How Is Fiction Responding To Science Of The Periphery? A Closer Look At The Indian Detective Narrative

• In Event: STS between Centers & Peripheries II

Abstract

How does one think about the scientific nature of the detective narrative genre in the context of the colonial peripheries, spaces that are not imagined as the centres of modern techno-science? My work is in conversation with that Joseph Agassi's paper, The Detective Novel and Scientific Method. This paper analyzes the science and the scientific method in the Byomkesh Bakshi series by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, which is produced between 1930s-1970s in India. It approaches Agassi’s idea of the eurocentric scientific method with Indian forms of knowledge. The central question that it attempts to answer is do peripheral forms of science find their way into the Indian detective novel? How are representations of local forms of knowledge framed within this euro-centric scientific approach that is thought to be pertinent to the detective novel? Does it change the genre itself or there is an Indianisation of these methods? My objects of enquiry of cocaine and snake poison have long histories and associations in 20th century India. They were also widely researched by Indian doctors who published both case studies and original research in the Indian Medical Gazette. I attempt to answer these questions with a study of these histories along with their representation in the detective series. My attempt is to think about ‘peripheral science’ and how its representation in Indian detective fiction moulds and subverts the representations of modalities of the science of the scientific metropole.

Author

• Pratiti -, University of California Berkeley