CHENNAI: The US has Spade and Marlowe. Sweden has Salander and Blomkvist. France can proffer Lecoq and Dupin, and Japan Yukawa. Looming over them all, and holding fort for England, is the ubiquitous Holmes. Who does India have to show, then?
We have Byomkesh Bakshi.
Byomkesh is the classical fictional detective. In the stories, spanning the early 1940s to the 70s, he is a private investigator with a sharp, analytical bent of mind. He uses intuition and logical analysis to solve cases, often with the help of circumstantial evidence. The stories are written by his friend and assistant Ajit Bandyopadhyay. Shades of Holmes and Watson? That is unsurprising. The writer of the Byomkesh mysteries, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay has acknowledged Conan Doyle as his inspiration for the characters.
In his detection methods though, Byomkesh is an original. His philosophy is to understand the mind of the criminal, and get to their motive. He is not unlike GK Chesterton’s Father Brown in his approach, though his ways are more physically active than Father Brown’s.
The innovative part of Byomkesh’s detection is the traps he sets to apprehend the perpetrator of the crime. Cases in point are Chorabali, Banhi-Patang and the meticulously planned Upasamhar, part of the group of stories in the recommended reading.
Byomkesh is quintessentially Indian. He does not like the moniker of a ‘detective’; he is a satyanweshi, a truth-finder. Where else will you find a dhoti-kurta-clad investigator, who’s married and has a son? Regular marital chores are welcome additions to Byomkesh’s stories, as are his loving quarrels with his wife Satyabati. Satyabati does not make many appearances in the stories, but whenever she does, she comes across as strong-willed and independent. Somewhat quirky as the Bakshi family may well be, they are normal folks.
Sharadindu wrote the Byomkesh stories (in gripping, visual, fluent prose) originally in Bengali. In the last 20 years though, there has been a surge in Byomkesh’s popularity across the country. Basu Chatterjee’s television series in the early 1990s contributed to a great extent — Rajit Kapoor’s remains the best representation of the bhadralok detective on screen — there have also been Hindi and Bengali adaptations on the silver screen. As for books, Byomkesh had been translated to Hindi and other Indian languages as early as in the 50s and 60s, and there have been excellent translations of Sharadindu’s works in English as well.
He is a must-read for lovers of mystery, and especially for the Indian aficionado. He is brilliant, he is an original, and he is one of our own. Recommended Reading: Picture Imperfect and Other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries, by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay.
(The writer is Financial Architect in Bangalore, whose short stories have been published in magazines in India and Singapore)
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