In this episode of The Unofficial Seminar, Arup K. Chatterjee sits down with award-winning author, producer, and graphic novelist Arvind Ethan David to discuss his debut novel, The Great Game (Thomas & Mercer), a geopolitical thriller set in 1905 London that weaves together Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill, and a forgotten history of Indian immigrants in the imperial capital. Arvind unpacks the real history behind his fiction, drawing on Arup’s book, Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India, and reveals why Britain’s Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian eras were far more diverse than popular culture remembers. The conversation dives deep into Winston Churchill’s complicated legacy, the psychology of “great men” and empire, Sherlock Holmes’s surprising ties to India, and what it means to write yourself into a canon that once erased you. Arvind also reads a gripping excerpt from The Great Game and shares the fascinating story of working with Douglas Adams on Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the unofficial seminar. I’m Arup K. Chatterjee, and I’m joined by a very illustrious guest today. Arvind Ethan David, you are an award-winning British-Malaysian author. You’re also a graphic novelist, and you’re a producer known across Broadway, television, and literature. You are also a well-recognized executive producer for the BBC America and Netflix production of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. That’s got a very interesting story, I hear, and we’d love to hear about that from you. You also produced the Tony and Grammy award-winning Broadway musical Jagged Little Pill. Most interestingly for us today, your debut prose novel, The Great Game, has been recently published by Thomas and Mercer. What interests me above everything else is that it’s a geopolitical thriller set in 1905 London, and it weaves in the characters of Sherlock Holmes and no less than Winston Churchill himself. That’s a mouthful. So, welcome to my show. How have you been?
Arvind Ethan David: Thank you. Great to be here.
Arup K. Chatterjee: And of course, you left out the most important bit, which is that it weaves in lots of facts from your wonderful book, Indians in London, which I read in researching my book, and that’s how we met. So I’m glad to be here talking to you.
Arvind Ethan David: Very kind of you to mention Indians in London: The — I wrote that a few years ago, published in 2021. I conceived of it not only as a work of history, a historical framework, but also a cultural phenomenon. We can come to that in a bit.
Arup K. Chatterjee: But what you did leave out, as you rightly hinted at, is a number of Indian characters in your novel, one of them being Balwinder Singh, Balwinder “Bunny” Singh, I think. So — set in 1905, this novel has been reported to challenge Edwardian conventions. What does that mean? There was a television show I don’t want to name which appeared a few years ago that also had plenty of Indian characters. So there’s a lot of reworking of Georgian-era novels, Victorian-era novels, Edwardian novels, in the twenty-first century. How is your novel The Great Game different from that, apart from the fact that it’s a geopolitical thriller featuring Sherlock Holmes?
Arvind Ethan David: Well, what I was interested in — and again, your book was a helpful inspiration — was the historical truth, which is that there were plenty of Indians in London in 1905. There were plenty of Africans. There were plenty of Asians and Orientals. London was the center of a global empire, and it didn’t just bring back spices and money — it brought back people as well, and people followed. There’s a sort of myth in modern Western politics that immigration is a recent phenomenon. It’s a very dangerous myth, particularly in British politics, that we all just came over and we’re responsible for all the ills of modern Britain. Of course, the truth is much more interesting and much more complicated than that. These days you talk about open borders and everybody gets very nervous, but open borders was the norm for 99.999% of the history of the world. You could just turn up in London in 1905. You didn’t need a passport. Nobody knew what a passport was. You turned up at the docks, you said hello, you came on shore, and you went and got a job. That was the immigration process. It’s not till the 1930s that the idea of a border crossing comes in. There has been some wonderful revisionist television and novels that do colorblind casting, or imagine a fantasy world in which there was a Black British queen. Mine does something much simpler — mine just says, let’s reflect London as it was. And I wrote it — you know, I grew up, as I think many Indians grew up, loving this literature, loving Sherlock Holmes, loving H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, P.G. Wodehouse, but aware that we were either absent from the story, or when we turned up in the story, we were the bad guys, or the servants, or at best the sort of studious, bookish student in the background, a suspect in “The Adventure of the Three Students” in Sherlock Holmes. And I was like, why are those the only roles available to Indians in these stories, when, as the record shows, there were plenty of Indian businessmen and lawyers and creatives and entrepreneurs and members of parliament? Why are we not represented in London in the roles in which we actually inhabited it? So that was one of the ideas from which the book came. And in creating Balwinder, I just wanted to insert into a Sherlock Holmes–type adventure someone who looked like me, someone who looked like us, and had agency, and had a point of view, and would have opinions as to what justice meant in the imperial age.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Yeah, I mean, there are at least three members of parliament — at least two, but three by 1920. There’s Dadabhai Naoroji, around 1893, or so; there’s Mancherjee Bhownaggree by the end of the nineteenth century; there’s Shapurji Saklatvala — and they represent three different parties. So very correctly said — they don’t just have agency, they also have a political point of view and political representation. But then what’s amazing is after those three there isn’t another one until — I mean, there’s a couple in the sixties, but they don’t identify as Indian — there’s one person who’s part-Black, one person who’s part-Indian, who don’t really, and they never claim it and they don’t run on it — but then it’s not till 1987 that there’s meaningful ethnic representation in the British Parliament. I think one of the things that’s so interesting about that is we think there’s a danger of thinking of history as an inevitable progression — that things now are always better than things before, and there’s a steady march towards diversity and liberalism — and that’s just wrong. It’s empirically wrong. The world goes in cycles. Of course there are broad trends — antibiotics are good, and so on — but in terms of these social issues, it’s wrong to think that the past was always more repressive and the present is always more liberal. The world spins in cycles. The truth is, there was interracial marriage at the highest levels in the London of the late 1800s — Queen Victoria and Prince Albert get involved so that Prince Duleep Singh can marry Lady Anne Coventry. That didn’t happen again until Prince Harry marries Meghan, right? And arguably the royal family was less supportive of that wedding than they were of the one 120 years earlier.
So — the title of your novel, The Great Game — you take it from this phase in Indian, imperial, British-Asian history: the political game between Russia and Britain, involving the railways, involving great bridges, set in the nineteenth century — unlike your novel, which is set in the twentieth. What is the connection you’re trying to draw? Of course I understand it’s a game between great players — Holmes and Churchill, no less. But were there political undercurrents of the present in your mind when you were conceiving this novel, or did you want to base it exactly in the historical moment?
Arvind Ethan David: I think we live in an age of empire. We live in an age of the declining American empire, the dying Russian empire, and the rising Chinese empire — and maybe, at the political level, ambitions for an Indian empire; I can’t speak to that. But we have always lived in an age of empire. The question is which empire it was. I think in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, political discourse was very conscious of that, because they actually called themselves empires. The British Empire called itself an empire. The Russian Empire called itself an empire. The French Empire called itself an empire. So the original “great game” was spoken of very explicitly in those terms, and I think it’s helpful — today we don’t talk about empire so much, we talk about hegemon and dominant economy, but I think the strongman politics of the last twenty years has reminded us that however much we dress up our geopolitics, it’s empire — it’s might, it’s power, military, economic, diplomatic leverage. In a way, the great game continues. But the book isn’t about today. The book is about 1905, and it’s a murder mystery that turns into a conspiracy. So the great game in my book is about the next chapter of geopolitical maneuvering, which the early twentieth century, the first half of the twentieth century, was all about — the various forces that eventually brought the British Empire into decline and allowed for independence for the former colonies. So I’m borrowing the phrase that was coined by spies in the late nineteenth century, then made popular by Kipling in Kim. But I’m applying it, I guess, to any major “might is right” battle between imperial forces, and how those battles crush the ordinary people just trying to live their lives in between — who are the people who get forgotten in histories of empire.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Fascinating. So that brings me to — not exactly your novel as much as your psyche — how do you feel about Churchill? At the beginning of your responses you identified with the broad Indian response to coloniality. You also mentioned Kipling just now. So I’m guessing Churchill was one of the — well, not exactly childhood heroes, but protagonists — that you must have come to hear about, and I’m guessing your impressions have not exactly remained the same since the first time you encountered that name — the Bengal famine reports and so on. So walk us through that journey, and how much of it affects your novel.
Arvind Ethan David: So Churchill is one of these extraordinary figures, but in a way he’s not as unusual as he’s made out to be. Of course he was crucial to the history of the twentieth century — I’m not diminishing that, and of course the world would be very different if he hadn’t led the resistance to Hitler and the war, and for that we can all be grateful. But when I say he’s not different, I think he is the archetypal great man of history, because he was certainly great. That doesn’t mean he was unequivocally good. We see this now, over and over, in the great men of our age, whether it’s Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or any of the big-man politicians who stride the globe and their countries today. The achievements are great, but sometimes the moral cost of those achievements is also great. And the interesting thing about Churchill, who — you’re right — I have always admired, always been a little obsessed with, and then, as one gets older and digs into the history, becomes aware of the horrors that happened under his watch, and his own attitudes, particularly to Indians. He was not universally racist — he was, for example, very supportive of the Jewish cause — but he was unquestionably racist. The most interesting thing is not to say Churchill was great but he was racist. I think the more interesting thing to say is Churchill’s greatness and his racism come from the same place. When Churchill was at Harrow, as a little schoolboy, he wrote in an essay that his ambition — this is at eleven or twelve years old — was to one day lead the empire in a clash of civilizations. At eleven. That sounds ridiculous, right? It sounds narcissistic and hubristic, or just like any teenager who wants to save the world. But what’s crazy is Churchill did it. He did exactly what he said he was going to do. But when you stop and think about who he is and where he sits in the world, it becomes less crazy. Churchill was not born into poverty. He wasn’t born on some small island in the Pacific. Churchill was born in a palace — his family’s ancestral home. His family included many of the great military and political leaders of the last three hundred years. The Dukes of Marlborough had been a political force in Britain for hundreds of years by the time he was born. His own father, Randolph Churchill, was secretary of state for India, was nearly prime minister, was a major political force and a great man in the terms that Churchill would have understood. And he was born not just great in England — England was the dominant political force in the world, the dominant military force in the world, the head of the biggest empire it’s ever seen. So if you’re born into an august family at the top of the social pile of the greatest empire the world has ever seen, and your father is a great leader and your ancestors were great leaders, it’s not crazy for you to think you may be a great leader one day. It would be crazy to think anything else. But part of that same attitude included an attitude towards everybody who wasn’t of his group. That included the ruled people — the Indians, the Asians, the Africans. So his attitude towards them is not separate from his perception of his own greatness, or the seed of his greatness. It’s the same seed. I try to portray that man in my book — the young Churchill. That is the question I like to ask about all these great men, and Sherlock is in the book as a great man too: what is their context? Where do they come from? What would an Indian, what would a colonial, what would a subject of empire make of them? Do we just look at them and go, “Wow, you’re so great,” or do we look at them and hate them? The answer is more complicated than either of those things. I think you can have admiration and see the greatness, and even envy it, but also dread its evil and its power. The original title of the book was The Dread and the Envy, which is now the title of my Substack. “The dread and the envy” is a line from “Rule, Britannia,” the great British imperial hymn, and I think that’s how a lot of us feel — those of us who grew up in the shadow of empire, who have spent our lives between two cultures. There is something still to envy in the casual assumption of authority of the West. But there’s something to be very scared of in it as well.
Arup K. Chatterjee: There’s indeed lots to be scared of — not only in the assumption of imperial normalcy in Western attitudes, but also, I suppose, there’s plenty to miss when we look at what intellectuals have done to somebody like Sherlock Holmes. Unlike with Churchill, my views on Holmes are different from my reception of Churchill today — I continue to admire Holmes very much, and of course he’s a fictional character. In your book he’s fiction within fiction — very interesting, we should talk about that metafiction. In fact, we should also have you read some excerpts from your book. But just to finish my train of thought — when imperialism has such a heavy hand on our histories, on our experiences today, for the global East or the global South, we also tend to become a little too skeptical, more than necessary, of figures like Sherlock Holmes, and it is then that we lose the nuances. So it’s not just the three Indian students, but indeed a lot more about India that prevails in the Holmes canon — apart from the very obvious fact that The Sign of Four, which is Conan Doyle’s second Holmes novel, was borrowed from The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, published in 1868. The Sign of Four is from 1890, and it’s completely an Indian plot — so India has, in a manner of speaking, migrated to London. So my question to you would be — I’d love to understand the creative process of translating somebody like Holmes onto a quasi-Indian landscape, this little India within London that you’re trying to represent. There are multiple historical precedents — Indians in London is only one source you could go to, there’s also Rozina Visram’s Asians in Britain, Michael Fisher’s Counterflows to Colonialism, both historians I’ve looked up to. In the case of Holmes, I feel like he has a lot of reverence for Eastern esotericism, and the industry hasn’t done a good job at all of picking that up — including the wonderful BBC adaptations, Benedict Cumberbatch, kudos to him, but I suppose Holmes was caricatured even there. So what was your creative process like, translating Holmes onto this landscape? Did you know, by the way, Arvind, that there’s been speculation about Holmes’s parentage — that his father was based in India, going by all the records? There have been unauthorized biographies of Holmes, and in at least one of them it’s speculated that he was an East India Company official, and Holmes was born around 1854. Anyway — question on how you translate all that.
Arvind Ethan David: There is so much about Holmes — of course, he has become more than he ever was even in Conan Doyle’s hands. He falls into this very rare category of literary character who has broken his bounds — like Prometheus, like Odysseus, like Jeeves and Wooster, like Spider-Man, like Superman — he has stepped outside the stories into which he was first created and now belongs, in a way, more to legend than to literature. I’m not one of these people who — I’m a huge fan, but I’m not dogmatic about canon. I think any interpretation that feeds the legend in interesting ways is interesting and joyous to me. But you’re absolutely right, his links to India are both philosophical — I read your essay on lucid dreaming, and I think you can see in him — he’s not strictly rational, any more than his creator was. Conan Doyle starts his life as an arch-rationalist but by the end of his life is believing in fairies and mediums and astral projection and all sorts of strangeness. So there was definitely a touch of a weakness for mysticism in him. Maybe this is a good moment if I could read a short section from the book, in which Holmes actually appears. This is where our hero, Balwinder, is first introduced to Sherlock, and of course it is a very big moment for him, because Sherlock is a hero of his, as he is of yours and mine, and so he is processing his shock at meeting Sherlock. I’ll just read a couple of pages, for those reading this in some distant future:
“I should perhaps make some attempt to explain the strength of my reaction upon meeting him. I had first read Dr. Watson’s colorful accounts of his and Holmes’s adventures in India, where they were widely available not only in English but also translated into Urdu. First came ‘A Strange Conspiracy,’ based on the case of the Red-Headed League, adapted by Muhammad Mushin Farooqi, and then ‘The Bloody Torrent of Love,’ based on Dr. Watson’s A Study in Scarlet. I devoured these, and they quickly put me onto the English originals, which I read and reread with a devotion that others in my family reserved for the writings of the guru. Holmes’s impossible feats of deduction, his insistence on the primacy of logic, his constant willingness to answer the call for his king and country, and the unquestioning loyalty that he and his friend and chronicler had for each other, came to lodge themselves permanently in my imagination, shaping my young mind. Since moving to London, I had made a particular point of following Holmes and Watson’s exploits in the press, and learning all I could of the great detective’s mythology, methodologies, and practices. Why, you might ask, should I — a former soldier and current thief hailing from the Punjab — maintain such a deep and childish fascination with the methods of a British consulting detective, however celebrated? What had his world to do with mine? I had not before this moment subjected this question to a full interrogation. But looking back now, I see with clarity that I was obsessed with Holmes because of what he represented. He was a force for order, for logic, and for balance — qualities that were absent in my young life. Holmes demonstrated the capacity of a singular mind and an uncompromising will to bring about justice and fairness in a universe that cared little for such things. In my culture, people are what they are born to be. Holmes’s unwavering determination to invent a role for himself in the world was in and of itself inspiring. Consider the following hypothetical: if, by some accident of fate, I had been born not in the Punjab but in Shropshire, born not to Indian parents but to English ones — what would change? That alternative to Balwiner— let us call him Barry — would have fought in the war as a captain in the cavalry, not as an unarmed auxiliary carrying a stretcher. Barry would be a member of the Garrick Club in good standing, able to enter at will and order sherry with wild abandon. Barry would be free to love who he wished, to love and to marry whom he would. I would be the conqueror, not the conquered. That was not my reality. I was Balwinder, not Barry, and fate and chance had dealt me a different hand, and I played it as best I could. I knew nothing of Holmes’s family or background, but I wondered what his destiny would be if he had been born in Kolkata, not London. Salman, not Sherlock. Would Salman Holmes have lived and died in a slum, achieving nothing of note? Would his exploits have been limited to solving the case of the missing chapati and the matter of the mysterious mongoose? Or would, as I suspected, his unparalleled intellect and his synaesthetic gifts have ensured that he would always have been that which he is — a man who, by the utilization of his singular powers, made his country stronger and safer, and bent the arc of history to his purpose, a fixed reference point of certainty and order in a chaotic and contingent world.”
Arup K. Chatterjee: That’s a little bit of — well, I couldn’t help but notice shades of Broadway penumbra upon that scene. It’s almost diegetic — a little like breaking the fourth wall, one is talking to the audience. Fiction within fiction, and within all that, a little bit of theater as well. I don’t know if that’s how you felt while writing, but thanks for giving us a wonderful interior view into your novelistic process. That’s also making the readership think about the veracity of the story you’re weaving, because there’s this tendency — I mean, not everybody is like you, not everybody thinks the canon is not the go-to element. People sometimes look for validation of their own biases, don’t they? But you —
Arvind Ethan David: Fandom, I’ve been writing about this recently. Fandom isn’t just about loving something — lots of people can love things and not be a true fan. A true fan, as I understand the phenomenon, is someone whose self-identity is tied into the affection and love and ownership that they feel for a fictional or public character. I think there’s something very beautiful about fandom — I’ve been lucky to meet fans of my work and I’m honored by them. But there can also be something a little too controlling in it, when fans demand that the object of their affection do only what they want them to do, and say only what they want them to say, and be only what they want them to be — and you’re seeing this battle now being fought over, say, The Odyssey, this debate in the global press around what does “accurate” even mean for a work of fiction. And I think with Sherlock more than most there is a group of folks for whom the canon is the canon — and some do it very seriously and some do it as a game, you know, the Baker Street Irregulars, the preeminent American society for Sherlock fans, have this convention where they don’t refer to Conan Doyle as “the author,” they refer to him as “the literary executor,” because Watson wrote the stories and Conan Doyle just edited them — lovely, a lovely literary game. In the book, I think I am respectful of canon, certainly respectful of the timeline — Holmes and Watson in 1905 would have been older. They would have been in their fifties or sixties, not at the beginning, nearer the end of their careers. A few years after this, Holmes retires to his bees on the coast, and Watson disappears from the picture. I portray them as older men. In a way, Balwinder is a fan, and that’s what the piece I just read is about — he’s a fan, he loves the legend of Holmes, he wants to be impressed by the man, and is impressed by the man. I think my Holmes does not disappoint him. But he comes to understand that even the great Holmes operates within the context of his time and his class and his race and his position. Nowhere in the canon does Holmes turn around and ask whose justice is being served when he’s acting on behalf of the Crown. He does, in many private matters — there are many moments in Holmes’s adventures where he says, “I’m not going to tell the truth to the police, I think this woman has suffered enough,” or “justice has been done already,” or whatever it is. He makes moral judgments all the time. But, for example, in The Sign of Four, at no point does Holmes go, “But you stole this treasure from India.” At no point does he go, “This isn’t a British treasure, it does not belong on our soil.” He doesn’t interrogate the context of imperial theft, because he’s a good subject of empire. He serves the Crown. That is the question Balwinder finds himself asking in this —
Arup K. Chatterjee: Very interesting. I’m tempted to disagree ever so slightly, but I won’t, because I think the point is — apart from the fact that I think, just to reiterate some of my own pet theories, that I find Holmes in the Holmes canon to be most sensitive towards the East, towards India — but yes, overall he is an imperial subject. But not to belabor the point, I think there are more important things to be discussed. So where does The Great Game go from here? Are we looking at a television adaptation? A film?
Arvind Ethan David: There are lots of interesting conversations. We’re at that stage of potentiality where everyone’s excited and everyone’s having lots of meetings. So I hope to have real news in the months ahead.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Wow. To all the budding writers out there, and to all fans of detective fiction particularly, you have to tell us that story about your professional origins as well. So why don’t you tell us that tale, and also tell us what we can do to manifest this germ that we seem to swallow when we are young and youthful, and then don’t seem to make much of it in the coming years, and then we’re jostling with the world, because most of these detectives are imperial personalities — we can’t seem to get them out of our heads, and then we realize, oh no, these are not the good guys after all. So how do we exercise that, like you are?
Arvind Ethan David: It’s interesting — you’re right, I have a sort of sideline in detectives, I seem to do a lot of detectives. I’ve done Sherlock and Balwinder in this book, I’ve worked with the Raymond Chandler estate and written Philip Marlowe adventures. It all started, which is I guess what you’re alluding to — for me it all started with Douglas Adams’s insane creation, Dirk Gently, of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. I first adapted that as a student, when I was a teenager — adapted that book as a student play — and, much to my surprise, Douglas Adams turned up to see it. Douglas Adams, for those who don’t know, is the creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and was a brilliant and extraordinary author and human being, and I was lucky enough to meet him in my youth and spend time in his presence and work for his company as a result of that first meeting, and that very much started my career. In a way this links to your question about how we hold on to that youthfulness, that sense of possibility, that sense of creativity, which so often gets encouraged out of us. For me it was the amazing thing of seeing an example in Douglas and his friends and partners — a group of serious grown-up people who didn’t act very serious, who managed, it seemed, to make money and make a career and support their families by being silly together, by getting together and making up nonsense and putting the nonsense into the world. Whereas, coming from a more traditional family, I thought work had to be serious — I thought you had to put on a suit and tie and boots and a briefcase and either go into an office or go into a university, that was my family background. When I met Douglas and I saw that you could put on shorts and a T-shirt and cycle to work and meet up with a bunch of famous writers and have long drunken lunches and then write into the night, I was like, “Oh, that looks more fun. Let’s do that.” That was my good luck. And that’s what I would say to anyone pursuing a creative career: it’s not going to be easy, no good career is easy, and it is definitely more chaotic and less linear and less predictable than a lot of other routes. I know this is a moment where the young generation is feeling the chaos of the world, and is feeling that there are fewer and fewer routes to success and to safety and to security. We’ve seen these demonstrations in India from the young generation who really feel there are fewer options, and that is a sad economic and political reality that our generation and the generations above us have failed the youth on. But I think one path that always remains forward is trusting in innovation, trusting in creativity, and trusting that play, more often than not, can lead to more interesting places than being serious.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Wow, that’s profoundly put, and very effortlessly done. Thank you so much for joining me. It has been not only an honor but also a deeply pleasurable conversation. I have not only got to learn lots from you, but it did not feel like we were doing something very serious — exactly like your guru, your professional mentor, taught you. But I suppose we have lots to take from this conversation, not just as people who get called intellectuals, but also as the future generation that Arvind is referring to. So, dear ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast — please like, share, and subscribe to the unofficial seminar. Arvind, wishing you loads of luck with your book, The Great Game, and thank you so much once again for joining me today. Ladies and gentlemen, you know what to do with that book. Thank you so much once again, until next time.
Arvind Ethan David: Thank you, Arup. Goodbye.
Arup K. Chatterjee 