The Coloniser and the Colonised 14 CHAPTER 2. A. (i) THE COLONISER AND THE COLONISED: - As Ian Ousby, et al., observe, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories "are...the most famous and enduring contribution to detective fiction by any single author" (The Wordsworth 850). On the other hand, Sreejata Guha considers Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi narratives "a classic of.,. [modem Indian literature]" (Bandyopadhyay, Picture viii). Bandyopadhyay's thirty-three Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries fbnned identifiably the most popular Bengali detective fiction in late pre- independence and post-independence India. Although the primary duty assigned to both Sherlock Holmes and Byomkesh Bakshi is identification of criminals, their conception, behavioural features and investigative methodology are markedly different. Holmes was created by Doyle perceptively as a representative of the British imperialists, who would safeguard their interests by maintaining peace and societal status quo at the colonial centre. On the other hand, Bakshi is a middle-class Bengali inquisitor who not only "seeks...the truth" but also acts as the spokesperson for Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's resistance against the hegemony of the Eurocentric sleuths in the sub-genre of detective fiction {Byomkesh 40). The Coloniser and the Colonised 15 Several factors as described below have contributed to Doyle's ideal conception of Sherlock Holmes as an upholder of the British colonial interests. It is important that most of Holmes's clients belong to the aristocracy while the criminals he deals with in narratives like A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four. "Five Orange Pips" and 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men" are either Orientals or Americans or White Westerners with obsessive attraction for Britain's contemporary or former colonies. In contrast, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay exhibits an ambivalent attitude towards the British colonisers in the stories of the Byomkesh Bakshi canon. It is significant that with the exception of "Aadim Ripu", no other Byomkesh Bakshi story contains reference to the Indian freedom stmggle even when the first ten of narratives - "Father Kanta" (1932), "Shimonto Heera" (1932), "Satyanweshi", (1933), "Makarshar Rash" (1933), "Arthamanartham" (1933), "Chorabalee" (1934), "Agniban" (1935), "Upasanghar" (1935), "Raktomukhi Neela" (1936), and "Byomkesh O Baroda" (1936) - had been written and pubhshed prior to the Indian independence in 1947. In the dhoti- punjabee clad Bengali gentleman Bandyopadhyay tries to crsate an extraordinarily ordinary investigator who, in spite of being colonised, would dare to oppose the Eurocentric detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Father Brown intellecmally, behaviourally and methodologically, thereby establishing a separate section of subaltern detective fiction. Other Bengali litterateurs like Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, Bhuvan Chandra Mukhopadhyay, KaUprashanna Chattopadhyay, Dinendra Kumar Roy, and Nihar Ranjan Gupta, whose sleuth narratives were published before 1932, had modelled their investigators on the White Western detectives but, unlike Bandyopadhyay, had subconsciously subsumed themselves in the realm of imperial literature. The pre- The Coloniser and the Colonised 16 Byomkesh Bakshi detectives, except Robert Blake, exhibit similarity in detecting Indian criminals and handing them over to the perceptively superior White administrators of British India. In contrast, Bakshi displays his insularity by avoiding the British police officials in stories, other than "Father Kanta", written before the Indian independence in 1947, and dealing personally with the native criminals. Bandyopadhyay does not follow the path of Fanonian collision but of cultural and literary collusion to protest against the British colonisation and refute the perceived omnipotence and omniscience of the White Western detectives created by Doyle, Agatha Christie and G.K.Chesterton. Bakshi's anti- imperial character is registered through what Homi Bhabha terms "hybridity". A Study in Scarlet, the first story of the Sherlock Holmes canon that introduces the detective and his associate Dr. John H. Watson, was published in the November 1887-issue of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Doyle based his detective on Joseph Bell, M.D., F.R.C.S. (1837-1911), consulting surgeon to the Royal Infirmary and Royal Hospital for Sick Children and teacher of medicine during his student days at Edinburgh University (Baring-Gould, Annotated 17). From their maiden appearance both Holmes and Watson express themselves as supporters of the British colonial expansion and appear to be ideologically prejudiced against the Orient and the inhabitants of the British colonies. It is important that Arthur Conan Doyle was not Enghsh by birth, having had been bom at Picardy Place, Edinburgh, on 22 May 1859 to the Irish Catholics Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Foley. Significantly, Holmes's full name - "William Sherrinford Scott Holmes", according to Khnger - might be interpreted as referring to his Scottish ascendancy\ On the other hand, Duncan MacDougald, in The Coloniser and the Colonised 17 Some Onomatological Notes on Sherlock Holmes and Other Names in the Sacred Writings, reports that the name "Sherlock" comes from the Irish scorFoz - Shearlock or Sherloch, which is derived from searVoz - Scurloch, Shrrlock, or Sherloch, which in turn is the Gaelic version of the Anglo-Saxon scortlog., literally 'short lock', that is, one with shorn locks (Baring-Gould, Annotated I 10). Moreover, Patrick Woulfe, in Irish Names and Surnames (1923), opines that "the Sherlock family...is of Anglo-Saxon origin, had settled in Ireland before the beginning of the thirteenth century, and soon became very widespread, being found in Dublin, Meath, Louth, Wexford, Waterford, Tipperary, etc." (Annotated I 10). In The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism. Irish Nationalism and the Gothic. Catherine Wyrme notes that Charles Altamont Doyle was committed to the Irish cause and his brother resigned as the main cartoonist for Punch after the magazine satirised the Pope (3-7). Therefore, incorporation of an element of subaltemity in his investigator symbolically becomes an instance of Doyle's own resistance against the hegemony the English colonisers. The detective's refusal of the English knighthood also assumes significance in this contest (Doyle, The Complete 1017). In contrast, John H. Watson, initially Ormond Sacker, is identifiably an Englishman from his fiiU name, but is constantly dominated by Holmes^. It is to impart universality to his creation and in background of his practice as an ophthalmologist at Southsea in the imperial metropolis of London that Doyle usually uses "Sherlock Holmes" that combines a name and a surname that do not testify to the investigator's nationality or indicate to which Westem continent he belongs. The detective has no relative except his elder brother Mycroft who appears in 'The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter" and "The Adventure of the Bmce- Partington Plans" and whose first name also does not reveal his nationality or faith. 184077 / • The Coloniser and the Colonised 18 In spite of the ambiguity in his nationality, Holmes offers his service to the imperial Britain more actively and rigorously than Watson who is an English ex-militar>' surgeon and has the experience of having served in British India. The investigator's early habitat might not be specified in that Watson first meets him as a "student" performing experiments at an unspecified hospital laboratory in A Study in Scarlet (Doyle, The Complete 14) but he exhibits a strong patriotic fervour in inscribing "V.R" or Victoria Regina on the drawing room-wall in 'The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" (334), thus alluding to the monarch under whom Britain's colonial expansion had reached its ultimate maturity. Holmes's cHents belong to the section of the British and international bourgeois society usually concerned with imperial expansion; for example, the king of Bohemia in "A Scandal in Bohemia", knighted old squires in The Hound of the Baskervilles. the British Prime Minister and the Secretary for European Affairs in "The Advenmre of the Second Stain", and (perceptible) members of the British Royalty in "The Adventure of the Illustrious Clienf'. That he deals with them without any exuberance suggests that such noblemen are his natural and ordinary clients. The cases he investigates are of international importance but are directly or indirectly related to colonisation. In "The Adventare of the Second Satin" he investigates into the theft of a letter potent enough to start an international war between two imperial powers, and in "The Advenmre of the Naval Treaty" that of a secret defence memorandum-of- understanding perceptively aimed at strengthening Britain's naval power, the navy being the traditional military wing tor imperial expansion. 'The Advenmre of the Blue Carbuncle" and 'The Advenmre of the Mazarin Stone" revolve round the stealth of The Coloniser and the Colonised 19 internationally-renowned gemstones that have identifiably been procured fi-om the British colonies, hi 'The Five Orange Pips" and Valley of Fear, xenophobic occult organisations like the Ku-Klux-Klan and gangsters from Britain's former colony of the United States of America lead to disturbances in the imperial centre. The Victorian man-of-science adhered to strictest codes of etiquette seek to refute the existence of the supernatural in The Hound of the Baskervilles and 'The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" and prevent social scandals in 'The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" and "A Scandal in Bohemia". Apart fi-om testifying to the versatility of Holmes, these cases depict how he follows the Eurocentric societal norms that, in extension, advocate imperial expansion. In contrast, the Byomkesh Bakshi's advenmres generally aim at solving societal problems faced by ordinary Indians of the subaltern metropolis of colonial Calcutta though occasionally landlords like Kumar Tridibendra Narayan Roy of "Shimonto Heera", Himangshu Roy of "Chorabalee", Deep Narayan Singh of "Bonhi Patango" and Mahidhar Chowdhury of "Chitrochor" consult him. Saradindu Bandyopadhyay thus negates the Eurocentric convention of granting primacy to the bourgeoisie. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Watson appears as a retired army-surgeon: a figure who has had actively suppressed the native figures in India, and thereby exemplifying Said's observation that "the cult of the military personality was prominent...[in late Victorian British culture]...[,]..,usually because such personalities had managed to bash a few dark heads..." (Culture 181). Doyle's The Coloniser and the Colonised 20 characterisation of Watson as a former member of the imperial army is aimed at fusing his Holmes texts with the contemporary imperial British cultural outlook. The retired surgeon has fought in the Afghan war, experienced the violence and malignance of "the murderous Ghazis", and has withstood 'curses' like the enteric fever which the White Western Orientalists customarily link to the Orient (Doyle, The Complete 13). In A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, he treats everything originating in India as the rightful property of Britain. Narratives like The Sign of Four and "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" are replete with references to the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 during which the author identifies the Indian characters like Mahomet Singh, Abdullah BQian, Dost Akbar, Lai Rao and Tonga with danger, treachery and mystery. Under the erroneous impression that the Europeans are inherently qualified to control, discipline and obliterate the colonised natives as and when required, Hohnes and Watson shoot dead the Andaman- dwelling Tonga without any further reflection but do not have to face persecution for homicide in The Sign of Four (82). Narratives like 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and 'The Advenmre of the Crooked Man" contain description of the daily life of the European settlers in colonised India (196, 365-6). While references to services in the Bangalore Pioneers and the Bengal Artillery in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (196) gain imperial significance in that they indicate British military wings used to dominate the Oriental natives, Sebastian Moran's wild game hunting in the Himalayas in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (550) testifies to how the British settlers passed their life in the colonies. The Coloniser and the Colonised 21 Holmes exemplifies his Orientalist attraction in his habit of storing tobacco in a Persian slipper in 'The Adventure of the Empty House" and his tour of the Orient covering Tibet, Lhassa, Persia, Mecca and Khartoum in "The Adventure of the Empty House"(550, 544). To Nicholas Stewart, Sherlock Holmes is an imperial-Orientalist "who utilises the European study of the Orient with the result of revealing and outwitting the criminally hnked Other, and by doing so.. .justifies Watson's actions and validates Orientalist research as the key to understanding, controlling and remaining superior to the colonised populaces" ^. Doyle's underscoring of the Oriental link of criminals hke Tonga and Dost Akbar depicts the common imperial perception that evil is intricate to the Oriental psyche. Significantly, a number of criminals in the Holmes nan'atives have strong links with the former British colony of the United States of America that serves to highUght Doyle's prejudice against the colonised individuals in general. Abe Slaney of "The Adventure of the Dancing Men", Enoch J. Drebber, Joseph Stangerson and Jefferson Hope of A Study in Scarlet. James Calhoun of "The Five Orange Pips", the Mormons prophets Brigham Young and his Elders of A Study in Scarlet and Councillor McGinty of The Valley of Fear are Americans depicted as criminals. Importantly, though Hohnes calls Professor Moriarty as "the Napoleon of Crime" in "The Adventure of the Final Problem" (417), the British crimtnal's activities are restricted to only three stories: "The Final Problem", "The Adventure of the Empty House" and The Valley of Fear. Byomkesh Bakshi first meets his associate Ajit Bandyopadhyay at a central Calcutta-boarding house in 1925 in "The Inquisitor". The Coloniser and the Colonised 22 Bandyopadhyay's specification of the year has an important postcolonial connotation because the anti-colonial activities of armed Indian revolutionaries had reached their zenith in Bengal and particularly Calcutta during the 1920s. That Bakshi and Ajit Bandyopadhyay, "fresh out of university", are aged between 23 and 25 during their first meeting is significant because participation of Bengali youths in their early twenties was the largest in contemporary Indian nationalist movement (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 1). Pahari observes that even before the 1930s, "Bengal... [had been]...one of the important regions for the rise of militant nationalism", and that Bengali youths taught in Western system of education and philosophy had thrown themselves in an all-out war against the British occupants (254). Significantly, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay never protests vociferously against the imperial occupation of India. His early profession as a lawyer at British Indian courts and chances of censure and detention for sedition perceptively prevented him from projecting Bakshi and Ajit Bandyopadhyay as active nationalists in stories written before 1947. Although influenced by Doyle, Christie and Jack London to formulate his fiction, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay has not specified details about a puiely imaginary character, and avoids any precise reference to the former imperial capital that was being constantly changed under the anti-imperial activities of the nationalists {Saradindu II637). While Holmes resides at 221B Baker Street in north­ west London, Bakshi's house is at an unspecified number on Calcutta's Harrison Street. However, like Holmes who retires from London to Sussex Downs in "The Adventure of The Coloniser and the Colonised 23 the Second Stain" (Doyle, The Complete 111), the Bengali inquisitor retires to Keyatala, Calcutta, in "Beni Sanghaf (Bandyopadhyay, Byomkesh 925). The hidian author portrays his detective as a family man with middle-class values who, as implied in "Where There's a Will", marries early (Picture 127-8) which is a subjective reference in the context that Bandyopadhyay himself married Paml Chakroborty on 28 June 1918 at the age of nineteen. In contrast, Holmes never marries or has affairs. He remains unmoved, unlike Watson, by the physical charms of Mary Morstan in The Sign of Four (Doyle, The Complete 58), Irene Adler in "A Scandal in Bohemia" and Violet hunter in 'The Adventore of the Cooper Beeches"; does not sympathise with Helen Stoner in 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band" (197-9); examines the hands of Violet Smith with the objective and detached eye of a scientist (587), and is immune to Hilda Hope's attractiveness in 'The Advenmre of the Second Stain" (728-9). He considers women to be distractions that would hinder his vigorous championing of Britain's imperial interests (58). Watson marries Mary Morstan in The Sign of Four (92), but the couple remains childless xmtil 'The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place", the last Holmes story to be published, which might be interpreted as Doyle's attempt to keep Watson an associate to Holmes's imperially compatible adventures. Holmes also does not pay a single address to his associate's wife after they are married. By eschewing description of scenes of courtship or post-nuptial life, Doyle not only conforms to the norms of the Victorian prudery but also asserts the requirement of the colonisers not to exhibit emotions before the subaltern populaces. To avoid complications such as sexual assaults on women, he never depicts Mary Morstan as The Coloniser and the Colonised 24 accompanying Watson during his adventures with Holmes. Not a single Doyle's detective narrative deal with the anti-feministic crimes like rape and incest, and does not relish them in states of undress or provocative outfits. In the Byomkesh Bakshi canon, the hidian inquisitor and his associate appear as strongly heterosexual characters, hi opposition to the Victorian conventions for detective stories, Bandyopadhyay exhibits vivid sensuousness and emotional involvements in his sleuth stories, starting with a detailed description of Bakshi and Satyabati's courtship in "Where There's a Will" (Picture 125-8). His profession of a Bombay-based Hindi film-script writer between 1938 and 1952 has had perceptively been instmmental in making him deal with extramarital affairs and incorporate courtship and flirtation scenes in the stories like "Picture hnperfect" (210, 220-1), "Bonhi Patango" (Byomkesh 554-9), "Magno Mainak" (779-80, 796-7) and "Shanjarur Kanta" (866-9, 881). hi contrast to Watson's restrained references to Morstan in The Sign of Four (Doyle. The Complete 58), Ajit Bandyopadhyay sensuously describes the physical appearance of Satyabati in "Where There's a Will" (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 100,111-2), of Shakuntala Singh in "Bonhi Patango" (Byomkesh 517) and of Mohmi Das in "Kahen Kabi Kalidas" (687). hi spite of being married, Bakshi exhibits a subconscious attraction for Rajani in 'Ticture Imperfect" (Picture 207). While Byomkesh Bakshi's investigations in "Arthamanartham", "Chitrochor", "Chinakhana", "Bonhi Patango" and "Magno Mainak" are overwhelmingly concerned with unmarried or widowed women, Holmes deals with married or honourably engaged primarily aristocratic ladies. Even in the love-centred narratives like A Study in Scarlet. "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" The Coloniser and the Colonised 25 and 'The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist", the underprivileged lovers like Jefferson Hope, Abe Slaney and Carruthers have been shown as incorporating within themselves conventions of chivalry. The differences in Doyle's and Bandyopadhyay's attitude to women in their detective stories might also be explained on the basis of their respective personal experiences. While Bandyopadhyay enjoyed conjugal bliss, Doyle suffered because of Louise Hawkins's consumption between 1893 and 1907 and because of his love for Jean Leckie whom he met on 15 March 1897 but could marry until his first wife's death in 1907̂ *. On the other hand, Mary Foley's affair with her boarder. Dr. Brian Waller, six years senior to Arthur, after Charles Altamont Doyle had been institutionalised for alcoholism in 1876, culminated into her moving into his estate m 1882 for the next thirty years, and caused deep anguish to the writer who wrote in Memories and Adventures that his mother's taking boarders to sustain her family "may have eased her in some ways, but was disastrous in others" .̂ It is possible that Holmes's maintenance of distance from women has its basis in such bitter incidents. The British author and the Indian litterateur also differ in the context of their self-identification with their detectives. Doyle positions himself between the extraordinary intelligence of Holmes and the simplicity of Watson in order to provide sufficient publicity for his detective without himself appearing on the scene. On the other hand, Byomkesh Bakshi is admittedly Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's own self-projection, which administers a subaltern identity also to the detective The Coloniser and the Colonised 26 (Saradindu 11 646). Contrary to Doyle's focussing on Holmes's different adventures while ignoring societal references, Bandyopadhyay exhibits a tendency to keep the detective stories at an intellectual level and writes them to be simultaneously read as social novels (647). In opposition to Holmes's indulging in physical violence while capturing Jefferson Hope in A Study in Scarlet (Doyle, The Complete 33), John Clay in "The Red-headed League"(124), Joseph Haixison in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty" (411), Sebastian Moran in 'The Adventure of the Empty House" (548), and Evans in 'The Adventure of the Three Garridebs"(1028), or using firearms in The Sign of Four (82), The Hound of the Baskervilles (527), Bakshi does not carry a gun except in "The Inquisitor" (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 23) and "Amriter Mrityu" (Byomkesh 633) and he does not personally own a revolver. According to Watson's chart of "Sherlock Holmes - his limits", the investigator is a novice at literature, philosophy and astronomy, weak in politics, but is profoundly knowledgeable in botany, geology, and an expert in anatomy, chemistry and sensational literature. He is also an accomplished violin-player, a skilled fencer, boxer and singlestick player and is well-versed in British law (Doyle, The Complete 16-7). Apart from his interest in science which he later uses to outwit the criminally-linked Others, Holmes has the basic training of every coloniser for self- protection through the usage of hands, swords and 'singlestick'-s. Ralph A. Ashton notes that "a singlestick is about 34 inches long [,]... [and]...is essentially a slashing, whacking, battering, beating and clubbing sort of weapon" - an instmment an imperialist would The Coloniser and the Colonised 27 customarily use to discipline a mischievous native (100). Holmes and Watson always carry revolvers during their adventures, and Sidney Paget's illustrations in The Strand Magazine show the former in Stetson hats or a deerstalker caps and tweed ulster, thus meticulously following the Eurocentric dress codes. Holmes smokes briar-root pipes, is attracted to Bach and Beethoven, and in stories like 'The Red-Headed League" visits opera houses for intellectual refreshment (Doyle, The Complete 121). His food includes cold beef, grouse and white wine while he is addicted to seven-percent solution of cocaine (79, 54). Ian Ousby, et al., note that Doyle has manifested his interest in contemporary Victorian science through his detective (The Wordsworth 850). Holmes conducts different biochemical experiments in A Study in Scarlet and suggests the infallibility of several others in forensic sciences (Doyle, The Complete 14-5), which led the Royal Society for Chemistry to grant him an honorary fellowship for his life-long contribution to the field of medical sciences on 16 October 2002. To depict his imperial investigator as unique and flawlessly conceived and attain credibility for his detective narratives, Doyle has devised several indigenous methods for crime detection including the usage of Plaster-of-Paris, chemical analyses of blood and mud stains, and forensic examinations of cigar ash, shoes, abandoned dresses and other daily-use materials. Against Doyle's profession as a physician, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay was a lawyer-tumed-litterateur and understandably has not given primacy to scientific research and chemical experiments in his Byomkesh Bakshi stories and has stressed on psychoanalysis for crime detection. He symbolically seems to attest the Orientalist conception of the Eastem aversion to science and technology. The Coloniser and the Colonised 28 A resident of the scientifically-developed Occident, Sherlock Holmes uses machines and technology soon after as they are devised, hi "The Red-Headed League", he uses the Tube even as the first underground metropolitan railway service stated operating between Paddington and Farringdon, London, in 1863 (Doyle, The Complete 120), speaks on the sparingly-used telephone in 'The Adventure of the Three Garridebs" (1020), and rides steamboat and Hansom cab respectively in The Sign of Four and 'The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax" (79, 815). Ousby, et al, identify his strong feeling, like Doyle, for the atmosphere of the late-Victorian and Edwardian London (The Wordsworth 850), and stories like The Sign of Four, "The Red- Headed League" and 'The Five Orange Pips" contain vivid description of the different localities of the imperial capital and its cUmate. The British detective reflects the contemporary British colonial perception of being the microcosm and locus of the imperial world while speaking about his own omnipotence and uniqueness as investigator. He asserts his centrality, if not his uniqueness while describing his position as a consulting detective in A Study in Scarlet and The Study in Scarlet (Doyle, The Complete 18, 54). By making his character refute the quahtative excellence of other literary detectives like Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and Emile Gaboriau's Lecoq in A Study in Scarlet. Doyle negates any challenge to his detective's position trom representatives of other imperial powers like France or former colonies like the United Sates of America (18). The Coloniser and the Colonised 29 It is important that though Sherlock Holmes is identifiably not an atheist or desecrates the Christian religious institutions, his faith has not been demarcated. He does not cite references from the Bible other than his singular mention of the Biblical David-Uriah-Bathsheba incident in 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (367). This has been instmmental in making Doyle's detective stories popular. Many former and contemporary colonies identified Christianity with the faith of the colonisers, and with the ambiguity of his belief Holmes is more easily intemalised by the non-Christian colonised individuals of Asia and Africa. Depicting Holmes as an orthodox Christian would have impeded his universality and acceptance. Specification of the investigator's faith would have gained significance in context of the intra-Christianity strife between different sections, particularly that between the Anglicans and the Methodists in late-Victorian England, which would have served to expose debilitating differences among the imperialists to the subaltern populace. Therefore, the canon eschews religious fanaticism. Moreover, though Doyle had been bom an Irish Catholic, he settled in a predominantly Anglican and Protestant London, and became an agnostic and deeply interested in spiritualism inl881 onwards .̂ The subjectivity of the author's changing faith might have been reflected in the detective's lack of a definite belief Significantly, the Holmes stories do not deal with Catholic Irish or Scotts, and, other than the excommunicated Williamson of 'The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist", do not depict the Church or clergymen in cormption. Both Doyle and Bandyopadhyay shared an interest in the occult, planchette and spiritualism, and identifiably possessed similar religious The Coloniser and the Colonised 30 ideologies. It is important that Byomkesh Bakshi also exhibits an ambiguity in faith and caste. Although he is a Hindu and, according to Bandyopadhyay, a "Kyastha" - the second group of Bengali societal divisions - the Bengali inquisitor does not ever visit temples or prays (Saradindu 11 646-7). In "Aadim Ripu" he avoids specifying his religious sentiment when approached by Fazlu Rahaman for declaring himself as a supporter either of India or the Hindus, or Pakistan or the Muslims (Bandyopadhyay, Byomkesh 489). On the other hand, his introduction of his mother as a practising Vaishnavite indicates his knowledge about his social and religious positions (434). In India, the acceptability for a general-caste character is greater than that from the "uppef classes like the Brahmins, and the author's ambiguity regarding his inquisitor's social strata and religious faith serves to grant the Bakshi narratives a wide readership. Saradindu Bandyopadhyay exhibits cultural hybridity in Byomkesh Bakshi's characterisation. The Indian detective uses Western gadgets like electric fans and telephones while simultaneously being ambivalent in his basic attitude towards the imperialists. Though he is perceptively well-conversant with using firearms, but uses them sparingly only in "The Inquisitor" and "Amriter Mrityu" and does not possess a revolver personally. Like Holmes, he is knowledgeable and maintains codes of chivalry while exhibiting qualitative excellence in his psychoanalysis- based investigation. In an instance of cultural hybridity, he smokes European cheroots in "The Inquisitor" (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 24) and the Oriental hookah in "Achin Pakhi", {Byomkesh 661). hi "The Gramophone Pin Mystery" he exhibits preference for European The Coloniser and the Colonised 31 silk stockings (50) and, in "Chorabalee", lunches on European menu like cutlet, boiled eggs and tea in flask (Byomkesh 131). If Doyle validates the British colonisation of the East through his Sherlock Holmes stories, Bandyopadhyay symbolically effaces the colonialists from thefr own colony of India in his pre-1947 stories except Bakshi's brief interaction with the White police commissioner in "The Gramophone Pin Mystery" (Picture 65). In the pre-hidian independence stories, the Bengali detective provides insularity to the Indian criminals from the colonial administrators by directly dealing with them himself In opposition to the Eurocentric detective fiction nomi of focussing exclusively on crime and detection, Bandyopadhyay develops his sleuth stories as poly-thematic narratives. "Durgo Rahoshyo" is also a historical narrative; "Byomkesh O Baroda" and "Shaiylo Rahoshyo" focus on the Gothic mode; "Aadim Ripu" describes the final Indian freedom struggle towards freedom, and "Bonhi Patango" informs about the Indian myth of King Dushyanta-Nerd Shakuntala who married oblivious to their respective social statuses. The author hidianises the Eurocentric conventions of Western detective fiction into Bengali ones. Thus, in "Shanjamr Kanta", identifiably drawn on Agatha Christie's ABC Murders. Prabal Gupta registers his attraction for the Tagore songs by penning the details on Deepa Mukherjee's autograph- book (Bandyopadhyay, Byomkesh 917); Shakuntala Singh of "Bonhi Patango" expresses her occult lust for the police inspector Ratikanta Choudhury by painting a detail from a The Coloniser and the Colonised 32 Sanskrit myth (558); in "Gramophone Pin Mystery", the assassin impersonating as PrafuUa Roy launches his attacks from a bicycle instead of an automobile or motor cycle; and Sukumari of "Magno Mainak" opposes the European cabaret dancers in being a devoted Vaishnavite singer (783). Doyle, in the Sherlock Holmes narratives, avoids detailed portrayal of Britain's social stmctures to maintain the British etiquette and project his society's centrality as a model for the primarily Oriental colonies to imitate. In contrast, Bandyopadhyay realistically points out the defects of Bengali societal customs and calls for their amendments. In "Picture Imperfect", Ashwini Ghatak's love for Rajani Choudhui-y is considered illegitimate because of her being a widow; Santosh Samaddar of "Magno Mainak" is disallowed from visiting Sukumari openly because she is a devotional singer, and Deepa Mukherjee is put under house arrest in "Shanjamr Kanta" because of her intended elopement with her lover Prabal Gupta who is not a Brahmin. On the other hand, Bandyopadhyay adheres to the Indian social norms by condemning extra­ marital affairs. Shakuntala Singh and Ratikanta Choudhury are killed in "Bonhi Patango" because of their adultery; a licentious widow is criticised in "Chorabalee", and Deepa Mukherjee, the heroine of "Shanjamr Kanta", is forced to become a sympathetic and cooperative spouse to Debashish Bhatta in spite of her pre-marital and post-nuptial love for Prabal Gupta. Bakshi testifies to Bandyopadhyay's faith in the supernatural by describing irrational incidents in "Shaiylo Rahoshyo" (Byomkesh 641), which is in opposition to the scientifically-developed imperial Sherlock Holmes who does not believe even when he has face Stapleton's recreation of the Baskervilles' gigantic hound. The Coloniser and the Colonised 33 While Holmes frequently verifies his empirical approaches by scientific experiments, the Byomkesh Bakshi canon does not contain any direct reference to science except in "Calamity Strikes" that focuses on the debilitating influences of British colonisation upon the Indian science (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 131- 3). The Indian inquisitor's relationship with Ajit Bandyopadhyay is pronouncedly different from that between Holmes and Watson. While Watson repeatedly asserts Holmes's intellectual excellence and uniqueness, Ajit Bandyopadhyay, who is more a friend and share a common history of domination with Bakshi, does not indulge in hero- worship while describing the Bengali inquisitor. Unlike Ajit Bandyopadhyay, Watson identifiably does not share the same social class with Holmes because none of the detective's aristocratic clients ever speaks to him. While Holmes leads a Western lifestyle by visiting operas and concerts frequently, Bakshi does not like music and opera, and seldom watches movies (118). Contrary to Doyle's detective, Bandyopadhyay's inquisitor never consumes alcohol in any of the thirty-three stories. Holmes exhibits his encyclopaedic knowledge before adventures like that of The Sign of Four by customarily lecturing to Watson on topics ranging between the Stradivarius violins, the Buddhism of Ceylon and warships of the fiiture, and the egg-shell pottery of the Chinese Ming dynasty (Doyle, The Complete 79, 1043); Bakshi, on the other hand, does not exhibit his scholasticism even after his education. While the British detective is assisted by pro­ active associates like Watson himself, The Baker Street Irregulars, and Inspector Lestrade, Bakshi is forced to replace his benign litterateur-assistant with Bikash Dutta in instances like that of "Aadim Ripu", "Chiriakhana", and "Shaiylo Rahoshyo". The Coloniser and the Colonised 34 Bakshi shares a physical similarity with Holmes though not his complexion. Judging from their respective descriptions in 'The Inquisitof (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 5) and The Sign of Four (Doyle, The Complete 16), both the detectives are tall, dark, sharp-eyed, square-chinned with an intellectual appearance. However, whereas the British detective exemplifies his physical strength and resilience by withstanding considerable amount of stress while travelling in 'The Adventure of the Final Problem" (422-4) or during pursuit of the Moriarty gang in 'The Adventure of the Empty House" (544), having been addicted to seven-percent-solution of cocaine (54), and avoiding food for three days (827), the Bengali inquisitor does not fast or undertake such arduous outdoor adventures. Holmes, like Doyle, is familiar with the British imperial policies and exhibits deep respect for the British aristocratic families. Importantly, in the Holmes narratives, Doyle glorifies Britain's successful imperial and international exploits and avoids referring to the abortive ones. Thus, even though the Afghan wars have been vividly described in A Study in Scarlet (13), the Crimean and Boer wars have only been mentioned passingly in 'The Adventure of the Blanched Soldief (1063-5). hi the Holmes canon, Britain is presented as well-govemed even when political uncertainty prevailed between Disraeli and Gladstone. First World War has been kept out of context, and except briefly in 'The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez" and "His Last Bow", descriptive references to other imperial powers like Russia and Germany have been avoided. The state of Ireland under the successive mles of Queen The Coloniser and the Colonised 35 Victoria, Edward VII and George V has also not found representation. Britain's apparent calmness is actually Doyle attempt to befool the subaltern who search for unrest in impearl realms to commence their nationalistic resistance. Doyle's championing of Ho hues and Watson as the powerftil perpetuators of Britain's imperial interests required that the detective and his associate should not be vulnerable to diseases and annihilation. But Eyles informs that "weary of being identified with Sherlock Holmes and what he regarded as 'a lower stratum of literary achievement'...[Doyle]... carried out his threats to do away with the great detective" (Eyles 30). Holmes's death near the Reichenbach Falls of Switzerland after a confrontation with Moriarty is suggested in "The Adventure of the Final Problem" (Doyle, The Complete 426), which made the common British citizens feel insecure and deprived them of presenting a flawlessly-contrived investigator to detect crimes many of which were supposed to be committed by Easterners or those related to the Orient. Following wide protests and demonstrations between 1893 and 1901, that included "we[eping]... wearing mourning bands... implor[ingJ... cajol[ing]... worry[ing]... [and] even.. .threat[ning]" the writer, Doyle was forced to revive Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles and finally to make him return under the disguise of a book-seller in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (Baring-Gould, The Annotated I 15-6). Moreover, the investigator is rarely sick, and in cases of genuine illnesses, recuperates quickly. Having had been wounded by Adelbert Gruner's agents in "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client", he reportedly recovers faster than any ordinary man (Doyle, The Complete 1042). Even after suffering from intense fatigue and exhaustion at Lyons in 'The The Coloniser and the Colonised 36 Adventure of the Reigate Squire", he continues to act thereby arresting the Cunninghams for murdering William Kirwan. In the only other receded instance of his sickness in 'The Adventure of the Dying Detective", he feigns disease to arrest Culverton Smith after tricking him into a confession of his crime. In his Sherlock Holmes narratives, Doyle does not indicate the advancing ages of Holmes and Watson except in 'The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" (1073). "The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place", the last story of the canon to be published in the 5 March 1927-issue of Liberty, seems to present the detective and his associate as retaining the same energy and quahtative excellence as in A Study in Scarlet. The concluding story ends with ample indications of the possible return of Holmes and Watson for undertaking more investigations (1116). Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi narratives identifiably counter those specific conventions of Doyle's stories which have been mentioned above. The Indian writer had also discontinued writing detective stories between October 1936 and December 1951 but was forced to resuscitate the Bengali inquisitor following demonstrations and requests irom the yoimg Indian readers particularly from Calcutta who were not ready to forfeit an intelligent subaltern detective who presented an alternative locus of power against the predominantly Eurocentric detectives (Bandyopadhyay, Byomkesh 1003). The Coloniser and the Colonised 37 Bandyopadhyay himself underscores that Bakshi's and Ajit Bandyopadhyay's ages and their relationship changes with every narrative so that in "Beni Sanghaf the inquisitor appears as an old man of sixty who is long-married, has a school-going son and a strained relationship with his equally elderly associate (Saradindu U 646). Bakshi's later adventures from "Beni Sanghar" onwards do not involve movements and chases and are focused more intensely on psychoanalysis. The writer's narrative technique changes from "Room Number Dui" - from ornamental archaic Bengah to the colloquial tongue. Ajit Bandyopadhyay's role as the narrator is minimised in "Beni Sanghar" and from "Shanjamr Kanta" onwards he is removed from the scene all together. In the introduction to Beni Sanghar (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers Private Limited, 1968), Bandyopadhyay writes, "Byomkesh can no longer afford the luxury of assigning the task of narration to Ajit. His language has become quaintly archaic, but he has not managed adapting the modem words and phrases. Moreover, he is desperately short of time. Those who have already entered the pubhshing business know how pennies break the pens... I have already released Ajit from his arduous task. From now on I shall write what I can afford" {Byomkesh 645). Other than 'The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier", Doyle has never made Hohnes narrate his own exploits. 'The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" follows the third-person mode of narration. The Coloniser and the Colonised 38 Unlike Holmes, the Oriental Byomkesh Bakshi has been depicted as genuinely suffering for a considerable period in "Picture Imperfect" (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 195-8). Also, in "Bishupal Badh" (1970), the final, incomplete story of the canon, the detective and his associate living a secluded life as a publisher, have been realistically depicted as being on the verge of separation which would obstruct their return and further collaboration. Judged in this context, Byomkesh Bakshi appears as more realistically represented than Holmes. The White imperial detective and the brown- complexioned subaltem inquisitor differ markedly from each other in their respective methodology of investigation and approaches to criminals. Holmes follows the theory of elimination that he summarises as "When you have eliminated all the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the tmth" in The Sign of Four (Doyle, The Complete 66). hi Doyle, the criminal is, with the exception of Grimesby Roylott of "The Adventore of the Speckled Band" and Joseph Harrison of "The Adventore of the Naval Treaty", usually not a member of the family concerned or a close friend or relative but is a stranger. The detective have to deal with several unfamiliar faces in course of his investigation, most of which he discard in the usual trial-and-error method. But his methodology also involves the basic Orientalist prejudice that the Eastemers are characteristically malignant and barbaric, thus imparting an anti-subaltera aspect to his approach. The writer also symbolically approaches the Hard Boiled detective fiction writers like Herman McNeile, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and Brctt Hallilay The Coloniser and the Colonised 39 whose sleuths often take recourse to unlawful methods during investigation and torture their captives to make them confess when Holmes kills Tonga in The Sign of Four (82), intends to horsewhip James Windibank in "A Case of Identity" (137), and unlawfully enters the house of Charles Milverton in "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (637). Byomkesh Bakshi regards the Hotmesian empirical proofs as fallible and depends on psychoanalysis (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 33). Bandyopadhyay thus opposes S.S.Van Dine's clause that "there is no place for description not for psychological analysis [in detective fiction]" that was meticulously followed by the post-1928 Eurocentric detective stories (Todorov 50-1). The Bengah inquisitor is first introduced to the suspect who is generally either a family member or a close acquaintance, and after a series of verbal interviews and rational psychoanalysis, he identifies and captures him. Following what might be identified as the "Classic Realist Detective Story pattern" focusing more on tnmition and intelligence than on physical quests, Bakshi guesses Shakuntala Singh's lust for Ratikanta by taking a look at the Dushyanta's blue eyes in her myth-painting in "Bonhi Patango" (Bandyopadhyay, Byomkesh 558); he also similarly deciphers Aurobindo Haider's lust for Mohini Das in "Kahen Kabi Kalidas" or the motive of Santosh Samaddar's murder of Heena MuUick in "Magno Mainak". However, his does not follow any definite mle or order during investigation in opposition to the British detective's meticulous maintenance of newspaper cuttings of reports on famous personalities and infamous anti-social individuals in his reference books. The Coloniser and the Colonised 40 While Holmes exposes himself and Watson during their rigorous outdoor adventures to lethal dangers like Tonga's poison darts in The Sign of Four (Doyle, The Complete 82), Sebastian Moran's air gun in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (548), Negretto Sylvius's cudgel in "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" (960), Evans's bullet in 'The Adventure of the Three Garridebs" (1027-8) and poisoned roots in "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" (783), Bakshi more follows the 'armchair conventions' of Dupin, Poirot and Marple, thus eschewing chase sequences and instances of danger in exception to "The Gramophone Pin Mystery" (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 63), "Adwitiya" {Byomkesh 751), and "Shanjarur Kanta" (921). Contrary to the British detective's fondness for disguises in stories like 'The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" and "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton", Bakshi does not conceal his original appearance except in 'The Inquisitor" and "Gramophone Pin Mystery". Bandy op adhyay's attempts to unravel the puzzles of human psychology symbolically make his Byomkesh Bakshi narratives 'proper crime stories' in context of Ronald Knox's convention that detective fiction to be concerned more with puzzles than with the issue of crime {The Wordsworth 254). Both Sherlock Holmes and Byomkesh Bakshi are occasionally maltreated by the official police forces. However, whereas bispector Lestrade of Scotland Yard is pitted against the consulting detective while safeguarding the imperial power's integrity, British India's police officers like Bidhubabu in the pre- 1947 Byomkesh Bakshi narratives see the inquisitor as a threat to the fimctioning of the The Coloniser and the Colonised 41 imperial government. Just as Holmes reprimands Lestrade in 'The Adventure of the Norwood Builder" (Doyle, The Collected 566), Bakshi exhibits a rare courage in warning and chastising a colonial police official like Bidhubabu in "Where There's a Wih" (Bandyopadhyay, Picture 101). That both the detectives come under the purview of law for violating civilian privacy and on mere suspicion in 'The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" and "The Inquisitor" respectively fortifies their image as the just upholders of law. Criminals in Doyle's detective narratives commit crimes of international ramifications and are concerned principally with power and money rather than love interests. Moriarty of "The Adventure of the Final Problem" and The Valley of Fear. Sebastian Moran of "The Adventure of the Empty House", Grimesby Roylott of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and Negretto Sylvius of "The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone" are either scholastic or respectable, enjoy immunity, and evade immediate suspicion because of their privileged position in the British society. Significantly, Moriarty, Moran and Culverton Smith possess different improvised weapons like the sawed-off Von Herder air gun in 'The Adventure of the Empty House" and the poisoned spring Smith mails to the detective m 'The Adventure of the Dying Detective". Such sophisticated weapons cannot be found in the Bakshi canon with the exception of PrafuUa Roy's bicycle bell in 'The Gramophone Pin Mystery" and Debkumar's poisoned match sticks in "Calamity Strikes". This may symbohcally attest the Orientahst conception about the Eastemers' characteristic aversion to science and technology. The Coloniser and the Colonised 42 The Holmesian criminals like Moriarty, Sebastian Moran, Grimesby Roylott, Jonathan Small of The Sign of Four , Stapleton of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Adelbert Gruner of'The Adventure of the Illustrious Ghent", Charles Augustus Milverton, Culverton Smith, and Joseph Harrison exhibit five distinct similarities. First, other than Roylott, they meticulously follow the standard Eurocentric codes for public conduct; second, many of them like Moran, Roylott, Small and Smith have previously been associated with or possess deep knowledge of the English colonies in the East; third, they are never punished by any non-British authority or extradited out of the imperial centre of England to be tried on foreign soil; fourth, other than Gruner and Roylott, they are chivalrous and do not harm women sexually; finally, like John Clay in "The Red-Headed League" and Sebastian Moran in "The Advenmre of the Empty House" they maintain etiquette even when courting arrest but never repent for their crime (Doyle, The Collected 124, 549). hi contrast, Bandyopadhyay's criminals like Phonibhusan Kar and Probhat Haider show remorse on being arrested, and like Kar and Amaresh Raha of "Picture Imperfect" commit suicide by slashing wrists or shooting themselves {Picture 124, 243). With the exception of Raha, they do not follow any formal dress code they maintain any formal dress code. While Small, Milverton and Clay exhibit affinity for money and power, criminals in the Byomkesh Bakshi stories like Probhat Haider of "Aadim Ripu", Ratikanta Choudhury of "Bonhi Patango", Prabal Gupta of "Shanjamr Kanta" and Bhuvaneshwar Das of "Kahen Kabi Kalidas" are The Coloniser and the Colonised 43 concerned primarily with love and sexual lust. In Bandyopadhyay, crime emanates with a challenge to the traditional Bengali societal customs, hi spite of his advanced age, Anadi Haider tries to marry Shiuly Mazumdar whose lover F*robhat Haider murders him in "Aadimi Ripu"; Pranhari Poddar is murdered by Bhuvaneshwar Das, Mohini's husband, when he tires to project the married woman as a bait to entrap young men and earn money in "Kahen Kabi Kalidas"; Santosh Samaddar of "Magno Mainak" is forced to commit suicide when his murder of Henna Mulhck is detected and his betrayal of his own country exposed; in "Bonhi Patango" Shakuntala Singh is killed as she sacrifices her husband Deep Narayan Singh for Ratikanta Choudhury; Manek Mehta of "Shaiylo Rahoshyo" is aimihilated when he tries to establish an extramarital liaison with Hymabati Biswas; and Sureshwar Ghosh is murdered in "Achin Pakhi" by Nilmoni Majumdar after he kills Hashi Ghosh, Majumdar's illegitimate daughter. Appearing as more socially relevant and realistically depicted, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi stories suitably challenge the perceived hegemony of Doyle's imperially-compatible Sherlock Holmes narratives and posit an altemative form of the subgenre that might be identified as the subaltern detective fiction. The Coloniser and the Colonised 44 NOTES: 1. Klinger, Leslie S. "Life and Times of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, John H. Watson, M.D, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Other Notable Personages". 1 February 2003. 2. Ibid. 3. Stewart, Nicholas. "A Postcolonial Canonical and Cultural Revision of Conan Doyle's Holmes Narratives". 3 February 2003. 4. "Arthur Conan Doyle: The Wives of Conan Doyle". 1 February 2003. 5. "Arthur Conan Doyle: Mary Foley Doyle". 1 February 2003. 6. "Arthur Conan Doyle: SpirituaUsm". 1 Februaiy 2003. http://www.qub.ac.uk/english/uiiprerial/india/conan%20doyle.htm http://www.%20siracd.%20com/life%20wives.%20shtml http://www.siracd.com/life%20mother.shtml http://www.siracd.com/life%20spirit.shtml Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 45 CHAPTER 2. B. DETECTIVE STORIES: A POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE. IMPERIAL DOMINANCE AND THE COLONISED PEOPLE'S RESISTANCE: - In Culture and Imperialism, Edward W. Said compares Rudyard Kipling's Kim with the Sherlock Holmes narratives, and identifies Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) as an imperial writer whose primary interest is to uphold and sustain the British law. He writes, "[The] union of power and knowledge is contemporary with [Arthur Conan] Doyle's invention of Sherlock Holmes (whose faithful scribe, Dr. Watson, is a veteran of the North West Frontier)... a man whose approach to life includes a healthy respect for, and protection of, the law allied with a superior, specialised intellect inclining to science...Kipling and Doyle represent for their readers men whose unorthodox style of operation is rationalised by new fields of experience turned into quasi-academic specialties. Colonial rule and crime detection almost gain the respectabihty and order of the classics or chemistry" (Said, Culture 184). Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 46 It is natural for an author of such imperially compatible texts like The White Company (1890) and The Great Boer War (1900) to advocate Britain's colonial expansion in the Sherlock Holmes canon that exemplifies his literary best. Doyle "spent several months on the ground... [of Boer War]... in South Africa during 1900", and put in his detective narratives like The Sign of Four and "The Adventure of the Crooked Man", "a long account of ancient treachery on another continent... [that is, Asia] that has prompted the... [catastrophic]...events in London...[,]... [the imperial centre]" (Eyles 40, 17). According to Said, "The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages" (Said Orientalism 1). Trevelyan uses the term "richest jewels of the English Crown" to describe the Indian colonies (391). But the Europeans, particularly the Enghsh who were the mightiest of the colonial powers, were not ready to link their own affluence to the resources of the colonies, hi novels like A Passage to India and Kim and the Sherlock Holmes narratives, E.M.Forster, Rudyard Kipling and Doyle refutes any symbiotic relationship between Europe and the Asian and African continents, projecting the latter two as forming the contrasting image, idea, personality and experience of the Occident. Especially the English and French Ktterateurs have always tried to deal with the Orient by "making statements about it, authorising views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, mling over it", and the Hohnes canon proves to be no exception (Said, Orientalism 3). Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 47 When Doyle published his first Sherlock Hohnes story in Beeton's Christmas Annual in November 1887, he was influenced by the past and contemporary social and political conditions of England and the world. These included the Anglo-Sikh War (1845), the Msh Potato famine (1845), the Crimean War (1854-1856), the Indian Sepoy Mutiny (1857), the American and Afghan civil wars (1861 and 1863, respectively), the foundation of the xenophobic Ku Klux Klan in the United States of America (1865), beginning of Prussian Expansion (1864) and of the primary ideas of Communism (1867), Franco-Prussian War (1870), Victoria's becoming the Empress of India (1877), and the Zulu War (1879). The British government witnessed frequent changes at the administrative level: the recurring tenures of the Derby-Disraeli government (1852, 1858 and 1866), the premiership of Lord Palmerston (1855 and 1859), Gladstone's Liberal tenure (1868 and 1880) and the Conservative rules of Disraeh (1874) and Lord Salisbury (1885). It is important that England's position as a colonial superpower began to face stiff challenges from other imperialists like France, Germany and Spain from the second half of nineteenth century onwards. Simultaneously, the British colonies like India, Afghanistan and South Africa began to violently resist the English colonial controls. Engel's Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and the first volume of Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867) seriously questioned England's capitalistic manoeuvres and, in extension, indicated their imminent end. Writing in background of the contemporary social and political conditions, it was natural that Doyle would attempt to present a calm and stolid face of the imperial centre to the colonies. Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 48 That is preciously why Sherlock Holmes protects the British imperial interests and disciplines the erratic Oriental subaltern and the White individuals associated with them without ever betraying his awareness of the unstable social and political conditions of late-nineteenth century Britain. On the other hand, he gives an impression that Britain's political stability and colonising potentialities are at their zenith more during the late Victorian Age than ever. Composing the Holmes narratives Doyle also shows an influence of the contemporary scientific and technological discoveries and inventions. This included the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, the Foucaultian demonstration of earth's rotation with a huge pendulum in 1851, the establishment of the telegraph system in India in 1853, commencement of trans-Atlantic cable m iSJT, Ji^ publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man in 1859 and 1871 respectively, construction of the first practical internal combustion engine by Lenoir in 1860, inauguration of the Metropolitan underground-railway in London in 1863 (though the first deep tube railroad began operating in 1884), invention of telephone and phonograph respectively in 1876 and 1877, and Edison's patenting the incandescent lamp in 1879.' Sherlock Hohnes's deep interest in science and technology does not only reflect the htterateur's confidence in the late Victorian and Edwardian sciences but also vindicates Said's observation that according to the European colonisers "the Orient was being outstripped and outdated by Western science" and was Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 49 "exploited by the developing sciences" (Said, Orientalism 65, 40). He has thus underscored the role of the European scientists in the domination of the Orient: "To be able to sustain a vision that incorporates and holds together life and quasi-living creatures [European and Indo-European cultures] as well as quasi-monstrous, parallel inorganic phenomena [Semitic, Oriental culture] is precisely the achievement of the European scientist in his laboratory. He constmcts, and the very act of constmction is a sign of imperial power over recalcitrant phenomena, as well as a confirmation of the dominating culture and its naturalisation" (Orientalism 145-6). Doyle's obsession with the colonies and his constant advocacy of the "pacification of the subject race" is an example of his "imperial might" and his adherence to the imperial clause that "there are Westerners, and there are Orientals.. .The former dominate; the latter must be dominated..." (Orientalism 36). Holmes giving primacy to rationality and preciseness of investigative techniques once again identifies him as an imperial figure because against the Eastemers' abhorrence of accuracy, "the European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 50 of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism" (Orientalism 38). On the other hand, the pictures painted in stories like The Sign of Four (82-92) and 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (365-6) serve to portray the general European conception about the demeanour of the Orientals. To the White imperialists, the Eastern subaltern populace are: "gullible, devoid of energy and initiative, much given to fulsome flattery, intrigue, cunning, and unkindness to animals...[they] cannot walk on either a road or a pavement...[they are] inveterate liars...lethargic and suspicious... and in everything oppose the clarity, directness and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race" (Orientalism 38-9). According to Said this is significant because ''knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental and his world" (Orientalism 40). By creating the character of Watson who has spent at least two years in India (Doyle, The Complete 13), and by asserting the superiority of Holmes to the surgeon (though the detective never visits the Orient such extensively) as far as the issues of power and efficiency of Orientalist knowledge are concerned, Doyle "contrasts the local agent [Watson] who has both a specialist's knowledge of the native Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 51 and an Anglo-Saxon individuality, with the central authority at home in London [Holmes]" (Said, Orientalism 44). In his capacity as the "local agent", Watson might unwillingly jeopardise imperial interests where as Holmes, "the central authority [,] is in a position to obviate any [such] danger" (Orientalism 44). In the Holmes canon, Doyle repeatedly attempts to "polarise the distinction [between the West and the East]... and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions and societies" (Orientalism 46). A transgressor of this polarisation, like Dr. Grimesby Roylott of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", is annihilated. Orientalism, to Said, is "a textual Universe by and large" and the "impact of the Orient was made through books" (Orientalism 52). It is, therefore, necessary that the scope of the Orientalists' text should "apparently cover everything from the editing and translation of texts to numismatic, anthropological, archaeological, sociological, economic, historical, literary and cultural studies in every Asiatic and North African civilization, ancient and modem'XOrientalism 52). Holmes's encyclopaedic knowledge includes information conceming the Buddhism of Ceylon in The Sign of Four ( Doyle, The Complete 79), the Andaman natives in The Sign of Four (75), tattoo marks of China in 'The Red-headed League" (113), association with the Tibetan Llama and Khartoum's khalifa in 'The Adventure of the Empty House" (544), coolie-disease from Sumatra in 'The Adventure of the Dying Detective" (819) and the real egg-shell pottery of the Ming dynasty in 'The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" (1043). Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 52 By practising prejudice against the colonised populace, particularly against the Easterners, Doyle was only following the "universal practice of designating in [his] mind a familiar space which [according to him] is ours and unfamiliar space beyond ours which is theirs" though such geographical distinctions, to Said, are "entirely arbitrary" (Said, Orientalism 54). In this "space" was placed the erroneous ideas that Asia exudes the "feelings of emptiness, loss, and disaster, that it is "defeated and distant", and that the motif of the Orient "insinuates dangef and its excesses "undermine rationality" (Orientalism 56-57). The experience of the authors with such ideas leads to the building up of an "internally structured archive from the literature that belongs to these experiences" (Orientalism 58). "The joumey, the history, the fable, the stereotype and the polemical confrontation" that Doyle has incorporated in his Sherlock Holmes texts come from such "internally stmctured archive" (Orientalism 58). Though Doyle, like Rudyard Kipling, has tried to construct a new picture of the Orient and the United States of America, a former colony of England (though it is not traditionally considered to be a part of the Orient), Said has refused to acknowledge such arbitrary literary constmctions as being genuine or artistically productive. Such acts, he opines, lead to the Western ignorance becoming more refined and complex, and not to the increase in volume and accuracy of "a body of positive Western knowledge" (Orientalism 58). Texts as Doyle's can never be accurate depictions of the East because "the language... [does not] even... [try].. .to be accurate" (Orientalism 71). Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 53 Though the Orient for Europe was, until the nineteenth century, "a domain with a continuous history of unchallenged Western dominance", the English always treated the colonies as threatening and malignant (Orientalism 73). However, Doyle's constant references to the hidians and Indian objects are baffling because "India never provided an indigenous threat to Europe... [the] native authority crumbled there and opened the land of inter-European rivalry and to outright European political control that the Indian Orient could be treated by Europe with such proprietary hauteur - never with the sense of danger reserved for Islam" (Orientalism 75). Most probably this attimde defines Doyle's ambition to know India better than any other European ever knew it - an inclination Simon Ockley exhibits in History of the Saracens in 1708 (Orientalism 75). Said's Orientalism also explains why Watson should be a former British settler and physician with elaborate Oriental experiences. He writes, ".. .To be a European in the Orient, and to be one knowledgably, one must see and know the Orient as a domain mled over by Europe" (197). Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 54 Most of the early English Orientalists in India, Said notes, were legal scholars or medical men with strong missionary learnings because "most of them were imbued with the dual purpose of investigating the sciences and arts of Asia, with the hope of facilitating ameliorations there and of advancing knowledge and improving the arts at home" (Orientalism 79). In all his capacities Watson belongs to the Institut, the learned division of England's army comprising of "chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons and antiquarians" (Orientalism 84). The imperially-compatible White Western characters like Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson were created and employed by the Eurocentric litterateurs to improve: "the Orient as a whole, to do what scheming Egyptians, perfidious Chinese, and half-naked Indians could never have done for themselves" (Orientalism 90). In spite of the fallibility and impracticality of the textual approaches to the Orient, they are undertaken by the Western authors primarily for two reasons: because these writers are not ready to confront at close quarters some "relatively unknown, threatening, and Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 55 previously distant" objects, and because they favour "the appearance of success" that serves to temporarily allay their psychosis of the East (Orientalism 93). To the imperialists, "the Orient, like the fierce lion, was something to be encountered and dealt with to a certain extent because the texts made that Orient possible. Such an Orient was silent, available to Europe for the realisation of projects that involved but were never directly responsible to the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects, images, or were description devised tor it" (Orientalism 94). In spite of all its subvereive ingredients like Tonga in The Sign of Four or the treacherous Indian sepoys in 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man", the Orient and particularly hidia is ultimately projected in the Sherlock Holmes stories as benign and, more importantly, silent. In "The Adventure of the Three Students", the Indian student Daulat Ras turns out to be innocent of copying from a question's proof although he moves about in agitation and exhibits suspicion of the British investigator. On the other hand, Tonga does not utter a single word, not even when he is shot to death, in The Sign of Four. Doyle pits Christianity, identifiably the predominant religion for the colonisers, against the non-Christian faith of the colonised like Hinduism and Islam in The Sign of Four , Mormonism in A Study in Scarlet, and the Negroid religion in 'The Tiger of San Pedro" (The Complete 754). Colonisation, according to Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 56 Said, involves identification and creation of rehgious, commercial, military and cultural interests, and the imperial Christian powers like England and France felt it to be their legitimate interest to safeguard themselves against the faith of the colonised, particularly Islam (Orientalism 100). Stephen Howe describes this as the coloniser's "aspiration to universality" (13). He writes, "With the advent of a universalist. Christian monotheism, the notion was added that all outsiders were by definition not only uncivilized but ungodly.. .Thus for such inferior peoples to be brought under the sway of universal empire by conquest would also be to bring them access to civilization and tme religion.. .Conquest was therefore morally justified, even divinely ordained" (14). Changing the faith of the colonised individuals served the colonisers because the former, when taught in Christian doctrines, shed their hostility against people not practicing their religion and felt an erroneous religious unity with the colonisers. Nicholas Stewart notes that though Jonathan Small, in The Sign of Four, reposes faith in Tonga, he views his native associate through a Christian ethnocentric perspective as a "hell-hound"^. Even if the colonised people change their faith, the element of mistrust remains with the colonisers to whom, even with aU exceptions, a person from the East is "first an Oriental, second a human being, and last again an Oriental" (Said, Orientalism 102). Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 57 Doyle's, and in turn, Holmes's suspicion of any individual or object related to the Orient might also be explained by Said's observation that to the Europeans, the Orient is to be watched for its offensive behaviour where as they, the Europeans, remain the watchers of the "living tableau of queemess" (Orientalism 103). To Holmes, "the Oriental... [is] in need of investigation, in need even of knowledge about himself, and that is what he proposes to undertake (Orientalism 308). It is significant that in Sherlock Holmes stories the Orientals or individuals connected to the East never use modem scientific gadgets or instruments, and in rare cases like that of the Ghazis who attack Watson at Maiwand with Jezail bullets in A Study in Scarlet, use weapons invented or devised by the Europeans (Doyle, The Complete 13). In The Sign of Four Tonga uses blow darts to kill people, Jonathan Small uses his wooden leg to kill a Pathan, and Mahomet Singh and Abdullah Khan threaten Small with a "great knife" (91, 86). In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band", Grimesby Roylott, who nurses an affmity for the East, uses a swamp adder to kill his step-daughter Julia Stoner, and in 'The Advenmre of the Crooked Man" Henry Wood, having had served in India, is always accompanied by the tropical ichneumon. In Orientalism in Crisis. Abdel Malek refers to the comparative lack of sophistication in the Oriental gadgets as instances of the time lag between Orientalist Science and that of the material under study (107-8). The Europeans' development of science and technology and the Easterners' underdevelopment in that field had resulted in the latter's being outstripped (Said, Orientalism 65). Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 58 All throughout his Holmes narratives Doyle identifiably exhibits a willingness to rule the natives, particularly the Orientals. To Howe, "the idea of empire has...usually been associated with European, White rule over non- Europeans, with 'racial' hierarchies and racist beliefs" (16). Doyle's insistence might be explained by his erroneous perception that the colonised Easterners "have never understood the meaning of self-government" which the European colonisers characteristically do (Said, Orientalism 107). He also thus undertakes the task of transporting the underdeveloped empire into modernity. Said has, however, detected in such attitudes as Doyle's a sense of power to resurrect and create the Orient (Orientalism 121). Holmes's rationality and Orientalist knowledge acquired through scientific experiments, reading newspaper reports and journals on the Orient, and through "lexicography, grammar, translation and cultural decoding" have not only made him a "central authority for the Orient" (Said, Orientalism 121-2) but also the Orient's principles have perceptively become his (Orientalism 129). Ernest Renan, in L' Avenir de la science (1890), has demonstrated that the Orientalist's attempt to become the centre is a necessity for his arrival at the very system of things, and that is what Holmes constantly attempts althroughout the narratives (Orientalism 132). Orientalism outlines the importance of pilgrimages to the Orient to the Eurocentric imperialists. Said observes, "... A pilgrimage to the Orient has involved not only the penetration of the Orient by an imperious consciousness but also the virtual elimination of Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 59 that consciousness as a result of its accession to a kind of impersonal and continental control over the Orient" (179). Holmes's Afro-Asian tour covering Tibet, Persia, Mecca and BQiartoum in "The Adventure of the Empty House" therefore exemplifies Doyle's another attempt at gaining control of the eastem colonies (Doyle, The Complete 544). It is important that Doyle never makes his detective deal with an Oriental woman. To Western litterateurs like Doyle and Kipling, the Oriental women express "express unlimited sensuality... [because].. .they are more or less stopid, and above all they are willing" (Said, Orientalism 207). The Orient being a region for "untiring sensuahty, unlimited desire and deep generative energies" (Orientalism 188), and "the association between the Orient and sex...[being]...remarkably persistent" (309), Doyle eschews indulging in fantasies about Oriental women, unlike what Gustave Flaubert in Flaubert in Egypt (Orientalism 187). Moreover, he conformed to the codes of Victorian prudery, exhibited, like a common European, the subconscious fear of being seduced by natives, and was always cautious about projecting Britain as a country precise about maintaining its etiquette. To Said, "Orientalism is a male province", and that disallows Hohnes from being accompanied by or dealing with any female during his adventures against the Easterners or those associated with them (Orientalism 207). The Orientalist investigator actually remains a bachelor until 'The Adventure of the Shoscombe Old Place", the last story of the canon. Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 60 The Oriental women are ftirther banished in the context that even the Easterners like Tonga, Mahomet Singh and Abdullah Khan do not possess any female counterpart. On the other hand, Frantz Fanon explains that the White European collective cultural unconscious has made the colonised Orientals the symbol of both sexual potency and evil, and that the sexual favours of White women bestow the Eastern subaltern a form of recognition (Wyrick 48-9). hi Black Skin, White Masks, he writes: "When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp White civilization and dignity and make them mine" (63). It was, therefore, necessary for Doyle to keep White women a 'safe distance' away from the Easterners. That is why Julia and Helen Stoner are, in spite of their step-father Dr. Grimesby Roylott's Oriental obsession, brought back to England when they reach marriageable age in 'The Advenmre of the Speckled Band". It is to ensure protection of the European women from the Easterners that Doyle does not give any pro-active role to them in his Sherlock Hoknes narratives. Said notes that in the early-twentieth century Orientalism delivered the Orient to the West by "translating, sympathetically portraying, inwardly grasping" the obscure, barely-intelligible Oriental civilization, and he describes the relationship between an Orientalist and the Orient as "hermeneutical" {Orientalism 222). The European approach to the East is identifiably "schizophrenic" and "eccentric" {Orientalism 102) - an attempt to deform the East (273). In the thirty four Sherlock Holmes stories published between 1901 and 1927, beginning with The Hound of the Baskervilles and continuing up to "The Adventure of the Shoscombe Old Place", Doyle tries to come at terms with the "chameleon-like quality" and "sublimity" of the Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 61 Easterners (Said, Orientalism 119) by explaining the Oriental "civilizations, religious dynasties, cultures...[and]...mentalities" as academic objects (222). His unmannerly Orientals like Tonga and Achmet are "simply the old Orientalist stereotypes dressed up in policy jargon" (Orientalism 321). Said, in Culture and Imperialism, has further gone on to describe culture as a kind of "kind of theatre where various political and ideological causes engage one anothef (xiv). The link between the British literary canon and its attendant culture requires special investigation. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin describe "literary canon" as "...not a body of texts per se, but rather a set of reading practices" and "reading practices" as "the enactment of innumerable individual and community assumptions, for example about genre, about literature and even about writing..." (The Empire 189). Said observes, "Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic" (Culture xxix). It is precisely because of its heterogeneous namre that the defmition of culture becomes even more complicated and its territory more extended. The link between different detective canons, for example, that of Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Father Brown, and its attendant imperialist culture therefore exists but in complicated intertwining. Doyle's conception of the Orientalist investigator at the end of the nineteenth century conforms to Said's observation that "by the end of the nineteenth century the empire is no longer merely a shadowy presence but in the works of Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 62 writers like Conrad, Kipling, Gide ...Loti [and Doyle], a central area of concern" (Culture, xviii). The definitions of imperialism and colonialism are identifiably intermingled in the Sherlock Hohnes stories (Culture 8). The White European investigator Holmes advocates the British occupation and rule of the South Asian and African countries while being ensconced in the imperial centre of London. The amalgamation of imperialism and colonialism in the social as well as literary context between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in the creation of a "socially desirable, empowered space in metropolitan England... [which was] connected by design, motive and development to distant or peripheral worlds...conceived of as desirable but subordinate..." (Culture 61). Westem powers like Britain allowed their metropolises to acquire and accumulate territory and subjects on a very fast scale, and Said notes that by 1914 "Europe had a grand total of roughly 85 per cent of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions and commonwealths" (Culture 6). Doyle's Holmes-narratives reflect the writer's satisfaction with the power of English imperialism in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Said notes that in the 1960s Jean-Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault have described a "striking new lack of faith in...the great legitimising narratives of emancipation [of the colonised] and enlightenment [of the comparatively unsophisticated colonised through Westem science, philosophy and literature]" practiced by such authors as Doyle, Kipling and Conrad (Culture 29). Holmes Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 63 is attracted to the Orient not only for the apparently criminal characteristic features of the Orientals, but also because he wants to make them knowledgeable through his own Orientalist knowledge, thus putting up a facade of Oriental liberation. The picture of the Orient in general and of India in particular that emerges out of the Sherlock Holmes stories such as The Sign of Four and 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man" "exists in a deeply antithetical relationship with the development of the movement for Indian independence" such as the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 (Culture 36). The self-definition of the cultures of the natives is suppressed in Doyle's detective stories. Tonga and Mahomet Singh in The Sign of Four and Daulat Ras in 'The Advenmre of the Three Students" possess no clearly demarcated self-defining culture. The assertion of their identity is prevented because such an assertion "can mobilise atavistically, throwing people back to an earlier imperial time when the West and its opponents championed and even embodied virtues designed not as virtues so to speak but for wai '̂ (Culture 42). The conception and construction of Doyle's Orientalist texts was a contemporary Western necessity because of the development of dominant discourses and disciplinary traditions in the canon of modem intellectual history - the intellectual identifiable with the knowledgeable Whites (Culture 47). In Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989), Gauri Viswanathan locates the political origin of such English studies and discourses as Doyle's in the system of colonial education imposed on the natives in nineteenth century India. Ideas of the necessity of discipline for and its maintenance by the White youths explored in the very British Sherlock Holmes stories was first created by the colonial Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 64 administrators "for the ideological pacification and reformation of a potentially rebellious Indian population" (Culture 48). The Holmes narratives can, therefore, be identified to have had been conceived for dominating and disciplining primarily the Oriental colonised people. Such classics as Doyle's stories were extremely Eurocentric, and, according to Said, exuded "narrow, often strident nationalism" on the part of the author (Culture 51). Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak's assertion that the subaltern in Western discourses cannot speak has also been reaffirmed by Said: "Without significant exception the universalising discourses of modem Europe ... assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world. There is incorporation; there is inclusion; there is direct mle; there is coercion. But there is only infrequently an acknowledgement that the colonised people should be heard from, their ideas known" (Culture 58). He characterises the Westem culture and literature as ongoing contests "between north and south, metropolis and periphery, white and native" (Culture 59). They have been identified to carry an unequal relationship of force between the sophisticated, privileged Westerners and the "primitive...weaker and less developed non-European, non-Westem person" (Culture 65). hi Doyle's detective fiction the colonised, particularly those fi-om south-eastern Asia like Tonga of The Sign of Four or the Sumatran coolies of "The Advenmre of the Dying Detective" are silent in the sense that they do not utter a single word all throughout the various references given to them in the said stories, and are Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 65 technically unsophisticated. Their silence is assumed by Doyle who does not want any voice of dissent against his apparently omnipotent and omniscient private investigator, least from an Oriental. The tirst Holmes narrative, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887 and might be included as a British text written during the age of empire which Said identifies as beginning around 1878 (Culture 68). Under the rules of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and Edward VH (1901-1910), Britain regarded itself as the most powerful academic, military and economic imperial centre. Under such "authority of the [Western] observer and of European geographical centrality", the colonised native was reduced to occupy "a secondary racial, cultural, ontological status" (Culture 70). The Westem fantasy of centrality and superiority of British culture was sustained by their obliterations of native cultures. Said's observation on the assumed centrality of British power, juxtaposed with Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin's canon moulded by "reading practices" which include "community assumptions", suggests that to privilege its own imperial and colonial stams, the British culture would readily accept texts affirming its imperial centrality and primacy (The Empire 189). Naturally Doyle's Sherlock Holmes narratives gained unprecedented popularity soon after their first publication. Said points out the gist of Holmes narratives when he argues that the British imperial culture encouraged "canonical inclusion and exclusion" (Culture 70). The identification of the unspoken subjects, that is, the marginalised, distorted representations of the colonised and their culture in texts accepted Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 66 by the contemporary British colonial culture would be the initial step in identifying, and thereafter questioning the canon and canonical texts such as Doyle's as constructs of imperial ideology. Said argues that the critical appraisal and reappraisal of such texts: "entail...reading the canon as a polyphonic accompaniment to the expansion of Europe, giving a revised direction and valence to such writers as Conrad...Kipling [and Doyle] who have always been read as sports, not as writers whose manifestly imperialist subject matter has a long subterranean or implicit and proleptic life... [in the works of previous generation of writers]" (Culture 71). He has detected the presence of imperial ideology in the works of writers including Spencer, Defoe, Austen (Culture 71) and Doyle (181). Said has also underscored the power of novels and short stories by imperial litterateurs such as Kipling and Doyle in upholding the imperial ideology. In the "incorporative, quasi-encyclopaedic cultural form" of such writings are packed "a highly regulated plot mechanism and an entire system of social reference that depends on the existing institution of bourgeois society, their authority and power" (Culture 84). A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, for example, are picmres of reality at the very early or very late stages in readers' experience, and the inherited reality from other such novels are rearticulated and repopulated according to their creator's situation, gifts and predilections (Culture 88). The Sherlock Holmes texts naturally inherit the Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 67 ideology of colonialism from the pre-Doyle litterateurs such as Austen, Dickens, Flaubert or Chateaubriand, hi them Doyle rearticulates his own Orientalist observations and asserts his conception of Britain as the colonial locus and superior in fields of culture, education, etiquette, social security and investigative sciences to other imperial powers like France and Germany. According to Said, the novels written by the British authors incorporate within themselves an overwhelming concem with power and "participate in.. .and.. .contribute to an extremely slow, infinitesimal politics that clarifies, reinforces, perhaps even occasionally advances perceptions and attitudes about England and the world" (Culture 89). He terms it as the novel's "consolidation of authority" (92). The time Doyle published his second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four, a number of options, all premised upon the subordination and victimisation of the Eastern natives, had been made available to the Europeans. That included delight in the usage of power to rule the natives and secure profit from distant territories through voyages, trade, annexation and learned expedition and exhibitions, "an ideological rationale for reducing [and] reconstituting the native as someone to be mled and managed", the security of the situation that allows the conquerors to overlook the violence perpetrated by themselves and the process "by which, after the natives have been displaced fi"om their historic location on their land, their history is rewritten as a ftmction of the imperial one" (Culture 158-9). While narrating the biographical history of Jonathan Small in The Sign of Four and Henry Wood in 'The Advenmre of the Crooked Man", Doyle identifiably chooses to execute the last option for subordinating the Oriental natives. Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 68 It is also significant that in such stories as The Sign of Four and 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man", Doyle repeatedly and obsessively alludes to the Indian Sepoy Mutiny that started on 10 May 1857 at Meerut. Said identifies the Mutiny as the "single most important, well known and violent episode of the nineteenth-century Anglo-hidian relationship" (Culturelll). The English litterateurs like Doyle and Christopher Hibbert cited the instance of the rebellion to demand the subjugation of Indians by the "higher civilization of European Britain" {Culture 177). Edward Thompson, in The Other Side of the Medal (1925) singled out the Mutiny as the "great symbolic event by which the two sides, Indian and British, achieved their Ml and conscious opposition to each other...The Mutiny, in short, reinforced the difference between the coloniser and colonised" {Culture 177-8). Said reasons that, "to be British [during and after the Mutiny] meant to feel repugnance and injury - to say nothing of righteous vindication - given the terrible displays of cmelty by 'natives', who fulfilled the roles of savages cast for them" {Culture 178). Doyle, while portraying the violence and annihilations perpetrated by the "savage" Indian Sepoys in The Sign of Four, has identifies himself as a conforming British imperialist. That is also the reason why Patrick Brantlinger could detect that "the mid to late Victorian fiction...[written in Enghsh in England].. .contained an immense amount of writing about the Indian Mutiny" (205). The two aspects that Doyle had written the Sherlock Holmes stories first in the English language, and second, in Britain, are also important to account for his imperial approach. In his The Nigger Question Thomas Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 69 Carlyle advocates a language of total generality that is "anchored in unshakable certainties about the essence of races, peoples, cultures, all of which need little elucidation because they are familiar to his audience" (Said, Culture 123). Said observes that Carlyle thus speaks a "lingua franca for metropolitan Britain: global, comprehensive, and with so vast a social authority as to be accessible to any one speaking to and about the nation" {Culture 123). This lingua franca, which Doyle also invokes in his Sherlock Holmes texts, locates England at the focal point of "a world also presided over by its power, illuminated by its ideas and culture, kept productive by the attitudes of its moral teachers, artists, legislators" {Culture 123). Written by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay (1899-1970), the Byomkesh Bakshi stories, on the other hand, are postcolonial in the sense that the Indian author hails from an Eastem country "colonised by Britain" and in his narratives and exudes "a concern only with the national...[that is, Indian]... culture...[during and]...after the departure of the...[British]... imperial power" (Ashcroft, et al.. The Empire 1). hi his sleuth stories, admittedly influenced by Doyle, Chesterton and Christie who begun their respective sleuth stories on Holmes, Father Brown and Poirot in 1887, 1911 and 1920, Bandyopadhyay rewrites the canonical stories of detective fiction {Saradindu 11 646). He protests against the othering of primarily the Eastem populace in the imperially-compatible detective narratives of the White Westerners by assuming for himself and his detective an authority, voice and control of the voice, hi context of Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffm's defmition, Bandyopadhyay's Byomkesh Bakshi stories might be identified as instances of the subaltern litterateur's writing "back to the centre of Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 70 the...[British]...Empire" (The Empire 97). A section of the national literature - an essentiality, according to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, for the "whole enterprise of postcolonial studies" (The Empire 17), was built up by Bandyopadhyay based especially on two facts. First, the British settlers in India had built their capital at Calcutta that became a reflection of the imperial metropolitan centre of London, and second, since the Bengal Renaissance of the 1820s to 1840s, the predominant literature in British India was that of Bengali and the British definition of "intelligentsia" catered almost exclusively to the people of Bengal while every important colonial activity was executed at and from Bengal. Byomkesh Bakshi not only belongs to the Bengah middle class, but also incorporates within himself almost every tradition of the Indian family life, thus catering to the postcolonial clause that "the study of national tradition is the first and most vital stage of the process of rejecting the claims of the Centre to exclusivity" (Ashcroft, et al.. The Empire 17). Bakshi does not possess any superhuman strength, unnatural intelhgence or potency. He also does not claim uniqueness for his profession, unlike Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four (Doyle, The Complete 54). With the exception of "Shaiylo Rahoshyo", no Byomkesh Bakshi narrative deals with supematural incidents, and the canon eschews melodrama, violent bloodshed, mystic sages and cannibalistic natives. Bandyopadhyay thus annuls the Western (mis)representation of the Oriental Empire, particularly India, as the "site of the exotic, of adventure and exploitation" (Ashcroft, et al., The Empire 19). Moreover, the Moroccan explorer Muhammad Ibn Battutah (1304-C.1369), who visited Bengal in 1346, referred to Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 71 the region as "moisture laden...[and]...amply-treasured hell" and accentuated its perceived exoticness by detailing on his purchases of "one concubine for one ashura [or gold coin], and the young boy Lulu for two ashura-s" in his RJhlah (Mukhopadhyay, Bangla 490-1). By writing his detective fiction as an Indian in Bengali, Bandyopadhyay nullifies any such distorted representation as mentioned above and creates a postcolonial venue for a "study of the effects of colonialism in and between English...{thdl is, the postcolonial writings in English]...and writing in indigenous language" including BengaU (Ashcroft, et al.. The Empire 24). Because he was an Indian colonised on his own territory, the author was "not forced to adapt to different landscape and climate", but according to D.E.S Maxwell in "Landscape and Theme" (1965), had his "own ancient and sophisticated responses" to himself "marginalised by the world view which was implicated in the acquisition of English" {The Empire 25). Significantly, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay does not directly oppose the British domination of India in the ten stories published before the Indian independence in 1947, which would have otherwise been confiscated on charges of sedition. As a lawyer who had practised in British-Indian courts, the author was understandably forced to resist the imperialists through cultural and literary collusion rather than colliding with them. However, in the stories written after the Indian independence and especially in "Aadim Ripu", he celebrates the united and individual Indian struggle for independence and in context of Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin's observations on "thematic parallels", becomes a postcolonial litterateur and critic (The Empire 27). Detective Stories: a Post colonial Critique 72 The Australian postcolonialists further note that the theme of "construction.. .of houses as buildings in postcolonial location is a recurring and evocative