Of dogs that read and stories from the Raj
Abir Mukherjee may be walking around a dripping London madly accusing people of nicking his umbrella, while he’s really forgotten them at his mum’s place or on the tube, but when it comes to talking about his books, one immediately sees a method in his madness. I met the 45-year-old Scottish-Bengali writer at a cafe near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Over coffee and cake, he spoke about the merry success of his historical detective series. The Wyndham & Banerjee books, set in Raj-era Calcutta of the 1920s, feature English cop Captain Sam Wyndham, and his Indian sidekick, Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee. Or Surrendernot, as his British superiors are wont to call him. Book 4 is done, he is working on Book 5 now. The stories, steeped in the history of the time, are also rollicking adventure tales. So while Sam and Surrender-not are haring around Calcutta solving murders and preventing attacks, the Swadeshi movement gathers force in the background, luminaries like Subhas Chandra Bose and Chittaranjan Das make an appearance, and powerful viceroys and puppet princes hold court.
The first title, A Rising Man, won the CWA Endeavour Dagger for best historical crime novel of 2017, while the third, Smoke and Ashes, was chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 Best Crime & Thriller Novels since 1945.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a good man upholding a bad system. A system that he doesn’t believe in. And I read a lot of fiction, like Gorky Park.” In Abir’s books, the good man doing the Raj’s dirty work is Sam Wyndham, but also Surrender-not, who is constantly grappling with his British job and his Indian conscience. They are both him, said Abir. “They’re just parts of my personality. Sam, even though he’s English, is basically my cynical Scottish side, in terms of his world view... depressed, whisky-infused, hopefully not opium-infused forever... and then you have Surendranath, who’s more optimistic; he also has my Bengali legs. I wanted to look at that period through the eyes of these two men so that I could see much more of the spectrum.”
The son of Bengalis who immigrated to the UK in the 1960s, Abir grew up in Glasgow, and currently lives in London with his wife and two sons. A chartered accountant by training, and a student of economics from the London School of Economics, he works part-time in finance, and devotes the rest of his time to writing. “When I turned 40, I decided to cut back on work and do the writing seriously. Though when I told my colleagues that, they said, oh we thought you were already working part-time.”
Mukherjee cracks his quips with a serious face, much like the humour in his books. Like when Sam encounters the infamous plaque at Calcutta’s Bengal Club – ‘No dogs or Indians beyond this point’ – and Surrender-not remarks, “...the British have achieved certain things in a hundred and fifty years that our civilisation didn’t in over four thousand…We never managed to teach the dogs to read.”
When Mukherjee sat down to write his fourth, he was all set to tackle the classic British crime novel trope – the locked room mystery. “It was going to be my homage to Agatha Christie... where a body is found in a room which is locked from the inside. But I have been very depressed and angered by everything that’s going on in the world, and in Britain. So I couldn’t just write my little locked room mystery. As an author, and just as a person, I had to write something which spoke to what is happening in the world.” So, Book 4 became something more than a murder in Assam in 1922, with a flashback to London in 1905. “It struck me that the east end of London, which is now full of Bangladeshi Muslims, 100-120 years ago was full of Eastern European Jews. They settled in the same streets that Bangladeshi Muslims now live in, doing the same jobs… And the British press reacted exactly the same way that they now react to Muslims. Today, the Jews are integrated. Britain has a decent track record of accepting people. I prefer to remind people of the better sides of their nature.”
For the rest of the series, Abir has a path in mind, he wants to get to the Bengal Famine of 1943, which is about 20 years from where the story stands now.
“People in this country (the UK) don’t know that at a time when the Holocaust was happening in Europe, three million people were dying in India, of a manmade famine done on the watch of the British. And the man we are taught to venerate (Winston Churchill) could be held at least partially responsible for this. It’s airbrushed from British history. Yet my father would remember skeletons walking into the streets of Calcutta and dying. So it happened. This was my urge to write. My intention was to tell the stories that the British don’t tell. I could write a history book, but if you want to reach people, you have to write crime novels. You’ve got to get them subtly, you know,” he grinned, before beginning to search frantically for his umbrella. One wonders who he pinned the blame on this time.
(Death in the East will be published in November by Penguin Random House India.)