Spectral Hunger: Transgressive Eating as Feminist Resistance in Fire on the Mountain

Abstract

This paper examines subversive representations of the normative femininity through acts of
transgressive consumption, focusing on the churail, a female vampiric ghost from the Hindu
mythology, as portrayed in Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain. In Hindu folklore, churails are
depicted as vengeful figures who rise from the dead to drain men of their life force. In Desai’s
novel, however, they dwell in the ravine of the Pasteur Institute in Kasauli, a dumping ground
where they chew on the remains of rabies-infected carcasses that were discarded by the British
colonial authorities after scientific experiments. Instead of treating them as literal vampires
preying on men, this paper positions Desai’s churails as postcolonial scavengers, driven by a
female hunger tied to colonial violence, which reclaim what was once taken from them. Marked
as abject and impure, the churails are denied a place in the social order where female hunger,
whether for pleasure, revenge, or power, is policed and punished. As socially marginalized and
sexually repressed women who are denied agency and consumption, they return as monstrous
flesh eaters who, through their transgressive eating, subvert gender and caste norms and disrupt
normative food hierarchies. By consuming discarded nonhuman bodies, deemed inedible and
commonly revered as deities in Hinduism, churails embody feminist resistance to confront the
colonial violence that continues to shape human and nonhuman life in the postcolonial
landscape.