The beginning of the novel already showcases Sanyal's unmistakable humor: the fifty-year-old Durga is at her mother's funeral in Sinzig. The wind is blowing poorly, the ashes are blowing towards the mourners, and the father is wiping his ex-wife from his face. Later, Durga recalls this quirky moment: "She had read somewhere that ashes were healthy, and she tasted her mother in her mouth again." The death of the mother sets off Durga's spectacular journey: first to London, then into the past, and finally to herself.
In London, the author is supposed to rewrite the Agatha Christie series in an anti-racist manner as part of a Writer's Room for Science Fiction and Costume Dramas. As ambitious as the project is, the team is just as diverse, beginning their discussions about the remake on the very day of the Queen's death. While protesting Brits accuse the politically correct authors of distorting important cultural heritage (“Cancel the Cancelers!”), the debates in the Writer’s Room heat up: shouldn’t Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Poirot be Black? Can tea, as a commodity derived from the slave trade, be enjoyed without guilt? And what are actually the critical differences between colonialism and Nazi fascism? Durga navigates the world with a maximally sensitive gaze, continuously scanning for sexism, racism, colonialism, ableism – there’s hardly an ism that doesn’t appear in Sanyal’s novel, demonstrating the author’s critical expertise on power at all levels.
Just as one has settled into this woke world of the London Writer's Room, an unexpected plot twist, equally fearlessly executed by the author, occurs: through an ominous time travel (whose background is not further explained but is thematically linked to the continuous Doctor WHO references in the novel), Durga suddenly lands in the year 1906. The time travel seems to confuse her less than the sudden existence of a penis on her body (“I had a penis! This somehow both the most familiar and yet the strangest body part of my previous world.”). Durga has taken her skin color with her, but not her gender into the past. In search of belonging in this foreign body in another time, her/his path leads her/him quite rapidly to India House, a London boarding house for Indian students, where Mahatma Gandhi and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar argue at the dinner table about nonviolent versus violent revolution. Durga presents herself in her male body as Sanjeev, largely accepting her fate as a time traveler with little resistance and becomes part of the revolutionary group led by Savarkar. That same Savarkar, known to her as "Hindu Hitler," a Hindu nationalist ideologue and founder of Hindutva – who exerts an astonishing (erotic) attraction on Durga alias Sanjeev. Here at India House, daily life, alongside smuggling weapons and building bombs, consists of discussions – only the spirit of the times and perspective have changed. Sanyal dares a deep dive into the discourse through historical figures and residents of India House like Madan Lal Dhingra, Lala Har Dayal, Chattopadhyaya, or Shyamj. It’s about the partition of India, caste, the difference between revolution and assassination, the deaths of Indian soldiers, the Hindu-Muslim conflict, and ultimately also about a criminal case: with an emerging locked-room mystery, who else but Sherlock Holmes suddenly appears in India House.
As a cultural scientist, Sanyal is the master of an overflowing reference system, which takes on new dimensions in “Antichristie” and suggests extraordinary research work. Alongside the main themes of the Indian Revolution, post-colonialism, and racism, Sanyal touches on everything that comes to mind, and likely loses some readers at times (or encourages them to Google). For instance, when well-known buzzwords like “The Utopia of Folkwang and Arts and Craft,” “reverse sexism,” or “Ockham's razor” are mentioned, when Sherlock and Savarkar discuss Hegel, and it furthermore touches on conspiracy theories, depressions, or Doctor WHO – which runs like a common thread through the novel because it desperately also needs to be Indian. One could indeed be annoyed by the density of information and names. If it weren’t for Sanyal with her unmistakable humor (“I had always wondered how a vegetable could be both so banal and so mystical as cabbages”) and her pointed strategies for uncovering one's own Eurocentric view: “Exactly, that’s the problem! You know nothing about us, that’s why you don’t want too many of us in your stories. And because we don’t appear in your stories, you know nothing about us. You don’t even know our names.” It’s such passages that pinpoint the ignorance of a European readership and raise the question of for whom Sanyal actually writes. Her novel is definitely demanding and likely intends to be so – both in content and form. Therefore, one should bring both prior knowledge of the debate and a pleasure for formal play when daring to tackle this book, which also experiments stylistically: such as when chapters begin with short sequences from film scripts or the narrative form shifts between dramatic and prosaic. “Antichristie” reveals one’s own gaps, which are relevant not only individually but also socially as a whole. This requires effort. With the book's release at the beginning of autumn, the publisher has proven to have a knack for good timing: gone is the pleasant beach reading. This novel must be worked for.
