VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The horror genre in India has been foundationally invested in the Feudal as an economic, political, and aesthetic dispensation from its very inception. The haveli (feudal mansion) often forms the core of these preoccupations across media like film, television, and, more recently, digital and social media platforms. This paper interrogates the “heritage haveli” in horror media as a particularly potent engine of what Svetlana Boym has called “nostalgia without guilt”. These forms of nostalgia are constitutively enabled by the neoliberal arrangements, and remain more about repurposing a past that meshes perfectly with the contemporary, rather than with recuperating any sense of “history,” however understood. In recent Indian horror media in particular, the densely evocative chronotope of the haveli functions as an architectural edifice that is often reduced to pure design; this flattening-out of history, or what Fredric Jameson had described as a “nostalgia for the present” is crucially buttressed by the fact that many of these stately mansions have now been converted into luxury hotels and resorts. In other words, while the “heritage” printed on glossy tourist brochures claim historicity, its presentation in the media remains curiously disemboweled of any sense of a lived past. In this paper, I will be looking at Bollywood horror films like Bulbbul (2020), Gaslight (2023) in addition to a range of web-series and Instagram pages across languages. Paper looks at formations like film, web series, but also social media platforms like Instagram and travel and tourism blogs