The Making of a Gentleman and a Detective: Tales of Crime, Respectability, and Surveillance from a Colonial Metropolis

Abstract

Priyanath Mukhopadhyay (also referred to as PM subsequently) enjoyed an extraordinary career in the colonial police force in Calcutta, where he served as a detective from 1878 to 1911. In his later life, he wrote as a bhadralok and a detective—both important parts of his fashioned self-identity—using narratives of crime to showcase his rare professional expertise and his responsibilities as a cultured upholder of the law. Through an examination of Priyanath’s serialized police tales, it is possible to see how crime writing forged the values of respectability and civic sensibilities, and shaped the moral fiber of an urban society that appeared to be falling apart at its seams. Examining criminal activities in colonial Calcutta as recoverable from PM’s writings affords glimpses of a city being reordered by its material wealth, social aspirations, and moral attitudes. PM’s tales attempt to face this challenge by forging a moral authority in the finely calibrated colonial order. His readers too were evidently invested in it as they endorsed this stand with their purse, leading to soaring circulation figures. The middle classes of Calcutta emerge in these tales as part and parcel of Priyanath’s policing, providing neighborhood and community surveillance networks and backing up the efforts of their detective hero. PM wrote very much as a social commentator as well as a police officer, reaffirming traditional social and domestic values, and frowning upon transgression of class and gender boundaries. What also comes alive is the city itself—the spaces laid bare or concealed by crime—the writing providing access to different topographies of urban knowledge and information networks.