Colonial Modernity, Crime and Detective Fiction: A Survey of Indian Detective Fiction

Abstract

The paper explores how modern rationality encouraged the development of Indian detective fiction as a genre by tracing the history of detective fiction from the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century when Saradindu Bandyopadhyay wrote the Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries. The study takes detective fiction to study Bengali Bhadralok as a byproduct of the symbiotic relationship with British colonialism. It argues that the modernity India/Bengal acquired is colonial modernity. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, every sphere of life in Bengal became modified by the wave of modernity, witnessing a transition in the domestic sphere and the world outside, which witnessed a change in the form of crime from pre-colonial times to the post-independence period. The Bhadralok are a part and parcel of the modernity of Bengal that came in the form of the Bengal Renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century. The study attempts to understand the ambivalence of colonial modernity. The production of culture by a particular socio-economic group is hybridized when it comes in contact with a dominant group. The paper scrutinizes the influence of modern rationality on the literary production of detective fiction. It will also trace the development of the detective genre published by the newly established publishing houses. As modernity affects more than any single aspect of human life, multiple effects have resulted from Bengal’s engagement with modernity through British hegemonic intervention.