Professor Brian Stoddart is an academic, historian, educationist, researcher, and fiction writer. His well-researched Le Fanu crime novels, A Madras Miasma and The Pallampur Predicament, are set in the Madras of the 1920s. Prof. Stoddart is an international consultant who works mainly on higher education reform in Asia and West Asia, and is currently a Distinguished Fellow of the Australia India Institute in the University of Melbourne.
In the third of the series, A Straits Settlement, which is scheduled for a worldwide release on May 24, Le Fanu, the fictional detective created out of an India-Madras-inspired imagination, is promoted to Inspector General of Police, a post which proves to be more boring than he had envisaged. In an email interview, Prof. Stoddart speaks about how Le Fanu came into being and why he chose Madras as his setting. Excerpts:
You mentioned earlier that you were in Madras for your PhD and spent time in the Egmore archives.
I went to Madras first in 1972 and lived there for several months while working in the archives. I have been in India for a total of seven-eight years and much of that time has been spent in Madras. That included a lot of time during the 1970s, including the Emergency, and a lot of time before and after Madras’s transformation to Chennai. Yes, the city has changed a lot. But at the same time, it has retained a lot of its ‘big village’ atmosphere and charm.
You also said that you lived in the house of V.R. Rajaratnam, then IG of Police. Was this the inspirational point for Le Fanu?
In a way it probably was, because he alerted me to the role of the police. My friend and colleague David Arnold wrote an excellent book on the police in the Presidency and there is also the excellent official history of the police. Sitting out in his yard in the evenings, V.R. and I would exchange knowledge of the times in the 1930s because he had the memories and I had the records. He was a fabulous man who in many ways became my second father. Le Fanu was formed a lot later, but the idea of the police was there because of V.R.
How did the India inspiration happen?
It started from both knowledge and [the place’s] vibrancy, I think. The Raj was an obviously evocative period, and India seemed the natural setting for crime fiction. I had a lot of knowledge about the period, knew a lot of detail, and it all started from there. That was aided and abetted by the great books from S. Muthiah, who provides such great insight, and from the columns by Sriram V. Basically, though, India and for me Madras/Chennai is just such a wonderful setting for stories like these.
Who inspired the creation of Le Fanu?
Aha. A couple of threads, I think. One is a biography I wrote of an Indian Civil Service [ICS] officer, Arthur Mario Agricola Collier Galletti di Cadilhac. He was based in the Madras Presidency between 1900 and 1934 and was always a renegade, a square peg in a round hole who really loved India, and for a long while supported the drive for Independence. As a half-English half-Italian man, he was never trusted by the rest of the Raj, and became known as the ‘People’s Collector’.
So, that was the basis. I wanted a character who was a bit out of the mainstream, a bit ‘foreign’, so Le Fanu came because of a couple of links. Sheridan Le Fanu was a great Irish horror and crime writer of the mid-nineteenth century who was a rival to Edgar Allan Poe. Le Fanu had a lot of relatives, including one called Henry who was a member of the ICS in Madras in the late nineteenth century. That seemed like a good fit. And it has worked, I think, because my Le Fanu is a bit of an ‘outsider’ who wants to do the right things in all respects. He is conflicted by a loyalty to his employers on the one hand and to the people of India on the other. That did happen with people like Arthur Galletti and, say, Bernard Houghton in Bengal and even Eric Blair/George Orwell in Burma.
What is the connecting thread in the three Le Fanu novels?
The centre of it is about Le Fanu dealing with the transition that was going on in the 1920s, a change from the certainty to the uncertainty of British India. That is, dealing with the idea that grew through the period that India would come to govern itself and that the British would leave. That was difficult for a lot of people, British and Indian. The sub-threads really run off that for Le Fanu, both personally and professionally. His relationships and his work are really all governed by that transition, as is his future. It is one man’s story about dealing with change and confronting his own ideas and feelings about that change while at the same time trying to run his job.
Are there more in the series?
From the start I thought that it would be a series, and that would stretch till about 1939 or so when he would have had to retire, given the age he is when we meet him. That allows me to look at the idea of him staying in Madras until the time of the Rajaji government in 1937, or going elsewhere in India, or the Empire, or anywhere. This is all part of the story about transition. In the new book, A Straits Settlement, he goes across the Bay of Bengal to the Straits Settlements and that brings about some possible changes for him in all aspects of his life. The idea is to look at a good stretch of time when India’s prospects changed, perhaps similar to Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet but set in a crime fiction dimension.
Besides your research at the archives, where else did you get so much of the landscape details for Madras?
Oh, just travelling about and exploring the city over a long time and watching it change. That included a lot of time out in the mofussil, as British India had it, and up in Hyderabad and out on the Andhra coast. Coming to Madras first, I loved going to Moore Market and the bookshops, wandering around George Town and contrasting that with the great suburbs, going to the beach, discovering Woodlands and other great food outlets, the movie theatres, going into Mylapore during the “season” and hearing the music, watching the temple carts and all the rest. Travelling on the railways was all part of that, meeting so many different people and learning all the time about a place that was just so different for me. Looking at old photographs has been a huge help, and thinking about the city in a different way as I did as a scholar has also been important — there are so many potential crime scenes in Chennai as I discover going about all over the place by autorickshaw.
Why Madras? Why not Calcutta, for instance, where so much of British history also prevails?
Well, Madras was always the ‘Benighted City and Province’, the poor relation in British India despite its significance. I knew a fair bit about its inner story, and I thought the crime series might be a way to counteract some of that inherited prejudice. Besides that, it is a fabulously evocative city, even now, with the distinctive Indo-Saracenic architecture, its great clubs and institutions, a great tradition for learning and literature and film, all that wonderful south Indian food and heritage and outlook, and great historical characters. It is just such a wonderful setting for a series like this, because Madras was always different from the others and ran to its own pulse. I like that.
( Nikhil Raghavan is a Chennai-based writer)
