In 1922, a disgraced half-Indian, half-Irish tiger hunter is summoned by W.B. Yeats to investigate occult disturbances in Ireland—only for his disappearance to expose a secret war between empire, fascism, literary genius, and ancient powers returning to the world.
William Mohan is a legendary shikari, a hunter of man-eating tigers famous across the British Empire. Half-Irish and half-Indian, beloved in his native Kumaon, and accepted rather than embraced by the elite of the British Raj. After a disastrous tiger hunt in India leaves an Englishman dead and Mohan disgraced, he decamps with his sister Mary to London. There, an unexpected invitation from W.B. Yeats brings him to Castle Dunsany in Ireland, where strange signs are spreading across the countryside: blood-red grass in fairy circles, impossible animal attacks, ghostly apparitions, and rumors of a spectral hound.
Yeats and Dunsany are convinced that Mohan is the man who will solve the mystery. He is charismatic, wounded, capable, and morally compelling—the hunter who understands both colonial drawing rooms and Indian jungles. He gives the audience a clean doorway into the series: a disgraced man bridging Britain and India.
Then, in the midst of his investigations of the animal attacks in Ireland, he vanishes. His disappearance expands the story canvas dramatically.
The Nine Unknown, an ancient cabal sworn to guard humanity from divine tyranny, dispatch a lethal operative named Sirit to England. Kiran Rao, a colonized Cambridge student with missing memories, is pulled into a conspiracy that may explain his entire life. In the Kumaon hills, Parvati, a poor grasscutter with a sick child, is stalked by a man-eating tigress possessed by an ancient intelligence. And in Tanganyika, an American poacher and a German occultist descend toward a blood-red crater where something inhuman is waking.
Around them gathers one of the strangest fellowships ever put on screen: Yeats, Dunsany, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, Tolkien, Dion Fortune, and others—not as cameos, but as brilliant, dangerous, frightened minds drafted into a war they understand only through brief glimpses into the unknown.
Shikari is the colonial adventure novel turned inside out.
The imperial adventure story from the 1920s gave us the hunter, the explorer, the scholar, the soldier: men who entered India or Africa and bent the world around their courage. The people of empire’s periphery were their guides, servants, mystics, porters, informants, or victims.
Shikari reverses that grammar.
The British literary figures have intelligence, wit, language, reputation, and history, but not final authority. They read the signs. They name the danger. They recognize that the world is entering Yeats’s widening gyre. But their interpretations alone cannot save the world.
In this story India and Africa are not the exotic backdrop, but the source. The empire’s periphery becomes the center of history. The final agency belongs to the mixed-race hunter, the colonized student, the village protector, the African-born operative, and the powerless mother whose body becomes the battlefield of the cosmos.
The broader series is an ensemble epic with co-leads who respectively carry action, morality, and emotion, but the majority of Season One is comprised of the inciting event of Mohan’s story: a disgraced hunter who follows a supernatural trail from India to London to Ireland. At Castle Dunsany, he investigates blood-red grass, ghostly animals, and occult signs tied to Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” The storylines that will take over in later seasons are seeded in the first. As Mohan disappears, the show inverts the colonial adventure formula and reveals that this was never only his story.
Compared to the subsequent seasons where the canvas expands, Season One is contained mostly in England and Ireland, with occasional flashbacks to India.
The seasons widen the map: Ireland, England, India, East Africa, Europe. The hunt for Mohan becomes the hunt for a legendary artifact. The hunt for the artifact becomes a war over who controls reality. The old centers of imperial power—London, Oxford, Bloomsbury, Castle Dunsany—become staging grounds. The true battlefield lies in the jungle, the savanna, the village, the body, the myth.
The series is governed by one principle: as above, so below. A divine order in the heavens; an imperial order on earth. A fellowship in Britain; a counterforce rising from the colonized world. Wounds in one realm open in another. Power repeats itself through gods, empires, bodies, and stories—until someone breaks the pattern.
Elegant, brutal, uncanny, and intelligent. Colonial clubs, fog-bound London streets, Bloomsbury salons, Irish castles, black steel ships, Bombay docks, Himalayan forests, East African calderas, fascist offices, vampire-haunted corridors, and tiger-dark jungle.
No capes. No wands. No chosen-one simplicity.
This is a world of rifles, poems, blood pacts, secret marks, burned manuscripts, occult machines, colonial files, poisoned loyalties, possessed animals, ancient cabals, and gods who use human bodies as doors.
Written as a novel. Engineered for the screen.
Shikari is a premium prestige epic with the propulsion of a conspiracy thriller, the atmosphere of supernatural horror, the emotional reach of a postcolonial family saga, and the scale to become global appointment television.
It begins with one hunter’s disgrace.
It becomes a secret history of the 20th century. The Lost Generation versus Cosmic Gods.
Complete 173,000-word manuscript with developed mythology; all dramatic rights available. Character bible and concept art available on request.