Pablo Mukherjee, Warwick

In an essay that - with typical ambition - announces his intention of coming up ‘with a new sense of the literary field as a whole’, Franco Moretti makes a device (the clue) and a genre (detective fiction) the crucial nodes in his arguments about the evolution of canons (‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’. 2000). He argues that authors or texts become canonical (Conan Doyle or Sherlock Holmes for example) because of their accidental deployment of formal devices such as clues with which they gain evolutionary advantage over their rivals who fail to adopt such devices to the same degree. But are there instances of successful generic models that evolve by not deploying such formal devices? If so, what explains their evolutionary success? Here, I take the example of a global ‘rival’ of Conan Doyle - the Bengali pioneer of detective fiction Priyanath Mukherjee (1855-1947) whose hugely popular serial Darogar Daptar was published exactly around the same time as Doyle’s Holmes stories (1893 onward) – to test Moretti’s model of the literary field.

Mukherjee occupies a canonical position in contemporary Bengali literary history – over two hundred of the Darogar Daptar stories were collected in two volumes by Arun Mukherjee and re-issued in 2004. By comparing the use of clues in the first cycle of the respective series by Mukherjee and Doyle, I pose a series of analytical and methodological questions – what happens to Moretti’s evolutionary model of genres when it is scaled up from local/regional to global levels? Are there exogenous as well as endogenous factors that determine successful evolution of forms? Can an exogenous factor over-ride an endogenous one in this process? For example, in the case of detective fiction in its global form, can the relative paucity of the formal device of the clue in Mukherjee’s writings be compensated by other factors, such as the different formation of the literary market in late-Victorian Bengal, the different organization of the colonial police administration, and, the different urban space inhabited by the fictional detective himself?