Guest Blogger: Brian Stoddart--Asian Postcolonial Echoes

Jeff--Saturday

 I arrived on Mykonos late Sunday, after an awe-inspiring, wonderful week in Bristol at CrimeFest--and immediately found myself confronting bureaucratic challenges and sharing in friends' personal tragedies. It's been a rough week. But it's ended on a high note, because out of the blue came a request from my long-time friend, Dr. Brian Stoddart, offering to post this primer on what's actually going on in the mysterious venues of Hong Kong and Malaysia. Believe me, it's well worth your while to read this post, for Brian knows of what he speaks.

Professor Stoddart is now a full time writer, after a storied university career culminating in service as Vice-Chancellor/President at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.  He's subsequently served as a consultant on higher education reform for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the European Union in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. 

Now based in Queenstown, New Zealand, Brian writes the Superintendent Chris Le Fanu historical crime series set in 1920s  Madras, British India. The most recent, "A Straits Settlement," was long-listed for New Zealand’s 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award and the first, "A Madras Miasma," was among CrimeFictionLover’s 2014 Top Ten debut books, a list that included Sarah Hilary, Clare Donoghue and Eva Dolan. His "A House in Damascus" won a gold medal award for best creative non-fiction and was a No 1 on Amazon Middle East travel.

 He is also a serious photographer and delivers history and culture lectures on board cruise ships--an avocation of which I'm intensely jealous.:)

Welcome, Brian Stoddart!

ASIAN POSTCOLONIAL ECHOES

Serendipitously, I recently found myself back in the Asian present but reflecting on its past.

I was in Hong Kong for a very modern reason, the stock exchange launch of an Australian private college for which I chair the council and sit on the board. Like most of Asia (used here as a shorthand only), Hong Kong is much changed two decades after its return to China by the United Kingdom which had run the place since the Opium Wars.

It has is increasingly hard now to find the quirky, the unusual or even the genuine Hong Kong. The Hollywood Road antique shops have been raided by wealthy Chinese now scouring the world in search of treasures to take home to where they belong, and for whom money is no object. This new Hong Kong is epitomised by its efficient airport that replaces the old Kai Tak one where flights in past laundry fluttering on apartment balconies was always an adventure. The main view on the way into this new one is of the about to be opened Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge that is really an elevated road and a tribute to engineering and vision.

But in the streets of Mong Kok and elsewhere, it is still possible to find all the elements that made the Shaw Brothers action films and Bruce Lee so famous, and that were captured so brilliantly by photographers like Fan Ho.

And some of those elements are found in the novels of Chan Ho-kei who deserves a wide reading in the West. http://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/the-borrowed-by-chan-ho-kei/ Kwan Chun-dok, his Hong Kong police force protagonist, experiences the city both before and after 1997 and charts the behavioural, political and social shifts that have occurred there.

At the heart of all that, of course, lies Hong Kong’s transition from the veneer of a British order to one that many still regard as a veneer of a Chinese one. That included the rise of the triads that had connections into China via groups like the Green Gang that aided Chiang Kai-shek’s struggle against the rise of Mao. Those gangs dominated the rampant drugs and sex industries and, like Shanghai, Hong Kong became a global centre. Throughout that colonial period Hong Kong experienced a strong British commercial, financial, legal, police and military fraternity that floated above the real Hong Kong.

Inevitably, cross-cultural clashes arose, like the 1952 murder case that saw British soldiers convicted for killing a Chinese woman. http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2124276/hong-kong-murder-files-british-soldiers-sentenced

Towards the end of that colonial period the crime range widened. In the 1970s, for example, Chief Superintendent Peter Godber of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force was returned to the colony from Britain to face corruption charges on which he was convicted. East had definitely met West.

The triads continued in the form of characters like “Broken Tooth” Koi who ran Macau and once made a film to memorialise his life. And more recently Carson Yeung, once owner of Birmingham City Football Club, was imprisoned for money laundering over $700 million. 

The coincidence was that while I was contemplating all this in Hong Kong, in came news that Malaysia’s dominant political party for over sixty years had been defeated by a coalition led by 92 years old Dr Mahathir Mohamad and assisted by Anwar Ibrahim.

Now here was a real colonial and postcolonial story.

Britain took over the region during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and ruled through three agencies: the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States, and the Straits Settlements. The last of those became the best known, perhaps, involving Singapore, Malacca and Penang.

My most recent novel, A Straits Settlement, has Superintendent Chris Le Fanu of the Indian Police Service come to Penang, ostensibly pursuing a case but really escaping a tyrant boss back in India. While there, he encounters the distinctive cultural patterns of the Malayan peninsula, mainly in the form of Jenlin Koh, a Straits Chinese woman.

Like the rest of the British Empire, Malaya (the Malayan Union was formed in 1946) had specific cultural forms that led directly to this most recent political upheaval. From the beginning, the British ruled over a mixture of autochthonous Malays, immigrant Indians (mainly Tamils and Punjabis) and immigrant Chinese. The latter came mainly from southern China with a myriad of languages and cultures. Some married into the Malay community, producing the distinctive Straits Chinese or Peranakan community of Jenlin Koh.

Given that heady brew, writers like Somerset Maugham, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, Noel Barber and Lesley Thomas understandably all set novels there. Maugham was notorious for enjoying the hospitality provided by his many hosts then casting them unattractively in his books. Those writers traced the British presence through early colonial times into the World War II Japanese occupation and subsequent Communist “emergency” then, eventually, independence in 1957 before the 1963 separation from Singapore that formed Malaysia.

Among Malaya’s colonial sensations, few rivalled the 1951 assassination of Sir Henry Lovell Goldsworthy Gurney, the High Commissioner, by Communist insurgents led by Chin Peng. Gurney was born in north Devon, went to Winchester then served during World War I before going to Kenya and the colonial service in 1921. Then came Jamaica in 1934, back to East Africa. and Colonial Secretary in the Gold Coast. In 1948 he was became Colonial Secretary in Palestine, overseeing the creation of Israel. From there he was appointed to Malaya.

Chin Peng was born Perak, Malaya. A Chinese, he believed that Malays received undue consideration. Through World War II, however, he was active against the Japanese, working closely with British forces that moved back in during 1943. He received an OBE for his services. After the war, Chin Peng climbed through the Communist Party of Malaya ranks, resenting what he thought was Britain’s undemocratic creation of the Malayan Union. That led to the armed rebellion remembered as the Malayan Emergency.

Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer led the British military campaign and was appointed High Commissioner following Gurney’s death. Templer later became a key British government adviser during the Suez crisis.

Today, Gurney Drive in Penang and Gurney Road in Singapore remember Templer’s assassinated predecessor.

Chin Peng struggled on until the final days of the Communist Party was finished, holed up in the jungle on the Malaysian side of the Thai border. The University Utara Malaysia is carved into that jungle, and I visited it many times while running one of Australia’s first offshore campuses in Penang. It was strange to be there then because Chin Peng was still alive – he died in exile in Bangkok during 2013.

Like Chan Ho-kei’s cop, Mahathir Mohamad traversed this colonial and post-colonial journey. He became a medical doctor then joined the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in 1946. It was 1964 before he entered Parliament but he was already a leading advocate of special treatment for Malays as outlined in his influential book, The Malay Dilemma. He fell out with Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore, suggesting too much Chinese influence was at play there. Mahathir fell out with his own leader, Tunku Abdul Rahman, too, and left parliament but returned later to become Prime Minister from 1981 until 2003.

His re-emergence is remarkable, if only for the rapprochement with Anwar Ibrahim. The pair were Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister for much of Mahathir’s ascendancy and up until the Asian financial crisis of 1997 when they began to disagree. While working there through that period, an Indian friend told me a story. It had Mahathir suggesting he was the better politician because he bribed everybody whereas Anwar bribed only Malays. True or not, it captured the political order where Malays held power, Chinese provided capital while Indians dominated business and labour. What is known in the West as “corruption” certainly existed then, as a cost of doing business.

Anwar suffered after the rift. He was jailed for corruption and then for sodomy. Freed, he was later tried again and served more time for sodomy right up until this new election. In all that period he was heralded in the West as a friend of democracy and a martyr to Mahathir. It is forgotten that he was central to the Mahathir regime for a long time and part of all the deals. His story is testament to how Asian complexity is often overlooked or even ignored.

So why is Mahathir back, allegedly to hand power over to Anwar within a couple of years? The short answer involves the decline of UMNO under Najib Razak who became Prime Minister in 2009. He comes from political royalty. His father, Abdul Razak, was the second Prime Minister, his uncle Hussein Onn the third. Najib himself was educated in the United Kingdom then entered parliament at twenty three to begin a storied career in senior positions.

But his Prime Ministership has been marked by scandal and corruption. One problem involved continuing rumours about the 2006 murder of a Mongolian woman being associated with people close to Najib. In 2009 two policemen were convicted then later acquitted of the murder, but in 2015 another court again found them guilty. One fled to Australia which would not extradite him back to a country carrying the death penalty. Now with the change of government, Mongolian officials want the case reopened.

Meanwhile, up popped the 1MDB story. This was a Malaysian government development company fund created in 2009 to enhance foreign direct investment projects. Its total holdings are effectively unknown, but a United States Department of Justice indictment suggests at least $US3.5 billion have disappeared into private hands. Anwar has long been a critic, identifying Najib as a key figure suggested as a major beneficiary. Some accounts have Najib him receiving $US800 million. 

Much of the story line swings around characters like Jho Low. A classic “flash Harry” who attended Harrow then the Wharton School and later befriended Najib’s stepson, Jho Low runs a Hong Kong-based finance company behind or associated with major global purchases. Those include the Park Lane Hotel in New York, EMI’s music publishing arm, and Reebok. He and Najib’s stepson also ran Red Granite pictures that financed The Wolf of Wall Street.

That movie connection has him associated with women like Paris Hilton and recently, Australian Miranda Kerr who has returned a substantial amount of jewellery following indications it was purchased with pilfered 1MDB funds,

Now the new Finance Minister, Lim Guan Eng who was a successful Chief Minister in Penang, has ordered a full 1MDB audit. Mahathir had already placed a travel ban on Najib and his family. Now, police raided Najib’s home and offices to confiscate seventy-two bags of jewellery, two hundred and eighty four boxes of luxury handbags, several luxury watches and substantial amounts of cash.

The war of words continues.

We can only imagine what Somerset Maugham might have made of it all, but one thing is clear – crime writers have plenty of material in all these colonial into postcolonial conditions even if, as the old saying has it, “you couldn’t make up this stuff.” Reality continues to be stranger than fiction.

Perhaps it will be a new case for Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh.

--Brian in for Jeff

Guest Blogger Brian Stoddart--A Murder in Bombay: Raj Crime

Brian Stoddart for Jeff—Saturday

I’m pleased to welcome back to MIE my friend Brian Stoddart, a New Zealander now based back in Queenstown after several years working in universities around the world and for agencies like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Brian has lived and worked in India, Malaysia, Canada, China, the Caribbean, Jordan, Syria, Cambodia and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. He has written seventeen non-fiction works across the history of India, sport, international relations, biography and memoir. His first crime novel, A Madras Miasma, appeared in 2014 and was named among the top ten debut books for that year by CrimeFictionLover website. It features Superintendent Chris Le Fanu of the Indian Police Service in Madras in the 1920s. The third in the series (following up on The Pallampur Predicament), A Straits Settlement, will be available on May 19 in UK bookshops as well as internationally via Amazon, Kobo, iBooks and other agencies. And now, here’s Brian...

British India is remembered mostly for its pomp and circumstance, the Indian struggle for political independence and the rise of Mahatma Gandhi. But as elsewhere in the world its popular culture frequently made fiction look tame, and few events did that better than the so-called Bawla murder case.

One evening in 1925 a woman and some men were enjoying a drive through Malabar Hill, then as now one of Bombay’s ritziest suburbs. They were overtaken by a red Maxwell car, a splendid and expensive American import. The Maxwell swung in and blocked them off. The travellers were then surrounded by a gang of men who attempted to abduct the woman whose face they slashed. Yet another car arrived. Three British army officers returning from a round at the Willingdon Club leaped out to intervene using their golf clubs. Another officer arrived shortly after. The gang produced knives and guns, one of the officers was shot and stabbed but still grabbed one assailant. His comrades rescued the woman. Meanwhile, the owner of the car was dying from gunshot wounds.

The wounded officer was twenty four year old John Maclean Saegert, a Canadian-born member of the Royal Engineers educated at the prestigious Cheltenham School in England. He went on to a distinguished career, among other things becoming the first Officer Commanding  9 Commando Group in 1940. He was later captured, and in 1946 died in Toronto as a result of his imprisonment. He was  awarded the DSO.

Saegert

The last officer to arrive was Colonel Charles Vickery, a career soldier who served in the Boer War then World War One as a member of the Royal Artillery but attached to the Coldstream Guards. He served in the Middle East and was close to and critical of Lawrence of Arabia. In 1920 Vickery was posted as the British Agent in Jeddah, and became involved in the rise of the house of Saud. He remained in the army until 1935 when he stood unsuccessfully as a Tory candidate in the General Election, became a County Council member in Durham, and wrote frequently on military affairs.

Vickery

The dead man was a wealthy Bombay Muslim merchant and member of the Bombay Municipal Council, Abdul Kader Bawla. He had inherited most of his wealth and was considered to be more interested in social rather than business life, for which read he was interested in the ladies. His lady companion this day was another story altogether.

Mumtaz Begum

Mumtaz Begum was the runaway second wife of Tukoji Rao Holkar III, the Maharajah of Indore which was a wealthy princely state in Central India. Mumtaz Begum grew up in a Hyderabad, Deccan singing family that leased out her sexual favours from a very early age. She was just eleven or so when she attracted the Maharajah’s attention and was soon ensconced in the palace as his mistress and he later married her. She accompanied him to England when he attended the coronation of King George V, and she produced a daughter after their return. She later claimed that a nurse murdered the child. Life in the harem turned sour so she fled, going to several places throughout India before arriving in Bombay where she took up with Bawla.

Maharajah of Indore

The Maharajah of Indore was one of those “only in India” stories. His father had been forced to abdicate by the British over political differences. The new ruler was at first guided as a ward but took over in his own right at a young age – he was perhaps eighteen or so when he first met Mumtaz Begum. By then he had developed expensive tastes, learning from his predecessors. Just before the outbreak of World War One he was in Paris and visited the famous jewellers, Chaumet, where he spied a pair of diamonds that, oddly enough, had come from the Golconda mines near Hyderabad. Each diamond was 46 carats. He bought them, adding to an already burgeoning collection. Mumtaz Begum wore these and other Indore jewels regularly.

It transpired that her assailants on Malabar Hill were employees of the Maharajah, drawn from the state police and army, and their mission was to return her to Indore. The one attacker who was caught led to several others, and nine men were charged with several offences, including murder.

The case was a sensation and the local press carried little else for days. It had everything: royalty, sex, money, intrigue, drama, and murder. As soon as the trial began the courthouse was thronged, the proceedings reported in detail and relayed around the world.

The judge overseeing the case was (later Sir) Louis Charles Crump who had trained at Balliol, Oxford then joined the Indian Civil Service in 1890. He rose steadily through the ranks, went to the bench of the Bombay High Court in 1919 and had already presided over several important trials.

J.B. Kanga, the Advocate-general for Bombay led the prosecution. A Parsi and a tax specialist, he was one of the giants of the Bombay legal world and would attend court regularly until his death at age ninety two almost fifty years after this trial.  He was assisted by the Bombay-born (later Sir) Kenneth Kemp who would himself become Advocate-General. Kemp’s son, David, also became a lawyer in England and became the acclaimed expert on law relating to damages for injury or death.

The defence team was even more interesting. J.M. Sen Gupta of Calcutta was by now a major aide to Mahatma Gandhi and practising less law than previously. English-trained, he had a strong reputation and his English wife would become the President of the Indian National Congress in the 1930s. Sengupta himself would die as a political prisoner in 1932.

His assistant was more prominent still. Mohammad Ali Jinnah was simultaneously advancing his legal career as well as the political one that would lead to the partition of India in 1947 and the creation of Pakistan of which Jinnah became the first Governor-General. He was now part of the Indian National Congress but also leader of the All-India Muslim League and developing his thinking about the creation of a Muslim state.

Jinnah

With so many prisoners and the added political dimension of a princely state ruler being implicated, the case was complex. Crump’s summing up is still regarded as a work of extraordinary legal skill, and it cleared the way for all the accused to be found guilty. Three were sentenced to death, the rest to transportation for life in the Andaman Islands, British India’s notorious prison off the Southeast Asian coast.

Andaman Islands Prison

One verdict went to the Privy Council, however, because legal technicalities left Crump no other choice but a sentence of transportation or death even though he doubted the nature of the evidence. The case was rehearsed in the Privy Council by Sir John Simon who would later lead the Simon Commission to India to investigate possible further political reforms. Crump’s handling withstood the inquiry so Sardar Anandrao Gangaram Phanse went to the Andamans.

Two men were hanged: Shafi Ahmed Nabi Ahmed, and Shamrao Revaji Dighe. It was a huge cost for loyalty to their employer. The other man sentenced to death was declared mentally insane shortly after sentence was passed. The rest went to the Andamans as well.

Inevitably, the fledgling Indian movie industry was attracted, and what is still described as India’s first crime mystery film appeared quickly. Kulin Kanta was just the first of many such movies that shifted the facts around in order to make a story, and its main actor became the first of India’s movie heroes.

The movie connection was prophetic. Mumtaz Begum appeared in a silent film a few years later and was then said to have gone to Hollywood. There must be some uncertainty about that claim, though. In 1926 she married the son of a wealthy industrialist in Karachi, and they had two children. In 1929, however, her father-in-law demanded that the pair divorce, so she returned to Bombay with another settlement in the bank.

In 1946, she appeared in a story in the Milwaukee Sentinel illustrated by the marvellous Willy Pogany. Her daughter had married an Abdul Kadir in Amritsar, but a year after the marriage Mumtaz Begum turned up at the house and effectively kidnapped her own daughter. She herself then ended up in court.

Tukoji Rao Holkar III lost heavily. The guilty verdict meant that he was deemed the architect of the murder, an assumption that he challenged vigorously. The British threatened a commission of inquiry and, rather than face that, he abdicated in favour of his son. He spent most of his time in Europe, and in 1928 married an American, Nancy Anne Miller who converted to Hinduism, a move that alienated all sides of public life. That marriage failed fast and after she divorced, Miller sold the Indore Pears to Harry “King of Diamonds” Winston whose empire still continues. Among other things, Winston owned the Hope Diamond before gifting it to the Smithsonian. He bought and sold the Indore Pears several times, and they are now owned by Robert Mouawad, the third generation boss of the jewellery and watch company that began in Beirut in 1891 but whose headquarters he shifted to Geneva from where he internationalised the business.

Tukoji Rao Holkar III died in Paris in 1978.

—Thanks, Brian

Guest Blogger: Brian Stoddart--"A New World of Crime."

Every other Sunday is our day for Guest Author Postings by mystery writers who base their stories in non-US settings.  We think it a great way of introducing our readership to new experiences and places.  We’re pleased to have with us today New Zealand-born Brian Stoddart.  During a university career that culminated in a term as President and Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, Brian wrote several non-fiction books on India and on sports culture, becoming a world authority in the process. Since leaving formal university life he has served as a higher education consultant in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, spending considerable time in Cambodia, Lao, Jordan and Syria. His e-book "A House in Damascus: Before the Fall," recounts his experiences living in an old Arabic house in the old city of Damascus immediately before the present troubles.Brian's debut crime novel with Crime Wave Press, "A Madras Miasma," introduces Superintendent Chris Le Fanu of the Indian Police Service in Madras after World War I.

Welcome, Brian.

As a few people have suggested recently, there is something of a gap between illusion and reality in the world of crime fiction. Put simply, in many national settings there is an inverse relationship between the number of murders committed and the number of novels written.

On the over-supply side, for example, Scandinavian noir rules the bookshelves: Sigurdardottir, Mankell, Nesbo, Indridason, Bates et.al. Yet in 2012, Iceland had just one murder, a rate of 0.3 per 100,000 of population. Sweden had 68 at 0.7 Denmark had 47 at 0.8, while Norway was rather more wild, 111 at 2.2.

While I haven’t done the full count there is a real chance that in 2012, there were more murders committed in novels written about those countries than there were on the ground, as it were. There is a psychology as well as a pathology here: what makes writers create mayhem where there is none?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Murder here?

In contrast, the USA had over 14,000 murders in 2012 at a rate of 4.7. Grist to the Block, you might say. The UK had 653 at a respectable enough 1.0. Plenty of writers there. About the only thing not discussed ahead of the Scottish independence vote was whether or not the tartan noir gang would be expelled from the CWA if the Yes vote got up.

Those reality patterns are reversed dramatically elsewhere around the world. Brazil, for example, racked up 50,000 murders that year, at a rate of 25.2. Leighton Gage was onto something. Nigeria had 33,000 at 20.0. Cue Adimchinma Ibe. Mexico had 26,000 at 21.5. Try Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

The world’s highest rates of murder are also instructive. Honduras had 7,172 deaths at a rate of 90.0 per 100,000. Venezuela had 16,000 at 53.7. The US Virgin Islands had just 56 murders, but at a rate of 52.6.  There are crime novels set in the USVI, but most are set in the British equivalent (two murders at 8.4). What does that mean?

I know you are dying to ask: what about Australia and New Zealand? Well, Australia had 254 murders at 1.1, New Zealand 41 at 0.9. That’s about right for novelists: Michael Robotham, Angela Savage, Garry Disher, Peter Temple in Australia; Paul Thomas, Vanda Symon and Paul Cleave in NZ. And, of course, Ngaio Marsh.

Actually, as a sidebar, the Australian case demonstrates the globalisation of crime fiction. This year’s prestigious Ned Kelly Award, given to be crime novel by the Australian Crime Writers Association, has just gone to Adrian McKinty: born in Ireland, university at Warwick and Oxford, sometime resident in the United States and now living in Victoria, Australia. He won for a book set in the “Troubles.”

Now the academic in me says “Yes, there is a case here, but these figures are misleading. What do you mean by murders? We know in places like Mexico a lot of those deaths are mixed up with drug trafficking and all the rest.”

Alright, caveat accepted. But there still remains a broad pattern, and only now are we starting to see crime fiction come out of some of the hotspots of actual crime. Some of my favourite reads in the past year or so (apart from the MIE crew) have been by Parker Bilal, the pen name for Jamal Mahjoub, a British-Sudanese writer whose protagonist lives on a houseboat on the Nile and works in Cairo. Then, there is much more now beginning to come out in translation as the appetite for crime grows globally.

All of which got me thinking about India. The country had a staggering 43,355 murders in 2012, about 119 per day. Take that, Iceland. The population is huge, of course, so the rate stands at 3.5, which makes it look less spectacular. (Over the border in Pakistan it is 7.7 on 13,846 murders).

As with “Indian writing in English” generally (think Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry), for example, there has been a crime strand since the nineteenth century when local versions of Sherlock Holmes appeared along with similar figures in the myriad of regional languages. Rudyard Kipling, in some guises, was a crime writer. And there was true crime, as well. The Agra Double Murder case of 1907 was a sensation. An Anglo-Indian doctor and his English lover decided to do away with their respective spouses. He hanged, she went to jail. That particular mixture of illusion and reality continued. H.R.F. (Harry) Keating, once President of the CWA, wrote a series of successful crime novels set in India, but never went there.

As Indian writers like Vikram Chandra and Anita Nair begin to edge into crime, prepare for a flood if only because there is so much to write about or be inspired by. And it is not just about the numbers.

Jayendra Saraswathi

Take, for example, the fabulous Kanchi Sankaracharya Jayendra Saraswathi case. Roughly interpreted this is the case of Jayendra Saraswathi , head priest at a temple in Kanchi or Kancheepuram, known under the British as Conjeevaram, a famous silk sari centre just to the south of Chennai, once known as Madras. Got that?

On 3 September 2004 one A. Sankararaman, manager of the Varadaraja Perumal temple in Kanchi was confronted in the building by six men who stabbed him to death. Media photographs showed him lying in pools of blood. After a period, twenty four people were charged with his murder, including Jayendra Saraswathu.  

This was huge news. Dedicated to Lord Vishnu, the temple is among the holiest in India, and a major pilgrimage site. It dates to at least the eleventh century, among its treasures a necklace donated by Robert Clive, the great “Clive of India” who figures so prominently in the British India story.

Jayendra Saraswathi himself was and remains one of the leading Hindu religious figures in India, if a controversial one. Moreover, he was long associated with Jayalaalitha, the current Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. Up until before his arrest, in fact, he was her guru. The former film actress herself was and remains a long time bitter opponent of M.Karunanidhi, former screen writer turned politician who was Chief Minister when I first went to India in 1972. Just to tease out this strand a little more: one of Karunanidhi’s politician sons is the wonderfully named. M.K. Stalin who has been arrested several times; a daughter, Kanimozh, is an India-level politician recently charged with corruption over the allocation of telephony licenses.

The story in Kanchi was that Sankararaman was unhappy with some business practices he observed at the temple so, using a pen name, wrote a series of letters on the subject to influential people. He alleged financial wrong doing and the misuse of temple funds. Sankararaman also suggested that Jayendra Saraswathi and his junior assistants spent an unusually long amount of non-spiritual time alone with certain women.

During tortuous court proceedings, 189 witnesses were called and 83 of them were declared hostile. In the end, Jayendra Saraswathi and others were found guilty, but on appeal were cleared late in 2013.

However, priest is still awaiting trial for having allegedly hired a gang of thugs in 2002 to beat up a temple auditor who suggested 80 kilograms of temple gold had disappeared mysteriously. This, of course, links directly to the concerns raised by the late Sankararaman.

Jayendra Saraswathi fields other problems, too. In 2004 (he had a rough time around then) a Tamil writer named Anuradha Raman took him to court alleging he demanded sexual favours of her. That case lapsed at her death in 2010, but another one remains.

Swami Nithyandra

In 2012 a Tamil actress named Ranjitha also laid charges against him, for linking her immorally to one of his sometime notorious associates, a charismatic God-man named Swami Nithyananda. A television channel released a tape allegedly showing Nithyananda having sex with the actress, and a series of charges followed with, as ever, complicated court proceedings. The use of drugs emerged, along with the suggestion that the swami is impotent which has also become the subject of court testing. Anyone see a plot line here?

Several incidents followed involving Nithyananda, and Jayendra Saraswathi upset many followers by still associating with the swami. The Ranjitha case against Jayendra Saraswathi is still pending.

Now this is surely the stuff of crime fiction. Murder mixed with drugs, sex, and money: perfect. It is worth probing that last ingredient a little further to get the full flavour because some of you may be thinking, “Well, that’s all fine, but in the end it’s just a religious thing.” Time for further evidence.

See Padmanabhaswamy Temple

Further to the south stands the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple, in the state of Kerala, for a long time one of the few world states to have an elected Marxist government. It is located in the capital city which has created one of the truly great name changes: what was Trivandrum is now Thiruvananthapuram. Incidentally, the city provides the national parliamentary seat for Shashi Tharoor, a former high flying United Nations figure now the centre of several controversies including the death of his wife, but that is another story.

Back to the temple. Last year, as a result of strenuous court actions over who should manage temple affairs, a couple of things emerged. First, the current estimated wealth of the temple is around $US 25 billion. Yes, you read that right: about $5 billion in gold and coins and associated items, and $20 billion in monuments. But second, there is an unopened vault. Some surveys are suggesting that the unopened vault alone may have treasures valued up to, $US1 trillion. H. Rider Haggard, eat your heart out.

The deity at the Tirumala Venkateswara Temple

The point will have been made. Not far to the north of Chennai once Madras, about 130 kilometres or so, stands another of the Hindu great pilgrimage sites, the Tirumala Venkateswara Temple at Tirupati which was the richest shrine until the Padmanabhaswamy revelations. Tirupati receives about 30-40 million devotees a year, and it is common for them to leave gifts. Yearly revenue is probably around $US 200 million. One wonderful marker of the wealth has the temple receiving 80-100 kilograms of gold as gifts, per month.

In 2009, Gali Jannardhan Reddy donated a statue valued at $US8.8 million. He was then state Tourism Minister for nearby Karnataka, and an immensely wealthy iron ore baron. These days he stands charged with corruption. Among other things, he and his brothers arranged for boundary markers between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh to be shifted physically, and without authority, in order to extend their mining leases.

Pilgrims at Tirumala Venkateswara Temple

Most of these temples are run by highly efficient management committees but, as we know, crime sometimes pays. The Varadaraja Perumal Temple in Kanchi is in the top flight of these pilgrimage centres and is estimated to have reserves of around $US500 million, although you will understand these figures are flexible. Let’s just say a lot of money is involved. There’s your motive. And it gives a context to the Jayendra Saraswathi tale.

The scope for crime and the writing of it abounds in India, then, both in its contemporary and historical settings. That is especially so when you consider the India diaspora and all the scope that provides. One of the currently popular crime series set in India is Tarquin Hall’s featuring the comical private eye, Vish Puri. The books capture something of Indian life, but do not begin to mine the seams identified here. It is time, as they say in India, “to do the necessary.”

Guest Blogger Brian Stoddary--Sunday