[Reader-list] Crime Fiction: Secret Doors, Amorphous maps, Swapankumar, Borges

[Debkamal Ganguly]

Dear friends,

In the last posting I have tried to provide an over view of common characteristics of the villains scattered in hundreds of crime tales written by Swapankumar. In the current discussion I would like to highlight some of the common formal narrative techniques used again and again by Swapankumar, on the face value which might not appear as crafty, innovative and brilliant like the stories by Sir Aurthur Conan Dyle, Agatha Christie, or even those of Satyajit Ray, but the recurringly similar stories of Swapankumar might have latent significance to a curious reader. In my proposal written to Sarai, I talked about one of my reserach area would be the portrayal of 'the city' in crime tales under discussion. After reading more than hundred Swapankumar tales, the images of 'the city' (mostly Kolkata) described by Swapankumar appropriates some kind of coherent narrative texture. I would like to indulge myself to look for generalizations in those scattered paragraphs of descriptions of the city
 and 'other' spaces.

 

1. Generally the story starts from heart of the city of Kolkata. In the beginning of the story, the location in Kolkata is established often from accurate sounding names of streets, junctions, landmarks of the city, having a convincing tone about the authenticity of the place almost in terms of jounalistic reality, like: Harrison Road, Welesley Street, Boubazar, the crossing of Vivekananda Road nad Almherst Street etc. These details of the city are often supposed to match with the real 'map' of Kolkata. But as the crime, criminal and detective move out of the city, the 'authenticity' factor of spatial location gets fused more and more. Like, in a town near Sunderban (the famous mangrove forest) Canning, Swapankumar writes about underground tunnels connecting to sea, while in actuality sea is still far away from Canning. There are similar examples, like, a 12,000 ft high mountain in the jungle near Pune (Chhatrapatir Talowar lit. The Sword of Chhatrapati), a dense forest with ruins of
 palaces in Birbhum district in West Bengal  (detective Deepak lands up there when he jumps with a parachute from a plane going from Kolkata to Bombay). Thus Swapankumar strategically has coagulated geographically mapped 'true' spaces with imaginary spaces placed within the co-ordinates of real space. Here I am not going to entertain the argument that he was a 'lazy' writer, not to check all the authentic details of a space (actually that habit of checking the 'trueness' of space was categorically practised by Styajit Ray), or not so 'creative', so that he has not able to create tensions in 'real' spaces. Here my observation would be that, his approach towards 'space authenticity' varies from center (the city of Kolkata) to the margin. In the center the space is properly mentioned with all real markers and that concrete contours of the mapped center tends to get diffused more and more as the event rolls out of the territory of Kolkata. Here one might ponder over the nature of space
 as an objectified entity, as a mapped territory within the discourse of colonial engagement.  

 

Borrowing from Thongchai Winichakul (a historian from Thailand), Benedict Anderson showed the nature of  pre-colonial representations of space in cosmographs, where world is shown as intermediary between the spiritual spaces of over and under, aligned along the sacred vertical line of axis mundi. Even the more political view of boundaries between two empires were perceived from eye level, and distinguishing markers were set accordingly, not from a birds eye view of horizontal modern map. The colonial enthusiasm and curiosity organised survey in unmanned places and by this process quantification and territorialization of space happened in terms of square miles and drawn boundaries of irregular shape projected on two dimensional paper. The shape of the map served as a container-object to be filled in with contained-objects like census and survey data of various kinds produced by the colonial governance and authority. The simple logistics of pictorial presentation of vast spaces in tiny
 maps was itself an abstract representation of reality according to Anderson. In that context Swapankumar's strategy of depicting spaces away from the center through coagulated, amorphous mapping, acts as a deterrant to the process of  objectification of the space.  

 

2. There are lot of secret doors and passages that crowd the tales of Swapankumar. As mentioned in the last posting, detective Deepak most of the time misses the serial criminal at the last moment. And most of the time it is found that the criminals have escaped through some undiscovered secret doors or secret passages. This strategy is so overtly used, that many might find it too simplistic. But if we look at the first few crime tales written in the end of 19th century and the beginning of 20th century (specially 'Haridas-er Guptakatha' written in 1897 by Bhuban Chandra Mukhopadhyay or 'Mayabi' written in 1904 by Panchkori Dey) there one could find reference of these secret passages and secret doors. Actually in medieval architecture there were provisions for secret doors and passages in the forts and palaces for the safety of the royal family during the sudden unwarranted attack of the enemy. While Bhuban Chandra and Panchkori placed their crime tales in those abondoned ruins of
 the structures of the pre-colonial era, those secret passages can be considered as reality. The aristocrats owning those palaces etc were no more and the criminals got hold of those ruins along with the knowledge of the secret structures. But Swapankumar frees those secret structures from the ruins of late medieval era and extends the elments of the secret architecture to the late colonial and even post-independent buildings. Thus a boarding lodge in one of the crowded main road of central Calcutta, or a bungalow in a northern hill town in West Bengal can have secret doors and passages. For me these imaginary secret passages are the connectors of two parallel spaces; one is real, mapped, concrete space and the other is imaginary and of amorphous nature, both casting their shadows on both simultaneously. And those two spaces are not delineated in concrete terms. That way, a mapped space in the center, in the city, under the gaze of surveillance of colonial authority or the newly
 emerged independent nation state can have links with those secret imaginary spaces through those secret corridors and doors and those imaginary spaces are inhabited by archetypal villains like Dragon, Kaalnagini or Kaalrudra.   

 

3. In Swapankumar's tales one can discover some urban legends, which has a resonance from the past. A parcel containing pieces of a female body is a theme of one of Swapankumar's story in Biswachakra series. One can find the distinct refrain from Panchkori Dey's 'Mayabi' (1904) and even from an  accounted real incident, written in the series 'Darogar Daptar' (written in 1890s) by retired police professional Priyanath Mukhopadhyay. As Priyanath claims most of his stories are real life incidents, that way, one can estimate about a similar incident that had happened in Kolkata atleast once during the years of 1890s or before. In the same story Swapankumar introduces the act of cannibalism also. Thus Swapankumar has tried consistently to dwell on the elements provided by his predecessors in terms of secret doors or urban legends etc while tearing out the temporal signature and association from those events. While that temporality has been tampered with, the incidents become timeless and
 finally tend to precipitate in the imaginary spaces connected to real world by secret doors.

 

4. The act of detection by 'India's best detective Deepak' is often facilitated by overhearing. At times Deepak secretly listens to the plans by the criminals, placing his ears on the closed doors, or at times it is the turn for his assistant Ratanlal or some other characters to do so. Again one can find the use of secret listening in the writings of Panchkori Dey. One can dismiss those listenings as unimaginative plot structures. But these acts of secretive listenings tend to connect the unseen, private world of the criminals to the public sphere of law and jurisdiction. The organic 'tunnels' of ears also seem to connect the secret spaces/secret actions/secret motives to the open world of reason and judgement. Thus the secret doors and secert listenings are two oppositely directed tools used in reverse ways in the course of navigation from/to the real world thorugh the imaginary-amorphous spaces. 

 

While leafing through different stories of Swapankumar, I by chance read a story by Jeorge Luis Borges, 'Tlon, Uqber, Terterius', compiled in his enigmatic collection 'Labyrinth'. There he wrote about an 'imaginary' entry in an encyclopaedia, on an 'imaginary' planet Tlon, where secretively every conceivable knowledge discipline practised on the earth has been given an 'imaginary' and 'unreal' face, just to counter the overwhelming pressure of concrete logic and instrumental reason. The works of Swapankumar, with their outer trechearous simplicity and inner nagation of dominant stereotypes of logic and reason, tend to fabricate that labyrinthine imaginary spaces, populated by criminals of unfamiliar type and connected by hidden doors and secret listenings.    

 

There are other points also, like Swapankumar's gendered description of the city, how it resonates with the image of city seen by god fearing Haridas in Haridas-er Guptakatha written long before Swapankumar started writing, how the city has been shown again and again as a space that regenerates crime -----I would like to discuss those in the final report submitted to Sarai. 

 

Debkamal    

    

 

 



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