Even today, Sherlock Holmes continues to be hugely popular in India, and particularly in Bengal - the Bengali translation of Sherlock Holmes are best sellers in their own right. In fact, a couple of years back a book called “Holmesnama” written Kaushik Mazumdar was launched became very popular as well. It is essentially a complete companion for Sherlock Holmes written in Bengali.
Holmes is not really my ‘homie’
I was introduced to Sherlock Holmes through Moby Books abridged illustrated classics. Moby Books were my introduction to the classics and were the usual reward for acing the ‘unit tests’ (i.e. scoring 20/20) that were held on Fridays.During my high school days, we also studied ‘The Hound of the Baskerville’ as prose text book. I must confess that these are the only 4 stories I have actually read.
I remember my late Mama had the complete collection, and he and Mami used to be huge fans of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series, but I never got around to reading the books. However I have recently watched most of the Jeremy Brett adaptations on iTV. It’s a pity Brett couldn’t complete all the stories as he’s very good in the first 6 seasons. Like Soumitra Chatterjee was the personification of Feluda, it is without doubt the the actor who brought Holmes to life on screen was Jeremy Brett. But I do have a gripe about the Victorian era Sherlock Holmes series in general - more about that at the backend of this this post.
I have also been a fan of the clever, slick reboot in BBC ‘Sherlock’ starring Benedict Cumberbatch but I couldn’t get through ‘Elementary’ though the premise was interesting (Sherlock Holmes in contemporary New York ably accompanied by Jane Watson players by Lucy Liu) it was just boring.
In summary, for me Sherlock Holmes will always be my beloved Feluda’s guru. A relationship twice removed.
Sherlock’s Indian connections
It gives me an inexplicable pleasure to spot the Indian elements in the stories by famous foreign authors… perhaps it is a need for a validation of my ‘Indianess’, I’m not sure. More specifically, I like to find a Calcutta connection, if any, in Tintin, Asterix, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, etc. (Click on this link that gives a very good overview of the Indian connections.)
While Sherlock never visited Calcutta in any of the Arthur Conan Doyle adventures, there are several Indian elements in the series. These include:
- The doped mutton curry in ‘The Silver Blaze’
- In ‘The Adventure of the Three Students’ one suspect is “a quiet, inscrutable fellow; as most of those Indians are”
- The novel ‘The Sign of the Four’ has a complex plot involving service in East India Company, the 1857 Uprising, a stolen treasure, and a secret pact among four convicts and two corrupt prison guards at a prison in Andaman islands.
- In ‘The Crooked Man’ in the Indian Uprising (viewed as the Sepoy Mutiny by the British) of 1857 plays a pivotal role and the suspect is a British soldier who is captured by rebels and kept as a slave in Darjeeling. After escaping from their clutches he learns conjuring tricks from Punjabis before returning to Britain as a queer sideshow attraction.
- The only Calcutta connection in the Arthur Conan Doyle series is in ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ — Doyle’s own favourite plot — the murder weapon turns out to be an extremely deadly Bengali swamp-adder trained to kill. Although quite unscientific (Bengal never exported swamp-adders to be used by Western murderers simply because there are no swamp-adders in India), the corrupting influences of colonialism loomed large: the culprit, if you recall, turns out to be a Calcutta-returned brutish British self-taught snake charmer. Illustration below from my beloved Moby Books version
It is a well-known fact that Doctor Watson, Holmes’ trusted companion and chronicler, had partaken in the Afghan campaigns. But the one remarkable journey that Holmes himself undertook in his fictional life, and which is the most fascinatingly alluring aspect of his myth, is his purported trip to India. I hear your doubts — and yes, there’s no story by Doyle that tells us of his adventures hereabouts. But clues in the compiled Sherlockiana hint at an Indian sojourn. Holmes drowned in the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland as a result of a mortal battle with the Napoleon of crime, Professor Moriarty; this was a ruse Doyle used at a time when he felt that writing detective stories was distracting him from more important work (he was into fairies and spiritualism).
Due to the public outcry at Holmes’ death, Doyle resurrected him a few years later and upon returning to London, the detective shrugs off his absence by casually mentioning that he had disguised himself as a Norwegian who hung out with the Dalai Lama! Says Holmes, “I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa and spending some days with the head Llama.” He simply faked his own death in order to hoodwink his enemies and went on a spiritual world tour that, apparently, also took him to Mecca — which was probably something of a dream itinerary for the spiritualistic Doyle himself.
Indian writers of Holmes pastiches bring Sherlock home
Several Indian writers have taken up the challenge to rewrite Holmes’ adventures from an Indian point of view. These include:
- Partha Basu’s ‘The Curious Case of 221B: The Secret Notebooks of John H Watson, MD’, looks at Holmes from a subaltern perspective (here Watson provides us with the real facts behind the published cases)
- Vithal Rajan’s ‘Holmes of the Raj’ spoofs the Orientalist fiction genre. In this pastiche, Holmes is dispatched on a confidential mission to India, where he makes the acquaintance of the virtual who’s who of colonial days, including Motilal Nehru, Tagore, Aurobindo, Kipling, Ronald Ross and Madame Blavatsky
- The prominent Tibetan freedom fighter Jamyang Norbu’s ‘The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes’, won the Crossword fiction award in 2000. It was the above mentioned Tibetan reference by the detective that inspired Norbu, who grew up in exile in India, to write his novel that contains some very evocative episodes set in Bombay about a hundred years ago. To top it all, Holmes teams up in this novel with a fictional spy from Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim! Eventually, the clues of the case lead him to travel up to Tibet, filling in that famous gap that Doyle left open in the larger narrative.
It is through the writing of one such Indian author when Holmes finally visits Calcutta - in Vasudev Murthy’s ‘Sherlock Holmes in Japan: The Missing Years’. Murthy’s novel, like many others, takes advantage of the great hiatus between ‘The Final Problem’ and ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’. The novel has Holmes and Watson arriving in Japan by a circuitous route from Calcutta through Bangkok, Angkor Wat, Hanoi, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
In the book written by Murthy under the pseudonym ‘Akira Yamashita’, Holmes with help from Watson exposes Professor Moriarty’s dastardly plan of world domination. Incidentally by happy coincidence, Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s second in command is formerly of the First Bangalore Pioneers. In Calcutta, Holmes and Watson have dinner at Debnath Chatterjee’s house. “He is modelled on Rabindranath Tagore.”, says Murthy. Dr. Jagdish Chandra Bose also makes a cameo appearance as well. As always Watson is rather stodgy but his love of Bengali sweets makes him endearingly human.
Murthy wrote another book in the series which was set in Timbaktu. Here story tracks the travels of historic characters like Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo traversing China, India and parts of Arabia and Africa, with Sherlock Holmes thrown into the mix.
Doyle’s dodgy views of India dampened my enthusiasm for reading Holmes
I cannot end this post without discussing the difficult topic of Doyle's portrayal of India. This is one of the reasons I could not get myself to read the original works. I do not know if I am being too sensitive but personally I cannot ignore the racist undertones in Holmes. While sympathists may say it was reflective of the time and readers should see it in the context of society at the time, his portrayal of India and Indians undeniably reflects a sense of racial superiority that marked the colonialists’ relationship with their subjects. There are several clear examples that betray these beliefs and views. For instance, in his second Holmes adventure, ‘The Sign of Four’, Jonathan Small, despite being a criminal and subaltern in Britain, dehumanises his Andamanese accomplice Tonga; Small calls Tonga “hell-hound”, “little devil”, “bloodthirsty imp” and parades him at freak shows as “the black cannibal.” Both are underclass, but the sub-text is that the white-skinned Small has the right to dominate the dark-skinned Tonga. This is classic 19th -century race theory translated into fiction. Dr Watson, too, considered Tonga a mass of black -- “like a Newfoundland dog”. Read this excellent academic paper that delves more into this topic.
Vilification of Indians continues with many of his famous criminals having connections to India. Jonathan Small (‘The Sign of the Four’) lost a leg to a crocodile while swimming the Ganga; he was liberal with the whip and insults at an indigo plantation. Dr Grimesby Roylott (‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’), who smoked Indian cigars and kept the company of gypsies was a doctor with a large practice in Calcutta; he killed his step-daughter with an adder, which the storyline suggests he was able to do because he had access to “exotic animals”. Sebastian Moran (‘The Adventure of the Empty House’), whom Holmes called the ‘second most dangerous man in London’, was a big game hunter and served in the Second Anglo-Afghan war. In short: like many of his Victorian contemporaries, Doyle seemed to believe that Englishmen who had spent time in the Orient had picked up its savage ways and returned home to civilised England as hardened criminals.
In her essay Crime and the Gothic, professor Catherine Spooner peels off other layers regarding Doyle’s views of India. Referring to ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, she says, “Dr Roylott intends to kill Helen by releasing a deadly poisonous swamp adder (the snake appears to be the Indian Cobra but Doyle changed the name), brought back from India, into her room. Following Holmes’ intervention, the snake returns into Roylott’s room and strikes him instead….The snake becomes an instrument of colonial retribution, revisiting on its master not only the violence he intended against his family, but also that perpetrated on the colonial subject, both literal (Roylott beat his Indian butler to death in Calcutta, but escaped being sentenced) and symbolic (the practice of colonialism itself).” That is, colonialism extracts its price one way or the other. But which side Doyle was on is still a question.
Did Doyle redeem himself in real life, though?
Possibly. Arthur Conan Doyle was drawn to investigate just one real-life crime during his lifetime and it involved a British Indian man wrongly accused of a series of mysterious crimes in an English village in the early 20th century. The story of that Indian-origin barrister, George Edalji, has now been dug up in detail and brought to life in a new book by London-based historian-author Shrabani Basu, who chanced upon the mystery and pursued it through archival records and letters over the years. The result is ‘The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji and the case of the foreigner in the English village’.
The story revolves around several threatening letters and the distressing killing and mutilation of animals. It was one of the most famous cases of miscarriage of justice in Edwardian England which was forgotten over time. Conan Doyle, whom George Edalji had turned to for help after being jailed in 1903 for crimes he did not commit, encountered a mystery worthy of his fictional detective. The Sherlock Holmes author meticulously pieced clues together to conclude that George had been the victim of racism for being a “Hindoo” – as all Indians were referred to at the time.
“I think Indian readers will find it interesting that in 1907 Arthur Conan Doyle responded to a letter by a young Indian lawyer appealing to him for help to clear his name, and he took up the cause. Even Jawaharlal Nehru, who was an 18-year-old student at the time in Harrow School in London, got fascinated with the case and remarked that George had no doubt been targeted because he was Indian. What fascinated me was the fact that the only true crime that Arthur Conan Doyle investigated personally was to do with an Indian," said Basu (pictured above).
As the world continues to be intrigued by the ageless Sherlock Holmes, and Bengalis love for goyenda golpo remains evergreen, I am hoping some talented author will set a full Holmes story in Calcutta. Till then enjoy this pastiche by Snehajit Lahiri I found on Facebook. In this story ‘London-e Londobhondo’, Felu Mittir works with his guru on solving a crime in London. Click on the photo below to read it.
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Sources:
- https://www.thehindu.com/books/sherlock-holmes-afterlife-in-india-the-adventure-of-the-drowned-detective/article27330794.ece/amp/
- https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/a-discovery-of-india-via-conan-doyle/story-FGSyS54gGN1sfGm6o9l8oI.html
- https://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/the-other-me/article5145872.ece
- https://www.freepressjournal.in/cmcm/sherlock-holmes-was-a-man-of-the-world-interested-in-absolutely-everything-vasudev-murthy
- https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/new-book-uncovers-indian-mystery-probed-by-sherlock-holmes-author-101614487806557.html
