Fiction
Afterlife of Sherlock Holmes
MEENAKSHI MUKHERJEE
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Both the books are playful and ingenuous pastiches, recreating familiar voices from the past.
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Holmes of the Raj, Vithal Rajan, Writers Workshop, 2006, p.217, hardback Rs. 300, flexiback Rs. 200. (www.writersworkshopkolkata.com)
Messers Dickens, Doyle & Wodehouse Pvt. Ltd., Neelum Saran Gour, Halcyon books, 2005, p.215, Rs. 220. (www.neelumsarangour.com)
BOTH books under review are playful and ingenuous pastiches, recreating familiar voices from the past. The first book presents six "as yet unpublished" Sherlock Holmes stories, told by Watson, with an engaging preface describing how these "lost" stories happened to come to the hands of Vithal Rajan. The second one, by Neelum Saran Gour, a more ambitious attempt, plays several games simultaneously — introducing people like Mr. Copperfield and Mr. Nickleby as clients of Sherlock Holmes in whose household Jeeves has recently been employed as a butler. Her three interconnected episodes are located in England and are narrated in a hilarious mock-Victorian style. The author seems to be enjoying herself hugely while playing this sustained joke on the English language and on three icons of British culture.
Rich texture
Vithal Rajan's sprightly stories are situated in different parts of colonial and princely India — Jhansi, Nainital, Pondicherry, Shimla, Hyderabad, the forests of Central India in addition to the four metros. Despite his primarily parodic intent, he manages to create situations that hold the readers' attention, his firm grasp of history and geography lending a rich texture and credibility to the stories. The stories in this volume begin in 1888 and end in 1914 as war clouds start gathering over Europe. There is hardly a public figure living in India during this period — Vivekananda, Rabindranath, Sri Aurobindo, Ramanujan, Annie Besant, Jinnah, Ronald Ross — who is not given a walk-in part in the book. Even Dhyanchand makes a brief appearance as a schoolboy playing hockey in Jhansi and Watson gets a chance to see Balu Palwankar and his brothers play cricket in Bombay. Whenever there is a slight chronological anomaly, Vithal Rajan offers speculative explanations in tongue-in-cheek academic endnotes which provide a great deal of reading pleasure. Not only people from history, fictional characters from other texts also step into his book occasionally — as in the story "Kim and Kim Again" where we discover that Kipling's character was actually a girl in a boy's disguise. There are forays into the future too — we meet a rickshaw puller called Balraj and his son Parikshit who live on the streets of Calcutta after losing their Do Bigha Zameen in the village. Altogether the author seems to be having fun bringing many of his interests together and the reader gets infected by his high spirits.
Written for insiders
Neelum Saran Gour's book is a literary tour de force to be enjoyed by those who are generally familiar with the works of Conan Doyle, Dickens and Wodehouse, although only a passionate addict of all the three writers will probably catch all the embedded intertextual references. Gour is a fairly well-known writer who has so far written two excellent volumes of short stories and three novels (all brought out by Penguin), but the present book might have proved too whimsical for her mainstream publisher. It targets a niche audience with a taste for literary games and a penchant for subversive play with style. She also changes the rules of the game by making Sherlock Holmes unable to unravel the mystery until Jeeves comes to his rescue. Towards the end of the book there is a scene of confrontation between Holmes and Jeeves which the author describes with awe-struck solemnity: "It was an instant that chroniclers of history may well have drawn the attention of the centuries to ... ... When two men of credit and conviction, two sagacious souls well matched, study one another acutely across the carpet, shrewdly evaluating each other's strengths and frailties, it does not behove lesser mortals present to hazard an interruption".
Enduring character
In the English language Sherlock Holmes is probably the most enduring fictional character, reappearing in over 200 novels in the last one century — beginning with Mark Twain's A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1902) in which Holmes comes to America with his nephew to the recent Whitbread Award-winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon (2004) whose title is a quotation from a Holmes remark in a Conan Doyle story "Silver Haze". From our part of the world I have come across only one Sherlock Holmes reincarnation so far, other than the two being reviewed today. The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (Harper Collins, 1999) by Jamyang Norbu received the Crossword Prize in 2000 and was later re-issued by Bloomsbury as Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years (2001). In 1891 a horrified public learnt of Sherlock Holmes' death in a struggle with the arch criminal Professor Moriarty. Two years later popular demand made Sir Arthur Conan Doyle resurrect the great detective. On his return Holmes informed Dr. Watson, "I travelled for two years in Tibet ... and amused myself by visiting Lhasa." Norbu's novel seizes upon this sentence and proceeds to fill in the gap of these two years. Since Watson cannot narrate this story Norbu uses the voice of a fictional character from Kipling — Baboo Haree Chunder Mookerjee. The language is marked by a period flavour, but it has a lively charge that carries the story forward — regardless of the reader's interest in or familiarity with Kipling or Conan Doyle. As in the books by Neelum Saran Gour and Vithal Rajan, the major attraction of Norbu's novel is also its deadpan humour, but as an activist scholar for the Tibetan cause, Norbu had an additional agenda — drawing the world's attention to Tibet where the last part of the plot unfolds and which metaphorically describes the country's present condition.
It is one of the ironies of history that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who embodied so completely the Victorian value system and faith in the British Empire should now live on in postcolonial India as the subject of affectionate parody.
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