The Manichean Investigators: A Postcolonial and Cultural Rereading of the Sherlock Holmes and Byomkesh Bakshi Stories

The Manichean Investigators: A Post colonial and Cultural Rereading of the Sherlock Holmes and Byomkesh Bakshi Stories makes a comparative study, from the postcolonial point of view, of the different detective novels and short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle and Saradindu Bandyopadhyay. Writing at a time when the United Kingdom had become the most powerful colonialist, Doyle created an investigator who would not only be efficient in detecting crimes and criminals but also regard his theories, including even the prejudiced ones such as people associated with the orient are prone to mischief and white imperialists with an affinity for Asia and Africa would suffer in consequence, as infallible. Bandyopadhyay, on the other hand, created a very Indian inquisitor in Byomkesh Bakshi, who would, in spite of his subaltern identity, successfully counteract all the investigative suppositions of the Western detectives, including Holmes, and prove himself to be an unchallengeable oriental investigator. The Manichean investigators offers detailed analyses of the specific points where Holmes expresses his orientalist suppositions and Bakshi demonstrates his anticolonial and independent investigative techniques and theories. Almost every story of the Sherlock Holmes and Byomkesh Bakshi canon have been reread in light of postcolonial theories by said, Spivak, Bhabha, Fanon, and son on. The history of English and Bengali detective fiction, a part of the critical analysis, traces the growth of imperial ideology in the Victorian and Edwardian English detective stories, and the anticolonial responses in the pre and early post-independence Indian sleuth narratives. Cross-textual references have also been made to all the important European and Indian detective stories, which would attract further researchers into the ideologies of European and Asian detective fiction.