Rahul Goswami :
WHEN IN 1973 Shwe U-Daung passed away at the age of 84, a part of the less-known literary legacy of Arthur Conan Doyle also passed into memory. The creator of the famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, may have been aware that east of the Suez too he enjoyed a measure of popularity, but one could wager profitably that Conan Doyle was ignorant of his Burmese admirer, the nationalist and author Shwe U-Daung.
San Shar was his character, and during the 1910s and 1920s, the tropical adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (as the work may have been called in the foggy precincts of Baker Street) these Burmese detective stories portrayed both the prosperity and crime in Rangoon, a background against which San Shar played his role in maintaining peace for what still was a colonial society.
It was during this period that the Burmese nationalist movement emerged and began to voice the demands for freedom and independence. One of its vehicles was a cultural group formed in 1930 named Dobama Asiayone, which soon became a political force led by university students among which were Aung San (the father of Suu Kyi).
Having studied communism and socialism, they criticised the corruption and incompetence of the parliamentary politicians and turned this criticism – for it was undoubtedly valid – into one more reason to demand independence from the British raj. Soon, as a Burmese echo of the freedom struggle in British India, they began to refer to their future government as ‘Komin Kochin’ which meant self-rule. But this was also a time when San Shar was killed by villains and the series was concluded – or so thought Shwe U-Daung. This final episode was based on Doyle’s The Final Problem, whose reading chilled armies of Holmes’s followers as they read of his unthinkable demise at the hands of the arch-criminal, Professor Moriarty, and the appalling plunge into the Reichenbach Falls.
Likewise, San Shar disappeared while attempting to overpower his enemy, a Professor Tun Pe, into a waterfall in Burma’s Shan State. This Burmese Moriarty was described by Shwe U-Daung as an extraordinarily talented Burmese, a sometime chemistry professor at the Rangoon University who was dismissed for misconduct and thereafter became a criminal mastermind in Rangoon.
Just as Doyle described London through his stories as a cosmopolitan crossroads, teeming with dangerous exotica, so too did Shwe U-Daung portray Rangoon, which was a big bustling colonial metropolis, a fascinating portal between British India and South-East Asia. And so Dr Watson, Holmes’s steady companion, recounted in A Study in Scarlet that he “naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained”. The imagery proved attractive indeed to Shwe U-Daung, who saw Rangoon in a similar way and would have observed closely the habits of such loungers and idlers who made their way thither through the crooked paths of an empire that was setting.
That we have an account of this literary curiosity of Burma is due in part to the efforts of Takahashi Yuri whose monograph, The Case Book of Mr San Shar , brought to English audiences a tale that would perhaps not have left the muggy harbours of old Rangoon. But in 1933, the Burmese Holmes released with a bang a new episode entitled The Assassination of Mr San Shar and which was based on Conan Doyle’s The Empty House , in which Holmes reappears (disguised as an old book dealer) in order to satisfy the demands of a vocal multitude of his fans. Gratifyingly for Shwe U-Daung, he resurrected his own detective for the same reason.
San Shar’s stellar career continued thereafter, and through the stories emerges a glimpse of the nationalist view of Shwe U-Daung and his contemporaries – of a future harmonious multi-cultural society in modern Burma, one in which a Burman identity was boldly illustrated and which rested upon Buddhist ethics. San Shar’s creator lived in Rangoon, a modern city for its place and time, with a large population of non-Burmese (the Indians amongst them numbered more than any other group) and residents from different ethnicities such as Chinese, English, Jewish and Armenians.
In this crowded and vibrant city San Shar fulfilled his calling, helping people regardless of ethnicity, religion and social rank – there are stories about Indian criminal groups against which San Shar battles to save their Indian victims, there is an English professor at Rangoon University who must be defended in the face of accusations that would ruin his academic standing, there is a story of a friendship between an old Bengali servant and a young Burmese student.
The world of San Shar is long gone, but its memories may be refreshed with a leisurely reading of the only Burmese Conan Doyle there ever was.
(Rahul Goswami author is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with UNESCO and studies agricultural transformation in South Asia)
