Episode 1 · with Vaibhav Parel
Vaibhav Parel on Diasporic Crime Fiction, Questions of Empire and Nationality
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.
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