The Ramsay Riot — Bollywood Horror and The Anxious Indian Audience
The Ramsay Brothers — the men, the movies, the money, the mockery, the memory — have found altogether new channels via which to haunt the contemporary.
Kartik Nair, “Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of the Ramsay Brother.”
In Veerana / A Deserted Place (Shyam & Tulsi Ramsay, 1988) the film opens with the murder of a young Indian man, chained in a cage, at the hands of a shape-shifting witch in what appears to be a desolate village. Priests and shamans surround this cage and narrate to the audience the nature of this beautiful, young seductress who transforms into a beast to suck the blood from unsuspecting young men and leave them for dead. The scene is characteristic of a typical Ramsay film in its depiction of religion, female sexuality, and the rural-urban divide. What is most interesting, however, is how the Ramsay brothers appeared out of a vacuum: their interpretations of horror are unique in Bollywood in the 1970’s up to the early 1990’s. It was only after the Ramsay brothers that the horror genre in Bollywood would see large-scale productions such as those of Ram Gopal Varma. The horror genre in Bollywood invites us to question Indian perceptions toward modernity, urbanization, and consumerism. By looking at how Bollywood horror addresses anxieties particular to the Indian audience, we can better understand the rise of the Ramsay Brothers and the immense appeal of their adult-certified, low budget productions.
The 1970’s & 1980’s in Cinema
The 1970’s were a time of significant political instability when the Indian public observed the weakening of the Indian National Congress that had been established by Gandhi and developed by Nehru. Meheli Sen, professor of Cinema Studies at Rutgers University, writes that this was a phase that witnessed the “final unraveling of the Nehruvian consensus — a consensus that was, reductively put, erected on four pillars: commitment to socialism, secularism, democracy, and a careful non-alignment in terms of foreign policy.” Far from revitalizing the Indian National Congress, the 1967 elections meant the start of the Indira Raj, and a more pessimistic era than the Nehru years. This would come to a culmination with the declaration of the National Emergency in 1975 that halted civil liberties and centralized power in Delhi.
Emma Tarlo, in her work on Emergency, writes that this was a period that was shrouded in a narrative silence of both proponents and detractors of the Indira Raj. Tarlo writes:
this can be explained in terms of the unsettling nature of what went on during those twenty-one months when democratic rights were suspended under Indira Gandhi and coercive measures brought into play. Press censorship, arrests, torture, the demolition of slums and tales of forcible sterilization have all made the Emergency fertile food for fiction, but uncomfortable grounds for historical, political or sociological analysis…the silence that surrounds the Emergency ‘as fact’ is not entirely accidental.
This state-sponsored crackdown would have a significant impact on how popular Hindi film would be made in the decade. Sen focuses on the combination of sex and violence in Emergency’s most “scandalous legacy”: the forcible sterilization of the lower class in dubious health centers and camps. The state-sponsored violence meant that Bombay cinema’s take on the 1970’s would, of necessity, be symbolic. Priya Joshi argues that “Bollywood commentary on the 1970’s, much as its commentary on other moments, is widely present, though it emerges indirectly through the use of highly elaborate symbols that displace the nation’s political crisis and its public fantasies elsewhere.” Like the advent of the “Bachchan film,” Meheli Sen argues that the Ramsay Brothers participated in a dialogue with populism that “animated the nation’s public sphere” in its ability to address a “specifically classed and gendered spectator.” Therefore, the Ramsay films and all their narrative and stylistic techniques must be treated as a powerful index into an especially turbulent time of Indian history.
From Ramsinghania to Ramsay
In a revealing series of first-hand interviews and trade journals, Kartik Nair tracks the rise of the Ramsay family across the “shifting landscape of Bombay Cinema.” He writes that, before they were the Ramsay Brothers, they were the Ramsinghania Radio and Electric Company of Karachi. Prior to partition, radio engineer F. U. Ramsinghania owned a somewhat successful 14- door showroom in Karachi that catered mainly to British businessmen. A success that grew after Mr. Ramsinghania changed his name to something more palatable to British buyers. “They couldn’t say ‘Ramsinghania’, so they would always say ‘Oh Mr. Ramsay, Mr. Ramsay!’” (Tulsi Ramsay, in a personal interview, 2009). After 1947, Mr. Ramsay would keep his new last name and venture into another showroom opposite Apsara Cinema Hall on Lamington Road. Nair writes that “from the Lamington showroom, F.U. Ramsay’ seven sons — Shyam, Tulsi, Kiran, Gangu, Keshu, Arjun, Kumar — The Ramsay Brothers, as they came to be known, launched an extraordinary career in the lower reaches of the Bombay film industry.”
Valentina Vitali argues that the prominence of Ramsay Brothers films must be examined in the context of the socio-economics of India from the late 1970’s to the early 1990’s. She writes that the rise and fall of horror or the exploitative genre depend on the flow of capital in and out of the state, the “entity regulating the territory and the institutions within which capital and films circulate.” Vitali notes that the industry grew increasingly fragmented in the 1960’s with established producers on one hand, and minor producers that used film production as “incubators for undeclared cash,” on the other. The latter, short-term capitalists and ad hoc film producers were focused on the swift production of small-scale films that would circulate outside central exhibition networks. It was around the same time that F. U. Ramsay would decide to turn to ad hoc film producing.
F. U. Ramsay’s first film Ek Nanhi Munhi Ladhki Thi / There was a Little Girl (1970) was a thriller that disappointed at the box office. Yet it was here that his sons saw a silver lining.They witnessed the audience’s response to a particularly gripping scene in which Prithviraj Kapoor escapes an exploding building and said to their father: “Public cheekhti hai” (The public screams). Nair recounts how they approached their father after watching his film and came up with the idea of a “full-fledged horror movie.” After having grown up watching classic 1950’s British horror films by Terrence Fisher like The Mummy and Dracula, Tulsi Ramsay was convinced that “anyone can direct a film…no need for cars…no need for stars.”
After renting an old colonial-style mansion for 500 ₹ a day, the brothers Tulsi and Shyam Ramsi persuaded the patriarch to begin filming for Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche / Beneath Two Yards of Earth (1972), a breakout hit that set the standard for Ramsay films to come. Nair writes that:
Every few months over the next two decades, cast and crew alike would be packed in to buses and transported to the outskirts of Bombay for filming. Here, brothers Shyam and Tulsi would dispatch directorial duties; brother Kumar would write scenes while brother Gangu would lens them, Kiran Ramsay was usually in charge of sound and Arjun in charge of production; meanwhile, Mother Ramsay would cook for everyone.
This keep-it-in-the-family mentality and work ethic sheds light on the nature of the Ramsay production as something that was more interested in crafting “scenes” as opposed to a cohesive screenplay. Sanjay Mehta a distributor for the Ramsay Brothers said that “they made their film for a few lakhs, and sold it for a few more lakhs…there was a lot of local-level publicity, and the film ran for two or three weeks…that was enough.”
It was the nature of this low-level production that attracted a distinctly non-urban and non-bourgeois male spectator. After playing at working-class cinema halls the Ramsay films would quickly move to semi-urban and rural cinemas. The stylistic elements within the film,according to Tulsi Ramsay, would focus solely on the male audience (“because ladies cannotwatch so much khoon kharaba [murder and mayhem]”). Tulsi Ramsay describes their audience below:
our first targets were the masses — by masses I mean the taxi drivers, those who drive rickshaws, lower middle classes, plus college-going girls and boys, this is my audience, in my estimation…See India is a vast country with so many small cities — our films ran in these small cities for 3 days — Friday, Saturday, Sunday — on Monday a different film would arrive … If the daughter-in-law (bahu) wearing lots of gold jewelry came in a Mercedes, she wouldn’t be able to digest our films.
Before we understand these stylistic elements, that were by no means unique to the Ramsay films, we must take a brief look at the nature of horror and the genre of excess that attracted Indian audiences of such a large scale during the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Linda Williams & The Genre of Excess
Linda Williams, a professor of film studies at Berkeley University, focuses on representations of “excess” by isolating the “body genres” of horror, pornography, and melodrama. William points to a 1989 article by Rick Altman who writes “unmotivated events, rhythmic montage, highlighted parallelism, overlong spectacles — these are the excesses in the classical narrative system that alert us to the existence of competing logic, a second voice.”Williams says that this excess may itself be organized into a system of parallel construction and excessive spectacles. Pornography and horror are two such systems of excess with pornography having the lowest cultural esteem, and gross-out horror as a close second.
The term “excess” here denotes the excessive display of (mostly female) bodies in the throes of intense sensation:
“The body spectacle is featured most sensationally in pornography’s portrayal of orgasm, in horror’s portrayal of violence and terror, and in melodrama’s portrayal of weeping…visually each of these ecstatic excesses could be said to share a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm — of the body ‘beside itself’ with sexual pleasure, feat and terror, or overpowering sadness.”
William argues that the male/female, active/passive binaries are complex and fluid with regards to spectators and their desires or fantasies to identify with bodies on screen. The period of Emergency in India was no doubt one in which blatant human rights violations occurred via forcible sterilization under the euphemistic disguise of “family planning”. Meheli Sen writes that this was a period in which all notions of sexuality come to be inscribed within the “discursive field of violence and violation,” and, as a result, the contested public sphere causes sex and violence to become the most “expressive tropes, real as well as imagined.” This must be the context in which we understand the Ramsay film and its use of sex as entangled with violence.
It is the female body, often on display in gratuitously long semi-nude sequences, on which male audiences can project their anxieties and fantasies. The Ramsay film will repeatedly focus on feudal landlord men (thakurs) and their female offspring encountering acts of violence from all sides. Whether that is through the predatory behaviors of characters like Vikram in Purani Haveli or through the haveli monster that lurks and gropes women in a manner not dissimilar to a sexual predator. Meheli Sen writes that “the spectator is specifically invited to contemplate hypersexualized female bodies being threatened and violated. In Emergency India, the Ramsay horror film most expressively apprehends the overarching concatenation between sex and violence.” However, there are also instances in which Ramsay films will produce female monsters or witches (chudail) like Nakita in Veerana. Nakita, almost killed by the local thakur’s brother, uses the body of Jasmin (the thakur’s daughter) to avenge herself by luring and killing lonely men. In Veerana, the Ramsay Brothers use the trope of possession to allow characters like Jasmin to “transgress cinematic as well as gendered perspectives.” Barbara Creed, in her work on the monstrous feminine writes, “possession becomes the excuse for legitimizing a display of aberrant feminine behavior which is depicted as depraved, monstrous, abject — and perversely appealing.” It is only under the occurrence of possession that a character like Jasmin is allowed a greater sense of liberty to display promiscuous or undisciplined behavior within the context of rural India.
Sex and violence are just one component of the Ramsay Brothers films that enable us to have a better sense of this time but there are numerous other intriguing tropes and components of these films worth investigating. It is precisely these tropes that we can see in films such as Purani Haveli / Old Mansion (1989), Purana Mandir / Old Temple (1984), and Veerana / Deserted Place (1988).
Rural India & Monstrous Depictions of the Feudal
A western-imported automobile is speeding across a vast empty space of Indian farmland as the driver, an adolescent Indian boy, speaks to the girl on his side, his girlfriend, in a macaronic hybrid of Hindi and English. The two are wearing “Western” clothing: the young boy, jeans and a polo, while the young woman, in a dress. Interjections such as “darling” or “baby” litter their conversation. Suddenly, but not quite unexpectedly, their modern car breaks down beside an old, feudal, colonial-style mansion. Shortly afterwards the two step out to look for help in this haveli only to be met by a hideous monster, vampire, or ghoul ready to prey on these unsuspecting urban-dwelling teenagers. The scene is so typical for Indian horror movies of the time, and specifically Ramsay Brothers pictures, that it would be hard to identify what film this sequence of events has been pulled from.
The complex legacy of colonialism coupled with increasing pressures to conform to a Western iteration of modernity would be a source of significant anxiety in the 1970’s and 1980’s. This anxiety almost always contends with the feudal in “a manner that is both compulsive and deeply symptomatic” of the political moment in those two decades. This can be seen in the stylistic difference between supernatural romance films of the 1950’s and horror films of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Earlier films such as Bimal Roy’s Madhumati (1958) consolidate this idea of the rural as supernatural, however, Roy’s depiction of village life is more whimsical than dark, mysterious, or fearful. Whereas in Madhumati we find the protagonist strangely attracted to the supernatural female ghost, protagonists in Ramsay films are almost always determined to vanquish and slay the monster in question. The reconstruction of the rural from a setting of paranormal romance into a setting of horrific violence is a symbolic transformation.
Sen notes that Ramsay films isolate the haveli or feudal mansion as the locus of terror. She suggests that this feudal order with its “untimely authoritarianism and out moded patriarchies” that appear in films such as Haveli or Darwaza is indicative of the political fantasies in India at that time. In contrast, modernity’s tools are usually no match to defeat or withstand the monsters of the feudal. Only when modernity weaponizes both religion and tradition is it that the evil beasts are finally defeated. It is this religious iconography that we will now analyze to better understand the landscape within which the Ramsay films function.
Religious Iconography & The Ramsay Brothers
In the 1980’s, India’s politics of secularization underwent a dramatic shift with the rise of the Janata Party and the growth in conservative Hindu ideology among the masses. Valentina Vitali writes that the Hindu right-wing organization, Shiv Sena, had remained on the outskirts ofpolitics since the late 1960’s; however, after having supported the Janata party in 1977, it switched to supporting Congress in 1980 when Indira Gandhi returned to power. Vitali writes,“attacks against Dalits, tribal groups and Muslims sparked off by the Shiv Sena in the 1970’sspread across the rest of the country between 1980 and 1984.” It was out of this context that religious, mostly Hindu and Christian iconography, would be used as a fundamental element ofthe Ramsay brothers’ productions.
Hindu mythology and religious iconography have been central to Indian cinema since its inception. By the 1920’s this iconography was used as a core narrative element in mythological and historical Indian film. Valentina Vitali writes that unlike American cinema, Indian cinema perceived Hindu mythology then “not in tension with notions of Indian modernization, but as a factor instrumental to its realization.” Mythological themes played a vital role in addressing anaudience that was “imagined as the Indian nation.” However, after independence and partition,efforts were made so that the two spheres of history and myth were clearly demarcated and India could deal with her “ancient sources” in a “rational” and “secular” manner.
The Ramsay brothers’ productions are unique in their use of religious iconographybecause they do not belong to either the historical or mythological genre. The Ramsay films,Vitali notes, “never took up religion in a religious way” but instead used the iconography for commercial ends in a national market that valued certain tropes above others. Shrines, demons, crosses and curses are not used as the objective of the Ramsay narrative but instead tools that provide moments of fear, suspense, and relief.
In Shaitaani Ilaka / The Devil’s Domain (1990) the audience is presented with the malevolent figure of Lal Bai, a sorceress who sacrifices newlywed brides at the altar of Shaitaanor, the Devil, every Amavasya (new moon) night. Lal Bhai can sustain the Devil, though weak, with virginal blood every few years. Lal Bai’s hopes to use her next victim, Anju, the descendant of feudal landlords and enemies of the Shaitaan, to finally help the Devil regain complete strength and wander the world freely. After numerous confrontations, Lal Bhai even manages to evade the powerful sadhu baba (or holy man) who tries to protect Anju. It is only after using a trishul (the holy trident of the goddess Kali) that the protagonists can permanently defeat Lal Bhai and Shaitaan.
The Disco Number & Modern Youth Culture
Another common denominator among the Ramsay films is the use of teenage protagonists as a stand-in for a “modern” India. More specifically, Meheli Sen isolates the choice of music, specifically disco and pop, used in song sequences and in presentations of romantic love between these teenage protagonists. Sen writes that “before the Ramsay film could travel to the feudal haveli, it — almost inevitably, and sometimes symbolically — had to make a detour through disco.”
The use of disco, not only emphasizes the modernity of the protagonists but also establishes their characters as not native to the feudal domain which they will occupy. The disco song is usually the most immediate precursor for the haunted haveli sequence where the“modernity/rationality of the primary characters is horrifically challenged and eventually dismantled.” For example, the disco song in Purana Mandir, “Main Hoon Akeli” (“I Am Alone”), occurs at the end of a date between the couple protagonists just before they are haunted by the haveli monster. The disco song indicates for the audience when a transition will take place. Sen writes that “these songs operate as codas of sorts for modernity, before the horrific/supernatural takes over the proceedings; they spectacularly signal the end of one register and thetransition to the next.”
Conclusion
The popularity of the Ramsay Brothers’ films must be understood by dissecting some of the most prominent components of the genre and the ways in which they engage public fantasies of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Given that this popularity dwindled in the post- liberalization landscape of the 1990’s, it is important to understand how the Ramsay Brothers’ depiction of horror registered with a non-urban, non-bourgeois, predominantly male audience. Some of the most “attractive” parts of the Ramsay films: the gratuitous combination of sex and violence, the monstrous depictions of the feudal, the religious overtones, and the youthful disco songs, etched out in their own ways the unique cultural discourse of an especially turbulent time.
Bandh Darwaza / Closed Door (1990) was the last major commercial success of the Ramsay brothers before the end of the collaboration between Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay. After the 1990’s, the Ramsay production morphed into the Zee Horror Show, a serial that tried to adapt to the growing presence of cable and satellite television. However, this meant a shift in the main audience. Instead of targeting working-class men, the Zee Horror Show tried to attract affluent, urban dwelling, or aspiring middle-class spectators regardless of gender. Though the Ramsay Brothers have attempted to revive some of their earlier successes with individual productions, historians like Nair suggest that they struggle with difficulty to stage a “comeback” in a genre that they themselves had once pioneered. As Bollywood slowly integrates with global cinema, the “formal disarray” so characteristic of Ramsay films may never find a foothill in twenty-first century India. Without acclimating to a new commercial and cultural landscape, perhaps the Ramsay Horror genre will be limited to cult veneration in this new age of changing media and converging cultures.
References for Further Reading and Viewing:
Altman, Rick. “Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989):321–59.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York:Routledge, 1993.
Joshi, Priya. Bollywood’s India: A Public Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Nair, Kartik. “Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers.” Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies 3 (2) 2012: 123–145
Sen, Meheli. Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre, and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.
Tarlo, Emma. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Vitali, Valentina Capital and Popular Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. — — — . Hindi action cinema: Industries, narratives, bodies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44 (4) 1991: 2–13.
Ramsay, Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay:
— — — . (1971). Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche [Motion Picture]. India:Hindi.
— — — . (1978). Darwaza [Motion Picture]. India: Hindi.
— — — .(1984). Purana Mandir [Motion Picture]. India: Hindi.
— — — . (1988). Veerana [Motion Picture]. India: Hindi.
— — — . (1989). Purani Haveli [Motion Picture]. India: Hindi.
— — — . (1989). Shaitani Ilaka [Motion Picture]. India: Hindi.
— — — . (1990). Bandh Darwaza [Motion Picture]. India: Hindi.
