East-West

I grew up reading Bengali detective fiction by Satyajit Ray and Saradindu Banerjee. Even today, Ray’s crime-solver par excellence, Feluda, a.k.a. Mr. Pradosh Mitter, and Banerjee’s wily detective Byomkesh Bakshi, are household names in (literate) Kolkata.

While both Feluda and Byomkesh Bakshi were as Bengali as tomato diye dimmer jhaal, neither Ray nor Banerjee laid any claims to being the creators of original fictional paradigms in this particular genre.

Ray was happy to see Feluda as a Bengali descendant of Sherlock Holmes. Likewise, Byomkesh Bakshi wasn’t conflicted about borrowing the crime-solving methods of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Father Brown.

In other words, neither Ray nor Banerjee nor the Bengali-reading public of their time found the idea of accepting Bengali-Indian detectives as local adaptations of the more globally-renowned English detectives, problematic or unnatural.

Today, it is different. Listen to what Vish Puri, the private eye in Tarquin Hall’s new detective novel "The Case of the Missing Servant" has to say about Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes, reflects Puri, is a Johnny-come-lately, an upstart who allegedly stole many of his crime-solving methods from an Indian named Chanakya, who served as prime minister in the royal court of emperor Chandra Gupta Maurya in 300 B.C. and believed to be the world’s first spymaster and founder of espionage.

Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, is displaced from his iconic status as the greatest fictional detective ever, and relegated to the status of a second-rate pilferer. At a glance, this appears to be a novelist’s whimsical reordering of reality in the realm of fiction. But it’s a bit more serious than that. The implications of what Puri says about the relationship between Holmes and Chanakya, is political as well.

Back in the days when I was a young adolescent in Kolkata, Dev Anand, the famous Hindi film hero of the between 1960s and 1980s, was regarded as a second-rate Gregory Peck, who aped Peck’s style. There was also Raj Kapoor and his on screen persona of the ‘lovable tramp’ that was a carbon copy of Charles Chaplin.

Even Chanakya, was fed back to us as the "Indian Machiavelli." Back then, few would have even entertained the idea of contesting, howsoever fictionally, the notion that everything originated in the West and then, spread elsewhere. It never occurred to us to say, even in jest, that a Gregory Peck or a Charles Chaplin stole their acting art from a Guru Dutt or a Dada Saheb Phalke.

Today, the conditions for the creation of narratives where history can be rewritten exist in South Asia. Following in the (hopefully, successful) footsteps of "The Case of the Missing Servant," we’ll have fiction where we’ll be told with zestful impunity that Galileo stole his ideas from the Aryabhatta (ancient Indian scientist) or that Aristotle plagiarized Gangesa (5th century B.C. grammarian), the or that Schubert is indebted to Surdas (medieval composer).

I look forward to the day when Machiavelli is reintroduced in the West as an "Italian Chanakya."