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.https://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuthsDr Maitrayee RoychoudhuryEmpire 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.Detectives, crime fiction, and the mobile lives of women across the nineteenth-century world.episodicfalseen© Dr Maitrayee RoychoudhuryDr Maitrayee Roychoudhuryhttps://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuths/1-vaibhav-parel-diasporic-crime-fictionhttps://www.empirescollective.com/podcasts/empire-sleuths/1-vaibhav-parel-diasporic-crime-fictionIn 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.Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTVaibhav Parel on Diasporic Crime Fiction, Questions of Empire and Nationality1full00:45:25falseDr Maitrayee RoychoudhuryIn 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.postcolonial literature, crime fiction, detective fiction, Abir Mukherjee, Sujata Massey, colonial India, empire, South Asian literature, Agatha Christie, nationalism, book podcast, literary criticism