Introduction

178
Sabina Fazli
In John Vandeleur, even more so than in his brother, the colony is connected with
amorality and crime. Prince Florizel insinuates that he has no scruples in the pursuit
of diamonds (97). Here again moral depravity is marked on the body, the scar
which makes Jack Vandeleur look savage and serves as a visual reminder of the
disfiguring influence of the colony. In his love for the diamond he parallels his
brother, but Thomas is not so much interested in the hunt for diamonds as in
climbing the social ladder through wealth. Jack Vandeleur has his double in the
original owner of the diamond, the Rajah of Kashgar, who is a “semi-barbarian
potentate” and in Prince Florizel’s story of the diamond, evidently a tyrant (130),
very much like the despotic Dictator.
Godfrey Ablewhite and Murthwaite, the traveller, are examples of Europeans
trying to pass as natives. In The Moonstone, which is not as obsessed with anxieties
of contagion as the Sherlock Holmes stories, two versions of disguise exist:
Murthwaite is the “celebrated Indian traveller […] who, at risk of his life, had
penetrated where no European had ever set foot before” (Collins, Moonstone 74),
“beyond the civilized limits” (81). He at once detects the Brahmins’ disguise as
jugglers (79) because of his “superior knowledge of the Indian character” (287). In
his conversation with Matthew Bruff, he is able to partly explain the “Indian plot”
just through the information the solicitor gives him. In this rational reasoning on
the grounds of second-hand information, he employs the favourite method of
Sherlock Holmes (Mehta 633). Although Murthwaite can “pass” “undetected“
(Collins, Moonstone 462) among the Indians, he is not in the same danger of losing
his English identity as Jonathan Small or Thomas Vandeleur. “Murthwaite demonstrates
the detective’s unromantic ‘English mind’” (Reitz 62) as opposed to “the
romantic side of the Indian character” (Collins, Moonstone 285). In Caroline Reitz’
study on the colonial origin of the English detective, Murthwaite is paired with
Sergeant Cuff, the epitome of Englishness (Reitz 61). In The Moonstone’s last chapter,
Murthwaite assumes the “imperial gaze”, separated from, aloof and superior
to the Indians and the Hindu ceremony he surveys (Reitz xxiii). The comparison
of his position with Jonathan Small’s direct involvement shows the security of the
one and the precariousness of the other’s white identity.
The principle that the criminal is always the Other (A.D. Miller 36) is played
with in the character of Godfrey Ablewhite. To escape, he also uses a disguise. He
dresses as a lascar and darkens his face. Sergeant Cuff discovers “the whiteness of
the thief” (Nayder, Wilkie Collins 119) when he washes off the paint and at the
same time undermines the notion that the perpetrator always has to be Other.
The characters whose English identity is thus threatened are Godfrey Ablewhite,
John Herncastle, the Vandeleur brothers and Jonathan Small 26. They are
‘infected’ by contact with the Other but also by contact with the diamonds.
“[G]reed […] has been my besetting sin” (Doyle, Sign 145), John Sholto avows. In
26 I leave out Thaddeus and Bartholomew Sholto as they seem to have ‘contracted’ their decadence
and Orientalness from their father, John Sholto, in a curious instance of heredity.