Hergé’s depiction of the natives in Tintin in the Congo recalls Conan Doyle’s Tonga

Jonathan Small, the treasure-hunter and escaped convict from the Andaman jails in Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four had a Man Friday called Tonga, a native of the Andamans who had followed Small to England. On his first proper appearance on board the river steamer, “Aurora”, Tonga is described as a “savage, distorted creature”. “Never have I seen features so deeply marked with bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half animal fury,” writes Watson. So here is the edifying portrait of a (possibly) Jarawa tribal as a grimacing monkey.

Later, in the course of Small’s narration of his story, Tonga is humanized, but reduced to a wayward child, following the usual fate of noble savages. Small reminisces: “We earned a living... by exhibiting my poor Tonga at fairs and other such places as the black cannibal. He would eat raw meat and dance his war-dance: so we always had a hatful of pennies after a day’s work.” After killing Bartholomew Sholto, Tonga struts about “as proud as a peacock”, and gets a good beating from his master.

In this post-colonial world, most of us would tut-tut in righteous dismay on reading this, thinking of sundry things like the white man’s burden. But Conan Doyle himself would probably have been surprised if the unkindness in his depiction of Tonga had been pointed out to him. In the space of the novel, Tonga, along with his master, is one side of the bad, and bad people need to be depicted in, well, a bad light for the story to be effective. And, to be fair to Conan Doyle, the villains of the piece, white men like Major Sholto and Small, come across as opportunistic, avaricious and rascally. Besides, if anyone gets the Great Agra Treasure, it is “little Tonga”, who is buried in the Thames along with the jewels stolen from his motherland.

Whatever Conan Doyle’s views may have been on colonialism, in real life, he seems to have kept an open mind, as proved by his remarkable defence of the solicitor, George Edalji, who had an Indian Parsee-turned-Christian father and an English mother. Conan Doyle’s spirited campaign helped clear Edalji’s name of the false charges that had been brought against him. George’s father, Shapurji Edalji, was the vicar of Great Wyrley in Staffordshire. From 1888 onwards, the family started receiving threatening letters, sometimes gifts like dead birds, all sent anonymously. In a brilliant display of investigative acumen, the chief constable of Staffordshire, Captain Anson, came to believe that George sent the threats to his own family (from this one can guess how true to life police detectives like Lestrade and Gregson were). Then in 1903, when a bizarre series of cattle mutilations started in Great Wyrley, George Edalji was promptly accused of the crime, convicted, and sent to jail.

Conan Doyle was convinced that Edalji was innocent. The process by which he arrived at this conclusion befits the creator of Holmes. Conan Doyle writes, “He [Edalji] had come to my hotel by appointment, but I had been delayed, and he was passing the time by reading the paper. I recognized my man by his dark face, so I stood and observed him. He held the paper close to his eyes and rather sideways, proving not only a high degree of myopia, but marked astigmatism. The idea of such a man scouring fields at night and assaulting cattle while avoiding the watching police was ludicrous.... There, in a single physical defect, lay the moral certainty of his innocence.” There was a huge public outcry after Conan Doyle wrote a series of articles in the Daily Telegraph outlining the facts of the case. Edalji was proved innocent and allowed to renew his practice as a solicitor.

In his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle says, “[T]hough the Vicar [George’s father] was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation.” This would suggest that although the cause of truth interested Conan Doyle, the existence of racial prejudices did not quite bother him. But then, it would be anachronistic to expect political correctness in an Englishman writing in the high noon of colonialism. Besides, if certain snobberies are granted, laughter, which is a powerful antidote to all prejudices, flows freely. One cannot but detect the self-congratulatory tone in Conan Doyle’s deduction of Edalji’s astigmatism. Did someone call Tonga “proud as a peacock”?