Sherlock Holmes vs. the Evil Empire!

Holmes of the Raj, by Vithal Rajan

Now, this is a fantastic idea. In fact it's such a good one, that Vithal Rajan wasn't even the first to have it. Take the popular character of late nineteenth-century fiction with whom we're all familiar and confront him with the realities of the British Empire. The Empire which hovers somewhere in the background of the Sherlock Holmes adventures. Of course you can say that many of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories feature no reference to the Empire, but enough of them do, and in any case, they were adventure stories written at the height of Empire in this country. The attitudes of imperialism, in the self confidence the characters exude, is a part of the narrative of Sherlock Holmes.

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And a quick look at Wikipedia reminds me that, in an episode which Julian Barnes fictionalised a few years back, Conan Doyle, if not his character, had a very real encounter with a half-Indian lawyer George Edalji, whom he defended against the prejudices of the British police and helped to exonerate.

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Confronting his famous character with the Empire seems like a telling of a story that Conan Doyle didn't, probably couldn't, get around to telling himself. Like I said, it's so good that someone already got their first. Andy Lane's Doctor Who novel, All-Consuming Fire, which not only mashes up the those two great British characters, but also Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos as well just for good measure, appeared in 1994 as part of Virgin's line of New Adventures published after the original series of the show ended. Now, I've not read All-Consuming Fire, but I did read a review just a few weeks ago on Philip Sandifer's magnificent TARDIS Editorum blog. Philip Sandifer, one of those bloggers who puts my meagre efforts to shame, has an often political take on the show and it's many spin offs. In this instance it sounds as though a political take would be pretty hard to avoid. From his account, it appears that the book is thoroughly aware of the problematic nature of some of the material it's mashing up. All too aware of the many abuses carried out by the British in our Empire, Andy Lane goes out of his way in his book to point out that he, through the mouthpiece of the Doctor, really doesn't approve of the British Empire. Which is problematic for several reasons, mainly because the book is apparently incredibly bad at representing the culture of the people the Empire is oppressing in India, mixing up the principles of Hinduism and Islam for instance, and often rather trite.

Again, like I say, I've not read Lane's book, although for all it's faults, it does sound like it might be worth tracking down. But I have had Vithal Rajan's book sitting on my shelves for a few months and this long preamble serves to give the reason why I chose to pull it off the shelves and read it next, because I thought that an Indian author's take on the same idea might well be more interesting. Written in a good approximation of Conan Doyle's style, the six stories, with five set in 1888 and the last under the shadow of a future war in 1913, send Watson and Holmes helter-skelter across the subcontinent, along the way encountering just about everyone who will have a future role in the independence movement. Or if not them, then their parents. As well, there are plenty of historical British characters, famous and otherwise, and not only Kipling, but analogues (the supposed originals on whom the author based his stories) of two of his most famous characters. If you don't know who everyone is, then there are helpful end notes, a device which reminds me of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series of novels.

Like Flashman, part of the joke comes from the reader knowing more than the characters who, leaving aside the implausibility that anyone travelling through India in 1888 would encounter such a disperate group of famous people from history like that, obviously have little idea of just how important some of these people are going to turn out to be. So for example, when the Prince of Wales is saved from a tiger by an Indian, the end note helpfully informs us that this man is the father of the man who will eventually write the Indian constitution. It's an at times affectionate ribbing of History. Not always so affectionate of course, when in the last story when Holmes and Watson foil a plot within the British military to discredit and murder a good number of the independence movement. But essentially, this is a very lighthearted set of stories. Holmes' detection often goes on in the background while Watson idles, giving us a frequently delightful travelogue, conveniently giving us a very full picture of all walks of life in British India. Again, it's not all that different from what MacDonald Fraser does in Flashman, his character's retrospective perspective allowing him to give us an incredibly detailed and well researched picture of the people and places amongst whom he travels.

Whilst there are jokes at the expense of the British - one of my favourites comes early on when they're told their driver will understand them if they just speak slowly and loudly - it's difficult to say that it's anti-British. Certainly not in the way that it sounds as though Lane's book is, the author indulging in a kind of overcompensation, apologising to the point of obsequiousness about something which our ancestors did. Funnily enough, that's not disimilar to something which actually happened to my wife not long after she arrived in Britain. Her British, white, liberal housemate felt the need to apologise to her for everything the British empire did in India. At some length.

And whilst in his review, Philip Sandifier criticises All-Consuming Fire for awkwardly grafting on it's social conscience about the horrors of British imperialism, he clearly wholly agrees with the sentiment:

But there’s a problem underlying all of this, and the book is aware of it. It’s 1994 now, and we’re all pretty much awake to the fact that the Victorian era consisted primarily of horrifying colonial impulses. It’s difficult to justify an unambiguous embrace of the Victorian in the mid-90s. And when you add Lovecraft, infamously racist dick that he was, you end up deeper in the weeds. And so the book, quite rightly, displays a social conscience. But there’s something… difficult about it. For instance, the scene where the Doctor yells at the villain, proclaiming, “you will be spreading death and destruction across the cosmos! The British Empire is based upon oppression and slavery. You offer not the hand of friendship but the jackboot of tyranny! I shall prevent your plans!” This is not wrong as such, but there’s something painfully awkward about it. And it’s far from the only moment like that - Benny refusing to help a beggar in India because, as she muses, “there were tens of thousands of people in Bombay. I couldn’t help all of them. That was the true evil. Not Daleks, not Hoothi. Poverty and powerlessness.” Again, true, but with a sort of painful facileness. I could cite more, but the point is, I think, made. 

And there's a problem here with this review too. It's all in that 'primarily'. As someone in the comments section pointed out, it all depends on how you look at it. For that commentator, the Victorian era was a time of great social progress. But if we narrow our focus just to the British in India, was the experience of the Indian people 'primarily' oppression and slavery? Before anyone reading this now tries to accuse of me of claiming that the British empire was a 'good' empire, the way I know some people do (just look at some of the scorn which has been heaped on those Kenyan men who have recently been granted permission to bring their case for compensation over the torture they suffered at the hands of British soldiers during the Mau-Mau uprising), that's not what I'm about to claim. I just think it's...more complicated than that. More nuanced. I'm as white and liberal as I suspect are Andy Lane and Phillip Sandifer and my wife's somewhat foolish former housemate, but I can't really accept such a simplified view anymore. Yes, it's my wife's fault, the influence of a trained historian. Undoubtedly, the British in India, throughout the empire, did some truly reprehensible things. In one story in Holmes of the Raj our heroes encounter a famine which has been if not manufactured, then certainly exacerbated by the British government's insistence on the doctrine of free trade. It's only through the actions of a British governor who goes against the order of his government and persuades a native merchant to help him who is able to get some famine relief to the local people. Really, aside from imperialism, the real evil in these stories appears to be free trade and those who unthinkingly espouse such an ideology. Plus ca change.

It's complicated though. The British government is the clear villain of this particular tale: British policies clearly lead to the deaths of many people. Yet the 'hero', if I can call him that, the character who at any rate does the most to help the people under his rule, is a British man. And then there's Holmes, who explicitly identifies himself as an agent of the British government, whose orders are the only reason he and Watson are actually in the country at all, but who otherwise does everything he can to help the native people whom he comes into contact with, and with whom he clearly has real sympathy. In both cases, you can argue that these are an idealisation by an Indian author, Holmes was never quite so sympathetic in Conan Doyle's original stories. Then again, you might ask why he goes to the trouble to include so many sympathetic British characters in his fiction. Why he might trouble not to depict British India as a hell of 'oppression and slavery'.

I've compared this book to Flashman a few times already, and I think one last comparison will draw out the point I'm trying to make here. MacDonald Fraser was, by his own admission, an imperialist. In his view the British Empire was predominantly a force for good which did much to spread ideals of democracy, science, education, etc. around the globe. It's not such an uncommon view, although not perhaps a very common one in my social circle. Yet as a writer and historian (his end notes show just how meticulous his research was for all his Flashman books), he had a basic honesty and clear sighted view of humanity that consequently his novels give a pretty damning view of 19th century British imperialism, almost in spite of themselves. In effect, Vithal Rajan comes at it from the other side. It's pretty clear where his sympathies lie, but at the same time he allows that India wasn't perfect before the British arrived. The Hindu caste system is shown to be hidebound and in need of reform. And some British individuals did good for the communities in which they found themselves. We see this in one story when Watson almost diagnoses the source of malaria, which nicely stands as an image for the material improvements of the country for which the British were responsible.

It's not that I think any good that the British did in India somehow excuses all the wrong we did. I don't believe that that kind of moral equivalence can ever exist. Which is why I dislike the use of the word 'balanced' in this context, one we see so often used by apologists for imperialism. Another term that irritates is 'realism', because that suggests we can somehow find a moral point which lets imperial aggressors off the moral hook. The victims of imperialism still exist, and the perpetrators of such crimes should be held to account, even if that can only be achieved via the history books. On the other hand, we also shouldn't ignore the existence of positive things which may have occurred, if only accidentally, because of the encounter between coloniser and colonised. The British presence in India was a history which occurred over centuries, and the British Empire was different things in different times and places. If people are complicated, then so I think are the empires they create. And if the Victorian era was a time of progressive movements as well as cruel oppression, then I strongly suspect that many such movements and beliefs were inspired or provoked by the experience of being in or ruling an empire. In which case, without the empire, would they have ever existed? The term I would prefer in this context is the one I applied to MacDonald Fraser above: 'clear-eyed', because it suggests an awareness of all the ways in which reality, however uncomfortably, doesn't fit into our neat ideological boxes.

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A cursory look at Wikepedia also shows me that Conan Doyle also wrote a pamphlet in support of the Boer war. And a few years later wrote another denouncing abuse in the Belgian Congo. Clearly an early example of 'their empire was worse than ours'. So he wasn't perfect. For all the ways in which Doyle was progressive, he was clearly also capable of possessing unthinking imperialist assumptions. Which is one reason why it's so pleasing when a writer like Vithal Rajan comes along and corrects him in such a playful fashion.