The Spectral as the Political: Dystopia, Myth, and Horror in Patrick Graham’s Ghoul

The Indian horror miniseries, Ghoul (2018), is set in a near dystopic future which envisions India at a time when Muslim-Hindu tensions have gone past the pressure-point and has led to state-sanctioned persecution of the Muslims. The chapter would analyse the emancipatory function of the ghoul vis-à-vis the concept of spectropolitics which evokes “both nightmarish scenarios of dehumanization and dreams of revolution,” emerging as the site of potential change, and would discuss how the spectral has been used to initiate a rupture within the well-guarded system—the detention/execution centre—that turns into a haunted space in which the drama unfolds. As Janice Radway argues in her foreword to Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, spectropolitics can work to “revivify our collective capacity to imagine a future radically other to the one ideologically charted out already by the militarized, patriarchal capitalism that has thrived heretofore on the practice of social erasure.” The ghoul is neither dead nor living; there is no definite ontological basis to its form. It is shaped by one’s grief insofar as it pathologized the grief by making manifest one’s guilt. In Graham’s depiction of the spectral as the political, the carceral space seems to be a repository of wronged, grieving souls, a spatial extension of their anguish. Spectres therefore gesture towards a still unformulated future while guilt and anguish of the victims attain anthropomorphic dimension in the ghoul incarnate.