Kaushik Bhaumik, A City of Detectives: Calcutta in the Global Division of Intellectual Labour
Kaushik Bhaumik
Why are urban detectives so popular in current Bengali cinema?
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Jighansa (adapting The Hound |
Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! |
Imagine Calcutta as a unique postcolonial city teeming with detectives, and imagine such a detective as a unique product of the global division of intellectual labour in the twentieth century. A man of leisure, an imagination of a particular literary time, the Calcutta detective was more a celebration of the postcolonial Bengali intellectual: maximally rational but in a way that was careful not to rock the boat of bhadralok feudal flamboyance*.
Can we, from our own viewpoints of leisure, reimagine the city of Calcutta itself as an emblem of global urban modernity - but a modernity defined by a persona who would bend rationality itself to his need for leisure?
*bhadralok: literally 'gentleman', 'well-mannered person'
(The film Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! will be screened).
Readings:
Chakrabarti, Gautam ‘The Bhadralok as Truth-Seeker: Towards a Social History of the Bengali Detective’, Cracow Indological Studies vol. XIV (2012) (download here)
Ginzburg, Carlo and Anna Davin Morelli, 'Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method', History Workshop, No. 9 (Spring, 1980), pp. 5-36 (download here)
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