ABSTRACT
Crime fiction is an excitingly protean form and has generated a veritable heteroglossia of genres across cultures. This chapter provides the terrain of decoloniality in crime writings within some colonised and postcolonial cultures and ends by examining the ideologically resistant mutations of Eurocentric models of crime fiction within colonial Bengal in India. The ideological ambivalence that marks W. Collins’s novel, however, all but disappears once the great white, upper-class English male detective Sherlock Holmes makes his debut and dazzles the audiences with his formidable ratiocinative powers. Despite its early history of entwinement with colonial and racial ideologies, crime fiction has undergone continuing changes and seen radical deconstruction of the ratiocinative process when adapted into an immensely diverse array of cultural and linguistic contexts all over the world. Goyenda fiction emerged during an epistemic break, when for the first time colonised Bengalis asserted their desire for a decolonised nation and identity through the idea of swadeshi.
