By now, ‘the world is changing’ sounds a trite cliche. But how and why? There is little sensible analysis available on that – only a few hints, which gleam as cursors do on our screens, and are also like them in that they herald the shape of the beast lurching towards the world.
In 1921, barely a few years after the Russian Revolution began, the Czech writer Karel Capek (in his play RUR) first narrated a scary story about an extremely disciplined and insensitive man-made group of robots eliminating mankind and establishing their own order on Earth. In Prague, around the same time, another group of writers began to write darkly comic stories about the hidden, menacing and morbid face of totalitarianism and progress.
In 2024, with young Indians turning away from print to audio and video, our republic of Bollywood is becoming a hall of mirrors reflecting the intimate secrets of Vishwaguru India’s soul. Surprising! So far it has been largely insulated against high literature or the secret goings-on between plutocrats and politicians to pull down democratically elected governments.
But suddenly after a long drought, it has started delivering blockbusters based on the strange genre of horror comedy. Beneath their paradoxical twists and turns, these films offer us an ineffably human magic of an age great and sick at the same time.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
I have been binge-watching some old horror comedies and two recent remakes of old super-hit films in Hindi: Stree (1 and 2) and Bhool Bhulaiyaa (1 and 2). It was partly out of a writer’s curiosity to see how the two essential classical rasas (hasya and raudra) could be yoked together and create narratives that resonate within India and among diasporan Indians alike.
Truth be told, the genre had hit our screens with Bhoot Bungla, a cult film created by the gifted and irreverent comedian Mehmood. For a long time after that, the genre had no takers. The Ramsay Brothers in the ‘90s tried to revive horror solo, but after some initial successes, they failed to evoke the larger public’s interest.
In 2007, as the new millennium bared its fangs and a revolutionary digital communication technology, horror comedy perked up. But it took India a whole decade for Stree (2018) to arrive on our screens. The southern film industry suddenly showed us a sluggish Bollywood hooked to Hollywood, whose actors and directors needed Hindi-Urdu film scripts and dialogues served to them in Roman as they walked a new path to the public’s hearts and wallets.
Always more grounded with a sharp ear for dialects, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada films easily combined mythical spooky characters with irreverent comedy that came out of metros and armed itself with with rural goddesses, spooks, shamans and rural kulaks in ancient ancestral havelis. The genre thrives on pan-Indian patriarchal khandans whose young are educated abroad and visit home carrying with them unthinkable life choices.
Of the two major hits in Hindi, Stree is based on Kannada folklore and Bhool Bhulaiyaa (two seasons with a third in the making) is a remake of the Malayalam film Manichitrathazhu.
The narratives of all these people with fierce-looking patriarchs barking out orders are nevertheless led by the young, who have wandered into what to them by now is an alien culture. The havelis, their inherited spooks as well as scared and mysterious inhabitants provide the backdrop to high horror, while comedy derives from the frantic bumbling attempts of the loud young visitors at injecting their own thinking while also trying to make themselves understood to their families frozen in time.
Keeping the ghosts propitiated with booze and blood provides a nice side income to local black magicians, priests and their sidekicks, who lead the comic subplot.
Some common pan-India patterns emerge in all. One is the simultaneous rise of mobile connectivity in the most regressive rural areas, where many affluent families have sent their young abroad for higher learning. Well, they return only to find an India being pushed towards a ritualistic feudal past and a Hindu dharma to which their families subscribe.
Women are educated now and wear modern clothes, but rural or urban, most families will organise month-long wedding festivities like movable feasts carrying the young and the baraatis from Europe to metro cities. The final stopover is in their native village, rich in both horror and comic clashes between the living and the dead.
Also read | ‘Stree 2’: A Mediocre Film of Ideas, Desperately Trying to Become a Spectacle
Public opinion is the final arbiter for all filmmakers keen to rake in enough on the first opening to cover costs and more. With porn flowing freely into smartphones at the press of a button, the truth is, all the officially young have turned away from old world romances between ghosts and mortals (from Madhumati to Nagin) that thrived on tree-hugging in forests and dream sequences.
Even the music and the dances presented by crowds dressed in faux rural ethnic costumes (like Gujarat’s much-publicised Garba today pushes the envelope some more with the irreverent braiding of bhangra pop and desi rap and ye olde Bengali romantic ditties like ‘Aami je Tumaar’).
Isolated from frustrated and sour family elders and greedy priestly classes thriving on rituals, the celebrations of temple festivals, exorcism and ghost-busting, all that the havelis now offer are tourist packages or solitude and women left behind nursing many anxieties. They and their souls provide the opportunity to populate films with ugly form-changing ghosts, demure sexy bahus and sex-crazed young teens.
As India – and indeed the world – descend more and more into existential terror and despair, the confused young, brought up in a dehumanised world of Facebook, Insta and smartphone images and podcasts, enjoy sequences like an educated female ghost flying in the air, reading messages scrawled on walls in red such as “O stree kal aana” (in Stree) and turning back, while the uneducated male ghost disregards the words to steal ‘modernised’ women. The male ghost drags ‘modern’ women to his lair and punishes them, no not by raping, but dressing them as tonsured female monks in white.
These films are a vaudeville version of Mira Nair’s film Water, and the dishevelled and mad ghost woman dancing alone in a haunted part of the haveli in candle-lit halls can be read as a spoof of all those grand operatic Sanjay Leela Bhansali films.
The real immutable subject of horror coms are backgrounds. They are like the invisible cities of which Italo Calvino wrote, designed to counter boredom and drift. How could you otherwise survive so much chaos and extermination worldwide?
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
