Sami
Ahmad Khan
Abstract
This paper studies two Indian dystopias
vis-à-vis the monsters stationed within them. It investigates how monsters
become metaphors for specific ideologies that threaten public order: it
utilizes two Netflix originals as templates for hybridizing dystopias, myths
and material realities. Aware of JJ Cohen’s seven
theses and Luciano Nuzzo’s assessment of Foucauldian monsters, it
focusses on Patrick Graham’s Ghoul
(2018) and Betaal (2020) to ascertain
how neo-imperialism, Islamism, nationalism and Naxalism intermesh within
constructions of monstrousness. It applies the neoMONSTERS (Mutagenic
Ontological Narratives in Space-Time Echoing Realistic Situations) thesis to
explicate the fusion of monstrousness, materiality and ideology.
Keywords:
Dystopia, Monster, neoMONSTERS, Ghoul, Betaal, Ideology, Indian Speculative Fiction
“We live in a time of monsters” (“Preface” vii).
JJ Cohen engages with a twin fixation of naming (i.e.
knowing) the monster and disempowering (i.e. domesticating) it in the context
of the US, a society that has “created and codified ‘ambient fear’” for Massumi,
but the ontological state(s) and epistemological construction(s) of monstrousness
can be approached as a “mode of cultural discourse” (“Preface” xiii) in other
spatiotemporal locations as well. When read vis-à-vis localized socio-political
contexts, national anxieties and popular imagination, this ambient fear constructs,
projects and interrogates its own milieu and the notions of monstrousness in
India – which both “reveals” and “warns”. A fascination with the monster
emerges: a recalibration of the
“total fear that saturates day-to-day living, prodding and silently
antagonizing but never speaking its own name” (Cohen viii).
In an India lacerated by crisscrossing,
antagonistic ideologies,
cultural production manifests monsters
not only as “symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society”
(Cohen) but also as the
disruptions in/by the national psyche that set limits of/to behavioural and
conceptual normativity alike. Fuelled by nuclear Pakistan and
China in the neighbourhood, India reels under an existential Islamist and Communist threat in/via its
dystopias. This underscores Luciano Nuzzo’s assessment
that the “monsters appear whenever and wherever knowledge/power assemblages
emerge” and “that which eludes the latter, and which threatens to subvert them,
is the monstrous” (“Foucault and the Enigma of the Monster” 55). The monsters become bearers of
political, religious, social and environmental anxieties, and the spectre(s) of terrorism, whether left-wing
or right-wing, emphasizes the colonization – and not mere contouring – of India’s
popular imagination with a new “aesthetic hegemon” (to borrow terminology from
Philip Lutgendorf’s “Mahabharata as a Dystopian Future”) that evolves its own
being.
India’s Speculative Fiction (SpecFic) provides a mutating canvas on
which alterity – and its extreme, the monster – is projected across narrative
forms. From the Islamist zombies of Mainak Dhar’s Zombiestan to the
mutants of Priya Sarukkia Chabria’s Generation 14, from the zombie-demons
of Jugal Mody’s Toke to the homo-rakshasas of Arati Kadav’s Cargo,
and from the aliens of Shirish Kunder’s Joker to the atript aatma
in Raj and DK’s Stree, contemporary India’s fiction, film and web series
exhibit a sustained engagement with the discourse of (hybridized) monstrousness
and its imbrication in social and geopolitical/geoeconomical reality. Nalo
Hopkinson defines postcolonial Science Fiction as “stories that take the meme
of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique
it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humour, and also with love and
respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about
new ways of doing things” (9), the
same holds true for dystopian SpecFic. By extension, monstrousness can be understood better when placed within
the glocal/global paradigms of a changing world order.[2]
These monsters not only terrorize but also
question epistemology of knowledge generation: Bologna finds the Greek τέρᾰς (téras) to “indicate something that is an extraordinary sign and therefore
monstrous, horrible, and marvelous at the same time”; it not only “signals the
infraction of an order” but also “the opening of a hiatus in the order of
knowledge” (quoted in Nuzzo 57).
Luciano Nuzzo responds to Foucault’s
classification of monsters into : juridical-natural monsters marked by “transgression
of an interdiction present in law” whether natural or social; moral monsters
where “monstrosity does not conform to juridical or moral prescriptions” and
“breaks social order”; and, political monsters who “puts the political order
into discussion” (64 -69).[3]
Their monstrosity is shaped by their ‘nature’, their ‘behavior’ or ‘conduct’
against the social contract, and their political positioning respectively.
Since for Nuzzo the political monster is inherently linked with “the
transformations of the forms of power”, and “all monstrosity is therefore
deeply, and inevitably, political”, these monsters help foreground the
refracted struggles, rising tensions and inherent friction between ideologies
in India.
This
paper views two horror/dystopia web series to investigate the interlinkages
between contemporary popular imagination (in the throes of right-ward lurch),
cultural production (within its OTT platforms), and the ensuing material
realities which necessitate the encoding of ideological and cultural alterity
in order to question the generation and reception of knowledge-power. It fuses arguments
by Cohen and Nuzzo to introduce a new framework (and lexicon) of the
neoMONSTERS, which explicates the monster through a location-specific
imbrication of nationalism, hybridization, postcolonialism, socio-political
reality and religio-cultural otherization. The neoMONSTERS – Mutating
Ontological Narratives in Space-Time Echoing Realistic Situations – places such
beings of alterity within their milieu and investigates the ideologies that combine
within a syntax and national matrix to render their existence possible.[4] The two (horror/dystopia) Netflix series
contain monsters which emerge as sites of engagement where fiction merges with reality,
India meets the world, dystopia fuses with the monster, and knowledge combines
with power.
Edward James argues in “Utopia and anti-utopia” that utopia has not disappeared in the wake of war,
genocide and totalitarianism in the 20th century but it has “merely
mutated… into something very different from the classical dystopia” (219). Since
the utopia/dystopia of the “revolutionary model” often meets the “alien/monster
SF” of evolutionary mode (Csicsery-Ronay Jr. 110), this paper extends to
argument to India’s dystopian web series of the 21st century: Ghoul and Betaal.[5]
Arab Monsters in a “New India”: Islamism,
Terrorism and Hindu Nationalism in Ghoul
The
country [India] has changed.
Sectarian
conflict has reached a crisis point.
Secret
detention centres are established.
A
military clampdown is in effect.
–
Ghoul
If monsters are “breaker[s] of category” for JJ
Cohen, dystopias, by extension, can be called as breakers of temporal,
political and moral normativity (through their disruptions). Patrick Graham’s Ghoul (2018) is set in a right-leaning
India of the near future: an Orwellian state clamps down heavily on suspected terrorists
after a spate of attacks and crackdowns become the norm. Civil liberties are curtailed;
books are burnt; people are picked up from their homes and sent to
reconditioning camps. A standard, state-sponsored syllabus is taught; intellectuals are routinely rounded up;
and loaded words like “anti-nationals” and “beef” are strategically inserted in
the narrative.
This can be read as a result of
India’s response
to Pakistan’s state-doctrine of making India “bleed from a thousand cuts”,
which, as per Pervez Hoodbhoy, now lies in ruins (“Bleed”). Jihadism as an
instrument of Pakistan’s foreign policy is mirrored by Islamophobia as a
domestic policy across the Radcliffe Line. A special force called the National
Protection Squad (NPS) is raised in Ghoul:
it is a security agency with a broad counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism
mandate. With rampant Islamist terror
and Islamophobia feeding into each other, bigotry and fundamentalism rule, and a
massive propaganda campaign is unleashed to flush out the “traitors within”. The
Indian Muslims are shown as being under threat (since they are seen as a threat to
the state), and are depicted as subversives: a character even remarks their
entire “race is filthy”. It is not just the blood-and-gore narrative of
horror-dystopia that makes Naahar exclaim: “Ghoul
is scary, yes, but for entirely different reasons than you’d anticipated. Like Fahrenheit 451, we witness Muslim
literature being burned, their religious artefacts are declared contraband, and
their voices clamped down with cries of ‘sedition!’” (“Ghoul”). The perception of (Muslim)
minorities as terrorists, foreign invaders, and by extension, monsters – who
are made to live in “scheduled religions zone” in Ghoul – dovetails not just with current geopolitics but even more
importantly with the historical bitterness of the two-nation theory (which can
be accessed in “The Others”). This can be read in tandem with the assertion that “when in the 19th century the state
becomes identified with the nation, and political unity became ethno-political
unity, the monster was able considered as he who is not recognizable as
belonging to the national community” (Nuzzo 65).
A “future-orientation” is
central to this web series as it draws on a “historical-projective suspension
of disbelief as the real thing” in order to “play with it” (Csicsery-Ronay Jr.)
Lt. Nida Rahim is a Muslim NPS cadet, whose “religion makes her a traitor in
the eyes of her people, and a pariah in the eyes of the (mostly) Hindu soldiers
at the facility” (Naahar). Her interaction with other military personnel, most
importantly Major Laxmi Das, underscore her problematic identity. While
religious groups appear to be persecuted in this future, the antipathy is more
towards Muslims than other minorities. The commanding officer, Lt. Col. Dacunha,
has a specific idea of the enemy – religious minorities – that is imprinted on
his unit (despite he being one himself). Lt.
Col. Dacunha is proud of his Christian heritage; he boasts that during the
Portuguese inquisition, his forefathers “hunted” the heretics and those who
pretended to be Christians. Moreover, the “scheduled zones” mirror the forced
ghettoization of traditionally marginalized communities such as scheduled
castes and scheduled tribes in India. A similar kind of arrangement exists in
the future, except it is based on religion (and not just caste).
Nida, however, firmly believes
in the system to such an extent that she hands over her father (Shahnawaz) – an
iconoclast who “instead of teaching the official syllabus, forces his students
to ask questions” – to the state, and who is, consequently, transferred to a
reconditioning camp. Weeks before she is to be commissioned as an officer in
the NPS, she is ordered to report to Meghdoot 31, a covert detention centre
built after the “emergency”.[6]
This is a claustrophobic “advanced interrogation facility” where “dangerous
anti-nationals” are sent, a list that includes “student protestors, opposition
party leaders, and religious fanatics”. Since the monster is “an exception
that suspends the law...the response to the monster, as a consequence, could
only be either outside-law, or violence, the
force of law without law, or medical cures, or mercy” (Nuzzo 66; emphasis
added), those who are brought to detention are perceived as being located
outside the law since they are guilty the moment they are captured – at least
in the eyes of the soldiers guarding this Abu Ghraib style prison – and the
force of law outside law is brought
to bear on them.
The NPS is tasked with breaking Ali
Saeed, a recently captured terrorist who instils fear and inspires dread. Ali is
usually reticent but often breaks out in ancient Aramaic; he can read the minds
of those around him and exhibits no pain or fear despite being subject to harsh
treatment. His mere presence flares tempers, leads to mutual suspicion, and
results in infighting: he seems to know “secrets” about the people around him.
For example, he calls Nida by a pet-name only her father knew. Nida
investigates further, only to be told by a terror-suspect Maulvi (Islamic
cleric) about a monster from Arabic folklore: a ghoul. The Maulvi says that
anyone can sell their soul to the devil and summon this beast by making a
specific symbol; the ghoul assumes the shape of the last person it bit, shows
those around “a reflection of our [their] sins” and makes them go mad before
killing them. Ghoul brings a new kind
of knowledge – one which is ancient, and contingent not on science but on
(Arab) folklore – though “for Hindus,
this entity is a rakshas or a pishach”. This fusion can be
accessed vis-à-vis Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay’s mythologerm that explains “the tendency to continually rework the history of
science through the use of the mythic, or to use the mythic as a source of
alternative or unknown or advanced science, or to use the mythic as a hinge to
elaborate a difference between one kind of sf and another” (Chattopadhyay 437).
The mythologerm, by extension, can also elaborate the difference between one
kind of Speculative Fiction – especially when seen as the fusion of future
history, dystopia and monster – and another. Fred
Botting writes on the gothic and Science Fiction that in “the crossings of two
generic monsters, monstrosity returns from the past and arrives from the
future” (112). Ghoul returns from Arabia’s pre-Islamic past – and the threat of
Islamism it metaphorizes emanates from India’s future. With its ever-changing
body at odds with that of the state, an identity in state of constant flux, and
a diffused positioning, the ghoul becomes a
representation of Cohen’s first and fourth thesis: the
monster’s body is a cultural body (“Seven Theses” 4) and the
monster dwells at the gates of difference (7).
Nida soon realizes that the
Meghdoot section is not merely an interrogation facility: it is also a
slaughterhouse and her father met his end there. The NPS has been executing
prisoners after interrogation even if they turned out to be innocent. Ali,
thus, turns out to be a supernatural entity, a ghoul that has been invoked by
Nida’s father as revenge against the totalitarian state that deprived him of
his life and liberty.[7]
The avenging-ghoul, again, plays with the sixth thesis of Cohen: the fear of
the monster becomes a kind of a desire since “the linking of monstrosity with
the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress
from constraint” (“Seven Thesis” 16). The ghoul becomes a “strange attractor”
for Shahnawaz (and later Nida), an avenger for the marginalized, a sigh of the
oppressed.
The ghoul – a guilt-activating
catalyst – assumes multiple shapes as the narrative proceeds, sows the seeds of
fear and suspicion within a cohesive military unit, destroys its camaraderie, and
goes on a killing spree. Nida barely escapes the facility but is immediately
taken into custody by a rescue team after she kills Dacunha in full public view
(since the ghoul may have taken his shape, or Nida might be punishing Dacunha
for his deeds). She then realizes that the (Meghdoot) unit she thought had gone
rogue was in fact conforming to state policies and following standard operating
procedures. Disillusioned, Nida cuts herself using a hidden blade and
engages in a blood ritual to summon the ghoul yet again: the cycle begins anew a la Cohen’s second thesis,
the monster always escapes, always to return (“Seven Theses” 4).
Ghoul manifests how
speculative traditions from Arab folklore reappear within South Asian
dystopias. While the critique of systemic state violence (e.g. Ahmad’s family
was killed in front of him to make him talk), religious extremism, terrorism, Islamophobia,
and Islamist terrorism is evident, ghoul’s premise undercuts its
superstructure. The wronged Shahnawaz petitions a Ghoul – an Arab monster – rather than an Indian bhoot, pret or pisach to
wreak vengeance, a choice that reaffirms Indian Muslims as outsiders. Rather than choosing a corresponding monster from the
SpecFic traditions of the country/culture/civilization one resides in –
especially when India has a healthy tradition of an avenging spirit – Shahnawaz’s choice of the avenger remains Arab
and not South Asian. The critique of Islamophobia itself emerges as
Islamophobic, since the Muslim other would always be an outsider, even in his/her
popular imagination, unless the ghoul specifically
represents Islamist terror (which again
makes the narrative Islamophobic, though this time from a different vantage
point).
Redcoat Zombies in the Red Corridor:
Naxalism, Military-Industrial Complex and Neo-imperialism in Betaal
If Ghoul engages with terrorism, Islamism, and Hindu Nationalism, Betaal takes the fight to India’s
troubled Red Corridor – especially when the nation is haunted by the spectres of Marx (in
the Red Corridor) and Mao (along the Sino-Indian border). To cite just two more
examples of ideological subversion in contemporary web
series: Leila features a
quasi-fascist India of the 2040s divided along class/caste/religious lines and JL50 does not fail to foreground –
though subtly – an imminent ‘naxalite’ threat in the nation’s past.
Cohen avers that
the “manifold
boundaries (temporal, geographic, bodily, technological) that constitute
‘culture’ become imbricated in the construction of the monster”; he finds the
monster to be “an extreme version of marginalization” that translates as an “abjecting
epistemological device basic to the mechanics of deviance construction and
identity formation” (ix). The Muslim other (in the popular imagination, also a
Pakistani, even, nay, especially if
Indian) and the communist other (conflated as a Marxist/Maoist/Naxalite in the
national psyche) haunt cultural production. To cite just one example of the
latter in another narrative form: Newton contains a comical
reference to the Naxalite insurgents in India’s Red Corridor as zombies, which
is actualized by Graham’s next endeavour.
Betaal is an apocalyptic narrative about Redcoat
zombies led by an undead Lt. Col. of the East India Company (EIC). Cohen’s third thesis,
that of the monster being the harbinger of category crisis (“Seven Theses” 6)
finds itself activated as SpecFic traditions from the east and the west clash
within the same (national/notional) body: the zombie (in this case, in this case) combines
with the betaal (revenant) of Indian folklore. The
series begins with a diary entry written by Lt. Col. Lynedoch dated 17th
June, 1857:
We
came to help these people. But they
resist. The mutiny has reached us. How dare they? I will use their own guardians against them. I will harness the Betaal’s
curse, and grind these savages into the dirt…It seems there are rebels in the
tunnel. I must go. (emphasis added)
The White Man’s Burden is inherently tied with orientalism, colonialism
and imperialism, and manifests similar concerns in the nation’s collective
psyche. The British officer laments how the ‘natives’ spurn the offers of help
(and civilization)
which England brings to India (specifically via the East India Company).
Simultaneously, the colonizer is aware of how India’s own guardians (and
traditions) must be used against the nation: perhaps a metaphor for the
education system, which was overhauled by the British to create ‘babus’ who served
the Empire (a la Macaulay’s minutes).
If
Ghoul followed the coming-of-age of
Nida, Betaal
follows another young officer who sways between discharging duty and obeying morals.
Monsters change at an ontological level – but the epistemology of victimhood
remains the same. Deputy Commandant Vikram Sirohi is
attached to the elite “Baaz Squad”[8] of
the Counter Insurgency Police Department (CIPD) that is tasked with sanitising
a “troubled” location. Parallel to East India Company’s Lt. Col. Lynedoch, who
also inspired hero-worship, this CIPD unit is headed by another charismatic (though
corrupt) officer: Commandant Tyagi is secretly on the payroll of a construction
company (Surya) that wants to build infrastructure within the adivasi (tribal) land to connect the
village with the city. This, again, runs parallel to EIC’s “development” of a
colonial India at the expense of the native: through Lt. Col. Lynedoch (and the
Taunton Regiment), the East India Company suppresses the “natives” (Indians)
under the guise of “development”; Surya Construction corporation of the present
“hires” the CIPD to suppress the natives (tribals) under the pretence of
developing a highway.
As
the construction company rushes to meet state deadlines (the CM is supposed to
inaugurate the construction of highway within a few hours), the fight between
the tribals protesting their dislocation and state forces echo similar concerns
ripped from newspaper headlines: the invasion
of forests and tribal habitats by corporations (for mining and infrastructure
development) dislocate the forest-dwellers and cause irreparable damage to the ecosystem
(refer to Areeparampil and
Oskarsson for details). The (tribal) villagers
feel that the opening of the tunnel would liberate what lies imprisoned within.
During
India’s first war of independence in 1857, the Taunton regiment, a particularly
vicious British unit, was trapped by Indian resistance fighters in a tunnel
under Betaal Mountain, where Indian folklore posited a betaal to reside. The entire
unit was killed in action but the Lt. Col. (Lynedoch) appropriated the power of
the betaal to become immortal: he now lies in wait for a human sacrifice to
escape his tomb and conquer India. Lynedoch, thus, becomes the betaal and his
zombie army waits to be break out of the prison: a goal in which it is
unwittingly (and later consciously) assisted by the Surya Construction Corporation.
When Nuzzo declares that the monster “is
always captured within a scientific, philosophic, or juridical discourse” but
also acknowledges that its body always exceeds “the discursive forms of its
conceptualization” since the “hybrid that the monster incarnates consigns it to
a liminal space” (57), the meeting of EIC and Surya Corporation, zombie and
betaal, imperialism and capitalism, become those liminal spaces that challenge
their own existence.
As the monster “polices” the borders
of the possible for Cohen’s fifth thesis (“Seven Theses” 12), the physical
boundaries of the tunnel must have remained “undefiled” – despite any attempts
on part of the Surya Corporation to open the tunnel and build a road through
it, or the Taunton desire to break free of their cage. The protesting villagers
come out in numbers to protect the tunnel and Surya Corporation requests the
CIPD to deploy the Baaz Squad. There is a second layer of ideological
subversion: the tribals would be declared as armed Naxalites and neutralized.
An agent provocateur of Surya detonates a bomb near a tense stand-off between
the villagers and the Baaz Squad, for which the tribal ‘naxals’ are ultimately
blamed, thereby evincing a brutal, knee-jerk CIPD counter-offensive.
The
fighting intensifies and the state forces sanitise the area: the tribal village
near the ‘Betaal mountain’ is razed to the ground. For Cohen, “the monster haunts;
it does not simply bring past and present together, but destroys the boundary
that demanded their twinned foreclosure” (ix-x). Construction begins but some
workers are killed by an unknown entity that lies within the tunnel: the Baaz
squad personnel who are asked to investigate are also attacked. The Baaz Squad
suffers losses as zombie soldiers storm out of the tunnel and go on a killing
spree. The survivors retreat to an old British barracks and fortify their
positions until it dawns that Lt. Col. Lynedoch-cum-Betaal entity can “possess”
anyone: it now controls Commandant Tyagi (whose hair has turned white) and
manipulates her to do its bidding.
While the ghoul ingests its victims and takes their
form, the betaal can possess humans or have them devoured by a zombie horde it
controls. Developing on the flux of ghoul – or Ali Saeed – which was able to assume any shape and resists
the state in a way that no one ever has (or can), betaal – or Lt. Col. Lynedoch
– of this series can control humans. This is parallel to Cohen’s argument that “the monster is best understood as an
embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, and a resistant Other known only
through process and movement, never through dissection-table analysis” (Monster
Theory x). The ghoul and the betaal keep changing
their identities despite their malevolent beings, and this movement make them
even more dangerous. The ghoul kills the suspected
Islamist terrorists and the military personnel with equal indifference – and
panache – and the betaal similarly wreaks havoc on the state forces and
protesting tribals alike.
The
tribals and the state forces decide to fight back together using weapons and tribal
forms of knowledge. As those bitten start “turning” into zombies (such as Haq,
another reference to the Islamist zombie, or the Muslim outsider who can “turn”
at any moment against those it is supposed to guard), protagonists face the
same ethical dilemmas which zombie narratives dictate. Ultimately, Lynedoch
possesses Sirohi but the latter fights back, driven by his guilt at having
killed a little girl under Tyagi’s orders. However, if the ghoul used guilt to
turn people against each other, it is guilt that redeems Sirohi in Betaal. In an attempt to defeat the betaal
(Sirohi wants the tunnel to be razed to the ground), the living end up
destroying betaal’s prison instead, allowing its curse to plague the land. The first
season ends with British ghost ships appearing off the coast of Mumbai – and
zombie attacks being reported from all over the country.
Betaal
pits a set of dialectical forces against each other: first, in terms of
nationality, it projects a (colonizing) British versus (colonized) India
conflict twice (once in 1857 and then the one in our immediate future with
British warships preparing to attack India); secondly, in terms of rural versus
urban divide as it locates the city and the village as two distinct spaces
about to be connected through a tunnel/road which then becomes a source of woe
since it is the centre which decides the epistemology of this connection. The
third opposition is seen between the forest/village dwellers (humans) versus
the military-industrial complex (machine) as represented by forces (CIPD) and
the corporations (Surya). The fourth binary is mapped along the living (tribals
and CIPD alike) versus the dead (zombies and those bitten). Between these
paradigms, identities keep switching sides depending on which ideology controls
them at that point. This, again, corresponds to how the shape-shifting ghoul/betaal reflects
that “even before
being a product of a device of knowledge/power, the monster is the
materialization of a space of experience in which thought tests its own limits”
(Nuzzo 56). Even the betaal, which possesses people in succession (and hence
changes shapes), tests the limits of its own ontology – of the zombie and the revenant – and becomes a
consolidation of Cohen seventh thesis, the monster stands at the threshold...of
becoming (“Seven Thesis” 20). The teleological movement, however, could be one
towards Adorno’s negative dialectics: genocide – of the monstrous and the human – can become the ultimate
truth for the ghoul and the betaal.
The neoMONSTERS Thesis: Ghoul and
Betaal
The vicious cycle of terror threats and
kneejerk state responses, the constantly shifting identity of the monster, and
the cyclical invocations in Ghoul manifest patterns of recurrence; the
contiguous existence of a paranormal deity as a protector and ravisher alike in
Betaal further disrupt any ideological stability. Despite (or primarily because of) the
ontological underpinnings of the monsters contained therein, Ghoul and Betaal, with their dystopian settings and technologized and
centralized polities, reveal what current praxis conceals – the dystopias in
the present. The respective monsters
– ghoul and betaal – are shaped by their ‘nature’, their ‘conduct’ and their
political subversion alike: they become juridical-natural monsters
(whose biological ‘nature’ harms those around), moral monsters (as their
‘conduct’ breaks social order), and political monsters (as they underscore
dominant/emergent ideologies) in simultaneity – and not just as a mere
progression over a time-scale.
The
neoMONSTERS thesis scans Ghoul and Betaal for their inherent monstrousness:
the monsters within these web series, when viewed alongside (resisting)
ideologies that operate within specific spatiotemporal locations become sites and processes that warn and reveal. The
mutating and mutagenic ontological beings
of these monsters – and the narratives in which they are imbricated – exists in
a liminal space between socio-political exigencies and popular imagination.
Their particulars could be accessed below.
|
Text
|
Ghoul |
Betaal |
|
Location of the dystopia (space-time) |
India, 2040 |
India, Immediate Future |
|
Civilizational origin of the
Monster |
Pre-Islamic Arabia (myth/folklore) |
India (myth/folklore) |
|
Procedural hybridization |
Ghoul + Rakshas/Piscach |
Betaal + Zombies |
|
Monster’s (and Monstrous) Ideology |
Islamism, Islamist Terrorism |
Naxalism, neo-imperialism |
|
Source of threat (to public order
and the nation) |
External (Islamist terrorism) +
Internal (Indian Muslims) |
External (neo-imperialism) +
Internal (forest dwellers and Naxalites) |
|
Opposing Force (to the Monster) |
National Protection Squad (NPS) |
Counter Insurgency Police
Department (CIPD) |
|
Classification of the Force |
Military |
Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) |
|
Protagonist with torn loyalties |
Lt. Nida Rahim is torn between her
minority identity and her duty as an NPS officer. |
Deputy Commandant Vikram Sirohi is
caught between his respect for Commandant Tyagi (and her orders) and the
ethos of uniform (and his morals). |
One wonders why the primary ‘forces’
of resistance to the monster are represented by Indian military in Ghoul and by the Central Armed Police
Forces or CAPFs (as opposed to local police) in Betaal. The Indian military
operates under the Ministry of Defence and responds to external aggression; the
Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs) work under the aegis of the Ministry of
Home Affairs and handle internal disturbances (among other things such as
border management); and the state police functions under the supervision of
state governments and handle law and order (Annual Report 1). As per its
organisational structure, Ghoul’s NPS
is a wing of India’s military (most probably a special operations group); and
in Betaal, the structure and mandate of
CIPD parallels that of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) which is a CAPF
deployed within the Red Corridor to handle left-wing extremism. By utilizing
dystopia and monstrousness, authoritarianism and horror, and military and
CAPFs, the two Netflix originals may problematize contemporary reality but
simultaneously end up reinforcing the stereotypes or regressive strains of
national psyche they ostensibly seem to indict. For example, as evidenced by
the ranks (Lt. Col., Major, Lt.) in the narrative, Ghoul’s Islamism is a matter of concern for the military (which is
meant to deal with external threats) – the implicit assumption is that Islam(ism)
is primarily an external threat.
However, the zombies in Betaal, which
fuse two distinct paradigms (foreign zombie and indigenous betaal) require a CAPF
response (ranks such as Commandant and Deputy Commandant are used by CAPFs) – this
renders the threats to national security from within (downgrading even neo-imperialism
and military-industrial complex to an ‘internal’ matter).[9]
As I argue in Star Warriors, the trajectory of India’s fictional futures – dystopian
visions included – is shaped by the behavioural patterns precipitated by the
(global) market forces (e.g. neo-imperialism/MIC), localised right-wing powers
predicated on a religio-cultural reassertion (e.g. Hindu nationalism and Islamist
fundamentalism), and a radical, left-liberal resistance to the previous two (e.g.
naxalism) (31). While
both series deploy
horror-and-occult tropes set within India’s totalitarian, dystopian tomorrows, Ghoul manifests the recurring intermeshing
of mindless terrorism and brutal state responses, and Betaal indicts the military-industrial complex and neo-imperialism that
lacerate India’s downtrodden populaces etc. The
message in both the narratives is clear: we may live in a time of monsters, but more often than not, the
monsters-are-us.
***
[1]
This paper neither studies the evolutionary trajectory of the dystopia nor
delves into the monster as a theoretical framework. It also does not “apply” Cohen’s
seven theses or Foucault’s categorization of the monster (as per Nuzzo) to
narratives. Instead, it distils the spirit that “possesses” monstrousness to
observe how monsters/dystopias intermesh within India’s contemporary reality
and builds on the neoMONSTERS thesis.
[2]
This paper is not concerned whether Ghoul
or Betaal are Science Fiction or not
– it views them as dystopias that contain monsters.
[3]
See Nuzzo for more: “in the modern age, at the end of the 18th century, the
juridical-natural monster is slowly substituted by the moral monster” (65).
While Foucault traces the mutation of monster from one form to another with the
passage of time (that is, from juridical-natural to moral etc.), this paper
consciously sidesteps the evolution of the monster, undercuts the temporality
of such an enterprise, and highlights how India’s monsters of 21st
century conflate the three Foucauldian categories of monstrousness.
[4] The neoMONSTERS
thesis emanates from the ‘IN situ Model’ of Indian SpecFic as proposed in Star Warriors of the Modern Raj.
[5] It is aware that
the three dominant paradigms of Science Fiction’s (and thus SpecFic’s) future
history – revolution, evolution and dispersion (Csicsery-Ronay Jr. 110) – often
crossbreed, this paper treats the point of convergence of the monster/dystopia
dispositif as a logical ingress point
into contemporary materiality.
[6]
This may refer to an external threat (such as a nuclear war) or domestic
strife. It also connects the past with the future by containing shades of the
emergency declared by former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi under article 352, a
state of authoritarian terror which lasted from 1975-77.
[7]
This also explains why Nida was called to Meghdoot 31 in the first place. A
captured terrorist (Ali Saeed) had whispered her name to an arresting officer.
[8]
Baaz, literally hawk in Hindi, can refer to CRPF’s ‘CoBRA’ (Commando Battalion
for Resolute Action) units, which are special forces deployed in jungles for
asymmetric warfare.
[9] This
manifests a tendency to see the Muslim other as the ultimate enemy sans
frontiers.
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