Introduction

176
Sabina Fazli
rapid industrial progress any more, but in race. Before the 1860s, racial others
could still be ‘civilised’. With the turn to Darwinian explanations of supremacy,
race and the purity of race become the defining markers of superior civilisation
and the legitimation for rule (David 88-89).
In the texts discussed, there are several different images which draw on this
theme. In all of them the influence of the colony is depicted as deforming and
asserts itself as deviation in body and/or mind. The body which is deformed and
altered through contact with the Other highlights the notion of racial difference.
Contamination through Otherness therefore also shows in the body and also
points to a mind tainted by the other:
[T]he coloring, physique, physiognomy, and vestments of the European
body all bespoke the puissance of a ruling race, as it was celebrated in public
rituals of social power, whether on parade or on a hunt. But at the same
time Europeans were continually aware of the weakness and vulnerability
of their bodies. Influenced by the theories of degeneration that were popular
in the late Victorian period, English people believed that imperial location
had harmful effects upon European bodies, passions, and intellects.
(Siddiqi 241)
What I will look at first is the deformed body in “The Rajah’s Diamond” and The
Sign of Four. The Sherlock Holmes stories swarm with “returned colonials” 23 and
the concept is ever present in Holmes’ co-lodger and biographer John Watson. In
A Study in Scarlet, Watson introduces himself as a former army surgeon. He was
“struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet” (Doyle, Scarlet 3), followed by “enteric
fever, that curse of our Indian possessions” and his “health [was] irretrievably
ruined” (4). The colony here appears as a place of both human and natural violence
from which Watson barely escapes. In The Sign of Four Jonathan Small suffers
very similar afflictions: A crocodile bites off his leg in the Ganges (Doyle, Sign
214) and he serves his sentence on the Andamans, a “dreary, fever-stricken place”
(226). As if to emphasise the connection between the two characters, Watson’s
wound, located in his shoulder in A Study in Scarlet, suddenly wanders to his leg in
The Sign of Four (Doyle, Sign 125) (Mehta 636).
Jonathan Small’s mutilation has to be connected with his involvement with the
“Sign of Four”, the Indian secret pact, which also transfigures him morally 24. To-
23 One of the most conspicuous is Henry Wood in “The Cooked Man”: Tortured by Indian rebels
during the Mutiny he is deformed, “carried his head low and walked with his knees bent”, “he
spoke in a strange tongue sometimes” (Doyle, “Crooked” 656), “living and crawling with a stick
like a chimpanzee” he has lived among Indians rather than return to England (660). India obviously
has reduced Wood, who was once “the smartest man in the One Hundred and Seventeenth
Foot” (658) to a more animal-like creature, an association which is driven home by his
only companion, a mongoose.
24 Thomas Vandeleur in “The Rajah’s Diamond“, induced by greed, also enters a pact with an
Indian and serves him against his own countrymen during the Mutiny. He “betrayed a body of