IISER MOHALI

Abstract: Sherlock Holmes believed that nothing is trivial if it is observed with care. Dr. Ansu Louis believed the same.
Let us invoke the character of S.H. to honor their shared ways of seeing the world.

Sherlock Holmes is often celebrated as the emblem of modern rationality: the cool logician who restores a sense of order through deduction. But what if this sense of order is less secure than it appears? What if Holmes’s investigations, rather than simply resolving crime, participate in a broader Victorian desire to contain social and political unease?

Read through the lens of Victorian anxiety, Holmes begins to look like a curious stabilizing presence at moments when the social fabric seems under threat. The crimes he encounters often gesture toward radical possibilities- challenges to aristocratic privilege, disruptions of capitalist propriety, or murmurs of anti-imperial unrest. Paradoxically, Holmes is a “disclassed” figure: he occupies no stable social position, he lacks steady employment, domestic life, and even a clear institutional allegiance. This very “disclassed” position allows him to move freely across social spaces, intervening without being implicated.

So, does Holmes’s refusal to question the foundations of his world make him complicit in its hierarchies, its class biases, its imperial confidence? Or does his very estrangement from belonging introduce cracks into the structure he seems to defend?