Clues, culprits, and cultural crossovers: Indian detective fiction is entering the mainstream

Detective fiction writers now weave captivating tales that blend mystery, social commentary, and local flavours into page-turning bestsellers.

My interest in detective fiction germinated fairly early in the 1970s, with Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven, moving forward to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators, and eventually the works of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Most of us young readers in India were not especially attuned to the stereotypes that marred some of these stories, especially in Blyton and even in Doyle. Comic book detectives like Chacha Chaudhary (with Sabu, his sidekick from Jupiter) were as far as one went with reference to the Indian scene then. Later, the films of Satyajit Ray introduced me to his character Feluda through Soumitra Chatterjee’s memorable personification of Ray’s ace sleuth; I read many detective stories by Ray in translation. Byomkesh Bakshi became part of the cultural landscape after Basu Chatterjee’s adaptation of Sharadindu Bandopadhyay’s stories for Doordarshan, with Rajit Kapur and K.K. Raina taking on the roles of Byomkesh babu and his sidekick, Ajit babu.

LISTEN: From its colonial roots to its emergence as a powerful lens highlighting societal injustices, contemporary authors have masterfully blended mystery, cultural nuances, and genre-bending narratives, propelling Indian detective fiction a long way.

However, curiosity about Indian and subcontinental detective fiction was really stimulated after I began to teach the genre at Hindu College, Delhi. While detective fiction was part of the BA English Hons syllabus at Delhi University (DU) in my time, Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the only representative text in the paper on Forms of Popular Fiction, besides Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s innovative Chronicle of a Death Foretold in a paper on Contemporary Literature. (This major gap has since been remedied with Madhulika Liddle’s Crimson City and Ibn-e Safi’s The House of Fear being included, after syllabus revision at DU.)

Evolution of Indian detective fiction

It was certainly a challenge to engage with Golden Age detective fiction and with Christie’s rule-breaking novel in particular as well as Marquez’s subversive gem, especially in the context of the debates with respect to the literary canon and the definitions of literary and popular fiction, while exploring other variants such as American hard-boiled thrillers and Scandinavian detective fiction. However, I soon began to feel the need for sustained engagement with the evolution of the form in the Indian context. As a teacher I would try and bring in references to exemplars from the subcontinent in class, which led up to an exploration of the archive and of contemporary writing from South Asia.

As Shampa Roy shows in her book, Gender and Criminality in Bangla Crime Narratives: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (2017), the popularity of goyenda (detective) fiction in magazines and novels in late 19th century Bengal had much to do with the advent of colonial modernity and the Anglicisation of the elite. While translations from English and French sources introduced the form to the bhadralok, adaptations with familiar plots in new settings allowed for an indigenisation of detective fiction in Bengal as perhaps nowhere else in the country.

A still from the Netflix adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games where the central character, the troubled police officer Sartaj Singh, was played by Saif Ali Khan. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Modernisation and Westernisation had this dual effect across India. Western models were translated and adapted, along with hybridisation of the form (and the induction of local elements), in Francesca Orsini’s account of the evolution of Hindi jasusi (detective) fiction. As Orsini demonstrates, elements from dastans (tales), such as the figure of the ayyar (spy or trickster), were incorporated into the Urdu and Hindi jasusi narratives without magic and with more emphasis on deduction (in Orsini’s Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India, 2009).

Highlights

• There is a need for sustained engagement with the evolution of the form of detective fiction in the Indian context. Western models were translated, adapted, and hybridised in Hindi jasusi (detective) fiction
• The masculinist assumptions underpinning the genre in the West, and in 19th century India, were interrogated in the wake of the rise of feminist consciousness
• Contemporary detective fiction serves as a means of highlighting the injustices of of society

Some of the earliest detective fiction in Tamil was written by women, creating a space later extended and claimed by Ambai. The role of translators and editors of magazines who encouraged adaptation, synthesis, and localisation was undoubtedly crucial. As Laura Brueck and Orsini point out in the essay “South Asian crime fiction” (in The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction), Vai. Mu. Kothainayaki Ammal (1901-60) was the first detective novelist writing in Tamil, as early as the 1930s, while in English, the novel Detective Janaki by Kamala Satthianadhan was serialised in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1933-34.

Some of the earliest detective fiction in Tamil was written by women, creating a space later extended and claimed by Ambai. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

The masculinist assumptions underpinning the genre in the West, and in 19th century India, were further interrogated in the wake of the rise of feminist consciousness and the different waves of the women’s movement in India. Some writers working in English situated their amateur women detective figures in historical times, while others created women detectives negotiating present-day settings, whether as amateurs or as professionals, often reflecting real-world changes in the constitution of the police force in India.

Classic detective stories

It was important to keep this complex history of the form in mind when I brought together the stories as editor of The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction (Volumes 1 and 2). While I included some classic stories of the earlier era, with translations of archival stories by Sharatchandra Sarkar and Rabindranath Tagore (his parody of the form in “Detective”, from 1898), as well as selected reprints of stories by Sharadindu Bandopadhyay, Ray, Tamilvanan, and Vikram Chandra, the effort was also to reach out to contemporary authors for fresh work. Thus, an invitation was circulated among both well-established and upcoming authors and translators to submit offbeat detective stories with a recognisable Indian dimension. The idea was to pose an intellectual challenge, with suitable modifications of the clue puzzle structure of Golden Age detective fiction, besides incorporating social critique as in Ambai’s collection A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge and Vikram Chandra’s story “Kama” and novel Sacred Games.

The invitation created space for experimental and parodic stories as well as hybrid forms. In this context, the setting was absolutely crucial, as a way of generating the ambience of the detective story. Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chennai have been the coastal crucibles where tradition and modernity found their respective points of balance in detective stories. Calcutta was the preferred locale for many goyenda stories, reaching a high point in the work of Sharadindu Bandopadhyay and Satyajit Ray and, subsequently, many more. In several stories the city of Mumbai/Bombay assumes a definite character, as the venue both for unbridled aspirations and the inexorable fall as dreams are shattered with the onslaught of grim reality.

In particular, Ambai’s detective stories set in Mumbai are layered examples of cosmopolitanism with vernacular roots, as she unpacks the form in order to examine the labyrinth of metropolitan existence, often from varied subaltern perspectives. Simultaneously, the hinterland has also become the locale of heinous crimes and investigations, given the impact of lopsided development paradigms.

Blurring the lines

As submissions came in and selections were made, the stories were grouped in five sections. Stories featuring Sherlock Holmes style-amateur detectives, albeit with Indian moorings, are in Volume 1. This is followed by a section on experimental and parodic detective fiction. Stories blurring the lines between detective fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, and the existential thriller round off this volume. Volume 2 begins with a section on police procedurals, with policemen or women as protagonists. A section of historical mysteries concludes the second volume: here we find detectives from earlier periods solving crimes long before the advent of forensics and DNA testing.

A promotional for the two volumes of Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

The diversity of the new kind of writing now coming to the fore, whether in the regional context (in translation from Tamil and Bengali) or in English became apparent. The genre seems to be thriving, as the detective assumes centre stage as a mediator of ethical and social dilemmas. The detective story has become, in the best of the recent work, a lens through which the manifold injustices of Indian and subcontinental society can be illuminated.

As a mode of fictive testimony, the form bears witness to the continuing imperfections of the institutionalised system of law and order, as well as to the traumatic residue of past injustices (such as the collective violence during Partition and its afterlife). The scar tissue of prior historical trauma is bared here even as authors attempt to uncover the basis for the loss of faith in judicial processes and to unmask the pervasive working of power structures that seek to silence marginalised sections of society.

Earlier, I had made a foray into editing sci-fi (The Gollancz Books of South Asian Science Fiction, Volume 1 and 2 were the upshot). As I see it, both science fiction and detective fiction remain niche subgenres, though detective and crime fiction are possibly emerging into the mainstream to a greater extent. The braiding together of forms as writers reflect on crimes not only of the present, but also of the future is a sign that sci-fi and detective fiction need not be seen as watertight compartments. Such hybridisation is an indication of the porosity of boundaries and the vitality of such popular forms even as they continue to be reinvented.

Tarun K. Saint is an independent scholar and anthologist, who has most recently edited the two-volume The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction (2024). This essay draws on the Introduction to the volumes.