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While Hindi cinema has often been critically engaged as a narrative form while ‘writing’ the nation, the role of Hindi horror genre in imagining this nation is under-explored. Hindi cinema itself emerged in a charged environment of nascent nationalist politics, and early Indian filmmakers saw themselves and their on-screen projections as part of the patriotic scheme. However Post-Independence wars with Pakistan and China, and the eruption of various separatists’ movements in the North-East, Sikh’s Khalistan movement and Kashmiri Muslims engendered narratives and counter-narratives to the state-sponsored scientific secularist discourse. In this article I trace how the Hindi horror genre with its evolving narrative strategies has itself been an area of conflicting ideas and ideologies in imagining the Indian state. Lying at the intersections of myths, ideology and dominant socio-religious thoughts, the Hindi horror genre reveals three major strands: the secular conscious, the traditional cultural and the Hindutva ideological, roughly corresponding to the way the nation has been imagined at different times in Post-Colonial India. Moving beyond establishing theoretical framework, I intend to demonstrate how the Hindi horror genre with its sub-sets provides us with the means to contemplate the nation and its representation.
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