Kishwar Desai’s Simran Singh series: Crime,detection,and gender

Introduction

With a unique focus on issues affecting women in contemporary India, Kishwar Desai’s Simran Singh series utilizes crime fiction to inform readers of feminist issues in India through the portrayals of gender, corruption, and nonfictional cases, at times turning a critical gaze back on to the reader and holding them accountable for the issues facing characters in the text. As an author who appears to write both from and back to India, and who works as a journalist to raise awareness of the experiences of Indian women pertaining to reproductive justice and patriarchal control, Desai’s voice and position(s) render her work a particularly fascinating case study. Desai’s novels feature representations of crime and detection that complicate the relationships between crime, gender, nation, and empire. Her feminist leanings, evident through Simran’s rejection of traditional gender norms and the character’s confidence in her work and sexuality, work on multiple levels to set Simran aside from others in her life. They also serve to make the character familiar for a contemporary reading audience, as these traits echo those exemplified by popular culture heroines. This article explores how Desai’s Simran Singh crime series frames Indian postcoloniality and Indo-British relations, and indeed crime in India, for consumption by readers.

At the same time, this article analyses the relationships between Simran and the novels’ “official” detectives as representatives of the Indian state, as well as deconstructs the way that Simran uses her gender and unofficial status to her advantage. In all three novels — Witness the Night (2010), Origins of Love (2013), and The Sea of Innocence (2014b) — Simran works closely with select members of the police force, finding herself unable to trust various authority figures and government officials. Significantly, her sex and sexuality allow her privileged access to parts of society that she needs to interact with, subverting the idea that women have limited access to the public sphere. By situating Desai’s novels within the traditions of detective fiction, one can further consider the ways that power functions within the texts and the ways that Simran, as a social worker acting as an amateur detective, reaffirms and deconstructs existing systems of power along national lines.

At times working over, through, or with members of the Indian police force, Simran oscillates between embodying traits of the hardboiled detective, the family-oriented Indian woman, and the staunch feminist. Simran’s perceived vices are likewise laid bare for the reader and mark her as an outsider within the Punjabi Sikh community from which she hails; she publicly smokes, drinks, and enjoys extramarital sexual and romantic relationships with men. Set in Jalandhar, Delhi/Mumbai, and Goa respectively, the three novels address a wide range of contemporary feminist issues in various regions of India, ranging from female foeticide and domestic violence in Witness the Night; surrogacy, stem cell research, and medical tourism in Origins of Love; to sexual violence and drug trafficking in The Sea of Innocence. The plot of each novel sheds light on different problematic areas in India’s national imaginary, with a consistent focus on corruption and shortcomings within the justice system in cases featuring gender-based violence. In each text, a particular element of gender relations in contemporary Indian society is illuminated, critiqued, and ultimately condemned.

As noted in an interview with Farhana Shaikh in The Asian Writer (2011), Desai moved to the UK in the early 2000s and is married to Lord Meghnad Desai. Desai states in the interview that her first book — the nonfictional Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt (2007) — was researched and published in India but written largely from the UK, and her later work has similar ties to both locations. This notion of in-betweenness permeates Desai’s acts of writing back to and from India, which complicates her portrayals of India as a nation in relation to theories of diaspora and postcoloniality. In other words, her construction of India is not idealized, but is rather complicated by her insider and outsider status. By creating a contemporary middle-aged feminist Indian detective, Desai simultaneously highlights the complicated subject positions women in India occupy, and challenges the patriarchal nature of the justice system through the invocation of complex references to empire and neocolonial international relations.

Desai’s overt criticism of India is made possible by her expatriate status and position as a journalist who highlights issues in India for a British readership. Indeed, her fictionalized narratives mirror the issues which she highlights in her journalistic pursuits. While Desai explicitly traces this relationship in her essay “Walking the tightrope” (2014c), it is also evident throughout her work. She cites “never-ending research” and “the crime of over-researching” as symptoms of her journalism career which carry forward into her fictional pursuits (Desai, 2014c: 66). For example, Desai opined in the Guardian that British physicians would do well to consider the traumatic legacies of sex-selective abortion on Indian women when addressing their clients’ wishes during assisted reproduction (2012: n.p.). In “Walking the tightrope” she further justifies her use of fiction to address this issue, suggesting that this medium “would affect readers more” (Desai, 2014c: 69). Desai’s 2014 opinion piece in the Guardian entitled “Calling for a bikini ban is a dangerous response to assaults in India” (2014a) addresses sexual violence in Goa and references the 2008 murder of British teenage backpacker Scarlett Keeling — both the theme and the event are central to The Sea of Innocence. In these examples, Desai’s cultural in-betweenness works to her advantage as she informs and contextualizes feminist issues from India for a British reading audience. She has both an established position from which to criticize her natal homeland and a platform from which to inform a British and global audience. This subject position is further highlighted in her texts as Simran moves between cultures.

The concept of the foreign and the postcolonial have long existed in the realms of crime and detective fiction, with writings set in the colonies having a long and complex history within the British tradition. In Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture, Caroline Reitz asserts that “not only was detective fiction an important player in the arena of imperial literature, it both served and challenged the interests of empire in a more direct way than either its status as fiction or the scholarship that declares it a minor genre wants to admit” (2004: xiii). Desai’s first two novels are briefly mentioned in Prabhat K. Singh’s work (2013: 8), which calls attention to the rise of genre fiction in English in India more broadly, addressing crime, detective, and science fiction in the same chapter. Singh echoes Reitz’s call to recognize the significance of genre fiction, thereby solidifying the significance of Desai’s work in relation to broader contemporary canons.

Desai’s position, living as she does between England and India and writing of a protagonist who occupies both spaces throughout her works, complicates her work in relation to notions of empire. However, the crimes Desai writes about emphasize the complex relationships with understandings of empire inherent in Reitz’s work. Desai’s series analyses the ways that crimes, generally committed by Indian citizens and sometimes representatives of the Indian state, serve patriarchal and imperial interests through the ways that bodies (both alive and dead), genetic materials, and drugs move and are moved across borders. Speaking of the scholarly approach to detective fiction as a popular genre, Nels Pearson and Marc Singer, in their introduction to Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World, critically note:

This approach [ … ] views detective fiction as a paradigm and an implement of the hegemonic processes of the Western nation-state, tantalizing readers with aberrant, irrational criminality while assuring them that society ultimately coheres through a shared commitment to reason and law. (2009: 1)

Echoing throughout Desai’s novels, hegemonic notions of “empire” and “colony” meet and intersect in unique ways, which reify Pearson and Singer’s call to dismiss simplistic understandings of the genre and to think about detective fiction in relation “knowledge production, justice, and human rights in a transnational and postcolonial world” (2009: 3). Desai’s texts often include a foreign individual assisting Simran, and it is worth noting that the foreigner is a citizen or resident of the United Kingdom in each of the three novels. In Witness the Night, Binny has fled to the UK to save her unborn daughter from foeticide at the hands of her recently murdered family members, and it is Binny who provides Simran with the necessary family background and contextual information for her to save Durga and Sharda. In Origins of Love, the victims hail from the UK and Simran travels there as part of her investigation. Finally, in The Sea of Innocence the victims are foreigners, and the protection of the tourism industry is cited as a reason for Simran’s invitation to investigate the crimes in Goa.

This engagement with, and victimization of, representatives of India’s former colonizer complicates the relationships between the victim, the detective, and the state, keeping it in focus even as the reader is begged to see gender as a primary site of oppression within the novels. Wendy Knepper’s analysis of the role of the foreign detective in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2001) is particularly poignant when considering the role of the body in Desai’s work. Knepper writes:

For the postcolonial crime novel, the postmortem entails a metafictional, metaphorical, and analytic investigation into postcolonialism itself. This is to say, that there are two bodies under examination on the autopsy table of the postcolonial postmortem: the body of the victim (plot of the crime novel) and the body of the (post)colonial society. [ … ] The postcolonial postmortem is a complex process because it plays with the literal and figurative interpretations of the postmortem. Consequently, the body of the victim is transformed into a site of multiple investigations and subject to many, often overlapping or intersecting modes of analysis and meaning. (2006: 39)

As Simran’s investigations dissect not only bodies but also the relationships between them, Knepper’s point echoes on, and the body of postcolonialism lives and breathes, even as it is dissected by scholars, critics, and authors alike. By framing the UK as a site of refuge in her first novel and casting British victims in her two subsequent texts, Desai creates intersecting avenues for investigation. Moreover, by positioning her victims as consumers of transnational industries with strong neocolonial implications (reproductive tourism and a Goan tourism centred around partying, respectively), Desai highlights some of the potential human costs of the growth of these industries. Her positioning of Simran — a social worker — as the one who is able to deconstruct these crimes likewise calls for a humane and feminist approach to these issues.

In “Challenging gender and genre: Women in contemporary Indian crime fiction in English”, Neele Meyer situates Desai’s first Simran Singh novel alongside works by Kalpana Swaminathan and Madhumita Bhattacharyya and addresses an important sociological question: “Is crime fiction a suitable genre to give Indian women a voice/space to (re)negotiate the role and (self-)image of women in modern India?” (2018: 107). Meyer situates these works within the postcolonial tradition of “writing back” (2018: 106), and also suggests that “Indian crime fiction writers often play with the element of closure and present alternative ways to get some kind of justice. Thereby, they alter generic conventions to draw attention to other problems such as impunity or corruption” (2018: 112). The relationships between characters, crimes, and settings in Desai’s novels become as important as the crimes themselves. The Indian investigator challenges and works within the framework of colony as secondary to colonizer, highlighting notions of corruption and corruptibility as identified by Meyer.

Simran so far

Although they form a chronological narrative, Desai’s Simran Singh novels all function as independent texts. None of the novels contain any indication within the body of the text that another Simran Singh novel is coming, but the success of the series so far suggests that Desai may not yet be finished with Simran. In fact, Simran notes in Witness the Night that this will be her last case (Desai, 2010: 240), but Desai then indicates in the acknowledgements that readers should “watch out for the return of Simran” (Desai, 2010: n.p.). The 2013 edition of Origins of Love likewise contains excerpts from The Sea of Innocence, but the main body of the text does not indicate that Simran wishes to continue with her detecting. Importantly, Simran enters into a romantic relationship in The Sea of Innocence and suggests a timely return to Goa, which indicates that her narrative will likely continue (Desai, 2014b: 356). However, there is no suggestion that another case will follow, and none have been published at the time of writing. The three texts also demonstrate a decreasing reliance on and engagement with the home space as Simran becomes involved in solving larger, more transnational crimes.

In Witness the Night, Simran returns to her hometown of Jalandhar, Punjab to solve a case in which 13 members of an upper-class household are murdered via both poisoning and stabbing. Readers are led to believe that the only surviving family member is the teenage Durga, who is found poisoned and tied to a bed (Desai, 2010: 24–25). It is slowly revealed throughout the text that Durga’s sister Sharda is not only alive but has been sent away by the family for having premarital sex which resulted in a pregnancy, and that Sharda’s son, Rahul, has escaped with Durga’s sister-in-law Binny to Southall. Despite the fact that Durga was raped and abused, she is held captive by the police as a suspect in the murder of her family members. Simran, who is friends with the local police, is called upon in her role as social worker to attempt to get the girl to open up about the events in question. By the novel’s conclusion, Simran has Durga released from police custody into her care. Readers are left with the uncomfortable knowledge that Durga is, in many ways, responsible for the deaths of her family members, as she worked in collaboration with her tutor in a plot orchestrated by a member of the local police who was interested in obtaining the family home to avenge the ill-treatment of her elder sister and the foeticide of numerous baby girls throughout the family’s history. Simran locates Sharda in a psychiatric hospital and takes her home as well, giving her a suite with a caregiver in the family home in Delhi (Desai, 2010: 241). Thus, the resolution is uneasy as the “criminals” walk free, while the patriarchal systems of oppression present in contemporary India are blamed for Durga’s actions and it is suggested that her family and society pushed her towards acting the way she did. This blurring of victim and perpetrator is alluded to by Meyer as one of the ways that Indian women’s crime fiction is subversive (2018: 116). The police chief is bribed with Durga’s family home at a discounted price for allowing Durga and Sharda to leave the city with Simran, the tutor is released from blame, and the women are cast as victims of their circumstances. Here, the UK is generally framed as a place of safety and reprieve for the characters who are able to escape persecution in India, and the country is engaged with only at a cursory level.

The second novel, Origins of Love, takes place in Delhi, Mumbai, and London and picks up Simran’s narrative a few months after the end of Witness the Night (Desai, 2013: 1–5). As Desai’s most cited novel, Origins is identified by multiple authors as an exemplary condemnation of India’s burgeoning surrogacy market. ¹ When a suspicious car crash kills the British intended parents of a child born to a surrogate in a Delhi clinic and their UK addresses prove false, Simran is summoned to help her friends who own the surrogacy clinic. The infant is discovered to have HIV, and the surrogate who carried her vanishes. Simran follows the scant paper trail to London, where she discovers that the infant’s deceased half-brother is also the child’s biological father. The name provided on the intake forms directs Simran towards the baby’s grandfather, who has no knowledge of her existence, or even the existence of his own deceased son due to his hobby of altruistically donating his sperm. Simran uses this hobby to get close to him by posing as a woman seeking his services, though the two also later become lovers. At the same time, embryos being sent to Delhi from abroad are being held up at customs in Mumbai, where the agent seeks first to extort money from the intended recipients, and later sells them to a hospital which harvests their embryonic stem cells for experimental treatment on the poor and illegal treatment of the wealthy.

Desai also acquaints readers with Simran’s childhood friend, Abhinav, who is introduced as a survivor of the 1978 Air India Flight 855 crash (2013: 9–12). Abhi, as he is known, was thought to be permanently disabled and unable to ever walk or talk again, but Simran later discovers him in the same hospital which is illegally purchasing the foreign embryos assumed to be delayed at customs. The realization that her friend’s mobility is increasing as a result of the illegal experimentation with stolen stem cells that she has discovered gives her mixed feelings about the situation, as she sees both the costs and benefits of the illegal research. British adoptive and intended parents benefit the most in this text, even as surrogacy clinics engage in extra-legal or unethical practices of recruitment and surrogate retention, thus leading to an uneasy resolution for the novel’s Indian victims.

Desai’s third and most recent novel, The Sea of Innocence, follows Simran and her adopted daughter Durga on holiday to Goa. There, her detective friend sends her disturbing images of the rape of a young woman who has been missing for an unspecified length of time (Desai, 2014b: 1–4). The case quickly becomes very dangerous and complex as Simran searches for the girl, who is identified as a British citizen and the youngest daughter of a local well-known hippie (Desai, 2014b: 157–161). It is suggested that the victim was a casualty of the drug trade, and Simran later proves that the victim was involved not only in the drug trade but with members of the Indian government who orchestrated her murder and sent her body to the UK disguised as someone else (Desai, 2014b: 334–335). Central to the plot is the fact that the government is seeking to save face after two high-profile cases negatively affected tourism through their threats to tourist, and particularly women’s, safety.

The three novels thus cover a broad topical and geographic range, with the dedicated amateur (feminist) detecting of social worker Simran being the thread that binds the narratives together. Simran refers only briefly to the earlier cases in each text, and her background is doled out slowly and only as necessary; the novels remain plot- and case-driven rather than psychological or personal. Simran, however, engages with the systemic issues that drive individual characters to crime, criticizing her compatriots for greed that is disguised as upward mobility, misogyny that some characters attempt to explain away, and corruption that is understood by some to be both endemic and unstoppable. Mary Hadley links a lack of resolution to gender in a chapter addressing the work of Liza Cody:

In the traditional British detective novel, the idea was that the world was a just place, and the detective, police force or the judicial system would remove the criminal and reestablish the status quo, but in the female hard-boiled novels, [ … ] this restoration does not happen since the detectives all question the worthiness of the justice system and the establishment in general. (2002: 66)

Simran’s constant questioning of the efficiency of the justice system aligns neatly with Hadley’s argument, although it is likewise important to note that many other fictional detectives throughout history have also worked, at times, against these norms.

The female body: Simran’s (single) sex life

Simran uses her sex and sexuality to accomplish her tasks through flirtation and the enlistment of the help of a male companion in each text. At the same time, she fully owns who she is and what she wants in an environment that attempts to strictly dictate the course of her life. Her single status and sex life are central to her character and to Desai’s constructions of the expectations of Indian womanhood. Simran has a lover for each novel; she repeatedly draws attention to the ways that this act is a rejection of the norms of her community. Maureen T. Reddy’s Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel (1988) provides valuable insight into the relationships between female-authored and centred texts and feminist movements that are relevant in relation to Desai’s novels, particularly as Desai deconstructs feminist issues in India. The incorporation of Reddy’s work here highlights the progress that has been made in the decades since its writing. Reddy astutely notes in her introduction that there is “one obvious lacuna in [her] book: the absence of black and Asian authors and protagonists” (1988: 16). ²

As a series featuring an Indian female detective which is also written by a woman of Indian origin, Desai’s novels fill the void that Reddy highlights. Reddy likewise highlights an “increasing diversity of female protagonists” which she attributes to feminism’s impact on the genre of crime fiction: “Just as actual women have moved into previously all-male preserves, ranging from the academy to the police force, so have their fictional counterparts taken advantage of these new opportunities” (1988: 2). Thus, Simran’s frequent commentary on her unusual status in the public sphere and, indeed, in the world of crime, can be read as a reflection of the shifting status of women in upper- and middle-class Indian households.

Community norms surrounding marriage and maternity are invoked throughout all of Desai’s works, but motherhood is addressed most obviously in Origins of Love where Simran addresses her lack of biological children on the very first page. Simran emphasizes her mother’s obsession with her reproductive decisions:

[She] could convince anybody that [Simran] should succumb to impregnation by any eligible and willing man and produce a grandchild for her. According to her, it will be beneficial all round. That is, it will be both “good for [Simran]” and make [her] a more “reasonable woman”. She also thinks that the very thought of “real” parenthood will make [her] amenable to marriage. (Desai, 2013: 1)

This emphasis on reproduction as a marker of “reasonable womanhood” echoes longstanding connections between constructions of maternity and good citizenship, and calls attention to the delegitimation of Simran’s adoptive parenthood. ³ Desai’s unwavering attention to the way that Simran subverts the expectations of her community, particularly when read alongside the gendered violence in her novels, makes the reader keenly aware of the trials, tribulations, and accomplishments of contemporary feminist movements in India and the tensions that are present between nationalisms and normative femininity.

In her introduction to Murdering Miss Marple: Essays on Gender and Sexuality in the New Golden Age of Women’s Crime Fiction, Julie H. Kim highlights the significant diversity in contemporary crime fiction, and suggests that the presence of “liberal feminist protagonists and ‘post’-feminist detectives” leave space for a range of interpretations of gender relations within the field (2012: 3; emphasis in original). In some ways embodying postfeminism through her emphasis on sexuality as well as the marketing and re-selling of her feminist ideologies, Simran has a male partner in each novel who serves his purpose and is eventually written out, inviting some of the diverse interpretations Kim highlights. Notably, the detective who notifies Simran of her cases, Delhi police officer Amarjit, is a former lover. Simran then has much younger reporter Gurmit as a lover in the first novel, altruistic and athletic British sperm donor Edward as a lover in Origins of Love, and the helpful and connected television writer Dennis to help her navigate Goa in The Sea of Innocence. Each of these men provide Simran with protection from her foes as well as insight into the community in which she is working. Without these men, Simran’s success would likely not be possible, rendering her sexuality useful in terms of gaining her protection as well as information. Rather than simply depending on these men, however, she uses them personally and professionally, and it is worth noting that none are able to contain or control her.

Simran’s body is also kept central within the novels as its flaws and features are either celebrated or picked apart in Simran’s internal dialogue throughout the texts. Gill Plain’s examination of bodies in contemporary crime fiction in Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body (2001) is useful here. Plain highlights the pivotal nature of gender to discussions of crime: “The increasing centrality of gender to studies of crime fiction is the inevitable outcome of a belated critical acknowledgement that the genre’s profound investment in the dynamics of power inevitably incorporates discourses of gender and sexuality” (2001: 8). While much of Plain’s text deals with situating queerness in paradigms of detection, her emphasis on the embodied nature of detectives and victims alike is noteworthy (2001: 13). Ultimately, Plain identifies the genre as one which presents a “façade of gender conformity” (2001: 25), concluding her argument as follows:

In the original paradigm of detection, the monstrous was woman — or, more specifically, the feminine. [ … ] “Woman” has returned not only as the other, but as the self of the detective, and has exploded this self with her contradictory and multiple desires — with her refusal to adhere to the patriarchal codes of rationality, explicability, and order. (2001: 246)

Thus, Plain’s text serves to highlight historic shifts whereby the detectives’ and victims’ bodies act and are acted upon in manners that highlight the crucial position gender takes in relation to understandings of crime and criminality.

The paradox of Simran’s visibility is also similar to that discussed by Adrienne Gavin in “Feminist crime fiction and female sleuths” (2010). In a work that traces the presence of female detectives from the early eras of crime writing, Gavin notes that for some female sleuths, invisibility was an asset, but that detective fiction created a presence and visibility for mature protagonists as well (2010: 263). As she traces the history of women detectives and feminist ideologies throughout time, Gavin further highlights a triad of contemporary issues being tackled in contemporary detective fiction: “ensemble characters, issues surrounding motherhood, and violence against women” (2010: 267). Desai’s invocation of these issues is therefore not unique, but her subject matter and the cultural positioning of her sleuth is relevant.

It is also noteworthy that Simran frames her features in relation to culturally specific expectations, removing the possibility of reading her as an Everywoman character, and instead rooting the narrative firmly in an upper-class Punjabi Sikh context. This is interesting to consider in relation to Winter S. Elliott’s essay on the female body in detective fiction, “Neither victim nor vixen” (2012), as Desai’s portrayal directly contradicts Elliott’s argument. Central to Elliott’s argument is the suggestion that the body of the female detective has become largely absent in works by contemporary detective fiction:

As the female detective’s body ceases to be a focal point, the victim’s body has increasingly become a target of graphic, and sexual, violence. Just as gendered identity in early crime fiction derived definition from allocations of power, so too does this shift in modern crime fiction depend upon the female reader’s understanding of social hierarchy. (2012: 211)

Elliott further suggests that this absence would allow readers to better identify with the detective characters. Desai’s novels subvert this idea, as Simran’s body is frequently owned and described within the narrative, but the bodies of the victims are largely absent. This absence is strikingly more relevant in the second and third novels due to the fact that the novels feature British victims. Rather than being unaware, readers may sympathize with Simran as she describes her ageing, bulging corpus, and celebrate with her when she owns her physicality. Because she is cast in a non-idealized body type, Simran gains invisibility and therefore mobility within the text, while her physical descriptions render her othered and exoticized to a non-Indian reading audience. By keeping Simran’s physical body present for the reading audience rather than erasing it as the bodies of many of her contemporaries have been erased, her Indianness, Sikhness, and marginality remain present for readers even as she moves unnoticed by other characters within much of the text.

Moreover, the novels contain frequent reiterations of Simran’s Punjabi Sikh identity which may challenge notions of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. Her presence in and shaping of the public sphere across various regions of India support this challenge. Simran’s India seems to be a diverse and constantly changing place rather than one that is firmly rooted in any one particular tradition. Just as Simran’s mother comments on her reproductive decisions, so too in the opening pages of Witness the Night does the matriarch remind Simran of her Sikh heritage and the expectations of propriety that go along with it: “Simran, you are a sardarni, a Sikhni, and you smoke!” (2010: 4). Readers versed in South Asian histories may have been able to deduce the heritage of various characters by their names, but Simran’s cultural and religious background is made clear to all readers from the outset. Desai’s specificity explicates the diversity present in contemporary India through Simran’s travels and characteristics, thereby providing readers with insight into some of the nation’s present cultural tensions. The crimes she encounters and their solutions are situated in relation to norms and practices of different groups.

Corruption and colonization: Simran and the police

While Simran’s sex and sexuality function as tools for her detecting, it is important to note that were Desai’s imagined India not rife with corruption, Simran would not be necessary to solve the cases that she does. She is called upon not only because she is talented at what she does, but because government officials cannot be trusted to do their jobs within the constraints of the law. Simran’s displeasure with the state of affairs in India is evident from the beginning of Witness the Night, when the electricity in her rented room in the police guest house flickers and she laments:

Why does anyone bother to live in this corrupt country? They screw you if you don’t pay your taxes, but you can’t do anything to them once you elect the damn ministers who live in palatial splendour while the rest of us scrounge around for a scrap of light. (2010: 6)

Importantly, her creator Desai also acknowledges her displeasure with the status of the police force in contemporary India through her author’s note in Witness the Night:

While the characters and places in this book are entirely fictional, the events which take place are not. There is a complicity of corruption between the police, the judicial system, politicians, media, and the uncivil society. My father, Padam Rosha, is possibly one of the very few incorruptible polices officers who was posted in northern India. [ … ]. But, as the case of Ruchika Girhotra in India has proved yet again, officers like him are few and far between, and gender issues are still treated with contempt. (2010: n.p.) ⁴

A similar acknowledgement is made in Origins of Love, while the dedication in the frontmatter of The Sea of Innocence is to “Jyoti, Scarlett and the thousands of women who have been raped and murdered in India” (2014b). ⁵ Real cases and historical events are invoked in all three texts as points of reference, and both later novels deal with issues that Desai has written about extensively as a journalist. Desai’s work thus attempts in some ways to bridge the gaps between fiction and reality as she draws parallels between real and fictional cases and fictionalizes real events to support her narratives.

An often-cited scholar of postcoloniality in detective fiction, Ed Christian’s analysis of the relationship between crime and colonization in The Post-Colonial Detective is relevant to Desai’s work. This criticism is particularly applicable to Desai’s fiction, as Origins of Love takes Simran to England and therefore back to the realm of the colonizer. Christian utilizes a very specific definition for postcolonial detectives, ruling out works which simply feature a detective who travels to a postcolonial nation-state as part of a broader case that is rooted elsewhere. He identifies marginalization as a defining feature of these detectives and explores the relationship between “cultural attitudes” and “approaches to criminal investigation” (2001: 2; emphasis removed). As an embodiment of Christian’s criteria for the postcolonial detective, then, Simran Singh allows Desai to explore and expose issues within the Indian police force through fiction. At the same time, she captures both “old” and “new” attitudes towards gender roles and sexuality in India by sometimes aligning Simran with members of state authority and at other moments pitting her against them. The fact that none of the chapters in Christian’s text deal with works which are comparable to Desai’s series speaks to the latter’s uniqueness as well as the progression of the genre and the expansion of work by diasporic and Indian writers within the global marketplace in recent years.

Similar to Christian, Reitz notes that the relationship between Indian and British detective fiction is not only strong but in fact goes back to the first English detective novel. Reitz identifies William Sleeman of the Thug Police as “the first fully-imagined English detective” (2004: 22). She outlines the existence, both literary and otherwise, of the Thuggee police, who were in imperial India primarily to protect travellers and British citizens from the locals. However, she notes that the external implementation of order created problems as well:

As suppressing Thuggee was something the British claimed to be doing exclusively for India, it was also done entirely to India (no British perpetrators or victims), underscoring rather than exorcising the uncomfortable balance between coercion and consent that marked contemporary concerns about policing and imperial administration. (Reitz 2004: 31; emphasis in original)

In Desai’s novel, Simran acts in India, but also in and through the UK, asserting dominion and authority which is in direct opposition to the process which Reitz refers. For instance, Simran’s trip to London in Origins of Love, in which she exposes negligence on the part of the company which sends embryos to the IVF clinic owned by her friends, as well as the fact that the preliminary victims in the novel are the British intended parents, thus subverts this order. Simran is the only one still willing to investigate and further pursue justice for the crime. Essentially, an Indian officer (however unofficial she may be) attempts to control India for the sake of the British parents and child who become victims at the personal level of some of the very systems of privilege that the texts seek to critique. She then travels to Britain in many ways to impose and restore the sense of order that has been overturned by the crimes against Mike and Susan (the deceased couple in Origins of Love), and Liza and Marian (the victims in The Sea of Innocence). Through these acts of a reclamation of power, though small in scale and personal in nature, Simran also seeks justice for the UK citizen Scarlett Keeling, whose narrative is directly invoked throughout The Sea of Innocence as a point of comparison for the fictional case of Liza.

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth Century Fictions of Crime is also useful for contextualizing the relationship between India and the UK in Desai’s novels. A key feature in Mukherjee’s work is an analysis of “how the rhetoric of crime [in India] became a crucial, perhaps a dominant strain in the British representations of India from the mid- to late eighteenth century onward” (2003: 24). As an author of Indian origin calling attention to crime and corruption in India, the British presence in Desai’s texts is noteworthy, as is Desai’s own geographic shifting. Reading Desai’s work as work by a British author condemning India’s government and police is very different from reading her work as work by an Indian author; her ability to write from both positions gives her narratives a balance of hope and criticism.

Matzke and Mühleisen’s introduction to Postcolonial Postmortems is also illuminating when considering the role of the colonizer and colonialism in Desai’s texts. Speaking first of fictions set or written in the colonial era, they note, “Order and discipline as primary colonial interests could [ … ] be affirmed through the investigation of crime and the reconstruction of a social stability so typical for the genre” (2006: 4). In many ways, Desai’s novels seek the same sort of stability. Deconstructing the title of their work, the critics note that “the ‘postmortem’ can also imply an examination of postcolonial literature which increasingly uses elements of crime fiction for ‘social’ rather than ‘criminal’ detection [ … ] It is also notable that crime fiction increasingly transcends, if not invalidates, national boundaries” (Matzke and Mühleisen, 2006: 8). Their work on the notion of the postmortem, when applied to the missing body in The Sea of Innocence, allows the body to take on significance as a symbol of order. Disorder ensues when the body is lost, and a new sort of order is restored when Simran discovers that the body was sent, under another name, back to the UK to be disposed of. Of particular note here is the significance of the perception of order. Desai’s indictment of the British in restoring the appearance of order while simultaneously participating in the perpetuation of disorder can be read as a comment on histories which did the same, such as those outlined in Mukherjee’s analysis (2003).

As a symbol of order, then, Liza’s body highlights shortcomings on the part of the Indian government. The latter can assume the semblance of order to the outside world when they perfectly execute the return of the body under a new name to the UK. However, rather than simply suggesting a restoration of order or a plea for help, Liza’s body arriving in the UK under a new name gives the pretense of a functioning justice system. This act of renaming by India also functions at the symbolic level, as more and more regions around the globe distance themselves from their anglicized imperial names. The erasure of Liza’s identity by the Indian government parallels colonial patterns of identification and erasure and subverts them, thereby reasserting a sense of control. The fear of bad press India as a tourist destination would receive if the corruption which led to Liza’s demise came to light is indicative of the value that the Indian authories place on the illusion of safety and order. This facade is to be maintained at all costs, and even Simran is complicit in hiding some of the truths that she discovers.

Throughout the three novels, Simran at times resists “playing along” with the corruption that she discovers, and at times exposes it. True to her status as a social worker, her first duty is to the immediate victims in her cases (Durga and Sharda, Amelia, and Liza and Marian respectively). Her secondary obligations seem, however, to be to herself and her friends and family rather than to any abstract notion of justice, for she acts in ways that preserve her self-image. Desai’s focus on corruption in India, and Simran’s inability to effectively counteract it therefore draw attention to many of the larger problems in contemporary India, and importantly fail to advance any simplified solutions. Simran’s vision of empowerment does not extend beyond herself and her immediate family, which helps humanize her and keep the focus on the broader societal issues at hand while still maintaining a readable, believable, and entertaining narrative.

Desai’s inclusion in The Sea of Innocence of numerous references to the 2012 rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey on a bus in Delhi (2014b: 5, 39, 42, 95, 102, 105, 108, 137, 173, 261, 343) is particularly noteworthy. Those events took place in Delhi and not Goa (where the novel is set), while the fictionalized case in her novel has strong similarities with the Scarlett Keeling case, which is invoked at other points within the novel as well (2014b: 29–33, 53, 103–108, 256, 343). In particular, Desai’s reference to “the Delhi rape” as the narrative which captured the world and drew attention to sexual violence in India renders the novel especially timely as it reconstructs the narrative for release and consumption at around the same time as the criminals are beginning to be tried. It thus allows readers to reconsume and connect with a familiar narrative, humanizing and actualizing the fictional victims in Desai’s novel. This notion of consumption supports an Orientalizing view of the text, as the Western readership consumes only the most newsworthy narratives from India. Desai’s invocation of these cases is relevant due to the fact that these cases became known worldwide. Meanwhile the conclusion of The Sea of Innocence — in which the British victim’s case is solved and the Indian victim is erased — provides an interesting commentary on the value of each woman to the police within the novel, to Simran herself, and to the reading audience.

Seeking Simran: Final thoughts

As a detective, Kishwar Desai’s Simran Singh leaves a lot to be desired. She neither neatly nor efficiently solves the crimes she is assigned, and often ends up unearthing larger problems which are far beyond the scope of her abilities to rectify. As a social worker, too, she is repeatedly defeated by the society in which she resides, leaving the reader with a very poor impression of her lived India and little suggestion as to how to address the problems which seem to plague the contemporary Indian society in which she is imagined. However, her vigour and devotion make her an attractive character to a contemporary reading audience, and the fast-paced narratives make Desai’s novels appealing. Desai uses her simultaneous insider–outsider status to raise awareness of persistent gender inequalities in India and skilfully uses the amateur detective to highlight numerous contemporary issues facing Indian feminists today. Simran’s meticulous balance of conformity with and rallying against gendered norms and expectations emphasize the fact that complex problems require complex solutions. Similarly, the omniscient nature of her narrative highlights the ways in which her personal choices function on a political level.

As Reddy notes in her conclusion, “Feminist crime novels, far from being mere escapist literature or isolated, peculiar experiments in an essentially masculine preserve, participate in the larger feminist project of redefining and redistributing power, joining a long and valuable tradition of women’s fiction” (1988: 149). Desai’s novels are no exception, as they fictionalize and centralize the struggles of contemporary Indian women for a global audience and frame the struggles in direct relation to patriarchal systems of oppression and corruption. Although the novels run the risk of perpetuating negative Orientalist ideas of India to an uninformed reader, the efforts of Simran and her colleagues present a valid and valiant counterpoint to these systems, highlighting feminist progress as a process which is well underway. Likewise, Simran’s complex and shifting relationship with local, state, and national politicians and law enforcement officers suggests, on the one hand, that the lasting legacy of colonization is an inability to self-govern that is being exemplified by India’s rapid economic growth and capitalist/neo-colonialist ideologies. On the other hand, however, one must consider the empowered/empowering acts of Simran and those she enlists to help her. As detective fiction, Desai’s Simran Singh stories are simultaneously unsettling, uplifting, insightful, and problematic, leaving readers uncomfortable but ultimately excited to see where Simran will lead them next.