Introduction

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Sabina Fazli
(28). These new and inventive means, often original and sometimes barely legal,
also proved fertile for the literary detective (Perera 112). The same form of police
intelligence, which had hitherto been rejected or at least been frowned upon in
England, was implemented in London in the wake of its colonial success (Reitz
28). As Caroline Reitz argues that the birth of the whole genre of detective fiction
heavily relied on India as the site of crime, the pedigree of crime fiction includes
Taylor as an important and influential contributor (22). The type of the Thug as
representative of India and the conventional literary villain congealed into a repeatable
literary stereotype. The close intertwining of the colonial adventure story
and the rise of the literary detective in England, Reitz suggests, make Dickens and
Collins not so much into inventors of the genre but inheritors of an imperial tradition
(45). In situating the birth of the detective in India, she also explains the conflation
of colony and crime which is to become a fertile impetus for detective
literature and refutes the traditional histories of the genre which posit the detective
novel as purely “homegrown” (46). Detective fiction is thus one mode which
perpetuated the image of the criminal colony .
Meadows Taylor immortalised another Indian ‘criminal’ in his novel on the
Mysore wars, in Tippoo Sultaun (1840). The figure of Tipu was made famous, primarily,
through captivity narratives which showed him as a despotic and cruel
ruler (Mukherjee 110). His ‘fame’ was definitely comparable to Nana Sahib, the
icon of the Mutiny.
The Mutiny
The Indian Mutinyof 1857/8 consolidated this image and again saw the indiscriminate
labelling of the colony as inherently prone to crime. The great outrage
the Mutiny had incited in Britain is impressively mirrored in the literary output.
Fifty novels on the Mutiny were written before 1900 and another 30 before World
War II (Brantlinger, Rule 199). The Mutiny was the subject of countless other
texts: “[t]here was a deluge of eyewitness accounts, journal articles, histories, poems
and plays dealing with the 1857-58 rebellion” (199). The Indian Mutiny was
the defining moment in the mid-Victorian attitude to British colonisation of India
and India itself and caused a boost in public interest in the colony (Pionke 109)
Writings on the Mutiny signalled a change in the attitudes towards India. Although,
before the Mutiny, India was represented in Orientalist stereotypes, many
writersstill expressed the possibility that Indians could be ‘civilised’ and ‘elevated’
from their state of ‘barbarism’. The discourse which underpinned British rule in
India posited the mild and passive Hindu as longing for and consenting to British
rule and reformation (Sharpe 58). The possibility of change for the better, in British
eyes, is rendered impossible after 1858. The trope of India as unchanging and
forever caught in the same “superstition and violence” (Brantlinger, Rule 200)
supersedes the ethnocentric and philanthropic, though racist, aspirations of earlier