By Ananya Banerjee

Purpose

Research Methods

Analysis

Bengal always had a very rich literature base since the independence, ithas been seen that the majority of the crime novels or detective fictionnovels at that time written by Bengali writers and detectives likeByomkesh Bakshi, Kiriti Roy, Arindam Bosu all became very famous andwell known characters and till today kids grow up reading these books.There has not been much representation of women in this genre; we onlyget to see a typical Bhodrolok in the main role.

My paper is based on the Crime Fiction novels and the Bhodrolok Societyaround the time of Independence and the lack of female characters inthese novels. I have done my research on the Byomkesh Bakshi Series bySaradindu Bondyopadhyay and the Feluda series by Satyajit Ray.Throughout the paper the focus is on the handful of female charactersthat we get to witness in these stories and the importance of theircharacter to the story line. Usually when a novel or any story is written itreflects a certain time, space and culture. In case of crime fiction it wasseen that it always attracted a large number of readers, in Bengal it was orrather it is still seen that the detective novels have a cult following,characters like Byomkesh Bakshi is still famous even after forty years andthere have been numerous adaptations of it.

To do this research work the methodology that was used was that of anon-empirical research work.

My work also does not include any field work or experimentation, thework is completely based on the data that I could gather from the twospecific Detective fiction series : Byomkesh Bakshi by SaradinduBondyopadhyay and Feluda Series by Satyajit Ray; and the articles anddocuments which mainly dealt with the subject that I was dealing with,these articles and documents were mainly gathered from journals andonline sources and the articles and documents that have been referred toduring the research work are mainly written by various sociologists andauthors who dealt with topics like crime novels and criminology and theBengal society.

The type of study that has been done here is more of a qualitativeresearch than a quantitative one, a qualitative research is mainly aimed atacquiring a in depth understanding of a specific event rather than aunderstanding it from the surface, it also aims to provide an explicitimage of the structure and the patterns that are found among theparticipants, there is no room for manipulation of variables it gives onethe room for the meaning to emerge from the participants. It gives abetter understanding of the data through a firsthand experience

Most of these novels were written when India was under the colonialrule, therefore the impact of the English literature and culture can be seenin the novels.

Bengal gets a prominence in this context because Bengal was the firststate where this particular genre was first introduced.

In India detective novels were first introduced when they were translatedfrom English to Bengali and then from Bengali to other Indian languagesat the end of 19th Century.

All the different genres that were introduced, detective novels raisedquestions of cultural translations and of genealogy that were of widerintellectual importance.

There was also a heavy influence of the Victorian Age in India aroundthat time.

When there are cultural borrowings like this one thinks how meaningstravelled. This problem did not occur here as the straight forwardtranslations replicated ‘Bengal modernity’ and revealed a society that hasalready fully adapted to British rule. The influence of the Bhodrolok wasvery prominent at this point of time.

This was the period of renaissance in India. Importance was given to science, education, and

reasoning. The Bhodrolok were the Intelligentsia of Bengal at that

time and their culture was heavily influenced by theEuropean Culture and the Victorian age.

Women around that time in India were only present tomake a family, look after the house hold and theystrictly did not work outside of the house, caste, classor religion.

There were restrictions on how women dressed andhow they behaved.

These automatically gave a very heavy impact on theessentially men-centric genre of literary fiction.

It is considered that the first ever female detective in aliterary fiction was Mrs. G. in The Female Detective(1864) by Andrew J. Forrester Jr.

Then came Amelia Butterworth, who first appeared inAnna Katharine Green's That Affair Next Door (1897).

After this we came across Miss. Marple (1926) andNancy Drew (1930).

Characters like Mrs. G and Amelia Butterworth hasnearly been forgotten as not a lot of these stories werepublished , it was in 2013 that the British libraryrevived these stories and re-published them.

In case of India it was in 2017 that we see womennovelists writing about female protagonists, but theyare still relatively unknown to the lager population.

Usually in crime/ detective literary genres we gotmainly four types of generic female characters to see:

1. Firstly, There are the objects; generally sex objects, theywere there to give the men to react to something.

2. Secondly there were the victims.3. Thirdly there are the sirens, the token sex symbol of the

story that uses men and has all the answers.4. Lastly there are the Mice and Shrews, generally the

wives and girlfriends. These are the characters thataccept everything that comes their way or theyconstantly complain about it

It is not only in European or the American Fiction but alsoin Indian literary fiction that we get to see the sametreatment of female characters.

At the very beginning I would like to talk about the Feluda series bySatyajit Ray. This particular series in the detective/crime fiction genre isthe probably the best example of the patriarchal crime-fiction that we gotto witness in Indian Literature. There are almost 34 finished Feludastories among which in seven stories (The Curse of the Goddess, Napoleon’sLetter, The Disappearance of Amber Sen, The Acharya Murder Case, The GoldCoins of Jahangir, Shakuntala’s Necklace, and Dr. Munshi’s Diary) we get tosee female characters . In all the other stories either the victim is awidower or a bachelor.

In The Curse of the Goddess, there is a little girl who is close to hisgrandfather and takes a deep interest in wordplay and riddles.

In Napoleon’s Letter, the victim’s daughter-in-law is a voracious reader ofFeluda

In The Disappearance of Amber Sen, the victim’s niece is a Feluda fan, In The Acharya Murder Case, the victim’s niece is once again a Feluda fan

and was trained to play the piano. In the story The Gold Coins of Jahangir, the victim’s aunt is a lady crippled

by age.

In Shakuntala’s Necklace and Dr. Munshi’s Diary,there is a greater female participation – the formerone depicts the eponymous character’sgranddaughter as an aspiring journalist andexercises her agency to keep the necklace safe,whereas in the latter Dr. Munshi’s wife is themastermind behind her husband’s murder. Withthe exception of these two crime-fictions from theFeluda series the character design of the womenare domestic, fragile, dainty and easily perturbedby crisis. They are in need of chivalrous men to beprotected and confined within the ambit of safehouse. They are merely reduced to fans rather thanentailing in active participation. The presence andportrayal of the female characters have beenengineered in such a fashion that their absencewon’t rouse the rhythm and texture of the plot.

When we go through the Byomkesh series we seethat the series has been very cleanly divided intotwo sections, the stories that took place before theIndependence of India where we do not get to seeany female characters of importance and thestories that took place after the Independencewhere we see the emergence of more femalecharacters in the plot lines. The only exceptionbeing Byomkesh’s wife Satyaboti who emerges inthe story Arthamanartham in 1933. though Satyabotiis shown as an important part of Bakshi’s life shewas still depicted as a housewife who stayed awayfrom most of Bakshi’s work and an interestedlistener to Ajit and Bakshi’s conversations.

For the Byomkesh Bakshi series we do get women characters like asmall girl, someone’s sister, wife throughout the series but theimportance given to a female character and the frequentemergence of female character is seen in the stories that werewritten by the author after the independence, that is after 1947.We start to see characters as perpetrators instead of a victim.

In the story Room. no 2 we see that the victim Sukanta was murderwith precision by Mrs. Roy with the help of the surgical knife.Saradindu Bandyopadhyay probably wrote the most bold femalecharacter in 1961 in Aditiyo where we find that man named TapanSen stabbed a man to death only to find out later that it was notTapan Sen but Santa Sen who use to dress as a man (Tapan Sen)who actually committed the murder. This was the only two storiesout of the 29 finished stories that we see a single female characterthat is caught by Byomkesh Bakshi and she is the sole perpetratorin the story.

In Adrisho Trikon we come across another female character Reba whowas murdered and was also one of the perpetrators of the story. InMogno Mainak we find Heena Mallik as a victim who is murderedby Santosh Babu.

The rest of the female characters were not given any name ofprominent character they were just mentioned as someone’s wifeor daughter.

The fact that the literature of a particular time framereflects or depicts the culture and society of that timeand that reflection can be found in any genres ofliterature, be it romantic novels, family drama or crimefiction is clearly evident from these various works.

Female characters in specifically in Detective Fictionstill now in many cases works only as side characterswhich does not contribute a lot to the genre.

It is only in the 21st Century which is almost a centurylater that we have realised that the representation ofwomen as detectives in the main stream crime fictionnovels are needed and they are needed in the main plotlines.

There is still a long way to go for women detectivesspecifically in the Indian literary fiction genre.

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Author Details:

Name: Ananya Banerjee

Email: ananya91banerjee@gmail.com

Designation: Research Scholar (Mphil)

Affiliated Institution: Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.