What's behind your Halloween Mask?

India has seen a rise in the representation of blood dripping monsters and broomstick riding witches for the last 5 years or so. Many have been hiding this Halloween season behind the designer masks.However, for most Indians, dressing up in weird costumes, and attending absurd theme based parties has nothing to do with the Celtic culture and the Samhain rituals.

This post is all about taking you deeper into the influence of culture shifts and literary influence on the pop culture, which is definitely more than what the media projects today in the form of Bollywood actors endorsing Halloween festivities.

Samrat Chakrabarty writes in his article Young India, new hunger for identity " We are increasingly producing popular media content that is turning our gaze inwards and informing us about ourselves." The Halloween debate has been taken up by almost every newspaper and magazine, and so I do not plan to revisit the arguments of the past. This article is inclined towards peeling the layers of this inward gaze that Samrat Chakrabarty talks about. To understand the nuances of this inner gaze, let us first go back to the start.

Irish people like every other generation were looking for supernatural protection (something beyond their natural strength). Little did they know, that they were fighting their inner demons. Samhain was just another way for venting the inward fear of being abandoned by the Almighty. This Gaelic festival believed that the veil between the natural and the supernatural world almost diminished on the eve of Samhain. The anxiety of the future lead them to chalk out a day to communicate with their dead family members. What is the common link between the 2000 year old ritual and the present situation? Is there still a looming fear hidden inside the vampire costumes? Is the thick blood color shrouding the effect of the poisonous reality? Or the deteriorating state of the world has made a Frankensteinian monster, just another head in the crowd.

Taking a gigantic leap from 1st century to the 20th century, we find that, 1970s and 1980s saw a rise in gothic fiction. Followed by a tsunami of Gothic thrillers in the 90s. Movies like Candyman, The Exorcist, and Ring propelled the pop culture to celebrate festivals like Whitby Goth Festivals. For those of you who are clueless about this festival, this is the divine place where the King of Gothic, Bram Stoker found his inspiration for Dracula. The western ghosts were not limited to Europe and America, and so we see imprints of the Gothic pulp on Indian cinema, starting with Kamal Amorhi's Mahal to the adaptation of The Exorcism into Gehrayee.

One thing is clear that literature, movies and art paved the way for Indians to embrace Halloween without much skepticism. A slow dose of horror, has finally turned the elite and upper middle class Indians into mindless zombies. As your intelligent minds have noticed, the privilege of having a television and radio set was limited to the educated and elite Indians. When fictional art has a plethora of positive tropes to offer our dear brothers and sisters have chosen graveyards, jack o lanterns and devil horns. If it is not about "let me choose what I want to mindlessly", then there has to be a healthy reasoning behind the ghastly, or one can say the "ghostly" choice.

What compelled us as Indians to paint our faces into hideous monsters? Grady Hendrix, the author of Paperbacks from hell, is quoted in The Guardian, stating that horror fiction "literalises everyday terrors".Maybe nothing but the brokenness of the Indian society, inequalities, and hypocrisy are the culprits. Jenny Kakkad writes in Huffington Post that "urbanization, gender discrimination, domestic violence, and lust for money are all social evils prevailing in the Indian society".

Just like the ancient Samhain ancestors, today we are stretching our hands into the other side of the veil, so that the hard reality of the physical world becomes soothing. From Mumbai to Delhi, the stretched out hand has generated revenue for the popular clubs and party houses. Designers have come up with high- end Halloween couture, event management companies are sliding on heaps of money like Uncle Scrooge. Who would have known few years back, that Hocus Pocus could have been a rewarding career.

On a very serious note, this post is not to dictate what's already happening, but it is an attempt to promote thinking, to question the 'why' behind Halloween, the effect it will have on future generation and above everything the message it carries. A message of "death is better than life", "darkness is the new light", or more precisely "you have no freaking idea who is behind this leprechaun mask." Maybe you are a Halloweener, and having a spooky bash is not a crime. Yet this is how Albert Einstein would have put it " the important thing is not to stop questioning".

So let me be the first to pose an innocent, free of magic potion, devoid of mystic spell kind of question:

What's behind your Halloween Mask?