Using Detective Fiction as a Source

 A question hovered over my head as I worked on Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia: how should I use detective fiction as a source? There was a rich and vibrant world of detective stories in colonial India—in Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, and English, for instance. But unlike my other primary sources, these were fiction... In this 4^th and final guest post for August, I’d like to share some of the ways I got past my initial (disciplinary?) resistance to using fiction as a source. I’m picking up the baton here from Rohit De in his 2020 guest blogposts. 

More after the jump.

I *wanted* to make use of fiction (as an avid novel reader), but there was also external pressure. My book came out in Cornell University Press’ Corpus Juris series, for which the series editor, Liz Anker, is a scholar of law and literature at Cornell. In addition, my second reviewer was also coming from a literature background. Both pushed me to do more with fiction, and this helped me expand my initially very brief references when revising my first draft. Specifically, I found these angles useful: 

(1) Fiction based on a true story: Some of my fictional sources were described by their authors as being based on actual events. One of the earliest collections of detective fiction in Bengali, Darogar Daptar (The Inspector’s Files), falls into this category. The author Priyanath Mukhopadhyay was a former detective who worked for the Calcutta Police for 33 years (1878-1911). His short stories were thinly veiled memoirs, by his own account. Similarly, “Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell (Eric Blair) is regarded as autobiographical, although I believe Orwell was less explicit about this than was Mukhopadhyay. My editor in fact made me move the Orwell piece out of the fiction section of my bibliography and into the primary source section. These kinds of fiction (semi-fiction?) were fairly easy to work with, in other words. I used Orwell on the theme of European colonizers’ sense that they had to uphold British (racial) prestige. I used Mukhopadhyay on the challenge of distinguishing cholera from arsenic poisoning, among other things.

 (2) But what about the stories that were actually fictional? Here I focused on how fiction writers depicted certain kinds of crime in popular culture, rather than trying to argue that these representations necessarily reflected empirical reality. For instance, the association of women with poisoning was a common narrative in popular culture, not just in colonial India but elsewhere too--from ancient Greece to the 20^th-century US (2-minute video on this here).

(3) I also used detective fiction to think about public awareness of particular kinds of forensic science, and here I could confirm that the depictions were consistent with my primary source research. Rare poisons and species-of-origin bloodstain testing featured in the adventures of famous Bengali fictional sleuths Kiriti Roy and Byomkesh Bakshi, for instance. So did the Chemical Examiner’s lab in Calcutta. Part 1 of my book focuses on these fields and institutions. This also led me to Charu Singh’s work on Hindi-language science monthly, Vigyan, that taught readers about forensic science in the 1910s through detective stories.

(4) Relatedly, there were questions about readership and audience. The more I could learn about how these stories were consumed and shared, the stronger my claims about the influence and reach of this fiction. This carried me into the history of print culture, as well as the history of radio and film. Detective stories were enthusiastically consumed through all of these media in colonial India. I was especially excited to discover lectors—professional readers who were hired to read out loud to factory and mill workers in colonial India (and elsewhere). Despite high rates of illiteracy and India’s many languages, I realized that detective fiction was physically loaned, read aloud, and translated orally across tea stalls and meeting places, and thus that these stories were consumed by audiences far beyond the literate public.

Finally, grappling with detective fiction was also useful for teaching. Anwesha Maity translated the Bengali-language Blood-Faced Dragon for me, which was a fast-paced novella combining detective, romance, adventure, and science fiction genres. It also reflected Sino-Indian foreign relations in the mid-20^th century. I refer to this novella in my book, but I also assign it for a jigsaw discussion exercise we do in my "History of Forensic Science" course on detective fiction from around the world (which reminds me of this post from 2019).

 And I must also mention a very fun memoir that I discovered while thinking about detective fiction and history: Agatha Christie’s Come, Tell Me How You Live, which draws fascinating connections between her detective fiction writing and her husband’s work as an archaeologist.

 Detective fiction plays a minor role in my book, but there is much more in the final version than in my initial draft. I’m glad to have been pushed in this way. The relationship also goes the other way, as I’ve been a consultant on detective novels set in historical contexts (see the Perveen Mistry novels by Sujata Massey, who draws extensively on scholarly work).  So while I used detective fiction as a source to reflect on popular culture, I also hope that my work will feed into this genre of popular culture in our own time.

-Mitra Sharafi

[Image: cover of Bengali version of Nihar Ranjan Gupta’s novella, Blood-Faced Dragon (source: Goodreads)]