CRACOW

I N D O LO G I C A L
STUDIES
History and Society
as Depicted in Indian Literature and Art
VOL. XIV Part I. DRŚYA. Visual and Performing Arts

KRAKÓW 2012 JAGIELLONIAN UNIVERSITY

I N S T I T U T E O F O R I E N TA L S T U D I E S
 Technical editor:
Tomasz Winiarski

© Institute of Oriental Studies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow

and the Authors
Department of Indology,
Institute of Oriental Studies, Jagiellonian University
ul. Podwale 7, 31-118 Kraków
[email protected]

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http://www.akademicka.pl/cis

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 Contents

Part. I. Dr̥ śya. Visual and Performing Arts

Introduction
Lidia Sudyka ..................................................................................... V

One man and many women: some notes on the harem in mainly an-
cient and medieval India from sundry perspectives
David Smith ...................................................................................... 1

Adoption, adaptation, transformation: the Mahiṣamardinῑ imagery in

pre-Kuṣāṇa and Kuṣāṇa art
Elena Restelli.................................................................................... 17

Constructing the eternal city of light through history and society: evolution of
the image of Kāśī in the 18th - 20th centuries “picture maps”
Vera Lazzaretti .................................................................................. 35

The Nāṭyaśāstra: the Origin of the Ancient Indian Poetics

Natalia Lidova .................................................................................. 61

The Actor’s Social Status and Agency. Fame or Misery?

Elisa Ganser, Daniele Cuneo ........................................................... 87

Indian Society as Depicted in the Caturbhāṇῑ and in Mahendra-

vikramavarman’s Prahasanas
Klara Gönc Moačanin...................................................................... 133
Nuns involving in the affairs of the world. The depiction of Buddhist
nuns in Bhavabhūti’s Mālatīmādhava
Danielle Feller ................................................................................. 147

The eightfold gymnastics of mind: preliminary report on the idea and

tradition of aṣṭāvadhāna
Lidia Sudyka, Cezary Galewicz........................................................ 169

Caste in the making, dance in the making

Maria Angelillo ................................................................................ 193

The Indian struggle for independence in popular Hindi ilms of last

decade
Tatiana Szurlej .................................................................................. 215

The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker: Towards a Social History of the Ben-

gali Detective
Gautam Chakrabarti ........................................................................ 255

Reviews
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal
World. Studies on Culture and Politics.
Reviewed by Piotr Borek .................................................................. 271
Cracow Indological Studies
vol. XIV (2012)

Gautam Chakrabarti
(Freie Universität Berlin)

The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker:

Towards a Social History of the Bengali Detective1

SUMMARY:1The igure of the socially-engaged detective who transcends his – a high-

ly gendered agency operates here – generically-sanctioned roles as a gloriied intellec-
tual mercenary or “gumshoe”2, solver of conundrums and “tangled skeins”3, champion
of the rule-of-law and keeper of the last resort, while attempting to uphold a universe
of moral and ethical values that, simultaneously, do not stray too far from the high road
of societal and political acceptability, is a igure to conjure within the literary history of
Bengal in the twentieth century. In the present essay, the attempt will be made to study,
through a comparativist’s prism, this gravitas, endowed by society, which is associated
with the image of the successful private investigator in Bengal; often, his is a voice
striking a blow for the spirit of rational enquiry, as with Feluda, and, in other cases,
he upholds the dignity of the traditional order/s, while exposing its/their soft under-
belly of moral corruption and criminal collusion, as with Byomkesh Bakshi.

1
All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are by the present author.
2
A somewhat dismissive American slang for, initially, a police detec-
tive and, thereafter, his private counterpart; one of the most famous ilm-noir
gumshoes was Sam Spade, notably in the ilm The Maltese Falcon (1941),
whose footprints can be traced to Satyajit Ray’s Feluda.
3
A recent audio-drama, using the main characters of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, is called “The Tangled
Skein”; http://www.biginish.com/releases/v/the-tangled-skein-20.
256 Gautam Chakrabarti

KEYWORDS: Bhadralok, Raj, detective, Calcutta, Bengali, Feluda, Byomkesh Bak-

shi, Anglophilia, crime iction, Dr. Dilip Chaudhuri, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chat-
terjee, Ashis Nandy, Bruno Latour, Occidentalism, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit,
Alastair Bonnett

The role of the Bhadralok4 in crystallizing and articulating pre- and

post-Independence Indian societal and cultural developments and
aspirations cannot be gainsaid: viewed as a class, the Calcutta-based
and Raj-educated Bhadralok located themselves in an arc of anglo-
philiac leisure, despite their well-entrenched and, more often than not,
radical opposition to British colonialism. Thus, despite the occasion-
ally aggressive manifestation of anti-British sentiments and political
and ideological posturing, the early-twentieth-century Indian, espe-
cially Bengali, intelligentsia remained an avid consumer of socio-
cultural Anglophilia. This was not only limited to the consumption
of Anglo-European canonical literature but extended to the domains
of popular culture, cuisine, modes of socialisation, intellectual pri-
orities, political and cultural organisation, sports and recreation and
even social and religious reform; in the early Bengali detective ilms,
such as, for example, Hānā Bāḍi (“The Haunted House”, 1952) and
Cupi Cupi Āśe (“He Comes in Stealth”, 1960), the detectives not only
dress in pucca śāhebi (perfect western) attire, down to their starched
waistcoats, but also mirror the mannerisms of their Anglo-European
archetypes, down to the patent leather shoes and the pipes. In some
cases, however, the detective sports a much less westernised look and
is, indeed, rather a level-headed dhoti5-clad bourgeois Bengali gentle-
man, who is rooted in his time but is keenly aware of the societal and
political fault-lines that inform his context; the most famous example

4
A term (literally, “civilised people”) used, till quite recently, to denote
the Bengali middle classes, which cultivated a speciic aura of eclectic cultural
and intellectual tastes, despite their social conservatism; often, this leisured
urbane sophistication was bought by economic pelf.
5
A one-piece traditional attire, wrapped around the loins and legs, of
the North Indian male.
The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker… 257

of this is Byomkesh Bakshi, a creation of the Bengali novelist, poet

and screen-play-writer Saradindu Bandopadhyay (1899-1970), who
looks at his profession as, primarily, an exercise of intellectual pas-
sion. This attitude seems to match the contemporaneous Bengali
attitude to the vita contemplativa; as Dipesh Chakrabarty notes,
in the 2007-preface of Provincializing Europe,
[t]he legacy of Europe – or British colonial rule for that is how Europe came
into our lives – was everywhere: in trafic rules, in grown-ups’ regrets that
Indians had no civic sense, in the games of soccer and cricket, in my school
uniform, in Bengali-nationalist essays and poems critical of social inequality,
especially of the so-called caste system, in implicit and explicit debates about
love-match versus arranged marriages, in literary societies and ilm clubs.
In practical, everyday living ‘Europe’ was not a problem to be consciously
named or discussed. Categories or words borrowed from European histories
had found new homes in our practices. (Chakrabarty 2008: ix)

Thus, even the pronounced bāngāliyānā (Bengali-ness) of an intersti-

tial character such as Byomkesh Bakshi seems but an inverted asser-
tion of this rediscovery of the “archaic” in the “modern” as Chakrabar-
ty and others have shown elsewhere.6 The norms of cultural alignment
and societal accreditation, as transferred through western detective
iction and popular cultural icons such as Sherlock Holmes, Her-
cule Poirot, Father Brown and Dr. John Thorndyke, found new sites
in the characters of Feluda, Bakshi, Kiriti Roy and Dr. Dilip Chaud-
huri, which, within a short time, acquired almost cult-status in Bengal.
The all-knowing or, at least, all-seeing rationalist-realist private detec-
tive seemed to represent, at political, cultural, individual and societal
levels, the fruition of the indigenous aspirational anxiety à propos Ben-
gal’s hybrid Europhone cultural inheritance; thus, even if the character

6
In his keynote address given at the conference on “After Subaltern
Studies”, which was held at Princeton University, 27th-28th April, 2012, Par-
tha Chatterjee, a founder member of the Subaltern Studies collective, argues
“that the time of colonial and postcolonial modernity was heterogeneous, that
its practices were hybrid, and that the archaic was, in many signiicant ways,
constitutive of the modern” (Chatterjee 2012: 46).
258 Gautam Chakrabarti

concerned always wears a dhoti and locates himself within the arc of
indigenous trajectories of socialisation and the spectrum of legal-crim-
inological interests of the Bengali bourgeoisie, the mediated conigu-
ration of his S/selfhood does remain Europhone and his socio-cultural
project identiiable with post-Enlightenment Rationalism.
Hence, this expression of cultural choice, through the selection
of ictive characteristics and psychological and social traits, was often
mediated through the operation of transcultural subalternity and hybri-
disation, as is exempliied in the manner in which many popular Ben-
gali iction-writers of the early twentieth century based their ictional
hero/ines on English prototypes. Nowhere is this truer than in the case
of detective iction, in which genre Bānglā literature has had a rich
corpus: from Kiriti Roy to Jayanta and dārogā (inspector) Banka-ullah
to Feluda, Bengali ictional detectives have succeeded in creating a ded-
icated universe of readership, which is incrementally ahead of similar
igures in other Indian languages, for themselves. At the same time
as Dr. Richard Austin Freeman (1862-1943), the creator of the medical
detective Dr. Thorndyke, who used his mini-laboratory for forensic re-
creation of crimes already revealed to the reader, the Bengali adventure-
novelist Hemendra Kumar Roy (1888-1963) created Dr. Thorndyke’s
Bengali counterpart, Dr. Dilip Chaudhuri.7 This “eminent chemist”
had helped the police in many cases that required a “medico-legal”
approach and always travelled with his “pocket-laboratory”, which had
the miniature testing-instruments and chemical compounds necessary
for forensic investigations. Though the setting for his crime-narratives,
as recorded by his “special friend and constant companion” Shrimanta
Sen in his diary, is Calcutta and its environs, all the characters seem
to be foils for their Europhone prototypes; thus, Manilal Bulabhai,

7
In his “Preface” to Rahasyēr Ālo-Chāyā (The Chiaroscuro of a Mys-
tery), Roy acknowledges his debt to Austin Freeman and writes: “This is the sto-
ry of a scientiic detective. …Though this is a story, real European detectives
do nowadays operate in the ways described in this book. Hence, the story
is immensely educative” (Roy 1953: 113).
The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker… 259

the victim in The Chiaroscuro of a Mystery, is a prosperous jeweller

dressed in a suit, sporting a felt hat, rolling his own cigarettes with
“State Express” tobacco and “Zig Zag” paper and lighting them with
“Wimco’s Club Quality” matches, which “do not sell well in the Ben-
gali areas of Calcutta but are used a lot by the Sāheb-s”.8 However,
he is shown as partial to the rasagollā, that iconic Bengali sweetmeat,
despite being, as his name suggests, of Gujarati origin; there are a num-
ber of extremely complex and seemingly contradictory meta-narratives
at work here: the creation of a pan-Indian “modern” individual who
aspires to and, occasionally, achieves the Europhone life-style, the sense
of colonial India necessitating a discourse of the conident Indian who
can face up to the “West” on its own terms, the urge to leverage modern
(read “Anglo-European”) habits of thought and action and the tortured
but almost deiant realisation that one is, all said and done, in India and
that is a privilege.
It is this location in the Indian/Bengali mindscape that makes
Satyānveṣi (Truth-Seeker) Byomkesh Bakshi, a quintessentially
bhadralok private investigator, who spurns that designation and prefers
to call himself a truth-seeker, a character created by Saradindu Bandyo-
padhyay, a ictive representation of an autonomous, proto-postcolonial
identity-forming urge. In the words of Sukumar Sen (1900-1992),
the renowned Calcutta-based polymath, linguist and cultural historian
of Bengal, in his Crime Stories’ Chronology (1988), an authoritative
diachronic study of “western” and Indian crime iction,

[h]e is not a scientist, violinist or an addict. He is a typical Bengali gentle-

man of the 1930s – educated, intelligent, shrewd, reserved and sympathetic.
Apart from his intellect and sedate serenity, he has got no other quality to dis-
tinguish himself from the average Bengali youths.

Though one may seek to differ from Sen about the typicality and aver-
ageness of Bakshi, given that the latter does seem to be endowed with
an extraordinary intuition and sensitivity, coupled with exceptional

8
Roy 1953: 145.
260 Gautam Chakrabarti

erudition, and is not entirely bereft of masterly idiosyncrasies, as Sen

observes; in “The Menagerie” and some other narratives, Bakshi
is said to be playing with Bāsuki,9 his pet snake. It is also interesting
that, instead of giving an affectionate, “light” name to his pet snake,
Bakshi names it after a signiicant Purānic igure; one is tempted, given
Bakshi’s self-location within the socio-cultural spectrum of the colo-
nial “native”, to call this a subaltern attempt to talk back to the Empire,
though that may be construed as reading too much into a selectional
whim. The colonial twilight saw a discursive cultural nationalism enter
into the realms of both public posturing and private choice, which was
often mediated, especially in Bengal, through the prisms of mythopoe-
ia and nationalist historiography; Saradindu Bandopadhyay, Bakshi’s
creator, was rather interested in weaving cultural nationalism into his
literary works, having written a number of historical novels and ilm-
scripts based in Rajput and Maratha Princely States, the most signiicant
of which was Jhinder Bandi (The Prisoner of Jhind).10 However, such
intertextual “nativism”, though putting the idea of an autochthonous
subaltern forward, was, more often than not, based on nineteenth-cen-
tury European conigurations of nationalism, not unlike the mimetic
constructions of patriotic and emancipatory discourses by Vinayak
Damodar Savarkar or Rash Behari Bose; as a truth-seeker, Byomkesh
Bakshi is, perhaps, re-seeking the socio-cultural absolutes that have
already been introduced to him through the felt life and passivity of
colonial subject-hood.
If one sees this, from a post-/Subaltern perspective, as a recon-
iguration of the “archaic” in/as the “modern” – an idea introduced

9
Vāsuki, the King of the Nāga-s, mythical beings that could appear
as snakes, was supposed to have been used as the churning-rope by the gods
and demons during the Manthana, the churning of the Primeval Ocean of
Milk, according to the Purānic lore (Lochtefeld 2001: 743).
10
The title and plot of this novel were inspired by The Prisoner of
Zenda (1894), by Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863-1933); in fact, Bando-
padhyay’s novel is almost an adaptation.
The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker… 261

above – one may be led to the idea that, in Bruno Latour’s words,
“[t]he traditional choice between freedom and necessity never prof-
fers, despite appearances, a real freedom of choice” (Latour 1999: 24);
the need to keep up the appearance of being autochthonous, in a cul-
tural sense, irrespective of the depth and range of the same, might and
did often collide with the lived actuality of cultural hybridity, given
the interstitial nature of socialisation patterns. Thus, a igure like Bak-
shi, despite and, perhaps, even because of his protestations of indig-
enous inspiration, exhibits, through both implicit and explicit textu-
al-narratival devices, the limitations of cultural choice that are faced,
more typically than not, by a colonised sensibility; this, however,
need not be a value-loaded deterministic judgement: Bakshi may still
be construed as a simulacrum of the English private eye, who becomes,
in the Calcutta of the Thirties, a somewhat crypto-nationalistic, some-
what Anglophiliac intersectional igure, and represents the target audi-
ence’s deeply ingrained societal and cultural roots and existential split,
in the throes of its modernist and proto-postcolonial desire to re-/nego-
tiate the boundaries and entanglements of a transcultural melange.
This ties in with Latour’s deinition of “politics as the progressive con-
stitution of a common world”, within which it is problematic “to imag-
ine a collective existence if all those who wished to participate were
irst asked to leave behind, in the outside vestibule, all the appurte-
nances and attachments that enabled them to exist” (Latour 1999: 30).
This, further, leads to the possibility of the engagement of the indi-
vidual colonial subjectivity, as, for example, in the case of Bakshi, with
“the common world as the object of politics, or what Isabel Stengers
calls ‘cosmopolitics’” (Latour 1999: 30); such engagement, however,
need not produce an even-handed or even reciprocity-based relation-
ship between “Occidental” and Indian conigurations of selfhood.
“Distinctions”, as Ashis Nandy says, “between westernisation and
modernisation have not touched the bulk of western educated modern
Indians, who are convinced that their future lies in being exactly like
262 Gautam Chakrabarti

Europe and North America” (Nandy 2007). This conviction, as Nandy

had argued in the Eighties, stems from a
colonialism [that] colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces
within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities once for all.
In the process, it helps generalize the concept of the modern West from a geo-
graphical and temporal entity to a psychological category. The West is now
everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds. (Nandy
1983: 11)

Perhaps, as he goes on to argue later, a possible response to this

colonialist double bind could be to deploy, like Pandit Iswar Chan-
dra Vidyasagar (1820-1891), conigurations of “dissent in indigenous
terms” (Nandy 1983: 12). In Byomkesh Bakshi, despite his somewhat-
idiosyncratic “cafeteria approach”11 to “Western” values and modes,
forms of self-identiication seem to avoid “the exogenous idea of ratio-
nalism” (Nandy 1983: 17) and carve out a new “native” space within
the ambit of a re-calibrated domain of past “traditional” constructs;
it is here that the possession of a pet snake named Bāsuki transcends
the level of romantic whim and attempts to reinforce, with various
explicit and implicit gestures, “the tradition of reinterpretation of tradi-
tions to create new traditions” (Nandy 1983: 18).
This attempt, along with Bakshi’s other acknowledgements of his
socio-linguistic and, perhaps more signiicantly, religious and cultural
roots and milieu, seems to belong within the domain of what Partha
Chatterjee calls “eastern nationalism”, which “has been accompa-
nied by an effort to ‘re-equip’ the nation culturally, to transform it.
But it could not do so simply by imitating the alien culture, for then
the nation would lose its distinctive identity. The search therefore
was for a regeneration of the national culture, adapted to the require-
ments of progress, but retaining at the same time its distinctiveness”

11
The term comes from marketing and involves the “establishment of
a wide variety of program opportunities and allows the consumer to choose
from the services offered”; http://www.prm.nau.edu/prm275/programming_
concepts_lesson.htm.
The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker… 263

(Chatterjee 1986: 2). The coniguration of this distinctiveness, hence,

was an intrinsic part of the nation-building project, one that, argua-
bly, continues in India till the present day, with various socio-cultural
and political platforms seeking to further the cause of what Swami
Vivekananda had declared to be the twin goals of education, “man-
making and character-building”; Bakshi comes across as a multi-fac-
eted gentleman, who seeks, as do Sherlock Holmes and Feluda, to cast
himself in the mould of the uomo universale, one whose constitutive
traits would be derived more from the works of Kālidāsa and Bankim
Chandra Chatterjee than those of the Graeco-Roman and Renaissance
masters. However, these traits were quarried in the “authentically”–
Indian sources by asking questions that stemmed from the classical
European construction of the ideal man, who is intelligent, physi-
cally and mentally strong, equipped with a well-read personality and
a cultivated subjectivity and rooted in the discourse of the inexorabil-
ity of human progress; as Chatterjee notes, quoting Ernest Gellner12,
“[b]y the twentieth century, the dilemma [of choosing between ‘west-
ernising’ and a narodnik tendency] hardly bothers anyone: the phi-
losopher-kings of the ‘underdeveloped’ world all act as westernisers,
and all talk like narodniks.” The philosopher-king in Bakshi perfects
this existential split to a ine art and even the other characters in his
detective-stories seem capable of switching between both worlds
effortlessly; in “The Quills of the Porcupine”, an apparently-upper-
middle-class Bengali couple, Dipa and Debashish, combine aspects of
“western” and Bengali sartorial, culinary, ergonomic and even attitu-
dinal preferences: Debashish wears “formal western clothes” to work
and changes to “the formal Bengali attire of dhoti and kurta” while
sitting down at the dining table and eating the traditional Bengali high
tea of “puris, potato curry and home-made sweets” (Bandopadhyay
2006: 206). The plot of this story, in terms of this couple, weaves
the informal but, nonetheless, binding networks of intra-societal groups

12
Gellner, Ernest (1964). Thought and Change. London: Weiden-
feld & Nicholson, pp.147-78.
264 Gautam Chakrabarti

and neighbourhood gatherings and evening “tea and chat session[s]”

(Bandopadhyay 2006: 208) organised by friends of friends, which are
so very characteristic of Bengali socialisation to this day, the tensions
and fault-lines of a loveless arranged marriage, the oppressive societal
demands of caste- and gotra13-maches and the incessant onslaught of
the process of westernisation into what is, basically, a murder mystery.
The admixture of social drama with crime creates an osmotic inter-
face between social-historical processes and the requirements of detec-
tive iction; it is this combination of the real and the ictive that gives
nuances to the representation of a divided loyalty such as that of Bak-
shi: he has to, continually, chart a middle course between the some-
what conlicting demands of being a Bengali approximation of Sher-
lock Holmes and a bhadralok truth-seeker, who fully comprehends
the way global crimes are locally-inlected and tinged with shades of
signiicant contextual meaning.
At this stage, it seems productive to take another look at the man-
ner in which this nuancing of the “global” may and does take the form
of selective replication, as Chatterjee and Gellner have argued,
of Western socio-cultural deployments; in their celebrated book
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (2004), Ian Buruma
and Avishai Margalit advance the thesis that a certain nationalist and
“nativist” resistance to the constructed trope of the “West”, in reality,
masks a mimetic response to the modernisation drives that are best
contextualised within the Euro-American societal and cultural para-
digms, both among nationalist conservatives and utopian visionary
radicals whose construction/s of governmentality was/were threatened

13
The term gotra means lineage-based “clan”, referring to the descen-
dants, through a theoretically unbroken male line, of a shared male ances-
tor, who was, almost always, a Vedic r̥ ṣi (sage, seeker); Pāṇini deines gotra
as apatyam pautraprabhr̥ ti gotram (Aṣṭādhyāyī, IV. 1. 162), which means
“the word gotra connotes the progeny (of a sage) starting with the son’s son”.
Cf. Ruegg, D. Seyfort (1976). The Meanings of the Term “Gotra” and the Tex-
tual History of the “Ratnagotravibhāga”. In: Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies, U London, Vol. 39, No. 2: 341–63.
The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker… 265

by the monolithic hegemonies of the Free Market, a liberal polity and

State secularism. Buruma and Margalit argue that, despite the initial
genuineness of the processes of cultural transaction implicit in colonial
and other pre-modern contacts between alien cultures, quite a few of
the later developmental trajectories of what they call “Occidentalism”
fail to conceal the formative inluence of certain core post-/Enlighten-
ment values and ideas on Eastern intellectuals. Some of these ideas
are those of the paramountcy of the Nation-State project, the Roman-
tic repudiation of discursive rationality and the much-touted spiritual,
moral and ethical degradation and ideological emasculation of liberal
democratic socio-political entities. This is traced, in the book, back
to German Romanticism and the history of intensely polemical debates
between the “Westernisers” and “Slavophiles” in 19th century Russia,
opining that comparable polemics appear, in varying constellations,
within the Maoist, Islamist, Imperial Japanese and other discourses.
This would seem to suggest that the idea of the “West”, as seen from
the “East”, is one that has risen in a self-negating mimetic opposition
to certain preconceived notions, themselves products of a Euro-Amer-
ican analytical sensibility, of what does or can constitute the West;
as Buruma and Margalit write: “The West in general, and America
in particular, provokes envy and resentment more among those who
consume its images, and its goods, than among those who can barely
imagine what the West is like” (Buruma & Margalit 2004: 15). Alastair
Bonnett, in The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (2004),
however, disagrees with the Eurocentricity of such an analytical trajec-
tory and argues for an alternative tradition of occidentalism, one that
may be said to evolve from the intercultural cross-fertilisation between
non-Western and Western intellectual frameworks. In a departure from
Buruma and Margalit’s focus upon the non-Western deployment of
Western ideas, Bonnett argues that the asymptotic roots of both occi-
dentalism and the West may be traced to non-western metropoles,
where, he asserts, concrete non-occidental structures of modernity
were conigured through the not necessarily negative deployment of
Europhone modes of cognition and analysis. Thus, Bonnett appears
266 Gautam Chakrabarti

to emphasise the centrality and even inevitability of “Eastern” asymp-

totic reiications of the West in the process of developing sub-/national
and ethnic identities worldwide.
Hence, in a igure like Bakshi, these meta-contextualisations of
Europe, operating within the circumstantial space of Bengali socialisa-
tion, attempt to locate his personal non-extraordinariness in the over-
all intra-societal angst to dissociate culturally hybrid phenomena and
products from those of the reiied colonial Oppressor, while acknowl-
edging and even cherishing the acute polysemy inherent to the trans-
cultural process of borrowing and transcreating. It is through this
polysemic transcreation of characteral idiosyncrasies and cosmopoli-
tan context against a middle-class Bengali backdrop that Saradindu
Bandopadhyay managed to fabricate a new, almost utopian socio-
cultural project through Bakshi and his sidekick, Ajit Banerjee, men
who, through their choices and actions, demonstrated the feasibility
of a rapprochement between the local and the global, in an attempt
at bridging the chasm between the seemingly divergent demands of
a late-colonial South Asian ideational, more than socio-historical, ano-
mie and the burgeoning aspiration of decolonisation. It is interesting
to note that Bakshi, similarly to Jayanta14, another detective created
by Hemendra Kumar Roy, enjoys the admiring support, if not adula-
tion, of the police and, more often than not, is happy to collaborate
with the colonially nuanced regime of law and order. In fact, Nara-
Narayan15, the David and Goliath duo who were another of Roy’s
avid crime-ighters, in Pradīp ō Andhakār (The Lamp and Darkness),
even collaborated with the Calcutta Police against pre-World-War-2

14
Jayanta and Manik are a detective-duo, in the manner of Holmes and
Watson, who solve a number of mysteries using, in a Poirotesque manner,
“the little grey cells”; some of their best-known narratives are Cābi ēbaṁ Khil
(“Key and Bolt”) and Ēkratti Māṭi (“A Speck of Dirt”) (Roy 1953: 203-22).
15
Narendra Majumdar (Nara) and Narayan Chaudhuri were “bosom
buddies” who were “unrivalled
unrivalled in their expertise in the theory of crime in Ben-
gal”: “even the most powerful police oficers, when embroiled in the most com-
plicated cases, were not embarrassed to consult Narendra” (Roy 1953: 77).
The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker… 267

“ifth columnists” working with the Japanese; this would have put
them at odds with the prevailing sentiment in the Bengali society
of the time: hundreds of thousands of people were rallying to the call
of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who had, during WW2, created
the Indian National Army in South-East Asia with Japanese support
(Roy 1953: 77-109). Thus, the cheroot-s, teapots, “chicken pies” (Roy
1953: 205) and solah topee-s of the Sāhib-s have their keen interest for
many colonial-era Bengali sleuths, who seem to be, at the very least,
deferential to their envisioning of the distant Occident in terms of what
constituted modern civility and, by extension, modern and/or pro-
gressive politics; Byomkesh Bakshi, however, in his white dhoti and
pānjābi (a shirt-like upper garment), with a passion for individual jus-
tice and a love for the exotic, both local and global, does see the world
in a somewhat conlicted manner. He does not seek to destroy the tra-
ditional socio-cultural order, but, with occasional conservatism, works
for its possible reconciliation with the prevalent perception of moder-
nity; however, his search for truth does lie in the leisured, old-world
“charm” of the high noon of the Calcutta-based bhadralok, soon to turn
into their own lyrical twilight.

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