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

[C]olonialism and capitalism are pandemics. If you look at the way colonialism has consumed everything, how could you not compare it and late-stage capitalism to a cannibal that devours everything in its sight mindlessly?

(Barnaby 2020, n.p.)

The God thou serv’st is thine own appetite.

(Graham and Mahajan 2020)

From Mahasweta Devi to Arundhati Roy, Indian postcolonial fiction has frequently addressed both the oppressive history of the British Empire in India, and the failure of India to live up to the promises of social, economic, and ecological justice that decolonization harboured. The long and ongoing history of continued violence directed at Dalit communities and marginalized ethnicities such as the indigenous Adivasi has been an important concern of postcolonial studies since the 1970s. The field has identified many different reasons why such inequality keeps haunting Indian society, from the persistence of Eurocentric epistemologies in Indian political and social life, to the insidious nature of a Hindu caste system that predates colonialism by millennia. More recently, postcolonial scholars such as Neil Lazarus (2011) and the Warwick Research Collective ([WReC] 2015) have redirected attention to the role that capitalism plays in postcolonial nations, as well as in the rest of the world.

When considering the fact that the violence done to Adivasi communities serves as a preliminary to enclosing, privatizing, and extracting natural resources from this land, and to making these resources available to a global industrial market, it should become clear, as Immanuel Wallerstein (1979) has argued, that capitalism is a world-system and that what is happening to the Adivasi is part of a global economic development. Further, if one views the human and planetary violence done to the people and land in India and in other places as an element of the ongoing and global climate emergency, capitalism appears not simply as a world-system, but as what Jason W. Moore (2015) terms a world-ecology: a system designed to make the planet available for extractive capitalism. To highlight the central role that capitalism has played in the history of the climate emergency, Moore eschews the term “Anthropocene” – the most common denominator for our current geological epoch – and instead suggests “the Capitalocene”. Focusing the ongoing era of world-destroying ecological crisis produced by an extractive and unregulated capitalism intimately entangled with early colonialism, Justin McBrien (2016) has proposed a related concept: “the Necrocene”.

This article reads the Indian postcolonial Netflix series Betaal as a Necrocene narrative. Betaal, I argue, explores precisely this capitalist, ecological, medical, and cultural crisis. Merging the (post)colonial with the post-apocalyptic in spectacular and violent ways, Betaal tells the story of how Indian Special Forces soldiers, contracted to eliminate an Adivasi community that resists capitalist exploitation of their lands, accidentally release a pandemic in the form of a horde of undead British soldiers once in the employ of the East India Company. From this vantage, the article argues that the series aligns British colonial-capitalist carnage with the neocolonial-capitalist violence performed by Indian soldiers in the employ of capital in the present, in the process revealing how both British colonial rule and the current Indian postcolonial/neo-liberal regime exhaust people and land. I will furthermore claim that the pandemic spread by the undead colonizers and that turns all people into the voracious undead in Betaal is not so much a metaphor for extractive capitalism as an attempt to accurately describe the apocalyptic violence and death that unregulated capitalism can engender in precarious communities.

Postcolonial studies, material history, and the planetary emergency

Postcolonial studies and (neo-)Marxist analysis have been uneasy bedfellows at best. Since its formation, the Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) has emphasized the need to rid India of Eurocentric modes of thinking, and of the paralysing epistemic and physical violence these modes continue to reproduce in the present. Emerging out of a European philosophical tradition, Marxist theory has been perceived as casting the long, culturally complex, and diverse history of the colonization of India, the Indian freedom movement, and Indian independence, as simply a chapter in the evolution of European capital and labour. In the words of Gyan Prakash (1992), writing in the immediate wake of formative contributions to postcolonial theory by Gayatri Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha (but also in the strange shadow cast by the ceasing of the Cold War and the emergence of Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) end-of-history thesis), nationalism and Marxism both “operated with master-narratives that put Europe at its centre” (8). Against such universalizing and inherently Eurocentric intellectual tendencies, postcolonial studies was understood to seek “to undo the Eurocentrism produced by the institution of the west’s trajectory, its appropriation of the other as History” (8).

This line of thinking has been very influential for postcolonial studies generally and, arguably, for literary postcolonial studies in particular. Scholars of Indian postcolonial literary writing, as well as many postcolonial authors, have thus been attentive to the way that fiction produces Indian pasts and presents, and how it constructs the racial, ethnic, gendered, religious, and cultural categories out of which Indian identities are built (and against which European identities take form). However, since Prakash’s discrediting of Marxist analysis in 1992, a series of global events and developments in India have served to re-energize the Marxist current within postcolonial theory. These international developments and events include the first Gulf War of 1991, the war on terror and the second Gulf War beginning with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the global economic depression that followed this invasion, and the reliance on a deregulated neo-liberal economy to resolve issues of poverty worldwide (see Kiely 2007). In relation to this development, it is important to note that much of what Rob Nixon (2011) has termed “slow violence” that is eroding the multi-species ecologies in which many postcolonial people live their lives is caused by multinational, capitalist enterprise. Inside India, the appearance of a nationalist and populist state that organizes against the notion of non-Hindu Indian identity, that encourages capitalist exploitation of land and workers, and that assists in the creation of ever larger economic gulfs between rural and urban communities, and between salaried and wage labourers, also suggests the usefulness of a Marxist-oriented analysis. As a consequence, in India as in other parts of the world, the image of the subaltern, ground beneath the heel of imperial and nationalist epistemologies, has partially given way to that of a growing surplus precariat, produced and kept poor by a global neo-liberal capitalist order that has supplanted the direct rule of the old colonial powers (see Hardt and Negri 2000; Standing 2011; During 2015; Scully 2016 for related accounts of this development).

It is not surprising that the role that capitalism plays in postcolonial nations and for planetary ecology has become a concern for many postcolonial writers. In Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Arundhati Roy (2014) makes the crucial point that Indian capitalism, as a part of globalized, neo-liberal society, is having a massively detrimental impact both on Indian lives and on (Indian) ecology. Indian post-independence capitalism is thus described by her as having “impoverished and dispossessed” 800 million people and forced 250,000 debt-ridden farmers to commit suicide (8). In addition to this, she importantly notes, it also produced “poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains, and denuded forests” (8). In other words, capitalism erodes not only human lives but also ecology.

By connecting capitalism to the violence done to Indian people and the land on which they live, Roy joins the vital and important trend in ecocritical and eco-socialist scholarship that identifies the origin of the climate crisis not in humanity as a species but in the emergence of capitalism in the 16th century. Moore is one of the most significant proponents of this direction in environmental humanities, but it also includes Elmar Altvater (2007), Kathryn Yusoff (2018), and Andreas Malm (2016). Central to their writing is that capitalism, colonialism, and the climate emergency are inextricably folded into each other. Considering the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and the rise of the fossil-fuel complex that is now bringing on global warming, Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) make the point that

[the] rationale for investing in steam technology [ … during the 19th century] was geared to the opportunities provided by the constellation of a largely depopulated New World, Afro-American slavery, the exploitation of British labour in factories and mines, and the global demand for inexpensive cotton cloth. (63)

Further focusing on the death that the capitalist/colonial project brought to those driven from the land enclosed for extraction, to those used in the process of extraction, and to the land being extracted, McBrien (2016) argues that capital “does not just rob the soil and worker [ ... ] it necrotizes the entire planet” (116). In McBrien’s analysis, the accumulation of capital is also the accumulation of extinction. What is being made extinct is not just the biological species (although it is importantly this too):

It is also the extinguishing of cultures and languages, either through force or assimilation; it is the extermination of peoples, either through labor or deliberate murder; it is the extinction of the earth in the depletion fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, even the chemical element helium; it is ocean acidification and eutrophication, deforestation and desertification, melting ice sheets and rising sea levels; the great Pacific garbage patch and nuclear waste entombment. (116–117)

The death of so many essential creatures, practices, cultures, waters, soils, and ecologies as an effect of (neo-liberal) capitalism and (neo)colonialism prompts McBrien to suggest the name Necrocene for the current moment in the geological history of the planet.¹ In this way, McBrien – as well as Malm and Hornborg, Yusuff, Moore, and Altvater – provides a material history and a theoretical framework that speaks clearly to the issues that Roy discusses in her book.

Betaal and the Adivasi in the Necrocene

Co-written by Patrick Graham and Suhani Kanwar, co-directed by Graham and Nikhil Mahajan, and produced by Blumhouse Television for Netflix, Betaal (Graham and Mahajan 2020) constitutes a relatively new type of Indian postcolonial, speculative narrative.² Unlike the anglophone postcolonial novel by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, or Rohinton Mistry, Betaal was produced for an Indian audience with actors speaking Hindi. At the same time, because of Netflix’s global spread and the availability of subtitles, it is an Indian fiction that has travelled widely and is available in a number of nations. Betaal is also different from more traditional postcolonial fare in that it is a collaborative fiction, co-funded, co-produced, co-written, and co-directed by European, American, and Indian parties and individuals. It should be noted that, as a net-streamed horror series, Betaal lacks much of the sophistication of literary postcolonial writing. However, this lack of subtlety may be precisely what allows the series to speak very plainly about the material capitalist and colonial history of the planetary emergency and the pandemic, and to so clearly connect the violence performed on the Adivasi in India to this history and emergency.

Graham has previously been involved in two similar undertakings for Netflix. His first major project was the three-episode series Ghoul (Blum and Ashyap, 2017) for the Indian market and he also assisted Urmi Juvekar and Suhani Kanwar in writing the Netflix adaptation (Mehta 2019) controversial, postcolonial, and dystopian climate-fiction novel Leila in 2019. Through the speculative register, Ghoul and Leila explore the same dark side of postcolonial history that Roy and other vocal critics of Indian politics have investigated; politically motivated violence against Muslim communities and the resurgence of caste-oriented and religious apartheid in the wake of the spreading of Hindu nationalism. Betaal also recognizes the existence of these tensions in Indian postcolonial society, but focuses most intensely on the deadly connection between British 19th-century colonialism and capitalism, and modern-day Indian neocolonialism and capitalism. In particular, it investigates the ongoing violence against indigenous Adivasi communities that inhabit regions rich in the natural resources coveted by Indian and international capitalist enterprise.

The culturally diverse communities that make up the Adivasi have a troubled history. On the margins of British colonial, Hindu, and Muslim societies, the Adivasi have long fought a multi-front battle against land-grabbing and physical and cultural erasure. Traditionally referred to by the British as part of the “Depressed Classes” and by the Indian constitution as “Scheduled Tribes” (alongside “Scheduled Castes”), they have existed “at the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy and fare even worse than Dalits” (Das 2018, 31). These Indigenous communities began to unite around a common political agenda through the formation of the Adivasi Mahasabha or “the Great Council of Adivasi” in 1938. In the wake of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 this effort has further intensified, often in collaboration with other indigenous communities across the world (see Rycroft and Dasgupta 2011). The SSG has furthered an image of the Adivasi as a community that has resisted the turn towards capitalist modernity which the post-independence Indian national government has encouraged. As Spivak (1981) notes in the introduction to her translation of Mahasveta Devi’s short story “Draupadi”, this resistance has sometimes taken militant form, as in 1967 when Adivasi farming communities in the Naxalbari area formed a Maoist guerrilla rebellion and began fighting government agents. The bloodshed that followed this still ongoing resistance has sometimes functioned as the excuse to invade and evict various Adivasi people from their ancestral lands. This is the topic of Roy’s (2011) provocative Walking with the Comrades. Written in conversation with Adivasi people and Naxalite rebels, Roy’s book claims that the government anti-insurgency operation targeting Naxalite resistance, codenamed Green Hunt, is essentially an attempt to clear the land of indigenous people so that the substantial deposits of bauxite valued (in 2011) to up to four trillion US dollars on the international market can be extracted by various Indian corporations.

Betaal tells this very story with the help of hyperbole (zombies) and euphemism (road-building through mountains instead of fracking). Interestingly, it also connects the violence performed in India on Adivasi communities to the long and violent history of British colonialism and capitalism. The series thus opens with a quotation from the fictional journal of Lt Col John P. Lynedoch, a British officer and agent of the British East India Company.³ Dated June 17, 1857 this entry reads:

“We came to help these people. But they resist. The mutiny has reached us. How dare they? I will use their own guardians against them. I will harness the Betaal’s curse, and ground these savages into the dirt … It seems there are rebels in the tunnel. I must go. (Graham and Mahajan 2020)”.

The “mutiny” referred to here is of course the widespread Indian rebellion that began in May 1857 and was finally struck down in 1859. The quotation directs attention to the epistemologies of empire that cast indigenous people as needing the assistance of white Europeans, but equally to the extractive and violent nature of British colonialism in India. In addition to this, it recognizes the Adivasi’s contribution to the early Indian independence movement. This contribution is further enhanced in the series opening by Brahmic script which warns the reader to “[t]read silently outside the tunnel”, because those who inhabit it “will be hungry when they wake”. This ominous beginning is then followed by a smattering of dark imagery and sound that clearly references the opening credits of Zack Snyder’s dark and popular zombie horror film Dawn of the Dead (Snyder 2004), a remake of George Romero’s 1968 seminal film by the same name. This opening thus introduces the political, historical, and cultural framework against which this pandemic horror series plays out.

In the scene that follows, we see present-day Adivasi people performing an arcane ritual intended to keep Lynedoch and his hungry men asleep in the “tunnels”. The immediate threat envisioned by the narrative thus seems to be that the British break out of their prison to colonize India yet again. Yet what transpires next is not a confrontation between the zombified agents of a resurgent British Empire and the free Indian nation. Instead, the series focuses on a military anti-terrorist unit termed the “Baaz Squad”, a part of the Counter Insurgency Police Department (CIPD). While far from a direct match, this unit is most likely modelled on the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) tasked with fighting Naxalite resistance in India in the real world. The leader of the imaginary paramilitary unit is Commandant Tyagi and we understand, from media and from flashbacks, that she has taken bribes to eliminate Adivasi communities from areas of interest to a company named Surya Development. However, the (right-wing) media channel that reports on this insidious action responds to critics by asking a question that directly recalls Lynedoch’s claim that the British are in India to help: “people who are cut-off from civilization don’t deserve a shot at development and progress?” (Graham and Mahajan 2020). On the same news show Tyagi self-assuredly declares that the CIPD has “marched into battle with the likes of Mangal Pandey, Bhagat Singh, and Subhash Chandra Bose” (Graham and Mahajan 2020), central figures in the history of the Indian decolonial struggle.

Commandant Vikram Sirohi, Tyagi’s second in command and the protagonist of the series, idolizes his leader and he would love to be counted among the patriotic heroes of the Indian independence movement. Yet the memories that intrude into his waking life are not of him and his squad nobly resisting Maoist guerrillas, but of how he faces, gun in hand, a pre-pubescent Adivasi girl, bloodied among dead bodies.⁴ Her face is haggard, and her eyes big and frightened. This is an image that recurs throughout the series and each iteration reveals more of what transpired during that particular encounter.

After the Baaz Squad has been introduced, we learn that the next assignment is to ensure the safety of Surya Development which is in the process of building a motorway through a mountain belonging to an Adivasi community. To save time and money, Ajay Mudhalvan, the person in charge of the operation, plans to open up a tunnel constructed by the British at the time of the Indian Rebellion, after which it was walled up. This is, of course, the same tunnel in which Lynedoch and his undead army is confined. The Adivasi villagers, reluctant to give their land up to the corporation and knowing the horror that hides in the mountain, resist the operation through sabotage and demonstrations. Pressed for time, Mudhalvan plants explosives to make it seem that the villagers are Naxalite rebels. Provoked by the explosions, the Baaz Squad opens fire, massacring the Adivasi villagers and opening up the land and the mountain to exploitation. With the Adivasi out of the way, the tunnel is unsealed, releasing a horde of undead British redcoats into the land. In zombie-like fashion, they begin biting and feeding on the unsuspecting crew and soldiers, spreading the zombie curse in the processes. What remains of the Baaz Squad, together with Mudhalvan, his wife, and young daughter, must flee the area and seek shelter in an old British barracks. There, they encounter a young Adivasi woman, Puniya, and her elderly husband.

The appearance of flesh-eating zombies in a postcolonial narrative may appear distracting, but the insertion of this particular element of horror is better understood as a device that reveals the uncanny and disturbing connections that exist between capital, colonialism, and land, and that makes plain and accessible the slow and fast violence that capitalism is capable of wielding. In turning to non-realist modes of representation, the series in fact joins a notable trend in world literature that explores capitalism and the ecological crisis. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh (2016) observes that most fiction that engages with the planetary emergency to explore the futures that may result if the present emergency is not (miraculously) averted eschews the realist register. Realism, Ghosh argues, is in fact designed to elide the very notion of (natural, chthonic, human-produced) disaster from fiction. The narratives that probe the climate crisis instead belong to “those generic outhouses that were once known by names such as ‘the Gothic’, ‘the romance’, or ‘the melodrama’, and have now come to be called ‘fantasy’, ‘horror’, and ‘science fiction’” (24). In other words, Ghosh observes that speculative fiction is able to describe, narrate, and make plain the enormous and catastrophic effects that human activity has on the environment, and of the human beings inherently and forever folded into this environment.

Michael Niblett (2012) and the WReC (2015) have also influentially proposed that speculative texts are better able than realist fiction to narrate the ongoing climate emergency. However, unlike Ghosh they theorize the speculative text as emerging out of a conjoined lack of economic and ecological justice. In other words, the non-realistic narrative is a response to the death-dealing inequities and ecological erosions produced specifically by capitalism. Niblett and the WReC have adapted Michael Löwy’s (2007) concept of “irrealism” as a descriptor of the aesthetics that rises out of, and makes visible, the experience of being caught in the web of precarity and death created by capitalism.⁵ Unlike the realist bourgeoise novel, which tends to occlude the violence of capitalism and colonialism, the irrealist text is thus capable of narrating both the horrific violence that extractive capitalism produces for humans living located outside the affluent strata of global capitalist society, and the strain that extraction puts on an ecology already on the ropes.⁶

When zombified British soldiers from the middle of the 19th century erupt out of a mountain to feed on, and turn against Indian special forces soldiers, Adivasi people, and Indian civilians, Betaal makes use of this irrealist register. It is not in spite of this horror element, but through irrealist horror, that the text is able to connect the consumption of Adivasi people and land by the British, to the consumption of Adivasi people by Indian neocolonial and capitalist agents. The zombie pandemic thus becomes a way to identify the parallels between the British colonial and capitalist invasion and occupation of India, and the present-day Indian capitalist assault on indigenous land. In Betaal, Lt Col Lynedoch is simultaneously a representative of the British Empire and of capitalism in the shape of the East India Company. He has come to India to profit from the riches this land contains, and couches this endeavour in the language of benevolence as expressed in the opening of the series: “We came to help these with people.” Mudhalvan, as an agent of contemporary Indian capitalism, is involved in the very same project. His invasion of Adivasi lands is also imagined as an act of benevolent development, as an attempt to give the Adivasi “a shot at development and with progress”, but to him and the Necrocene capitalism he represents, the Adivasi are an expendable part of the land he seeks to prime for extraction.

This parallel becomes even more prominent as the zombie illness begins to spread among the members of Baaz Squad. Several of the soldiers/police have already been infected, including Commandant Tyagi whose hair has turned white and whose mind is slowly being invaded by the undead Lynedoch. Joined by the two surviving Adivasi villagers, Vikram has come to understand that his squad is beset by an out-of-control evil firmly rooted in the British Empire. This comprehension is deepened through an interrogation of a partially zombified and chained solder, and through discovering and reading Lynedoch’s old journal, hidden in the barracks where they have taken shelter. From this source they understand that Lynedoch’s “greed drove him crazy” and that he intended to become “the sole emperor of British India” (Graham and Mahajan 2020). Trapped in the mountain through which his regiment was building a tunnel, he even sacrificed his own son to the Betaal to gain immortality. This is how Lynedoch turned into the patient zero of the zombie epidemic that the Baaz Squad has unwittingly let out of the mountain where it has been trapped. Yet the Betaal is merely the tool of this transformation. As the diary declares, the god that Lynedoch serves, and that is the true origin of this symbolic and violent epidemic, is not the Adivasi demon Betaal, but Lynedoch’s “own appetite”.

While Vikram and Puniya are revolted by this revelation, Mudhalvan, as the agent of Indian capitalism, becomes intrigued. If Vikram has (unsuccessfully) pretended that he is an agent of the Indian nation and that he has been fighting the rebels rather than killing innocents inhabiting mountains of great monetary value, Mudhalvan harbours no such illusions. The entrepreneur thus explains to Vikram and the Baaz Squad: “Do you really think you run this country? Money runs the country. The country doesn’t run on ideologies – it runs on money.” When Commandant Tyagi begins to channel the spirit of Lynedoch – appearing as a dark figure looming just behind her head – Mudhalvan learns that to escape the mountain, the British commander needs a sacrifice much like the one he once performed on his son, but this time preferably “from the female sex”, “before she has bled” (Graham and Mahajan 2020). Mudhalvan has access to precisely such a potential sacrifice in the form of his daughter. Symbolically merging his own destiny with Lynedoch’s, he proposes a deal whereby he gives up his daughter if Lynedoch agrees to share the terrible power he now possesses. Like Lynedoch, then, Mudhalvan’s god is his own appetite. The capitalist hunger for accumulation permeates his being as thoroughly as it does Lynedoch’s. With the help of Vikram, now also possessed by Lynedoch, Mudhalvan exits the barracks with her daughter to sacrifice his daughter.

Conclusion: Apocalypse

Betaal was released in May 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and although conceived long before the new virus emerged, it speaks to this pandemic and its origins in capitalism and colonialism in thought-provoking ways. The spring of 2020 was a time when societies across the world were shutting down to avoid contagion. For large sections of the privileged Global North, and in affluent communities in the Global South, the arrival of the virus was thus also the advent of a novel precarity where endemic ill-health and imminent death, as well as job-loss and homelessness, became real possibilities. Media in many parts of the world thus projected the notion that the pandemic was something new, and also something universal because, as the editors of Business & Society put it, “what appears fairly certain is that individuals are equally vulnerable” (Bapuji et al. 2020, n.p.). In the months that followed, this myth began to erode. The COVID-19 virus was no more egalitarian than Ebola or HIV or, for that matter, the influx of pathogens that accompanied the colonial project in America and that killed an estimated 87–92 percent of all indigenous people on the American continent by the year 1600 (Koch et al. 2019, 22).

Indigenous and poor communities have always suffered more than other groups from the health crises caused by epidemics and ecological degradation. Anthropologist Paul Farmer (1996; 2004) has influentially argued that these groups are exposed to a “structural violence” (Farmer 2004) that accelerates suffering. Focusing on Haiti, Farmer insists that this violence has an often-neglected necrotic material history and that it emerges out of a “transnational tale of slavery and dept and turmoil” (2004, 305). The COVID-19 pandemic thus reinforces the understanding of illness as a product of capitalism and colonialism, and of indigenous people as the most vulnerable both to the detrimental effects that the virus has on the body, and to the secondary, social, and economic effects produced by the pandemic.⁷ When viewed as such, it also becomes clear that if the pandemic is an apocalypse, this began centuries ago for indigenous people.

Postcolonial and indigenous literature has been telling apocalyptic stories for a long time. Canadian First Nation’s author Waubgeshig Rice (2018) spells it out clearly in Moon of the Crusted Snow. In this novel about climate upheaval, death and American indigenous people, an elder explains that

[t]he world isn’t ending [ ... ] It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash [white people] came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was out world [ ... ] Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people again (149).

Ultimately, this is also the story that Betaal tells. The Adivasi community in Betaal have lived in the shadow of the British zombie pandemic for 170 years. When the Indian soldiers (as mercenaries of capitalism) accidently release this contagion, they bring on suffering and death that seem novel and absurd to the soldiers and the agents of capitalism, but that are not a new experience to the Adivasi community. That the Adivasi have long suffered is brought out in a number of ways, but most strongly through the recurring image of the bloodied and abandoned Adivasi girl that haunts the daydreams of Vikram. In the final episode we understand that Vikram shot this girl in the back as she tried to run away from the village where her family had been massacred by the Baaz Squad. As in the Canadian mountains where Moon of the Crusted Snow plays out, the apocalypse is an unravelling process rather than a sudden and inexplicable event. Like the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears as new only because the violence done to people and land has reached such proportions that it also spills over into affluent worlds.⁸

It is by telling this story of how an uneven and dispersed apocalypse erupts, time and time again, out of a long colonial and capitalist history, that Betaal narrates the Necrocene. The invasion and rendering asunder of bodies that rise up again and again, animated by the sheer force to accumulate more death, has a systemic colonial and capitalist history. The violent pandemic thus illustrates capitalism’s universal relationship to land and people: its necrotic potential to produce universal, extinguishing death. In this way, Betaal makes horribly plain how British colonialism and capitalism, and then Indian capitalism, have engaged in what McBrien describes as the “extermination of peoples, either through labour or deliberate murder” (2016, 116–117). The series leaves no doubt that the colonial/capitalist system introduced by the British and then inherited by Indian capitalist agents ultimately produces extinction. As argued by McBrien, the “logic of accumulation is not capable of outrunning extinction because accumulation and extinction cannot be decoupled” (135). In this way, the joint process of colonialism and capitalism is like a zombie pandemic: it wills towards extinction and universal apocalypse.

Yet Betaal also offers a certain hope. At the climactic end of the series, the guilt Vikram experiences because of his wilful murder of the Adivasi girl is mobilized as resistance. He refuses to sacrifice Mudhalvan’s daughter to the hungry Lynedoch. This allows the Adivasi Puniya and the Baaz Squad soldier Assad Akbar (whose name signals his Muslim background) to bring the daughter out of the tunnel and away from the mountain. While accumulation and extinction cannot be decoupled, the “human being can be decoupled from Capital”, Mc-Brien argues. “Capital is extinction. We are not” (Mc Brien 2016, 135). In the final scene, the Muslim man, the Adivasi woman, and the Hindu girl, all located in the peripheries of the Indian nationalist state and just decoupled from the extinction occurring in the catastrophic contact zone in the mountains, drive back towards the city. However, as they travel they realize that, despite the rescue of Mudhalvan’s daughter, the catastrophe remains imminent. Ancient British sailing ships have been spotted on the horizon. The apocalypse has not been averted; indeed the violence engendered by colonialism and capitalism now threatens all of India. Even so, the prospect of a future that is not extinction remains. The three people driving away from the mountain and towards even greater cataclysm personify the type of resistance capable of dismantling extinction. This is the thin sliver of hope conjured by the series. In a world where ongoing capitalist violence continues to erode ecology, indigeneity, and other precarious communities, a final victory over the zombified agent of empire and capitalism would have been an absurd ending. Hope is thus located, in the series as in the present moment, instead in the margins; where unity can take form across cultural, religious, and class-related gulfs. This is where “we” cease to be extinction.

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.

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).

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.