The Adivasi and the undead: From (post)colonial carnage to Necrocene apocalypse in Betaal (2020)

ABSTRACT

In conversation with work by Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy and Jason W. Moore, this article shows how the 2020 Indian Netflix zombie miniseries Betaal aligns British colonial-capitalist oppression with the neocolonial-capitalist violence performed by Indian soldiers on India’s indigenous Adivasi community. Merging the (post)colonial with the post-apocalyptic in spectacular and violent ways, Betaal tells the story of elimination of an Adivasi community that resists capitalist exploitation of their lands, accidentally releasing a pandemic in the form of undead British soldiers once in the employ of the East India Company. The extractive violence that these two entities perform destroys not only people and traditions, it exhausts the land itself and can thus be considered an element of what Justin McBrien calls “the Necrocene”. The zombie pandemic that erupts in Betaal is an attempt to render the apocalyptic violence and death that unregulated capitalism performs on ecology and precarious communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Adivasi
• capitalism
• necolonialism
• Necrocene
• pandemic
• zombie

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens jubileumsfond) for the research funding that made the writing of this article possible. I am also greatly indebted to the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and to members Rebecca Duncan and Mike Classon Frangos for crucial feedback during the writing process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See also “Thanatocene” as defined by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016).

2. Blumhouse has made a name for itself as an American production company that explores American racism through drama films such as Spike Lee’s (2018) BlacKkKlansman and via provocative horror such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out (Peele 2017) and Us (Peele 2019).

3. Director Patrick Graham’s full name is John Patrick Lynedoch Graham and according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) he is a descendant of Thomas Graham, 1st Baron Lynedoch who fought in the Napoleonic wars (https://m.imdb.com/name/nm3318887/trivia). In naming the main British villain of the series “Lynedoch”, Graham thus connects the narrative to himself and to his own British imperial history.

4. Vikram is also a reference to the Indian king Vikramāditya who managed to trap a Betaal or vampiric spirit in Indian folklore legends.

5. See also Rebecca Duncan (2020).

6. Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2019) uses the concept of Benjaminian allegory to explain a similar turn in postcolonial, ecocritical writing to unrealistic narrative.

7. See Rebecca Duncan and John Höglund (2021) for a detailed discussion of this understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.

8. This spillover does not mean that the system as such is collapsing. Capitalism, as Naomi Klein (2007) observes, thrives on crises and uses them to deregulate, to move its positions forward, and to project the sense that it alone can restore society to its former imagined glory.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Riksbankens jubileumsfond [SAB20-0015].

Notes on contributors

Johan Höglund

Johan Höglund is professor of English at Linnaeus University and former director of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, 2017–2020. He has published extensively on how popular culture narrates colonialism, neocolonialism, and extractive capitalism. He is the author of The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (2014), and the co-editor of scholarly collections and journal issues, including Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: Gothic and the Anthropocene (2022), Nordic Gothic (2020), “Nordic Colonialisms” for Scandinavian Studies (2019), B-Movie Gothic (2018), Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (2015), and Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires (2012).