The Witch’s Tale: Women In Indian Horror Films

Chutni Mahato lived to tell her tale—branded a witch in her in-laws’ village in Jharkhand’s Seraikela-Kharsawan district, stripped and paraded naked and forced to drink urine. Once a woman is branded a witch—a superstition rife in many states in India—her chance of survival is very low; lynching of women over suspicion of witchcraft is widely prevalent in many parts. But Mahato managed to escape. That was 1995. She is now an activist battling such social evils. In 2019, Mahato won the Padma Shri—India’s fourth-highest civilian honour—for helping nearly 150 women, all victims of witch-hunting and persecution.   

A few years before she was honoured, a film purportedly inspired by her life was released. But Kaala Sach: The Black Truth turned out to be the typical Bollywood horror fare—instead of depicting her empowerment, the film is full of scenes of sexual violence, its dialogues replete with expletives and innuendos. Mahato does not know about the film but says they can’t do justice to the struggle faced by women branded witches and hunted down by an unforgiving society. “They (films) show witches with bulging eyes, with feet turned backward and matted hair. She is in search of men to seduce and children whose blood she can d­rink,” Mahato tells Outlook over the phone. “In real life, though, ‘witches’ are not demons but women just like you and me,” she adds.  

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For decades, Hindi horror films stuck to a hackneyed characterisation of women—sexist and mis­ogynistic. Be it as the ‘ghost’ or a living character, women have only pandered to the voyeuristic desires of the male audience. And one of the most common and often misrepresented sub-genres within the horror universe in India has been the daayan film and the rape-revenge genre where a pious or pure woman becomes impure due to the wrongs done to her by men and turns into an all-powerful, bloodthirsty demon. Popular films like Chudail (1991), Khoon Ki Pyaasi, (1996) and Khoon Ki Pyaasi Daayan (1998)—with their exp­loitative storylines and focus on women’s bodies as objects of lust—nevertheless laid the groundwork for later films like Raagini MMS (2011), Ek Thi Dayan (2013), Pari (2018) and Bulbbul (2020) which strived to subvert the trope of the witch to depict powerful, feminist women and themes of violence against women. While many films followed the ‘sexploitation’ sub-genre, some of them, in their own right, paved the way for more layered women characters in horror films.

Horror film buff and author Aditi Sen, however, has an interesting take on the Hindi films of the ’80s, when the Ramsay brothers’ sex-horror films had acquired cult status. Sen, a history professor at Queen’s University and a researcher on South Asian horror cinema, argues that while the films were definitely exploitative and objectifying women for eyeballs, they were also giving glimpses of women with more agency and independence. “In Purana Mandir (1984), for instance, a group of men and women go to an abandoned place for a weekend of casual sex with their partners. That’s unthinkable in a mainstream Hindi film of the time, for women to have that kind of freedom,” says Sen.

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In 2002, the film Raaz was one of the biggest runaway hits of the year. Though the film did not have the traditional witch, it developed a different kind of woman fiend—the lonely woman spirit who is just looking for love. It was a more boisterous, sexualised reincarnation of the ‘lonely, lovelorn woman ghost’ of the sixties who wore a white saree and sought men who reminded her of her estranged lover. Sen, who has written a chapter on the film in the 2020 book Bollywood Horrors, says Raaz was a turning point. “It reinforced beliefs about women being tasked with the job of ‘fixing’ men and accepting their follies, but also opened a starting point for more films that showed wom­en not just as accessories but movers of the plot.”  

Another aspect, Sen says, that outlined the narrative of women in Indian horror films is an exp­ression of the country’s internalised cultural beliefs, mythology and pop culture. In Raaz, for instance, Bipasha Basu—the wife—is the Devi while the ghost—the other woman—is a wronged woman or chudail. The ‘Devi’ can only obliterate the evil spi­rit by giving her a proper funeral. In later dep­ic­tions of the daayan or chudail, filmmakers have used the daayan as a twisted allegory for the div­ine. “It is because filmmakers (and all men) know the power of Shakti and that no man can actually stand up to it. None of the films, of course, have shown a near accurate representation of witches, even though in India, witches are as old as gods,” says Anubhuti Dalal, 42, who lives in Delhi and claims to be a tantrika. “I am what they sometimes call a dakini. I belong to the Aghori clan of tantriks,” she says. A practitioner of tantra, an ancient sect of Hinduism that predates the age of “organised religion”, as Dalal puts it, she and other dakinis like her worship the Dasha Maha Vidya—a pantheon of 10 feminine energies, each representing a form of the supreme goddess. In ancient texts, the dakini is defined as a ‘fiendish’ spirit who worships Kali.

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In India, Dalal explains, the reason why women are repeatedly depicted as horrible, monstrous entities in the form of a chudail or daayan can be traced to the fear and patriarchy of Bra­hmins. Accepting the power of the woman as a divine healer meant accepting the power of her wrath. “When it comes to the battle between Mahakaal and Mahakali, the goddess will always win. Brah­mins and all men know that. Perhaps that is why they have always picked up their pitchforks and torches to behead and burn the ‘witch’. Bec­ause deep down they know they can’t kill the wit­ch just as they can’t kill the goddess,” she says.  A slew of recent Bollywood filmmakers seem to have picked up on that trend.  

In 2018, Amar Kaushik’s film Stree stumped aud­iences with its feminist horror-comedy approach to the witch. The film retold an old folk story abo­ut a witch who roamed the streets hunting young men with not-so-subtle subversions in gender roles. The witch in Stree, for instance, sought consent from her male victims before seducing them. In 2020, debut filmmaker Anvita Dutt’s horror film Bulbbul won two Filmfare OTT awards and accolades for retelling the story of the vigilante daayan who employs her own brand of justice system to punish those who hurt her, and the drivers of patriarchy. In both films, the witch in the end becomes a metaphor for power.

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Film writer Amborish Roychowdhury feels that while sexual violence has been an ill-used trope in Bollywood horror films in the past, it continues to be a popular theme in horror films as it is a living reality for most women. “Horror is one of the mo­st expressive genres of film. I think filmmakers today are realising the potential of the platform to tell powerful stories about women and violence is a big part of many women’s lives,” he says. “Here lies the credit and intent of the filmmakers—are they using it as a bit to draw in audiences or are they using it to make audiences uncomfortable and ask questions about the society they live in?”

Away from the world of films, Aloka Kujur lives in the land of so-called witches. “In Jharkhand, daayan pratha is still a relevant practice and every year, hundreds of women are persecuted and even killed in the name of being a witch,” Kujur, who works for the rights of such women under the Adivasi Jan Adhikar Manch, tells Outlook. In Jharkhand, most of these cases are rel­ated to property disputes. “Women who have property and are single or elderly are often the target of such tactics, often by relatives and neighbours who want to usurp her property.” Kujur, however, says that films like Bulbbul that romanticise the daayan are equally bad as the B-grade films. She explains that in states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, tales of the witch are much more believable as they are deeply woven into the social fabric. “These films reinforce the idea of daayan and chudail.”

(This appeared in the print edition as "The Witch’s Tale")

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