The Self-Isolated Sleuth

SHERLOCK HOLMES’ intellect is seen as a synecdoche for the powerful Western liberal bloc—led by Britain and America—that emerged during the First World War and would continue until after the Iraq War. Today, the hidden vulnerabilities of that bloc have been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic. Bliss it is now for the likes of Holmes to be alive, in a world where to have an opinion or a theory on epidemiology is ‘very heaven’.

Shielded now from the theatres of macabre in Syria, Palestine, Iran, Pakistan, Kashmir and other places, it is unsurprising to see that the 2011 film Contagion tops viewers’ choices, hunkering comfortably in self-isolation, feeding off ‘pandemic porn’. It is the stuff that drives ‘Shakespeare’s plays and Jacobean dramas, of old ballads, apocalyptic paintings and morality tales’, writes Paul Theroux. It eclipses the fanfare of reality television, as it happens in ‘in real time, with no edits’, adds Simon Cottee. As a society, we have turned Sherlockian, eschewing or dissevering data and regulations—and an Indian policeman’s hand—which had wanted to save us.

Holmes saw Eastern contagions, exotic poisons and tropical diseases plaguing the imperial epicentre. The adventures of ‘the Speckled Band’ and ‘the Devil’s Foot’ are still firmly grounded in the annals of Sherlockian toxicology. The Strand magazine thrived on people gorging off those plots; not unlike the ‘petrified fascination’ with which, according to Sarah Dunant, we now monitor death tolls before going to bed each night. Arthur Conan Doyle demonstrated that it was not uncommon for well-to-do Englishmen—the ruling and therefore the superior race—to contract ‘an out-of-the-way Asiatic disease in the heart of London’. And, it was commonplace for them to die of it.

In ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, Holmes is presented as bedridden after contracting the mysterious Tapanuli fever or the black Formosa corruption. It is a disease in which Dr John Watson, a medical man, can render no assistance, because its aetiology is in biological militancy. Watson is astonished when told that ‘the man upon earth who is best versed in this disease is not a medical man, but a planter. Mr Culverton Smith is a well-known resident of Sumatra, now visiting London’.

Can it be that in our global war against the killer pathogen, rechristened as the ‘Chinese Virus’ by President Donald Trump, we too are looking towards medical men without identifying the real plantation behind this alleged biomilitant plot?

James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, who was a biographer of William Shakespeare, was one of the greatest experts in the subject of human nature. Dr Watson—referred to as Holmes’

Boswell by the detective himself—had taken the task of chronicling his friend’s expertise in human nature in a Britain caught in the web of expanding and warring medicinal and toxicological technologies.

Holmes was a creation of troubled times, when microbiology and bacteriology saw their first modern hallmarks in discoveries by Robert Koch, Paul Ehrlich and Louis Pasteur. His world was replete with characters effecting, or falling prey to, fatal poisons and diseases trafficked from Britain’s colonies. For the Victorian mind to prosper, it had to overpower the Oriental mind. For the Oriental mind to exist, it had to be fictionally invented in the criminal mind. And that criminal mind was usually of an Oriental nature residing in an English body. Holmes’ doctoring of the vulnerability of Britain’s imperial body politic, in curing its metropolitan bodies of a social malaise, makes of him the pandemic man’s Shakespeare today.

My thesis conflating the Shakespearean and Sherlockian, however, collapses when I see that Holmes was almost always in self-isolation. Watson had seen ‘that seclusion and solitude were very necessary for my friend in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence’, as he wrote in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’. When Holmes first visits Devonshire, to investigate the footprints of the ‘gigantic hound’ and Sir Charles Baskerville’s death, he does so not in person but in spirit, through his timetravelling mind. Shakespeare was a frequent traveller; Holmes was not. The latter would certainly not be shot in Gothic scenes set against the jagged summits of industrial Victorian London—or the Ferris Wheel in the modern BBC adaptation—if not for our remorseless desires to consume cities, societies and civilisations in proxy.

The materialist and literal-minded will argue that Holmes takes several train journeys from Paddington or Charing Cross into the countryside, that he is often in disguise combing London’s unfashionable streets for opium dens and devils, that he perambulates across Tibet, Persia and Norway during his Great Hiatus after being reportedly killed at the Reichenbach Falls in the duel with Professor Moriarty, and so on! That is how the demands of imperialism, advertising and surveillance gave the outer body of Holmes a distinctly urbane character.

Returning to the Holmes oeuvre of late, I found all that overshadowed by the fact that his Bradshaw, Imperial Gazetteer, Encyclopedia and traces of evidence left by his clients at his quarters—such as the walking stick forgotten behind by Dr Mortimer—taught Holmes more about the world and human nature than the over-glamourised West End society, the great Continental railways or the lure of political power wielded by his brother Mycroft. The only social outlet Holmes permitted himself—if at all it could be called that—was the Diogenes Club, founded by Mycroft, where ‘the most unsociable and unclubable men’ of London gathered, and where none was allowed to take notice of another. Being a club whose members were fined and expelled if found socialising with each other, Holmes found it ‘a very soothing atmosphere’. Unlike his literary descendant Hercule Poirot, considered to have an enviable female circle, Holmes was neither a ladies’ nor just a men’s man. It was not the ‘poisonous’ and ‘inscrutable’ East that Holmes had quarantined himself against, but his own society.

There were distinctly two Holmes then: one that we desired him to appear as and the other who could see through the appearances of our desires. The answer to why the latter Holmes was so self-isolated, even quarantined, is a vexed one. Critic Susan Cannon Harris observed that crime and disease were conflated in Victorian detective fiction, as though both were ‘uncontrollable and pandemic’. The identification and taxonomy of Oriental poisons, that abounds in Holmes’ adventures, were means of identifying and naming inhabitants of an alien and dangerous territory—such as the Andaman Islands from where the Tribal Tonga arrives in London, accompanying the ‘criminal’ Jonathan Small, in ‘The Sign of the Four’.

HOLMES MAY HAVE been bodily agile, even pugilistic. But in the canon, scenes of him reclining by the fireplace at 221B Baker Street, perusing The Times or Evening Standard over his pipe or engrossed in clients’ cases, by far outnumber the scenes of Holmes running about London. The deerstalker, that for us completes Holmes, was not Doyle’s own idea but an invention by the illustrator, Sidney Paget. Since gentlemen did not wear hats indoors—and Holmes was mostly indoors—he rarely wore one. ‘Oh, do your research,’ as the BBC Sherlock would say.

It is not the global pandemic alone that leads me to believe that we must resurrect the Sherlock within, which is not the Sherlock of theories on dissent. Holmes resides in all of us. Most only choose to see him represented in a fleeting world of adaptations or appearances. Watson is one of us materialists, jumping to conclusions, when he writes that Holmes was very well-read in the sensational fiction of his time, but that his knowledge of serious literature was nil. Then, the doctor’s own future accounts betray this as a false notion, when we find Holmes quoting Charles Darwin on music or from at least 14 plays of Shakespeare—the famous phrase ‘the game is afoot’ came from the play Henry V—or memorably alluding to philosopher Arthur Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, when he says, ‘The individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty… Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.’ This last example, not a Sherlockian theory but pure observation on human nature, is eerily prophetic. Almost meant for our times when our fellow-earth-dwellers have been reduced to numbers and statistics!

There is a great overlap between prospective audiences of Sherlock Holmes and pandemic statistics. The cold, calculating, pragmatic stance of the theorist or the emotionally charged rhetoric of the audience-turned-critic are realities we cannot ignore when death has overawed most realities. While we fight this war to end all wars, however, we must also try develop a theory to end all theories, in this phase of the war at least—a theory of quiet resolve, bearing and acceptance, which does
not need theological, religious, social, political or even democratic support.

When the allies defeat the pandemic, what sort of Indian society are we to return to? One where cricket matches still brew internecine divisions that promise to manifest in vicarious killings? Or one that held democracy and human lives hostage, at times even killing both even during elections? Or one where before the nationwide lockdown was announced, the hanging of four criminals was celebrated like a cricket match victory? Or one where law was weaponised through its reinterpretations to delay the hanging of those criminals convicted of the most heinous killing?

The loss of our dearest ones and the perpetual fear it has brought on us cannot deter us from asking ourselves these questions. It must not deter us, either, from respecting Covid-19, which did emerge from China but had its first roots in a human body. It is revealing to see Holmes when he discovers the toxicology behind Tonga’s poisoned darts—the sleuth refers to the small tribesman with a mark of great respect. Quoting Jean Paul Richter, Holmes says, ‘The chief proof of man’s real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. It argues, you see, a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself a proof of nobility.’

Finally, when this war is won, I hope to see a noble adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, one that is not necessarily as materialistic, not necessarily as masculine, not necessarily as shrewd nor even as intelligent, but only a little spiritual—one that mirrors the Sherlock hidden within the canon and within our souls, a little more. India, the land of the Upanishads and Sufis, may even co-author the intellect of that new character, as a new synecdoche of the Western liberal bloc. But first, we must face our own poisoned darts with marks of respect and grace. The virus certainly respects us more than we have ever. It has not killed our religions, classes, castes or genders, but as man kills for man and is killed by man.

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