest, translated by Joel Martinsen. New York: Tor Books. ———. 2016. Death’s End, translated by Ken Liu. New York: Tor Books. ———. 2016. The Wandering Earth. London: Head of Zeus.

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Liu Cixin. 2018. Ball Lightning, translated by Joel Martinsen. New York: Tor Books. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. London: Duke University Press. Oreskes, Naomi and John Krige, eds. 2014. Science and Technology in the Global Cold War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shippey, Tom. 2016. Hard Reading: Learning froms Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2009. Terror from the Air, translated by Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran. Semiotext(e). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, Eric. 2016. The Republic of Cthulhu: Lovecraft, the Weird Tale and Conspiracy Theory. New York: Punctum Books.

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About the Editors and Contributors

Editors Ritwick Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor of English at the Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, University of Delhi. His research has been located around fantasy, philosophy, phenomenology, horror fiction, science fiction, Indian English novels and Disability studies. He has done his MPhil from Delhi University and written a thesis on the fantastic phenomenology of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower Series. He is the author of Humanity’s Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy and a co-editor for What Makes it Pop? An Introduction to Studies in Popular Fiction. He has been awarded the Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee Memorial award for his essay titled ‘Politics of Translation: Disability, Language, and the Inbetween’ published in the book Disability in Translation: The Indian Experience. He is also the treasurer of the Indian Disability Studies Collective. Saikat Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English at the Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, University of Delhi. He has taught courses on Marxist Cultural Theory, Popular Fiction, Modernism and Psychoanalysis and writes extensively on the politics of higher education. Ghosh currently holds a seat in the Academic Council of the University of Delhi.

Contributors Aina Singh is an aspiring academic with a keen interest in Feminist and Queer studies. She has pursued her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Literature from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and Pondicherry University, respectively. She has also invested her time in activism, theatre and performance poetry. Anhiti Patnaik is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science—Pilani, India. She submitted her PhD dissertation ‘Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics of Murder: Jack the Ripper to Dorian 197

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Gray’ at the Department of Cultural Studies, Trent University. Her areas of interest include Postmodernism, Crime Fiction, World Literature, Trauma Studies, Queer Theory, and she has been published by Neo-Victorian Studies and Victorian Network. She is a Fellow of The School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, and The Institute of World Literature, Harvard University. Anurima Chanda is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Birsa Munda College, North Bengal University. Before this, she was associated with the Centre for Writing and Communication, Ashoka University, where, among other things, she extensively worked with English Second Language (ESL) students and students with learning disabilities, trying to devise teaching modules according to individual needs. She has completed her PhD on Indian English Children’s Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was a predoctoral fellow at the University of Wuerzburg under the DAAD Programme, ‘A New Passage to India’, working under Prof. Isabel Karremann. She is also a literary translator and children’s author (published with Scholastic and DK).   Jarrel De Matas is from Trinidad and Tobago. He holds an MA in English Literature from the University of the West Indies. At present, he is a PhD English candidate and Teaching Associate of College Writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests include Postcolonial Criticism, Caribbean Science and Speculative Fiction. He has published in the Journal of West Indian Literature, Caribbean Journal of Cultural Studies, Criterion and Journal of Comparative Politics. He is also the Managing Editor of Paperbark Literary Magazine. Paperbark is a graduate student print and online magazine which celebrates the confluence of the literary arts and environmental activism. Krushna Dande is an MPhil researcher at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research on science fiction, planetary history and Lovecraft and video games has been presented at international conferences in Kolkata and London. He has translated science fiction stories from the 1960s and 1970s by the writer Narayan Dharap from Marathi into English. Meenakshi Sharma is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Delhi. Her research interests include Cinema Studies, Postcolonial Literatures in India, Performance Studies and Culture Studies. She is fascinated by how different and contrasting cultures interact with each

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other and the effect this interaction produces by creating or negotiating and renegotiating different tropes and stereotypes, especially in cinema and performance. She is also a trained classical dancer currently invested in learning Kathak in the Lucknow Gharana, but loves grooving to Bollywood songs. She is a huge fan of Hindi cinema. Meenakshi currently works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Delhi College of Arts and Commerce. Meenu B is currently working as Assistant Professor in the Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore. She has also worked in the English departments of Amrita School of Arts and Sciences, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham  Kochi Campus, the Central University of Karnataka and St. Teresa’s College, Kochi, respectively. Her PhD from the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, was in the area of Monster Studies. Her PhD thesis, titled ‘The Woman who Walks the Night: Yakshi as Myth and Metaphor in Kerala’s Cultural Imaginary’, tried to explore the (under)world of Kerala’s culture through its popular monster, the yakshi. Her areas of interest apart from Monster Studies include Early Indian Fiction, Social Reformist Novels, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies.  Puja Sen Majumdar is a research scholar who has recently completed her MPhil from Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She finished her BA and MA from Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her thesis tried to explore the notion of a deconstructive feminist subjectivity in the works of Donna Haraway. She is interested in literary theory, feminist and Marxist theory, postmodernist literature and psychoanalysis. Rajarshi Bhattacharjee has done is graduation and post-graduation in clinical psychology from Ambedkar University, New Delhi. He has then acquired a post-graduate certificate in addiction and mental health from Humber College, Toronto, Canada. He has a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, specialising in psychoanalytical psychotherapy, and has been trained by some of India’s top psychoanalysts, with over three years of clinical experience. He has had the incredible opportunity to work with His Holiness the 17th Karmapa of Tibet, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, to prepare material for a book bringing together the ancient mindfulness and compassion practices in Tibetan Buddhist psychology with evidence-based western psychotherapy. After moving to Toronto, Canada, he completed his post-graduate studies in Addiction and Mental Health and have supported individuals on their journey to

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recovery as an addictions and mental health counsellor. He is currently working as an independent counsellor at radiantmindcounsellors.com. Sakshi Dogra currently teaches English literature and language at Gargi College (University of Delhi) as Assistant Professor. She is simultaneously pursuing her PhD research titled ‘Food, Feelings and Flavors: A Study of Contemporary Indian Writing in English on Food’ wherein she seeks to bring out a synthesis of affect and taste through an analysis of an indispensable consumption practice of ingesting food. She is broadly interested in affect theory; study of moods and atmospheres; emotions, feelings and their function in constituting people and cultures. Samarth Singhal is pursuing his PhD at the University of California, Riverside. He has been Assistant Professor of English at Maitreyi College and Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi. His MPhil dissertation discussed contemporary Indian Fantasy across the mediums of the novel, the picturebook and the graphic novel. He has published on Detective Fiction, Political Cartooning and Painting. Forthcoming publications include essays on Indie Comics, Indian Fantasy after Harry Potter and an edited anthology on South Asian Visual Cultures with Primus, New Delhi. Shweta Khilnani is a PhD scholar at the University of Delhi, New Delhi. She is also an Assistant Professor, Department of English, at Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College, New Delhi. Her PhD research focuses on different forms of female self-expression and affective communities in the Indian digital space. She is invested in the study of popular cultures, affective theory and visual cultures. Soumyarup Bhattacharjee is currently a doctoral research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay. He has previously worked as a Guest Lecturer at the Department of English, Aliah University. He has completed his Masters in English literature from Presidency University, Kolkata. His areas of interest include contemporary Neo-gothic fiction, Modernist European drama, postcolonial and indigenous Indian theatre. Srinjoyee Dutta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Indraprastha College for Women. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi. She also holds a master’s degree and an

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MPhil degree in the same from Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research interests broadly lie in the field of Gender and Queer Theory; she also finds Poststructuralist and Postmodernist thought engaging. Her thesis deals with 20th century Affective and Nomadic Philosophy, with particular emphasis on the works of Hélène Cixous. It attempts to bridge the gap between ‘Fiction’ and ‘Philosophy’ as compartmentalised categories and delineate its role in understanding the affective/affected Subject. She is the co-editor of What Makes It Pop?: Introduction to Studies in Popular Fiction. Sushrita  Acharjee  is a Junior Research Fellow (MPhil)  at the Department of English,  Jadavpur University.  She has also worked as a research fellow under  Sahapedia-UNESCO. Her research interests lie in Children’s Literature, Gender Studies, Romanticism, Popular Cultures and Indian Literatures in English.  

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Index A Aahat (TV serial), 69n1 ‘Aath Bochor Aager Ek Din’ (A Day Eight Years Ago), 1, 5 Abbas, Lu’ay Hamza, 19, 91, 96 Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, 93 Abu Ghraib prison, 97 acceptance of the ‘closeness’, 8 Agamvagisha, Krishnananda, 53 Age of Reason, 162 Ahmed, Humayun, 50, 53, 58–59 Ahmed, Sara, 36 AI (artificial intelligence), 17 AIDS, 15 aiyyars, 81 Ali, Agha Shahid, 127 Almond, Ian, 163 Amazing Stories, 82 American militarization, terror of, 46 Anantya Tantrist, 21, 80, 83–88 Angulimala, 125–126, 128, 131–132, 134 anthropo-cultural typologies, 10 ‘anti-fairy tale’, 134 Antoon, Sinan, 19, 92, 96 appropriation cultural politics of, 37 Gothic appropriation of conflict, 180 legitimate reproductive body of a married woman, 109 rational, 179 Arabian Nights, 90 Arata, Stephen, 73, 95, 97 ‘arc of cosmic history’, 22, 191 Artenie, Christina, 75–76 ashvattha tree, 1, 22n1 Asian Gothic literatures, 15, 173–183 contemporary revaluation, 174

definitive generic signifier, 173 Eurocentric understanding, 183 ‘Frankenstein mythoi’, 181 fusion with indigenous Folk Horror elements, 174 Gothic appropriations of conflicts, 180 Gothic horror, 181 inclusion in the language of literary criticism, 174 literary exploration, 179 phobic essence, 173–183 sociocultural and spatio-temporal conflicts, 174 theoretical and critical approaches, 174 transcultural dispersion of, 181–182 transgeneric understanding, 182 Atharva Veda, 63 Aurobindo, 52 ‘authentic death’, 98n5 Azuma, Hiroki, 34 Azzam, Julie Hakim, 97

B Badley, Linda, 143 Bal, Mieke, 52 Balaji Mandir, 63 Ball Lightning (Liu Cixin), 185–186 Bandhopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan, 50–54, 56–57, 60n2 Bandhopadhyay, Taradas, 55, 60n7 Bann, Jennifer, 164 Basu, Samit, 80, 87 Baudrillard, Jean, 34 Beal, Timothy, 94 The Beast and the Sovereign (Derrida), 105

203

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204

Index

Being and Time (Heidegger), 98n5, 112n6 Bengali horror fiction feminine sexuality, 50–59 history, know ledge, hauntings, 51–53 inside-outside binary, 53 remnant of stories, 57 repetition, trauma, horror, 58–59 sacred and the Abject, 53–58 sexual trauma, 50–59 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 136n13 Bhabha, Homi K., 126–127, 135, 176 bhadralok, 56 Bhaduri, Bhuvaneswari, 108 Bhangarh fort, 63 Bhattacharjee, Sukumari, 51 Bhoot (2003), 114 bhoot and the pret, 62–63, 69 Black comedy, elements of, 124 The Blair Witch Project (1999), 106 Blanco, María del Pilar, 50, 59 Blasim, Hassan, 19, 91, 93–95 Blavatsky, H.P., 75 Bluebeard myth, 134 Bodhisatta, 154 The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (Slaymaker), 30 ‘body-for-others’, 142 Boehmer, E., 39 Böhme, Gernot, 115 Bordo, Jonathan, 105, 107 Bowles, Adams, 11–12 Brandstetter, Gabrielle, 133 Brechtian epic theatre, 21 British imperialism, 74, 76 British imperialist cultural hegemony, 76 Brodber, E., 40–44 Bronze Age, 191 Buddha and Angulimala, story of, 125, 135n5 Buddhist Jataka tales, 154 Burton, Richard, 15, 71–77, 88 Butler, Judith, 94, 143, 146

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C Calvin, David, 134 Camus, Albert, 13 ‘The Canterville Ghost’, 164 capitalism, 16, 128, 131 Caribbean monsters, 39–48 cultural significance of monstrosity, 40 dehumanisation of the Caribbean individual, 40 folklore character, 44 internalisation of racial difference, 42 inversion of monstrosity, 44 lobotomisation, 43 monstrosity, 39 origins of, 40 psychological and traumatic connection, 43 racialisation of the enslaved, 41 racialisation processes, 39 racialised othering of, 40 self-prescribed abnormality, 42 spatio-temporal complexity, 41 spectacle of monstrosity, 48 trans-fixation of the now-freed slaves, 42 Western ontological systems of racialisation, 40 Carrigan Jr, Richard A., 190 Carroll, Noël, 35, 92, 162–163 The Case of Peter Pan (Rose), 161 Casper, the Friendly Ghost, 164 caste hierarchy, 17 The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 162 Centauri, Alpha, 187 Chain of Being, 128, 136n9 Chakrabarty, Biharilal, 52 Chakravorty, Gayatri, 108 chandaali (caste slur), 84–85 Chandrakanta (Khatri), 81–82 Chariandy, D., 39–40, 44–48 Chatterjee, Upamanyu, 14, 123–135 Chaudhuri, Arun Kumar Ray, 51 Cheryl Akner-Koler’s thesis, 143 Chouboli (Zaidi), 139

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Index Christian and scientific oppression, 11 Christian trinity of Father, 23n4 Christianity proliferation of, 8 rise of, 10 influence of, 10 Chain of Being, 136n9 cinematic rain, 116–117 civilised world, 145 ‘civility’, notion of, 123 Clarke, Marcus, 91 ‘closeness’ applications of, 9 with the cosmos, 13–14 first kind of, 8 functions of, 9 second order of, 8 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 40, 149 Cold War, 16, 185–187, 190 aporia of distrust and paranoia, 190 emergence of NATO alliance, 16 possibility of planetary war, 185 scientific research, 186 strategic thinking in, 190 threat, 187 colonial inheritance, ‘sign’ of, 176 colonial print history, 84 Columbus, Christopher, 40 The Conjuring (2013), 106, 114 Conrad, Joseph, 123, 135n1 ‘contemporary social novels’, 84 Copjec, Joan, 53, 59 Cornwell, Emma, 145 corporeality of horror, 19 The Corpse Washer (Antoon), 92, 96 ‘corpus anarchicum’, 19 ‘cosmic maturity’, 189 Creed, Barbara, 55–56 cremation ground, 52–56 Cronin, M., 76 cryptocurrency, 17–18 Cult of Chaos (Taneja), 80–88 attention to other sexualities almost by chance, 88 genre, 81–83 rendition, 83–88

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205

D Dabashi, Hamid, 19 Damle, Deepak, 118 The Dark Forest (Liu Cixin), 189–190 Darna Mana Hai (2003), 114 Das, Indrapramit, 17 Das, Jibanananda, 1, 3–4 Das, Riju, 85 Dasgupta, Sashibhushan, 51 dastan are imperative elements, 81–82, 85 Date, Anita, 120 Dave, Naisargi, 111 Dawkins, Richard, 135n2 De Baecque, Antoine, 107 Death’s End (Liu Cixin), 187, 192, 193n1 Debi (The Goddess), 50 Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization (Smith), 142 Delany, Samuel R., 80, 82–83 Deleuze, Gilles, 34 demon, 72, 86, 118, 121, 132–133 Derrida, Jacques, 42, 45, 105–108, 149 Descartes, René, 136n15, 137n19 detachment, spiritualism of, 71 deterrence-based system of sovereignty, 192 Detha, Vijaydan, 138–146 Devi 1.0, 17–18 horrific nature of, 18 Devi, Mahasweta, 60n2 Devil’s Experiment (Ogura), 35 Dhar, Payal, 80, 87, 161 Dharma, Disorder and the Political in Ancient India (Bowles), 11 Dickens, Charles, 164, 171 discursive hegemony of the West, 139 ‘disestablishment’ effect of horror, 179 djinn, 56, 72, 91, 93 Dobson, K., 45 ‘Doom of Exiles’, 133

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Index

‘A Double Life’ (Dohri Joon, Detha), 138–146 beginning of story, 138 biological determinism, 142 corporeality and incorporeality, 143 descriptions of violence, 144 feminine utopia, 145–146 form and formlessness, 142–145 homosexuality as a violation of the natural order, 139 horror from different perspectives, 139–141 horror in, 138 ‘natural’ order of heteronormativity, 140 portrayal of heterosexuality, 139 shapeshifting, 143 supernatural in, 141 supremacy of the heteronormative order, 141 violent performance of masculinity, 144 Dracula, 15, 71–77 eastern mysticism, 75 epistemophilia and, 76 fascination for mesmerism and hypnotism, 75 iconic representation, 75 mystical knowledge, 77 reception of, 75 represents a paradox figure, 71 reverse colonisation in, 73 Druce, Robert, 71 Dumas, Rachel, 31–34

E Earth Trisolaris Organisation, 189 East-West dichotomy, 78n1 ‘easy familiarity’, 62–63 Ebong Inquisiton, 50 ‘Echo in the Bone’, 49 Edelstein, David, 35 ‘editorial complex’, 80, 83 ‘Enjoying Horror Fictions’, 98n1 Enlightenment, 19, 90, 163, 173 European Enlightenment, 90

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gospel of, 19 like a safety valve, 163 misanthropic satire, 136n14 principles of, 173 entropy, signs of, 22 epiphenomenal visitation, 5 Eurocentric bias of mainstream theory, 4 Eurocentric fairy tale, 125 Eurocentric myth of the body, 19 European Gothic tradition, 90, 95, 175 existential horror, 2, 5 ‘existentialism and art-horror’, 98n1 exorcism, 67, 85, 103–104, 106, 157 experiential matrix, 3, 16–17

F Faces in the Water (Lal), 161, 165, 168–170 Fairy Tales at Fifty (Chatterjee), 14, 123–130 as a theoretical springboard, 126 classic anti-fairy tale, 134 Eurocentric tales, 124 fundamental text in Global South, 130 macabre twisting of, 124 postmodern retellings, 124 problem of postcolonial nationhood, 125 South Asian myths, 124 story of two twins, 124 use of farcical black humour and magic, 126 Western context, 123 fantasy, 21, 56, 80, 82–83, 87–88, 105, 125, 131, 133, 135, 139, 143 feminine sexuality, 13, 50–59 feminine utopia, 139, 145–146 feminist fairy tales, 134 feminist ‘spectropolitics’, 104, 109–110 Ferrier-Watson, Sean, 163–164, 171n2 flesh-eating zombies, 20 Flower of Flesh and Blood (Hino), 35

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Index folk horror, 115, 119, 121 atmospheric quality, 115 genre of, 114 Ford, Jacqueline, 130 Form and Gender (Summers,), 144 Foucauldian sense, 94, 126 Foucault, Michel, 136n6 Frankenstein (Shelley), 20, 181 Frankenstein in Baghdad (Saadawi), 91–92, 95, 174, 181 Frankenstein, Victor, 181 Frankensteinian monster, 91–94 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 64, 106, 108, 136n13, 141, 178 ‘friendly ghost’, 162, 164, 167, 170 Froude, J.A., 40

G Galvan, Jill, 74 Gandhi, Mahatma, 119 ‘A Garland of Talking Heads’, 58 Garuda Purana, 165 gender-sex identities, 145 generic horror, 2 ‘generic instability’, 82, 87 genie, 72 genre detective fiction, 80 fairy tales, 123, 126 fantasy, 83, 143 fiction, 20 folk horror, 114–115, 121 folktale, 126 Gothic, 90 horror, 36–37, 48, 82, 90, 106, 126, 162 ‘indigenous fantasy’, 130 legend, 126 ‘mutiny gothic’, 71 myth, 126 science fiction (SF), 82–83 ‘trans-genre’ narrative, 135 George, T.K., 151 ‘ghostwomen of Islam’, 108 ‘ghoulish face of empire’, 94 Giraya (Wijenaike), 174–177

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207

‘Goblin Market’, 130 goddess of vampires. See Kali Goddess Goddess, emergence of the, 13, 50–59 Goosebumps (Stine), 165 Gothic horror, 174–175, 180–181 Gothic narratives, 19, 90 anxiety of reverse colonisation, 95 atmospheric horror in post-2003 Iraqi fiction, 94 contemporary Gothic tradition, 91 haunting atmosphere of death and decay, 95 historical roots in the, 86 ‘imperial Gothic’’, 95 monsters of art-horror, 92 post-2003 Iraqi fiction, 91 postcolonial Gothic texts, 91 taboo and negative emotions, 91 trauma, 91 vision of one’s own murder, 96 The Graveyard Apartment (Koike), 174, 178 ‘graveyard apartment’, 179 Great Filter, 192 Guinea Pig series, 35 Gulf war (1990–1991), 96 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 136n14 Gygi, Fabio, 149

H Hahn, Daniel, 164 Halbfass, Wilhelm, 12 ‘halfway house’, 62 Hamel, the Obeah Man, 91 Hamlet, 108 Hansel and Gretel, 129, 132–133 Harker, Jonathan, 71–73 Harris, Wilson, 39, 43 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 123, 135n1, 135n3 Hedges, Chris, 94 hegemonic superiority, 77 Heidegger, Martin, 112 The Hereditary (2018), 114

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208

Index

heteronormativity, horror of, 141 hibakusha–survivors of the bombings, 31 Hindi language horror cinema, 114 Hindu conception of ‘dharma’, 11 Hindu mythology, 80 Hino, Hideshi, 35 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic bombings at, 30–31 Hogle, Jerrold E., 91, 94 ‘The Hole’, 91, 93 homologous and homogenous parameters, 4 Horn, David G., 98n2 horror genre, cultural form of the, 90 human trafficking, 15 Humanity’s Strings, 24 hyper-aestheticised mirror, 192

I idiosyncrasies of the Global South, 134 Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Mary L.), 78n4 in-between-ness of the ghost, 5 Indian horror cinema, 21, 103–111 liminal position of a spectral witness, 108 Manichitrathazhu (1993), 103, 107 Stree (2018), 103–104, 107 Indian rebellion of 1857, 71 ‘indigenous fantasy’, 130, 133 ‘The Iraqi Christ’, 95 Iraq–Iran war (1980–1988), 96 ironic compromise, 127 Islam, Nazrul, 52 Ito, Junji, 20, 29, 31, 33, 36 Iwanek, Krzysztof, 67–68

J James, Henry, 164 Jameson, Fredric, 16–17, 37 Japanese history and culture kotukai, 30–31 nikutai, 30

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physical body, 30–31 self-sacrificing kamikaze soldiers, 30 sheer intensity of the violence, 31 shintai, 30 war time propaganda, 30 Japanese horror (J-Horror), 34 corporeal-affective understanding of horror, 36 monstrous body in, 34–38 transnational success of, 37–38 Japanese youth, kogyaru, 32 jasusupanyasi, 82 Ji, Luo, 189–190, 192 Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 78n9

K Kakkar, Sudhir, 62–63 Kali Goddess Bengali Shakta literature, 59n1 bloodshot eyes, 74 as a blood-sucking vampire, 74, 78n5 an established Hindu devi, 52 forms of, 52, 58 image made of dancing evil spirits, 51 myth of, 17 mythic retelling of, 18 Western audience, 74 Kali_Na, 17–18 Kama Sutra (Vatsyayana), 87–88 Kamalakanta, 51 Kamini, 175–178 Kaplan, E.A., 74 Kapoor, Shraddha, 109. See also Stree Kearney, Richard, 94 Kerala progression to modernity, 149 traveller-tales of, 154 yakshi tale of, 149–157 Khatri, Devakinandan, 81, 88 The King and the Corpse (van Buitenen), 78n2 King, Stephen, 72, 75, 179 Kinsley, David, 51, 60n5

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Index Kiss, Attila, 133 Koike, Mariko, 174, 178–179 Kripal, Jeffrey J., 51, 58, 60n5 Kristeva, Julia, 32, 53, 55–57, 94, 96 Kutzbach, Konstanze, 53–55

L Lai, Stephanie, 110 Lal, Ranjit, 161–162, 166–170 Le Vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes, 104 ‘Little Earthquakes’ (Nair), 148–158 anxiety-inducing future event, 149 fascinating exploration of the human psyche, 149 fascination for the yakshi, 153 homo-social bondings over the heterosexual pursuits, 150 protagonist’s alienation, 149 ‘a space and time out of joint’, 151 ‘state of crisis’, 152 taravaadu, 152 ‘a time of change’, 151 uses supernatural paraphernalia, 149 yakshi and Karineeli, 155 ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, 127 Liu Cixin, 22, 184–193 ‘living-dead’ state, 11 The Location of Culture (Bhabha), 126 Locke, J., 163 Lovecraft, H.P., 18, 82–83, 90 Lowenstein, Adam, 35

M Macaulay, T.B., 77 Magic realism, elements of, 124 Mahadamori (goddess of ‘barbaric’ communities), 56 male tantric, 84–85 Malshe, Jyoti, 119 Manga (Japanese comic books), 20, 29, 31–34, 36 fabric of, 29 formal features of, 37

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209

physiognomy and the formal qualities of, 36 Manichitrathazhu (Malayalam horror film, 1993), 103–104, 107, 109–110 climax of, 110 ontological status of non-human, 107 shot from Stree’s perspective, 104 singular intimacy between human and non-human, 103 Markham, C.R., 40 Marozzi, Justin, 92–93 Mazumdar, Arunima, 166 Mbembe, Achille, 40, 187 McCann, Andrew, 91 McCloud, Scott, 33 McDermot, Rachel Fell, 60n5 McKim, Kristi, 82–83, 116 Meiji Restoration, 30 Menon, Dilip M., 151 Menon, Radhika, 167 Merrill, Christi Ann, 144 ‘metonymy of presence’, 126 metrocoloniality, 77 mimicry, ironical role of, 127 mind-body duality, theorisation of, 136n15 Misir Ali series, 50, 58–59 Mohan, Anupama, 176 ‘The Monster’s Sacrifice...’ (Nuzum), 159n5 Monthly Halloween, 29 Morton, Stephen, 108 Mourning ritual, 152 ‘A Much Traveled Man’, 91, 96 Mueller, Monika, 52–55 ‘mutiny gothic’, 71 Mutthashi, 150–153, 157, 158n2 The Mystery of Major Molineux (Clarke), 91 The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus), 13 mythopoeia, 14, 123, 135

N Nair, M.T. Vasudevan, 14, 148, 151–154, 157

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210

Index

NATO alliance, 16 natural and supernatural worlds, 3 ‘The Nature of Gothic’, 173 neo-capitalist market, 124 neoliberalism, consensual agenda of, 17 Neptune, H.R., 47 Neumann, Gerhard, 133 Nikolajeva, Maria, 158 1920 London, 114 Nirip, 125–129, 131–132, 134 Nishithini–The Night Roamer (Ahmed), 50, 59, 60n2 ‘normal’ oedipal tendencies, 70n7 Nuzum, K.A., 159n5

O ‘object of desire’, 94 ‘objective spirit’ of trans-individual socio-linguistic structures, 66 oedipal system, 64–65 Ogura, Satoru, 35 Onoh, Nuzo, 14 oppressor-oppressed binary, 126 oral literary tradition, 123 ‘oriental bands of brigands’, 74 oriental mysticism, 74 Orientalism (Said), 16, 23n8 Orsini, Francesca, 81

P Paciorek, Andy, 115 Pan’s Labyrinth, 130 Paranormal Activity (2007), 106–107 aesthetics of, 106 ‘flawed’ camera in, 107 push the limits of cinema vérité, 107 protagonists of, 106 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 90, 94 Parvati, 64–65 A Past Out of Time (Chen Xin), 192 patriarchal heresy, primal act of, 109 Patteshah Dargah, 63 Peeren, Esther, 50, 59 ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, 146

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phantom, 43, 72 The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (Carroll), 162 phobic essence, 173–183 physical intimacy, 37 planetary war, possibility of, 185 Plath, Sylvia, 133 Platts, John, 78n2 Pleasure and Print (Orsini), 81 ‘polygenetic cultural artefact’, 123 post-death rituals, 62 postmodern cultural, 17 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 97 Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 137n18 pre-teen horror fiction, 14, 161–171 horror and children’s literature, 162–168 reading the texts, 168–171 The Prince and the Pauper (Twain), 124, 135n4 psychoanalytic theory, 35 psycho-civilisational complexities, 64 ‘psychological socialisation’, 134 pursuit of pleasure, 82

R Raaz (2002), 114 racial, cultural and social identities, 73 The Rainmaker’s Mistake (Brodber), 20, 39–48 acts as a site for the recollection of memory., 47 colonialism, 44, 48 conflaction of enslavement, 45 dispossession of people, 42 focused on colonised Caribbean subjects, 40 imperialism, 48 individual and communal level, 41 manipulation of the enslaved, 47 pickney gang in, 44, 47 plantation house in, 40

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Index racialisation system and imperial encounters, 48 slave narrative, 44 Ramkrishna, 51–52, 59 Ramsay brothers, 114 Rankini as a goddess of indigenous communities, 52 ‘Rankini Debi’r Kharga’, 51 Rankini goddess, 51 refugee exodus, gritty realities of, 15 Remembrance of Earth’s Past (Cixin, Liu), 185, 187, 192 ‘Rendition’, 80 re-orientalisation of tropes, 80 Reyes, Xavier Aldana, 35–36 Ringu, 36 Rose, Jacqueline, 161, 166 Rosenbaum, Roman, 29 Rossetti, Christina, 130 Ruskin, John, 173 Ryder, Arthur W., 78

S Saadawi, Ahmed, 19, 91–92, 95, 174, 181 sacrifice, ritualistic act of, 84 Said, Edward, 16, 76, 80, 87, 127 Sajan, N., 155, 159n8 A Salute to Feminine Utopia, (Vischer), 145 same-sex love, 138 same-sex relationship, 140 Sanghi, Ashwin, 80 Saraswati, Tantric form of the Hindu goddess, 57 Sarkar, Avik, 50, 56 Sayad, Cecelia, 106–107 Schiller, Friedrich, 173 science fiction (SF) as avant garde of materialism, 184 birth of, 83 emergence of, 98n4 genre of, 82–83 ‘hardness’ of, 184 imagination schemes of, 185 moon as a real physical object, 194n6

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211

Sigma, 194n3 Scott, David, 39 Second World War (WWII), 30–31, 41, 44 sectarian militants, insurgency in Iraq, 93 The Selfish Gene (Dawkins), 135n2 Sen, Ramprasad, 51–52, 59n1 SETI, 189 sexual abuse, 58 ‘The Sexual Compact’, 59 sexual orientation, prohibition on discrimination, 85 sexual trauma, 13, 50–59 sexual violence, 126 Shah, Mitesh, 118 Shamans, Mystic and Doctors (Kakkar), 63 Shamoon, Deborah, 31, 33 Shaviro, Steven, 37 Shelley, Mary, 20, 92, 181 Shiva, Lord, 18, 65–67 taandav, 18 authority is challenged by Ganesh, 65 shojo manga assemblage of body and emotion, 31–34 culture of consumption, 33 dismemberment of the physical body, 32 emotional engagement between readers and characters, 33 postmodern anxieties, 34 source of horror, 34 thematic traditions, 32 shoo ismo, 93–94 Sigma, 194n3 ‘sign’ of colonial inheritance, 176 Slaymaker, Douglas, 30–31 Sloterdijk, Peter, 185 Smith, Frederick M., 142 Smitten, 167 ‘social bodies’, Foucauldian idea of, 98n2 Soucouyant, 20, 39–48

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212

Index

focused on colonised Caribbean subjects, 40 highlights the problem of articulating a horrific past, 44 horror of colonialism and imperialism, 48 racialisation systems and imperial encounters, 48 reference to invasive surgeries, 47 spectre of race, 46 trauma of American occupation of naval base, 44 space-based society, 191 Spadoni, R., 116, 118 spatio-temporal focus, 133 Spectres of Marx, 108 spirits and goblins, notions of, 163 spiritualism detachment of astral soul, 71 rise of, 164 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 108–110 Stine, R.L., 165 Stoker, Bram, 15, 71–77 strategic orientalism, re-employment of a, 86 Stree (2018), 103–111 camera at work, 110 climax of, 110 complex gesture of feminist reparation, 110 conceptualisation of, 10 ethical treatment of female, 103 female body in North-Indian patriarchy, 108 final scene, 110 ontological status of non-human, 107 spectral camera in, 104 spectrality and the subaltern, 108–111 tussle between the two cameras, 109 Summers, David, 144 supernatural horror, 2–4, 7 characteristic of, 3 encountered with, 3

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experiences of, 7 Swift, Jonathan, 136n14 Swordholder, 192

T Tagore, 52 Takahashi, Hiroshi, 36 Taneja, Shweta, 80–88 tantrism, 80, 83–84, 87 effects of, 87 Tantrist, 83–87 Taranath Tantrik (Bandhopadhyay), 50–54 taravaad, 150–151, 155, 157 Tehkhana, 114 ‘telegram vs. telepathy’, 74 terror and wartime cosmologies, 22, 184–193 Terror from the Air (Sloterdijk), 185 Thakurmar Jhuli, 69n1 Thakurta, Tapati Guha, 88 ‘thanatopolitics’ of post-Gulf War Iraq, 19 Thapan, Meenakshi, 142 There’s a Ghost in My PC (Dhar), 161, 165, 169–170 Third World Asian literary traditions, 175 Third World nations, 17 Third-world woman, 108 Three Body (video game), 188 tilism, 81–82 Todorov, Tzevtan, 130 Tomie, 20, 29–37 aspect-to-aspect transition, 33 demonic version of, 34 elements in, 36 fascinating element of, 29 full body portraits, 33 genre, 20 global success, 36 horror as an affective state, 33 physical attractiveness, 32 physiognomy, 32, 36 trope of mechanical reproduction, 34

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Index uncertainties and pleasure of the simulacrum, 34 Townshend, Dale, 164 ‘trans-genre’ narrative, 135 transgressive relationship, 145 Tsurumi, Shunsuke, 30 Tumbbad, 14, 114–117, 119–121 aesthetics of horror, 114 atmospheres, 116 atmospheric quality, 115 camera angles, 121 cinematic rain, 116 claustrophobic atmosphere of the womb, 118 diegetic sounds, 116 environment of perversion and immorality, 119 environmental conditions, 121 events of, 115 evocation of atmospheres, 116 final chapter, 120 first chapter of, 115 folk myth, 121 greed of the Indian elite class, 119 lighting, 116, 121 meteorological element of rain, 117 rainfall in, 117–118 sacrifice and martyrdom, 119 second chapter of, 177–120 sense of premonition, 121 setting, 116 sinfulness and decay, 121 sounds, 121 unethical and depraved wealth, 121 valence of folk horror, 121 The Turn of the Screw, 164 Twain, Mark, 124, 135n4 The Twenty-five Tales of a Sprite (Platts), 78n2 Twenty-two Goblins (Ryder), 78n2 Twilight, 87

U Ubuntu, 11–12

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213

ucchakkaanam, 154 The Uncommercial Traveller, 171n1 understandings of the spiritual world, 64 Urban, Hugh B., 74 US war on terror, 96 Utopian transformations, 16

V Valente, J., 77 Vampires, 15, 87 vampiric behaviour of an Indian fakir, 75 van Buitenen, J.A.B., 78n2 Vanita, Ruth, 138, 142 Vatsyayana, 88 Vedic cosmogony, 11 Veerana (1988), 114 Venuti, L., 76 Vetal Panchavimshati, 72, 111n1 Victorian reputation of dabbling, 75 Vikram and the Vampire (Burton), 15, 71–72, 76 Vischer, Jacqueline Claire, 145 von Schlegel, Friedrich, 173

W Wagner, Tamara S., 180 Walcott, Derek, 39 Wallfacer Project, 189 Walpole, Horace, 162 ‘waning of affect’, 37 weaponised faith, 18 Weird Tales, 82 West, Mark I., 166 Western exorcism of ghosts, 70 Western ‘fairy tale’ paradigm, 124, 134 Western genre fiction, 20 Western horror cinema, 114 Western rationalism, 72 Western rationality, 3 Western realism, reality principle of, 16 Western world’s interest in horror fiction, 16

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214 Why Fairy Tales Stick (Zipes), 123 Wijenaike, Punyakante, 174–178 Wilde, Oscar, 164 Wilson, Eric, 193 ‘witness’, definitions, 111n4 Wonder Woman, 128, 136n10 ‘Wound of Being’, 49n1 wound of history, 44, 49n1 World War I, gas warfare in, 185 Wright, Jonathan, 93 Writing Horror and the Body (Badley), 143

Index

Y yakshi, 149–157 Your Ghost Stories, 97

Z Zaidi, Nishat, 139 Zipes, Jack, 123 Žižek, Slavoj, 35 Zolkover, Adam, 130 zoom technology, 109

X Xin, Cheng, 192

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