A Rising Man

Biography

• Before beginning his writing career, Mukherjee was an accountant for 20 years. In 2013, at age 39, Mukherjee learned that Lee Child didn't begin writing until age 40 and was inspired to begin writing himself.

• He began writing A Rising Man in September of that year, partly inspired by the Telegraph Harvill Secker Crime Writing Competition, which he won the following year.

• Mukherjee's parents moved from Calcutta, India to the United Kingdom before he was born. He grew up in Scotland and now lives in Surrey, England. with his wife (Sonal) and two sons.

Publications

• Wyndham and Banerjee series

  • A Rising Man (2016)

    • Won Telegraph Harvill Secker Crime Writing Prize

    • Won CWA Historical Dagger

    • Nominated for Edgar Award

    • Nominated for Barry, Award, best first novel

  • A Necessary Evil (2017)

  • Smoke and Ashes (2018)

  • Death in the East (2019)

    • Won CWA

  • The Shadows of Men (2021)

Interview with Publishers Weekly

• I suppose there’s the idea that British rule in India was somehow benevolent, or if not completely altruistic, then that it had redeeming features. This is the “at least we gave them the railways” argument. The truth is, British rule in India was oppression, and as in all cases where one people oppresses another, I believe it was evil. This is a very hard idea for a lot of British people to accept, brought up as we are to believe that we are a moral nation which tends to be on the side of the angels.

• The question I wanted to ask in the book was: how does a moral, Christian people justify the oppression of another race, both to outsiders, and more importantly to itself? I wanted to explore the impact of colonialism, not just on the subjugated peoples but on the psyche of those doing the subjugating, especially the moral and psychological pressures placed on those tasked with administering the colonial system. And what I found was that a lot of them were thoroughly disillusioned by what they were doing in the name of empire.

Interview with Publishers Weekly

• I’ve read quite a few detectives who operated in and for totalitarian systems. I wanted to see what would happen when a British detective, coming from a background of democracy and liberty, was placed in a situation in which he had to uphold a system that trampled on those values.

• The first thing to say is that the Raj period isn’t really taught in British schools. I think that, in itself, says a lot. I learned more about German history in the 1920s and 1930s than I did about British history in the period. As such, I only really learned about the Raj from romanticized period pieces like The Jewel in the Crown and A Passage to India. I found it difficult to square those accounts with what my parents would tell me.

Interview with Publishers Weekly

• Growing up as the child of immigrants, I think you develop a natural skepticism for what you learn at school. From an early age, you learn to keep an open mind, to question everything you’re told. You learn that there are two sides to every story and that, quite often, neither side is right and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

• My impetus to write this book was a desire to tell the story of a time and place which I felt neither British nor Indian sources did justice to.

Calcutta to Kolkata

• Kolkata was always called Kolkata in Bengali―derived from the name of one of the three villages said to have become the modern city of Kolkata.

• But the British called it Calcutta. When they left India in 1947, they left behind quite a bit of baggage—starchy clubs with antiquated jacket-and-tie dress codes completely unsuitable for Indian weather, a passion for cricket and English and Anglicized names. Every city had streets and squares named after English viceroys and governor-generals: Clive, Hastings, Dalhousie.

• Soon the new government was busy renaming those roads and landmarks after Indian freedom fighters. Lala Lajpat Rai. Tilak, Gandhi. Nehru. A lot of Gandhis and Nehrus.

• In 2001 the government of West Bengal decided to officially change its capital city’s name to Kolkata to reflect its original Bengali pronunciation.

Cast of characters

• Captain Samuel Wyndham

  • Mother died when he was 6, father remarried; he's headmaster of the local school and sends his son off to boarding school—Haderley

  • Enlisted in World War I, married Sarah, a school mistress who died of influenza while he was gone

  • While wounded, he gets addicted to morphine

  • He worked in military intelligence during the war, for Lord Taggart, who offers him the job in Calcutta

• Surrender-not “Surendranath” Banerjee

  • Sergeant in Imperial Police Force, but also British educated, and a lawyer, who lives with extended family in a "palatial" home, until he refuses to render his resignation.

  • At the end of the novel, Wyndham moves out of the guest house into an apartment and Banerjee moves with him.

Cast of characters

• Alexander MacCauley: head of the finance department for the ICS (Indian Civil Service)

  • He's the L-G's "fixer," described as "this administration's rottweiler"

  • Also the murder victim, killed by Digby, when he threatens to tell the L-G's secret, that one of Mrs. Bose's "girls," Parvati, became pregnant. MacCauley arranged an abortion, but she and the baby died. He's been paying support money to Mrs. Bose for Parvati's family.

  • He knew Rev. Gunn, who runs the orphanage, back in Scotland

  • Wife Isobel died of typhus while pregnant

• James Buchan, "merchant prince," immensely wealthy owner of several businesses, including jute and rubber.

  • A Scotsman, powerful because of his wealth, which provides political connections as well. Impervious to scandal or investigation.

Cast of characters

• Lord Charles Taggart—Commissioner of the Imperial Police Force in Bengal; Daniels is his secretary

• a "good guy" but working within a corrupt political system which he's well aware of; hires Wyndham because of his suspicions.

• Detective sub-inspector John Digby

• Back during the war, Digby wrote a report critical of the conduct of a policing action Dawson and his men (from Section H) carried out somewhere up north. This black mark on his record has curtailed promotion.

• His informant is Vikram

• L_G—Stewart Campbell, Lieutenant Governor of Bengal Presidency

Cast of characters

• Dawson, head of the anti-terrorist movement in Section H, the military, at Fort William

• Annie Grant—had been secretary to MacCauley, she's Anglo-Indian, and secretly Buchan's "girl friend"

• Stevens—MacCauley's replacement whose wife owns a rubber plantation; he therefore argued with MacCauley about tariffs on that rubber

• Devi, also one of Mrs. Bose's "girls," saw MacCauley's murder and knows that the killer was a white man. She's killed for talking; real name is Anjali.

• Reverend Gunn, runs an orphanage in Dum Dum, knew MacCauley as a young man in Scotland, his early history. When the two met again, MacCauley "converted," ashamed of what he had become, but held back information on the event that "turned" him—the abortion and death of Parvati.

Cast of characters

• Occupants of the Royal Belvedere Guest House

  • Mrs. Tebbit

  • Colonel Tebbit: retired from the Indian army

  • Horace Meek, added late in the novel

  • Irishman Byrne—posing as a textile salesman, but arrested and jailed when found with the money from the bank robbery, as well as weapons, which he supplies to Irish revolutionaries.

  • He knew that Benoy Sen looked like Leon Trotsky, although no photos existed, even in government files.

Cast of characters

• Benoy Sen, well known "heroic" Indian revolutionary

• According to his various political statements in the novel when interrogated by Wyndham, he has become non-violent.

• Although sentenced to death, that charge is commuted to exile when Wyndham proves he didn't kill MacCauley

• Note, the Calcutta High Court case files mention prosecution of Benoy Kumar Sen vs. the Emperor for possession of illegal print materials on 24 April, 1929

Rowlatt Acts

• Passed on the recommendations of the Rowlatt Committee and named after its president, the act effectively authorized the colonial British government to imprison any person suspected of terrorism living in British India for up to two years, and gave the colonial authorities power to deal with all revolutionary activities.

• The unpopular legislation provided for stricter control of the press, arrests without warrant, indefinite detention without trial, and juryless trials for proscribed political acts.

• The accused were denied the right to know the accusers and the evidence used in the trial. Those convicted were required to deposit securities upon release, and were prohibited from taking part in any political, educational, or religious activities.

• Despite much opposition, the Rowlatt Act was passed in March 1919 to curb the growing nationalist upsurge in the country.

Amritsar Massacre

• The Amritsar massacre took place on April 13, 1919 when a large peaceful crowd had gathered to protest the Rowlatt Act and the arrest of pro-independence activists.

• In response to the public gathering, the temporary Brigadier general, R. E. H. Dyer surrounded the protesters. The area could be exited only on one side, as its other three sides were enclosed by buildings. After blocking the exit with his troops, Dyer ordered them to shoot at the crowd, continuing to fire even as the protestors tried to flee. The troops kept on firing until their ammunition was exhausted.

• Estimates of those killed vary between 379 and 1500+ people and over 1,200 other people were injured. Responses polarized both the British and Indian peoples. Anglo-Indian author Rudyard Kipling declared at the time that Dyer "did his duty as he saw it."

Amritsar Massacre

• The massacre caused a re-evaluation by the British Army of its military role against civilians to "minimal force whenever possible." The army was retrained and developed less violent tactics for crowd control. The level of casual brutality, and lack of any accountability, stunned the entire nation, resulting in a wrenching loss of faith among the general Indian public in the intentions of the United Kingdom. The attack was condemned by the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, as "unutterably monstrous," and members of Parliament voted 247 to 37 against Dyer. The ineffective inquiry, together with the initial accolades for Dyer, fuelled great widespread anger against the British among the Indian populace, leading to the non-cooperation movement of 1920–22.

• Some historians consider the episode a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India.

References to "a rising man"

• Quote in the Prolog from Kipling, City of Dreadful Night:

  • "Calcutta seems full of ‘rising men’."

• Benoy Sen, when interrogated by Wyndham

  • For a time I considered it the highest honour for an Indian.

  • What changed?

  • I grew up. I became involved in politics. It’s what Bengalis do. It’s our national hobby. You have gardening, we have politics. I grew interested in the writings of men such as Pal and Tilak. They opened my eyes to the true nature of your rule in my country. But I am sure you do not wish to hear about my journey from rising man to revolutionary.

• Buchan in a conversion with Wyndham about MacCauley

  • "He may have been just a junior clerk back then but he was already marked out as a rising man."

• So what does it mean to be a "rising man"?

Questions for discussion

• Among the genres, this is a mystery novel, or crime novel, even to some extent a police procedural. But it is also an historical novel, like Clark and Division.

• Does one of those genres dominate?

Questions for discussion

• Although Detective Wyndham is generally an admirable man, he's also a drug addict? Why is that element added to his characterization?

Questions for discussion

• In some ways, Calcutta is multiple cities in one location and place, or setting, is an important characteristic in this novel.

• On the one hand, is the capital city of the British Raj, with large Greek and Roman buildings—columns, porticos, statuary, rose gardens—all enclosed and segregated. The novel refers to this as the "architecture of domination."

• But it's also an Indian city, home to servants, merchants, rickshaw drivers, opium dens, revolutionaries.

• What role does the city play in the novel?

Breakout room question

• So what's your final verdict on this novel?

Interview—Suffolk library

• Who were your literary heroes and influences growing up?

  • There are a number of authors whom I’m indebted to, and whose works I still look out for. Top of this list has to be Ian Rankin - I’m a huge Rebus fan, but I love the stand-alone novels too. In terms of inspiration, I’ve always been fascinated by the predicament of a good man upholding a corrupt or evil system. To that end, I adore the works of Philip Kerr, Martin Cruz Smith and Robert Harris, all three of whom write novels shot through with wit and an intelligence. I also love the hard-boiled gumshoes of American crime fiction, and like so many others, I’m a great fan of Raymond Chandler.

  • Then there are the authors who’ve helped me develop from a budding novice to a fully fledged author. I could reel off a long list here, but I need to make special mention of Val McDermid, who’s been a real source of inspiration to me and, I’m proud to say has become a good friend.

  • Finally, and in a special category, there’s William McIlvanney, whose Scottish detective, Laidlaw, is a fantastic creation.

Interview—Suffolk library

• Your path into writing was not a straightforward one. Did it help or hinder you starting a writing career at the relatively late age of 39?

  • I like to think it helped – otherwise I wasted the previous twenty years of my life needlessly being an accountant! Seriously though, they say that writers generally come into their prime in their fifties, so I think starting at the age of 39 wasn’t bad. I think most people need a degree of life experience before they find their voice. I don’t know if I’d have had anything interesting to say if I’d started writing in my twenties.

  • In terms of my journey to publication, I’d always wanted to write a book but never had the confidence. That, and a well-honed tendency to procrastinate meant I’d never actually written more than a chapter of anything, and I doubt things would have changed had it not been for two pieces of good fortune.

Interview—Suffolk library

• Your path into writing was not a straightforward one. Did it help or hinder you starting a writing career at the relatively late age of 39?

  • First, I was running late one morning and caught an interview with Lee Child on breakfast TV. He recounted how, having never really written before, he’d started writing at the age of forty. I’d never read any of his work till then, but I went out that day and bought a copy of his first book, Killing Floor, and devoured it within forty-eight hours. I was amazed at how simply written and well plotted it was. I’d recently had an idea for a story centered on a British detective who travels to India after the First World War, and reading Killing Floor gave me the motivation to put pen to paper.

Interview—Suffolk library

• Your path into writing was not a straightforward one. Did it help or hinder you starting a writing career at the relatively late age of 39?

  • Nevertheless, after about ten thousand words, I made the error of reading what I’d written and began to doubt whether any of it was any good. I’d have probably given up if it weren’t for the second piece of good fortune. I’d been doing some research on-line and came across details of the Telegraph - Harvill Secker Crime Writing Competition, looking for new and unpublished crime writers.

  • The entry requirements were simple: the first five thousand words of a novel, together with a two-page synopsis of the rest of the book. There was only one stipulation – that the entry contain some international element. I tidied up the first chapter, wrote the synopsis and sent them away.

Interview—Suffolk library

• Your path into writing was not a straightforward one. Did it help or hinder you starting a writing career at the relatively late age of 39?

  • Having never submitted anything before, I didn’t expect to win, so it was a complete surprise when, a few months later, I was contacted by the organizer of the competition and told that my book was going to be published. The problem was at that point I didn’t have a book, just half a first draft of fifty thousand words that didn’t always fit together.

  • How did Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee come into being? Are they based on anyone?

  • Sam and Suren basically came as a pair. Sam’s a war veteran and ex-Scotland Yard detective. Life has made him a cynic; he’s scarred by his wartime experience and burdened by survivor’s guilt and comes to Calcutta looking for a fresh start away from England.

Interview—Suffolk library

• How did Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee come into being? Are they based on anyone?

  • I’m not sure what the inspiration for him was. He’s an outsider, someone who’s not truly at home anywhere, and I think part of that comes from my own background, being the son of immigrants to the UK. At the same time, I’m a big fan of detectives such as Ian Rankin’s Rebus . . . and I think fictional detectives to some degree need to be fish out of water. They see things differently from other people.

  • While Sam is jaded, his assistant, Sergeant Banerjee, is young and idealistic. Newly recruited into the Calcutta Police, he’s a bright lad, and one of the first Indians to be inducted into CID. His real name is Surendranath, but his British superiors found that too difficult to pronounce and instead christened him Surrender-not. It’s a name he’s gradually getting used to.

Interview—Suffolk library

• How did Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee come into being? Are they based on anyone?

  • His decision to join the police force led to tensions within his family. His father in particular is shocked by his son’s decision, accusing him of siding with oppressors of his own people. Surrender-not sees it differently. His view is that even when the British leave, Indians will probably still keep murdering each other and someone’s going to need the skills to solve them.

  • Surrender-not embodies the conflict felt by many educated Indians of the time, torn between their rose-coloured view of British justice and the repression of their own people. He’s also quite shy and awkward, and he’s particularly inept at talking to women, white or Indian – that is unless they have an interest in cricket.

  • To an extent, both Sam and Surrender-not embody different parts of my own personality. Sam has my cynicism and suspicion of authority, while Surrender-not represents the hopeful, optimistic side of me . . . and my chicken legs!

Interview—Suffolk library

• Can you tell us about your latest book Death in the East.

  • The book is set in two timelines, Eastern India in 1922 and East London in 1905. As seasoned readers of my books will know, Sam Wyndham has a wee bit of an opium problem, and this book sees Sam head off to rehab at an ashram in the hills of Assam. On his way there though, he sees a ghost from his past; a man he thought had died in England almost twenty years earlier.

  • The book began as my tribute to Agatha Christie. From the start, I wanted to write my take on the locked-room mystery, and I think I’ve come up with a method of murder that hasn’t been done before and which even seasoned readers will hopefully find fiendishly difficult to work out.

  • But as I was writing, I became troubled by what was going on in the UK, especially the growth of anger and extremism and the erosion of tolerance and decency. I find this fear and intolerance hard to reconcile with the Britain I know and love. Suddenly, while writing a book set in India, I felt I needed to write something which reflected my Britain. I wanted to remind people what history shows us: that when intolerance and hatred raise their heads, the vast majority of British people take a stand against it.

Interview—Suffolk library

• Can you tell us about your latest book Death in the East.

  • I find it fascinating that the streets of the East End of London, which today are home to Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants, were a hundred years ago, home to Eastern European Jews, fleeing persecution. Much of the press at the time vilified them in exactly the same way that certain papers do with Muslims today.

  • Yet over time, those immigrants, their families and descendants have become part of the fabric of British life. They maintain their own distinct culture but are still British. The same has happened with many other communities including my own, and it will happen with these new immigrants as well.

  • I set half of the novel in the East End of 1905 because I wanted to show that we have been here before and that we have risen to the challenge. I wanted it to be a book about hope and about remembering who we are as a nation, so that we may try and live up to those standards of tolerance and decency that I believe still run through us.

Interview—Suffolk library

• Has a book ever changed your life or made you look at things differently?

  • Quite a few, to be honest. In terms of fiction, I think my world-view has, from an early age, been influenced by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. It’s a book I have read more times than I can remember, and few have been as prescient or left more of a mark on me.

  • On another note, the book I have most identified with is The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I think Lahiri is one the most brilliant authors of her generation, having won a plethora of awards including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Hemingway award. The Namesake is the story of the Ganguli family, their emigration from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. The parallels with my own parents’ move from the same city to Britain were uncanny. I can’t underestimate the effect it had on me.

Interview—Suffolk library

• Can you share anything about what you are working on at the moment?

  • I’ve just handed in the first draft of the fifth book in the Wyndham and Banerjee series. It’s provisionally entitled, The Shadows of Men, and sees our heroes trek to Bombay on the hunt for a man they believe to be a murderer. It’s set against a background of Hindu-Muslim violence which threatens to tear the country apart and undo all of Gandhi’s good work of the previous few years, and for fans of the series it contains a big surprise. I won’t say more than that.

  • I’m now starting to work on a stand-alone novel. A modern-day novel set in the US and UK, which will deal with issues such as radicalisation and terrorism in a way which I hope is both fast-paced and thrilling, but also written with intelligence.

Interview—Suffolk library

• What is on your ‘to read’ pile at the moment?

  • I tend to read several things at once, some factual and some fiction. At the moment I’m reading Mark Edward’s new book, The House Guest and an advanced copy of Midnight at Malabar House by my friend Vaseem Khan, author of the Inspector Chopra novels.

  • This is the first in a new historical crime series for him and features a female detective, Inspector Persis Wadia. Both are great reads.

  • I’m also listening to Why Does E=mc squared?(and Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. I love books about science, especially quantum theory, though I tend to get confused with the maths after the first fifteen pages.

So, why these books?

• With Horse, Geraldine Brooks recreates for us the Civil War South, not the battles, the soldiers, or the combative armies; these traditional historical accounts have been written, at length, in copious numbers.

• What she has given us are the comparative lifestyles of the landed gentry, plantation owners, and horse breeders, and poised them against the backdrop of house servants, field hands, horse trainers and groomsmen who cared for all this valuable property.

• It’s class division at the extreme; the upperclass have all the money, freedom, power, and self determination. The minority classes have none.

• But in telling this story, Brooks gives a voice and a reality to these overlooked and historically ignored Black trainers, jockeys, and groomsmen.

• She gives them a "life" that traditional history has overlooked.

So, why these books?

• With Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell fictionalizes the historical Anne Hathaway, about whom there are only the sparsest of official records.

• She exists as an historical fact, William Shakespeare’s wife and Hamnet’s mother, but until someone tells her story, fictionalizes her, she has no presence in reality.

• As an author, when O'Farrell creates the world Agnes inhabits, she thereby draws a parallel between herself and Shakespeare. He gave his son immortality by writing Hamlet, as O’Farrell gives Anne an existence by writing this novel.

• To paraphrase Shakespeare, she has given to Agnes a local habitation and a name.

So, why these books?

• With The Magic Hour, Kristin Hannah has drawn our attention to another kind of social outlier, the wild child. In her own way, this little girl is as much outside the social milieu in which most people live as are the horsemen and slaves in Brooks’ novel.

• In The Magic Hour, to those who would institutionalize her, she is an outcast.

• But the novel is about Julia Cates, the child psychologist, who works to reclaim the little girl's humanity, to give her an existence, and to integrate her into the society that would rather not recognize her as human.

So, why these books?

• With Clark and Division, we have a story that is both mystery and historical novel, primarily the latter. It tells the story of Japanese Americans interned at Manzanar during World War II; more specifically it focuses on the consequences of that incarceration as they attempt to re-build their lives once freed.

• It brings into the light one of those historical events that's been forgotten, ignored, or buried because it is not one of the more glorious episodes in our history, one that historians prefer to neglect.

• And this is a woman writer trying to find a voice from an emerging culture, like the Blacks from the South in America, like the Scottish when freed from British dominion, and like the Australians, throwing off the British legacy in hope of finding their own national voice.

• And of course like A Rising Man whose author writes about the cost of the Raj to both British and Indian alike.

So, why these books?

• With Resurrection Bay, author Emma Viskic gives voice and reality not only to the indigenous Australian natives brutalized by the convict settlers, but in the character of Caleb Zelic gives voice, almost literally, to another form of social outcast, the hearing impaired.

• The story is his struggle for a “normal” life, for an identity, for self determination, and for independences. Rather than race or ethnicity to make him an outlier, it is his disability, and his reluctance to accept it.

• This story is an attempt at recognition, and reparation, cast in the guise of a mystery novel.

So, why these books?

• And with A Rising Man, we once again combine mystery and historical novel, with more equanimity. And once again a writer from an emerging culture wants to tell the story of an historical event, the British Raj in India, from a wider, more inclusive perspective. The story of British oppression has already been told, as has the fight for Indian independence.

• But he wants to show us as well the cost to the British who had to enforce this subjugation.

So, why these books?

• With all of these books, the authors attempt to widen our perspective on history, on life, and on people. They tell stories that a more traditional perspective does not want to acknowledge.

• As with all fiction, an author's imaginative idea does not become realized until put into words. An unspoken imaginative fiction lives only in the writer's mind. When he or she puts it into words on paper, it becomes real; it has an existence that lives on.

• Words give form, and life, to a story; they give it existence and reality. This is true for all for stories, whether in a culture that follows the oral tradition, or one such as our with a written, literary tradition.

Conclusion

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

For giving me the opportunity to teach these classes, which I love

For sharing your unique ideas and history with the rest of us

For being the absolutely best students I could ever wish for.

Happy holidays

Hope to see you in spring