# Empires Collective — full text > An interdisciplinary collective of researchers examining the legacies of imperialism through podcasts, games and free digital artefacts. Source: https://www.empirescollective.com. Licence: see the site. Contact: hello@empirescollective.com Generated at build time from the site's own data. Last built 2026-09-21. ## About the collective The Empires Collective is an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers and academics that examines the legacies of imperialism through a critical-theoretical lens using multimedia formats. We are literary historians, film theorists, computer scientists, and philologists. As a group we use a multiplicity of digital artefacts to explore the connection between culture and colonialism. Via blogs, podcasts, video games and discussion forums, we spotlight the sociopolitical and historical forms imperialism took in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, laying bare its links to the contemporary moment. ## Research strands ### Diasporic crime fiction Detective writing as colonial history in disguise — who is permitted to investigate, whose crimes are legible, and what the whodunit does with the nation. The subject of the first Empire Sleuths episode. ### Identity and masculinity in Arabic fiction How imperial encounter is written into gendered selfhood, and how Arabic literary form carries and resists it. ### Digital infrastructures The pipes, archives and platforms that now mediate cultural memory — and the older asymmetries they quietly reproduce. ### Film strips and visual culture Projection, circulation and the colonial image: what was shown, to whom, and on what apparatus. ### Queer lives Sexuality and its archives under and after empire, including what the record was built not to hold. ### Memory and affect Literary history as a history of feeling — how modern South Asian and global modernist writing holds loss, belonging and aftermath. ### Periodical research The nineteenth- and twentieth-century press as the infrastructure of empire: serial fiction, reprint networks and the making of a reading public. ## Members ### Dr Debolina Dey Affiliation: Azim Premji University, Bhopal Profile: https://www.empirescollective.com/collective#debolina-dey Debolina currently teaches at Azim Premji University, Bhopal and has previously taught at Ramjas College and Lady Shriram College for Women. They have been a fellow at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin and recently a Barker fellow at Durham University. They have also been a recipient of the Charles Wallace scholarship. Debolina’s research interests are divided between contemporary issues — digital cultures, queer lives — and historical aspects of literary culture, especially the 19th century. They also love all aspects of food: reading, writing, eating and cooking. ### Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury Affiliation: ARSD College, University of Delhi Website: https://www.maitrayee.me Profile: https://www.empirescollective.com/collective#maitrayee-roychoudhury Maitrayee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, ARSD College, University of Delhi. She works on detective fiction and female sleuths from the global nineteenth century. Her PhD investigates a global framework for the New Woman detective across London, Melbourne, and Calcutta. Her upcoming publications explore Fergus Hume’s querying of race and empire in his Melbourne trilogy. ### Vaibhav Parel Affiliation: Newcastle University Profile: https://www.empirescollective.com/collective#vaibhav-parel Vaibhav Parel is a Northern Bridge-AHRC funded PhD candidate at Newcastle University. His thesis, The Scene of the Crime: Nationhood and the Postcolonial Contemporary in South Asian Diasporic Crime Fiction, explores Anglophone diasporic crime fiction written by authors of Indian descent who are based in the Global North. In it, he argues that this fiction offers a double lens: firstly, it allows us to investigate how the uneven terrain of the nation-state, race, class, gender and caste in this contemporary global form is negotiated transnationally; and secondly, it pushes for a reassessment of the relationship of diasporic fiction with the shifting terrain of postcolonial Indian culture and society. He examines how this body of work challenges the paradigmatic frame of the nation and nationhood, and responds to questions of diasporic belonging and representation. He has previously published with Brill and in Literature, Critique and Empire Today. ### Dr Zehra Kazmi Affiliation: Institute of Ismaili Studies Profile: https://www.empirescollective.com/collective#zehra-kazmi Dr Zehra Kazmi is a Research Associate in the South Asian Studies Unit of the Institute of Ismaili Studies and is a literary scholar specialising in modern South Asian Muslim literature and culture. Dr Kazmi is a literary historian of memory and affect, with a background in South Asian literatures, critical Muslim studies, postcolonial theory, and global modernisms. She was recently awarded a PhD in English from the University of St Andrews. Her thesis, which was passed without corrections, is titled “Indo-Muslim Nostalgia: Memory, Modernity and the Nation in 20th Century South Asian Muslim Writing”. It explores historical memory and nostalgia in South Asian Modernist Muslim writing within the context of sectarian violence and cultural disintegration in the wake of Partition. At the intersections of postcolonial theory, memory studies, affect theory, global modernisms, and decolonial feminist thought, she examines the works of South Asian Muslim and diasporic writers including Qurratulain Hyder, Ahmed Ali, Intizar Husain, Khadija Mastur, Attia Hosain, and M.G. Vassanji, among others. The study offers a rigorous analysis of the interconnections between Anglo-American and South Asian modernisms by tracing the emergence and trajectory of the latter in 20th century Indo-Muslim writing. ### Abdullah Alahmari Affiliation: University of St Andrews Profile: https://www.empirescollective.com/collective#abdullah-alahmari Abdullah Alahmari is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, in the School of Modern Languages. His research focuses on the literary representation of masculinity in the works of Egyptian author Yūsuf Idrīs, examining how masculinity is performed, portrayed, and neglected in Idrīs’s oeuvre. His thesis, titled ‘The Construction of Masculinity in the Works of Yūsuf Idrīs’, contributes to the broader fields of gender studies and Middle Eastern literary analysis. Abdullah holds an MLitt in Middle Eastern Literary Studies from the University of St Andrews. ### Dr Clara Défaschel Affiliation: University of St Andrews Profile: https://www.empirescollective.com/collective#clara-defaschel Dr Clara Défaschel is an Associate Lecturer at the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews. She recently completed her AHRC-funded PhD in Comparative Literature, which explored literary translations from Arabic into French produced in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in the past decade. Her broader research interests include reading in translation, plural ‘Frenches’ and ‘Arabics’, North African fiction, material and print cultures, sociology of literature, postcolonial cultural policy and diplomacy. ### Dr Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal Affiliation: University of St Andrews Profile: https://www.empirescollective.com/collective#anushrut-agrwaal Dr Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal is a film and media historian. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the AHRC-DFG “Relocating Filmstrips, Remapping Europe” project, a collaboration between the University of St Andrews and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century British educational and visual culture, non-theatrical film and media, film technologies, science and cinema, colonial cinema, and media materiality. Anushrut’s current book project, Watch and Learn: How the Invention of Cinema Changed British Education, reveals how cinema’s invention in the 1890s had a transformative impact on British education. Building on his research, Anushrut works on the history of the filmstrip as an instructional and political media technology. He is currently also researching glass as a media object, examining what the material and metaphorical uses of glass in British screen media — film, television, digital media — reveal about the class hierarchies, colonial legacies, gender discriminations, and environmental degradations embedded within British visual culture. Anushrut is also a Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy, and the Book Review Editor at the journal Early Popular Visual Culture. He previously worked as an Associate Lecturer at St Andrews (2023–2025), and has delivered guest lectures and led seminars at other universities, including Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main in Germany, and Jamia Millia Islamia and St Stephen’s College in India. ### Dipankar Sarkar Affiliation: Neul Labs Website: https://www.dipankar.name Profile: https://www.empirescollective.com/collective#dipankar-sarkar Dipankar is an independent researcher and CTO, and the founder of Neul Labs. He holds a B.Tech from IIT Delhi and an M.S. from Arizona State University, and is a member of the ACM and the IEEE. His research sits at the intersection of machine learning, distributed systems and decentralised technologies — federated learning and privacy-preserving AI, blockchain and decentralised physical infrastructure, deepfake detection, and copyright-compliant generative AI — and has produced a book, a body of published papers and more than twenty-five patent applications. Within the collective his interest is in digital infrastructures: what the pipelines, archives and platforms that now carry cultural memory inherit from the ones that came before. He builds the collective’s own, from the Empire Sleuths production pipeline to Empire Veil. ## Podcasts ### Empire Sleuths Detectives, crime fiction, and the mobile lives of women across the nineteenth-century world. Empire Sleuths investigates Victorian detective fiction, female detectives, and the colonial print cultures and mobility networks that carried crime writing across the nineteenth-century world — from Brighton to Bombay. Hosted by literary scholar Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury. Host: Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury Page: https://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuths Feed: https://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuths/rss.xml Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/empire-sleuths/id6813057302 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0bS3qKCFOcKWBacCMi6wli #### Episode 1: Vaibhav Parel on Diasporic Crime Fiction, Questions of Empire and Nationality Published 16 September 2026. Duration 45:49. Guest: Vaibhav Parel, Newcastle University. URL: https://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuths/1-vaibhav-parel-diasporic-crime-fiction Audio: https://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuths/empire-sleuths-1.mp3 Show notes: In the debut episode of Empire Sleuths, host Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury talks with Vaibhav Parel — an AHRC Northern Bridge doctoral researcher at Newcastle University and a former colleague from the University of Delhi — about the surprising historical depth of detective fiction. Parel traces his path from teaching Agatha Christie in Delhi to a PhD on South Asian diasporic crime writing, arguing that the genre's "entertainment" surface hides a rich subtext of colonial history, class, and power. Together they read the contemporary wave of historical crime novels set in British India — Abir Mukherjee's Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant "Surrender-not" Banerjee in 1920s Calcutta, and Sujata Massey's Perveen Mistry, one of Bombay's first women lawyers — to ask how these books stage nationalism, gender, and the uneven experience of empire. Who is allowed to be a detective? Whose crimes are visible, and whose disappear? What happens when the servant, rather than the sleuth, becomes the moral centre of the story? Ranging from the politics of representation to the instability of "crime" itself, this conversation offers a postcolonial lens on why the whodunit remains such a powerful way to reckon with the afterlives of empire. Chapters: - 0:00 Introduction: Empire Sleuths & guest Vaibhav Parel - 2:44 From Agatha Christie in Delhi to a PhD on crime fiction - 7:44 Crime fiction as colonial history - 12:44 Women, gender & Sujata Massey's Perveen Mistry - 20:14 Crafting characters: Mukherjee's Wyndham & Banerjee - 27:44 Nationalism and the politics of representation - 35:14 Class, servants & who counts as a criminal - 42:44 Closing reflections Topics: postcolonial literature, crime fiction, detective fiction, Abir Mukherjee, Sujata Massey, colonial India, empire, South Asian literature, Agatha Christie, nationalism, book podcast, literary criticism Full transcript (speaker-corrected): **Maitrayee** `0:00` Hello, I am Maitrayee Roychoudhury and you are listening to an episode of Empire Sleuths, where I analyse detective fiction from the last two centuries through a postcolonial lens. Today I have with me Vaibhav Parel, who is an AHRC Northern Bridge funded doctoral student at Newcastle University. He's also a former colleague from the University of Delhi where he taught at Hansraj College for many years. Vaibhav has written and published widely on crime fiction, postcolonial literature, memory and historicity. So of course, I'm very excited to have you here as a guest speaker and a discussant. So welcome Vaibhav. I will start this episode by posing this extremely wide question to you which I'm sure every doctoral student gets at some point, which is that could you tell us a little bit about your research and the scope of it, the authors, the texts you focus on, how you came to work on these ideas and this particular corpus. **Vaibhav** `1:18` Thank you, Maitrayee for this very generous introduction and for inviting me to be part of this episode. I'm very excited to be part of it. In response to your question, I came to this topic because I started teaching crime fiction in Delhi University, just Agatha Christie, but then I discovered that Agatha Christie was not just about murder. The subtext of those texts were deeply historical. And she was writing as an author of her time. You could excavate a whole range of issues in those texts which were apparently meant only for entertainment. But in my pedagogy I discovered that no, they are not just entertainment, they're more than that. And it was at that point that I was writing a conference paper and I started working on authors like Abir Mukherjee and Sujata Massey and discovered that there was really no work that had been done, no critical work that I could lay my hands on, and only to learn that it was a field which was open for a little more critical exploration and that there was very little work that had been done on those authors. So I kind of applied to various universities, got fairly favorable responses, and discovered that this was a field which was open for understanding what's going on in diasporic crime fiction, which, of course, has not really been worked on because crime fiction has generally been understood, as you know, from within nationalist frames. So either the Indian frame or the original Anglo American frames. And even when it has expanded beyond Anglo American frames, it has mostly been looked at within European frames of European languages, which meant that, first of all, South Asia has really not been represented very significantly in a lot of work. And secondly, there is very little work or practically no work that has looked at this interesting overlap of diasporic crime fiction with authors from South Asian descent, second generation now in the UK and the US, but writing fiction which is either set in India or set in the UK, but talking about distinctively UK based reality, which I think is a very interesting way of looking at the question of race, the question of class, and the question of diaspora, of course, through the frame of the nation. **Maitrayee** `4:10` That sounds amazing and now that you mention it, I realize that yes, I haven't come across work that actually looks at this broader cross-section of issues. I've read Sujata Massey before. I've maybe started an Abhi Mukherjee novel but I wasn't aware of Harini Nagendra for instance, whom you also look at and once I started looking at these authors, these issues became apparent but it's not the sort of a methodology that I've come across or I'm familiar with, so your approach is definitely novel. And I find it fascinating that you're looking at historical crime fiction because at least I think all three of them really look at India from the 1920s. They're interested in this particular moment in time, at this point in the British Raj, when you have the rise of nationalist sentiments and as you point out, they're all moored in their respective diasporic contexts, where there's also this tremendous amount of churn in terms of identity and questions of ethnicity and nationality. So could you elaborate a bit more on this intersection that you draw between Anglophone crime fiction and the South Asian diaspora, the way these come together within this sort of subgenre of historical crime fiction specifically? **Vaibhav** `5:57` That's a very interesting question, Maitrayee, thanks for that, because I think in the historical crime fiction paradigm what's happening is it really depends on the author and the way in which they work with it. So my argument, for instance, with Abir Mukherjee is that even though he's setting his fiction in Calcutta of the 1920s, there are a few critics who have read his work as responding to an Indian reality. Whereas my argument is that if you read his work with a little bit of care, it is very apparent that he is actually talking about Brexit. He is actually bringing out the politics of Brexit in the UK by showing and by talking about the problems of colonialism through a white detective in fiction set in India. And that really becomes not just interesting, but really complicates the way in which you then have to read his work because the gaze instantly shifts. It becomes a double-sided gaze. He is looking at India, speaking about Indian reality, but from the perspective of a white male detective who is critical, deeply critical of the colonial project. And through that, he is then kind of talking about certain forms of exclusion, certain forms of discrimination, different kinds of ways in which colonialism was bad. We know that. But he is speaking to a white British audience. And he makes that very clear. A.A. Dhand, for instance, from Bradford, who I'm just kind of wrapping up a chapter on, is also doing something similar. But he is working on contemporary UK. And he is not really historical fiction, but he is talking about what happens when a brown man becomes a police detective in a racially stratified society like Bradford. And the complications of the racial dynamic that unfold in the UK. And that becomes another way through which you then immediately the nation becomes this very tense signifier which is being appropriated by all sides, but at the same time is open for different kinds of understandings. On the other hand, if you look at at Sujata Massey, for instance, she's writing from the US. She's writing historical fiction set in the 1920s in Bombay with a Parsi writer. But when you compare that to an Indian writer like Harini Nagendra, who is writing historical fiction, you immediately see the differences. The way in which people located within India are writing about an Indian reality, even though it is set in the 1920s, can be very different from the way in which Sujata Massey portrays India of the 1920s set in Bombay. And that, I think, is the difference between a diasporic lens and a so called national lens, which I think is which are some of the features which I'm trying to open up and look at question of representation, really, in this thesis. **Maitrayee** `9:36` That sounds brilliant. I mean there's so many thoughts popping in my head right now, especially with Abir Mukherjee, the way he's looking at Brexit, but also you have A.A. Dhand from Bradford looking at these very complex realities of being a person of color or a person of Indian descent in a politically charged and politically stratified atmosphere like Bradford for instance. So I think it's so interesting, the sort of multiple positionalities that you take up and that your research reveals. It sort of allows you, I think, to open up these wider issues or these sort of meta narratives of nationality and identity but also I think the value lies in the sort of granularity that you introduce to these topics. So in that context, because I found this so interesting when you just sort of referred to it right now, but could you talk a little bit more about the fissures and the differences when you talk about representation that you find in Nagendra's work versus Massey? Because I know we've had these conversations before and I know you have very strong feelings about Massey's portrayal and her protagonist. What are these differences? What are these fissures? How do you think they sort of render dynamic our understanding of, and given that they're both metropolitan sleuths and they're both women but from very different backgrounds using very different methodologies, could you shed a bit more light on these texts that you study? **Vaibhav** `11:29` Yeah, it interests me a lot because when I mean, I'll give you one classic example from a Massey novel where you have Perveen Mistry kind of going into a slum in this chauffeur driven Mercedes and stepping out and kind of feeling completely uncomfortable, obviously not knowing what to do, where to go, and having to step into a slum, of all places. And really comes across that she is uncomfortable. She doesn't know what to do. Whereas the other major problem I think I have, and I've not been able to articulate it as well, is the fact that Massey somehow overcomes the problem of caste by only looking at class, whereas anyone familiar with South Asian history will immediately know that class and caste are not the same. And you cannot cover one over with the other. Whereas when you look at Nagendra's work, she's very particular about the fact that, yes, her detective Kaveri Murthy is also a very upper caste Brahmin. But nonetheless, she is able to kind of step into, again, slums and houses where there are people of other lower caste women. But you see a cognitive reimagination of her brain which is going on, where she has to then do the labor of being able to understand her positionality and then expand her ideas, expand her brain, expand her the ways of thought to be able to bring in lower caste people into her narrative as well and then embrace them, which I think is very different kind of affective labor which Kaveri Murthy puts in and Perveen Mistry doesn't. And that I think- **Maitrayee** `13:30` Sorry, I'm so sorry to step in but because you were talking about her inclusion of different people from different classes and different castes and I think it's so interesting that the subtitle often is think the Bangalore detective club and you get this very bougie, the title gives you the sense that it's a bourgeois construct, this Bangalore Detective Club. It has this sense of an upper class construct but then you find that the composition of this club is so heterogeneous, it really cuts across different borders. I was just reading of course that she consults street urchins and sex workers and so within her ambit are all of these different sort of people that, I think the fact that it expands the sense of a club which in itself as a category or a signifier appears quite exclusive, I think she's already doing something so interesting with the semiotics of this sort of framing, right? **Vaibhav** `14:46` Yes exactly and that is what I find so challenging about her work because eventually then and the argument that I have made is that she's looking at questions of activism and I'm trying to kind of empower various forms. And marginalization is not just for the poor or for the subaltern in her work. You find even elite women from upper castes and upper classes marginalized for just because they are women. And she's able to kind of bring a whole range of women to help each other in that form of activist energy that she kind of puts into the crime novel, which I think becomes a fairly new thing which is happening within crime fiction in India. And I'm sure there are various other ways in which you can read her work, but I found that the most exciting and challenging bit. **Maitrayee** `15:39` So is Massey not doing something half as interesting? I mean where are your, sort of apart from her protagonist's discomfort with the slums, where else do you find these points where there's a dissonance for you, where you feel as though the diasporic lens maybe doesn't work quite as well as it does perhaps for someone like Mukherjee? **Vaibhav** `16:05` I think with Massey, what happens is that portrayal of Perveen Mistry herself as an upper class Parsi lawyer is based on a very, very partial kind of understanding of Cornelia Sorabji. And even if you look at the books themselves, the books are packaged. They're really packaged with a whole section called “Behind the Book.” And behind the book, at least in the first three volumes of the series, you have a glossary. You have a section called About the Parsis. You have a note on Cornelia Sorabji, a very select note, which I'll speak about in a minute. You have discussion questions, interestingly. And you have recipes. Recipes about stuff that Perveen Mistry eats and drinks are then made into recipes which you can then make in your kitchen. So the book really travels from the library to the kitchen in that sense and becomes a part of your life, which is the first thing. I mean, so that's why I'm saying the book is a package. Whereas what I found really interesting is the way in which she kind of speaks about Sorabji in very selective terms. So Sorabji had this very complicated existence. On the one hand, she was this important first female person who had a degree in law from Oxford. And she had this important status. But at the same time, she defended orthodox Hinduism. She was deeply critical of Gandhi’s fairly contentious attempts to abolish untouchability. She was opposed to the suffragette movement. She had all these problematic positions, though Perveen Mistry is modeled on she very comfortably and easily elides and takes on just the position of being the upper-class lawyer while claiming Sorabji’s positionality for herself. So I find that very, very troubling because what happens to the rest of Sorabji? How can you just so selectively take on a certain aspect of the liberal aspect of one's personality and just eschew the illiberal part entirely while you're crafting this image of a person. And you're not even doing it, it's not happening without by saying that, oh, Sorabji, this is incidental. Because there is a whole section on Cornelia Sorabji at the end of the book. So there's a very careful fashioning that is happening around that figure. But I find the selectiveness of it fairly disturbing. **Maitrayee** `19:02` I think that's so true because when I was reading the, and I admit I've read perhaps one Perveen Mistry book I didn't realize that there was so much whitewashing going on because of course when you read about Cornelia Sorabji, you also get to contend with her myth and you don't realize that there are all of these pockets that have been glossed over that we don't talk about and for an author to then paper over these cracks and create this really glossy version of modern Indian womanhood, which is extremely privileged, it sets all of those alarm bells ringing, which you point out so well. Do you think with Nagendra and Mukherjee, do their characters also have historical roots or do you think they sort of you know, is there a certain amount of freedom in crafting characters that are only very loosely based upon or not at all based upon reality? **Vaibhav** `20:09` Nagendra, for instance, has spoken about Kaveri Murthy being based on her grandmother and on various women in the Kannada sphere who were part of the national movement, but at the same time, they were kind of activists and looking to take care of other women and being very active in various social roles. So Nagendra has spoken about that in a number of interviews. She's also, even in a personal email to me, she has kind of made it very clear that she wanted the collaborative aspect of activism to come across in her writing, which it does. And whereas with Mukherjee, I don't think that it's based on any historical person. But I think it's more an ideological fashioning, the ideological persona that he's creating. Because Sam Wyndham, you couldn't get a more British man than Sam Wyndham. But at the same time, you see again, like what happens with Kaveri Murthy, you see a certain change that slowly an incremental change that slowly comes around in his thinking, in way he sidelines his own kind of colonialist upbringing and is able to actually sympathize with, empathize with the anticolonial cause through his sergeant who an Indian, which becomes a fascinating trope to just look at the affective way in which he measures up to an anticolonial process of thought, which I think is very well done in that series. **Maitrayee** `22:01` This is so interesting, this dynamic you talk about between Wyndham and Banerjee because so much of it is also based on these I don't know if they were pairs but it's definitely common for British superiors to have under them various Indian local subordinates and because my work looks primarily at late nineteenth, early twentieth century detective fiction and I've looked at some Bengali detective fiction, very early police casebooks for instance and you see that dynamic but at the same time there is that push and pull, right? I mean there is that collaborative energy but also because so many of them are based on daroga’s narratives, there is the sense of working for the Burra Sahib and that you are answerable to them but at the same time there's a lot of cribbing, there's questions that they raise, sometimes as in the case of Priyanath Mukherjee's Darogar Daptar, the Daroga is extremely put out to be working during in Durga Pujo. So you know, there is a sense that that cultural sensitivity is missing from his superiors for instance. Is that of push and pull something that you see happening through the series? I think Shampa Roy talks about how at least in Bangla detective fiction within the sort of corpus of crime fiction and their very often consciously crafted macho protagonists, there is that anticolonial thread that runs through these narratives and they're going against this crafting of an effeminate Bengali persona for instance. I mean something that the British of course consciously did after the Mutiny as well and they created all of these sort of racial and community stereotypes. How does that play out for you in the Wyndham and Banerjee relationship? **Vaibhav** `24:17` It's very interesting because Banerjee is kind of, you know, there's this famous line where we are told that he has an accent, his accent matched the Archbishop of Canterbury. And he studied at Harrow and he studied at Cambridge. And you have Wyndham who's very conscious of the fact that he is not as well educated as Banerjee is, because Banerjee was the top three in the ICS. And so he's really the creme de la creme of the Indian underclass in that sense. So in some senses that is kind of reversed where you have the subordinate who has a purer British accent and far more educated than the superior, which I find very interesting. And then you have this classic case of Jallianwala Bagh . Banerjee is kind of is pressed to resign by his family. And Wyndham, on the other hand, while he expresses great sympathy with him and says that had he been in Banerjee’s shoes, he would have probably shot one or two of the British on his own. But at the same time, he presses him not to resign. And when he does not resign, he's thrown out of his family home. Since he's thrown because his family is deeply nationalist and he's thrown out of his family home and guess who chooses to move in with him? It is Wyndham. Wyndham moves in with Banerjee which is of course frowned upon deeply by the Burra Sahibs. And people say this is nonsense. But Wyndham says, no, they can go to hell. And he literally says that. So which is very interesting because later in, I think, one of the novels, Wyndham goes so far as to say that he doesn't care about this whole white man's burden because the only person he had as a friend, and this is practically a quote, in the whole world was Banerjee. And later, I think in the third or fourth novel of the series, he says something very interesting where there's this change that has happened. And Banerjee is able to actually question some people. And he's very irritated with the racial way in which he's treated. And he's thrown in one corner of a British mess, and nobody is speaking to him. And you have Wyndham who actually comes and says that he is surprised at the way in which his people who come from this wet little island have the temerity to treat Banerjee like that, especially when they are colonialists in his country. So I find that very, by the end of that series, you have this complete reversal, which in some senses happens, where there is a tension, of course. But at the same time, there is this very emphatic move towards an anticolonial process of thought, which Wyndham kind of almost personalizes and personifies, which you are really surprised at. But I think that is the ideological point that Mukherjee is trying to push and say that, look, you can have characters who are critical of the colonialist project, which I think in the long run is somewhere speaking to nostalgia for empire which Brexit generated. And the whole business of Brexit and exclusion becomes central, which I think is being clearly attacked in this series by Mukherjee. **Maitrayee** `28:21` And you talk about nostalgia which has always been a cornerstone of diasporic fiction but when you look at diasporic detective fiction, I think that nostalgia and that search for identity or the mining of memory, they take such interesting forms. I think it becomes an entirely new configuration within the larger genre of diasporic fiction. So how do you think Mukherjee is playing with that? Because you've referenced it, you've talked about Mukherjee speaking not to maybe contemporary Indian reality so much as he does to post Brexit UK and just now you spoke about the dangers of this sort of evocation of nostalgia for the days of empire and how that can, every day we see the political reality of UK changing and shifting and that move towards more extreme sort of political positions, and I think Mukherjee is sounding such an important warning. Could you then maybe draw that out a little bit more? **Vaibhav** `29:39` Yeah, the question of nostalgia becomes and there's a lot which has in the last decade really emerged on this question of nostalgia and Brexit. And what Mukherjee is trying to do is play with that, kind of show you the dangers of what nostalgia does and what when people start imagining colonialism to be is very different from what the reality on the ground is. And nostalgia kind of plays on an imaginary idea of colonialism and a very selective idea. Whereas what Mukherjee is doing is he's kind of showing you the reality and I think that he does very well. He doesn't just show you how colonialism affects Indians or the colonized. But he also shows you in many of his novels how colonialism actually affects the English themselves. And that the English common man, the British person who was in India also becomes as much a pawn and a victim of colonial attitudes as the Indian. So he is kind of trying to point that very important difference out, that it's not just the poor colonized Indian who is a victim of colonialism, but the colonial attitude is something everybody including the British. **Maitrayee** `31:10` I think that's such a unique perspective to look at not only how colonization impacts obviously the colonized but how it impacts the colonizer. I think you were, could you give me some, for instance, examples of that? **Vaibhav** `31:27` Yeah, there are many examples in Mukherjee's novels where you have poor white characters or you have accountants, for instance, who are becoming difficult and kind of exposing the reality of colonial rule, and they are done away with. And when Wyndham checks and says, what's happening? Why has this guy been murdered? And then figures out that, okay, there's a far more sinister plot to this, he is very curtly told that it's better for one white man to fall than for the whole kingdom to collapse. And in the various kind of instances like this where the English themselves become victims of colonial practices in the thing. And I think that becomes a very important counter to this grand nostalgia that people have for the Raj, where they thought that it's only about elephants and snakes and stuff like that, the story is far more sinister than that, which I think detective fiction brings out with far greater clarity than one would have imagined. **Maitrayee** `32:46` And I think that's a really pertinent point to make because there's this constant refrain about detective fiction being a conservative genre and I think Clare Clarke has done such brilliant work on pointing out the ambiguities that detective fiction is actually able to illuminate, and I think you have just been able to highlight the way detective fiction can work as a destabilizing force and as something that actually works against grand narratives, and against these sort of rationalizations that make us forget that constructs are made up, right? That this political reality we live in is a creation that's undergirded by power relations and for detective fiction that you are looking at the kind of detective fiction you're engaging with, to do that with such clarity and to speak to two time periods and to make those intersect, I think is just brilliant. Do you think all three of these writers are doing that in different ways? I mean I know Massey is a slightly different sort of writer and even in her work which features for instance Rei Shimura, which is more of a contemporary offering, it looks at politics very differently from say Nagendra or Mukherjee who seem to have a more overt axe to grind, that sense. And also I think from what you're saying that for both Mukherjee and Nagendra, the sense of solidarity that cuts across all of these artificial boundaries is so important, right? I think that really comes across again and again, whereas Mistry appears to be more of a lone wolf sort of a character. I mean maybe I've got it wrong. **Vaibhav** `34:54` I think you're right really in suggesting some of these. I just want to pick up on one thing that you said which is the question of detective fiction and its apparent conservative leanings. There is that of course traditionally as we know there has been that kind of critical way of looking at detective fiction as a conservative genre and you know because the crime is solved at the end and so you are kind of left feeling very happy and you know there's a certain catharsis which happens and you move on. But in a lot of these cases, including Mukherjee and A.A. Dhand, as I was talking about, the crimes may be solved on paper, but you're left with this lingering sense that actually the larger crime may not be the one on the page. But for instance, in Mukherjee's case, the larger crime is colonialism. In Dhand's case, the larger crime is racism within the UK that faces as a police officer. So with various people, you have this idea that detective fiction is being able to pull out other very, very pertinent questions, political questions, which people tend to assume is not the job of detective fiction. Having said that, there also another kind of feeling which you often get when you're reading this stuff, that they are talking about the failure of the genre itself in some ways, the failure of the genre to be able to not really deal with the social and political situations that they are narrativizing. So in some senses you have, and that comes out very clearly in Dhand's work where you have questions, of very political questions regarding what happens if the UK gets a Muslim prime minister. And given that we are forever changing prime ministers in this country, maybe a Muslim prime minister is not far off. But then what happens when a Muslim prime minister comes and says, “no, I want to eradicate the far right?” That becomes as dogmatic as anything else. So you move from one dogmatic of being far right to, the other end of the spectrum where you're saying, “Okay, I want to eliminate the far right.” So at that point, you begin to wonder, Okay, it might sound a very liberal kind of thing to say. And it may work for a certain kind of . But then you also know that politically that cannot be a stance. So what happens to the genre then? So I think the genre is, at this point, in a fairly tense situation where it is projecting its political , but at the same time, political leanings also tend to pull it back into other sorts of problems. So you have this very tense kind of configuration going on, which I think a very productive moment. **Maitrayee** `38:18` Do you think some of this tension also comes from the sort of positioning of the detective figure as either a state agent or a private inquiry agent? I mean do you think the differences that crop up when someone takes up detection as an amateur activity or as a consultant figure versus a detective who explicitly works for the government, for instance? **Vaibhav** `38:56` Yeah, that's an interesting question really because when most of the detectives I am reading currently are people who are working for the government as police detectives. And so the question of the State becomes very central in the solving of these problems and crimes. Therefore, I think when you go back to a thing like Perveen Mistry, who is someone who is not related to the state as such, but who is a lawyer and who's kind of amateurishly looking into questions of crime, there you have the sense that sometimes, okay, maybe she is looking at these questions from a perspective which are not really state-based. But on the whole, when you look at all these various detectives, the question of how you define crime is not stable. So there is no stability to the question of what is crime. So for instance, in Mistress of Bhatia House, which is Massey's 2023 novel, there is a murder, of course. But the murder is not the main crime. The main crime is the rape of a servant girl. But the servant girl herself, if you look at , portrayed as a victim. She's not given any sense of in which she victimhood in the narrative. So how you portray crime itself kind of changes from moment to moment, detective to detective, novel to novel. I think and that instability adds to the excitement on the one hand but it also doesn’t allow me to give you a clear answer. **Maitrayee** `40:42` Yeah and I think that you know again, I mean Spivak raised it, but the idea of can the subaltern speak or is in this case the detective speaking for her or, is, like you pointed out and I think that is such a fascinating point, is the genre itself in some instances suppressing the narrativization of certain kinds of stories? Or certain kinds of crimes? And how do you, I think it's so important the question you raise, the instability of the definition of criminality itself especially when the state is complicit. And we're seeing this across nations I think, when the state is complicit in so many different kinds of crimes but is also setting the boundaries on what is criminal and what is not or who is criminal and who is defined as a criminal. And I think where the detective stands in matters of political resistance and crafting of political bodies and subjectivities then is really something that is fluid. And as you point out, this is a genre poised at a breaking point or a moment of change and how we deal with that and with these fast changing realities is something that remains to be seen. Given this, and I think I've tried to sort of draw you on, as you said, fissures within the text, do you think gender becomes at any moment because you have two male detectives and then of course you have Mistry and you have a Murthy, do you think in their methodology, the sort of resources they use, in the kind of cases they pick or the way they intercede in crimes or they see crimes, is there a difference that you can see? Of course, I think that is also shaped by their positions as maybe independent investigators or of course people who belong to the police for instance. But do these women investigators exhibit methodologies that vary at all from Wyndham and Banerjee? **Vaibhav** `42:53` Yes they do. For instance, they are definitely more in tune with people's subjectivities. They are emotionally far more mature at times. They are more willing to take risks, even to be able to understand how people think and where they are coming from and what is their positionality. So in that sense, I find for instance, Murhy does all these things at various points in the novels. Whereas you have a case like you have Wyndham who may be politically very liberal, but at the same time he can be very rigid as far as his positions on gender are concerned, for instance. So there are those kinds of problems as well in a lot of these texts where you have to be very alert as to who is doing what and what are the various, because there's so much intersectionality as far as gender and race and caste and class that there's always nothing really stable. But that instability, I think, is very difficult to kind of pin down in onesizefitsall kind of answer. **Maitrayee** `44:19` Thank you, that was illuminating, really. I think that's I have so many more questions to ask you but I think we've run out of time and I think this is a good point at which to stop so we actually can think about all of these various things that you've raised. So thank you so much for joining us today. It's been absolutely amazing to have you. **Vaibhav** `44:43` or having me, it's a blessing to speak about some of these things and you realize when you speak, you think differently. So maybe I'm going to speak while I write. **Maitrayee** `44:53` I think that's a very good idea, thank you Vaibhav. #### Questions about Empire Sleuths **What is Empire Sleuths about?** Empire Sleuths investigates Victorian detective fiction, female detectives, and the colonial print cultures and mobility networks that carried crime writing across the nineteenth-century world — from Brighton to Bombay. Hosted by literary scholar Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury. **Who hosts Empire Sleuths?** Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury, ARSD College, University of Delhi. Maitrayee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, ARSD College, University of Delhi. She works on detective fiction and female sleuths from the global nineteenth century. **How many episodes of Empire Sleuths are there?** one episode so far, featuring Vaibhav Parel. Empire Sleuths is an episodic show, so episodes can be listened to in any order. **How long is an episode of Empire Sleuths?** Episodes run about 45:49. **Where can I listen to Empire Sleuths?** On Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or in any podcast app via the show's RSS feed. Every episode also plays directly on this site. **Are transcripts available for Empire Sleuths?** Yes. Every episode page carries the full transcript, corrected by the speakers rather than left as raw machine output, and the feed links a timed transcript for apps that display one. **Is Empire Sleuths free?** Yes. There is no subscription, paywall or account. Episodes stream and download free, and the transcripts are open on the web. ## Gallery — digital artefacts ### Empire Veil (Game, 2026) Empire Veil is a cooperative investigation game played in the browser, with nothing to install and no account to make. Players read evidence, follow transport routes between ten cities of the nineteenth-century imperial world — Calcutta, Benares, Delhi, Madras, Alexandria, London, Cape Town, Melbourne, Kingston, Hong Kong — and try to expose a conspiracy before it closes around them. Its three campaigns put the historical argument in the player’s hands: what counts as evidence, whose testimony is admitted, and which networks carry information when the official ones will not. URL: https://empireveil.empirescollective.com - Play free: https://empireveil.empirescollective.com/play - The three campaigns: https://empireveil.empirescollective.com/campaigns - Ten regions: https://empireveil.empirescollective.com/regions - How to play: https://empireveil.empirescollective.com/rules - Articles: https://empireveil.empirescollective.com/articles From the collective: - Dipankar Sarkar — built and maintains it - Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury — shaped the history it is built on **What is Empire Veil?** Empire Veil is a cooperative investigation game played in the browser, with nothing to install and no account to make. Players read evidence, follow transport routes between ten cities of the nineteenth-century imperial world — Calcutta, Benares, Delhi, Madras, Alexandria, London, Cape Town, Melbourne, Kingston, Hong Kong — and try to expose a conspiracy before it closes around them. Its three campaigns put the historical argument in the player’s hands: what counts as evidence, whose testimony is admitted, and which networks carry information when the official ones will not. **Is Empire Veil free, and do I need to install anything?** Empire Veil is free and runs in a web browser. There is nothing to install and no account to create. **What is a digital artefact?** It is how the collective describes the things it builds rather than writes: games, archives and tools where the argument is something you do rather than something you are told. The collective uses blogs, podcasts, video games and discussion forums alongside conventional scholarship. **Can I use these in teaching?** Yes. The artefacts are free to use in a classroom and the podcast episodes carry full transcripts, which makes them usable as set reading. The collective asks only that you get in touch and say so — it likes knowing where the work is used. ## Taking part Join: https://www.empirescollective.com/join Contact: https://www.empirescollective.com/contact or hello@empirescollective.com Newsletter: https://www.empirescollective.com/newsletter (https://empirescollective.substack.com) **Who can join the Empires Collective?** The collective is interdisciplinary by construction — its current members are literary historians, a film and media historian, a computer scientist and philologists, working across universities in India and the United Kingdom. Enquiries are welcome from academics, doctoral researchers, independent scholars, archivists, technologists and writers whose work touches the collective’s. **How do I propose an episode of Empire Sleuths?** Use the form on the Join page and choose “Appearing on Empire Sleuths”. Episodes are recorded remotely as a conversation rather than an interview. **I want to build something with the collective. Where do I start?** The same form, choosing “Collaborating on a digital artefact”. The gallery shows the kind of thing this means — a playable game built on researched history — and the collective is explicit that the format follows the argument. **How do I contact the Empires Collective?** Through the contact form, or by email. Several members also have their own sites, which are linked from their entries on the collective page and are faster for a question about their own research. ## Questions about the collective **What is the Empires Collective?** The Empires Collective is an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers and academics that examines the legacies of imperialism through a critical-theoretical lens, using multimedia formats. Its members are literary historians, film theorists, computer scientists and philologists. Rather than publishing only in journals, the collective works through podcasts, games and other digital artefacts to explore the connection between culture and colonialism. **Who is in the Empires Collective?** The collective currently has eight members: Dr Debolina Dey (Azim Premji University, Bhopal), Dr Maitrayee Roychoudhury (ARSD College, University of Delhi), Vaibhav Parel (Newcastle University), Dr Zehra Kazmi (Institute of Ismaili Studies), Abdullah Alahmari (University of St Andrews), Dr Clara Défaschel (University of St Andrews), Dr Anushrut Ramakrishnan Agrwaal (University of St Andrews) and Dipankar Sarkar (Neul Labs). Full biographies are on the collective page. **What does the collective publish?** one podcast episode of Empire Sleuths, each published with a full transcript, and one digital artefact: Empire Veil, a cooperative Victorian detective game about evidence, geography and the informal networks of women across the British Empire. Free, in the browser. Everything is free to read, listen to and play. **What does the collective research?** Its members work on diasporic crime fiction, identity and masculinity in Arabic fiction, digital infrastructures, film strips and visual culture, queer lives, memory and affect, and periodical research — spanning the sociopolitical and historical forms imperialism took in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their links to the contemporary moment. **Where are the members based?** Members hold posts at Azim Premji University, Bhopal, ARSD College, University of Delhi, Newcastle University, Institute of Ismaili Studies, University of St Andrews and Neul Labs. The collective is not itself a department, institute or funded centre. **Can I join the Empires Collective, or take part?** Yes — the collective takes enquiries from researchers whose work touches its own, from prospective podcast guests, and from people who want to collaborate on a digital artefact. There is a form on the Join page, and a general contact form for anything else.