Introduction

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Sabina Fazli
ing ethnographic knowledge is supposed to make the Other knowable and to
exert control over the criminal who is himself always othered (A.D. Miller 36).
Contexts
Before I will look at the texts themselves I will briefly sketch the historical and
cultural background. The Victorian attitudes towards India as well as their articulation
in the literature of the time, are a complex topic. As already said, the diamonds
are the centre of plots of detection. Detective fiction, the genre which The
Moonstone arguably initiated, heavily relies on the writing of empire. The British
view of India painted a picture of the colony as a hotbed of crime. Caroline Reitz
contends that even at the beginning of the century this notion intrinsically influenced
the formation of detective fiction. The constellation of the detective, crime
and India is a common denominator of my chosen texts and therefore deserves
prior consideration.
Lastly, I will briefly outline the significance of diamonds in Indian culture and
their introduction into Britain as a colonial product and the growing interest in
stories and legends surrounding them.
India in Literature: The Fashioning of India as ‘Criminal’
The image of ‘criminal’ India came up in the late eighteenth century and informs
the discourse on India in the Victorian period (Mukherjee 23). The expansion of
empire relied on the justificatory myth of spreading civilisation and progress. It
brought “order, justice, and legality” to a place which was in turn imagined as
lacking all of these, a site of unchecked crime and injustice (25). This constellation
was repeated in further violent encounters where Indian rebellion was not viewed
as politically motivated but as the expression of an innate tendency to crime. The
first and enduring instance may be the infamous ‘Black hole’, the prison where the
inhabitants of the British settlement in Calcutta were held, in 1756. While contemporary
texts were more concerned with the emasculating effect of having been
defeated by a people that was considered to be inferior, the construction of Indians
as ‘criminal’ emerged in later accounts of the ‘Black hole’ when the East India
Company began to establish wider political domination and could make ideological
use of the stereotype (26-27).
Thuggee and the Detective
The idea of innate criminality infused British contempt for Indian religions. Hindu
iconography was condemned as immoral in its depiction of sexuality and as exalting
not only deviant but criminal behaviour (Mukherjee 33). An influential in-