Bollywood Horrors

Religion, Violence and Cinematic Fears in India

Ellen Goldberg, Aditi Sen, Brian Collins, Ellen Goldberg, Aditi Sen, Brian Collins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350143173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

Bollywood Horrors is a wide-ranging collection that examines the religious aspects of horror imagery, representations of real-life horror in the movies, and the ways in which Hindi films have projected cinematic fears onto the screen. Part one, "Material Cultures and Prehistories of Horror in South Asia" looks at horror movie posters and song booklets and the surprising role of religion in the importation of Gothic tropes into Indian films, told through the little-known story of Sir Devendra Prasad Varma. Part two, "Cinematic Horror, Iconography and Aesthetics" examines the stereotype of the tantric magician found in Indian literature beginning in the medieval period, cinematic representations of the myth of the fearsome goddess Durga's slaying of the Buffalo Demon, and the influence of epic mythology and Hollywood thrillers on the 2002 film Raaz. The final part, "Cultural Horror, " analyzes elements of horror in Indian cinema's depiction of human trafficking, shifting gender roles, the rape-revenge cycle, and communal violence. This book also features images (colour in the hardback, black and white in the paperback).

Part One

Material Cultures and Prehistories of Horror in South Asia

1

Monsters, Masala, and Materiality: Close Encounters with Hindi Horror Movie Ephemera

Brian Collins

Introduction: Posters, Song Booklets, and “Methodological Fetishism”

Scholars generally agree that the first promotional material of any kind for an Indian film appeared in the form of a newspaper advertisement for the 1913 “mythological” film Raja Harishchandra (King Harishchandra, dir. Dadasaheb Phalke).¹ However, no evidence exists for an actual poster until Kalyan Khajina (The Treasures of Kalyan, dir. Baburao Painter) in 1924.² And it was not until after the success of the publicity campaign for 1948’s Chandralekha (dir. S. S. Vasan) that posters became widespread marketing tools.³

Typically, Indian movie posters advertise the title of a film and provide relevant information like stars, director, and songwriter. They also give an idea of the film’s genre: mythological, social, family, or masala (“spicy”). When used to describe a film, masala refers to a something-for-everyone approach, with thrills and chills, dance and romance, as well as humor. As the director Manmohan Desai puts it, masala films should have “an item in every reel.”⁴ Given the amount of film contained in one reel, this amounts to a dance number, a fight scene, a jump scare, a romantic duet, or some slapstick comedy about every eleven minutes.

But when someone describes the style of a poster as masala, they mean something more like “[an] item in every square inch,” often utilizing a bright color palette. Devraj and Bouman explain:

An elementary color code marks the characters as positive or negative, with pink-faced heroines flinching from villains painted angry red or base green … The diverse elements are at times unified by some device like a spiral pattern or a background of flames. The title treatment is often monumentally three-dimensional and may wield its own pictorial elements, symbols representing the theme of the film like a rose, a chain, a pair of handcuffs, or a bloody dagger.⁵

As the art form of the Hindi movie poster developed, illustrators began to employ an established color scheme to advertise each movie’s genre, using blue, purple, and dark green paint for action-oriented films and yellow, pink, and light green paint for family films. And even as posters incorporated more and more photographic elements and stopped relying on painting, this color scheme remained in use. “There is probably no [śilpa-śāstra] for this colour code,” writes Stephen Haggard in an oft-cited article, “but the evidence of the posters suggests that it is known to artists and perceived by the public.”⁶ He continues:

These systems of colour reference can also be found in the West, but a comparison of Hollywood and Bombay publicity shows a far less naturalistic, more symbolic use of colour in the Indian case. For example, the use of dark blue in poster representations of Amitabh Bachchan and Darmendra, the two rival heart-throbs of the late 1970s, is surely significant … In the film Mera Gaon, Mera Desh, Dharmendra hides in a tree and secretly watches the village girls bathing in the river. This reference to Krishna is obvious, and there can be no doubt that similar associations are achieved by colouring a major male star blue in a poster.⁷

The masala style of poster design is rooted in Indian techniques of storytelling, art, and imagination. But it also rooted in another hallmark of Indian culture—bureaucracy. India is divided into eleven film distribution zones derived from an old Raj-era system: Bombay, Delhi, Nizam, East Punjab, Eastern, Central Provinces and Berar, Central India, Rajasthan, Mysore, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra. Purchasers of distribution rights must operate within these geographical confines, leading to large-scale and flashy advertising efforts to maximize their profits. Additionally, in each distribution zone there is an “A circuit” for the wide release of Bollywood blockbusters, a “B circuit” for re-releases of classic Bollywood films and new low-budget genre films, and a “C circuit” for “sexy horror” and soft-core pornography.⁸ The posters that concern us here (if it needs to be said) come from the B and C circuits.

Song Booklets

When the tradition of printing promotional booklets for upcoming movies first arose in the 1920s, the booklets that were distributed contained stills, plot synopses, and reviews, and were only intended for distributors and theater owners. But the arrival of sound in the 1930s and the subsequent popularity of film songs saw the addition of lyrics to the booklets, which began to be distributed to theatergoers in advance of a film’s showing.⁹

A typical modern song booklet is 7in. × 10in., printed on magazine paper stock coated with kaolin to give it a slick feel, and is either one-fold with two inside panels or two-fold with three inside panels. In some cases, there is an additional page of cheaper newsprint paper glued or stapled inside like a magazine. The booklets also contain poster-style artwork for the film along with the title, credits, and a synopsis (kathaasaar). Usually, but not always, they also include the lyrics of one or more songs in Hindi, English, and sometimes Urdu. We should note here that, while Indian movie posters may have their own distinctive style, they are nonetheless recognizable as a type of promotional material found all over the world. The song booklet, on the other hand, is a form of advertising unique to India. As such, they share certain design characteristics with other products produced, circulated, and used within South Asia.

This brings us to another influence on the stylistic development of movie posters and song booklets that has been underappreciated: South Asian industrial design of the kind documented by design historians Catherine Geel and Catherine Lévy in 100% India, their photography book featuring everyday objects ranging from bicycle reflectors to stamp pads.¹⁰ In the introduction, Geel characterizes this design aesthetic:

Indian objects are witty and spirited in every sense of the words. They are filled with sparkling details and possess a unique sensibility that refashions them again and again, in thousands of copies. What inspires workers and craftspeople to take the time to engrave little flowers on the most ordinary of glasses, to adorn radio-cassette players with flashing lights and LEDs? Rather than succumbing to the inevitable and reflexive appeal to a cultural habit that embellishes and elaborates everything (from frescoes to temple walls, from a taste for kitsch to precious textiles) I like to believe it to be the expression of a subconscious refusal to be subsumed by the market, like the stubborn recalcitrance turned against the British occupation in its day.¹¹

Building on Geel’s intuition, I will argue that the most useful way of interpreting these posters and song booklets requires us to see them as drawing from a deep well of cultural knowledge and forms, but also shaping and being shaped by the economies in which they circulate.

Market Forces and Methodology

“No social analysis of things,” writes anthropologist of globalization Arjun Appadurai, “can avoid a minimum level of what might be called methodological fetishism.”¹² By “methodological fetishism,” Appadurai means that, in order to counterbalance what has historically been an overemphasis on human intention and cognition in the study of artifacts, a scholar must “fetishize,” or imagine some inherent power in, whatever object she is studying. To carry out this recommendation, I will continually reframe and refocus my analyses of these posters and song booklets in this essay by returning to them as the things that they are—things that, when interpreted in their overlapping contexts, can tell us much about the intersecting currents of human activity in which they are caught.

As the objects of an enthusiast’s desire—traveling along a current that flows from manufacturer’s shop to reseller’s stall to collector’s collection—they are brittle, age-worn artifacts, dwindling in number; cheap to produce but expensive to purchase, and originally designed to do nothing more than serve as advertisements for a few weeks and then dissolve into pulp in the unforgiving Indian elements.¹³ On the other hand, as Indian products of manufacturing, these song booklets and posters have a kind of fragile durability that provides an explanation for their longevity that has nothing to do with the collector’s market. It derives instead from traits they share with a wide array of other Indian products.

Referring mostly to the electronic and mechanical items that reasonably skilled technicians (often either informally or self-taught) can keep in working order through the ready availability of standardized components, Geel writes:

The incredible fragility that radiates from shop windows in India … seems to go together with the industrial production of the most densely populated country in the world. For Westerners, this quality makes them unusual objects, filled with happiness and the symbolic value of transgression. The captions to the photographs in [100% India] regularly mention the relative efficiency of these objects; nonetheless, the products do not at all seem to have been designed for a limited period. There are no preconceived ideas about the life of an object. Such ideas wouldn’t be Indian. Godrej refrigerators or Penjaj scooters easily give twenty or thirty years of loyal service. But Indian objects do in fact look fragile, and they often are.¹⁴

Posters are not like motorcycles that can be repaired and put back on the road by a self-taught mechanic. But the skills of the bricoleur do come ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface Brian Collins
• Introduction Brian Collins, Aditi Sen, and Ellen Goldberg
• Part One Material Cultures and Prehistories of Horror in South Asia
• 1 Monsters, Masala, and Materiality: Close Encounters with Hindi Horror Movie Ephemera Brian Collins
• 2 Vampire Man Varma: The Untold Story of the “Hindu Mystic” Who Decolonized Dracula Brian Collins
• Part Two Cinematic Horror, Iconography, and Aesthetics
• 3 Divine Horror and the Avenging Goddess in Bollywood Kathleen M. Erndl
• 4 Horrifying and Sinister Tāntriks Hugh B. Urban
• 5 Do You Want to Know the Raaz? Sāvitri, Satyavān, and the Other Woman Aditi Sen
• Part Three Cultural Horror
• 6 Cultural Horror in Dev: Man is the Cruelest Animal Ellen Goldberg
• 7 Bandit Queen, Rape Revenge, and Cultural Horror Morgan Oddie
• 8 Mardaani: The Secular Horror of Child Trafficking and the Modern Masculine Woman Beth Watkins
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plate Section
• Copyright