ālim Ḍākū and the Mystery of the Rubber Sea Monster: Urdu Detective Fiction in 1930s Punjab and the Experience of Colonial Modernity

Abstract

Detective fiction counts amongst the most successful literary products that the metropolitan west has exported to the world periphery. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War the genre acquired a global presence – both in the form of translations of existing works such as the Sherlock Holmes stories, and in the form of numerous indigenous adaptations. This kind of literature represented a prime example of the mass-produced and mass-circulated print entertainment that was part and parcel of the emergence of mass consumption as a social form. Detective fiction was, thus, both a carrier and an expression of modernity. While some literary theorists have pointed to longstanding historical antecedents, detective fiction would not have made sense in earlier historical epochs. The principles of scientific enquiry permeate the genre throughout, not just in terms of the ubiquitous magnifying glasses, finger-prints and assorted scientific apparatuses, but in terms of the subject matter itself – the fact that it is possible to make sense of an increasingly confusing world by uncovering hidden causal connections through rational enquiry.