By Shantell Powell
Content warning: sexual assault, cannibalism, graphic depictions of violence
Indra (Indrapramit) Das is a writer from Kolkata, India. His first novel, The Devourers, was written during his MFA graduate studies at the University of British Columbia. The Devourers was shortlisted for numerous awards and won the Lambda Literary Award in 2017 for best LGBTQ SF/F/Horror. He is a Shirley Jackson Award-winner for his short fiction, which appears in Clarkesworld Magazine, Asimov’s, Slate Magazine, and Strange Horizons, as well as in numerous anthologies.
I spoke with Indra at the Roots. Wounds. Words. writer’s retreat in January of 2023. There I learned that this gorgeous meta-tale of history, mythology, and bloodshed was inspired by a time when he protected a stray kitten from street dogs in Kolkata. The novel opens with a variation on that scene: Alok Mukherjee (a professor of history) protects a kitten from a pack of dogs while sharing a cigarette beneath the full moon with a stranger who claims to be half werewolf.
The story contains layers within layers: A predator (Alok) protects another predator (a kitten) from other predators (the dogs), while speaking to the most dangerous predator of all (the half werewolf). When Alok says he doesn’t think there are any wolves in India, the stranger says, “Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not there.”
This sentence can be seen as a microcosm of the book. Alok is a closeted queer person in a place where colonial laws have made homosexuality a crime. As a result, queer folks are hidden. Alok has been masking his sexuality in order to please his family. He feigns being a cisgender heterosexual man out of fear of brutal reprisal. Until the stranger comes along, Alok has never entertained the existence of supernatural creatures, because they’ve gone as unseen as he has.
The conversation between Alok and the half-werewolf leads to Alok being hired to transcribe a handwritten notebook. This book is filled with translations of diaries documenting the remarkable lives of shapechangers and the human woman who connects and complicates their lives. The stories of shapechangers and their prey have been hidden for centuries, but if you know where and how to look, the tales of their existence are ubiquitous.
The Devourers does for werewolves what Anne Rice’s seminal Interview with the Vampire does for vampires. It is a sumptuous and visceral look at what it is to be an apex predator in a multicultural world. It is an unapologetic look at survival as a queer person. It is a paean to the complex history of a colonial melting pot, where numerous peoples, religions, cultures, and mythologies violently collide. It traces generations of shapechangers and stolen lives. It shows how one culture forced itself upon another, just like how long ago, a European shapechanger forced himself upon a human woman from India.
The Devourers contains some of the most beautifully written depictions of graphic violence I have ever read. It is transgressive, transgender, trans-species, and trans-genre. It carries the reader along from seventeenth century Mughal India to twenty-first century Kolkata. It travels from modern cities to lost ruins, from caravans to harems to jungles, from the erotic to the repugnant, and it does so with the most delicious of vocabularies.
The Devourers may appeal to readers of Marlon James, NK Jemisin, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Atwood. It will certainly appeal to werewolf fans.