Introduction

Indian Diamonds 115
commit crimes (Ascari 71). Opium is one of the products of empire which incited
discussion, and it is closely linked to imperial history through the Opium Wars.
The fact that it also highlights the economic interrelatedness of Britain and its
colonies will be the basis for my analysis of how the perceived relation between
opium and diamonds informs the texts.
“Imperial Gothic”
If the literary detective is imagined as originating from the encounter with the
Other and their criminality, detective fiction provides a frame which contains and
regulates the foreign elements in England. The reliance on science and rationality
which the Holmes stories propagate contrasts with another tendency in mid- and
late Victorian literature which describes the encounter with the Other as threatening
and uncontrollable.
When the British Empire was at its height, the optimistic belief in its stability
and progress was undermined by visions of imminent decay and danger for the
nation as a whole and the individual. The celebration of British imperialism in
Queen Victoria’s Gold and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 is thus contemporary
with the mode of imperial Gothic in Victorian fiction. An interest in the occult
in connection with the exotic and mysticism had existed since mid-Victorian
years, but it produced a specific tone through the rise of a pessimist outlook on
empire. Occultism and imperialism, separately and mixed, stood in for a loss of
religious certainties and faith. Several themes and motifs, attendant on the consolidation
of empire in the last decades of the century, address a sense of insecurity
and fear surrounding Britain’s expansion. The mode of imperial Gothic transforms
the progressive belief in the superiority of science and Darwinian ideology
into their darker undersides of occultism and the possibility of regression (Brantlinger,
Rule 227-228).
Patrick Brantlinger identifies three distinct themes in imperial Gothic: The fear
of “going native” as reversed evolution in an individual and the regression to an
earlier stage of civilisation expresses an awareness of just how thin the dividing
line between coloniser and colonised was. From the middle of the century onwards,
the superiority of the British over their colonial subjects had been based on
race (David 88-89), a concept which could now be contested. The fear of invasion
and the appearance of “barbarism” and “demonism” far from their assigned
places on the periphery in the middle of British society is another recurrent theme.
These occult forces were imagined to follow homecoming colonials to England.
Lastly, Brantlinger cites the waning of “opportunities for adventure and heroism
in the modern world”. The “Colonial Adventure Story” thus propagated an image
which had lost its credibility.(Rule 230-231).
The imperial Gothic draws its unsettling quality from the assumed diminution
of distance between the self and the Other. While the sensational novel had al-