The Man-Eating Tiger and the Vampire in South Asia

Abstract

This essay is rooted in two observations about the vampire that are widely accepted by scholars: as Ken Gelder puts it in the very first paragraph of his seminal study, Reading the Vampire, any account of this particular species of the ‘Undead’ has to address ‘the tremendous reach of the vampire into the popular imagination’ and ‘the many forms vampire narratives can take [… while still sharing or even reproducing] certain features’ (Gelder 1994, p. ix). Both are valid and necessary observations, but they are also given a particular twist when inserted into the South Asian context. While India and Pakistan have various versions of the Undead, to which I will return later, the vampire qua vampire is largely absent from English-language fiction written by Indians and Pakistanis.¹ A similar situation seems to obtain in African English literatures too. Instead, some other ‘para/non-human beings’ are evoked in South Asian English Literatures (henceforth: SAEL), which share ‘certain features’ of the vampire. As such, my essay performs the dual function of, first, noticing and accenting this relative absence of the vampire qua vampire, and, second, exploring how and why the vampire narrative takes other ‘forms’ — while retaining ‘certain features’ — in the context of South Asian, primarily Indian, literature.