On a family holiday to the hills, an effete, anglophone tantric occultist convinces Ajay Devgn’s daughter Janvi to consume an enchanted laddu that acts as a conduit for him to control her every action. What he says, she does. He uses this power to hold Ajay Devgn’s family hostage for an entire night, as he pied-pipers Janvi into carrying out violence and debauchery (a bit like Funny Games [Haneke, 2007] amped down). The price to get Madhavan to stop is Janvi’s hand in marriage. After she almost kills her little brother at Madhavan’s behest, Ajay Devgn concedes temporarily. He then chases after Madhavan and Janvi on a motorcycle, and as soon as he enters a forest, some trans women emerge from the bushes and jump him.

We respond to this with an incomprehension that may well be intended. ‘Is that…?’ we ask because it is a dark scene (though flatly lit). We wonder if these people that jump him are trans women. After a few more combat jump-cuts, we are all but sure they are. But our memories of this scene are hazy and a little afraid. We don’t remember their faces well: just bad wigs of long braided hair and perhaps biceps through sari blouses and grimacing teeth. But they are trans women, and Ajay Devgn kills them.

Once he gets past the obstacle of the trans women who jump him, Ajay Devgn finds himself at a tantric death ritual, a sati dark mass, where Madhavan orders many young cis women including Janvi, to jump into a burning fire. In the firelight, we can see their enthralled faces and dirty, matted hair. But we also remember the trans women who jumped Ajay Devgn and were killed by him a few moments ago.

Sowmya Rajendran (2024) asks if it was “necessary to throw in a couple of trans women for no good reason other than to amplify the shaitaan’s villainy?” Pratiskhya Mishra (2024) says that the fight sequence “perpetuates the harmful stereotype of trans people being violent and evil”. Lachmi Deb Roy (2024) says that “what is completely unacceptable is the dark representation of trans women in this film”. We are grateful to Rajendran, Mishra, and Roy because, without their reviews, we might have thought we hallucinated this scene. But we have a different question from Mishra’s question. We want to know why those trans women jumped Ajay Devgn in Shaitaan (Bahl, 2024).

This is a question and a big clock full of gears and cogs and also a mandala. It spirals into other questions and spins and generates heat, friction, and psychic shock. We must, together, break it down into questions that are easier for us to stomach one at a time.

Why did Ajay Devgn need to be jumped at all?

It’s obvious if you see what happens. Ajay Devgn is playing to type, effortlessly sinking into a family man cliché he established for himself first in Drishyam (Joseph, 2015). Mohanlal’s performance in the Malayalam original (Joseph, 2013) simmers with nebulous, vast violence behind his bumbling eyes and countryside ingenuity, but Devgn’s interpretation sublimates that violence – making it obvious that the potential for sadism is a necessary feature for this type of man.

The point of the first two-thirds of his character arc in Shaitaan (2024) is to undermine that violence, to tickle those sinewy arms like they don’t have the force of will to strike back. It is the ritual emasculation of the urban Indian family man the way you taunt a circus tiger to get it to leap. Consider the opening scene: Devgn watches silently through his car windshield as his daughter flirts with two smooth young men on either side of the school grounds. His jaw clenches and his lips purse into a flat line, but he does little else beyond honking his horn to divert her attention to him. Back at home, Ajay Devgn’s doe-eyed wife (Jyotika, in a parallel to Shreya Saran’s role in Drishyam) is concerned about Janvi’s propriety and chasteness, while Ajay Devgn is meant to provide grudging approval for her modernness. In the idyllic family montage that follows, the film is careful to temper its ruthlessness with sympathy: part of this emasculation is what it takes to be a good father given the circumstances.

Ajay Devgn’s comfort with modernity gives Madhavan an in. He is affable, polite, erudite, and a little fruity in a South Indian sort of way. He’s the type of guy who you meet in the Bangalore airport, who talks to you about rising ICSE school fees and how many PayTM stocks you have between the two of you. No one exactly misses Madhavan giving Janvi a laddu to eat. No one particularly cares, not even Jyotika, whose hackles are raised the earliest in the subsequent home invasion.

This theme is not particularly novel in post-liberalization Bollywood horror. Ram Gopal Varma gestated a cottage industry out of the ‘horror of the high-rise’ motif across the first decade of the 2000s, where the tension has always been about what primordial truths modernity occludes. When the author’s hands are not tight enough on the reigns, horror fiction has a homeostatic tendency to cluster around some status quo beyond the status quo, some unquestionable core civilizational value facing the ravages of societal neglect. Devgn himself stars in Bhoot (Varma, 2003) which comes to much the same conclusions about the safety-blanket nature of modern consumerism, with a devoted Urmila alone in the high rise for hours at a time to be molested by all sorts of ancient evils, while Ajay Devgn smokes cigarettes in his office.

Where Bahl deviates in Shaitaan is:

And, in the interest of calling a spade a spade, the damsel in distress is still the damsel in distress. But the mind control laddu concretizes the amorphous threat of a more typical possession narrative, leaving not just Janvi’s life and innocence at stake, but her moment-to-moment agency. Modernity breeds a certain naivete and dependence on institutions like hotlines and the police. While Ajay Devgn is only emasculated by it, this naivete leaves Janvi vulnerable to being lured to her death.

For all Madhavan’s bluster, he must be aware all along that the trauma he inflicts has the power to awaken the primordial ur-man buried in Ajay Devgn’s sclerotic spirit. This is why he needs to plant human landmines on the route to his ritual site to stop him.

This is why Ajay Devgn needs to be jumped. Why do the people jumping him need to be trans women?

The answer might very well be that Madhavan’s enchanted laddus are effective only on women. Madhavan’s character is called Vanraj: the king of the forest positioned as an antagonist to the city-dweller family that he infiltrates as an ancient wolf in modern sheep’s clothing. For Shaitaan, the flip side to the liberalized coddling that keeps Ajay Devgn’s birthright of masculine puissance shackled is that modernity conjures a certain liberation and self-sufficiency in women that they do not actually have. In Shaitaan’s moral universe, the core of a woman is a natural tendency towards pliant obedience. Additionally, in Shaitaan’s moral universe, trans women are women.

We forgive you for applauding this woke little hidden nugget in a film that otherwise takes great pains to inform its audience that it does not condone the use of black magic lest that gets lost in the subtext. You must have forgotten that in the final mob of nubile young thralls Madhavan beckons to jump into a pyre, there are no trans women. Trans women do not have the ritual significance that Janvi and her peers do, and immolating them will not grant him special powers. But, because they are women, Madhavan can control them. Madhavan needs people he can control to protect the route to his ritual site. The only women expendable enough for him to risk their death at the hands of an awakened Ajay Devgn are trans women.

In terms of structure, the people jumping Ajay Devgn need to be trans women because, in his hero’s journey, he needs to be tested by monsters. The monstrous trans woman echoes back to Stryker’s (1993) ‘Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix’ and the rage of wrestling subjectivity from the prescriptions attached to being objectively constituted through the disciplines of enlightenment science. Transphobic claims to assert the monstrosity of the trans woman sometimes deploy a logic of malevolence, of the trans woman using ideological shifts and biomedical/surgical techniques to infiltrate female-only spaces. But this is often not necessary to enmonster the trans woman, as the very existence of her body indicates a pre-built abjection, and triggers fear and revulsion. Bahl draws on a tradition of trans women as Bollywood monsters both generally and specifically. Maharani, the trans pimp of Mahesh Bhatt’s Sadak (Bhatt, 1991) stands as a murderous obstacle between Sanjay Datt and the woman of his dreams and must be killed for true love and the heterosexual contract to ultimately win out. In a particularly resonant parallel, in Sangharsh (Tanuja Chandra, 1999), which Chandra claims has nothing to do with The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), the trans-Kali-worshipping Lajja Shankar Pandey abducts and ritually sacrifices children to be granted immortality. Having the monsters who jump Ajay Devgn in Shaitaan be trans women is an intertextual reference. Bahl is possibly tipping his cap to a legacy of evil Bollywood trans women who hold helpless young women captive.

Madhavan needs cis women for their identity, as pure, unblemished lambs for slaughter. Madhavan needs trans women for their capability to jump Ajay Devgn or to die trying. He needs trans women to work. This is why Bahl is so frenetic with them, why they emerge out of the ground with no time afforded to any foreshadowing, set-up, or even an establishing shot before the mayhem. The whole thing is done in about three minutes. We are as perplexed at first as Ajay Devgn must be, and then we are afraid. In Shaitaan, agency is the only precious commodity; the only thing truly at stake. Even a second’s worth of agency for the trans women who jump Ajay Devgn: a word spoken, a name, a face, is a second wasted. They are trans women. They jump Ajay Devgn. He kills them. That is all.

Ajay Devgn’s hero’s journey kicks into gear only in the second half of the third act. Most of Shaitaan is about the horror of gradual corruption: Jyotika, tears perpetually in her eyes, looking at all the little things she loves about Janvi being erased one after the other as Madhavan turns her into an automaton that does nothing else but his bidding. The horror of this gradual unmaking expands into a looming threat of total, bodily annihilation, of Janvi becoming nothing else but ash mixed with the ash of a hundred other women in a hole in the ground. Unless the awakened Ajay Devgn rescues her, not even the specificity of her body will be left for her parents to love.

The transwomen who jump Ajay Devgn are unmade before they even show up on screen. To be put to work in this way is already a form of annihilation. Just as the cis women give Madhavan power only in death, the trans women give Madhavan power only as functions, as entities who:

  1. Jump Ajay Devgn
  2. Are trans women

When the idea that I might be trans began to threaten me with enough seriousness, I began to seek opportunities to lift boxes, crates, and sacks full of material. I certainly had reasons to give people about why lifting those boxes, crates, and sacks was an important thing to do. I wouldn’t disagree with those reasons in principle. But in hindsight, those weren’t my reasons. I sought out heavier things to lift and carry, for longer durations of time, till my body had no strength to do anything other than sleep. I think I was trying to become pure function, to purge every aspect of being beyond physical movement through space, carrying weight. It was a kind of annihilation I did to myself, or perhaps one that was done to me by a spirit living inside me that deemed me unworthy both to be led to the ritual pyre and to be rescued from it. When you are unmade before you are made, created to be destroyed, what else is there to do but try to become an object, to try to give the universe whatever vestige of use-value you can offer before heat death?

Anyway. About the trans women who jumped Ajay Devgn in Shaitaan (2024). There are references to them in at least five reviews across print and digital media. Most of them wag their fingers at the sequence, others wonder why it wasn’t plumbed for more depth. Nobody says anything more about them, because, honestly, what else is there to say? We can’t find the names of the people who played them on IMDB. Maybe if we go watch it again, we might see them in the credits. I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t.