A Rising Man

Abir Mukherjee

2 ideas

1. The MacAuley murder in 1919 Calcutta

   In April 1919 Captain Sam Wyndham, a Scotland Yard veteran of the Great War, arrives in Calcutta and is handed the case of Alexander MacAuley, a senior British official found murdered in an alley in the Indian quarter with a note in his mouth warning the British to quit India. The easy reading is terrorism by Bengali revolutionaries, and a militant suspect is available. But Wyndham's investigation runs into military intelligence, which obstructs him to protect its own operations, and the resolution is shaped as much by imperial politics as by evidence.

2. The compromised investigator as moral instrument

   Wyndham is traumatised by the war and widowed, and he relieves his pain with opium in the city's dens. The same empire that profits from the opium trade employs him to enforce order. His private dependency mirrors the colonial system's hypocrisy, so the man seeking truth is himself implicated in the vice and machinery he polices. That limits how cleanly he can stand against either.

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