May 23, 2011 02:20 PM
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Knowing that many acute readers of detective fiction might chance on the book, I left several trails to its real character, which unfortunately found no detective.
In Chapter one, very early, I introduced a character Subaltern Guha who is working on the living conditions of the poor. As everyone knows, Prof. Guha was the key academic in the new branch of Social Science Studies known as Subaltern Studies. To reinforce this clue, I bring in at the end of that chapter a German who mentions ‘Right Livelihood’ now well-known throughout the world as the Alternative Nobel.
In Chapter two, the centre-piece of investigation was the discovery of the role of the mosquito in vectoring malaria. The Joun_Mehra of the Malaria Policy Centre, 25 Jan, 2010, picked it up, but failed to detect that I had made the real discoverer the lab assistant Husein Khan. Ronald Ross had an assistant of that name and though it is impossible to prove at this late date, one may be sure he had a much larger part to play in the discovery than medical history agrees to record.
Even today the ‘big name’ gets all the scientific credit and the lower order assistants who do all the work are consigned to oblivion. There are a few other features in that chapter which I hoped you would notice. Saving Royalty from the stigma of being Jack the Ripper as so often suspected and yet making a close companion the psychopath. Dr. Babasahib ambekar_ashishdkar’s father is recognized as ‘touchable’ by Royalty, and so forth. I also found it egregiously offensive that Kipling created the characters of Mowgli and Kim for the following reasons. In 1861 by the Forest Act the British had committed the gross theft of all forest areas in India, disinheriting tribals. So I thought it only fitting that Mowgli should be a tribal leader demanding as they still do Jungal and Jamin. The O’Haras were some of the High Kings of Ireland, and to use that surname for Kim and make the boy an imperial stooge had to be overturned in a subaltern literary version by making Kim a revolutionary Irish woman. Such inversions are underlined by bringing Rhett Butler[of Gone With the Wind] to India as Clark Gable, and also making Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin really happen 60 years earlier and bring its actor Balraj Sahni to life in the story. The massacre at Jalianwallah Bagh changed the course of Indian history, but few historians recognize General Dyer as an Orangeman, and it is his type of Northern Irish who created the massacre at Dublin’s Croke Park just three years later. I gave the credit for discovering the Orange link to Sherlock Holmes, surely a greater achievement than many of the cases mentioned by Conan Doyle, since political crimes are the greatest crimes. A remark has been made that my depiction of Holmes makes him a very different man than known to us through Conan Doyle. Many Indians who traveled to England in those days were always astonished how kind and civil the English were at home, so different from their colonial persona. It was not a matter of individual choice, I am afraid, but the social imposition of roles. I rest my case.A longer explanation is in the Afterword of my new book The Year of High Treason. I can send it to you by email if you will reach me at: vithalrajan@hotmail.com
