Introduction

164
Sabina Fazli
The Moonstone and The Sign of Four, nevertheless, frame fears of intrusion and
invasion in a similar manner and draw on the popular perception of the Mutiny as
a conspiracy against British dominion.
Secret Societies and Thuggee
The idea of a murderous and secretive India is largely based on two sources. The
immense interest in Thuggee at the beginning of the century and its popularisation
and fictionalisation in Philip Meadows Taylor’s successful Confessions of a Thug
(1839) almost certainly shaped the image of India as the site of murder which is
rooted in religion but underpins the whole of society (Mukherjee 108). The problems
which arose in the attempts to suppress Thuggee made for popular plots and
secured it an afterlife detective fiction. The sensationalist press coverage of Thuggee
also nurtured the belief that Thugs could appear in the middle of London or
Paris, and motifs and figures from Thug narratives found their way into all kinds
of crime fiction in the latter half of the century (níFlathuín 35-36).
The outbreak of the Mutiny revived the notion of Indian conspiracies as contemporary
explanations centred on the existence of secret societies, which aimed
to overthrow British rule in India. Again, it was thus possible to reduce the popular
basis of the rebellion and deny a more widespread discontent with British rule.
Furthermore, the theory also paid off ideologically, as British resistance and retribution
was directed against the secret and cowardly plans of ungrateful conspirators
(Pionke 114-118). Patrick Brantlinger also acknowledges the Victorian resorting
to these theories and sees Nana Sahib cast into the role of prime conspirator,
while at the same time Indians as a whole were held to be incapable of acting on
an organised scheme (203).
Deception is therefore rooted not in personal ability but in religion which encompasses
the whole of society. Thus concealment and murder are hallmarks of
Indian rather than Thug culture (Reitz 25). Consequently, the Indians in The Moonstone
and The Sign of Four, who allegedly conspire to harm English persons, appear
as secret societies. The Moonstone might have been the “object of a conspiracy in
India” (Collins, Moonstone 43) and Murthwaite remarks that “a Hindoo diamond is
often part of a Hindoo religion” (74) and that there was “a conspiracy then in
existence to get possession of the gem” (461). These instances show that the elements
of the discourse of secrecy and conspiracy recur in The Moonstone with reference
to the diamond itself. The depiction of the Indians, of course, follows the
same lines. First of all, their “modest little Indian organisation” (284) conflates the
image of the gang of wandering murderers with the emphasis on their religion.
Their voluntary forfeiture of cast obliquely evokes the affair of the greased cartridges
(Pionke 126). The mutineers in The Sign of Four are accordingly described as
“fanatics” and “devil-worshippers” (Doyle, Sign 216). This also transports the
underlying notion that they are completely determined by their religion and em-