Kishwar Desai’s Simran Singh crime novels ( Witness the Night, Origins of Love, and The Sea of Innocence) present readers with a feminist heroine working towards a more equitable India. Desai’s heroine challenges many generic conventions of detection, while her interactions with British characters and symbols complicate understandings of the relationship between detective fiction and postcolonialism. Simran’s role as a social worker and her critique of official policies and processes render her at odds with conventional and official detectives in and out of her narrative. At the same time, she is presented to readers as empowered and grounded in a world which is written to have many similarities with our own; Desai makes use of real cases in her narratives to motivate Simran’s actions against injustice. This article analyzes the relationship between Desai, her protagonist Simran, and notions of postcoloniality and empire through an examination of the roles of intersections of nation, power, and justice in crime fiction. Deconstructing these relationships helps further understandings of the role of genre fiction in global literary marketplaces, and emphasizes the significance of the popular in the postcolonial, particularly in regard to gender equity and contemporary feminist movements.
An interview with Helen Jacey
