The Devourers by Indra Das

Reviewed by Salik Shah

03 August 2015

Think of a field. A swamp, rather. This is a long time ago. Kolkata. Calcutta, or what will be
Calcutta. (p. 9)
That sets the tone for the rest of The Devourers. Indra Dass debut novel takes us to an
alternate, fantastic past of Indiainvaded by the Raj, infected by foreign myths and
demons, werewolves and weretigers. A string of beautiful passages evokes sadness and
longinga desire to be human, to be loved by men and women. It is a provocative work
of speculative fiction about identity, gender, and the little places we occupy in time.
The Devourers is a tragic love story between two werewolves, Fenrir and Gvaudana
gay coupleand their human consort, a young Muslim woman called Cyrah. Alok
Mukherjee, the narrator of the novel, is a Bengali professor of history, who is still
recovering from a broken engagementthe result of his own illicit affairs with men.
In order to truly appreciate The Devourers, we need to understand the world Dass
characters inhabitthe India of 2015 with a British-era law from 1860 which makes
homosexuality a crime. Manil Suri, an acclaimed queer novelist of Indian
origin, writes about the underground gay culture of India, and why he chose self-exile to
the US, in his short essay for Granta, How to Be Gay and Indian. It is a confession
worth reading. At the time of his writing, Suri was optimistic that the Supreme Court
would uphold a high court decision to scrap the colonial-era law. But the hope of LGBT
community was misplaced. In a 2014 ruling, the Supreme Court refused to strike it
down.
Suri writes:
Gays in India still find many reasonsfamilial approval, job security, internalized shameto
remain closeted. There are no gay icons, no major Bollywood stars who have come out, no
influential CEOs who have made their orientation public. The vast majority of gay men still

get married (70 per cent in Mumbai, 82 per cent in smaller cities, according to a 2009 survey
by the Humsafar Trust).
One Bollywood star director who has kept his sexual orientation shrouded in mystery is
Karan Johar. In a famous talk show interview, Simi Garewal asked Johar, Wouldnt
you ever like to give respect to who you are and your identity and come out and talk
about it?
Why should I tell them Im straight? Or Im bisexual or homosexual or trisexual? Johar
says. Nobody knows what I stand for in terms of my personal life and Id like to keep it that
way.
The vexed and tortured status of public sexuality is also a hallmark of Alok Mukherjee
in The Devourers. He wears a faade in his public life, concealing his true sexual
preference. For men like Mukherjee, this is the gay experience in India, a strong
undercurrent running in the background of The Devourers. Indra Dass protagonists
must find the courage to reconcile their private selves with their social identities. They
are shape-shifters living in the margins of society, their hearts and minds filled with
doubt, turmoil, and rage against those who wouldnt truly accept or understand them: I
asked your mother whether she would like to change anything in you, Garewal tells
Johar, before playing another clip from the video.
I wish he got married. I wish there were grandchildren, his mother says, I wish all those
things, but then if its not to be then I would have to accept it.
This maternal desire for grandchildren is often painted across the experience of Indian
men of many stripes. In his intimate essay, Suri writes about his mothers wishes, which
are not so different from those of Johars mother. It is plausible, then, Aloks mother is
similarthe reason he got engaged to a woman, Shayani, and then tried hard to make
the relationship work. (I leave lipstick traces on Shayanis mouth as I kiss her, and
know that shes only pretending to be comfortable [p. 341].)
This desire for grandchildren to continue their lineage is not unique to mothers in India.
In John Chus Hugo-winning Chinese-American queer fiction, The Water That Falls on
You from Nowhere (Tor), the protagonist Matts mother expresses the typical desire for
grandchildren. Fortunately, Matts mother doesnt have a problem accepting Gus, her
sons partner. But there is a price, a condition. Matt and Gus must find a way to carry on
the bloodline of her husband and not let it die: Youre a biotech researcher. Can you
give me a grandson? One with genes from both of you? John Chu expresses Matt's
suppressed anger at such a conservative expectation in a terse, sarcastic tone: And I
need to win a Nobel Prize if shes dead set on a grandson with both our genes. Parents.
That single word"parents"tells us all we need to know about a sons perceived
responsibility to pass on his genes and bear children in Asian culture. The dilemma of
Dass Bengali professor, Alok Mukherjee, is similar. Izrail, the androgynous beauty
who claims to be half-werewolf and later becomes Aloks lover, understands this
limitation very well. Izrails father, Fenrir, was also haunted by this compulsive desire to
createto reproduce a human child, which is forbidden for his tribe, even if its through
rape:
Fenrir pounded the bubbling ground around him in fury, bellowing: I Created, like the gods
of humankind!
I Created, like the lowliest khrissal can, and we cannot. (p. 233)

Izrail gives Alok two scrolls to translate from Pashto into English. These scrolls take us
to Mumtazabad, placing the time of these events anywhere between AD 1632 and
1653 as Alok explains in his footnote (p. 53). At Mumtazabad, Fenrir sees Cyrah and
chooses her to be the mother of his child, while the emperor Shah Jahan waits for his
miracle, to be born. A construction pit holds an unfinished palace, the Taj Mahal (p.
54).
Apparently, Fenrir doesnt hold Shah Jahan in high regard: Perhaps he lets tears of
shame slip down his cheeks, thinking of the many hands that build his dead wifes tomb,
none of them his own (p. 54). He doesnt seem to care about love either. He rejects
Gvaudan, because he cant bear him a child. Gvaudan wants to turn into Cyrah, by
stealing her form through the ritual of ekhduwhich could be read analogously as
genital reconstruction surgery. But Fenrir tells him that even if he goes through a sex
change, he may still have to find a woman to reproduce:
You want to be her, so that I might love you back. You wanted to give Cyrah to me, in you, so
that I might love her, and you . . . But you wouldnt have held a child for me. You wouldnt
have sacrificed your second self for nine months. And that alone would reveal the falsity of
your new flesh. Even if it looked like Cyrah, it wouldnt have been. (p. 232)
Much of the conflict in The Devourers comes from Alok, Fenrir, and Gvaudans guilt
and inability to reproduce among their own kind, and Cyrahs struggle to come to terms
with the werewolves identity and sexuality. Ultimately, she refuses to become either the
faithful wife or a nurturing mother, leaving her newborn baby in the care of the tribal
people of the Sunderbans: I will not be your human idol, your little goddess of
suffering (p. 257).
Their son, Izrail, doesnt seem to have a problem with his identity or sexuality. He is
like Fenrir, who believes in the power of writing, and recognizes the need to embrace
and speak the tongue of ones lovers, without any fear of judgment or inhibitioneven
if the language is not their own; even if they are outsiders, foreigners. The act of writing
and storytelling in The Devourers, then, becomes the act of giving birth. This is Fenrir
and Izrails way to ensure that they live on through stories beyond their bodies (p. 58).
And Aloks translation of the scrolls becomes a key to their survival in a rapidly
changing world:
We have many names, or none, sometimes. This body, this face; its the one I was born with,
the one that Cyrah and Fenrir gave me. But I can change it, if I will it, though after so long it
would be difficult. But I can. Just like I can change my second self as well, if the
circumstances are right. Identity doesnt mean the same thing to us as it does to you. Names
are arbitrary in such an existence. (p. 287)
Throughout the novel, Izrail insists that he is not a human. What he actually means is
that he is neither a man nor a woman. He is both. The word "khrissal," which the
werewolves use to denote "man," could also be read as a word for a heterosexual
man or woman. Alok and Izrail clearly dont belong in this straight category. They have
a fluid gender: werewolf, gay. Through Izrail and his storieswhether real or
imaginaryAlok finally comes to terms with his own gender and identity. Izrails
second selfa werewolf, a rakshasaalso stands for Aloks private, second self
which is revealed to us towards the end of the novel in an unforgettable, beautiful
passage. Fantasy then becomes a door to freedom, a means of escape from the bondage
of harsh reality for both of them.
Das is a prophet of the new Indian speculative fictiona writer who is bold enough to
resist the ghosts of Sanskrit, and carve a new imaginative territory for himself and his

audience. He gives us the names and stories of a tribal goddessBanbibi, Bandevi, or

Bandurgabut doesnt consider Hindu goddess Durga or the shape-shifter Vetala worth
exploring, as it could destroy the realism he is trying to achieve. There is also a danger
of censorship and failure in taking religious or mythical creatures from a conservative
country and using them to express a new thought, a whole new language of queer
fiction. It is not possible, a fact Izrail recognizes: "When I left the Sunderbans, I thought
of myself as more werewolf than a rakshasa, though I didnt know the word then (p.
288).
Traders from the British East India Company give Izrail the word he is searching for.
But the influence is one-sided. The Europeans come to explore India and inhabit it, but
they refuse to convert to the land, its religions and customs. They bring their own
mythswerewolves and demons. Its this mindset The Devourers attempts to break. In
one of the memorable passages, Cyrah describes Gvaudan as shaken by the lack of
superstition in the Christian worldview of one such trader, Edward Courten, in which
there is no place for the "other":
Hes arrogant. He believes Im a man, and nothing more. He believes in his one Christian
god, and no other. He believes in his empire and its ways, and no other. (p. 219)
By borrowing mythological characters from Europe to write a novel set in India, Das is
hinting at the legacy of the British occupation and how he came to inherit the English
language, and the modern, scientific worldview. By eschewing religious and
mythological characters from Indias rich past and its predominantly Hindu, Jain, or
Buddhist literature, Das is showing us the influence of a more westernrigorous and
scientificmindset in his upbringing and worldview. It is also true, perhaps, for the
young, digital generation of India.
The Devourers contains a fragment from William Blake's poem "The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell"; Das has said in a piece at Bangalore Mirror that Anne
Carsons Autobiography of Red (1998), meanwhile, served as a model for his book. The
choice of the novels female protagonist, Cyrah of Kandahar, a young Muslim prostitute,
also gives us a clue to Dass real ambition: he wants to write a truly progressive,
crossover novel, representing historically marginalized communities and groups from
across the world:
There are stories of our tribes in many forms. In Europe we are oft made wolves, the devils
children, but in the arid lands between the Bosporus and the Indus, where you came from, the
tribes of our kind take the name of djinn, from stories the Khorassians wove of beings who
can change shape, created by your Allah from a smokeless fire. In the African plains, perhaps
our unknown kinsmen take the second selves of great hyenas laughing under a blood red
moon, slack-tongued lions stalking the savannah. In the flesh of sailors who hailed from
beyond the Red Sea, Ive tasted rumours of jackal-jawed cenobites of Anapa roaming the
dead cities of the pharaohs. And what are we here, in Hindustan? Perhaps here our other
selves are chimerical tigers burning bright in the Asiatic jungle, not so far from here. (p. 81)
Far-flung locales are nothing new to Das. In Kolkata Sea, one of his earliest stories,
the former capital of colonial India lies underwater. It is a poignant, powerful story set in
the real world of the authors childhood. On the other hand, his much-celebrated,
fantastic talesincluding muo-kas Child (Clarkesworld), Weep For Day
(Clarkesworld), and A Moon for The Unborn (Strange Horizons)are set in a world
often foreign and strange, well-crafted but still alien. But the world of Kolkata Sea is
one I have often visited, a feeling that I know well. Its vivid, unforgettable.

There is a palpable difference between building and carrying a new world inside your
head, and actually living in one, experiencing it through all your senseseven if its in
fiction and speculation. The Devourers likewise feels real, but there is nothing in it as
striking as the corpse of a city buried under the sea. The pace suffers slightly from the
bane of SF: repetition and info-dumps. The Devourers is also not a page-turner book;
it is a turn-page-back book, like Ian McDonalds River of Gods. (See this excellent
review by Dan Hartland.)
The world of Indra Dass The Devourers is intimate and accessible, then, but the novel
is occasionally impaled by the scale of its omnicultural ambition. What sets Dass work
apart from his South Asian peers is his resistance to Indias mythical past and creatures,
and yet his keen understanding of the essence of its geography and setting. The
Devourers captures the beauty of living in a shared world of fantasy, and the desire to be
human and to love in beautiful, haunting prose. The novel, however, is scattered, like the
modern great Indian experiencethe ruins of its civilizations on the verge of collapse
and disintegrationin a homogenizing, twenty-first century. Nevertheless, it results in a
magnificent tale.
Originally published on Strange Horizons.

Copyright 2015 Salik Shah