Abstract

The possibilities of the police procedural in 21st-century Bengal have been effectively re-informed by the emergence of Supratim Sarkar’s Lalbazar narratives, featuring accounts of true criminal investigations carried out by the Detective Department of the Kolkata Police, compiled for the first time by a real-life police officer on active duty with the approval of the Lalbazar top brass. These accounts, presented on public demand through popular narrative techniques, report cases which are significant as regards public fascination as well as the institutional excellence and efficiency of the Detective Department. The colonially-rooted activities of the Department are acknowledged and separated from its roles as an investigating authority post-Independence through two separate series, namely Achena/Adekha Lalbazar and Goyendapith Lalbazar. At the same time, Sarkar critically distinguishes between real-life criminal investigations and fictional ones while incorporating those attributes which characterize postcolonial vernacular popular crime writing. The significance of the Lalbazar narratives in the context of this paper lies in its reflection of these postcolonial deliberations in the attempts at recontextualizing the history of the Department, reinstating the ‘reality’ of criminal investigation as well as catering to the popular cultural ethos. Initiating the case with an overview of ‘glocal’ trends in South Asian crime writing, this article will examine the cultural relocation of the Bengali police procedural in the 21st century with regard to Sarkar’s narratives. By examining Sarkar’s role as an omniscient narrator, this paper will attempt to culturally re-situate the Detective Department as regards its two opposite histories. Finally, this paper will examine the narrative techniques, genre-bending attributes and cultural intertexts in the Lalbazar narratives which render them a popular mode of crime writing associated with the dynamics of history, thrill and instruction vis-à-vis present-day readership and popular culture.