Spoilers Ahead, but also: Content Warning for discussions of colonial violence, xenophobia, and violence against women.

Ram V. and Sumit Kumar’s These Savage Shores was a book that I slept on for about a year. A close friend breathlessly described the premise of the Vault Comics miniseries one afternoon, and, while I was taken in by the idea, it took time before I finally got around to reading it. The earful of “I Told You So’s” I got after was warranted. Admittedly, I dragged my feet because I love vampires as a concept but vampire fiction tends to leave me flat. There are only so many times I can see sexy nigh-immortal blood drinkers languishing over their condition before I get exhausted.
Thankfully, These Savage Shores goes back to reframing vampires as symbols of a fiendish European gentry. What it also does, however, is put those same monsters in a new setting: 1760s India, where older and more dangerous monsters rise up against them.
These Savage Shores concerns the East India Company’s work in the Malabar Coast. The story also concerns Bishan, a raakshas –in short, a malevolent demigod – bound to serve a local lord, and his priestess lover Kori. When a young vampire uses his connections in the Company to escape being hunted in London and heads to the Coast, he makes the mistake of stalking and trying to eat Kori, ending up torn to shreds by Bishan instead. When news of the vampire’s death reaches England, the dead thrall’s sire Count Grano joins the English in their expansion through India to find Bishan.
There’s only so much I can say about TSS’ depiction of its ruthless raakshas or the history of the region. I’ll leave that analysis to someone more qualified. That said, I am half-British and a pretentious Humanities major who loves old horror fiction and tropes, and, as such, one recurring theme in the narrative made me want to write this article.
The common image of the vampire is that of the aristocrat, the lord in the castle who stands miles above the common folk and drains them of their life force. Everyone makes that comparison. Hell, I made that comparison in this very piece. It’s a common theme that people have drawn from the seminal vampire text, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

People often forget that Dracula isn’t merely about the upper class preying on the lower classes, however. The book is also deeply xenophobic. Count Dracula is a Romanian monster who flees west to terrorize the Good and Just British subjects to expand his reach. While many die at the Count’s hands, only Lucy and Mina have his gift of vampirism forced upon them, and portrayals of their turnings are often tinged with hints of sexual violence. And the Count himself is tended to by a slew of Roma servants, depicted in the text as a silent and nameless horde who fiercely protect his carriage in the final act. However we slice it, Dracula was an amalgam of racist and bigoted tropes rolled into one supernatural apex predator.
That’s why it’s interesting to see V. and Kumar take this angle and flip it on its head. The vampires in These Savage Shores are also an invading force from beyond the sea looking to conquer a new land and terrorize its women. In TSS, however, they aren’t spooky immigrants killing our men and kidnapping our women, but a part of the spearhead of British colonialism.
The vampires themselves do not initially mobilize east in order to keep a low profile, but they are rich and powerful and connected enough that moving in with the East India Company isn’t a problem. Doomed vampire Alain Pierrefort sees life on the Malabar Coast as an opportunity to be a menace to its denizens, wasting no time in trying to make a meal out of Kori. Once Grano and his kin come looking for Bishan, it is easy for them to move among the musket-bearing soldiers and merchant barons that have already settled in the area. While Bishan’s countrymen are slaughtered by the British in a nearby conflict, Grano kills countless Indian villagers and raises them into an undead army before turning Kori into one of them.
And there are strong parallels between England’s colonial violence and the brutality of the bloodsuckers who came to the Coast with them. In the first issue, Pierrefort’s human associate explains that the British Empire’s business in Malabar is to take over the region and forge a road between the north and south, striking deals with the neighbouring Mysore’s Sultan Hyder Ali in order to increase trade opportunities. In short, the Company’s plan is to locate a vein and bleed it for the Empire’s nourishment and to create a thrall out of Sultan Ali.
This is hammered home in the final issue when Mysore’s Sultan tells his son in a letter that “we are not fighting an enemy that seeks to take our land, or our titles, or our people or our poetry. No, they wish for us to keep it all. The only thing they want is to put a price on its soul.”
That’s why it’s so satisfying when both Bishan and Kori take the fight to Grano in London. Both are representatives of a culture struggling to protect itself from conquest, from two disparate angles. Bishan comes in as a manifestation of ancient cultures and religions at risk of eradication, while Kori serves as a stand-in for women assaulted by colonizers. It’s a small victory, since anything more than this might get them or more innocents killed. Even Bishan admits it wasn’t enough in the end. As the final line states: nothing will be the same again. Such is the business of empires, after all.
As an act of resistance, however, Bishan and Kori’s words and deeds remain incredibly meaningful. Maybe they couldn’t stop the British Empire, not on their own, but they made it bleed. When dealing with bloodsuckers, there’s no better way to hurt them.
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