My personal journey with Sherlock Holmes began when I was rather young, not more than 8 years old. The first Sherlock Holmes story that I read was The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was an abridged version full of illustrations of the novel. And when I started writing my first book, guess what? The book that came as an inspiration to my writing the history of the Indian railways was The Hound of the Baskervilles. The way The Hound of the Baskervilles informed my first book was that there are at least two very interesting train sequences in this novel. So there is one train sequence in which Sir Henry Baskerville, Dr. Watson, and Dr. Mortimer travel from Paddington in London to Devonshire, and there is another train sequence in which Sherlock Holmes and Watson travel from Devonshire to Coombe Tracey. Imagine an illustrated version of these sequences, and these were reworkings of Sidney Paget’s illustrations, who had a very important role to play in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s rise to fame.
This novel has been termed the 44th most popular novel of the 20th century by Le Monde, which is a French newspaper, the most circulated French newspaper. It has a readership of close to 2.5 million and over 500,000 subscribers. So The Hound of the Baskervilles was placed, interestingly, two ranks ahead of The Great Gatsby and 14 ranks ahead of The Lord of the Rings. That is a little bit of sad news for the fans of The Lord of the Rings, but good news for people who continue to enjoy detective fiction, and like me, who see detective fiction as something much more, something much beyond the world of mystery and detection, because there is also a lot of philosophical value, a lot of theological value even, and surely a great deal of literary value in the mysteries authored by Arthur Conan Doyle and later on by Agatha Christie and by many others.
Now, there’s one more critical personal, and I am sure people would resonate with it in most spaces today because we are in a deeply globalized world. There was a kind of an Indian rethinking on The Hound of the Baskervilles, which also I was deeply influenced by while growing up, namely the novella called Sonar Kella, written by Satyajit Ray, the Indian filmmaker and polymath. The novella was serialized in 1971. It was adapted into a film of the same name, Sonar Kella, which means the golden fortress, in 1974 by Satyajit Ray. So Satyajit Ray wanted to show how, whether or not there is the existence or there is the validity of previous lives, of reincarnation, the devil should not possess the route to a treasure island or to a hidden treasure. So the message that Satyajit Ray derived from The Hound of the Baskervilles is that it is not as if God and devil do not exist. But if somebody tells you that they exist and I know the way to their existence, I know the proof of their existence, you already ought to be a little skeptical of them. But more so if such an entity promises hidden treasures to you, that is where your skepticism should become really acute.
So neither The Hound of the Baskervilles nor indeed Satyajit Ray wanted to dismiss the existence of non-human powers. On the contrary, in my interpretation, I have continued to say, to write, that both these epistemological worldviews try to create a way of believing in the non-human, the extraterrestrial, even the supernatural in very legitimately plausible ways. But at the same time, they do not let that belief degenerate into superstition. So supernaturalism is one thing, but superstitionism is something very different. So the folks of Devon are partly superstitious. But The Hound of the Baskervilles, unlike maybe 90% of the other interpretations, to me does not signal an insensitive, rigidly materialistic Sherlock Holmes. It signals a very sensitive Sherlock Holmes who is, of course, a detective who believes in evidence, who is empirical to the core, but at the same time he is highly intuitive. He is deeply pluralistic. He believes in the propensity of the devil to travel in mysterious ways. He believes in the validity of the footprints of the gigantic hound that Dr. Mortimer informs Holmes about. Holmes does not dismiss the existence of those footprints. All that Holmes is skeptical of is the interpretations that people give to such details.
Once again, to reiterate the main thesis of my interpretation of this novel, on lines of which I will go forth for the next 20 minutes or so, is that The Hound of the Baskervilles is not about dismissing diabolism. It is not about dismissing God. It is not about dismissing external, non-human agencies. All that it tells you is that Holmes is a naturalist, just like Jack Stapleton, who is the antagonist to Sherlock Holmes in the story, and being a naturalist he can only work with the traces of the non-natural or the supernatural in the materialist universe. And so I am with my cup of thick black coffee, which is also a very important ingredient in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Remember the chapter where Sherlock Holmes sends Dr. Watson away after Dr. Mortimer has come and revealed the details of the legend of the Baskervilles, and Sherlock Holmes says that I need some private time, and so Dr. Watson and Mortimer are gone. And what Holmes does is he covers the room of 221B Baker Street with thick fumes of tobacco smoke. That is a missing ingredient. We cannot do that. But the other key ingredient is black coffee, and with the help of that he goes into a meditative state. He goes into a highly intuitive state. In fact, it is very close to what is called lucid dreaming. And he orders Ordnance maps of Dartmoor. And he later tells Watson that my spirit has hovered all over Dartmoor. He was reconstructing the scene of the crime, or the scene of the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, as it were.
It is that scene which has left that critical trace of the footprints of the gigantic hound, which will become the theological leitmotif of this novel in times to come. And it is because of his spiritual investigation, if I can use that phrase, during that private time that he spends in Baker Street, that Sherlock Holmes would later tell Sir Henry Baskerville, beware of the moor in those hours when the powers of evil are most exalted. So Sherlock Holmes does not himself believe in the materialist existence of the devil. The devil is not material. The devil is supernatural, but it will leave materialist traces. In other words, it is the banality of evil that Sherlock Holmes is anticipating much before Arendt. The ordinary people, people like Jack Stapleton, the naturalist, phenomenally talented, but he has got a hardcore resentment against the Baskervilles because he himself is a Baskerville and he would like to have the Baskerville mantle for his own. So it is these ordinary people that are out to devalue the dignity of the great British Empire, whose protector is Sherlock Holmes, and Sherlock Holmes has already investigated the case in the third chapter itself. So it does not need 15 chapters to solve the case, but we need the 15 chapters in The Hound of the Baskervilles to convince, as he says, the 12 stolen jurymen. So he will throw up hardcore evidence, physicalist evidence, to convince the jurymen, the jury persons, of the court of England. That is why we have to read the novel for the remainder of the 12 chapters.
Another thing I must tell viewers right from the start is one of my pet peeves is when somebody calls this novel The Hounds of the Baskervilles. It is not The Hounds of the Baskervilles, it is The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is Baskervilles in the plural, the hound in the singular. And that is very important, not only because you are confounding the title of a BBC adaptation with the name of the original novel, which is still forgivable, but more importantly the hound in the novel stands for something much beyond itself. The novel is very allegorical, and that is also the subject of the essay that I want to discuss today, that is by Lawrence Frank, The Man on the Tor. Remember the man on the tor, it is that mysterious figure that Dr. Watson and Sir Henry Baskerville will see on the moor while returning from almost having got a glimpse of Selden, the convict who is hiding in the moor. So Sherlock Holmes appears as the man on the tor, and Lawrence Frank wrote an amazing essay comparing the man on the tor to the Victorian mind. So the man on the tor becomes a metaphor of human imagination, human scientific talents, and also the fears and the fantasies of the Victorian mind. That form is also decoding in the form of the man on the tor, who is almost brooding over existence like a Darwinian spirit lurking about the moor, exactly like the convict itself.
So The Hound of the Baskervilles was serialized first in The Strand Magazine between 1901 and 1902, and Arthur Conan Doyle informed that he came up with the idea of writing this novel upon a golfing trip while he was with somebody called Fletcher Robinson, and the original setting, the colours, the tone, tonality of this novel were supplied to him by Robinson apparently, and that is what Doyle also acknowledge in the form of a footnote. And the central title of the novel came from the name of Fletcher Robinson’s coachman, that is Harry Baskerville. And Doyle was obviously reluctant to resurrect the character of Holmes seven or eight years after he had already killed him off. But then apparently it turns out that The Strand offered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle double of what they were originally offering him. I think the original offer was 50 pounds per 1,000 words, but then they revised it to 100 sterling pounds for every 1,000 words.
Now there are some beliefs from north English folklore, like from Norfolk or the Isle of Man, where certain kinds of dogs, the black shuck for instance, are seen as harbingers of death, and clearly Doyle was drawing on those sources. But we should also leave the option open of seeing the hound as something beyond itself. The hound is not merely a cultural signifier. It surely is a dog, a beast. And even if we want to see the hound allegorically, it will remain some kind of a symbol of European and western folklore in general. But at the same time I wish to propose that The Hound of the Baskervilles be seen as a kind of a symbolic sequel to The Sign of the Four because this brings me to my reasoning from a different author whose name is Saadat Hasan Manto, who wrote two very influential short stories about the partition of South Asia in 1947. One was Toba Tek Singh and the other was The Dog of Tetwal in Hindi. So Toba Tek Singh is the name of a person. It is also the name of a place, by the way. But if you read the story, you will understand why he is called Toba Tek Singh. And he is a prisoner. He is a mad person. And the mad people inside this asylum, or this prison so to speak, are not aware of why South Asia has been partitioned. They have no clue, and they feel like their place and their place of intellect is the best, and the others are actually mad, which is what this short story is also trying to convey, because Toba Tek Singh turns out to be a very intelligent person. In the end of the story, The Dog of Tetwal features a dog that is caught between two loyalties, or rather it is caught between a universal loyalty towards people and towards people who the dog thought were his own or its own. But eventually one of those people, that is a soldier from one of the warring armies, shoots the dog, and both sides, both the armies, end up making fun of this dog, and it is said that the dog died a dog’s death.
So I think both the stories contain tremendous allegorical value, as well as in the Holmes universe, The Sign of the Four, which is for a large part set in India, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is not set in India if you take a very literal interpretation. But in my reading, and I have expressed this in a few of my writings as well, although I have not exactly developed this very idea, I propose that when you read the descriptions of the Andamans in The Sign of the Four and then you turn to descriptions of the swamplands, the moorlands in The Hound of the Baskervilles, you find amazing similarities. Both are exotic others. Both are these alternate spaces where humanity has reached, but the best parts of human expression are sort of quarantined. So both the places seem to be manifestations of some propensity of the devil, and Tonga, who is a manifestation of the Andamans.
Of course, Doyle gets all the anthropological details wrong about Tonga. That is a different matter. Tonga is given less than 5 ft height, and Tonga is depicted as bestial and cannibalistic, which is all completely false historically speaking. But on a symbolic level, notice the amazing similarities between Tonga in The Sign of the Four and the titular hound in The Hound of the Baskervilles. So, two amazing similarities, one the landscape and the other the central antagonistic characters.
This also brings me to the point that The Hound of the Baskervilles is generally, and 99% of the interpreters of the novel would take it as implying, this tension between scientific materialism and supernaturalism on the other hand. So there is the army of naturalists, which constitutes Holmes, and paradoxically it also constitutes somebody like Jack Stapleton, who is Sherlock Holmes’s adversary, in fact enemy, in this novel. But at the same time, I want to underscore Holmes’s sensitivity to what we otherwise think as supernaturalism. Holmes is sensitive to the powers of the supernatural. It is not as if Holmes is completely dismissive of some nonhuman or extraterrestrial agency. He just does not ascribe a form to that agency. All he wishes to do is tell us that Holmes’s capabilities are confined to the naturalist domain, to the material domain. So if he is detecting traces of the other world, the nonhuman, the devil, he can only detect those traces. He can only work with them in the material domain. So the diabolical aspects of this world will have to leave materialistic traces.
But the allegorical directions that phrase takes on, the footprints of the gigantic hound, should not be dismissed either, because Arthur Conan Doyle around this time was reading tremendously. He was learning restlessly from his sources in India. Of course there was Rudyard Kipling, who was supplying all these amazingly, you know, fascinating layered stories from the courts of India, from the villages, and the, you know, townships of India. There was also Alfred Sinnett based in Shimla, who was an intermediary between Arthur Conan Doyle and Helena Blavatsky. Helena Blavatsky and Arthur Conan Doyle had a falling out of sorts, because by the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, Arthur Conan Doyle had started considering Helena Blavatsky as not very genuine. But it is no secret that Arthur Conan Doyle nevertheless harboured many ideas of theosophy, and these were ideas that he had learned from Helena Blavatsky via the writings and letters of Alfred Sinnett in the 1880s and early 1890s. So all this was also going into the ideology of The Hound of the Baskervilles. And this novel therefore is not merely a championing of Darwinian theories of evolution or the scientific imagination of Tyndall, but it is also a kind of a subliminal championing of ideas of theosophy proposed by Helena Blavatsky and later taken up by Annie Besant. By the way, Annie Besant also went on to be a president of the Indian National Congress, as a trivia, when she came to India in the early 20th century, and then she also nurtured the intellect and the spirit of Jiddu Krishnamurti.
To come back to The Hound of the Baskervilles, we therefore need to see Lawrence Frank’s essay on The Man on the Tor as a metaphor of the human mind, with this notion that the novel can very well be read allegorically, and perhaps its basic thrust is not to be seen as a literal depiction of incidents that occurred on a given moorland in Dartmoor or in, you know, the English Riviera in Devonshire. Its basic thrust is to be read allegorically, just like The Sign of the Four can also be read allegorically. So Frank argues that the moor is a bridge between geological depth, evolutionary time, and the hidden depths of human consciousness. Selden, who is the escaped convict, is treated as a Lombrosian born criminal, so to speak, apparently confirming the atavism and hereditary degeneration of the human species. However, Frank also argues that The Hound of the Baskervilles undermines Lombroso’s direct biological determinism by linking Selden not only to prehistoric savagery but also to Sir Henry Baskerville himself, to Stapleton himself, and indeed to Holmes as well, because Selden is one of a family of these people, not merely because he is human, but because of other examples that Frank points to. There is a layered third definition of civilization that this novel gives us.
Frank gives special weight to Watson’s backward glance at the corpse of Selden, with which he reads Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis and Charles Lyell’s geological writings. These are all writings that connect The Hound of the Baskervilles to the Victorian mind. The human brain becomes a palimpsest, with layers of thought, memory, and inherited past superimposed upon one another. This is Frank’s answer to Lombroso’s biological determinism. Not a clean biological reversion, but a buried continuity of mind, memory, and unconscious life, all struggling in this mad competition on the moorlands of Devon. And Frank broadens the argument beyond The Hound of the Baskervilles to later Doyle’s The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, which is about an African poison, supposedly. I have argued it took an Indian poison called aconite, but in that novel as well Doyle traces antiquity and the roots of language itself. So The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot are talking about human origins and the origins of evil, therefore.
It is the essay by Lawrence Frank that tells us that the moorland is basically a manifestation of the human mind. And therefore, the scenery that you get in the morning and the very Gothic imagery that you get in the night, out of the same landscape, these are all manifestations of the struggle for meaning, and meaning-making was itself in crisis in the 19th century thanks to Darwin’s great revolution, a materialist theory of human origins. And obviously notions of Genesis are in crisis, other theological notions are also in crisis. In 1879 we have the publication of The Light of Asia by Edwin Arnold and also the publication of The Sacred Books of the East by Max Müller, which also contain the Upanishads. So it is not as if all kinds of theology have been tarnished, but the Christian worldview is surely under great fire and alternate theological worldviews are being imported to the English psyche.
So theories of Genesis, particularly Christian theories of Genesis, are facing a great challenge from all these materialistic interpretations of the universe, and the life of the Buddha and the values of the Upanishads seem to be completely compatible with this new scientific materialist worldview. Therefore, values of eastern non-dualism, tat tvam asi, for example, or yin and yang or wu wei, these were getting celebrated, or at least accepted, in 19th century Britain, especially after Darwin, because one strong materialistic impulse of a creation of the universe 6,000 or 10,000 years ago is not getting accepted any more by at least the scientific elites and therefore the other intellectual elites, if not the masses of England.
So, Lawrence Frank’s essay, The Man on the Tor, as a metaphor of the mind, challenges at least three things. Number one, it has challenged the prevalence of a Christian worldview in the 19th century. And that challenge might be slightly exaggerated. So, it is not as if the entire Christian worldview collapsed, but in large parts Darwin had caused a great rift in the Christian world. The second challenge that Lawrence Frank throws at us is that this novel is not to be read in a purely literalist fashion. Our literal interpretations of the man on the tor and the moorlands of Devonshire may be problematic, and that could establish another hard, rigid materialism on the lines of, you know, some religious ideology. And the third thing, the third challenge that Lawrence Frank’s essay throws at us, is that, well yes, Darwinian materialism was very important. It challenged the Christian worldview, but it was not the only kind of materialism. Multiple other kinds of materialisms were prospering, and look at the history of 19th century Britain. Feminism has its origins practically in the 19th century. Mary Wollstonecraft’s treatises started appearing in the 18th century, but the suffragette movement started getting, you know, its strength in the 19th century. So feminism has its roots, and that is a different kind of materialism. The Sacred Books of the East, eastern non-dualism of the Upanishads, the Chinese manuals on spiritual well-being, the Japanese manuals started entering British consciousness in the 19th century, and although these were spiritual principles, they seemed to be compatible with the new kinds of material principles that post-Darwinian theories were proposing.
And The Hound of the Baskervilles, the titular hound therefore, is not to be taken as a dog that has been dressed up by phosphorus and turned into a devilish beast. It is more of a manifestation of your spiritual malaise, according to Lawrence Frank’s essay. He does not say that directly, but I am interpreting that essay in line with the theories of The Hound of the Baskervilles that have already been being proposed. So today I hope was somewhat useful. Hopefully in the coming weeks I would also share more on my series of Sherlockiana. I hope you take this journey with me. And there is so much to explore in the world of Sherlock Holmes, so much indeed to talk about Sherlock Holmes’s association with India. Today’s video was not about that very subject. Today’s video was more about how The Hound of the Baskervilles is more of a metaphor of the mind. How the slant lands of Devonshire, the Great Grimpen Mire, where Jack Stapleton eventually gets drowned in, is also more than a physical landscape. It is a counter to the grand Christian theory of Genesis.
References
Chatterjee, Arup K. The great Indian railways: A cultural biography. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Doyle, Arthur C. The Hound of the Baskervilles. New York: P.F. Collier, 1902.
Frank, Lawrence. “The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Man on the Tor, and a Metaphor for the Mind.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54, no. 3 (1999): 336-372.
Ray, Satyajit, director. Sonar Kella [The Golden Fortress]. Government of West Bengal, 1974.
Arup K. Chatterjee 