The best of the Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes: Byomkesh Bakshi.

Bakshi, Byomkesh. Byomkesh Bakshi was created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay (Baroda) and appeared in thirty-five novellas from 1932 to 1970, beginning with “Pather Kanta” (Basumati, 1932). Byomkesh Bakshi is a Bengali private detective, although he describes himself as a satyanneshi (truth-seeker). Bakshi is smart, young, educated, observant, and is a bhadrolok (gentleman). With the help of his obtuse Watson, the writer Ajit Bandyopadhyay, Bakshi solves a variety of murders in Calcutta and across India. Bakshi discovers his cases while reading the local newspaper, and is Bengali enough to prefer the dhoti kurta to the traditional p.i.’s trenchcoat. Bakshi is Hindu and a patriot, but uses English items like electric fans and telephones.

The thing about Indian detective fiction is that you should, both usefully and accurately, divide it up into groups: Bangla detective fiction, Sindhi detective fiction, Punjabi detective fiction, and so on. India is enormous, its literature (both classic and popular) is vast, and different Indian ethnic groups have different histories with detective fiction, so that any description of Indian detective fiction quickly devolves into an account of those ethnic groups’ histories with detective fiction. You can usefully and accurately talk about the history of “American detective fiction” or “English detective fiction” or “French detective fiction;” such a statement is neither useful nor accurate with regards to India, where those individual ethnic groups’ detective fiction evolved more or less independently of each other—Bangla detective fiction has a richer tradition than Punjabi detective fiction, but the latter developed without interference or influence from the former—and there is so much of it.

What I’m saying, I guess, is that India is big, and its tradition of detective fiction is long and as ethnically varied as India itself is. An encyclopedia of “Indian detective fiction” would likely be four or five times the size as your typical encyclopedia of “American detective fiction.”

The other thing of note—there are many things of note in Indian detective fiction, but I’m going to restrain myself for now and limit myself to just one other thing—is that, as best I’m able to tell from here in Texas, fans of Indian detective fiction have a much greater knowledge of the fictional detectives of their past than American detective fans do—greater knowledge, and greater willingness to reinterpret them for the present. Sherlock Holmes gets reinterpreted every generation, but few others do—Marple and Poirot and Marlowe and the rest are stuck in their time periods and rarely if ever get revived in new skins. But India…Byomkesh Bakshi (who may be the closest thing India has to Sherlock Holmes, admittedly) has been a mainstay of film, radio, and television for fifty years—I mean, just look at his Wikipedia entry, and the image above is from a film due out this April. But Bakshi is hardly the only detective of India’s golden age to be continually reinterpreted, as we’ll see.