Fear and Fright in South Asia Encounters with Ambivalence and Alterity in Vernacular Religion and Society

The contemporary era, both in the "East" and in the "West", seems to have -in a certain sense - legitimised the theme of fear, the figure of the monster and the fright that it instils. Multiple and polychrome representations through fashionable narrative cycles - such as television and film series, comics and novels, videogames and whatever else distinguishes the mass production of the postmodern period - have now accustomed contemporary society to a certain familiarity with the theme (Levina / Bui 2013, Asma 2009). However, in these contemporary forms of representation of what we conceive of as unknown, unknowable and consequently scary, even potentially monstrous - but also prodigious and admirable - there is a certain widespread awareness of the survival of the original root of an ancient tradition. A certainly pre-modern, pre-urban cultural element that boasts a similar imagery in social and ideological complexes that are also very distant in space and time. It is important to start from the assumption that the term monster derives etymologically from the Latin monstrum: a divine sign, a prodigy; from the verb monēre, or to warn, to admonish about something extraordinary, frightening, still horrible or wonderful, that could manifest itself in order to warn or instruct the humans on the will of the gods. In more recent times this constitutive ambivalence has diminished through modern dualism between what is natural and unnatural or supernatural, ultimately relegating monsters to the status of em- pirical non-existence as a product of superstition or fantasy, or to that of the organic anomaly in scientific terms, or even to that of generic synonym for anything inhuman, cruel, terrifying (Miyake 2014: 16). Considering this, it should however be clear today that the stories of fear constitute, in a very general comparative dynamic, a narrative and folkloric corpus that goes well beyond the old legend or pop-culture tendencies of more recent memory. To immerse ourselves in this corpus, in relation to a specific culture, means entering into a sort of intimate, secret yet elective non-place for that given culture, in which the community agrees to face the most critical aspects of its identity.