Maitrayee Roychoudhury

The Featured Researcher for April 2025 was Maitrayee Roychoudhury, with a project titled, ‘From Brighton to Bombay: Mobility and the Nineteenth-Century Female Detective’

HEIs: University of St Andrews

Supervisors: Dr Clare Gill and Dr Sara Lodge

My thesis focuses on female detectives, fictional and real, through the long nineteenth century, tracing how technologies of mobility impacted her dissemination worldwide. A staple of sensational reportage and Victorian melodrama in Britain, the growing influence of the British Crown and its preoccupation with policing and control created variants of pre-existing law enforcement in its colonies. Examining periodical evidence, graphic satire, and popular fiction from the United Kingdom, Australia, and India, I use a decolonial approach that is interdisciplinary in its methodology and practice.

I thus showcase the contradictory impulses animating the sleuth and her complex positioning within histories of early feminism, of popular print culture, and Britain’s imperial expansion. From her earliest appearances in (news)print from the 1850s, the transnational sleuth was a part of violent state reprisals against vagrants, the marginalized, the powerless. At the same, she was often a victim of coercion herself—widowed, sexually preyed upon, financially constrained.

Juxtaposing the complicated pasts of real-life women and their role in penal transportation and running “female factories” in Australia with the exploits of the educated, well-travelled, professional New Woman sleuth in fiction allows me to showcase the intersectional nature of prejudice and exploitation. As my White, middle-class protagonists travel across Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, I consider the connections between mass transit, female journeys, and detective work. As I examine the sensory shifts enabled when these women travel by bicycles, omnibus, trains, and ships, I also query how this figure fits into the project of colonial modernity and serves to entrench Orientalist assumptions.

I contend that the globetrotting sleuth, in constant motion herself, generates from her journeys what Edward Said has termed an “arbitrary” and negative “imaginative geography,” that typifies colonial space as passive and unchanging whilst identifying technology, acceleration, and modernity as uniquely European (55).

I thus read Antipodean authors Mary Fortune and Fergus Hume with Bengali popular fiction and vernacular articles to create a counter-narrative, working from within Britain and across its former colonies to establish a tensile configuration that is global and polymorphous, albeit also locally rooted.