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If we go beyond the stereotypical reading of South Asian horror as folkloric and derivative, what do its ghosts whisper: they reveal how caste and gender structure who can be seen and who remains spectral. This talk explores horror and gothic traditions from South Asia as sites where the haunting is also social, entangled with caste hierarchies that shape both narrative and affect.
Theoretically, I draw on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, Avery Gordon’s haunting, and other anti-caste theorists to frame what I call a “caste hauntology.” If, as Gordon suggests, ghosts signal unresolved violence, then in South Asia the question becomes about whose deaths return to haunt and whose are erased from the frame altogether. I illustrate this through close readings of contemporary horror from the region—Bulbbul (2020), Tumbbad (2018), and Gulaabo Rani (2023). These films reproduce caste aesthetics through Brahminical structures of haunting and spectrality. The avenging spirit is often upper-caste, gendered feminine, and aestheticised through purity and suffering, while caste-oppressed deaths are atmospherically evoked and made invisible.
By situating these texts within wider South Asian traditions of horror and gothic, the talk argues that caste is central to how the gothic and horror are imagined in the region. More broadly, it highlights how horror, when studied through caste, becomes an urgent archive of violence that unsettles dominant narratives and demands new ways of imagining social justice, mourning, and the spectral.
