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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Why they hate us
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Why they hate us

Why they hate us

Orient express: Films like The Deceivers, starring Pierce Brosnan, have long exoticized India. Photo: Merchant Ivory/Michael White/The Kobal CollectionZPremium

Orient express: Films like The Deceivers, starring Pierce Brosnan, have long exoticized India. Photo: Merchant Ivory/Michael White/The Kobal CollectionZ

I address these lines—written in India—to my relatives in England." So goes the first line of the first, and some say best, detective novel published in Queen’s English.

Orient express: Films like The Deceivers, starring Pierce Brosnan, have long exoticized India. Photo: Merchant Ivory/Michael White/The Kobal CollectionZ

What struck me when reading it are its Indian elements. The eponymous Moonstone, belonging to an idol and stolen by a corrupt British soldier in the aftermath of the battle of Srirangapatna, gives three Brahmins reason to travel all the way to inauspiciously foggy and spooky Yorkshire, masquerading as a band of juggling gypsy fakirs. The mysterious priests are, in a way, the real heroes and they eventually return the sacred jewel to its home.

Collins never visited India but started a fashion in popular pulp: The sacred but cursed jewel as well as the secret Oriental society would both feature in innumerable thrillers. It is probably no coincidence that such exotic ingredients were used to spice up mysteries when the British empire was at its mightiest.

Consider The Adventure of the Speckled Band (1892)—Arthur Conan Doyle’s favourite Sherlock Holmes story. It had suspicious gypsies and weird wildlife (a cheetah and a baboon) frolicking outside a British mansion. The murder weapon is an extremely deadly Bengali swamp adder trained to kill. Although quite unscientific (Bengal never exported swamp adders to be used by Western murderers, simply because there are no swamp adders in India), the corrupting influences of colonialism loom large and the culprit, if you recall, turns out to be a brutish British Calcutta-returned self-taught snake charmer.

An action scene from the film Gunga Din.

Chesterton wrote several detective stories in which a Catholic priest battles the superstitions of the Orient. In The Salad of Colonel Cray, a British officer appears to have been cursed by monkey-worshippers while looking for strong Trichinopoli cigars in India; The Wrong Shape features an enigmatic Indian conjuror; the title of The Red Moon of Meru refers to a sacred, and perhaps cursed, ruby, and so on.

Entertainment epics that sustained popular prejudice are as endless as they are mindless. This “Eastern influence" wasn’t limited to India. There was, for example, Fu Manchu waging jihad against the West with ray guns and poisoned prostitutes, nastier and far more long-lived than any other megalomaniac. Fu Manchu debuted in a story by Sax Rohmer in 1913 and survived the author’s death in 1959 by becoming the inspiration for several 1960s cult movies starring Christopher Lee. Lee is best known for playing Dracula in B-film shockers produced by the ultra-low-budget Hammer Studios whose success formula is summarized in two Bs: Boobies and Blood.

Gradually, with the Western pulp writer maturing intellectually, the idea of evil Orientals fell out of fashion. Recent Hollywood attempts to produce Fu Manchu sequels have failed because of the character’s political incorrectness—after all, such films might harm US trade with China, now that relations are thawing. I can’t for the life of me recall any major motion picture with Kali-worshipping Thugs over the two last decades while (coincidentally?) post-liberalization India’s importance has grown as an export market for the West. Of course, in the latter half of the 20th century the bogeyman from the East was usually typified by KGB agents from the far side of the Iron Curtain, and thriller heroes (be it “007" by Ian Fleming or Smiley by John le Carré) all fought the Cold War. However, that genre died abruptly with perestroika and is now but nostalgia.

As usual, I have a theory. At the root of such (mis)representations is perhaps a fear of anything that cannot be explained in rational market-economy terms, a dread of everything mysterious and idealistic that inspires a dedicated following. In many of these examples, the antagonist is (if at all characterized in a multifaceted way) a criminal mastermind who could have been a Mensa top-scorer if circumstances were different, but for inexplicable reasons now wants to destroy the Western way of life.

This makes him quite superior to the archetypal Western natural-born killer who has an IQ barely touching 70 and who commits crimes for short-term gain—typically clobbering somebody to death in an unsophisticated way to steal a six-pack from an off-licence or, at best, a cursed diamond. Such criminal acts are quite logical and do not baffle the Western mind at all.

It’s just a theory, but if you have another I’d love to hear from you.

Zac O’ Yeah is most recently the author of Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan.

Write to Zac at criminalmind@livemint.com

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Published: 25 May 2012, 09:16 PM IST
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