Byomkesh Bakshi’s Calcutta Crime and Detection in Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's The Menagerie (1954)

Abstract

Like the social novel in Bengal, Detective literature, a popular branch of fiction amongst the burgeoning middle classes, originated with the colonial encounter, paralleling the growth of a reading public that were buttressed by the ubiquitous presence of schools and colleges imparting an English education. Genealogies are always messy but if we look at the origins of this branch of popular literature then it is inevitable that we must link it to the growth of Calcutta as an imperial city, especially where goods, capital and labour flowed in and out with regularity. The vast hinterlands attracted a steady stream of the working poor to its portals just as it was a playing ground of the mighty. Detective literature in Bangla has been shaped with the vagaries of city life, its anonymity and its expanding population that made crime easy. This essay will explore the genre’s relationship with the postcolonial city with a discussion of the works by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay and his detective Byomkesh Bakshi. In particular it will look at a short novel The Menagerie (1954) that establishes the role the city played in how murders ‘had become the quiet game of the well-behaved.’ The text looks at what Foucault suggests is the embourgeoisement of crime, a peculiar feature of a post-war Calcutta as the setting of criminal activities embodying the rapid dereliction and movements of a migrant population. Set in a pastoral farmhouse, the classic detective story elements of a closed bunch of suspects and methods of ratiocination are used by Bandyopadhyay to turn an interrogative eye to contemporary Bengali society and the constant reversals of notions of law and order where the figure of the detective performs a crucial role as the provider of justice.