Dear Sherlockians,



This has reference to Ms. Julia Higgins question regarding the Agra Fort about
which Arthur Conan Doyle has written in the twelfth chapter of “The Sign of
Four”.



The city of Agra is located in the state of Uttar Pradesh, 25.09 N 78.00 E
(there is also an Agra in Spain, 42.12 N 1.43 W), and is renowned all throughout
the world for the presence of the Taj Mahal. However, there are also different
large and small forts in and around Agra, and having had reread “The Sign of
Four”, I think that Doyle, by the Agra fort, has not referred to any definite
fort, but has used it to portray the fortification of the English troops in
India during the time of the Great Sepoy Mutiny. All throughout the twelfth
chapter (pp. 672-688) of in his “The Annotated Sherlock Holmes”, volume I (New
York: Clarkson and Potter, 1967), William S. Baring-Gould has also not explained
anything in special about the Agra fort. One thing must, however, be mentioned
here – there was really a diamond named ‘The Great Mogul’ that was recovered
from Golconda in 1650, and has had not been found after the British troops
seized Delhi in 1739. There is a theory that someone has thrown
it down in the Thames.



Doyle’s Agra fort demonstrates how the
intelligent British colonisers learned to protect themselves against the
onslaughts of the Indian Sepoys by using the latters’ buildings and castles
during the Mutiny. During the first great Indian struggle for freedom that
started on 10 May 1857, simultaneous attacks were launched against the British
forces in the months of June and July at places located particularly in the
state of Uttar Pradesh that were not very far away from Agra – including
Lucknow, Kanpur, Gorakhpur, Jaunpur, Shahjahanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut,
Gwalior and Jhansi. Fortifications were prepared in Agra too, and the fort
remains as a monument of the initial triumph of the British troops over the
Sepoys. It is significant that Doyle’s Agra fort is divided into two sections –
the modern half that is suggestively inhabited only by the Europeans, and the
old that is deserted. This old portion actually serves to designate the heritage
of
India, and following Edward W. Said’s perspective, it might be reasoned that
Doyle’s Orientalist bias toward India distorts its heritage – it is reportedly
inhabited only by “the scorpions and the centipedes”. With the arrival of
Jonathan Small, the onus of safeguarding the Indian building is unobtrusively
passed to the Briton who is perceptively culturally superior to Mahomet Singh
and Abdullah Khan. The fort also serves as Doyle’s canvas for portraying the
legendary ‘Eastern inscrutability and treacherousness’ – culminating in the
murder of Achmet, and exhibits India to the Orientalists as being really the lad
of ‘rajas and gemstones’.



This is, of course, my own view! I shall be grateful to the other esteemed
Sherlockians if they let us know their own views about Ms. Higgins’s question
and my observations.



Thanking you,





Yours sincerely,



(Pinaki Roy)









From:



Pinaki Roy,

Faculty Member (P),

Department of English,

Balurghat College,

Post Office: Balurghat – 733 101

District: Dakshin Dinajpur, West Bengal



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