Detecting Through Precarity: Affective Intelligence and Anglo-Indian Subjectivity in Nev March’s Murder in Old Bombay

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of affective precarity to reinterpret Anglo-Indian identity in Nev March’s historical detective novel Murder in Old Bombay (2020). Moving beyond dominant readings of Anglo-Indian subjectivity through hybridity or liminality, it argues that the novel foregrounds emotional insecurity as a structuring condition of social life. The Anglo-Indian narrator-detective Captain Jim Agnihotri emerges as a figure whose experiences of genealogical abandonment, racialized romantic exclusion, and professional instability cultivate a distinctive affective intelligence. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s cultural politics of emotion, Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism, and interdisciplinary scholarship on precarity as both sociological condition and affective subjectivity, the article shows how Jim’s heightened sensitivity to grief, loneliness, fear, and strategic silence enables him to access testimony, negotiate trust, and resolve crime. Detection thus operates not solely through rational deduction but emotional attunement forged within chronic precarity, positioning affective precarity as both lived condition and epistemological resource, and proposing a new analytic vocabulary for marginal subjectivity in postcolonial historical crime fiction.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. South Asian Review, 2026 · DOI ↗