When women and girls are better off as ghosts.

Starting from the nerve jittering and eerie ‘The Exorcist’ of 1973 to recent times ‘The Nun’, ‘Annabelle’, ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ (to name a few), or even ‘Stree’ and ‘Bulbbul’ which took the Indian cinema box office with a storm, there is a common link that tied the West horror genre with the South, and that is a vengeful female evil spirit. Have we really wondered why the antagonists of most of the horror movies are almost always women? Why we need mythological and fablesque representations to strike at the putrid core of patriarchy?

In a ‘real’ world where women and girls and their bodies remain a battlefield for violence, the hypervisibility of female ghosts in movies and series make sense, because at least in ‘reel’ life they can seek revenge and get justice. In our everyday life it is easy to find news about women who have been victims of rape, abuse and violence, but the chances of finding an example where she fought to take revenge and succeeded is almost nil. As long as she is breathing in full flesh and blood, she is vulnerable and her value somehow shrinks down to her body parts, and millions of hyenas are salivating and waiting to feast on her. Therefore, only rising from the world of dead with supernatural powers is her way to avenge for all the injustice she went through. Haunting people who mistreated her, even though in films has more plausibility, because as long as she lives, she cannot do it. There is a joke which goes like this: men do not need to be ghosts, because whatever they could do as ghosts, they can do it while they are alive anyway. Ironically, this is the most practical and relatable joke which shows men as ghosts simply don’t fit the image, and the reason is- in real life if anything untoward happens to them, they will go out there and seek revenge while they are still alive, which is why most action films with revenge plots typically revolve around men. Contrarily, women lack power and agency in natural world.

According to the data of Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK) 195 girl children (minors) were raped between January to September this year, and among them 22 were between the age of 0-6 years. Another data set of ASK reveals that during the same time period 22 adult women were murdered after rape. In an egalitarian society, this data and numbers would have compelled the society and the state to adopt strict measures, the irony is- we are quite far from being egalitarian, rather, we live in a society where often the perpetrator is someone familiar, where parents defy sex education, where keeping mum is the way to move forward, where the culprit goes on with his life and the victim has to lower her gaze and live in the shadows. These are the reasons why women might be better off as ghosts.

In her now classic 1975 essay, ‘Woman the Gatherer’, anthropologist Sally Slocum challenged the primacy of ‘Man the Hunter’. Anthropologists, she argued, ‘search for examples of the behaviour of males and assume that this is sufficient for explanation’. And so she asked a simple question to fill the silence: ‘what were the females doing while the males were out hunting?’ Answer: gathering, weaning, caring for children during ‘longer periods of infant dependency’, all of which would similarly have required cooperation. In the context of this knowledge, the ‘conclusion that the basic human adaptation was the desire of males to hunt and kill,’ objects Slocum, ‘gives too much importance to aggression, which is after all only one factor of human life.’

Slocum made her critique over forty years ago now, but the male bias in evolutionary theory still persists. An article of 2016 in the Independent claimed to reveal that humans have evolved to be six times more deadly to their own species than the average mammal. This is no doubt true of our species overall – but the reality of human-on-human lethal violence is that it is overwhelmingly a male occupation: a thirty-year analysis of murder in Sweden found that nine out of ten murders are committed by men. This holds with statistics from other countries, including Australia, the UK and the US. A 2013 UN homicide survey found that 96% of homicide perpetrators worldwide are male.

Vera Donovan, in Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne said “It’s a depressingly masculine world we live in, Dolores.” This dialogue from a film of 1995 still stands and applies. Long before this, in 1981 Suniti Namjoshi, a revolutionary poet and fabulist wrote a book titled ‘Feminist Fables’ which is a rework of fairy tales where she mixed fables and mythologies to deconstruct patriarchy that our society follows as oblivious fanatics. In the book there is a fable titled “From the Panchatantra” which is taken from a Sanskrit book of fables. In this, she attempts to reveal the true color of caste and gender hegemony established in society. In the story a Brahmin wants Lord Vishnu to grant him a son. However, out of sheer absentmindedness Lord Vishnu grants him a daughter. In a very short period, Lord Vishnu reappears and the Brahmin asks for a son again. Thus, in his next incarnation, he takes birth as a woman and becomes a mother of eight boys. But this time when asked for a wish, the woman asks for ‘human status’ which Lord Vishnu says “is much harder” to grant. This speaks volumes about the status of women and girls in our society. In a world of twisted values, repressive mindset and plethora of perversions, maybe it is better if women are portrayed as banshees and ghosts, at least then she can fight against all the odds in a powerful manner. She can be a witch, but she will no longer be vulnerable.

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