Conan Doyle Subverted and M. R. James Trans-created: Two Novels of Hemendra Kumar Roy

Introduction

This article explores how two works of Bengali adolescent and young adult literature by the same author, Hemendra Kumar Roy (1888–1963), each reference, in a different way, two different works of British popular fiction, subverting one and creatively reworking the other.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-2) and Amabasyar Raat (‘New-Moon Nights’, serialized 1933, book 1939)

  ‘New-Moon Nights’ begins with a newspaper report of strange occurrences in the large village/small town of Manaspur near the tiger-infested mangrove region called the Sunderbans in pre-independence, and therefore pre-partition, Bengal. On each of the previous new-moon nights, a woman, invariably one wearing expensive jewellery, has disappeared. Till these disappearances began, Manaspur, despite being near the Sunderbans, had not been plagued by tigers. However, precisely at the stroke of midnight on each night of disappearance, the roar of a tiger has been heard, although no one has as yet seen the animal. It is never heard on any other night. The local police, discarding their initial association of the disappearances with a man-eater, have now linked the jewellery worn by the women to the depredations of a dacoit gang led by Bhulu, whose den is believed to be in the Sunderbans. On reading the report, Kumar proceeds to Manaspur on his own. In Roy’s novels and short stories featuring the duo Bimal and Kumar, the latter acts as Bimal’s sidekick. Kumar goes to Manaspur alone because Bimal has gone off tosome days ago to an undisclosed location.

    Instead of the marshes of Devonshire, the jungles of the Sunderbans; in place of the howls of a supernatural hound, the roars of a tiger, which, as the newspaper report says, seems to have consulted an almanac to make its appearance always coincide with a new-moon night; corresponding to the escaped convict in the moor in Conan Doyle, the dacoit and his gang inhabiting the jungles of the Sunderbans; and finally, the presence of a sidekick, Dr Watson in Conan Doyle, and Kumar in Roy, in the absence of the leading member of a twosome; the parallels are obvious, but the ending of Roy’s novel will reverse the trope of ‘the supernatural explained’ to which Conan Doyle adhered in his novel.

  At Manaspur, the police inspector Chandrababu welcomes Kumar. The latter also makes the acquaintance of two newcomers to the area: the middle-aged Mohanlal and Patalbabu. The eyes of the Patalbabu resemble those of a corpse!

   The next new-moon night arrives. At the stroke of midnight, the roar of a tiger is heard. Kumar, from his vantage point atop a tree, fires his rifle, and is greeted by the cry of a human being: Patalbabu is seated on the ground, nursing a wounded leg! Mohanlal suddenly appears and backs up the embarrassed Kumar, pointing out the pugmarks of a tiger and its hair on the ground.

   A few days later, Kumar and Mohanlal visit the ruined palace in Manaspur, which Patalbau has purchased and in a repaired part of which he has made his home. There, they discover a tunnel full of the stench of a tiger. The tunnel leads to a hall littered with the skeletons of women – the hapless ones who disappeared, and were kidnapped not only for their jewellery. Unexpectedly, the dacoit gang appears, to escape whose attack, Mohanlal and Kumar plunge into a canal at the end of the hall, which leads to the Kajla River. After escaping a crocodile attack, the two return to their respective homes, discussing on the way the links between Patalbabu, the tunnel in the palace he inhabits, which is full of tiger-stench, ending in the hall full of women’s skeletons, and the sudden appearance of the dacoit gang from within the palace.

  Both Chandrababu and Kumar now receive an anonymous letter each, directing them to act in a manner that will solve the mystery on the very next new-moon night. Kumar, as directed, stations himself in a bush outside Patalbabu’s palace on that night. Just before midnight, Kumar sees a shadowy figure carrying a lantern disappear into the tunnel. Then, at the stroke of midnight, deafening roars of a tiger are heard, and Kumar sees a huge shadow in front of him. Someone behind him asks him to shoot. Along with him, the person behind also fires his rifle. A series of wounded cries fills the air. Then all is silent. Kumar turns to see Mohanlal behind him. In front of them is the corpse of Patalbabu. Meanwhile, a gun battle breaks out between the police and the dacoit gang at the junction of the Kajla River and the canal in the palace.

  Mohanlal now persuades Kumar to come to Mohanlal’s house, where he tells Kumar about lycanthropy, referring to Margaret Murray’s 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. He then proceeds to narrate the incidents that have been taking place at Manaspur in their chronological order, saying that they lead to the possibility of a were-tiger operating in the village/town. He adds that he is not asking anyone to believe in the supernatural, and that Kumar is welcome to dismiss his suggestions. However, one fact is undisputed: the dacoit Bhulu and Patalbabu were the same person, and Patalbabu was using the ruined palace as a refuge for his gang.

  Chandrababu now appears, determined to arrest Mohanlal, believing him to be Bhulu the dacoit. Mohanlal now abandons his disguise to reveal himself as Bimal. Let us recall the man on the tor in The Hound of the Baskervilles who turns out to be Sherlock Holmes himself.

Comparison of Conan Doyle’s and Roy’s Narratives

• Conan Doyle’s murderer utilizes an ancient legend to gain possession of the Baskerville estate. He eliminates the current holder and then tries to bring about the demise of the latter’s successor. Roy’s criminal employs the paranormal to acquire the jewellery worn by the kidnapped women and commits acts of dacoity. Both villains want material wealth.
• However, Roy seems to employ Holmes’s famous dictum against Conan Doyle’s rationalization of the apparently supernatural creature. Holmes had said in The Sign of Four.Through Mohanlal-Bimal, Roy is telling his readers, “This is what Holmesian ratiocination indicates: there was a were-tiger. Now, feel free to disbelieve it!”

   In India, the were-tiger is often seen as a sorcerer and a menace to livestock, who, however, may turn anytime to man-eating. Through travellers who encountered the Royal Bengal Tiger of the Sunderbans, the legend travelled to Persia and further west.

‘Casting the Runes’ (1911) and Bibhishaner Jagaran (‘The Terror Awakens’, 1942)

   In his transcreation of ‘Casting the Runes’, Roy replaces James’s diminutive and barely visible demon with a monstrously huge creature. However, until the end of Roy’s novel, the creature is not clearly seen either. The private detective Hemanta Chaudhuri and his sidekick Rabin first encounter in the pitch darkness of the blackout imposed on what was then ‘Calcutta’ during World War II. They hear its deafening roars, clearly those of a lion, and are hurled aside by the impact of its body. Hemanta says he has seen its eyes glowing like fireballs at a height resembling an elephant’s. The surroundings are filled with animal stench and they both hear its maniacal laughter. When Hemanta finally repels it using the blinding flash-bulb of a camera, sending it back to destroy its creator and his cohorts, the resultant photograph shows a being with the head of a lion and the body of a human being, which is the Narasingha or Man-Lion (Were-lion?) shape that the deity Vishnu took to destroy the demon Hiranyakashipu. However, as Hemanta explains to a bewildered Rabin, the creator of the shape, an evil kapalika[1]…had conjured up merely the outward shell of that avatar. The shape did not contain any soul, let alone the Supreme Soul of the Divine. It merely embodied the violent will-power of an evil human being. Having returned to its creator, and, as he revealed, having destroyed him and his associates, it has vanished into the world of emotions and ideas.

   Roy matches James in using elements from occultism, both Occidental and, here is where Roy is at his creative best, Oriental, using Hindu mythology and a fusion of spiritualism from both the East and the West. Let us recall Karswell’s use of the modern Golden Bough and the medieval Golden Legend are indiscriminately in James’s story:

… there was nothing that the man didn’t swallow: mixing up classical myths, and stories

out of the Golden Legend with reports of savage customs of today— all very proper, no

doubt, if you know how to use them, but he didn’t: he seemed to put the Golden Legend

and the Golden Bough exactly on a par, and to believe both … One chapter in particular

struck me, in which he spoke of “casting the Runes” on people, either for the purpose of

gaining their affection or of getting them out of the way— perhaps more especially the

latter: he spoke of all this in a way that really seemed to me to imply actual knowledge.[3]

  After consulting books on spiritualism, the Bengali detective Hemanta explains to his skeptical sidekick Rabin that, according to spiritualists, every human emotion or thought has a corresponding appearance or form. For example, all Hindu devotees have an ‘image’ of the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, in their minds. People endowed with exceptional mental power can, through cogitation and the exercise of intense will-power, conjure up the goddess in a living, physical form, and make this form speak, move about, and even touch human beings. Corresponding to the plethora of occult authorities James cites in his stories – more in a story like ‘Lost Hearts’ (1895), admittedly than in ‘Casting the Runes’[4]– Hemanta cites several examples from Bengal of this phenomenon. He begins with the fifteenth-century saint Shree Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who was considered by his devotees to be the combined avatar of Krishna – himself an avatar of the deity Vishnu – and Krishna’s beloved Radha. Shree Chaitanya is believed to have seen Krishna with his eyes. The same applies regarding the goddess Kali to the eighteenth-century poet, lyricist, and saint Ramprasad Das, the early nineteenth-century zamindar of Natore (today in Rajshahi district of Bangladesh) Ramkrishna, and the Hindu mystic and spiritual leader Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, also of the nineteenth century, who lived in today’s West Bengal in India.

  Hemanta now turns to the possibility of an ascetic who, having achieved some paranormal abilities, becomes misguided enough to use his powers to give physical shape to an emotion of evil ferocity. It is in this context that Hemanta actually uses the phrase ‘Casting the Runes’ and explains its operation in a European context. Using the script of the obsolete language called Runes, magicians, he says, could conjure up monsters which they directed to kill their enemies. He adds that should the creature be frustrated in its aim, it would turn on its creator to destroy him instead of the victim. This is Roy’s variation on James’s device of returning the runic inscription to the sender so that the fiend created destroys the latter. Again, there is creative variation on James in Roy’s narrative. Hemanta uses the concept of Western spiritualists that apparitions which materialize during séances originate from the vibration of ether. The room in which a séance is held is kept totally or largely dark. This is because the apparitions cannot endure light. Hemanta repels the monster, as said earlier, by using a camera with a blindingly bright flashbulb. This at once directs the monster back to its creator and his disciples and produce photographic evidence of the creature’s appearance. Ocular evidence is indispensable to a detective, whether he is operating on strictly corporeal and rational principles – as Hemanta has done in his three previous cases – or on an occult level, as is the case now. It is immaterial to Hemanta that such evidence will not be admissible in a court of law. As he says, there is much that the current legal system does not recognize. such as the power of hypnotism to make people commit illegal acts of which they remain unaware.

Conclusion

  ‘New-Moon Nights’ challenges the reader to disbelieve in the supernatural after pointing out that the idea of a were-tiger is what is suggested by the process of ratiocination, and to deny it would amount to repudiating the very rationality that conventional detective fiction prioritizes. ‘The Awakening of the Terror’ is a remarkable achievement in the broad genre of detective fiction, successfully straddling the world of ratiocination, which Hemanta employs, and that of the supernatural, establishing that the two are not mutually exclusive as many writers and readers would like to believe. This is not to claim that the novel is unique in some way. Roy may well have been inspired by William Hope Hodgson’s creation, Thomas Carnacki. Carnacki, according to Wikipedia, employed ‘a variety of scientific methods in his investigations, as well as resorting to more traditional folklore. He employed [ed] technologies such as photography and his own fictional invention,the Electric Pentacle.’[5].’ The reference to scientific methods and photography reminds us of how Hemanta set about solving the mystery of the horrific murders. What evokes admiration is how Roy thoroughly Indianizes – and makes specific to Bengal’s spiritual history – this exercise in producing photographic evidence of the supernatural, and, in the process, thwarting the evil unleashed by a human being and his followers.

In 1928, S. S. Van Dine formulated twenty rules to be followed by writers of detective fiction. Of these, no. 8 said:

The problem of crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic séances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.[6]

  Most classical detective fiction, under the influence of which Roy was writing, adheres to this principle. The two narratives studied in this paper show how he fused the ratiocination of such fiction with the paranormal, in the first leaving a degree of ambiguity between the paranormal and the corporeal, while unambiguously asserting the actuality of the supernatural in the second.

Endnotes

1.Text quoted from https://sherlock-holm.es/stories/pdf/a4/1-sided/sign.pdf 17, 16 Feb. 21.

2.According to Britannica, Kapalikas were devotees of the Hindu god Shiva, and were most prominent in India from the 8th through the 13th century, who became notorious for their practices of esoteric rituals that allegedly included both animal and human sacrifice. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kapalikas accessed June 1, 2025.

3.James, M. R. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Part 2: More Ghost Stories. 1911. Kindle Edition.

4.James, M. R. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. 1904. Original Classics and Annotated. Kindle Edition.

5.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnacki, accessed 26 Oct. 23.

6.https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/01/s-s-van-dines-twenty-rules-writingdetective-stories/, accessed 16 Feb. 21.

List of Works Cited

Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur. The Sign of Four. 1890. Text quoted from https://sherlockholmes/stories/pdf/a4/1-sided/sign.pdf 17, 16 Feb. 21.

The Hound of the Baskervilles. Serialized 1901-2. Book form 1902.

de Voragine, Jacobus. Golden Legend (Legenda aurea). Compiled 1259-1266.

Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. 3 Editions. 1890-1915.

Hodgson, William Hope. Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. 1913. Kindle Edition.

James, M. R. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. 1904. Original Classics and Annotated. Kindle Edition.

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Part 2: More Ghost Stories. 1911. Kindle Edition.

Murray, Margaret A. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. 1921.

Roy, Hemendra Kumar. Amabasyar Raat (‘New-Moon Nights’. Serialized1933. Book form 1939). Hemendra Kumar Roy Rachanabali (The Writings of Hemendra Kumar Roy). Volume 2. Kolkata. Asia Publishing Co. 1976. 5th printing 1982. 9-83 Bibhishaner Jagaran (‘The Terror Awakens’. 1942). The Writings of Hemendra Kumar Roy. Volume 16. Kolkata. Asia Publishing Co. 1997. 199-242.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnacki, accessed 26 Oct. 23.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kapalikas accessed 01 June 2025.

https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/01/s-s-van-dines-twenty-rules-writingdetective-stories/, accessed 16 Feb. 21.

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